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