Animating Sight and Song: A Meditation on Identity, Fair Use, and Collaboration

Abstract

In producing an online ‘edition’ of Michael Field’s poem ‘Antonello da Messina’s Saint Sebastian’ from their 1892 collection of poetic ‘translations’ of paintings, Sight and Song, this project aims to suggest how digital tools might enable us to ‘edit’ and present literature in new ways — ways that, in this case, are meant to gesture not just at the process of composition, but also at the extent to which the poetic effects achieved depend on optical, spatial, and kinaesthetic metaphors of transparency and opacity. The project is also meant as a reflection on the terms upon which we encounter nineteenth-century authors and texts on the Web, whether in official electronic archives or the kinds of personal and crowd-curated digital collections being assembled on online mass platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flickr.