Ada Lovelace, Romantic from the Future: Adapting Ada
This post is the third of three celebrating Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852). Daughter of Lord and Lady Byron and regarded by many as the first computer programmer, these posts explore the current and future role of Ada Lovelace in literary studies and the classroom. This post is written by Aaron Ottinger for the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
Since the inauguration of Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, Lovelace has enjoyed a stronger position in the history of science and computing. However, her place in the literature classroom remains a little less certain. In what follows, I provide a reason for including Lovelace in the classroom and a few adaptation exercises to help integrate her life and writing.
The Text:
Lovelace’s major contribution to the nineteenth century is a translation of Luigi Federico Menabrea’s treatise on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, with notes that nearly triple the original essay in length, and was published in Richard Taylor’s journal, Scientific Memoirs (1843). An extract of the first note appears in Laura Otis’s anthology, Literature and Science of the Nineteenth Century (2002). Note A contains helpful comparisons, mathematical meditations, and visions of speculative computation to better communicate the value of Babbage’s machine:
Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
Lovelace’s image of a creative artificial intelligence pairs well with Mary Shelley’s creature (Frankenstein), Hoffman’s uncanny objects (e.g. “Nutcracker and the Mouse King”), or her father’s poetic look at radical change (The Deformed Transformed). However one introduces Lovelace’s notes, fundamental to this discussion are the “adaptations” of artistic expression from one medium to another. Because music production can be reduced to the language of mathematics, it can migrate across human and nonhuman media. Ultimately, Lovelace’s futuristic vision of artistic adaptation raises questions regarding the nature of creativity, the logic of discovery, and the rhetoric of aesthetics.
Mirroring her interest, I believe adaptation exercises provide students with a way to use Lovelace’s life and work as a lens to creatively reassess her romantic predecessors, imaginatively reprocess literary criticism, and recursively enhance metacognitive skills.
Three Exercises:
Asking students to write a work of historical fiction provides more opportunities to demonstrate an awareness of the Victorian cultural context. A fine example appears in chapter fourteen of Jennifer Chiaverini’s Enchantress of Numbers (2017), when Lovelace first meets Babbage and witnesses a silver automaton and the prototype for his first calculating machine, the Difference Engine. The book exemplifies how to integrate poetry, letters, and a map of social relations, including Charles Dickens and the mathematician Mary Somerville. Students could also expand this project by assuming a global perspective, as when, for instance, Patricia Rozema links English affluence and Antiguan slavery in her film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (2000).
Students might also consider featuring Lovelace in a graphic novel, after Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2015). Padua’s book stands out for its speculative approach to Lovelace, breaking the rules of space and time. In Padua’s version, Ada is the “Person from Porlock” who interrupts Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s composition of “Kubla Khan.” Through this exercise, students have the opportunity to create conversations between figures that could not otherwise meet. Personally, I would love to see Lovelace having tea with Dorothy Wordsworth, who yearned to study Euclid but was never afforded the opportunity. Adaptations provide an opportunity to alter the possibilities of history and the reality of the present.
My final recommendation, inspired by Lynda Berry’s Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (2014), is a fictional reconstruction of Lovelace’s personal notebooks and journals. Like historical fiction, the notebook can synthesize historical context, creative writing, literary criticism, as well as personal thoughts and feelings. Like the graphic novel, it provides students with a chance to mix genres and media. But the notebook departs from these other adaptations because it requires no narrative. Students can more freely express their ideas and make connections across disciplinary bodies of knowledge. Last, the genre begs for metacommentary: on the same page, students can include their content and what they think about that content.
Conclusion:
One of the reasons I am drawn to these experiments is because they might make it easier for students to share their views of Romantic and early Victorian literature through the voice of another persona. From the outset, literary scholars strive to establish their own voice. But in many disciplines, it is strongly encouraged to imitate the style of others. I think adapting one’s voice to an unfamiliar task by adopting a voice other than one’s own can offer new opportunities and perspectives otherwise regarded only as the object of one’s study.
In other words:
The literature classroom offers a space where students can learn about Ada Lovelace through adaptation exercises, and students can learn about Romanticism through Ada Lovelace.