The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.

— Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Welcome to Diagrammatic Readings!

Here, you'll find the figures I made while performing research on the audio archives of postwar American poetry. These figures are best represented as new media objects rather than as pictures in books, and I hope that digital humanist projects like these will utilize the web space to query what media will count as texts for literary studies and what types of book-like organizations will be possible in the future.

A funny story! When I submitted an article to the journal, the anonymous reader objected to my usage of the word mapping and noted that those figures were diagrams. Thus, Diagrammatic Readings was born. I'm currently working on the related book project, Diagrammatic Readings: Essays on Postwar American Poetry, Digital Scholarship, and the Audio Archive, where I will report on the audio research I performed with Dr. James Lee, the principal investigator of the project, at the University of Cincinnati's Digital Scholarship Center. The objective is to develop a general framework for archival research, one that leverages the digital technology for acquisition, analysis, and visualization of archive-based corpora.

I look at various audio archives of poetry recordings, many of which are housed at university libraries and contain large amounts of postwar American poetry in oral form: viz., the Elliston poetry audio archive housed at the University of Cincinnati; the PennSound archive at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing; the Voca audiovisual library at the University of Arizona Poetry Center; and UbuWeb.

-- Ankit Basnet