This project is about the environment in Caribbean literature, but it is ultimately an experiment in the representation of thematic similarities among a set of texts. When I first read the novels that would form the basis of this project, I was struck by the repetitions across the texts of the language used to describe the natural environment, from tiny crabs in the rivers to the shades of green tinting the islands. How, then, can I capture the experience of encountering these motifs in a set of works? What does it mean to connect allusions and repetitions into one giant web? How can I visually represent these texts as their own ecosystem of reciprocal interactions?

I intend this project to be an alternative to the linearity of traditional literary scholarship, to exist outside of the requirements and expectations of the book or the article. I see the digital form as a facilitator for this kind of non-linear, allusive, connected reading. George Landow has written on the way that the digital environment is one in which “text can be reproduced, reconfigured, and moved with very little expenditure of effort” (170). The digital environment affords the visual collaging of textual fragments, and juxtaposing these fragments often produces “the pleasure of recognition” of the connections between them (Landow 172). Scholars whose projects influenced and inspired this one include Marisa Parham and J.R. Carpenter. Both have made use of this kind of textual juxtaposition in their projects .break .dance, The Gathering Cloud, and Wanderkammer.

Hypertext, or the connection of digital media via interactive links, is the basis for representing relationships between texts in the project. It is what enables this textual collaging and interactivity between the reader/viewer and the interface. The way that hypertext enables connection and juxtaposition across difference is similar to the way that the authors of the novels on which this project centers juxtapose disparate environments and construct non-linear narratives in order to question the power dynamics of colonial history. The collage aesthetics of this project also speak to the hybridity of the Caribbean, not only culturally, but biologically as well. The digital is also a space in which to explore and recreate the experience of reading a non-linear narrative, the way these novels jump in time and space. The hypertext format encourages returning to passages and reconsidering them in new contexts.

I hope that the interactivity of this work invites a slowing down and a close reading of not just the fragments of text themselves, but the connections between them. It can certainly be challenging to interact with a project that doesn’t have a clear start or end and that doesn’t package its information in a neat, ready-to-use bundle. In “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” Miriam Posner argues that there is value in being challenged by interfaces and in not always receiving information in an easily digestible way. I hope that this project is disorienting in a way that reflects how the protagonists of these novels felt upon leaving their homes and arriving in an unfamiliar, cold, damp country. I hope that this experience rewards looking closely and paying attention to setting and surface details. Rather than boring, pointless, or tired, close reading our environment is a necessary practice that can teach us something about empathy in an increasingly fractured, virtual, consumptive world.