How to Be a Human Hinman Collator

In Joseph A. Dane’s Myth of Print Culture, pgs. 94-95, he describes how to be a “Human Hinman,” to collate pages from the same setting of type (or stereotype plates) without the aid of any external device. I learned about the process that Dane describes from Randall McCleod, who sent me an extensive email on the process. Over the past year I have adopted McCleod’s method for my own work, and with his permission I post his training regimen for turning one’s self into a Human Hinman here.

You may laugh. I laughed myself when McCleod first sent me this email on 31 January 2006 (which below I’ve edited slightly to emphasize method and discard most topical chit-chat) after I inquired about collating newspapers.

My collator has worked on Holinshed’s _Chronicles_, 1587, a bruiser of a book, but it is awkward. To work on bigger things, I have xeroxed parts of them and collated the parts separately.

What I suggest is that you use Mother Nature’s collator, which is totally free, once you have a xerox or positive microfilm print-out of your control copy printed to size. (It is possible to use this method with something printed slightly smaller too, but it is not very feasible if you go bigger).

Then you place a column of your copy next to a column of the copy you want to compare it to, and cross your eyes, so that the left eye sees the right column and the right sees the left. When you do this, you will actually see four columns, two will be transparent and two will be opaque. By adjusting the tracking of your eyes, the four will suddenly collapse to three and will be stable there. The two on the outside will then be the transparent ones and in peripheral vision, but the middle column will be opaque and will be in your foveal vision, which is where you want it to be. This central column is a superimposition of the two columns you are comparing, and if there is a difference between them it will reveal itself through the visual oddities you experience on the Haley’s comet, Lindstrand, or McLeod.

Don’t be afraid to try this simple way! I use if for almost all my collating now and it is the favoured way of geologists working in the field who compare aerial photographs of terrain taken a few seconds apart.

But start by practicing on simple things. Sit facing a wall ten feet away and look at a small object on it. During this time raise your two index fingers to a position slightly below the object on the wall, so they don’t block it. Let them point straight up about four inches apart from each other. Be aware of the appearance of your fingers while you are still focused on the object on the wall. You will see that there are actually four finger images — all of them out of focus. As you move the fingers toward or away from each other, you will come to a point where two of the images lie on top of each other, and your eyes will tend to lock on this arrangement. That middle image of three is what my collator would deliver to your brain. The trick now is to hold your eyes in this configuration, but shift your focus from the object on the wall to the middle of the three finger images.

Let me explain. There are two independent functions of the muscles associated with the eye. Those outside the eye do the tracking, making the eyeballs converge or diverge, for example. The muscles in the eye control the focal length. Once we are a few weeks old, we track the two eyes in tandem, instead of letting them go their separate ways, and we also learn to focus at the point of intersection of the eyebeams. But this association of the two muscular functions is totally arbitrary and there need be no pain with disassociating them as an adult.

Consider the following. If you look at a single finger held four inches in front of your nose, you don’t think of yourself as cross-eyed. But if you take your finger away while holding your eyes in that position, you will experience double vision of whatever objects lie behind where the finger was, and someone looking at you would think you were a cross-eyed person. Yes, your eyes are crossed, but you have no ocular disorder — for all vision at distances less than infinity entail eyes crossed in varying degrees. Almost all our vision in life is double vision. We tend not to be aware of this doubleness because it is present in peripheral not in foveal vision, where our attention is concentrated. But once you are aware that most vision is double, you can take foveal vacations there. (I do. It is like walking in a jungle full of strange creatures. It is a fearful symmetry.)

So, now on to a meaningful example (which would be simpler for you to absorb if I could show you, instead of resorting to painstaking instructions). Get two new dollar bills (or, if you can’t afford that, quarters with different dates) and put them in the position your fingers were when you were looking at the wall (and in the same orientation). Move them until the four images become three, and then work on getting your focus shifted to the plain of the bills, WITHOUT CHANGING THE TRACKING OF THE EYES (for if you let your eyes adjust the tracking, you will automatically go back to seeing only the two bills that are really there instead of the four images that are in your mental experience). When your focus is on the fused images of the two bills, you should get a visual buzz from the difference in the serial numbers. If ink spots are on one bill and not the other, they may seem to float, etc.

Now practice on some quarto pages, which are not so big that they will cause you eyestrain. If they are too big for comfort, you can shrink them on a xerox machine and/or hold them away from you at a greater distance — either manoeuvre entailing less extensive convergence of the eyes. To practise with, you can find variant title pages of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the 1944 Variorum edition by Hyder Rollins (or in my late 1970’s) SB article on the same title (see the biblio reference on the University of Toronto in Mississauga website under my name, under Dept of English and Drama) — or Fletcher’s massive photographic study of the variants in _Paradise Lost_ — from the 1940s, as I recall. Also, the Huntington Library has just published a big book on Holinshed, coauthored by Clegg and McLeod, and I have four states of part of a column there with the variants made vivid.

Anyway, don’t give up trying. This kind of collation is not really a hard thing to do, as you have all your life been taking two visual images and merging them. The problem now is that you are trying to do it under instruction, whereas a baby does it just by fooling around and seeing what works.

Randy

PS As for your rash statement [i.e, I questioned whether McCleod's stand-based collator could hold a newspaper]. What my collator can¨”hold” is not the same as what it can “look at”. The design breakthrough of my collator is that I dispensed with symmetrical optics. But I sell the machine with the possibility of symmetrical optics. On my machine, each train is chamelion like, and can swivel in any direction. One could thus sit in a corner and have one eye trained on a poster on the left wall, and the other on a copy of the poster on the right wall (i.e., there is not any longer a reading stand to “hold” the objects being collated). Size is not now a problem. If the objects are giant atlases or newspapers, supporting them on the walls and getting them flat can a problem. But if the images are merely projected from slides, exit problem. Another thing you can do with a collator or with crossing your eyes is to get e-images of the objects your want to collate and scroll down each screen to cover the height of the column in stages. I have collated an original copy of a few pages of Holinshed with a web version on my lap top.

R

That’s all there is to it, from one of the contemporary masters of sight-based collating. This method is necessary when you need to collate two impressions from the same setting of type and either a) have no optical collator available or b) have a book or periodical that won’t fit in a collator. It is the cheapest and fastest option even if you have a mechanical device at your disposal. Cheap is obvious: there’s nothing to buy. To get to the point that it’s the “fastest” option takes a few hours of practice. But the more time that you spend with this method, the faster it becomes. It took me about 25 hours to collate two copies of the 600-odd pages in John P. Jewett’s 2-volume 1852 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Happy collating.

Thoughts on Practices for Comprehensive Orals

A few weeks ago, a Ph.D. student at Nebraska shared the reading list for his (or her, to maintain anonymity) comprehensive examination, the third of four hurdles that almost all Ph.D. students in departments of English must overcome (the four being course work, language proficiency, comprehensive orals, dissertation). Although his or hers was a customized list, I was struck by the difference in approach at the University of Virginia (UVa) and the University of Nebraska (UNL).

At UVa, oral exams had to be passed before one could enroll in the dissertation seminar, where one would prepare and refine a prospectus. I was encouraged–nay, exhorted–to ensure that my reading list could withstand the scrutiny of almost any scholar in English literature, as its purpose was to ensure that I could carry on an intelligent conversation with other scholars (on the assumption that our past training would include some overlapping texts). While any scholar could point out omissions from a necessarily selective list of the equivalent of 30 to 40 novel-length works, the list preparer should be able to offer a rationale for inclusion and exclusion. The exhortation was no mere rhetorical exercise: the intellectually intimidating (though nice and altogether generous) chair of graduate studies at the time, Professor Chip Tucker, grilled me after I presented my list. That practice (of having to undergo the grilling of the graduate chair) was of brief duration in the department. What Professor Tucker intended (I think) as an invitation to talk intelligently about the list was understood by Ph.D. students as a formidable barrier that usurped the authority of advisers–the practice soon ended.

UVa offered three modes for reading lists: historical period, genre, custom. The historical period was required, and one could choose a previously recognized genre (epic, novel, lyric, etc.) or propose a custom list that departed from the “genre” formulation. For a custom list, one had to provide a written rationale for the choices, whereas one had only to provide oral assurance of one’s understanding of the historical period rationale for the required list. My lists, including my custom list in Bibliography, Textual Editing, and Electronic Texts, survive online on my CLIR portfolio page (too busy to link now).

In contrast, at UNL, I find a radically different process, which tends, I think, to use every step to prime the student for dissertation writing. The reader will please not hold me to exact account, as my familiarity with UNL process derives from a few chats with students from two different departments. The first marked difference is that students prepare a dissertation prospectus during their first year in the Ph.D. program. This prospectus, which I assume will influence course work, though not formally, also informs the comprehensive orals reading list. As compared with UVa, these lists at UNL tend to be comparatively more rich in both canonical works of criticism (for the historical period or the genre) and specific criticism.

Whereas I would never have thought of including E. Bruce Kirkham’s Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on my UVa historical period reading list–because one’s historical period is limited to at most a handful of monumental field surveys (Matthiessen, Fiedler, etc. in American literature)–I think that I could have included it under the UNL regime. The prospectus (prepared beforehand) would have provided an implicit rationale at UNL, whereas the emphasis on broad field survey (prospectus not yet prepared at UVa) would have almost certainly have nixed it. Put otherwise, UVa advisers would have looked askance a field survey that seemed to clearly to point toward a dissertation plan. You don’t do the reading for your dissertation as your orals list. Instead, you select the field of scholars for your dissertation after you’ve completed the broad survey and passed the orals exam. Scholars at UNL are encouraged, in contrast, to be looking forward to the dissertation that they might write.

One disadvantage of the UVA system is that the post-orals/pre-prospectus period is a time of goofy indecision. You go into orals expecting to be asked to talk about any of 60 works in two broad fields, and you end up providing answers to about five questions that invite broad answers. Unfriendly examiners might grill you on finer points of individual texts, but I only had one such question.

If only I had thought to say that Moby Dick’s subject is man’s confrontation with hostile nature, my examiner would have had to come up with another objection.

A second disadvantage is that orals do little to prepare one to write a dissertation, so my dissertation is weak at placing itself within the broader sweep of literary and cultural studies at the present moment, a weakness compounded by my decision to edit a loooooong text, and to finish on a fast schedule rather than making a career out of graduate school.

With my UVa background, I would conceivably have been doomed had I accepted a tenure-track position on my way out–not a choice available to me!–because I did not have the broad range of field reading that I could have completed in a program like UNL’s. The recognition of that fact (as well as procrastination or unavoidable difficulties) led many students at UVa to stretch out their Ph.D. to sixth, seventh, or eighth years. As someone who escaped, I will merely sigh over the department’s Faustian offer for graduate students–the apparent offer of intellectual enrichment now and future rewards–against the Marxist reality that you are in the teaching proletariat and shall remain there until you complete your degree, at which point it is likely you will have to accept continuing membership in the proletariat of visiting instructorships or short-term fellowships. Not everyone gets stuck–every graduate program has stars–but it’s a depressingly familiar course for many. My mirage of intellectual rewards has just turned to what seems a pleasing reality, so my bitterness is expected to fade–but keep your own counsel.

Where was I? The reading lists and orals at UNL seem to prepare one to write a dissertation and book that are deeply engaged in the current moment of critical thought. At UVa, the reading lists cannot possibly serve that purpose because of the way it is timed. The reading and research for the dissertation will have to serve. So my postdoctoral fellowship has been spent in part reading criticism in my field so that I can join conversations with greater confidence. I don’t, on initial thought, believe that one method is significantly better than the other, but I do believe that the two models represent significantly different conceptions for the purposes of reading lists and comprehensive oral exams, which should be weighed carefully among the relative merits of individual programs.

I think that the broad field surveys (without a particular focus on intended dissertation research) will enrich my teaching, but they weakened the contemporary rhetorical relevance of the dissertation for students of American literature. I could have solved that problem by spending another year or two reading and writing (a choice that is altogether reasonable if one has time and money). On the other hand, my custom orals list and a long fascination with textual scholarship make those parts of my dissertation stronger, though I don’t think the orals list was consciously crafted to focus my research. I had read widely in textual scholarship for three years before crafting my list, and I took the opportunity to expand into areas in which I was not broadly familiar.

The observations on the discrepancy between the UVa and UNL practice respond tangentially to the fact that I work through Eric Sundquist’s monumental To Wake the Nations now–in partial response to reader comments on a submitted essay–rather than when I should have, before or while writing the dissertation. I know now that I could have benefited immensely from Sundquist’s work while writing the dissertation, but I did not know it then.

Superattention and the Scholarly Editor

In documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s blog entry of 10 April 2008 (which discusses Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire), Vanderbilt psychology professor Dan Levin offers a critique of people who worry about (and catalog) continuity errors in movies. Levin offers a critique which might apply equally well to scholarly editors:

ERROL MORRIS: And here’s my question. Why are people so interested in continuity errors in movies? What’s that about?
DAN LEVIN: I don’t know, maybe it’s about being the expert. Being the person that sees something that other people don’t see. Being aware of the deep workings of the movies or something like that. That’s my guess.
ERROL MORRIS: The person who pays more attention than anyone else?
DAN LEVIN: Yeah, the super attentive person, there’s this kind of idea that “I’m super attentive, I have a super attention system. I see all this stuff.”
ERROL MORRIS: But your belief would be, of course, that since they super attend to all this stuff, they’re probably ignoring something else.
DAN LEVIN: Yeah, they’re not paying attention to the stuff they should be paying attention to, which is the story, the ideas of the filmmaker, all this cool stuff. And a lot of psychologists have argued if you’re really paying attention to all this detail stuff, you’re missing the good stuff. You’re missing what you need to be paying attention to[....]

I would reply that the “detail stuff” is what anchors us to fact and helps inform our understanding of the act of artistic making. The artists mostly know the details, and they mostly have reasons why some details matter and some don’t. Levin, to me, suggests that vanity (and perhaps the desire to excel at snarky cocktail conversation–those scholarly editor cocktail parties are a riot, what with our emendations and accidentals livening up the whole proceeding) drives those who focus on details. I will merely say that to determine what one “should” pay attention to derives from the interest of the examiner. To me, the textual alterations are the “cool stuff.”

Perhaps the mistake of another filmmaker in a New York Times interview will suffice to illustrate my point. When Robert Altman described himself as feeling like Stowe’s Eva on the ice being chased by dogs (Kornbluth, June 1997), Altman’s mistake (he meant Eliza) went unremarked by his interviewer. It seems likely that the editors of the New York Times did not notice either. They knew the important stuff, and a factual error that two generations earlier would have marked Altman and his interviewer as lunkheads was allowed to stand (though a reader’s letter noted the error). To cite Uncle Tom’s Cabin but falsely remember the white child as the one fleeing slave traders is to indicate something profound about cultural amnesia (even if one must recognize Stowe’s clear hierarchy of mulatto over pure African–in matters other than Christian forbearance). By cultural amnesia I refer to the reading of antebellum slavery through the lens of minstrelsy. Postwar minstrelsy’s deep workings included obscuring the horrors of antebellum slavery and thereby detracting attention from the South’s effort to re-impose practical slavery through disenfranchisment, erosion of civil rights, legal racial terrorism, and the organized extra-legal terrorism of lynching.

Similarly, when John Updike in his review of Gates’s edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin unknowingly exchanges Dinah and Prue, the editors of the New York Times magazine did not notice. Updike in “Down the River” explains Uncle Tom’s attempt to console Dinah, a “hapless servant.” Prue is not a servant to the St. Clares, and Dinah is far from hapless. My interest here again is that the editors/fact checkers for Updike’s review failed to notice the error. Had the book under review been Huckleberry Finn, would such an obvious error–i.e., confusing the Duke and the King, an error which I submit you would be unlikely to recognize without double-checking–have gone undetected?

If we push a little bit on Altman’s and Updike’s mistakes, I think we can at least detect signs that the minstrel remaking of Stowe’s work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century continues to influence our contemporary reading. Maybe continuity mistakes in film and literary criticism are just what Levin say–the stuff that we need not pay attention to when paying attention to the good stuff–but mistakes, in addition to indicating that our cultural elite are not familiar enough with Stowe’s work to notice the error–may indicate a widespread cultural tendency to discount the continuing relevance of slavery’s legacy. Those who ignore the “deep workings” may also be missing something. But it may be the “important stuff” that they’re missing.

Meta-Post: or, Why are Readers Here?

The WordPress tools provide a way to see why a reader has arrived at this site. The most interesting (to me) is search terms. And here’s the lifetime list, ranked according to frequency.

Search Views
wesley raabe 24
amanda gailey 5
bibliography of nineteenth century ameri 5
gerry mcgann blog 5
the fayetteville observer + digital news 4
raabe juxta 4
“wesley raabe” 4
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joshua bell video metro station 3
washington monument inscription 3
19th century periodicals gale 3
american periodicals, 19th century 3
jewett dunnet shepherdess summary 3
chesnutt + ivanhoe 2
nineteenth century american periodicals 2
“ken price” greenville 2
fatima tennyson 2
“type damage” tanselle 2
robert stilling 2
sarah orne jewett 2
english phd blogs 2
sarah orne jewett the town poor 2
a dunnett shepherdess 2
english phd blog 2
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emily dickinson handwriting 2
“vault at pfaffs” -site:lehigh.edu 2
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quotes by emily dickinson 2
textual collation exercises 2
hyphen 2
emily dickinson there is a word 2
aprille raabe washington dc 2
“digital textual studies” 2
“converting mla to chicago style” 2
“amanda gailey” 2
wesley raabe author:w-raabe 2
gettysburg address script 2
“pat bart” 2
phd english market 2
periodical, new york, 19th century 2
brooklyn newspaper 19th century digital 2
joshua bell washington post video 2
“peter robinson” scholar “tame expert” 2
new york digitized periodicals 2
digital literary scholarship 2
alice cary uncle christopher’s 2
english phd job search 2
“english journal” “college edition” 2
dummy version of the book scarlet letter 1

I’m glad some people find my blog by searching for some variant on my name, although I expect I’m responsible for finding myself at least some of the time. It’s as easy to Google your own blog as it is to type in a URL. I’m sympathetic to the poor fellow or gal who searched for “dummy version of the book scarlet letter” and ended up on my site.