I would like to acknowledge that I am a settler scholar working and living on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region of southern Alberta, and that the University of Calgary, where the research and writing of this paper took place, is also located on those traditional territories. I also thank the external reviewers whose suggestions for revision strengthened and clarified this paper.
What I am suggesting by this too-brief discussion of what is to be found in the Munro archives is that Munro’s methods of composition, often readily discernible there, lend themselves to archival analysis. Those methods need to be probed more thoroughly than they have been. This is because Munro’s methods are fundamentally organic — that is, as she has written in the introduction to her Selected Stories, she often imagines a scene, seeing it as an image, and then tries to write its contexts, to discover what it means. As she both imagines and works through the story, focused on such contexts, she leaves clues throughout her holograph drafts and typescript. […] Throughout these drafts, such clues abound. And because of this, and especially because Munro’s work is in the short story form, hers is an art that demands mapping in ways not yet done. To my mind, all such maps begin in Calgary.
(Thacker 2016, 196)
1This essay discusses the “Visualizing a Canadian Author Archive: Alice Munro” project,1 a collective effort to gather data on a segment of the Alice Munro papers held at the University of Calgary and visualize the interrelations of the archival materials, offering a preliminary response to leading Munro scholar and biographer Robert Thacker’s call for mappings of her archive in ways not yet done, “the need for better maps of Munro’s work” (Thacker 2016, 194). If genetic critical investigations, like most literary archival work, are generally undertaken individually by a solitary scholar carefully examining and comparing drafts of a text in order to trace the creative process, I want to explore the possibilities — and limitations — of collective genetic critical projects here. In 2008–19, a team of researchers,2 in collaboration with library staff, read through the drafts of 22 Alice Munro stories. They were all composed in the late 1970s, and would eventually comprise two of her collections: Who Do You Think You Are? (Munro 1977; published in the United States as The Beggar Maid) and The Moons of Jupiter (Munro 1983). Researchers included faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students; each researcher put data from the materials into a template with the goal of mapping the evolution of these stories in relation to each other, as well as to the editorial interventions of Munro’s editors at the New Yorker, Macmillan, Knopf, and other magazines and publishing firms. As the sole Canadian literature scholar amongst the faculty members of the team, as a teacher whose students have worked with primary sources in the Alice Munro papers for years leading up to this project, and as a researcher with particular interest in genetic critical approaches, I took a lead role in the project and have written this paper discussing the collaborative project from these teaching and research perspectives. As a collective, “distant reading” genetic investigation across a substantial subsection of an author’s oeuvre, the “Visualizing a Canadian Author Archive: Alice Munro” project offers a response to Dirk Van Hulle’s question as to “whether genetic criticism and textual scholarship can connect to the more ambitious, going ‘around’ of distant reading and still go ‘on’ doing what they have always been good at, the careful transcription of drafts and direct, microscopic analysis of textual relationships” (Van Hulle 2022, 189).
2Due to ongoing copyright restrictions, this project focuses on visualizing metadata gathered from a segment of the Munro archive, rather than digitizing drafts and/or transcribing them so that they may become searchable. In addition to gathering metadata to answer some initial research questions about Munro’s practice at this particular stage of her career, as well as to prompt further questions both about her writing practice and the nature of the archive itself, we sought to create a public-facing resource which could alert researchers to possible avenues of further investigation into the Alice Munro Papers. Due to the time constraints of the project — less than a year from the conception and grant application stage to the conclusion of funding — securing permissions from Alice Munro and/or her legal representatives to digitize and/or transcribe the materials was not possible. Moreover, there are ongoing challenges to securing copyright permissions in relation to the Alice Munro Papers in general. We feel that this mapping of metadata, however, is in itself an innovation and significant contribution: the visualizations we produced supplement the existing finding aids which describe the collections.
3As genetic studies of Munro’s fiction by scholars such as Christine Lorre-Johnston and Nadine Fladd suggest, her work invites and rewards genetic critical analysis (Lorre-Johnston 2015; Fladd 2015). The numerous drafts in the Alice Munro collection evince a writer who revises heavily and retains the various iterations of each story. We can trace the genetic sequence through most stories from holograph drafts in notebooks to numerous typescripts and galleys with holograph revisions; even after she began using a word processor in the early 1990s, Munro continued to print drafts and revise by hand. This process of revision continues even after first publication, with many stories undergoing substantial revision between first publication in magazines and their subsequent republication in book collections, or even their republication in anthologies or collections of selected stories by Munro. This process of ongoing revision throughout the life of a story suggests that Munro’s fiction exemplifies John Bryant’s observations about “the fluid text”:
that writing is a process; that a literary ‘work’ is not just a final print version published but the full range of revisions which occur before and even after initial publication; that patterns of revision reveal a writer’s “revision strategies”, which give us a clearer sense of the writer’s shifting intentions; and that an analytic “narrative of revision” can be constructed as a critical means of assessing not simply a writer’s development but the dynamics of an individual writer’s acceptance of or resistance to the ideology of a culture.
(Bryant 2008, 4)
4Grzegorz Koneczniak argues that Konrad Górski’s notion of “textual awareness” “seems to go hand in hand with Munro through her creative development” (Koneczniak 2016, 106) and that “[e]ven a cursory look at the manner in which the Canadian Nobel-Prize winner frequently modified versions of her short stories […] can be treated as an invitation to a more methodologically-oriented editorial discussion of Munro’s oeuvre and the way she shaped it” (Koneczniak 2016, 105). Because for Munro revision is a process which continues throughout the life of a story – including after publication — and because interactions with editors of both magazine and book publishers have significantly shaped her corpus, her work especially invites textual and editorial scholarship, and, I would add, genetic critical approaches. Moreover, the instability of Munro’s texts aligns with an ongoing concern with indeterminacy in her work; as Coral Ann Howells observes, “Munro’s storytelling methods have always encouraged a plurality of meanings as alternative worlds are positioned ‘alongside’ each other in the same geographical and physical space” (Howells 1998, 70). The reader of Munro’s stories is placed in a position analogous to that of the genetic critic, considering and assessing numerous versions of a story and always arriving at a place of provisional meaning and completion.
- 3 In his “Series Introduction” to the Canadian Archival Inventories Series produced by the University (...)
5In 1974, Alice Munro was first approached by the University of Calgary library with an offer to acquire her papers, though the arrangement was not finalized until 1980 (Tener and Moore 1986, xxix). Acquiring her papers was part of an aggressive effort by then-head of Archives and Special Collections, Kenneth Glazier, to build the national profile and research capacity of a university which was only established as an autonomous institution in 1966. Not unlike decisions made in the middle of the twentieth century by other North American institutions, such as the Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York, Buffalo, or the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the University of Calgary saw an opportunity to quickly establish this profile and capacity through acquiring the papers of contemporary writers, chiefly Canadian. This strategy was supported by the comparably extensive resources available to libraries for such acquisitions in the 1970s, not to mention funding available to support the work of describing the collections and producing detailed finding aids.3 In addition, during this period, contemporary writers were increasingly willing to either sell their papers to university libraries, or donate them in exchange for a tax receipt, not only for the financial benefit, but to relieve them of the burden of holding them and ensure their preservation in an organized archive. As Kathryn Sutherland puts it:
To a living author the mass of papers, sorted and unsorted, that accumulate in attics, garages, and garden sheds or lie encrypted in obsolete electronic storage devices — drafts of works published and unpublished, diaries, and letters — represents a burden and, just possibly, money in the bank, a pension; to descendants of the fashionable, the admired, or the best, a potential windfall.
(Sutherland 2022, 31)
- 4 While this essay was at the proofing stage, Alice Munro passed away in May 2024. On July 7, 2024, h (...)
6While Alice Munro was already a prominent and award-winning author in Canada at the time of the arrangement reached with the University of Calgary, and — as I discuss further below — her then-newly-established relationship with The New Yorker would propel her to prominence in the United States, at this point the financial benefits of the arrangement would have been especially welcome. And as Munro’s national and international profile has grown since the agreement was reached, her papers have become the most internationally significant of the University of Calgary collections, particularly after her reception of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013.4
7Although, as Stephen Brier has argued, the digital humanities, broadly speaking, have tended to focus too narrowly on research and scholarship while “also minimizing and often obscuring the larger implications of DH for how we teach in universities and colleges” (Brier 2012, 391), this project has its roots in an archival-based pedagogy. As well as supporting scholarship, the Munro papers provide excellent opportunities for undergraduate and graduate student research projects. I have had students work with the drafts of Munro stories we are studying as part of archival projects that have replaced the conventional group project, but still encourage collaborative peer learning. Students examine drafts of a story, or correspondence relating to it, collect images of the materials with their phones, which they share with the class through our learning management system, and then write short essays in genetic criticism in which they identify substantive variants between drafts and the published story, explaining the significance of these revisions to the story as a whole. In addition to the opportunity for students to conduct primary archival research, their close work with these materials, I will admit, has provided a crowdsourced, quantitative investigation into the Munro archive which has alerted me to curious compositional histories, enabled a greater sense of her practice’s evolution, and spurred my interest in the possibilities of quantitative archival and genetic analysis.
8Although Munro had initially claimed in correspondence with Calgary that she had not retained “that many manuscripts”, this fortunately proved not to be the case, “for when a trunk and a suitcase were unpacked in 1980, there were 2.5 metres of papers going back to the early 1950s” (Tener and Moore 1986, xxix). The materials from the mid-1970s, when Munro acquired the representation of Virginia Barber in New York and began to publish in commercial U.S. magazines, most prominently the New Yorker, provide an especially rich resource which gestures towards the ways in which Munro’s practice at this point enters into dialogue with editorial influences at The New Yorker. For example, a letter dated November 18, 1976, from The New Yorker editor Charles “Chip” McGrath, suggests Munro make the location of her stories more explicit, because “American readers think everything happens in America unless you tell them otherwise” (McGrath 1976). A 1981 fan letter from a Richard Carr of Solon, Maine, would appear to support McGrath’s suggestion, telling Munro “[i]t’s refreshing to see a slick magazine publish something realistic about New England” (Carr 1981). Carol L. Beran notes The New Yorker’s “editorial policies regarding language and descriptions that might offend conservative readers created small conflicts between the magazine and Munro” (Beran 1998, 207), which occasionally led Munro to attenuate the forcefulness of diction and imagery, particularly as relates to sex and the body. And so, for example, in “Royal Beatings”, the first story Munro would publish in the New Yorker in 1976, horses that wouldn’t “pull your cock out of a pail of lard” become horses that wouldn’t “pull your tail out of a pail of lard” (Beran 1998, 207–8) (“cock” would be restored to its rightful place in the story’s publication two years later in Who Do You Think You Are?). As a result of such editorial interventions, Beran contends, “Munro’s depiction of lower-class people in rural Ontario becomes slightly less authentic when the genteel image of The New Yorker excises their characteristic impoliteness and deliberate lack of gentility” (Beran 1998, 209).
9In her book-length study of Munro’s archives, JoAnn McCaig situates the editorial influence of Munro’s editors, at The New Yorker and especially at Norton during the composition of the stories which would comprise Who Do You Think You Are?, within a framework of “American cultural hegemony” (McCaig 2002, 121). Similar to our project, McCaig focuses on the 1970s as “a particularly intense and fascinating period in her authorial history”:
It is during this time that she enters the American literary marketplace, marries for the second time, and struggles with genre privilege while preparing Who Do You Think You Are? for publication. In general, the tensions between nationality, gender, and genre all clash during this period, and some very powerful negotiations are needed to bring Munro into the full force of her own authority.
(McCaig 2002, 13–14)
10Noting that publishers generally regard a novel as an easier genre to market than a collection of short stories, McCaig discerns in the archive an insistence by Munro’s editor at Norton, Sherry Huber, that the stories in that collection be linked closely, an insistence not shared by Munro’s Canadian publisher, Macmillan. Both McCaig’s book and Helen Hoy’s essay “Rose and Janet: Alice Munro’s Metafiction” discuss the “tortuous” (Hoy 1989, 69) editorial and publication history of Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid; McCaig suggests that Munro’s resistance to linking the stories more closely was both feminist and postcolonial, as “the genre issue has links to gender and nationality or colonial status” and “[i]f the short story ranks below the novel in the hierarchy of genres, the categories of autobiography or memoir fall even lower on the scale” (McCaig 2002, 122).
11The New Yorker’s editorial interventions in Munro’s writings would appear to reflect this genre hierarchy which McCaig identifies, even if its reasons were perhaps more legal than generic. Even more significantly than The New Yorker’s discomfort with the rural working class language of some of Munro’s writing, an “editorial dislike of autobiographical stories” evidently arising from an earlier “lawsuit about a supposedly fictional work by another author” (Beran 1998, 207), would lead to some of Munro’s more apparently “autobiographical” stories to be rejected or substantially edited.
12Genetic research in the drafts of her story "The Progress of Love," for example, suggests that relatively late in the composition process, Munro changed the narrative perspective of the story from first to third person prior to its publication in The New Yorker (October 7, 1985), and then changed it back when it was republished as the title story of her 1986 collection The Progress of Love. Here are Munro’s edits on one draft of the story’s first paragraph, perhaps made at the recommendation of her editor at the magazine:
Figure 1: Transcript from: Munro, n.d., "‘Typescript Draft of ‘The Progress of Love’".
Typescript by Munro; transcription by the author.
13The shift to third person for the magazine publication, for instance, may have been prompted by a suggestion to further distance the narrator from the author. Although Munro’s employment of free indirect discourse in the third-person narration of The New Yorker version allows the reader access to the narrator Phemie’s thoughts, recollections, and perspectives, this narrative perspective creates a further detachment between story and narration, the told and the telling. This is all the more consequential in a story which establishes an unreliable narrative perspective in Phemie’s recollections, for example, in her uncertainties over whether or not her father witnessed her mother burning her inheritance in the stove (Munro 1986, 28–29). The return to first person narration in subsequent publications, then, suggests Munro regarded the shift to third person for publication in The New Yorker as a compromise, and that Phemie’s self-questioning at the story’s end — “How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them” (Munro 1986, 30) — more effectively embodies the story’s concerns with the imperfections of memory when narrated in first person.
14In a 1982 interview with Geoff Hancock, Munro describes her compositional practice as sequential, with the composition of each story a singular process: “I see everything separate. Right now, all that matters to me is making a new story. It’s as if I had never made any in the past. When that story’s finished, it’s only the new one that will matter” (Hancock 1982, 77). The archive, however, suggests a different practice, revealing Munro’s stories as composed less as discrete works but rather generated from a compositional matrix in which names, episodes, imagery, and other elements are continually mutating and overlapping intertextually as each story takes shape.
15In my own readings through the archive, for example, I discovered an episode in a holograph notebook from the mid-1970s, in a draft of what would become her story "Chaddeleys and Flemings" in which neighbours are alerted to a woman threatening to hang herself in a barn:
Franklin’s mother was in the barn, just as he had said. She was standing on a kitchen chair in the middle of the space her husband usually parked the car, and she had a noose around her neck. Phyllis and Marjory and the dog were hanging around the barn door.
"Oh Mrs. Cole!" said Winona’s mother in a tired voice. "Come down out of that."
(Munro, n.d., 197, “Alice Munro Papers”)
This episode eventually disappears from that story only to resurface as a key scene in "The Progress of Love":
At the end of the yard is a small barn, where they keep firewood, and some tools and old furniture. A chair, a straight-backed wooden chair, can be seens through the open doorway. On the chair, Marietta sees her mother’s feet, her mother’s black laced shoes. Then the long, printed cotton summer work dress, the apron, the rolled-up sleeves. Her mother’s shiny-looking white arms, and neck, and face.
Her mother stood on the chair and didn’t answer. She didn’t look at Marietta, but smiled and tapped her foot, as if to say, "Here I am, then. What are you going to do about it?" Something looked wrong about her, beyond the fact that she was standing on a chair and smiling in this queer, tight way. Standing on an old chair with back rungs missing, which she had pulled out to the middle of the floor, where it teetered on the bumpy earth. There was a shadow on her neck.
The shadow was a rope, a noose on the end of a rope that hung down from a beam overhead.
"Mama!" says Marietta, in a fainter voice. "Mama. Come down, please."
(Munro 1986, 10)
16Recognizing that in order to trace the composition of a single story it would be “advisable to zoom out and consider the genesis as part of an entire oeuvre in motion” (Van Hulle 2022, 60), I began to think about how an individual student or faculty member’s qualitative, individual archival investigations might be extrapolated into a quantitative, collaborative practice, providing a “distant reading” of the archive through the accumulations of hundreds of close genetic readings. I was also reminded of the urgent need to digitize these documents, build upon the excellent foundational work in the finding aids produced in the 1980s, and develop new resources for researchers interested in these papers.
17As timing would have it, an internal grant opportunity would provide the resources for such a project. In the Fall of 2018, I and several colleagues from the departments of English, Classics and Religious Studies, and Computer Science, as well as our digital library, received a subgrant to develop the project “Visualizing a Canadian Author Archive: Alice Munro”. Funded by a grant awarded to the library from the Mellon foundation, these subgrants are intended to cultivate collaborations between the library and faculty working in different disciplines. The amount of the subgrant was modest — a little over $20 000 CDN — and the timeline short (about eight months), so our scope was limited to a pilot project. Our initial proposal stated that the project would “focus on the Alice Munro collection in Archives and Special Collections, specifically her correspondence with other writers, her readers, and her editors and agents as they negotiate revisions and publications of her work”. We further narrowed our focus to stories relating to two of Munro’s collections — Who Do You Think You Are? (Munro 1977) and The Moons of Jupiter (Munro 1983) — all of which were composed during the same timeframe of the mid to late 1970s, that crucial period in Munro’s career when she acquired New York representation and began to expand her international reputation with publications in U.S. magazines. The data gathered from the correspondence affiliated with these stories trace the networks that emerged between Munro, her publishers and editors at various magazines and publishing houses in New York and Toronto and, eventually, her readers. One of the goals of our project was to determine if there was any consistent causal relationship between the revisions to Munro’s drafts and the correspondence with the various publication venues of her stories. Excellent work has been done on the editorial influence during this period on stories such as “Royal Beatings” (Beran 1998) and “The Turkey Season” (Fladd 2015), and we had hoped our project may reveal other interesting intersections of editorial intervention and Munro’s writing practice. This ultimately proved impossible to visualize accurately, however, because while the correspondence is entirely dated, the drafts never are.
18Nevertheless, we wanted to see if a genetic critical method, a method typically performed individually and qualitatively, could be scaled up and performed collectively and quantitatively. And we wanted to see if these findings could be visualized in interesting and revealing ways. We established clearly defined data units, hoping to avoid ambiguities and not rely too much on interpretive decisions of researchers. Indeed, our work with the archive could be read as a scaled down, analogous version of Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” approach. His “evolutionary model”, in which the fittest texts not only survive the slaughterhouse of literature, but establish the literary values that ensure their continued survival, parallels a genetic critical method. In such an analogy, the various textual witnesses that are discarded in the revision process would approximate his notion of literary “rivals” to the canonical works: “contemporaries who write more or less like canonical authors…but not quite” (Moretti 2013, 66–67). The scenario Moretti identifies as “Darwinian” in the evolution of the novel parallels a genetic understanding of the composition process: “the field opens up to a multiplicity of possibilities, it narrows down as an external pressure selects one and discards the other, then it opens up again to a new multiplicity” (Moretti 1983, 264). If Moretti’s practice is a “formalism without close reading” (Arac cited in (Moretti 2013, 65); italics in original), then ours is a formalism of multiple and various close readings, with the shared ground of “identifying [multiple] discrete formal trait[s], and then following [their] metamorphosis through a whole series of texts” (Moretti 2013, 65; italics removed).
19Aided by graduate and undergraduate student researchers, we cast a wide net in gathering metadata, which we hoped would enable us to visualize these relationships in significant ways. The student researchers and I spent hundreds of hours reading through all of the drafts and correspondence relating to the 22 stories which eventually comprised these two collections, compiling spreadsheets that charted the various iterations of titles; narrative points of view; character names, professions, and relationships of each character to the protagonist; settings, both primary and secondary; cultural references, both “high” and “mass”; historical and geographical references; authorial and editorial revisions; Munro’s typed deletions; even the colour and dimensions of the paper as well as the colour of pens and typewriter ribbons. For the correspondence, we recorded the dates; locations and professional positions of the correspondents; stories discussed; rejections and acceptances; other individuals mentioned; and references to other cultural institutions and events. We collectively harvested an enormous amount of data from the drafts: one spreadsheet I compiled of metadata from the drafts of “Chaddeleys and Flemings” eventually grew to 239 rows across 20 columns, and extrapolating this across the comparable number of drafts of 22 stories produced a sizable data set.
20Our determinations about which categories to gather data were shaped by our own understanding of the Munro papers and in which categories many of the substantive revisions were typically made. But these determinations were also influenced by existing scholarship on Munro. The decision to map the changes to character names across the drafts, for example, arose from a recognition that, as James Carscallen has noted:
[i]n studying drafts and earlier published forms of the stories, we find that characters we know from a single name may have had others in the course of their evolution — Rose [the protagonist of Who Do You Think You Are?] has had a good dozen. Munro herself has remarked that, while the names may change, the characters do not, but true as this is (the contrary, by the way, would be equally true), it hardly explains her need to fuss with her names as much as she does, nor could any such explanation dispose of similar variations within her work in its final form.
(Carscallen 1992, 85–86)
21Asked in her interview with Hancock if names are a clue to her characters, Munro responds, “Well, they might be but I don’t choose them that way. I usually choose names that sound right. But with difficulty. I change names a lot. And then part ways into a story I realize that the name I’ve been calling a character isn’t his or her name. I know what the name is” (Hancock 1982, 101). Similarly, mapping changes to both settings and geographical references would seem especially important in the work of a writer for whom place is such a powerful determinant of character and narrative; Robert McGill, for instance, has called Munro’s work “geographic metafiction”, a fiction which, “even as it configures space and place, examines its own ability to do so” (McGill 2002, 103).
22In addition to comparing different drafts of a text to the completed version and focusing on isolated variants and their significance, our approach demanded that we record the data in such a way that consistencies across drafts were also noted, establishing how and when in the composition process, for example, certain character names, settings, or other details solidify, and when others are discarded. I should note that, because the drafts are undated, we followed the sequence produced by archivists when the accession of Munro papers were described; therefore, any inaccuracies in “original order” produced in the finding aid 35 years ago would be reproduced in the course of our project. We were unable to find any way around this problem, although we did hope that our meticulous examination of the drafts might identify any such errors in sequencing, and indeed some of the data gathered were intended to clarify the temporality of each story’s composition. While we initially transcribed each individual revision, this proved too time (and therefore resource) consuming, and we instead moved to a quantitative measure of revisions and deletions. This produced a kind of distant reading of a particular section of the Munro archive, made all the more distant and quantitative as it was employed across the materials relating to 22 stories, rather than just one.
23John Brosz, our library’s coordinator of data visualizations, and Jagoda Walney, a postdoctoral fellow working on visualization, then produced visual models of the data the research team had collected.5 The CSV files of original raw data from our investigations are also open-source and available for download at this site. We hope our attempts to this point might raise general questions as to how one might visualize a literary archive and indeed a literary corpus considered in the quantitative terms of a distant reading approach. The Exploratory Visual Analysis (EVA) tool we chose to employ was Tableau, due to its flexibility in handling both large and small data sets, its user-friendly functionality, and the clarity of the visualizations it produces. Reviewing the literature on EVA projects, Leilani Battle and Jeffrey Heer note that EVA projects often do not have clear goals, and that some researchers “describe EVA as a situation where analysts may not know what they are looking for, but will know something interesting when they see it”, while others assert that in fact “EVA is more effective when the goals are less clear” (Battle and Heer 2019, 147; emphasis in original). They further note that “[o]thers take a different view, saying that analytical goals evolve throughout the course of an EVA session: the analyst starts with a vague goal, and refines and sharpens this goal as they explore” (Battle and Heer 2019, 147). Our method combined both approaches: starting with a particular goal — attempting to determine if there is a recurring pattern between the editorial correspondence during this period and Munro’s revision process — and then seeing if a visualization of this cross section of the archive would provoke further research questions.
24Genetic critical approaches generally seek to reconstruct or trace the creative process through determining the sequence of the process and decisions made as evidenced in the drafts of the avant-texte. Genetic criticism may employ a visual “map” of the creative process, such as the “genetic map” of Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie (Endgame) in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (Van Hulle 2022, 11). According to Van Hulle, “[w]hat genetic maps show above all is that authors’ intentions can be highly mutable, to the extent that several genetic critics no longer see the writer as a monolithic ‘self’ but as a succession of selves” (Van Hulle 2022, 11). Because our approach looked at a cross-section of an author’s archive in relation to not one, but 22 texts, our visualizations would take a different form than such genetic maps. Van Hulle observes that,
[w]ithin Digital Humanities, both genetic criticism and textual scholarship are exceptional in that they are forms of microanalysis, whereas the general trend is towards ‘macroanalysis’ (Jockers 2013). But this macroanalysis generally makes use of only one version of the text in their corpus. What is lacking, therefore, is macroanalysis across versions.
(Van Hulle 2022, 176–77)
25The “Visualizing a Canadian Author Archive: Alice Munro” project thus employs the tools of genetic criticism — microanalysis of all the documents in the life of a text, including multiple publications — without engaging in interpretation at the “micro” level. Rather, we sought to collect data across the lives of multiple texts written contiguously with each other, and then visualize the data gathered in what we hoped would be revealing ways.
26Because of the temporal and resource constraints of our project, we have not yet created visualizations in response to all the research questions we have asked. We first worked to visualize the quantity of revisions — revisions and deletions made by Munro, as well as “external”, i.e., editorial revisions — over the sequence of drafts of a particular story through vertical bar graphs. We then juxtaposed these different graphs, suggesting which stories were more heavily revised and in which drafts the most revisions occur; these visualizations also provide a quick comparison of the number of drafts produced for each story (see Fig. 2). These visualizations may be of most interest to genetic scholars, suggesting which stories were more heavily revised and therefore potentially offering more fruitful directions for research. Stories such as “The Turkey Season” or “Royal Beatings”, which scholarship has already established were shaped by significant editorial intervention, are represented as such. Other stories, such as “The Moons of Jupiter” or “Providence”, are shown as having been revised significantly through external editorial interventions, but scholarship to date has to our knowledge not yet explored the significance of these interventions.
Figure 2: Occurrences of revisions in Munro’s stories.
Data visualization created by John Brosz and Jagoda Walny, and reproduced with their permission.
27We also mapped both settings and geographical references in the set of stories (Fig. 3). Such visualizations perhaps reinforce what we already know about Munro’s work: that she sets most of her stories in Ontario, southern Ontario in particular, with substantial reference as well to British Columbia. If we expand the project to eventually incorporate all of Munro’s works, these maps may be of comparative interest in terms of visualizing the expansions (or contractions) of the geographic range of Munro’s work over her career (or perhaps reinforce a critical perception that associates her so closely with one particular region). Alongside the mapping of settings, the visualization also provides a global map of references to various locations beyond setting in the 22 stories — references to places characters visited, for example, or origins of secondary characters, or geographic points of comparison. While almost all continents are represented, locations in North America and Europe appear to dominate, perhaps unsurprisingly. Although the researchers who gathered the data did not distinguish between actual locations, such as Sudbury or Lake Huron, and fictional ones, such as Jubilee or Hanratty, it would not be difficult to modify the visualizations to distinguish between such locations and thus establish a ratio between the real and the invented in Munro’s fictional worlds.
Figure 3: Settings and geographical references in Munro’s stories.
Data visualization created by John Brosz and Jagoda Walny, and reproduced with their permission.
28As noted above, we had hoped to visualize a determinative relationship between the editorial correspondence in the Munro papers and the drafts of her stories discussed in this correspondence, but because the drafts are undated, establishing this relationship conclusively proved impossible. However, we were still able to create visualizations that could help us roughly establish the compositional time of the stories. Tracking the paper colours and size of the sheets that comprised the various drafts, as well as details about the writing apparatus used, we hypothesized that grouping drafts written, say, on yellow paper, or with a fading typewriter ribbon placing text in red and black, might indicate the drafts of these stories were composed contemporaneously with each other. This logic might lead us to conclude that “The Moons of Jupiter” and “Royal Beatings”, both typed on blue paper, were written around the same time, as perhaps were “Chaddeleys and Flemings”, “Wild Swans”, and “Moons of Jupiter”, as drafts of all were produced on a fading black / red typewriter ribbon. Moreover, data gathered from the correspondence still proved useful by establishing which stories are mentioned in letters alongside a particular story. In Figure 4, the frequency a story is mentioned alongside Munro’s story “Accident” is represented by the relative size of the circle, and the stories referenced are colour coded by the collection they eventually joined (or neither in some cases). This tells us that “Accident” was actually referenced in the correspondence more frequently alongside the stories that would comprise the earlier collection, Who Do You Think You Are?, rather than within the orbit, pardon the pun, of the stories that would make up The Moons of Jupiter, where it was eventually published. At some point I envision an interactive visualization, in which by clicking on the circle of one particular story in the orbit, it centres that story and then re-constellates the other stories around it.
Figure 4: The frequency in which a story is mentioned alongside Munro’s ”Accident”.
Data visualization created by John Brosz and Jagoda Walny, and reproduced with their permission.
29As noted above, researchers were initially recording the text of revisions in the spreadsheets, which we soon realized would have been too time- and resource-consuming across the drafts of 22 stories, and therefore unfeasible given our limited time and resources. However, we returned to this initial focus on particular revisions through another possibility we explored in a preliminary way: employing XML to create interactive digital genetic editions of each story. A graduate research assistant (Min Lei) used OCR to create digital files of each draft of the story “Wild Swans”. Then other graduate assistants conversant in XML (Hannah Anderson and James Robertson), encoded these drafts, allowing us to track the revisions across them. Figure 5 presents the code of a brief section of the story; the LEM represents the published text, and the RDG tags variants across the revisions. In the products of the encoding work (see Fig. 6), the blue shades in the passage represent text that has been revised; the darker the blue, the more revisions. The coding will allow a user to hover over any revised text to have a pop-up reveal the different versions. However, because this element of the project works with transcriptions of the drafts themselves rather than metadata about the drafts, to pursue this encoding further will require copyright permissions from Alice Munro’s identified representatives such as her family or legal representation. Van Hulle notes another possible application of XML encoding: the <del> and <add> tags could be used “to calculate the percentage of words that remained ‘stable’ across versions, how many were cut and how many added” (Van Hulle 2022, 174). Van Hulle further notes that “[t]o make this kind of research fully operational, however, it is necessary to present readers with the entirety of the author’s oeuvre and sous-ouevre” (Van Hulle 2022, 174), something our project moves towards and which could be part of its expansion in the future.
Figure 5: Encoding for tracking revisions across drafts.
Quoted text by Munro; ncoding by Hannah Anderson and James Robertson.
Figure 6: A passage that has been revised.
Quoted text by Munro; screenshot of work by Hannah Anderson and James Robertson.
- 6 For studies of Munro’s fiction in relation to class, see Katrin Berndt, “Trapped in Class? Material (...)
30Further work with the existing metadata set collected from drafts of the 22 stories could draw upon metadata not yet quantified and visualized meaningfully. For example, we tracked the different character names Munro used in the different drafts of her stories; a visualization of where the same names are used in drafts of different stories could lead to different hypotheses about the proximity of a story’s composition in relation to others, or perhaps gesture towards thematic similarities between stories in which a character’s name in one story migrated to another. The metadata we collected on character professions, on “high” and “mass” cultural references and historical references, may be especially interesting to consider in relation to the depictions of class in Munro’s work, or on the work’s relationship to a postcolonial context: both areas that have been written about extensively in relation to Munro’s fiction.6 Do the professions of characters across her oeuvre, or the ratio of high cultural references to mass cultural references, support a reading of Alice Munro as a writer who represents working class characters and milieu, for instance? If not, how might we account for differences between our quantitative data and qualitative readings of the work? Do the locational, cultural, and historical references across her work place it squarely in a Western / Eurocentric frame of reference, and if so, how might that relate to its postcolonial elements?
31The pedagogical impetus for this project has to some extent come full circle: just as the project was at least in part prompted by student work, students continue to build upon the research foundation established by the Visualizing a Canadian Author’s Archive: Alice Munro project. Although our group’s research has been paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a doctoral student in a course I recently taught, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, was able to access the Munro papers and complete a project on fan mail collected from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the same period our project covered. Working once again with John Brosz in our library, Ramji produced visualizations of these collective letters, mapping them in terms of gender, geographic location, and positive, negative, or neutral “sentiments”. She was struck to find that her “affective experience with this set of correspondence did not align with the data” (Ramji 2022, 3), and indeed I experienced a comparable reaction when I saw the visualizations of the Munro revisions across the drafts of the 22 stories. Quantitative visualizations are limited in their ability to convey the qualitative degree and impact of revisionary work across the various extant versions of a story or stories.
32Despite such limitations, I am intrigued by the possibilities once metadata drawn from the archival materials around all the stories can be quantified and visualized in this way, leading to a comparative approach to the materials. Researchers will be able to quickly see which stories were more heavily revised, for instance, which stories were likely being composed around the same time, and which characters and episodes are moved from one story to another. Such a distant reading of the archive will not replace close reading, of course, but it can alert researchers as to which archival avenues might prove most productive. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our team had planned to apply for a large grant from Canada’s federal humanities research agency — the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada — for multi-year funding that would allow us to expand the project to cover all of Munro’s drafts, including the period when she begins to produce born digital materials using a word processor, which will obviously impact the residual textual archive in significant ways. In addition to extending the visualizations of metadata of the sort I have introduced here to the entire archival corpus, the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary is currently investigating the possibility of digitizing the entire collection of Munro drafts. A future research project, in addition to the data collection and visualizations I have described above, could transcribe the drafts so as to make them searchable (and in the case of handwritten drafts, more legible), and encode text versions of the drafts to permit the creation of genetic critical editions of the stories as well as allow for quantitative analysis of the sort Van Hulle describes. Now that the pandemic has receded and the idea of large groups of researchers working in the archives is feasible again, I plan to apply for this funding to continue, and expand, the project. All of this, of course, will be contingent not only on success with the grant application, but on the permission of Alice Munro’s estate.