I suppose I should start by introducing myself; my name is Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette and I am the newest member of the EMiC family. I am very new to digital humanities, but not so new to the Modernist period in Canada. One of my areas of interests is comparative Canadian literature, and I specifically looked at how the poetry of Anne Hébert was translated into and published in English for my dissertation.
I became fascinated by her poetry and their translation when I took a course on Québécois poetry at the Université de Sherbrooke with Richard Giguère as an undergraduate. He had us read the Dialogue sur la traduction, the correspondence that took place between Frank Scott and Anne Hébert about the translation of her poem “Le Tombeau des rois.” Researching for my final paper, I discovered multiple other translations of the poem and was immediately hooked on learning as much as I could about the process of translating Hébert’s dense and hauntingly beautiful poetry.
In 2007, I defended my dissertation. I had consulted 15 different archives in both Canada and the United States. I had found 27 collections and anthologies that had included her poetry in translation and for each one I tried to find out as much as possible about the process of putting the collection together as well as how Hébert’s poetry appeared and, whenever possible, was received. I collected four full file boxes of notes, photocopied letters, manuscripts, reviews, and other materials. Somehow I wrestled it down to 235 pages of dissertation. It won honorable mention for the 2009 Prix Anne-Hébert.
In 2011, I traveled to Toronto for the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory Conference. I had already begun to explore digital humanities, but I hadn’t tied it to my own research. A light went off while I was at the conference: why am I sitting on these boxes and boxes of research? Why is the only way I could imagine sharing my research the dissertation/scholarly monograph? The theme of the conference was Space/Place/Play, and I began to think of ways I could “play” with my research, making it more engaging and accessible.
A few short months later, and here I am, a part of EMiC. I am really excited to be a part of this research group, a community of scholars who are interested in digital humanities as well as the Modernist period in Canada. Right now, I am a complete novice (or n00b in proper geek-speak) at things like encoding, programing, and visualization. I will be attending this summer’s DEMiC session in Victoria and I look forward to meeting everyone as well as finally figuring out how to do what I want to do with my materials.
And what is it that I want to do? I envision something along the lines of the Digital Thoreau project, enabling readers to trace the evolution of Anne Hébert’s poetry in English, compare the different translations, as well as peek behind the curtain to read the relevant letters and manuscripts behind the translations, which include the input of the author herself. I want to make the interface dynamic but also a little unstable, visually representing the instability of language and the slippery nature of translation. Frank Scott, in Dialogue (adapting Paul Valery), wrote that a translation is never finished, only abandoned. How can that sort of indeterminacy be represented in a digital way?
Could it also be possible to let readers create their own mashups of the translations, incorporating their own interpretations? There is precedence for such a project; the 20th anniversary issue of the translation journal Ellipse asked 20 poet-translators to translate the same Anne Hébert poem and provide a brief explanation. These sorts of exercises could reach a larger audience, be used as a teaching tool, as well as open up the aspect of “play” when it comes to poetry and translation.
These are just some of the ideas I have. As I learn the tools as well as how to encode and manipulate the texts (and collaborate with my peers at EMiC!), I’m sure there will be other, better ideas. I’m just excited to be able to do something with all of my research, as well as build something potentially more meaningful and lasting than a monograph.
In July of 1955, a few literary folks showed up in Kingston, Ontario to discuss the state of affairs in literature in Canada. Here is a small sampling of the attendees at the Canadian Writers’ Conference:
Desmond Pacey, Eli Mandel, Anne Wilkinson, Dorothy Livesay, Hugh Garner, L. N. Cohen, James Reaney, Marjory Whitelaw, Earle Birney, Phyllis Webb, Adele Wiseman, Ralph Gustafson, Douglas Spettigue, Miriam Waddington, Irving Layton, Jay Macpherson, F. R Scott, Louis Dudek, A. J. M. Smith, Morley Callaghan.
As Margaret Atwood would say – “Kaboom!”
Despite George Whalley’s excellent collection surrounding the conference, there is a major gap that exists in the proceedings. It is well known that Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton pulled off some controversial poetry readings that charged the more intellectual affairs of the conference, and led to major disputes among attendees. Despite the fact that there were representatives from the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, and the CBC, there is no audio, film, or photos that I can find of such excellent historical events. Thus, I call on EMiCers to seek out possible evidence in individual authors’ archives. Can I please ask, if you get the opportunity, to see if there is anything associated with the 1955 Canadian Writers’ Conference at Queen’s University in relation to any research you may be undertaking with specific authors’ fonds. Anything you find would be appreciated. And catching a photo of the whole troupe together will earn you one-hundred times the Glory
Marc
A little intro to using Drupal and Omeka from my colleague Ben Gehrels and I…
I hope this will provide a bit of perspective and guidance for those of you still wondering which tool you will use to build your EMIC project.
[Excerpt of editorial cross-posted from Canadian Literature.]
Canadian Literature’s winter 1995 Marx and Other Dialectics
issue watched over the changing of disciplinary and literary old guards—or, if you will, an old left guard. This was the same number that announced the establishment of the journal’s home page (canlit.ca) and the creation of the Canadian Literature Discussion Group listserv (CANLIT-L) hosted by the National Library. It was “an hour / Of new beginnings,” as F.R. Scott said in his 1934 poem “Overture.” That same year observed the deaths of Earle Birney and George Woodcock. Dorothy Livesay passed away the year following. These deaths signaled the passing of a generation that put into practice the dialectics of modernism and political radicalism. With the appearance of an issue devoted to Marxism and Canadian literature, it may have seemed at the hour of their death that their generation’s literary and political legacies had for the moment been granted reprieves and survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of European communism.
[Click here to read the rest of the editorial at canlit.ca]
[This is the first in a series of posts on my current research on modernist laboratories—avant garde, corporate, and scientific—and their relationship to the emergence of digital humanities labs. My thanks to the participants in my Modernist Remediations graduate seminar at Yale for letting me test these experiments with them and for their feedback on my various hypotheses.]
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
—Billy Bragg, A New England
My first drawing of a laboratory pictured a meteoric machine reentering the earth’s atmosphere, molten metal raining down upon an imagined metropolis. During the summer of 1979 I was transfixed by reports of where the wreckage of NASA’s Skylab was projected crash down to earth. I spent several days in early July feverishly touring around my neighbourhood on a pedal-powered motocross in search of space debris. It was an international media event—broadcast daily and nightly on radio and television, headlined in newspapers and covered in magazines dropped on my doorstep—far more important to me than stories my teachers told about men on the moon and their giant leap for mankind. Strangely, I distinctly remember being deflated at the discovery that Skylab didn’t take out my school, that I lived in the wrong hemisphere, that it fell to earth over the Indian Ocean and scattered across Western Australia. I wasn’t the lucky kid who cashed in on the San Francisco Examiner’s contest that offered ten grand to the first person who could deliver a piece of Skylab to its newsroom. That kid lived in Esperance, Australia. Of course he did: he lived in a place of named for eternal hope and expectation—Esperance, which seemed to me at the time an exotic territory of dream and fantasy. I lived in Victoria, British Columbia: more British than the British, as the local tourist industry advertised itself to the world, a proudly late Victorian town, a former Hudson Bay Company outpost living out its colonial half-life—or, as I later discovered, a remnant of empire that somehow produced modernists without ever being modern. For that week in July I was seduced by technologies of modernity. I was, after all, a Cold War kid. And that Australian kid was, if only for his 15 minutes of fame, the irrational object of my Western media-fueled envy. I felt myself freewheeling backwards into the Victorian past; he, my commonwealth counterpart, was rocketing into a globalized modernity. Yes, the sky was falling, and I wanted to catch a fiery piece of the southern sky.
At the time I had no conception of the magnitude of the five IBM mainframe computers at the Johnson Space Centre required to navigate Skylab. I probably still don’t. My only encounter with a computer was the Apple ][ that one of the teachers at my grade school kept in what had once been a chemistry lab. It was the only classroom with microscopes and glassware and dissection instruments, which were kept under lock and key in cabinets at the back. On an early morning prowl I discovered that the classroom itself wasn’t locked, which seems strange in retrospect, given that someone at the school board must have signed off on the delivery of a computer that—depending on the amount of RAM—cost somewhere in the range of $1300 to $2700 US. Presumably it made the most sense to keep the school’s one computer in its old lab. I’m assuming that it never crossed anyone’s mind to put it in the music room. Or the library. It’s a computer, and computers belong in labs. What would humanists ever want to do with a computer? The short answer is sneak into the classroom-lab before school to play videogames—my obsession, which happened to be Steve Wozniak’s proof of concept for the Apple ][, was a game called Breakout—and the long answer is to start peddling myself down the long road to becoming a digital humanist.
Mount Allison University, Sackville NB, 20–23 September 2012
Poetic discourse in Canada has always been changing to assert poetry’s relevance to the public sphere. While some poets and critics have sought to shift poetic subjects in Canada to make political incursions into public discourses, others have sought changes in poetic form as a means to encourage wider public engagement. If earlier conversations about poetics in Canadian letters, such as those in the well-known Toronto Globe column “At the Mermaid Inn” (1892-93), sought to identify an emerging cultural nationalism in their references to Canadian writing, in the twentieth century poetics became increasingly focused on a wider public, with little magazines, radio, and television offering new spaces in which to consider Canadian cultural production. In more recent decades, many diverse conversations about poetics in Canada have begun to emanate from hyperspace, where reviews, interviews, Youtube/Vimeo clips, publisher/author websites, and blogs have increased the “visibility” of poetry and poetics.
Acknowledging the work that emerged from the 2005 “Poetics & Public Culture in Canada Conference,” as well as recent publications considering publics in the Canadian context, we are interested in examining a growing set of questions surrounding these and other discursive shifts connected with Canadian poetry and poetics. How have technological innovations such as radio, television, and the Internet, for example, made poetry and poetics more accessible or democratic? How does poetry inhabit other genres and media in order to gesture toward conversations relevant to political, cultural, and historical moments? What contemporary concerns energize those studying historical poetries and poetics? How do commentators in public and academic circles construct a space for poetry to inhabit?
The conference sets out to explore the changing shapes of and responses to poetic genres, aesthetic theories, and political visions from a diverse range of cultural and historical contexts. In the interest of reinvigorating conversations about the multiple configurations of poetics, poetry, and the public in Canada, we invite proposals for papers (15–20 minutes) on subjects including, but not limited to:
–Public statements/declarations of poetics
–Publics and counterpublics in Canadian poetry
–The politics of public poetics
–Tensions between avant- and rear-garde poetics in Canada
–Shifting technological modes of poetic and critical production (print/sound/video/born-digital)
–Poetics of/as Activism
–Public Intellectualism and Poetics
–Recovery and remediation of Canadian poetry and poetics
–Poetics and collaboration in Canada
–People’s poetry and /or the People’s Poetry Awards
–Poetry and environmental publics in Canada
Proposals should be no more than 250 words and should be accompanied by a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical note. Please send proposals to publicpoetics@mta.ca by 29 February 2012. For more information visit www.publicpoetics.ca.
In conjunction with the conference, a one-day workshop will be hosted by The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada. This purpose of this workshop (CWRCshop) is to introduce, in accessible and inviting ways, digital tools to humanities scholars and to encourage digital humanists, via a turn to close reading, to connect with the raw material, which is the basis of digitization efforts.
The PUBLIC POETICS conference is organized by Bart Vautour (Mt. A), Erin Wunker (Dal), Travis V. Mason (Dal), and Christl Verduyn (Mt. A). The conference is sponsored by the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, the Canadian Studies Programme at Dalhousie University, and The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada. We plan to publish a selection of revised/expanded papers as a special journal issue and/or a book with a university press.
Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the 21st Century
Call for Papers
The Textual Studies team of INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) wish to invite presentation proposals for Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the 21st Century .
June 8, 9, and 10, 2012, University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada.
Keynote speakers: Adriaan van der Weel (Leiden University) and Sydney Shep, (Victoria University of Wellington)
At the end of the 20th century, textual studies witnessed a revolution in accessibility to texts with the explosion of the internet. Now we simply take it for granted that digital processes infuse every step of our study, editing, production, and dissemination of texts. The Textual Studies team of INKE invites presentations that address the questions “What is the state of textual studies in the 21st century? What is the important work of textual studies in the 21st century? What are the outstanding issues, challenges, concerns, emerging trends, methods, attitudes, and exciting developments in textual scholarship? Papers may address such questions as
* What is the state of the scholarly edition after the transition from print to print and digital?
* What is the impact on the material book and on book history of the different kinds of access enabled by the digital medium?
* How have authorship attribution studies been transformed by access to so many more searchable texts?
* How has the new age of access to materials affected the state of textual studies in various regions of the globe?
* How well are scholars being served by traditional and emerging infrastructures for the study, creation, production, and dissemination of texts?
* What is the future of, for example, the study of readership and letter writing, genetic editing, and reception history?
INKE is a multi-national, multi-disciplinary research initiative, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and partnering organizations, to study, develop, and implement digital environments for reading and research (www.inke.ca). The Textual Studies Team of INKE is researching ways in which the age of manuscript and print production can inform our development and implementation of electronic reading technologies.
We invite proposals for papers, posters/demonstrations, and roundtable discussions that address these and other issues pertinent to research in textual studies. Proposals should contain a title, a detailed and focussed abstract (of approximately 300 words) plus list of works cited, and the names, affiliations, and Website URLs of presenters. Please send proposals before 15 December 2011 to richard.cunningham@acadiau.ca.
Potential participants in the conference, particularly those coming from abroad, might be interested to take advantage of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which will just before our conference, from 4-8 June, also at the University of Victoria (http://www.dhsi.org/). A limited number of scholarships for workshop tuition will be available for graduate students participating in the Beyond Accessibility conference. Also of potential interest is the annual conference of the Society for Digital Humanities (SDH/SEMI) at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, 28-30 May, 2012 (http://www.sdh-semi.org/).
Interdisciplinary Multidisciplinary Woolf
7-10 June 2012
University of Saskatchewan
This conference invites explorations of Virginia Woolf’s work from a range of different disciplinary perspectives and practices. We welcome proposals on any aspect of Woolf studies, and especially papers or performances that:
• respond to Virginia Woolf and her texts from interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches;
• respond to the inter- and multidisciplinary work carried out by Virginia Woolf and her circle; and/or
• respond to the implications of Virginia Woolf’s work by applying its themes and claims to other disciplinary, institutional, social, or cultural contexts.
Proposals may reflect (but need not be limited to) methodologies and knowledge from disciplines such as:
Queer Studies, the Digital Humanities, Native Studies, Literary Studies, History, Translation Studies, Art and Art History, Drama, Psychology/ Psychoanalysis, Business Administration, Media and Communications, Music, Political Science, the Study of Sexualities, Postcolonial Theory, Children’s Literature and Studies, Editing and Publishing, Creative Writing, Religious Studies, Economics, Film, the Study of Teaching and Learning, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Ecocriticism, Health, Women’s and Gender Studies, Anthropology, Disability Studies, Law…
Submissions from artists, writers, community activists, administrators, “common readers,” independent scholars, teachers, academics, and students are welcomed.
For paper proposals, please send a 250-word abstract as a Word attachment. For panel proposals, please submit a 250-word description of each paper to be presented by the three panel participants along with the proposed panel title. Because we will be using a blind submission process, please do not include your name on your proposal. Instead, in your covering e-mail, please include your
name(s), institutional affiliation (if any), paper title(s), and contact information.
Proposals and inquiries should be directed to Ann Martin, Department of English
306.966.5527 • woolf@arts.usask.ca
The deadline for submissions is: 1 February 2012.
We have come together…to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—
but seen by many eyes simultaneously. (The Waves)
In my “Digital Romanticism” class with Michelle Levy at SFU, we recently hosted Professor Andrew Stauffer, Director of the NINES project at the University of Virginia. The resulting conversation touched on some core questions about the purpose of the digital humanities, and its future potential, particularly as it pertains to the question of scholarly communities. I think EMIC scholars will find there are interesting points of reference here for our own community-building efforts.
In preparation for the class, we read John Unsworth’s article “Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?” In this article (taken from a presentation he gave at a symposium in London) he gives a list of scholarly “primitives” - “basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.” These are: discovering; annotating; comparing; referring; sampling; illustrating; and representing.
Unsworth is clear that he doesn’t think this list is exhaustive, and I wonder if he (or you) would think that “creating community” should qualify as a primitive. Scholars have been incredibly good at creating communities (if you agree, contra i.e. Wendell Berry, that a community doesn’t need to inhabit one geographic location). The conversation that happens in these communities across space and time is crucial to scholarly work.
What excites me about NINES is that the community-oriented features of other non-scholarly online spaces are built into it in in a unique way. I haven’t seen other scholarly sites foreground tagging and discussing, with activities attached to personalizable profiles, in the same way NINES and 18thConnect have.
Sadly, these features are under-used. Talking with Professor Stauffer, I can see the clear need for NINES to use its limited resources on improving the more standard database functions that are the primary reason scholars find NINES so useful (improvements include building a tool, Typewright, that will allow scholars to correct OCR scans, for example).
If we agree that creating community is indeed a crucial part of scholarly work, however, then there is ample incentive to persist in community-building online. The added advantage of the web is that it often creates less hierarchical, more transparent communities with a lower barrier to entry than a non-digital community has. The general tendency of DH to reflect the decentralizing and empowering nature of the web within its own projects and communities is part of what, I think, makes it so exciting and potentially transformative.
It would be fantastic to focus on encouraging people to use the community-oriented functions on NINES (especially the tagging, since it has a clear link to democratizing the classification [and therefore control] of knowledge) but, as I said, NINES faces resource constraints and has other tasks it needs to do.
Getting creative, someone from our class had the fantastic suggestion that NINES could mirror the conversations that take place on some of the bigger nineteenth-century listservs. it seems scholars often don’t feel these conversations are the best use of inbox space, but that having a searchable archive of them would be very valuable and perhaps even help these conversations flourish. I also suggested trying to popularize a #nines hashtag on twitter, hopefully creating another conversation that could simply be mirrored on NINES (this would take time and resources to accomplish, however).
It’s not that scholarly conversation isn’t happening on the web – it’s just that it’s often not happening on purpose-built tools like the Nines discussion boards. One major learning in online outreach over the last few years has been to recognize that the phrase “If you build it, they will come” is simply not true. Instead, you need to find ways to meet people where they are, and then integrate conversations happening in different places.
I’m really impressed with the collaborative effort it must have taken just to get all of the NINES federated sites to play nicely with each other (a Star Trek joke just flickered across my mind, but I’ll leave it to your imagination). The EMIC Commons will be another example of a large-scale scholarly collaboration. But the online community-building efforts seem to lag behind. That’s to say nothing of the efforts to bridge academic and non-academic communities. Online scholarly community building will definitely require some very creative approaches, given some of the challenges Professor Stauffer outlined for us.
A quote from Unsworth’s article is relevant here: “The importance of the network in all of this cannot be overstated: with the possible exception of a class of activities we’ll call authoring, the most interesting things that you can do with standalone tools and standalone resources is, I would argue, less interesting and less important than the least interesting thing you can do with networked tools and networked resources. There is a genuine multiplier effect that comes into play when you can do even very stupid things across very large and unpredictable bodies of material, with other people.”
Keeping the potential of the multiplier effect in mind, I’m wondering if people have other thoughts about this question of creating community online. How does the aim of community-building fit into your DH/EMIC work, if at all?
The question of the relevance of the digital humanities came up in my Digital Romanticism class with Michelle Levy at SFU, and I’m hoping EMICites will share thoughts, particularly as it pertains to our own work.
We were reading Matthew Kirschenbaum’s piece “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments“, in which he defines DH via Wikipedia as “methodological by nature.” He continues by saying DH is “a common methodological outlook.”
A concern I raised is that, by focusing on its status as a methodology, we risk eliding the question of whether or not DH is actually a transformation of the humanities, not simply a way of doing the traditional humanities differently.
Are the end goals of DH the same as the end goals of the non-digital humanities? Or even: is DH a way of bringing a shared notion of ends back to the humanities, if we agree that this is something the humanities is missing?
My inclination is to say that DH is actually a transformation of the humanities, and one that we won’t fully understand for some years. There are two distinct paths I see now, and I would love to have a conversation about which one we want to go down (or whether, of course, there is some ‘middle way’).
One path sees DH fitting the humanities more neatly into a managerial paradigm. Because DH can more easily demonstrate that it requires and creates certain transferable, technical skill-sets, because of its work with quantitative indicators and data, etc. it is potentially more appealing to those who see a necessity for humanities work to produce those kinds of measurable outcomes.
This gets directly to the question that comes up almost every time we talk about where the humanities are going: are the humanities still relevant? I generally hear two types of answers to that question. The first is to submit to it completely, and argue that the humanities are relevant because of “critical thinking skills” that are essential in the workforce. This answer comes in the terms of managerial paradigm – I’ve heard the number of Globe and Mail journalists with English degrees cited as evidence of relevance here (and I have to say I question how good an indicator that is of the success of English programs).
The second type of answer to the question of relevance resists its terms entirely, and argues that it’s an unfair one, that it’s antithetical to the humanities to even think in those terms. This is basically the “education for education’s sake” argument.
What we discussed in class, and where I see a second path opening up, is that DH can give us a new outlook on relevance. Instead of submitting to the managerial paradigm entirely, or rejecting the question of relevance, what if we reframed the definition of relevance so that instead of meaning something like “having an effect on our value in a market economy” it meant something like “serving the public good” or even “serving the public good by refining our notion of what that means.”
In his article “Electronic Scholarly Editions” Kenneth Price tells us we should “celebrate this opportunity to democratize learning.” This is the second path opening up, one wherein DH transforms the humanities in ways that I think most DH scholars (certainly all EMICites I’ve talked with) embrace.
But sometimes (and I hope we can talk about this in future posts, and in the comments here) I think we too easily assume that DH will take this path by default. It likely won’t. If the second path is the one we want to take, we are being called upon now to be conscious of, and to clearly articulate, the ways in which our contributions democratize learning and serve the public good.
I’m really excited to hear what EMIC colleagues would say about this. How do these questions play out in your own scholarship and thinking? Have they shaped your involvement with DH or with EMIC, or even your plans for your own edition?