Like what you're doing with Joyce here, who's screamingly obviously dragging Homer into the Irish (then-) present, so clearly you'd need to touch on that. But specifically this image is a subject in regular rotation, including recently, so I'm hoping you listened to the Radiolab on it (pretty well done): https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue

and also this amusing bit by Wilford from the 80s: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/20/science/homer-s-sea-wine-dark.html

and here in Lapham's Quarterly: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea

and you'll definitely want to talk about the Himba tribe, since they're much discussed of late, just to be able to say you did (and to outline for your committee, in case they're not aware).

Also I think, most centrally, I want to know what you want to know, which will carry us through the chapter with more energy--like Matt Hart mentions, what's driving us to make the model? What do you most deeply want from this work? The work here is extensive and fascinating, certainly, but as your reader I want more hand holding. As a fellow interdisciplinary person, I suppose I'm also projecting my own concerns... ;) Do you want to know more about Joyce? Do you want to build a literary theory of "prose poetry" for deeply colorful texts, and tease out the cognitive differences between that aesthetic experience--apprehending that sort of aesthetic object, I mean--and the ones we find apprehending what most poets these days normally call prose poetry? Or neither, is that all on a journey toward building cool tools for digital humanities scholarship in the general area of visuality in texts?

I suspect a lot of those driving questions / motivations would be set up in ch. 1-3, as your header indicates, but you should reconnect with that throughout the text...

Also true: unclear to me why British literature, particularly (and Irish), though again, maybe you ground us in that in Ch. 1? Is it because of the particular corpus you're working with--the availability of text that one could consider, in other words--or is there something about this body of literature that invites considerations of ocularity (doing that in Chapter 2)?

And I suppose I want to know that mostly because I like the thought experiment of modeling an "imagination engine" but I also want a clear orientation: do you want to know more about literature from a specific time and place? about aesthetic cognition, especially with respect to text-triggered visual processing? is it that the study of these texts, in this way, with this sort of modeling, will especially illuminate the latter? In the simplest terms possible--and I ask this because I struggle with this in my own work, too!--do ya wanna know more about books or brains here?

technically first our retinas, no, then all sorts of selective stuff happens along the optic nerve (and its famous chiasm) and then eventually the brain... so maybe safer to indicate that the, er, wet ware in general is where the trouble lies, and not the lens itself?

want this point to arrive sooner, I think

Ha, fun. And you might as well note the Irish thing, since you're already going to talk about Joyce... though Irish folk are only slightly more likely to be red-haired than people from elsewhere in Western Europe, the popular imagination of Irishness, including this period, lodges on the red hair.

okay cool, now we're in business

Nice! I'll put a long comment here, since I think it's going to matter a lot for your dissertation in general, as well as the more immediate discussion of Joyce's lemonyellow:

You should probably spend time discussing the current state of play in cognitive science dealing with memory and visual apprehension--it seems "memory" is largely inseparable from "real-time" apprehension of sensory information in the human brain... not only in terms of the working memory of what one has just seen (even in the tiniest sense, the way the mind re-directs attention in the eye to "focus" on something, automated saccades cascading shattershot over a source of visual stimuli, in a kind of continual feedback loop of stimuli-sensory array-stimuli, quite a bit before anything rises to "conscious" attention) but also in terms of "higher" features of cognition, wherein the mind reconciles remembered stimuli that are categorically similar--or crucially, assumed to be similar, as predictive features of cognition are woven into baseline perception--with what it's more recently perceived. All of which is to say I suspect what's cool about reading Ulysses, for the reader, are the ways in which what's normally crammed together in cognitive processing is sort of teased apart--that there's a metacognitive experience, as a reader, of Bloom's apprehension of the world that pulls apart the normally-dense features of sight, which naturally involve memory, visual information in present narrative time, and the intake of other sensory information. Yea? The human mind never experiences "now." It's always stretched over time as it reassembles the Self, in constant iterative revision, from memory and new stimuli, with massive amounts of "prediction" as it moves through the world. Some of that prediction means we're able to understand that the rabbit is behind the fence, even though we only see little furry slats (half an eye, a third of an ear, a rectangle of rump). Some of that is also why we blink--nearly universally--when we watch videos of someone looking for keys at precisely the moment that person finds the key. (Blink rate is more closely tied to event segmentation than lubrication.)