The boundaries between writers and readers are fuzzy; humanistic disciplines–especially literature, writing studies, and book history–explore interdependent connections across the acts of writing and reading. Often, this body of work does not capture the experiences of all readers, particularly readers for whom traditional modes of engaging with texts are not always available or even desirable. This panel asks how do we–researchers, digital humanists, community members, and avid readers–understand, trace, and highlight alternative modes and acts of these readers by using alternative methods?
Theories about literature, reception, and culture have long considered readers to be passive consumers of culture, who often have limited or no influence beyond their spending power. Furthermore, many studies imagine and/or assume a reader from a text. Within serialized publications, though, letters to the editors could work dialogically and recovering them has challenged the notion that cultural production flowed in one direction (Ardis 2007; Golding 2005). Centering these letters helps highlight the active role readers had within literary works. In writing studies, reading is central to the act of writing, both writers thinking about their readers as well as writers needing to understand genre conventions. Uptakes are the formal, kairotic, and social conventions of how a writer responds to one genre with another; these conventions adhere to, reveal, and construct ideologies and systems of power that can then be challenged, remixed, or reimagined (Freadman 2002; Bawarshi 2000; Messina 2019). In book history, the traditional pathway books take from writer to reader are often not applicable to the movement of print and engagement with books in the domestic sphere (Darnton 1982).
This panel argues digital humanities has a responsibility to not only study readers, but center readers as active participants with a multiplicity of reading practices, in shaping, building, and sustaining culture and community. Currently, digital humanists trace readership by collecting and analyzing different forms of reader response, especially fandoms (Adams, 2022; Lothian, 2018; Messina, 2019), digital book reviews (Mendelman & Mukamal 2021; Walsh & Antoniak 2021) or published reader responses (Ardis 2007; Golding 2005; Quinn 2020). The mix of quantitative and qualitative methods employed across this work demonstrates a responsibility to readers, viewing readers not just as objects of study or numbers, but people–some still alive and some whose legacies have left marks on culture or on the literal page.
Our panel uses interdisciplinary methods to continue centering readers, specifically spotlighting alternative forms of readership. The first panelist examines the question of researchers’ responsibilities towards readers through a case study exploring the explosive tensions in Our Flag Means Death fanfiction, especially around interpretations of trans representation and liberation. The second panelist proposes a method for analyzing and “reading” food stains in cookbooks through the use of techniques from analytical chemistry in order to highlight the alternative encounters cooks had with books beyond the boundaries of the written word. The third panelist reconsiders literary production from the perspective of readers by analyzing the debates and critiques in their letters to the editors.
Fan Scholars’ Responsibilities Towards Fans: A Case Study of Trans Representation in Our Flag Means Death, Cara Marta Messina
Fanfiction—when fans write creatively about the media products and characters they love—authors often use fan fiction to develop creative craft, explore their identities, and create community through shared positionalities (Adams 2022). In the past decade, fan scholars have called for a focus on critical fandoms (Booth 2015: Lothian 2018; Wanzo 2015).
Our Flag Means Death (OFMD) aired on HBO Max in March 2022 and, as of December 2023, has over 28,000 fanfictions published on Archive of Our Own (AO3). I collected approximately 10,000 OFMD fanfictions to trace genre patterns, examine queer and anti-colonial themes, and spotlight fanfiction authors’ critical uptakes. One explosive tension manifested: fans’ interpretations of Izzy Hands, one of the only cisgender white main male characters. I interviewed several fans and asked them for their interpretation of the data. One transgender man author critiques the fandom obsession with Izzy, especially when other fanfiction authors reimagine Izzy as trans. Another transmasc author advocates for reimagining Izzy as trans; the author sees themselves in Izzy.
Fan scholars and digital humanists have created feminist and ethical research guidelines for digital communities (Bailey 2015; Kelley 2016), so how may these guidelines apply to moments of conflict? What responsibility do fan studies scholars have in representing fans’ conflict, especially around conversations of race, gender, and sexuality? These different interpretations and representations of Izzy demonstrate that trans fanfic authors—and trans people—are not homogenous, even when their overall goal is trans liberation. I argue critical uptakes can be conflicting and competing, so scholars must center community stakeholders by representing these competing critical uptakes with care, love, and transparency.
The Anatomy of a Stain: Forensic Science as Literary Method, Avery Blankenship
Despite the mass popularity of cookbooks in the nineteenth century, most cooks did not know how to read and write. Instead, cookbooks were often written by mistresses who employed or enslaved cooks. It was common practice for a mistress to read a cookbook like one reads a novel before dictating a recipe to her cook and promptly leaving the kitchen. Only occasionally, if a cook happened to have reading literacy, were cookbooks handled by the cooks, themselves. Because of this dynamic, there are very few cookbooks that we know of which actually contain marginalia left by an actual cook as opposed to notes left in the margins by a much less experienced mistress. As a result, for most cookbooks, the only evidence of a cookbook actually encountering a cook are the stains of food that these cooks left behind—splatters across the page likely left by accident. In this paper, I propose a new method for “reading” food stains in cookbook which uses infrared spectroscopy in order to obtain the chemical signatures of food stains in nineteenth-century cookbooks. This method, which I call “literary forensics” uses techniques from chemical analysis and computer science to restore a critical specificity to these mysterious stains and thus enable us to “read” them as a form of marginalia. By doing so, I argue that pathways open for scholars to restore the presence of the cook to the historical record and to read the language of food in food itself, a language which could not be moderated by the literate mistress.
Agitation in the Masses: Readerly Reinvention in Cultural Magazines, William Reed Quinn
Often called “the most dangerous magazine in America,” The Masses was a radical socialist magazine first published out of Greenwich Village from 1911–1917. The magazine featured national and international news on socialism and the cooperative movement. But, The Masses struggled to stay afloat due to rising inflation costs and ramped up censorship and ultimately was forced to merge with The New Review in August 1916. The New Review was also a New York-based socialist newsletter and the union of the two magazines should have been amicable. In the letters to the editors, published within most issues, readers from both magazines aired their grievances and accused each other of being politically compromised. The primary difference between the two publications seems to rest in their stance on “agitation.” Piet Vlag, founder of The Masses, argued that “This highly centralized and closely organized co-operative movement can only be created by steady, insistent agitation and education” (1911, i). Meanwhile, the inaugural editorial of The New Review claims it “will be devoted to education, rather than agitation” (1913, 1).
Building from other digital studies of reception (Mendelman & Mukamal 2021; Walsh & Antoniak 2021), I assess how the cultural reception of readers folded back into the production of the magazine itself. I use network analysis tools and word embedding models to examine the relationship between readers, editors, and contributors. As both consumers and contributors of The Masses, readers’ letters provide historical evidence of magazine dialogics and how their debate shaped subsequent magazine content. Digital methods offer new opportunities to understand the breadth of reader activity and their role in reinventing culture.