Digital Texts and Online Exhibits: NYPL's Candide 2.0 Offers a New Take
Curator Alice Boone discusses why Voltaire's <em>Candide</em> is the perfect platform for this digital reading experiment
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 04/27/2010
The New York Public Library's physical exhibit celebrating the anniversary of Voltaire's novella Candide—Candide at 250: Scandal and Success—recently ended, having run from October 23, 2009 to April 25, 2010. It featured, among other things, all of the 17 known editions from the work's original publication in 1759, presented by the library's Rare Book Divison.
While those pieces of the exhibit may be on their way back to permanent housing, a follow-up experimental version of the text dubbed Candide 2.0 remains open to public view, a digital commons of sorts offering up an English translation of the text as starting point for public discussion and debate. There, library programming and exhibition have merged in what may be an emerging new model for the presentation of special collections—curated content meets patron participation.
The project took as its starting point the last line of the work: "let us cultivate our garden." From there, authors, scholars, playwrights, and translators were invited "to work as 'gardeners' in the text, sowing seeds of commentary and preparing the ground for a fertile public conversation," according to NYPL Digital Producer Ben Vershbow. He formerly served as Editorial Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, to which a portion of Candide 2.0's comment platform also traces its roots.
LJ: How does the Candide 2.0 text project fit into NYPL’s larger Candide anniversary exhibit?
AB: Candide at 250: Scandal and Success is an exhibit about how the book has been refashioned by its readers over the years: illustration, translation, adaptation, sequels, commentary, and more. I call it the paradox of canonization: any canonical text gets transformed as it gets preserved, including in exhibits designed to celebrate it. So it made sense for the Library to participate in this transformation on the web, to invite its patrons to refashion it with these new tools that the institution is developing for reading.
What were your goals for the project?
The goals we had at the beginning of the project were to present a public digital space for annotation and reflection on Candide. I had some other, less coherent goals of seeing what worked and what didn't for this kind of project, so I tried to reach out in slightly offbeat directions for contributors and prompts for inspiration. Initially, in my annotations for early chapters of the book, I tried to see what kinds of annotations would generate different types of discussion; I was really set to digress on any subject. Of course, one can't plan digressions unless one's in Tristram Shandy, so it turned out that a more streamlined, directed form of close reading worked best for the project.
Do you have much of a sense of who your readers and contributors were? Any surprises there?
One issue that we ran into was that the general community of readers who are interested in close reading Candide was not terribly large. Candide 2.0 was used most heavily by classes, who were there for a specific purpose and who responded to that kind of teacherly close reading, rather than generally curious NYPL patrons or scholars. The student enthusiasm was a nice surprise, and it demonstrated what I tend to believe about reading technologies in general: that you can't predict some of the ways that a tool will be used, and users will adapt it themselves. It would be interesting to see how commenting would work on a different book, or with a different kind of outreach.
On April 15, you co-hosted a performance event with NYPL digital producer Ben Vershbow (who is also co-director of local theater collective Group Theory). How did you see the live event fitting into the virtual discussion?
The LIVE event worked out well. Ben and I presented the trajectory of reading Candide from 1759 and then moved to a mixed discussion/staged reading of some chapters interspersed with commentary from the web site. We had explicitly organized it and labeled it as an experiment, because this whole project has felt most exciting when we've thought about it in terms of what we're learning in producing knowledge on the Internet (and less as producing a final answer on Voltaire, Candide, or x piece of specific knowledge cited in the annotations).
For that reason, it was exciting to be enacting the experiment on stage, as opposed to the comment field. We had asked two of our most enthusiastic contributors, science fiction author James Morrow (The Philosopher's Apprentice, The Last Witchfinder) and playwright Stanton Wood (who wrote an updated contemporary play called Candide Americana), to join a discussion with Adam Gopnik about the book and the Library's future in cultivating its garden.
As you've written, both the text and the themes of Candide lend themselves to being remixed, adapted, and altered—how does that fit into the more conservative current landscape of literature and copyright?
I've become fascinated by the ways that Candide's publication history reflects major publication events and trends in the past 250 years. It was censored and stayed on the Vatican's forbidden list for more than 200 years. It had several unauthorized sequels that we can look to today as artifacts of a very different publishing community that delighted in refashioning characters and claiming false authorship.
It was the first book published by Random House; I think it was the first of the new covers that Penguin classics produced in concert with contemporary graphic artists. Bernstein's [1956] operetta has been recut and had new songs added in each of its revivals, and director Robert Carsen has rewritten parts of the book but kept the lyrics the same as he has reimagined the show to reflect contemporary politics and media in his English National Opera production. Terry Southern's 1960s Beat version of the story, Candy, was banned—you can read a great piece about it by his son Nile Southern on the All Possible Worlds blog linked to the site. Again, canonization means adaptation in some unexpected, sometimes weird ways.
So it makes some sense that we'd see some problems with public domain translations when we wanted to put a good version up online; the 1918 translation leaves something to be desired. But this is also a nice moment to reflect on these issues: you can situate the book in a vital ongoing discussion because it's always been involved in copyright and censorship issues. It's a good debatable teaching text for those reasons—it reveals those issues over and over again. To reflect that debate in copyright is to see a fascinating mirror history of narrowing a field through different forms of constraint, at the same time that adaptation opens the field in less expected ways.
The project is described as "a mix of programming and exhibition"—do you see that as a new model for what libraries will offer online?
I hope so! I hope it's a model for what exhibitions can do in the future. It requires a different form of curatorial work because it's interactive, but I really enjoyed this expansion of what I could do. It was the first exhibit I had curated (in situ or online), and it was exciting (and a bunch of other adjectives) to have to experiment every day with what we could do.
Ben has remarked on numerous occasions that our Candide prototype gestures toward several possible service models for the Library down the road: hosted social editions for scholarly communities and groups of researchers; digital classroom texts where students can read and comment in a single shared "copy" of the book; virtual book discussion groups led by librarian-moderators. Social reading could take on a variety of forms depending on which segment of the NYPL community you're addressing.
What's the most interesting issue you've run up against?
Our contributors have written some fascinating work, and I've learned a lot about coloratura, translation and contemporary publishing issues, adaptation, illustration. I wanted the All Possible Worlds blog to be a place where people with different forms of expertise than we normally expect in editorial work to bring their knowledge to bear on the book. The blog form is so adaptable to this kind of work, and I've learned a lot from them.
So much web-based discussion seems to lend itself to drive-by comments, capturing immediate and momentary reactions to different media types. How do you foster the kind of close reading and sustained engagement a project like this requires to be successful?
I'd like to see more iterations of this project in the future so we can test out this question. Maybe I'm deeply weird, but I think feedback loops of comments and digressive comment fields (even drive-by ones) are fascinating for what they show about the repetitive nature of commentary, how it feeds on itself.
We see that feature in some of the stranger commentaries on Candide (I'm thinking of an 1826 translation from Boston called Fame and Fancy, which underscores the anti-clerical satire with its own slightly intrusive bracketed annotations about the Catholic Church after the Napoleonic Wars, as though Voltaire's irony weren't corrosive enough), that there are more ways to comment than we can imagine.
This project generated a relatively modest amount of feedback, but what readers did with the text was interesting and instructive for us to consider for the future. I'm less worried about the flash-in-the-pan effect, and I'm more hopeful that institutions of reading can try out experiments to see what they can do, and they can be flexible and generous with seeing these projects adapt and change.
