At the beginning of the spring semester, each of the Praxis fellows was asked to run a pen-and-paper workshop introducing the rest of the fellows and staff to a digital method. No screens, no code, just the low-tech materials needed to think through a concept with your hands.
The driving philosophy for my workshop came from a quote by Richard Bach: “We teach best what we most need to learn.” I found this a clarifying provocation because instead of asking myself thorny, stressful questions—What will I teach? What do I know well enough to even be able to teach? What will be interesting to the other fellows and staff?—I was able to begin with a simpler one:
What do I need to know?
That was easy. I need to know how to curate and organize works of literature into coherent clusters and how to present those clusters to an audience. The structure of my dissertation is somewhat unusual in that it isn’t organized into chapters based on individual authors—for example a chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, a chapter on the works of Ted Hughes, a third on Gwendolyn Brooks. Rather, my chapters are conceptually themed around three kinds of poems I believe to be undertheorized: poems written from the perspective of animals, poems mourning the death of an animal, and poems detailing an animal encounter. Because these are undertheorized categories, there is no obvious starting point, no established canon to lean on. One of the central challenges of this work is determining what poems to include and how to present them to a reader. Hence my workshop.
A Word Teeming with Life
I decided to begin with a brief etymological history. (Based on my previous blog post, you may sense that this is a common pattern for me, and you would be correct.) The word anthology can feel dead and tiresome, especially in the context of an English department, where it quickly becomes synonymous with The Norton Anthology of English Literature—the ubiquitous teaching tome that conjures up associations of imperialism, hierarchy, and canon-formation. But it felt important to go back to the original anthology, a word whose origins are quite literally teeming with life.
Anthology comes from the ancient Greek anthologia (ἀνθολογία), meaning “flower-gathering”—from anthos (ἄνθος), “flower,” and legein (λέγειν), “to gather or collect.” The word traces back to a specific act of curation: around 100 BCE, the poet Meleager of Gadara compiled what is considered the first true anthology, a collection of epigrams by forty-six Greek poets. He called it The Garland—Stephanos (Στέφανος)—and in his introduction, he compared each poet to a different flower, weaving them together into a literary wreath. From its very beginning, an anthology was never just a heap of texts. It was a garland—something deliberately woven, where the selection and arrangement were themselves creative acts.
I shared this with my fellow fellows to begin reframing the kind of work an anthology can do. The anthology is not a neutral container. It is an argument about what belongs together and why.
Aesop’s Fables
I then introduced the anthology-making exercise. I gave each pair of participants a set of eighteen Aesop’s fables—but only their titles and associated morals, printed on cards. I chose not to include the full text of the fables at the wise suggestion of Brandon Walsh, which saved on reading time and allowed me to include enough fables to make the anthologizing meaningful. Participants were asked to select, cluster, order, and title an anthology from this set of cards.
The decision to strip the fables down to title and moral started me thinking about metadata. In this exercise, what is normally considered metadata—the title, the summary moral—was itself the data, given that participants didn’t have the fables themselves to read. This necessarily informed how they constructed their anthologies. Several groups clustered the fables based on the morals, sorting them into thematic categories like greed, deception, or flexibility. But I noticed that these morals are open to interpretation. Given the cryptic nature of some of the fables, it is fully possible for a single fable to have several competing morals, all of which would in turn affect how it was categorized. Is “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a fable about a thirsty crow attempting to drink from a pitcher too narrow for its beak, about cleverness, persistence, or desperation? The answer depends on the anthologist, and each reading produces a different garland.
Titling conventions themselves proved significant. One participant (Shane, unsurprisingly) included only fables featuring dogs (and the dog-like) and titled his anthology “Canidae.” It made me realize how contingent such an anthology is on the metadata available. If the titles of the fables were different, if they foregrounded the morals rather than the characters, could such an anthology even exist? The exercise revealed something I hadn’t fully articulated before: that the categories we use to organize literature are not found but made, and they are made from whatever information is legible to us at the moment of sorting.
Wireframing
The second part of the workshop asked participants to take their anthology and imagine it as a website. Using markers and blank paper, each pair sketched wireframes for three pages: a homepage, a browse page, and a single fable page. The shift from editorial decisions to design decisions turned out to be more disorienting than I expected—and more productive. Suddenly the question was not just what belongs together but how does someone move through what belongs together.
One of the most interesting wireframes came from Shane, who designed a single fable page that presented two fables simultaneously. At the top left of the page, a small illustration accompanied the first line of “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” reading right-side up. But the next line down was the last line of “The Fox and the Grapes”—printed upside down, beginning from the bottom of the page. The two fables were enmeshed, line by line, so that as you read downward through one fable you were also reading upward through the other, the right-side-up text and the inverted text meeting in the middle. Even the pairing was deliberate: the contentment of the country mouse set against the fox’s sour dismissal of what he cannot reach.
To sharpen the design conversation, I borrowed a technique I’d been advised to try (also from Brandon): after the initial wireframing round, I asked participants to create a deliberately bad wireframe, then swap it with another group to fix. It is easier to talk about good design in the context of bad design, and the exercise gave everyone a shared vocabulary. But Shane’s wireframe complicated things beautifully. The group that received it didn’t want to “correct” such a fun and original idea (and who could blame them?) Their fix was to simply present the two fables one after the other, essentially normalizing the layout. It was the responsible design choice. It was also, in some way, a loss. Watching it play out, I realized the exercise had surfaced a genuine tension at the heart of digital presentation: between accessibility and experimentation, between making something usable and making something that rewards a different kind of attention.
This, I think, is the crux of the digital anthology problem and the reason I designed this workshop. The editorial and the digital are never really separate; they shape each other. The way you organize a collection changes what kind of interface it demands, and the affordances of an interface change what kinds of organization are even possible.
Anthologies Reimagined
But why stop at a website? The wireframing exercise opened a door in my thinking that I’m still walking through. If an anthology doesn’t have to be a book—if it can be a website with its own navigation and architecture—then what else could it be? What would an anthology you could walk around in look like? What if it weren’t a book to flip through linearly but something more like a room in a house you could dwell in. Where the poems on the walls changed depending on which door you entered through, where proximity meant something, where you could sit with a cluster of texts the way you sit in a corner of a room?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet. But I think the workshop helped me understand why they matter. Meleager’s original garland of poems was a wreath, a circle with no fixed beginning or end and where each flower touched the ones beside it. Somewhere between the garland and the Norton, we flattened the anthology into a line. The digital gives us a chance to unflatten it, to think about what it means to arrange literature not just sequentially but spatially, relationally, experientially.
We teach best what we most need to learn. I walked into that workshop needing to think more carefully about how the structure of a collection shapes the experience of reading it. I walked out with eighteen fables, four very different garlands, a handful of good (and bad) wireframes, and a vision of an anthology as a room. That feels like progress.
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(New version on the left.)
