MITH will host the first annual Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI), from Monday, January 7, 2013, to Friday, January 11, 2013, at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. We’re delighted to be expanding the model pioneered by the highly-successful Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria to the United States.

DHWI will provide an opportunity for scholars to learn new skills relevant to different kinds of digital scholarship while mingling with like-minded colleagues in coursework, social events, and lectures during an intensive, week-long event located amid the many attractions of the Washington, D.C. region.

Courses are open to all skill levels and will cater to many different interests. For the 2013 Institute we’ve assembled an amazing group of instructors who will teach everything from introductory courses on project development and programming, to intermediate level courses on image analysis, teaching with multimedia, and data curation. DHWI will also feature more technically-advanced courses on text analysis and linked open data. We hope that the curricula we’ve assembled will appeal to graduate students, faculty, librarians, and museum professionals as well as participants from government and non-governmental organizations.

An exciting program of extracurricular events will accompany the formal DHWI courses to capitalize on the Institute’s proximity to the many cultural heritage organizations in the region. This stream of activities, which we’re calling “DHWI Public Digital Humanities,” will include an API workshop, a hack-a-thon, and opportunities to contribute videos and other materials to the 4Humanities campaign to document the importance of the humanities for contemporary society.

Both the outward-looking DHWI Public Digital Humanities program and the week of high-caliber, in-depth digital humanities coursework will be kicked off by the Institute Lecture. This year’s speaker will be Seb Chan, currently the Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.

We hope that many of you will join us this winter in Maryland for what promises to be a terrific event. Registration is now available at this site.

Like DHSI, we will be offering a limited number of sponsored student scholarships to help cover the cost of attending the Institute. The scholarships are made possible through the generosity of this year’s DHWI Instructors and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

To keep up with news and events related to DHWI, follow @dhwi_mith. For all other enquiries, please contact Jennifer Guiliano, dhinstitute@umd.edu

Great news for EMiC scholars: The MLA has released its guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship. I encourage everyone to look through this important document as a way of thinking about your own projects. http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital. Does your individual project meet these basic guidelines? How can EMiC help you attain the goals set forth in this document?

In other news: in the next few weeks we’ll be launching a new “resources” page put together by Kaarina Mikalson. We’ll make sure these guidelines are a part of this new resource.

As my Hugh Garner edition moves along, I’ve been thinking a lot of late about audience. Specifically, what audience(s) am I hoping to garner with this collection of stories? (I’m sorry, I can’t help myself.) Since I’m at an American university, working with Americans on the edition, this question comes up a lot. My amazing intern Kelsie, who has eyes like a hawk, has helpfully noted each time a story uses a specifically American or Canadian spelling, and we’ve talked a lot about how the distinctly Canadian parts of the stories sound to her New Jerseyian ear, and what we might need to explicate to make the text more accessible to an American college student.

The question of audience also came up at a recent conference I attended in the southern US. I was on a panel with a professor who also works on CanLit. Her paper was fantastic, mapping contemporary Black Canadian literature, and she fielded a lot of questions from a clearly really interested audience, who were clearly mostly unfamiliar with the Canadian canon. After the panel, we chatted a bit about access to texts, and how it would change our teaching—both of us work in American schools, and we’ve both taught Canadian lit to our undergraduates, but always with difficulties in getting the right books.

So, between the collection, the conference, and the future project planning, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about who we’re doing this editorial work for—who our imagined audiences are—and I’m interested in how y’all are navigating these questions. Do different parts of your editions correspond to different intended audiences?

What I enjoy most about working as a research assistant for EMiC is how varied my responsibilities are. Last semester, my tasks including researching and writing biographies for people mentioned within Le Nigog, and running our scanned images through OCR software. This semester, my main task has been obtaining permissions for the works we plan to publish in our digital archive, that is, tracking down the copyright information of French-Canadian artists and intellectuals who died almost–but not quite–fifty years ago.

When I was first assigned this task, I wasn’t even sure how to begin. Matt Huculak linked me to Copyright databases, as did the Dalhousie Copyright Officer (he was very helpful in providing resources and answering my questions, no matter how vague, and he still sends emails checking up on me and my project):
Watch
Copyright Renewal Database
Copyright Clearance Centre
Unfortunately, these databases did not contain much information on my obscure French-Canadian authors. At Huculak’s suggestion, I turned towards archives and libraries for more guidance.

I was a little wary about initiating this kind of contact, particularly as much of the correspondence would be conducted in French. So before I began I wrote up templates: clear, concise messages that could easily be modified depending on the individual. I wrote one in French and one in English and had them proofread by someone outside the project to ensure they made sense–I didn’t want my requests ignored or misunderstood. Note: Huculak insisted that I use email as much as possible and keep all the messages on file, so that we had evidence of our search and its results.

Thankfully, my predecessor had already tracked down fonds and collections of these authors and left me links to finding aids. I chose to contact the archivists to see if they had any contact information related to the fonds. Contacting the archivist themselves proved to be more difficult than I anticipated, lost as they were among the myriad of information on the archive and collection websites. I tried to locate the emails of specific archivists and librarians, but often the closest I could get was a vague info@ email or, worst case, submitting an information request into the abyss of the Collections Canada and Archives France websites. Once my requests were sent, I imagine they were referred from person to person until they reached the right one. Now that I have successfully corresponded with many of these archives, I have the coveted emails on file and I can post them for the use of others.

Finally, I waited. Some archivists replied at lightning speed, some took over a month. Some gave replies that had absolutely nothing to do with my request, and some gave me exactly what I needed (contact information of rightholders, heirs, or estates).
When the responses stopped coming in, I contacted Bibliothèque et Archives Nationals du Québec, explained my situation, and asked if they had any resources they could share with me. They linked me to Copibec, a Quebecois copyright database. Like the Copyright Clearance Centre, these folks charge a fee in exchange for obtaining permissions, but they also help users research rightholders. ( a full list of copyright societies like this one can be found here) I contacted them with the names of the missing authors. They were able to confirm that three of the others were nowhere to be found–Copibec had researched them and come up empty handed.  This was very valuable information, as the Copyright Board of Canada gives permissions in the case of unlocatable copyright owners. This is where my carefully archived emails will come in handy, as we need to prove that we have made an adequate attempt to find the rightholders.

After two months I have whittled down my list significantly. I hope this post can help others have the same success.

2012 has been a very eventful time for the EMiC community.  To keep everyone informed about some of the exciting advancements and contributions made by our project members this year, we have put together a Spring Bulletin full of updates, upcoming events and recent publications.

We are taking this as an opportunity to introduce some of our new co-applicants and graduate fellows, as well as to highlight on-going research and new publications.  Enjoy!

EMiC Spring 2012 Bulletin

This semester I’ve been taking a class in the digital humanities with Jentery Sayers and am now beginning work on a larger project to digitize, annotate and present the photographs, newspaper articles and audio in the Audrey Alexandra Brown fonds at UVic. Under the supervision of Professors Ross and Sayers, and with the help of Chris Petter and John Frederick in UVic Special Collections, I hope to provide a data model, sample images and audio, and a narrative, which will delineate the ways in which an increasing reliance on these media to market Brown’s work undermined her supporters’ hope of establishing Brown as one of Canada’s Romantic poets. As such, her example may speak to larger questions concerning the interplay between East/West divisions and the impact of modern media on the marketing of Canadian poetry in the 1930s.

My project on Brown will take the form of a scholarly exhibit.  I plan to scan archival material from the Audrey Alexandra Brown fonds in The Special Collections Unit to .jpeg form. The media will be housed on the UVic server, and I will back up the material on an external hard drive. To display and annotate the digitized material, I plan to use Scalar, a platform which we are piloting in the DH class. Embedded media will include the scanned images of selected photographs and poems published in various newspapers. I plan to use Dublin Core to ensure that each image is well documented so that scholars will be able to cite the material in future work. I also plan to provide an .xls spreadsheet for those interested in finding the original materials modeled on the Deena Larsen Finding Aid. The fields will include the title, description, date, author, source and file number, type, format, and rights for each image. The narration will comment on how increased marketing through the different media influenced reception of Brown’s poetry.

Future work on the exhibit could follow the trajectory of Brown’s later work, and might focus on how modernity impacted her writing style and later reception in academic circles. Since Brown’s work has suffered as a result of what Dean Irvine calls ‘literary-historical amnesia,’ further examination of the archival material might suggest to what extent shifts in media focus accounted for this dismissal.

Many questions have arisen as I have delineated this project and I look forward to all thoughts and suggestions:

1) How might a 1930s readership have encountered this media differently from readers today, and how can my model draw attention to these differences? Can I in any way reproduce some of the ways a 1930s audience might have encountered the media? How can my model best represent the overlap between materials?

2) How can I build a model that will allow others (librarians, other scholars and historians) to expand upon this work?

3) How do I best draw attention to the process of digitization as a transformation of the archival experience?

The aim of the project is to build an integrated online environment for collating and editing modernist texts that exist in multiple versions. The task here is much more than simply to allow comparison of texts to identify where variations occur. Instead, it is to facilitate new interpretive possibilities. That is, out of the collation of text A and text B we will generate a set of variants, that can stand as text C. We want to read text C to see what it can tell us about the evolution of a given novel, say, and then to link those changes into the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that produce them. The theoretical issues that arise concern what counts as a text and how we can read the third possible text — the C text — that emerges out of the incompatibility between text A and text B. The aim is to read the gap between one version and the next, following Derrida’s imperative to attend to difference itself as the source of meaning rather than presuming that it is a merely negative product of the non-coincidence of two entities: text A and text B. Given modernism’s own fascination with radical breaks, discontinuities, and making things new, the theory behind our approach to textual variation is in many ways deeply modernist itself. Following the lead of such writers as Conrad, Forster, and Joyce, and the ways in which their innovations in narrative informed much of later twentieth-century theory, the Modernist Versions Project concerns itself with what gaps, silences, and difference itself can tell us. It does not pursue the holistic text of the genetic edition, nor the definitive edition of the “corrected text,” but rather the trace of what has been erased, of erasure itself, as the most productive point of meaning. In doing so, we hope to be able to restore to our understanding of modernism a key element of its production, an aspect which modernism itself elided, but which remains central to understanding it as fully as possible.

Hi, my name is Katie Tanigawa, and I am a new addition to the EMiC community. It has been wonderful reading about everyone’s projects (Dr. Bessette’s study of translation in Anne Hébert’s poetry and the possibilities for interacting with Hébert’s materials in different ways is fascinating).  As someone new to DH, reading EMiC scholars’ takes on the role of digital humanities in building scholarly communities and the relevance of DH has been particularly helpful (I have really appreciated Rilley Yeo’s series among others).

As an EMiC funded RA for Dr. Stephen Ross at the University of Victoria (UVic), I am currently working with Martin Holmes from UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Center (HCMC), Dr. Stephen Ross, Dr. Jentery Sayers, Dr. Matthew Huculak, and Julian Gunn on the pilot project for the Modernist Versions Project (MVP). The MVP will be an online database for comparative editions of various modernist texts such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Tarr, and Ulysses. For the pilot project, we are versioning two editions of part three of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad that were both edited by Conrad himself: the serial published in T.P.’s Weekly from January 27, 1904 to October 7, 1904 and the 1904 Harper’s edition.

In line with the vision for the MVP, the digital editions of Nostromo will be a research resource and framework for the collation of textual variants.  This resource will allow researchers to easily explore the variations between texts and thus spend more time extrapolating the significance of these variations.  The methodology used to uncover the differences in the varying editions of Nostromo involves scanning the different editions, light structural mark-up to the text, difference identification, and semantic mark-up to yield a display.  The end product is an intensive mark-up of the variants using a technical mark-up language, Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI), to produce a searchable critical, digital edition.

Because naming is so important within Nostromo, the characters have multiple aliases, and because the aliases used for characters in different circumstances shifts between editions, person names are one of the key elements we are tagging. Julian Gunn and I are currently finishing the mark-up of the two variant texts and have encountered a few key editorial questions along the way.  For example, what counts as a person name?  Does the name have to be in the form of a proper noun? Can a name simply be what someone is called? When is a job title someone’s name? Who counts as a character? Does the owl who cries “Ya-acabo” get a tag?

While the questions may seem relatively insignificant, they play a large roll in designing the accompanying ographies, the xml:ids , identifying who said what and which alias a quote is attributed to.  These tags will affect how the versioning tools are able to search for certain attributes, how the differences and which differences will be visualized, and how scholars will be able to interact with the MVP’s edition of Nostromo. As part of the pilot project I will produce a document of editorial decisions that explains why certain decisions were made such as whether or not the owl is tagged (I’m still undecided), and why names that include an adjective such as “old Viola” are considered names and not simply pared down to the proper noun, e.g. “Viola.” I look forward to collaborating with the EMiC community as the project goes through these editorial and soon, the versioning and visualization stages.

Call for Papers: Upcoming Special issue of Modern Fiction Studies
Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism

Editor: Anne Fernald
Deadline for Submission: 1 March 2012

The editors of MFS solicit new feminist scholarship on neglected women writers from the first half of the twentieth century. Feminist readings of single texts, essays on groups and/or movements, and overviews of a single woman’s career are equally welcomed. We are particularly interested in new theoretical approaches to modernism emerging out of feminist theory, imbued with what Sianne Ngai calls “a feminist attentiveness to the persistence of sexual hierarchies” (2). How can a feminist approach to women writers shape the conversation at a time when New Modernist studies have largely shifted the focus away from gender toward history and nation? How do recent developments in transnational modernism, urban theory, material, textual, and cultural history affect our readings of texts by women? Most of all, this issue’s double focus on neglected women writers and feminist theory seeks to make a critical intervention: What might new theory of modernism, taking as its foundation a feminist approach to a woman writer, look like?

This issue seeks to represent the full range of womanhood in the early twentieth century: conservatives and radicals, feminists and anti-feminists, lesbians, mothers, professionals, urban and rural women, women of color, white colonialists. Most importantly, it hopes to offer readings of texts by women through new feminist theoretical approaches with continuing resonances for all scholars in the field.

Essays should be 6000-8000 words and should follow the MLA Style Manual for internal citation and works cited. Queries should be addressed to Anne Fernald (fernald@fordham.edu). Online submission is at http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/mfs/special_issues/