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)