Thanks to all folks for attending the final NUDHL meeting of the Fall term. Last Friday attracted staff, students, and faculty from divisions including NU LIbraries, IT, History, and English. I first recounted my experiences at Rare Book School over the past summer, as well as some of the particular things I learned from Bethany Nowviskie, Andy Stauffer, and the community of scholars, librarians, collectors, and students with me in Charlottesville. The readings I selected were designed to approach the “doings” of DH through bibliographical methods (that is, the study of the physical and material qualities of printed books, manuscripts, &c). Not accidentally, the discussion also touched upon some critical issues facing today’s academy: digitization, scholarly communication, and reevaluation of graduate training practices and tenure criteria. Each of these, I believe, are deeply related to our present navigations between the print and the digital. It is our patience with the iterative nature of these navigations that will define the shape of humanistic study in this century (here, I follow Jerome McGann).

I opened with a summary of my activities at Rare Book School, an opportunity partly facilitated by a NUDHL Connections Grant. The grant remains open for graduate students at Northwestern for programs like this. You can better grasp the full extent of the talk by linking to the powerpoint presentation accompanying it (Scholarship, Libraries, and c.21 Humanism). However, a few brief comments will suffice to explain what I discussed and how the conversation proceeded. First, I talked about my time in Charlottesville in the course “Digitizing the Historical Record,” which was team-taught by book history and digital humanities gurus Andy Stauffer and Bethany Nowviskie. Participants ranged from students to scholars to librarians and enthusiasts – a fairly diverse group, but typical enough for RBS. In order to think about the complexities of digitization, especially for objects that are difficult to render in digital forms, we explored a series of “hard cases” (mine, a c16 printed edition of Peter Martyr’s commentary on Paul’s letters – a fragmentary volume riddled with handwriting from numerous readers). Nowviskie and Stauffer also led us through Digitization Services at UVa, a remarkable facility where we witnessed students scanning physical matter (letters, printed books) for patrons. This was a chance to pause and reflect upon the necessity of involving undergraduates in the developments in the humanities today, for UVa’s digitization center could not run without the help of these students. Sessions later in the week at Rare Book School included discussions with technologists (Jeremy Boggs among them), demonstrations of some promising projects in the Scholars’ Lab (Mapping the Catalogue of Ships), and participants’ presentations on developing research or digitization projects.

This portion of the course enabled me to reflect upon The Spenser Engagements, a small digital project I have been running since early 2013 alongside Josh Honn and Brendan Quinn. In Charlottesville, I envisioned a more detailed and complex iteration of the CSS/HTML apparatus we now have (and which we are trying to redesign currently for TEI). This would be called “ART” (Apparatus for Renaissance Translation) and would function along the lines of Version Variation Visualization and UVa’s Juxta. The goal is to design an interface that facilitates the study of a text as it is translated or revised across multiple languages, accounting all the while for the linguistic particularities of each language. The project is also interested in exposing/exploring the deep roots of digital scholarship in philological study.

The readings selected for this NUDHL meeting were designed to provoke some deeper thought about bibliographical methods in relation to the digital (Galey), and the problems and instabilities of digitization and the not-necessarily-linear movement from print to digital (trettien). A short piece written recently by Jerome McGann in Profession provided a general discussion of these topics in relation to the future of humanities in practice. The conversation first revolved around the stakes in “presentist” views and longer historical approaches; the notion of “resistance in the material” (to use William Morris’s phrase); the allographic and the autographic; and questions of authenticity or truth in texts. Galey’s piece stimulated some interest in the ethics of emerging scholarly methods and the “interpretive malleability” of software; the time that one must devote to a particular scholarly effort, and how the digital may streamline that process; and the prestige economy of the academy and the value associated (or not) with tools and curation.

Some links to resources & tools:
Andrew Keener’s Slides
The Rossetti Archive
The Blake Archive
NINES
The Scholars’ Lab
Mapping the Catalogue of Ships
The Elements of User Experience
Juxta
Lexicons of Early Modern English
Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project
English Short-Title Catalog (ESTC)

Friends and members of NUDHL:

Here’s a brief recap of our first meeting of 2013-14. Over the course of this year, you’ll see more posts like this, which will provide a record of our gatherings for current and future members, They will also serve as a resource as our agenda unfolds over the course of the academic year.

On Friday, October 11, NUDHL Convener Michael Kramer moderated the first meeting for the 2013-14 year. The title of this two-hour session was “Introduction to NUDHL and the Digital Humanities,” and it sought to reflect upon what we accomplished last year as well as what we will undertake this year. Michael mentioned Matthew Gold’s edited collection Debates in the Digital Humanities, which we used in the past to stimulate conversation in monthly meetings. He also summarized some of the points that surfaced frequently in last year’s sessions (file backwards through the NUDHL blog for some of this content).

This first meeting of this year also introduced all members in attendance, both old and new, including Co-Conveners Jillana Enteen, Josh Honn, and Michael Kramer, and Assistant Directors Kevin Baker and Andrew Keener. Attendants hailed from a variety of departments and disciplines including: Art Theory and Practice; English; History; Information Technology; Media, several divisions in Northwestern Libraries; Technology and Society; Rhetoric and Public Culture; and Spanish and Portuguese. The recommended reading for this first session was Jeffrey Schnapp et al., “A Short Guide to Digital_Humanities” (2013), which provoked a thoughtful conversation about the multiple, conflicting definitions of DH, what it can do and offer, what the stakes are, and who is or who can be involved. Of course, as Michael and the English Department’s Jim Hodge were quick to remind us, this book bears the marks of its origins: advocacy for an undergraduate DH program directed towards administrative offices.

Rather than attempting to collaboratively formulate a strict or polemical definition of what digital humanities is, we sought in this session to articulate what it does. This strategy for the conversation invited members to discuss some of their own experiences or interests in the ways that DH serves their research or work. Michael suggested at first that DH might promise a challenge to the very traditionally text-centered approaches of the humanities, as well as multiple modes of perception in both research and teaching. Jim Hodge brought up the notion of “deformance,” a term used by Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels to describe the playful reconfiguration of texts, to which Josh Honn added computer glitching. Thinking more broadly, Andrew Keener summarized some of Franco Moretti’s points about distant reading in Graphs, Maps, Trees, and offered some thoughts about different modes or models of DH (Moretti being at Stanford, and the bibliographically-inclined McGann “school” radiating outwards from UVa on the East Coast). Towards the end of the conversation, Elizabeth Hunter raised some questions about the roles of gaming in the digital humanities, and we hypothesized how a first-person Shakespeare RPG might integrate a player’s experience with an increasingly difficult sequence of encounters with early modern English language or text. Other topics to surface, if only briefly, included: the difference between the public humanities and the digital humanities; 3D printing; canonicity; and databases.

At the very end of the meeting, Josh invited attendants to peruse the Northwestern University Library’s “A Guide to Digital Humanities”, a useful resource for faculty, staff, and graduate students interested in learning more about DH at Northwestern. Additionally, this NUDHL blog offers a place for discussions to continue between sessions and throughout the year.

 

2.1: Introduction to NUDHL and Digital Humanities

 

Hi fellow NUDHLers,

I hope each of you are enjoying some time off this summer. I realize that I’ve neglected the NUDHL blog, but catching up I was glad to have Emily point me to the Claude Fischer Ngram piece. I’ve been toying around here and there with the Ngram viewer, rather uncritically thus far, I might add, so some deeper thinking about its scope and its utility are certainly welcome.

As some of you may know, I spent a week last month in beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia at Rare Book School, which has been held at UVa since 1992. The courses offered at RBS traditionally treat the material qualities of manuscripts and printed books; topics usually include descriptive and analytical bibliography, paper production and watermark study, paleography and illumination, engraving and woodcuts, that kind of thing. However, the curriculum has been taking a digital turn that, I think, really showcases the continuities that must be understood when we think about manuscript, print, and digital modes of communication. With Rare Book School, TGS, and the NU Department of English, NUDHL was a co-sponsor for my participation in the course “Digitizing the Historical Record,” led by Bethany Nowviskie and Andy Stauffer. Both learned from Jerome McGann during the 1990s at UVa, where they now work today as Director of Digital Research & Scholarship and Associate Professor of English/Director of NINES , respectively.

I’m not going to write much else here, since I’ll be talking in the Fall about the take-aways of this seminar and the practical applications for our own community at Northwestern. But I will say that the course included students from a variety of ages and backgrounds (librarians, scholars, editors, graduate students – the last one, me!) and that it was conducted in a kind of round-table format not unlike what we do in our NUDHL meetings. With Bethany and Andy’s advice, we structured a substantial amount of time toward thinking about a particular project that we’d been working on – in my case, this was “The Spenser Engagements,” about which some of you heard me and Josh speak during the Spring. The course’s content addressed some of the concerns we have articulated and pressed upon throughout the last year, including but not limited to: What should a digital scholarly project look like? What is the role of design in digital scholarship or a digital archive? What kinds of language should we use when we discuss our work with administrators and colleagues who may not be familiar with or warm to digital approaches to these humanistic issues? What bearing do these transformations we’re seeing today have upon the university library, broadly understood? What bearing do these transformations have upon graduate education, and what can we do to make it (more) sustainable?

I admit that no hard and fast answers emerged, but the five days of conversation were fruitful and sparked a lot of ideas. Take this as a teaser, then, and I hope all of you have a pleasant summer! Much more to come.

ASK

THIS WEEK’S QUESTIONS:

What do we recognize to be the state of affairs of DH in practice at Northwestern? What kinds of digital work are faculty and graduate students taking on right now? How can we activate useful and responsible DH practice in the classroom setting? What technologies and resources are available through the Library, and what will be available in months to come? What resources and individuals can one turn to for assistance and guidance on digital projects?

We will address these and other, related questions during the first hour of this Friday’s meeting. Four presentations will deliver a picture of DH on-the-ground and in practice among graduate students, researchers, instructors, and librarians. (These samples of current work will serve as the basis of discussion in lieu of readings.) The second hour will serve as a forum for graduate students to discuss among themselves what they see to be useful approaches and techniques in DH going forward. In the hopes of bringing together our group in a less formal fashion, we’ll then gather for a collegial get-together at the Celtic Knot, where the conversation will continue.

DATE & TIME:

Friday, 17 May 2013
12pm – 1pm:  Presentations & Discussion
1pm – 2pm:    Graduate Student Forum
2pm and on:  Conversation @ Celtic Knot, 626 Church St., Evanston (click for map).

PLACE:

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Conference Room, Kresge Hall, 1880 Campus Drive, #2-360, Evanston, IL 60208 (click for map).

FULL PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION AGENDA:

I.     Introduction: Emily VanBuren & Amanda Kleintop, Ph.D. Students, Department of History
II.   Brief Presentations: DH in Practice
a. Graduate Research:  Andrew Keener, Ph.D. Student, Department of English
b. Pedagogy: Michael Kramer, Department of History
c. Library Resources: Josh Honn, Digital Scholarship Library Fellow
III. Discussion about DH @ NU (with an eye toward its futures)
IV.  Graduate Student Forum (tools, workshops, presentations, goals)
V.   Walk into Evanston & Continued Conversation @ Celtic Knot

Hello NUDHLers! My schedule blocks me from attending the sessions this quarter, but I have been attempting to make up for my absence through occasional conversations with some of you as well as though fthis blog. I also found Ben Pauley’s visit to be particularly interesting and helpful.

Emily, thanks for jotting down some of your thoughts in preparation for tomorrow’s session. While I’m (again) not going to be there, I want to pass along to you all two brief articles that might be somewhat germane. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece this week that gives  accounts of three graduate students working on “digital dissertations” at Emory, Stanford, and UVa. It’s important that their projects are getting some press, although the article still seems to understand their projects as exceptional in some way (at least, that’s how I see it). The link to the article is here. Another good piece on the changing nature of the dissertation that appeared in the Chronicle on the same day is here. To branch off of some of your comments then, Emily, I’m beginning to wonder about how this supposedly crowning achievement of doctoral study could/needs to change, and exactly where this priority lies in relation to other DH questions. How can/should DH make our graduate studies programs sustainable?

I realize that through my comments here I’m late in joining what I’m sure is already a rich and developed conversation this quarter. I only wanted to share these articles and to register a couple thoughts. I hope the meeting goes well tomorrow, and I’ll try to join you all in person again A.S.A.P.

ASK

 

 

Hi NUDHLers, I’m experimenting with Vade Mecum, a new blog on literatures, languages, and the technology of the book. I’ve just released a new post on the Renaissance pamphlet, and it is designed to resonate with many topics we discuss at NUDHL meetings. Have a look, & happy holidays!

ASK

Emily, it’s too bad you weren’t with us on Friday to add to the conversation. (This began as a response to your post, but it became too long.) A lot of the points you mentioned in your post truly resonated with me as well – especially the notion of ‘building things’ as scholarship, which to me suggests several possibilities for study as we explore departures from an era of mainly discursive inquiry (high theory being especially possible in an era of ‘invisible’ print) to a very material time marked by varieties of communicative technologies that mingle, compete, succeed, and fail at different times. I’m borrowing much of this from Ramsay and Rockwell, who of course suggest the possibility of ‘building things’ as a new direction for scholarship.

Perhaps building things, then, rather than arguments, is a productive direction for the future of the academy, although our things will certainly be invested with arguments in some way. In this sense I think I’m approaching DH from a different perspective than Jillana, though I am not at all resistant to developing a new theoretical framework along the way. I do think however that I’m probably motivated toward the material possibilities of DH by three things: 1) my anxieties about the futures of academic labor; 2) my (measured) optimism for the possibilities of digital humanism, especially re: cultivating a public audience; 3) following my interest in the history of printing and bookmaking, my desire to consider the ‘electronic revolution’ as historically contingent, but also the latest link in a communications continuum (contra Parry, 435). These motivations touch on issues such as power (in the academy, not in society) and legitimacy of academic work, which I hope we discuss at more depth at the next meeting. I think it merits some attention, and I think I speak for the graduate students here. The problem of evaluation of digital work is complex, as Ramsay and Rockwell rightly recognize (76), but it has every consequence for humanistic study if “To ask whether coding is a scholarly act is like asking whether writing is a scholarly act” (82). Juliana, you expressed similar concerns in your post and at the table. I agree with you that they introduce a variety of dilemmas, however important ones. I was also glad to speak with Amanda after the last session about some of these issues (and much of what I write here came up as we spoke).

In the first decades of printing, the press was glorified as a divine miracle (and condemned as demonic), but four centuries later it was (generally) taken for granted, invisible. If we only began to reconsider the printed book as a technology because of our recent saturation in consumer electronics, perhaps the future will bring with it a regularization (in copyright, habituation, etc) that will render the internet more ‘invisible’ than it seems today. I have no way to predict the future, of course, but if this could be the case, I think it makes sense to wonder about what scholarship we can build for the future, especially as a young scholar anxious to benefit from the digital tools around me and to give back to the greater community. In other words, I think we as humanists seriously need to consider building things in the attempt to sustain intellectual inquiry, and that we should regard this direction not so much a concession to a neoliberal turn, but to act constructively and publicly in what is merely a new, if unstable and constantly developing, communicative environment. It will be hard, though – clicking “publish” after writing these posts always brings me anxiety!

Hello all,

My name is Andrew Keener, and I’m a first-year Ph.D. student in the English Department. It was truly a pleasure to join all of you on Friday to discuss a some meanings and complexities of digital humanities, and I look forward to the next session. Special thanks go to Michael and Jillana & all at the Kaplan Institute.

In this post I’ll share something about myself, as many of you already have, but I also want to briefly revisit some ideas in our Friday session (some of these points were touched on by Michael in the previous post). Much of my interest in the digital humanities results from my own interests in the history of the book and the literature of the Renaissance. I’m particularly interested in the circulation of Continental literary forms on the early English book market, as well as the collaboration among authors, printers, and booksellers. Fellowships and courses at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Rare Book School inspired me to take up bibliographic methods, and now I’m thrilled to have the Newberry so close by. I spend as much time as possible in the archive handling the artifacts, but I also find myself relying to a large degree on digital tools. For example: the uploaded microfilm copies in Early English Books Online (EEBO) with its corresponding Text Creation Partnership texts, the Electronic Short Title Catalog, and other digital scholarly projects like UToronto’s ‘Lexicons’ and Martin Mueller’s ‘Word Hoard.’ These are great resources and truly useful instances of scholarly service. I confess the material books still seem more like ‘texts’ to me, but combining rare book research with the available Renaissance digital scholarship has been a rich experience so far.

Friday’s session was very useful but my definition of digital humanities remains admittedly nebulous. I’m comfortable with Josh Honn‘s loose definition, though, mainly because it allows me to unite a series of interests that don’t fit normally under the rubric of a single department. Digital humanities, then (to reiterate), can refer to (1) the electronic scholarly resources we use to address our questions; (2) the publication of our work in electronic forms; and (3) scholarship about this transitional period between print and digital. As Claire Stewart said, though, we are still in the ‘dark ages’ in our understanding or capability with digital technology (for humanistic purposes or otherwise, I think),  and so I feel decidedly more comfortable with the first 2 parts of this definition until we have some historical perspective on the changes we are undergoing now. This presents exciting possibilities through which the academy might recuperate a public audience. Without a doubt, our current, theoretical understanding of print culture and other forms of media (TV, radio, etc.) come to our aid when we use or create projects like ‘Lexicons’ or the ESTC. But the issue is vexed; there is also value in delivering and reformatting the historical and literary record for future generations in ways that prioritize the presentation of the primary documents without imprinting them with a decidedly ’20-teens’ look. Just how to do this is the real question. I look forward to meeting again next time and thinking more deeply about these and other things.