I would be interested to hear different writer's opinions on this notion. I'm sure many would be intrigued by the idea; it definitely widens the avenue for the potential of a piece to stay relevant over time. But I would imagine that some writers would dislike the fact that readers believe in an idea that there is no such thing as "the piece itself," and that their piece is a thing to be changed. Then again, the amount of effort and thought that it would take for such a reader to practice this game on that writer's piece should be flattering to the writer.

Close-readers commonly perceive it to be a contradiction for the slaves to have been acknowledged as possessing agency of their own (or any humanistic attributes), since, at the time, they would have been considered property and not human. Here, they are shown fighting as a unit; and this is only one of more than a few instances in the text where the blacks have agency of their own--especially Babo, who by now it has been revealed has been the secret commander since the slaves' revolt.

Interestingly enough, this tribute to the real Captain Delano from the United States Gazette in 1806 mirrors that contradiction. “…a Spanish merchant ship called the Trial [which] a cargo of slaves had mutinied and in a most cruel manner, butchered the greater part of the Spanish crew.” The slaves are “cargo,” but they also “mutinied”; can cargo mutiny? Is cargo capable of cruelty? So, rather than the perceived contradiction in Melville’s story being a discrepancy in narrative stance or mood, it may actually have been a clever choice on his part to convey a contradiction that existed in the minds of people of both, Delano’s and his own, time periods. The slaves were either cargo or butchers, but nothing in between. But to admit that a slave has the agency to butcher cruelly or to mutiny would have (should have) dissolved the notion that they were beings of servitude—property.

The Real Amasa Delano

Amasa Delano was a real sea captain who lived from 1763 to 1823. This story is based on an account of an actual voyage of his in 1806. He was indeed from Duxbury, Massachusetts and is known to have fought in the American Revolution in his youth.

The name of the ship that Captain Delano commanded on this particular voyage was "Perseverance." He authored a book which is where Herman Melville found his inspiration; it was called, Narrative Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Comprising Three Voyages Around the World, published in 1817.

Amasa Delano would have been roughly 43 years old during the voyage that this story is based on. Furthermore, the details to come about the dense fogginess in the air over the sea is taken directly from Captain Delano's actual record--Melville's story begins very similarly to the original captain's-log.

The Real Amasa Delano

Five Sea Captains

This is one of a few instances in the text where the narrative and the actual Amasa Delano's perceptions were nearly opposite. Interestingly, this sentence very closely parallels a passage in the actual captain's sea-log; though, the mood towards the subject (Babo) is very different.

Delano wrote, "...the negro, who kept constantly at the elbows of Don Benito and myself, I should, at any other time, have immediately resented; and although it excited my wonder, that his commander should allow this extraordinary liberty, I did not remonstrate against it, until it became troublesome to myself."

From Delano's language, it is clear that he was less accepting of the behavior of the real Babo; he probably would have disagreed with the notion of him being, "less a servant than a devoted companion." And while Melville's text is not written with a first-person narrative--the narration being of a 3rd-person--it is not an omniscient narrator either, but a close-3rd perspective. Since Delano is the protagonist, the ideas, opinions, and observations provided by the narrator can be assumed to be akin to those of the character.

Five Sea Captains

Fishermen/hunters/poachers of seals. Ecologically destructive practice.

Small ropes or lines that traverse the masts of a ship and work as a ladder to clime up.

A solid wall enclosing the perimeter of a ship's deck for the protection of persons or cargo.

A stout pole, such as those used for masts.

Surtout-- a hood with a mantle worn by a woman

"Indian," here, is used to describe the natives of Peru, not the people of India.

a Spanish robe worn by women that covers all but the face.

Meaning fog

I'm not sure how effective a note-taking seminar would be. Part of me feels like note-taking is so personal, so connected to our own thought processes that one person's strategy probably won't fit another's. Then again, I have had two teachers--one in middle school and one in high school--who strongly influenced my method/style of note-taking. The middle-school teacher did actually demonstrate to me the technique of bullet notes with the possibility of an endless chain of sub-bullet notes--this changed my life. The high school teacher taught psychology and in his note-slides certain words were always highlighted certain colors. He never explained this and no one, in my class at least, asked about it, but I started underlining the words that he had highlighted. He was highlighting key words that, if you were reading his slides speedily, you could choose to only concentrate on them and retain the info quicker because it made the definition or fact more concise. I still practice this in my own note-taking. So, perhaps strategies can be taught.

Interesting. I think that people's notes or annotations of certain texts might actually provide insight into their psychology. But I think that this would only be true within certain parameters: I wouldnt think much personal info can be inferred from someone's notes on a technical manual or something of that sort; also, I think the reader would have to be reading in an un-manipulated way--notes for the sake of commenting to one's self, not for the sake of a specific assignment, for example.

It could be fascinating to essentially experience a text through someone else's mind; see how differently a text can be experienced. However, this seems like an activity of leisure for someone with an abundance of leisure-time.

Who says? Is Barthes creating his own ideology here? He writes as if he is speaking indisputable grammatical law. His distinction is interesting, though; despite his language being so very elevated.

I think it's odd that such metadata as comment boxes at the bottom of a page would infringe on copyright laws. While commenting is annotation, the primary document is left unscathed as its own entity. I see such annotations to be more like a critic's exterior comments (closely situated next to the text) than a kind of injection of outside info or opinion into the text.

Invisible is right; even after reading literature on the evolution of annotations, I didn't make the connection to facebook tags and youtube comments. Funny how we can take such functions for granted. I guess, for me, i'm still coming to terms with viewing facebook pages and such as a text.

In my own history as a student of English and a student in general, I always had a lack of motivation when it came to writing about literature. I was highly interested in literature--obviously, since i chose to study it-- but the commonly implemented structure or application used by teachers and professors just didn't really do it for me. "Read this and then compose a thesis to write x pages on." If i was assigned, for example, an essay or article that was fifteen pages long, there might be a multitude of elements in the text that catch my interest, but i wouldn't allow myself to think too deeply on them because i was scanning for the thing that i knew i could write x pages on. I might read a sentence that fascinates me, though i knew i couldn't flesh-out x many pages on it, so i moved on and, most likely, forgot about it. Reading a piece through a tool like hypothesis enables me to enjoy and absorb the text so much more. If more educators used annotating software in their courses, students wouldn't necessarily have to set aside their ideas about the less central aspects of a piece simply out of pragmatism since they had been asked to devise a single point and produce a certain number of pages in a limited amount of time. And I'm not arguing that students should not be asked to write longer essays, but if students were to initially experience the given texts through such annotate-able software--prior to being asked to write an extensive paper-- I believe they would take so much more away from it. Of course, I am not a student of education and I am only speaking from my own experiences in the classroom.

Just as a general response to this article--coming from a place of total ignorance of what the "Digital Humanities" were before reading this--it seems to me that English departments are almost playing a necessary game of catch-up by jumping on board. In my experience, many literary people have historically been the most reluctant to bring their craft to the web or to credit web-based writing. Writers often put-down blogging and intellectuals in general often show disdain towards social networking and other such things. Meanwhile, these technologies are believed to be the major entity that is pulling young people away from what has traditionally been viewed as literature. Now, English departments maybe realize that there is no combating the lure that these computerized networks have on the younger generations, so, they acknowledge that the stage of the internet is one that they must establish themselves on.