(This post continues from part 1, “A Conversation about Project Beginnings…“)
E: Now, let’s talk about the process. Who are the teams?
N: There are two – there’s one primary RA team and then an extra team – the Omeka team – because I got some money from the HRI (Humanities Research Institute) at Brock. These are three students from my first-year English class. I scanned a whole bunch of Ann-Marie’s research materials to catalogue using Omeka software and they have done that work through the Brock Library, which Tim Ribaric was instrumental in supervising.
The “main” team of RAs is funded by SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) and includes three literature students, one student from the Department of Geography, and one student from the Department of Digital Humanities.
E: They’ve been working with us since late October (2023), and it is a mixture of grad and undergrad.
N: I remember sitting around this very table at the first team meeting and thinking, “what the heck have I gotten myself into?” Because I didn’t really know how to ask RAs to do things. Our disciplinary norm in literary studies is that people usually work alone, so thinking about what we wanted them to do was very hard.
E: Yes, it’s new for us, with a new format, language, categories, and activities.
N: So, the first thing I did was choose which novel.
E: Yes. Why did we start with The Way the Crow Flies?
N: I didn’t want to start with Fall on your Knees, because it has already received the most critical attention. I still maintain that The Way the Crow Flies is one of the most important Canadian novels ever written; it’s about difficult and ugly histories in Canada.
E: It’s about politics. It’s about trauma.
N: I mean, it was bestseller and nominated for prizes. I just don’t think it has been talked about enough. And we focused on two routes that intersect. The novel is set in the 60s – it’s very much a Cold War book. The main family in the story is the McCarthys. But one of the characters is their neighbour, Henry Froelich. Another secondary character is Oskar Fried, who becomes the responsibility of Jack McCarthy, who is given the mysterious task of helping Oscar set up an apartment in London, Ontario and then helping him get across the border to the United States. I chose these two characters because, although they seem so separate and secondary, one of the most important events in the novel is that they intersect. And you realize that when they intersect in a market in London that it’s not the first time they’ve met. It’s revealed that this is in large part a novel about a) post-World War Two Jewish refugees in Canada – that’s Froelich – and b) the Canadian government’s complicity in whitewashing Nazi war criminal scientists who end up going to the United States to join NASA.
E: So, the RAs read the book, and then we needed to develop a methodology for collecting data. We wanted them to work asynchronously and for there to be a record of all their data collection.
N: We wanted them to look for specific things, so I came up with data collection tools and, because I’m not a software programmer, the tools were a shared Excel sheet with a series of drop-down menus, a glossary of terms that linked back to the drop-down menus –
E: Do you remember them? There were things like latitude and longitude – those were the easy ones, but there was also “encounter” – is this encounter associated with custom, or is this a first encounter? Is this representation of a place part of a route?
N: And we wanted them to be able to identify, not just the character in a space, but whose eyes are we looking through? We started talking about focalization and then other literary qualities. Is this plot? Is this theme? Is this character development?
E: And these were all the drop-down menus. We had things like relational situation. Is this a contested space? Is this exclusionary space? Also – sense of place: are you coming to this space with a sense of apprehension or comfort? So, it’s emotional geographies.
N: Absolutely. So, we had this this Excel sheet, the glossary, a worklog –
E: WhatsApp was our fourth tool, which is another way to communicate with one another. The work log worked quite well because it was time stamped, as well as people stamped – it was very important for them to see how the others were working.
N: Yes, because every part of this project has prioritized making labour visible –
E: and crediting that labour, not just in terms of payment, because the RAs are paid, but crediting one another for ideas, for cheerleading, collaborating –
N: learning from each other, just being confused and totally frustrated.
E: And they would write, “this is what I’ve been working on,” and we came up with this colour-coding system to signal if you wanted to ask somebody else to look at your work. And so, we have this incredible archive of labour and conversation.