Keywords for Building the Modern World
In the winter of 2021, to overcome the limitations of Covid-time instruction, I launched a digital humanities project that would give students an opportunity to engage in research and see their work published on a digital platform. Since students were indeed limited to remote learning, I surmised this project might offer them some digital tools to explore the world of nineteenth-century architecture. Titled, Building the Modern World: Keywords, the student-driven project uses an open-source platform, Scalar, that is conducive to multi-media and multi-vocal works and supports embedded video and audio along with functionalities for visualizations, annotations, and extensive content tagging (Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1: The visualization of connections among the contents in this project. Each dot represents a piece of content color-coded by type.
Figure 2: Alternative way of visualizing connections for each keyword. Each box represents a piece of content, color-coded by type. The darker the box, the more connections it has to other content (relative to the other boxes). Each line represents a connection, color-coded by type.
Students were asked to select a keyword from a list I prepared, and they were to write short entries (500-1,000 words) to explicate some aspect of the built environment of the long nineteenth century. They were to consider why the term was/is used, what it designates in terms of built works, and how it helps us understand the relation between space (built and natural) and social processes. The main argument of the project is that the global relations created during the long nineteenth century demand an understanding of how sites/buildings/regions/peoples were connected directly or indirectly, and by the same token what aspects of the landscape became disconnected. Instead of following a traditional chronological or national/regional approach to architectural history, the project and the chosen platform encourage cross-referencing and cross-tagging that help students discover non-linear relations across time and space.
The Inspiration
As may be obvious from the project title, Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, published in 1976, is the inspiration for this work, albeit in a humbler and discipline-specific way. It derives from the experience of teaching an advanced undergraduate course titled Nineteenth-century Architecture for over two decades at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the years I have cobbled together reading lists for the course and wished for an architectural-history equivalent to Williams’s Keywords. To fill such an absence, I have sought to bring to the class ideas that I found necessary to engage with in my own research on the long nineteenth century. Foremost of these is the interconnected sense of the world that was violently imbricated through colonialism and capitalism. Recently I have started giving students a set of key terms under the heading “what I want you to learn from this course,” with a full recognition that it is not possible within a ten-week academic session to fathom all these terms in any but the most rudimentary manner. The key terms serve as the scaffold to shape the course materials.[1]
In the preface to Keywords Williams explained that his book was driven by a need to understand the emergence of a new vocabulary of culture and society upon coming home from the Second World War. It was a search for the relation between language and social change, specifically through the word “culture,” that led him to look for not just philological roots of words, but more importantly for cultural links. The term “culture” got him to think of “class” and “art” and connections to “industry” and “democracy.”[2] He was interested in a shared vocabulary and chose terms that he found being used in “general discussion” in “interesting or difficult ways.”[3] That inquiry into vocabulary was both about setting down the “available and developing meaning of words,” and the explicit as well as implicit connections to everyday experience to which these words led.[4] They were “key” in being binding and indicative of certain ways of thinking about culture and society.
What then are the keys to understand the architectural history of the nineteenth century?
The Long Nineteenth Century
The long nineteenth century was foundational to the modern world. Colonialism, long-distance trade, capitalism, slavery, plantation economy, and the industrial revolution connected distant parts of the world, wreaked havoc, destroyed landscapes, as well as economies and livelihoods, generated new ways of thinking about buildings, cities and landscapes, and gave rise to new spaces, new technologies and new publics. New building types such as the railway station and the tall office building were created. A host of terms from City Beautiful to slum were coined during this time, and other terms given a new turn to describe and comprehend the emergence of new social and spatial relations.
A few ideas undergird this sense of the changing nineteenth-century world and the choice of key terms. The events and processes—war, trade, migration, technological breakthroughs, rebellions, artistic movements—did not take place in a vacuum. These were spatial events; they took place in physical and imaginative structures that affected the material conditions of life. This suggests that building construction, architecture and spatial relations are fundamental to any discussion of the material world—its politics, technology, culture. Likewise, it is imperative to consider the connections between politics, technology and culture in any discussion of architecture. Once we pay attention to connections, and not limit our inquiry within regional, ethnic, racial, and national boundaries, we open up opportunities for understanding social relations in a more capacious and critical manner. This might involve a recognition that French architecture didn’t just happen in France; that the Haitian Revolution is constitutive to turn-of-the-nineteenth century discourse on liberty and that Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign shaped European architecture in substantive ways; that Indian architecture is as much about what happened in Canton or Singapore as it is about the events within its subcontinental limits; that an understanding of the architecture of Germany would benefit from recognizing its colonial connections and forays into Ottoman territories. The connections were uneven, power-laden, and diffuse.
“It was a search for the relation between language and social change, specifically through the word “culture,” that led [Raymond Williams] to look for not just philological roots of words, but more importantly for cultural links.”
The keywords for Building the Modern World, I hoped, would help us see these connections, and move us out of old and tired habits of thinking about architecture as a parade of buildings in which style begets style. The keywords list is evolving and explicitly intended to engage with a larger number of actors and agents than has been typical of architectural histories. It consists of terms that refer to both small as well as large spaces, spatial types that were peculiar to this time period, and modest structures as well as monuments.
The term “modern” in the project’s title is not meant to valorize or describe only buildings and events that fit imperial definitions of progress. Rather it is used as a placeholder for the transformations that were particular to the long nineteenth century, with the hope that an exploration of connective links would also allow us to notice the disconnections.
Process and Pedagogy
Students from three classes worked on the project, as did a group of graduate students. They conducted individual research and worked in a collaborative mode as a team to develop their ideas and upload the content they created on Scalar. Each team had one person for a specific task: one led discussions and took notes to share with the group, one served as the text editor, another as the visual editor and the fourth person was the content manager responsible for uploading text and media on Scalar. I invited colleagues from my campus and other institutions to provide feedback to improve the keywords contents.
The project reimagines the pedagogical methods of architectural history in two important ways. First, by engaging with a digital humanities platform like Scalar, which enables the discovery of a wide range of geographical, material and social relations, the project reconfigures how a building or a site may be understood in terms of its making and meaning. It demonstrates that a site’s or term’s significance is illuminated by how we frame it in terms of its connections with historical events and processes. For example, the hidey holes in the slave quarters of U.S. plantations may appear spatially significant when tied to other sites of agrocapitalism and food storage and consumption both within and beyond the plantation. Second, in encouraging students to conduct research in a collaborative manner, it helps students develop skills for learning from each other and to trust their own instincts and repertoires of knowledge. The project encourages students to rely on their digital-native knowledge of popular culture and bring it to the classroom, be it music or video clips or podcasts. They learn how to integrate such knowledge forms with more traditional academic endeavors such as short-form critical writing and assembling architectural drawings and photographs (Figures 3 and 4).
Figure 3: Opening visual content of keyword World’s Fairs/Exhibitions: “The Great Industrial Palace,” handkerchief with portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with figures representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. Would have been a souvenir of the Great Exhibition of 1851, London. Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 4: Portion of keyword page: verandah.
As a project driven by student research, it does not claim to be the final or definitive word. It merely hopes to suggest a constellation of meanings, spaces, and events around each term from an historical perspective. Its most important aim is to indicate a set of references for each keyword and opportunities for discovering relations among different terms and sites to which the Scalar platform is well-suited. In that sense this work is open-ended and amenable to revision.
“The project reimagines the pedagogical methods of architectural history.”
The events that have unfurled because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the political events since 2020, including the Black Lives Matter Movement, have raised a global awareness about spatial limits and privileges. We have seen stark reenactments of methods of dispossession and containment through travel restrictions, quarantines, and infrastructural violence that many had wanted to believe belonged to a bygone world of the nineteenth century. The reach of the long nineteenth century extends to our times and unsettles our privileging of modernity. The links and gaps that this keywords project would hopefully make visible would perhaps enable narration of the yet-to-be told stories of architecture, of unlearning modernity.
Invitation
This article is also an invitation to undergraduate and graduate students at institutions other than UC Santa Barbara to participate in this collaborative work. We are planning a workshop in August 2022 for both students from and beyond UC Santa Barbara. If you are a student and wish to participate in this project, or as an instructor if you would like to bring this opportunity to the attention of your students, please follow this link.
Notes
[1] For a discussion of keywords as method see, Marie Moran, “Keywords as Method,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 4 (2021):1021-1029. Other forays with keywords include Julian Wolfreys, Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: the Key Concepts, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2013); John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018); New York University Press’s series; and the Keywords Project at the University of Pittsburgh.
[2] Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford University Press, 2014); xxv.
[3] Williams, Keywords, xxvi.
[4] Williams, Keywords, xxvii.
