IIIF for Educators

"Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and actively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the experience of postmemory and the process of its generation."

Curiously, in addressing Art Spiegelman's Maus, a comic book account of the Holocaust as narrated by the artist's father, a survivor, Hirsch focuses first on photography, and not drawing (or graphic speech) as a medium of remembrance: "For me, it was the three photographs intercalated in Art Spiegelman’s Maus that first elicited the need for a term that would describe the particular form of belated or inherited memory that I found in Spiegelman’s work."

🖥️ Activity

For this hands-on lab activity, we will conceive of Spiegelman's Maus as an archive of visualized memories Spiegelman methodically collected and curated from his father Vladek, based upon Vladek's oral testimony. Additionally, following Hirsch, we will view Maus as a body of evidence about Art Spiegelman's own state of mind as a survivor of second-hand trauma. The focus of our study, however, will be upon his handiwork.

Like fingerprints at a crime scene, hand-drawn lines and words are uniquely expressive of their creator. Visualized scenery inside a frame reflects the perspective of the artist as much as the witness. What isn't shown is left to the reading viewer to fill in. Using concepts introduced by Scott McCloud, such as line-drawn cartoon, the connecting gutter between panels, and a simple cropping tool (embedded below) we will select, describe and interpret examples from Maus. This exercise in a discussion-based setting will help prepare you collaboratively for your solo illustrated paper assignment that follows. 

NOTE: You are welcome to use materials and ideas you submitted for this lab activity in Paper Assignment #3!

👓 Example

Sample description, observation, and interpretation 
To help you get started, here is an example of visual description, or ekphrasis, followed by a statement of observation/interpretation. (click to open and close)

The passage below is quoted from scholar and Spiegelman collaborator Hillary Chute in "Maus's Archival Images and the Postwar Comics Field," a chapter from her Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016). Remember that Chute is an advanced scholar, and has considerable experience writing such passages. 

Description One sees the outside of the crematorium, with arrows identifying aboveground spaces (ovens) and belowground spaces (undressing rooms, gas chambers), along with a smaller diagram of the complete interior building--Crematorium II--lying vertically on the right across two views of the exterior. The diagram of the interior, a blueprint, shows the relation and scale of spaces like the toilet, coal storage, room for melting gold fillings, and 'corpse lift,' in addition to the incineration room and gas chamber. On the page's bottom tier, the panel depicts the ramp down to the so-called disinfection room from the perspective of someone walking down it. The final panel takes readers into the space of the undressing room with its signs designed to perpetuate the illusion of return: 'Important-remember your hook number.' Observation & Interpretation On this page the crematorium chimney itself breaks the frame of reference, in its comics expression as in life: its stack bursts upward, jutting out of Spiegelman's topmost border, sitting conspicuously and ominously against white space. On the previous page an Auschwitz chimney also breaks the top of the frame, its wafting smoke joining Spiegelman's cigarette smoke in the above tier; even as a second-generation witness, the book implies, Art breathes Auschwitz, perhaps as a habit and perhaps to his detriment).

Illustration

🧱 Materials

 The Complete Maus (2003) (click to open and close)

You can inspect The Complete Maus in the viewer below, thanks to IIIF (The International Image Interoperability Framework), a standard used by the Internet Archive and other libraries and museums (including the UCLA Library Digital Collections). Click into any page thumbnail, advance pages, and return to thumbnail view by clicking the display options icon in the upper right corner.

🛠️ Tools

IIIF Cropping Tool
This is a viewer and cropping tool for IIIF content. It is pre-loaded with The Complete Maus (click to open and close)

🪜 Steps

Cropping
To view a page and crop a detail (click to open and close) 

1. In the IIIF Cropping Tool above, scroll through thumbnails on the left to find a page
2. Click the page thumbnail to load in the viewer
3. Zoom and view
4. To crop a detail from the image, click the white pencil icon, and highlight the desired rectangle by clicking and dragging a rectangle from corner to corner
5. A thumbnail of your selected detail will appear in a slider at the bottom of the Cropping Tool. You can repeat to collect multiple details.
6. Click on the thumbnail of any detail to generate an image URL. 
7. Select "Full" for highest resolution or leave it at "Actual" to crop your detail at the size you see it in the viewer.
8. Click Copy to copy the Image URL

Posting
To add linked images to a discussion post (click to open and close)

1. click Reply
2. to enter your image details, click the  picture icon in the text editing toolbar. In the Upload Image popup, click the URL tab, and paste your URL in the File URL blank. Briefly describe your image in the Alt Text field (for the visually impaired), and click Submit.
3. repeat for additional images

✉️ Share

1. Select an image portion of Maus with at least two panels that you feel express Art Spiegelman's postmemory and/or demonstrate key concepts and practices outlined in McCloud's Understanding Comics as featured in this module. Post it as a reply to this discussion-based lab activity using the IIIF Cropping Tool and following directions in Steps above. Add a brief (40-60 words) description in your post of what you see in your detail, following the example from Hillary Chute. 
2. Once you have submitted your post, reply to it and add a brief (approx. 30-40 words) statement of detail observation and interpretation based upon one or more specific details.

You are encouraged to keep it simple and write what you see in your own words; in your observation and interpretation of details, you do not have to be "right." 

Post by January 22, 11:59 pm

🤝 Collaborate

Once you have posted your own submissions, take some time to read and look at posts by others. Choose at least one (preferably one that has not already received comment), and reply to it. In your brief (approx. 20-30 words) follow-up post, engage with the shared image directly, as well as the description, observations, and interpretations of details:

• as a viewer of your peer's post, do you think their cropped illustration serves effectively as evidence of the concepts and ideas they hope to illustrate?
• as a reader, do you find their observations and interpretations plausible? (Whether or not you agree with them is not important; but whether you think they could be both informative and valid to a reasonable audience will help them refine their analyses)

Reply by the start of your section's Week 3 meeting time