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Archive for August, 2010
August 31, 2010
Fumbling for what we do not yet know
I recently finished reading Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (2001), a text that documents McGann’s co-creation of The Rossetti Archive, a digital archive begun in 1993 and supported by The University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). The first thing that struck me as incredible was that, although published nearly ten years ago, many of McGann’s concerns still remain of utmost concern for digital humanities today.
While the warning cries of downfall of the book that he documents as present back in 1993 are today echoed in heated debates surrounding e-readers and Google Books, McGann soothes these worries and asserts that the digital age will not bring about the death of the book but instead allow us a chance for critical reflection on the technology of the book. He asserts that a digital environment exponentially expands the critical possibilities of editorial projects such as The Rossetti Archive. “When we use books to study books,” he notes, “or hard copy texts to analyze other hard copy texts, the scale of the tools seriously limits the possible results” (55). That is, he sees traditional textual forms as “static and linear” in nature and digital forms as “open and interactive” and therefore able to move beyond the media of the primary text being studied in order to critically reflect with a broader and more elastic perspective. (25)
If we agree with McGann’s formulation of the static/linear versus open/interactive dichotomy of text and digital forms (Do we agree? Dichotomies are scary.) then what I want to start envisioning are editorial and critical projects that really do go beyond the formal limitations of the book. Here are some questions I’ve been throwing around:
1) What are the formal limitations of the book? Are these limitations truly dictated by the physicality of the book and all the ways we interact with it or are there psychological / social limitations that we have placed upon it? What are our reactions, to use a radical (but is it?) example, to an editorial method based around book burning. It seems abhorrent because of the social history of book burning but what possible textual illuminations (ha!) could such an editorial method produce? Maybe that’s a weird example, but what I want to start teasing out are the possible divisions between physical and social “limitations” of the technology of the book.
2) How can a digital environment help us to start such a project? How can studying the changes in text between these media broaden our understanding of the book? What would such studies look like? What sort of studies are already out there that attempt this?
3) Can we even start to project how such studies would then change the way we make and receive texts in both media? Do you believe McGann when he states that digital technologies allow for “interpretive moments” where not only do we discover “what we didn’t know we knew, we are also led into imaginations of what we hadn’t known at all” (129).
August 27, 2010
British Academy funding for UK/Canada collaborations
The British Academy has a small amount of funding (£5000) for collaborations between UK researchers and those in Commonwealth countries.
Would any EMiC participants of postdoctoral standing or above be interested in putting together an application with me for one of these awards, to collaborate on a joint publication or two? I’ve put details of the scheme below.
Anouk
Special Joint Project Programmes: Commonwealth Countries
Funds are available to support joint projects between UK-based academics and those based in Commonwealth institutions. The scheme is administered in partnership with the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), and information may be sought from either the ACU or the International Relations Department at the British Academy.
Level of award: Up to £5,000
Period of award: Up to one year
Closing date: 13 October 2010
Further information: Please view the Notes for Applicants.
Method of application: Applications must be submitted via e-GAP2, the Academy’s electronic grant application system.
Details of past awards made under the scheme can be seen here.
August 23, 2010
TEI & the bigger picture: an interview with Julia Flanders
I thought those of us who had been to DHSI and who were fortunate enough to take the TEI course with Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman might be interested in a recent interview with Julia, in which she puts the TEI Guidelines and the digital humanities into the wider context of scholarship, pedagogy and the direction of the humanities more generally. (I also thought others might be reassured, as I was, to see someone who is now one of the foremost authorities on TEI describing herself as being baffled by the technology when she first began as a graduate student with the Women Writers Project …)
Here are a few excerpts to give you a sense of the piece:
[on how her interest in DH developed] I think that the fundamental question I had in my mind had to do with how we can understand the relationship between the surfaces of things – how they make meaning and how they operate culturally, how cultural artefacts speak to us. And the sort of deeper questions about materiality and this artefactual nature of things: the structure of the aesthetic, the politics of the aesthetic; all of that had interested me for a while, and I didn’t immediately see the connections. But once I started working with what was then what would still be called humanities computing and with text encoding, I could suddenly see these longer-standing interests being revitalized or reformulated or something like that in a way that showed me that I hadn’t really made a departure. I was just taking up a new set of questions, a new set of ways of asking the same kinds of questions I’d been interested in all along.
I sometimes encounter a sense of resistance or suspicion when explaining the digital elements of my research, and this is such a good response to it: to point out that DH methodologies don’t erase considerations of materiality but rather can foreground them by offering new and provocative optics, and thereby force us to think about them, and how to represent them, with a set of tools and a vocabulary that we haven’t had to use before. Bart’s thoughts on versioning and hierarchies are one example of this; Vanessa’s on Project[ive] Verse are another.
[discussing how one might define DH] the digital humanities represents a kind of critical method. It’s an application of critical analysis to a set of digital methods. In other words, it’s not simply the deployment of technology in the study of humanities, but it’s an expressed interest in how the relationship between the surface and the method or the surface and the various technological underpinnings and back stories — how that relationship can be probed and understood and critiqued. And I think that that is the hallmark of the best work in digital humanities, that it carries with it a kind of self-reflective interest in what is happening both at a technological level – and it’s what is the effect of these digital methods on our practice – and also at a discursive level. In other words, what is happening to the rhetoric of scholarship as a result of these changes in the way we think of media and the ways that we express ourselves and the ways that we share and consume and store and interpret digital artefacts.
Again, I’m struck by the lucidity of this, perhaps because I’ve found myself having to do a fair bit of explaining of DH in recent weeks to people who, while they seem open to the idea of using technology to help push forward the frontiers of knowledge in the humanities, have had little, if any, exposure to the kind of methodological bewilderment that its use can entail. So the fact that a TEI digital edition, rather than being some kind of whizzy way to make bits of text pop up on the screen, is itself an embodiment of a kind of editorial transparency, is a very nice illustration.
[on the role of TEI within DH] the TEI also serves a more critical purpose which is to state and demonstrate the importance of methodological transparency in the creation of digital objects. So, what the TEI, not uniquely, but by its nature brings to digital humanities is the commitment to thinking through one’s digital methods and demonstrating them as methods, making them accessible to other people, exposing them to critique and to inquiry and to emulation. So, not hiding them inside of a black box but rather saying: look this, this encoding that I have done is an integral part of my representation of the text. And I think that the — I said that the TEI isn’t the only place to do that, but it models it interestingly, and it provides for it at a number of levels that I think are too detailed to go into here but are really worth studying and emulating.
I’d like to think that this is a good description of what we’re doing with the EMiC editions: exposing the texts, and our editorial treatement of them, to critique and to inquiry. In the case of my own project involving correspondence, this involves using the texts to look at the construction of the ideas of modernism and modernity. I also think the discussions we’ve begun to have as a group about how our editions might, and should, talk to each other (eg. by trying to agree on the meaning of particular tags, or by standardising the information that goes into our personographies) is part of the process of taking our own personal critical approaches out of the black box, and holding them up to the scrutiny of others.
The entire interview – in plain text, podcast and, of course, TEI format – can be found on the TEI website here.
August 3, 2010
Introducing: Anthologize!
The One Week | One Tool project, Anthologize, officially launched today at 12:30 ET, with 100+ people watching the live stream. I have say that I’m really impressed with the tool so far!
Below, I’ve compiled a list links to information, blogs, and groups pertaining to Anthologize (I will update as needed):
Official Sites
The Anthologize Homepage: http://anthologize.org/
Anthologize Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/anthologize-users
The Official Launch Podcast: http://digitalcampus.tv/2010/08/03/episode-58-anthologize-live/
Cafe Press: http://www.cafepress.com/oneweekonetool
Blogs
Boone Borges: http://teleogistic.net/2010/08/introducing-anthologize-a-new-wordpress-plugin/
Dan Cohen, “Introducing Anthologize”: http://www.dancohen.org/2010/08/02/introducing-anthologize/
Dan Cohen’s Thoughts on One Week | One Tool: http://www.dancohen.org/2010/08/05/thoughts-on-one-week-one-tool/
Jana Remy: Daily Reports: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Launch, or One Week | One Tool, Goes Live
Tom Scheinfeldt’s Lessons from One Week: Part 1: Project Management | Part 2: Tool Use | Part 3: Serendipity
Effie Kapsalis: Please Feed the Visitors | Smithsonian 2.0: Rapid Development at a 162 Year Old Institution
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/anthologize/
Chad Black: http://parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/anthologize-this-anthologize-that/
Mark Sample: http://www.samplereality.com/2010/08/04/one-week-one-tool-many-anthologies/
Anthologize at UMW: http://anthologize.umwblogs.org/
Julie Meloni @Profhacker: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/One-Week-One-Tool/25972
Patrick Murray-John: http://www.patrickgmj.net/blog/anthologize-uses-what-can-we-turn-on-its-head
Meagan Timney (My “Outsider’s Perspective”): http://corpora.ca/text/?p=422
News Items & Press
NEH Report:
http://www.neh.gov/ODH/ODHUpdate/tabid/108/EntryId/140/Report-from-ODH-Institute-One-Week-One-Tool.aspx
CUNY Commons: http://news.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2010/08/03/one-week-one-tool-the-reveal/
The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/academics-build-blog-to-ebook-publishing-tool-in-one-week/60852/
Musematic:
http://musematic.net/2010/08/03/anthologize/
Read-Write-Web: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/scholars_build_blog-to-ebook_tool_in_one_week.php
Chronicle Wired Campus: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Digital-Humanists-Unveil-New/25966/
BookNet Canada Blog: http://booknetcanada.ca/index.php?option=com_wordpress&p=1787&Itemid=319
BBC Tech Brief: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/seealso/2010/08/tech_brief_61.html
Snarkmarket: http://snarkmarket.com/2010/5979
Videos
Anthologize Test Drive by Ryan Trauman
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I’ll finish with @sramsay‘s description of One Week | One Tool: “It was like landing on a desert island w/e.g. a master shipbuilder & someone who can start fires with their mind.” #oneweek
Please send additions and corrections to mbtimney.etcl@gmail.com or direct message @mbtimney