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

Via Neil Fraistat on the Centernet discussion list:

I’m delighted to announce that in an effort to make membership more widely affordable, the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), will now offer low-cost membership for students and early career scholars and unwaged or low-waged independent scholars, beginning 2013.

Those who join under the program will not receive a subscription to LLC: the journal of digital scholarship in the humanities, published by ADHO. ADHO’s membership-only fees will be set at $25, £14, and €20. Please spread the word!

Those interested in membership for the coming year can join (or re-join) here:

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/litlin/access_purchase/price_list.html/.

As you know, centerNet is now a constituent organization of ADHO. We’ll soon be announcing our own quite modest membership rates in the near future, as we’ll as news about our new open source journal focused on the registry and peer review of DH projects.

(Hello fellow NUDHL-ers. I came across an article and wanted to share it with all of you. I’m interested to know what everyone makes of it. I’m cross-posting to the HASTAC website as well. Happy Thanksgiving!)

President of the AHA and American environmental historian William Cronon recently published an intriguing piece in the November issue of Perspectives on History. In “Recollecting My Library . . . and My Self,” Cronon ponders what is lost in the transition from material text to digital text. His own interests in senses of place and the nature of storytelling really shape this piece, and I found it a very compelling claim about the potential pitfalls of our embrace of the digital. I thought it would be worth sharing, to see what others make of this.

He points out a few dangers that the “digital revolution” poses to “building personal libraries.” As others have pointed out before him, the ease of retrieving information has fundamentally transformed the research process. Cronon also points out that the digital turn imperils a source’s context, comparing the ease of computer searching with a return to the Roman scroll. He discusses his own difficulties in locating a piece of information that he’s already collected in a digital storehouse vs. a material library. I think Cronon is signaling toward important problems here, and I wonder how other researchers (not just historians) are grappling with these same challenges in their use of the digital. Cronon somberly points out that digital evidence gathering is forcing a change in how historians conceive of themselves through their research processes:

“This lifelong process of creating a scholarly self by means of an intellectual and emotional journey whose way-stations are marked by passionately remembered texts — many of them so dear to us that we keep them close to us for our entire lives — is being transformed in the fragmented world of search and scroll that has become our dominant metaphor for knowledge itself.”

If this transformation (which reads to me, in this account, as something woefully lost) is inevitable, as Cronon claims, what are we to do about it? He points out that what is at stake in this transformation is not just a form of practice but a sense of identity. So how are digital researchers to maintain their “memory palaces,” as Cronon calls them? How are we to construct these palaces at all? If the materiality of the research process is being lost, is it also being replaced? Is there a materiality to the digitized research process? Is the memory palace still there, but in a different form? Can we still construct a scholarly sense of self when the trek to the archive is not a journey to a foreign country, but the act of opening a laptop? Can we maintain a sense of context through the iPad?

I’m eager to hear what others have to say about this transformation.

The other night, Jade Werner  and I presented “A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis.” Attendance was strong and the post-presentation discussion lively and we’d like to share our work as broadly as possible. The link below features the presentation slides, full transcript of our remarks, and links to our live collation and analysis environments using Juxta Commons andVoyant Tools. The presentation (a) introduces our the object/subject of our study, (b) outlines a brief history of text analysis, (c) discusses and displays new digital tools, and (d) outlines popular text analysis methodologies.

This presentation came about through a collaboration between Jade and I on her wonderful scholarship on the two versions of the Lady Morgan novel The Missionary (1811) and its edited version Luxima, The Prophetess (1859). Having cleaned up the texts, we are now exploring new interpretations enabled and enhanced by online text analysis tools. Please take a look and feel free to get in touch with us with any questions/comments.

http://cscdc.northwestern.edu/blog/?p=687

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!