The A Companion to Digital Literary Studies edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman is available online in full text. This is tremendous resource with too many excellent contributions to list individually. Chapters go from Reading on the Screen by Christian Vandendorpe and Algorithmic Criticism by Stephen Ramsay.
There is a good Annotated Overview of Selected Electronic Resources by Tanya Clement and Gretchen Gueguen with links to projects like TAPoR.
I’m at the State of the World: Information Infrastructure Construction and Dissemination for Humanities and Social Science Research conference at the University of Alberta. This conference was organized primarily to reflect on the Canadian Century Research Initiative which has been developing “a set of interrelated databases centered on data from the 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941 and 1951 Canadian censuses.” Peter Baskerville, the organizer, yesterday took us through how one can use census data to make inferences about a young girl in Edmonton in 1911. Some of the interesting ideas:
Dan Larocque from Open Text spoke on “Private/Public Ventures in the Digital World: Open Text and the Canada Project”. The mission of the Canada Project is to “To advance Canadians’ awareness of and access to accumulated knowledge through mass digitization of Canada’s published heritage.” The project is to put all Canadiana online and to create a user experience that allows all Canadians to use the content from genealogist to children interested in a historic hockey game. Dan also talked about the Stratford Institute which is a collaboration between the town of Stratford, Waterloo University, Open Text, and the province to create a digital media focused campus.
I spoke at this conference on “Cyberinfrastructure: Mashing Texts and Tools in TAPoR”.
Last week I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure: Reflections from TAPoR to Tools at the Canadian Research Knowledge Network Annual General Meeting 2008 (they have a PDF of the slides.) I was part of a panel on cyberinfrastructure that included an interesting presentation by Walter Stewart of CANARIE who made the point that the big issue is people. While many still don’t have access to the technical infrastructure that would facilitate their research, the big challenge is professional staff/collegial support for digital research. If one looks at the life span of a typical project one can see where people are needed:
In short I think we can begin to articulate a baseline of cyberinfrastructure and support needed at research-intensive universities to support a culture of digital humanities projects:
I just noticed that the CH Working Papers have a new look and structure. They are using the Public Knowledge Project Open Journal Systems to good effect. I’m impressed how they have ported over the legacy content like the article I co-authored with John Bradley on Eye-ConTact: Towards a New Design for Text-Analysis Tools. The only wrinkle is the first letter of the authors’ names in the bibliography and small subheadings.
I just came across the AHRC ICT Methods Network Final Report edited by Lorna Hughes. It is one of the most thorough final reports of its kind and nicely designed. There is a bitter-sweet conclusion to the report by Susan Hockey and Seamus Ross as the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) seems to have had its funding cut and therefore cannot renew the Methods Network (or support the Oxford Text Archive either.) As the home page of the AHDS says, “From April 2008 the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) will no longer be funded to provide a national service.” The conclusion by Susan and Seamus states unequivocally that,
In conclusion, the activities of the Methods Network demonstrated not only that ICT methods and tools are central to humanities scholarship, but also that there was ‘a very long way to go before ICT in humanities and arts research finds its rightful and needed places’. The investment in ICT in the arts and humanities needs to be much greater and it needs to reflect better the particularities and needs of individual communities. Researchers who do not have access to the most current technological methods and tools will not be able to keep
pace with the trends in scholarship. There is a real need for support and infrastructure for distributed research. (page 74)
Interestingly they propose a “flexible co-ordinated network of centres of excellence as the best way forwards”. (Page 74) I also liked the report because it kindly mentions TAPoR,
The group looked at how collaborations are fostered and supported, how partnerships are brokered in the first instance, and how this work is rewarded and evaluated by the different communities. Geoffrey Rockwell, Project Director of what is almost certainly the largest collaborative humanities software development project in the world, the TAPoR (http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal) project in Canada, shared his experiences of how the development of a collaborative and inter-institutional set of tools for text analysis was managed within the project. TAPoR was funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and succeeded in its overall goals in providing general purpose text analysis tools. The TAPoR site reports that its tools were run over 5000 times in November 2007. TAPoR provides strong evidence that networked collaborative tool development can succeed. (Page 63)
The World of Dante is a totally renovated site from the University of Virginia (IATH) on Dante. It has some neat features. They use an image by Domenico di Michelino of Dante Reading from the Divine Comedy as a visual introduction to the site. You roll over the parts of the image and get an introduction to the project. The project also has a lot of media, including music that was commissioned to connect to references in the text to music. I heard some of this music at the New Horizons conference. This is a gem of a project even if sometimes paging the texts is slow – I’m told that it has to do with caching – just be patient.
Diane M. Zorich prepared A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States for the Council on Library and Information Resources that is critical of the lack of collaboration between DHCs in the United States. The Executive Summary (pages 4-5) noted three “features of the current landscape of centers that may inadvertently hinder wider research and scholarship:”
- The silo-like nature of current centers is creating untethered digital production that is detrimental to the needs of humanities scholarship. Today’s centers favor individual projects that address specialized research interests. These projects are rarely integrated into larger digital resources that would make them more widely known and available for the research community. As a result, they receive little exposure outside their center, and are at greater risk of being orphaned over time.
- The independent nature of existing centers does not effectively leverage resources community-wide. Centers have overlapping agendas and activities, particularly in training, digitization of collections, and metadata development. Redundant activities across centers are an inefficient use of the scarce resources available to the humanities community.
- Large-scale, coordinated efforts to address the “big†issues in building humanities cyberinfrastructure (such as repositories that enable long-term access to the centers’ digital production) are missing from the current landscape. Collaborations among existing centers are small and focus on individual partner interests that do not scale up to address community-wide needs. (pages 4-5
It is worth noting that TAPoR is an example of a network of centers that avoids some of the problems, though not all. The report reads to me like a library view of how to support digital humanities. While centers have problems they are also excellent at supporting individual projects. Large scale services tend to not support any one innovative project as well.
The report has some interesting things to say about tools:
Of all the products DHCs offer, tools have received considerable interest of late among the digital humanities research community. As digital scholarship grows, centers are increasingly taking on a developer’s role, creating new tools (or expand existing ones) to meet their research requirements.
In the interests of furthering research and scholarship, DHC-developed tools are made freely available via various open source agreements. However, there is some concern that the efforts expended in DHC tool development are not being adequately leveraged across the humanities. A recent study commissioned by CLIR (and included in its entirety as Appendix F to this document) found that many of these tools are not easily accessible. They are “buried†deep within a DHC’s Web site, are not highlighted nor promoted among the center’s products, and lack the most basic descriptions such as function, intended users, and downloading instructions.
The reason for this state of affairs may be related to how tool development often takes place in DHCs. Centers frequently develop tools within the context of a larger project. It may be that, once the project has been completed, the center becomes involved in other activities and does not have the resources available to address usability issues that would make the tool more accessible for others. The unfortunate end result is that significant energy is expended developing a tool that may receive little use beyond a particular center. Funding agencies who support tool development among centers, and who make it a requirement of their grants that the tools be open source, may wish to develop guidelines and provide support for mechanisms that will help enhance the usability of existing tools and expose them more prominently to the humanities community. It may be that funding tool development as a piece of a larger center project is not in the best interest of the humanities community, as individual centers seem unable to maintain these tools beyond the life of the project. (page 42)
Included as Appendix F is a report, “Tools for Humanists Project; Final Report” by Lilly Nguyen and Katie Shilton.
We know now that there is much more than text. “Texts,” as Geoffrey Hartman, has observed, “are false bottom.” The implications of scholars’ blindness to the nontextual and of their recent discovery of their own blindness have still not been worked out entirely. Textual squint is still with us, and, in some ways, with deconstruction has become more disabling in certain quarters at the very time that its diagnosis has become easier. The way to overcome textual squint is not to devise theories, which textualism promotes ad nauseam, but to call attention to reality, to the relationship of texts to the full human lifeworld, …”
Page 2 of “MLA 1984 Literacy Studies”
This passage is from the second page of a five page edited typescript at The Walter J. Ong Collection. The web site notes that “Ong’s notes indicate that this talk was part of the ‘What is Literacy Theory’ session (program item #190) of the 1984 MLA Convention.” I wonder what Ong would make of the Dictionary of Words in the Wild? I don’t think Ong had wild text in mind as a way of overcoming the “textual squint”; the hand notation “Alice Springs” in the left-hand margin suggests what he thought would be an example of nontextual human lifeworld.
Man can even reflect upon his own earlier reflections as these are registered in books and elsewhere. All this is what ultimately the humanistic subjects deal with: Mankind’s life world, [page break] everything around and in men and women insofar as it affects or is affected by human consciousness.
The humanities–and I think we should get this clear–are not defined by being set against a field of science and technology presumably hostile to them. This is a fashionable, but essentially cheap, way of treated both fields.Walter Ong, “Defining the Humanities for Congress”
Browsing through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection I came across an extended quote from Ong’s address to Congress from 1978 when he was president of the MLA. The address was in support of a resolution to authorize the President to call a conference on the humanities. Walter Ong quotes a definition of the humanities which he wants to play with,
The joint resolution introduced by Mr. Brademas on October 27, 1977, in the House of Representatives follows Congress description of 1965 in stating that:
“The term “humanities†includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history, jurisprudence; philosophy; archeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, theory, and practice of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.â€
He then goes on to conclude,
However, if the humanities need technology, technology also needs the humanities. For technology calls for more than technological thinking, as our present ecological crises remind us. Technology demands reflection on itself in relation to the entire human life world. Such reflection is no longer merely technology, it includes the humanities even though it needs to be done especially by scientists and technologies.
Ong, Walter J. “Statement of Rev. Walter J. Ong, Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at St. Louis University; and President, Modern Language Association of America.†White House Conference on the Humanities. Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, and the Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First and Second Session, on H.J Res. 639 to Authorize the President to call a White House Conference on the Humanities. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978. 684-88.
The Digital Humanities Summer Institute this summer took a number of us aside and asked us to answer four questions about the digital humanities on video. The collection of streaming video clips makes interesting viewing as they chose a representative sample of people from myself to a software architect. You can stack the rows of video clips and compare different answers, which is nice.