Friday, December 2nd, 2011
KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 8

IN THE EIGHTH issue of KindleReads for DragonWeb I have collected articles that present views on Digital Humanities from various perspectives. Sam Harris muses on the future of the book, while Timothy Burke argues for the necessity of learning to use digital tools if one opts to study or research DH. Bethany Nowviskie puts forth a modest proposal for the reform of higher education, and finally William G. Thomas tries to define what we build in DH, and how it affects issues of scholarship. As usual, I hope you find this small compilation worth reading, and if you have anything to share, please do not hesitate to contact me at zoltan@dragonweb.hu.

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Table of contents

- "The Future of the Book" by Sam Harris

- "Catching Up II: Letting Go of the Reins" by Timothy Burke

- "It Starts on Day One" by Bethany Nowviskie

- "What We Think We Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities" by William G. Thomas

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The Future of the Book

by Sam Harris

Writers, artists, and public intellectuals are nearing some sort of precipice: Their audiences increasingly expect digital content to be free. Jaron Lanier has written and spoken about this issue with great sagacity. You can purchase his book, which most of you will not do, or you can watch him discuss these matters for free. The problem is thus revealed even in the act of stating it.  How can a person like Lanier get paid for being brilliant? This has become an increasingly difficult question to answer.

Where publishing is concerned, the Internet is both midwife and executioner. It has never been easier to reach large numbers of readers, but these readers have never felt more entitled to be informed and entertained for free. I have been very slow to appreciate these developments, and yet it is clear even to me that there are reasons to fear for the life of the printed book. Needless to say, many of the changes occurring in publishing are changes that neither publishers nor authors want. The market for books is continually shifting beneath our feet, and nobody knows what the business of publishing will look like a decade from now.

When I published The End of Faith in 2004, I created a website as an afterthought. In fact, I remember feeling silly asking my publisher to put the web address on the dust jacket, not knowing if there was any point in doing so. While my website has since become the hub of everything I have accomplished as an author, it took me years to understand its utility, and I only began blogging a few months ago. Clearly, I am a slow learner. But many other authors are still pretending that the Internet doesn’t exist. Some will surely see their careers suffer as a result. One fact now seems undeniable: The future of the written word is (mostly or entirely) digital.

Journalism was the first casualty of this transformation. How can newspapers and magazines continue to make a profit? Online ads don’t generate enough revenue and paywalls are intolerable; thus, the business of journalism is in shambles. Even though I sympathize with the plight of publishers—and share it by association as a writer—as a reader, I am without pity. If your content is behind a paywall, I will get my news elsewhere. I subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker, but when I want to read one of its articles online, I find it galling to have to login and wrestle with its proprietary e-reader. The result is that I read and reference New Yorker articles far less frequently than I otherwise would. I’ve been a subscriber for 25 years, but The New Yorker is about to lose me. What can they do? I don’t know. The truth is, I now expect their content to be free.

My friend Christopher Hitchens is a writer of truly incandescent prose whose career has been forged almost entirely in the context of print journalism. Among his many outlets, the most prominent has probably been Vanity Fair: a gorgeous, glossy magazine to which I also subscribe. Happily, Vanity Fair offers its content for free on its website. I visited the site a moment ago and read Hitch’s latest: a very tender essay of praise for the work of Joan Didion — another wonderful writer who, I have just learned from Hitch, will soon publish a book about the tragic death of her daughter. This will be a follow up to The Year of Magical Thinking, her searing account of the loss of her husband. I will buy and read Didion’s new book, just as I bought and read the last one, and I expect that it will be a bestseller. Hitch did his job and got paid. Didion will soon publish her book in hardcover and has already benefited from his review. All appears to be well in the Kingdom of Print.

Getty Images

However, with the gimlet eyes of a new blogger, I detect ominous portents of change. First, I see that Hitch’s article has been featured on the Vanity Fair website for the better part of a week and has garnered only 813 Facebook likes and 75 Tweets. Many of my blog articles receive more engagement than this, some by nearly a factor of 10. No doubt this has something to do with the ratio of signal to noise: When readers come to a personal blog, they are more or less guaranteed to read what the author has written. How many people will find Hitch’s article on the Vanity Fair website? Of course, it is prominently displayed on the home page, along with an arresting photo of Didion taken by Annie Leibovitz, one of the most famous photographers on earth. Presumably, Leibovitz had to go to Didion’s apartment with a small crew to obtain this image. All of this creative work was paid for, one imagines, by print ads. But with respect to Hitch’s interests as a writer, and Didion’s as his subject, everything else in the current issue of Vanity Fair is noise. A glance at the online page rank of the magazine raises even greater concerns. I know bloggers—Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin, for instance—whose personal blogs get more traffic than the entire Vanity Fair website.

When I began writing the previous paragraph, I forwarded Hitch’s article on Facebook and Twitter. Over 3000 people have since followed the link I sent, and we’re up to 955 Facebook likes and 100 Tweets. I hesitate to read too much into these metrics, but it doesn’t seem entirely crazy to wonder whether a significant percentage of the people who have read Hitch’s essay in the last week read it in the last hour because I broadcast it on social media. I used to view this as a wonderful synergy—digital enables print; print points back to digital; and both thrive. I now consider it the death knell for traditional publishing.

Vanity Fair has a print circulation of around 1 million copies; the current issue has a fresh photo of Angelina Jolie on its cover; and Hitch is one of the best writers to ever draw breath. However, I’m reasonably sure that this blog post, or the next one, will reach more readers than his latest gem. For bloggers like Ferriss and Godin, the future arrived long ago: Publishing in Vanity Fair would be tantamount to burying their work. This is astounding. Given its range of content, and the costs of acquiring this content, a magazine like Vanity Fair should get much more traffic than any one person’s blog. And this brings us back to the problem of money: Apart from my occasional use of a webmaster and a graphic designer, my blog employs no one—not even me. Where is all this heading?  I can count on one finger the number of places where it is still obviously better for me to publish than on my own blog—the opinion page of The New York Times. But it’s not so much better that I’ve been tempted to send them an article in the last few months. Is this just the hubris of the blogosphere? Maybe—but not for everyone and not for long.

Related difficulties are now looming for books. I love physical books as much as anyone. And when I really want to get a book into my brain, I now purchase both the hardcover and electronic editions. From the point of view of the publishing industry, I am the perfect customer. This also makes me a very important canary in the coal mine—and I’m here to report that I’ve begun to feel woozy.  For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600-pages-long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life.

These intersecting concerns have now led me to stratify my written work: I am currently writing a traditional, printed book for my mainstream publisher, the Free Press. At the other extreme, I do a lot of writing for free, almost entirely on my blog. In between working for free and working for my publisher, I’ve begun to experiment with self publishing short ebooks. Last week, I published LYING, my first installment in this genre. The results have been simultaneously thrilling and depressing.

My goal in LYING was to write a very accessible essay on an important topic that could be absorbed in one sitting. I know how revolutionary it is to be honest with everyone one meets—to refuse to shade the truth even slightly in business or in one’s personal life—and I know how few people do this. LYING spells out my reasons for thinking that we would all be better off living this way.

The essay appears to have had its desired effect on many readers. But others were not satisfied. Some did not understand the format—a very short book that can be read in 40 minutes—and expected to get a much longer book for $1.99. Many wondered why it is available only as an ebook. Some fans of ebooks were powerfully aggrieved to find it available only on the Kindle platform—they own Nooks, or detest Amazon for one reason or another. However, the fact is that Amazon made it extraordinarily easy for me to do this; the Kindle Single is the perfect format for so short a book; and Kindle content can be read on every computer and almost any handheld device. I decided that it was not worth my time or other people’s money to publish LYING elsewhere, or as a physical book.

On the surface, the launch of LYING has been a great success. It reached the #1 spot for Kindle Singles immediately and #9 for all Kindle content. It is amazing to finish writing, hit “upload,” and watch one’s work soar and settle, however briefly, above the vampire novels and diet books.

I would be lying, however, if I said that I wasn’t stung by some of the early criticism. Some readers felt that a 9000-word essay was not worth $1.99, especially when they can read my 5000-word blog posts for free. It is true that I put a lot of work into many of my blog posts, but LYING took considerably longer to write than any of them. It is a deceptively simple book—and I made it simple for a reason. Some of my readers seem not to have appreciated this and prefer to follow me into my usual thickets of argument and detail. That’s fine. But it is, nevertheless, painful to lose a competition with oneself, especially over a difference of $1.99.

One thing is certain: writers and public intellectuals must find a way to get paid for what they do—and the opportunities to do this are changing quickly. My current solution is to write longer books for a traditional press and publish short ebooks myself on Amazon. If anyone has any better ideas, please publish them somewhere—perhaps on a blog—and then send me a link. And I hope you get paid.

Source URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/27/sam-harris-on-the-future-of-the-book.html

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Catching Up II: Letting Go of the Reins

by Timothy Burke

I bookmarked a blog entry earlier this month by Elijiah Meeks that was endorsing a longer essay by Natalia Cecire about the relationship between theory and tools in digital humanities work, and also the relationship between humanists and technologists. Meeks and Cecire both argue for humanists to reassert theory, to not be driven by the promise of tools which elide or erase the need for difficult conceptual work, to not accept the primacy of code and coders. Meeks observes that this is almost a Thunderdome struggle: two paradigms enter, one paradigm leaves.

If so, I guess I find myself a spectator who has money down on both combatants but who is really just waiting for Master Blaster to show up and put both together–or maybe I’m looking to be at another venue altogether.

I think Cecire in particular approaches theory in a fashion that I’ve grown more and more unsympathetic to in my own thinking and writing, as something which is recognizably achieved in positive relation to its difficulty and its refusal to reach closure. She notes that theory in this post is not 80s-style Theory, but “a catch-all term for thinking through the philosophical and cultural consequences of things”. I’m good with that, but I think we should be wary of the idea that thinking through is always a present-tense gerund, that theory ends if we’ve thought through to arrive at a commitment to a practice. This is what the “less yacking, more hacking” sentiment is partly about even from some humanists, not just coders. Cecire walks up to the edge of a pretty old trope, I think, that making and theory are opposed kinds of work, that to make something without a perpetual accompaniment of theoretical unmaking is to leave theory behind. Theory in this sense seems to involve a notion of a principled commitment to being on the perpetual verge: to consider, to problematize, that theory is a predicate and prelude whose horizon stretches infinitely out. She suggests that for some digital humanists, their practice is a refuge from theory, an evasion. I guess I think this is another kind of evasion, an unwillingness to see this division as something more like a disagreement between theories rather than theory and untheory. If some digital humanists think that a THATCamp on narrative or biopower is only a THATCamp kind-of-session if it’s about new ways to visualize biopower using a digital tool or ways that the meaning of narrative changes in hypertext rather than an abstracted reflection on narrative as a theoretical category, that is not untheorized. That is an argument that theory emerges out of certain kinds of commitment to practice or experience, or that it can’t be disaggregated out of creative or interpretative action, or that theory should be predictive, instructive, testable, experimental. One can, to use a favorite rhetorical construction of critical theory, contest or problematize that view, but don’t confuse it for absence or flight from theory.

I should be clear: I’m completely with Meeks and Cecire that simply waiting around for the tools to be created and then adapting or living with them as the coders see fit is absolutely the wrong way for digital humanists to operate, whether we’re looking to produce knowledge or create artistic works. This is precisely one of my major frustrations in game studies: I don’t accept the arguments of many people involved in the production of virtual worlds (both massively-multiplayer online games and open-world solo games) that procedural content and sandbox designs are technically impossible or of no interest to most possible audiences. I don’t have the coding ability or resources to prove them wrong, but the sociology and mindset of the gaming industry is a tightly wound, recursive loop that regularly regards all sorts of creative, successful work as impossible until someone manages to do it. Part of the work of humanists is to look at how expressive media have or could produce novelty and invention from within their own potentialities in defiance of what their standard practicioners believe to be possible or desirable.

In our own work as scholars and artists, digital humanists need to imagine not just tools to do work that we already know we want to carry out, but theories of representation, aesthetics, interpretation that will think beyond, against or around “tools”, around technologies. But I think Cecire and Meeks pine for sovereignty over tools and medium which not only doesn’t exist in the digital humanities, it has never existed in any non-digital medium. Writerly forms of expression and representation, including scholarship, were as dependent on tools that scholars and writers did not create and did not control. There have always been “coders” in that sense: font designers, layout specialists, copy editors, printing-press designers, booksellers. The bizarre publishing regimes which still have immense power in academia exist in part because of an older political economy of printing: it was once too expensive and too technically difficult for scholarly authors to operate the physical plant of publication in collaboration with one another, so we gave our work away to companies who then sold it back to us at high price. Almost no humanistic scholars in 1960 knew much of anything about the technical constraints or economic structures that gave highly particular shape to their work (or forbade other kinds of work). There are some interesting exceptions in artistic practice: many visual artists (and scholars of visual art) were and are trained in the technical infrastructure of their expressive work rather than just letting someone else provide their paints and inks and canvases and quarried marble. And many humanists for a very long time have had at least a passing ability to describe the technical infrastructure governing their work, if not an ability to “get under the hood” and do it for themselves.

Whether or not I can code, I’m comfortable continuing to theorize about what we could do, what we should do, what the point of humanist knowledge is, digital and otherwise, and where possible, letting that become a instruction to coders, a complaint against coders, a refusal to deploy or accept technologies or a user-level hacking of their capabilities to some unforeseen end. But at the same time, both the scholarly humanities and expressive culture have always had some complicated dependencies upon technologies of representation that they do not master, control or own. That’s sort of what we study at many junctures: the emergence of culture and thought from technologies whose designers neither desired or anticipated what their technologies would produce. I’m no longer content to peg my dissatisfactions and worries on the uncomplete, partial sovereignty of myself and my peers over some domain that we imagine we are entitled to possess, as if the completion of sovereignty would open the doors of a better kingdom. Digital media are good at reminding us of how much of the cultural and intellectual future is an unpredictable eruption from material, social and imaginative starting places. Rather than try to smooth it out, I’d rather fasten my seatbelt and enjoy the bumpy ride.

Source URL: http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2011/11/18/catching-up-ii-letting-go-of-the-reins/

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It Starts on Day One

by Bethany Nowviskie

Here’s a modest proposal for reforming higher education in the humanities and creating a generation of knowledge workers prepared not only to teach, research, and communicate in 21st-century modes, but to govern 21st-century institutions.

First, kill all the grad-level methods courses.

Kill them, that is, to clear room for something more highly evolved — or simply more fruitful — to take their place. Think: asteroids clobbering dinosaurs. Choking weeds ripped from vegetable gardens. The fuzzy little nothings and spindly cultivars in this scenario, squinting cautious eyes or uncurling new leaves into the light, are:

- those research methodologies and corpora (often but not exclusively gathered under the banner of the “digital humanities”) that address hitherto unanswerable questions about history, the arts, and the human condition;

- and the new-model scholarly communications platforms we can already recognize as promising replacements to our slow and moribund systems for credentialing and publishing humanities scholarship and archiving the cultural record on which it is based.

What do these critters need to grow up? The same thing our colleges and universities so desperately need: a generation of faculty and alternative-academic scholar-practitioners who have been trained to work in interdisciplinary contexts and who can not only take advantage of computational approaches to their own research, but who have been instilled with enough of a can-do, maker’s ethos that they feel empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.

Although a small number of extra-curricular experiments (like the Praxis Program) and curricular interventions (like Michigan State’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool) offer new and concrete models for emulation, there’s little hope for wholesale, bottom-up, grass-roots reform of methodological training in the humanities. With vanishingly few exceptions, required first-year graduate methods courses are dinosaurs and weeds. Some are an abbreviated introduction to journals databases and the mysteries of inter-library loan. Others have little to do with research and production “methodologies” at all, and are instead a crash course in the jargon and en-vogue theories of a given discipline. The intra-institutional level of coordination in developing and teaching these courses, even among closely-allied humanities departments, hovers around zero. Within single departments, they are catch-as-catch-can, shaped almost wholly by the individual faculty who teach them (often as they themselves were taught a generation or two before) and sometimes vacillating wildly in content from year to year as instructors rotate to make more equitable the “burden” of a course generally construed as service. Is it any wonder they’re a mess?

And is it any wonder that we continue to produce graduate students unready to engage with new technologies and opportunities for interdisciplinary and computational work — baffled and frustrated at the conditions of the academic job market and its underpinnings in a dying scholarly publishing industry — and under-prepared for or uneducated about hybrid and non-traditional academic careers?

Here comes the asteroid we require. (And in offering a trajectory for it, I want to acknowledge my debt to conversations with participants in the Scholarly Communication Institutes held at UVa Library, with Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, and with our Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities and Praxis Program students.)

Funding agencies, both private and public — like Mellon, Sloan, and (in the US) the NEH and NSF — should be approached by a respected humanities organization that itself possesses a mandate for and a track record of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. I think here of groups like CHCI, the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes — especially in partnership with centerNet, its digital counterpart — or the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The organization should offer, with sufficient funding, to serve as a broker for a prestigious and competitive RFP (request for proposals). The RFP would be issued to universities with core strengths in the humanities, adequate support for digital scholarship, and a desire — able to be expressed at the institutional level — to create broad-scale curricular change in the way graduate students are inducted into and trained for 21st-century humanities. Probably no more than 3 or 4 schools would win funding, which would be contingent on this:

- the planned, top-down, apocalyptic wiping-out — one academic year from delivery of the award — of existing graduate methods courses in (say) four to six core humanities departments;

- the formation of a small but representative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary team charged with creating the year-long common methods course that will replace them;

- a commitment by participating academic departments, in the light of the new common course, to re-think the training that they consider to be absolutely unique to their disciplines and to offer an avenue (1-credit classes? discussion groups? new approaches to departmental teaching or to comps and orals requirements?) for students to acquire it;

- and a rigorous program proposed for assessing and publicizing the successes, failures, and overall impact of the experiment, so that lessons may be learned and new programs inspired.

The common methods course would be required of all incoming graduate students in participating departments. Grant funding could support staffing of curriculum design and assessment phases, offer incentives (including course release or professional development) for faculty participation, or pay for teaching assistants. The program would be designed and team-taught by its planning group, which should include faculty from relevant departments, representatives of the offices of deans and provosts, and — importantly — local #alt-ac professionals, trained in the humanities, but working as scholar-practitioners in R&D or academic support roles in libraries, labs, publishing units, and centers. It should also engage faculty from departments like CS and Architecture, whose students may not participate directly in the program, but who would have important lessons to share about research methods and collaborative practices.

As its primary focus, the course must cover current humanities research skills, corpora, and trends — both digital and archival or material. But it should also address issues like: intellectual property and open access; the intersection of scholarship with the public humanities; publishing, preservation, and scholarly communication; funding and material support for research and teaching; interdisciplinary collaboration; matters of credentialing and assessment (peer review, tenure and promotion), faculty self-governance; and the under-interrogated policies that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university.

This is a tall order — but we can no longer afford to produce humanities PhDs who have only a foggy notion of how universities work, and how they are impacted by external technological and social forces. The first time a humanities scholar encounters a budget spreadsheet or performs a calculation should not be when he or she becomes department chair. And no new member of the professoriate should feel utterly out of depth in decision-making processes that impact the teaching, research, and service mission of his or her institution. Likewise, the health of the humanities depends on our production of graduate students who do not simply replicate the faculty of yesteryear, but who are prepared to take uncharted paths in and around the academy, working together to ask new research questions and to fashion new systems or adapt the ones we treasure to altered conditions.

Graduate training in the humanities starts anew every year, on Day One. How, at a moment when we feel so much is at stake, can we allow it to remain so purposeless?

Source URL: http://nowviskie.org/2011/it-starts-on-day-one/

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What we think we will build and what we build in Digital Humanities

by William G. Thomas

Innovations in Digital Research: Challenges and Opportunities
University of Nebraska
Nebraska Digital Workshop
October 14, 2011

(The following talk was given for the 6th Annual Nebraska Digital Workshop. I’m grateful to Kay Walter and Ken Price for the invitation to serve as a presenter at the workshop and to Susan Brown for participating on the panel, and to Kirsten Uszkalo, Jentery Sayers, and Colin Wilder for their participation in the workshop.)

I’m going to talk this afternoon about a central paradox of doing digital humanities–what Jerome Mcgann, one of the leading scholars of electronic texts, calls the problem of imagining what you don’t know.

In Digital Humanities, what we think we will build and what we build are often quite different, and unexpectedly so. It’s this radical disjuncture that offers us both opportunities and challenges.

As you just heard, my book from Yale came out in September. From the start I thought of the book and the digital project on Railroads and the Making of Modern America as complementary and inter-dependent. The web site was a publicly available platform for assembling research, integrating data, collaborating with other scholars, and experimenting with forms of argument and interpretation.

And about a week before the book came out, I received a phone call from someone named Harvey Rochman. Mr. Rochman is a film producer, saw the book listed on Yale’s web site and saw the link to the digital project, and he said he wanted to make a film of . . . The Iron Way.

I assured him that such an enterprise could not be undertaken for business purposes. Perhaps, this was some sort of elaborate tax shelter, or a front for something awful, like the illegal trade in exotic species, or maybe it was part of a charity program to benefit poor historians. He was calling from Florida–Key West–which was meant to impress me I think.

He said that oh yes he was serious, I could find him in IMDB, he produced a studio film in 2008 [(Misconceptions--about a religiously conservative Southern woman who agrees to be a surrogate mother for two gay men in Boston, one is African American, much confusion and comedy ensue, apparently).] He was working with someone whose name I did not immediately recognize, that means he had not been on Dancing with the Stars recently, no one famous like the guys from Duran Duran, Ally Sheedy, or Kirsty Alley, or someone like that. Anyway, he said in total seriousness that all I needed was 3 acts, 1 to set up the conflict, one to have the conflict, and last a resolution. Three acts. Simple. Let’s see. The Civil War, there’s conflict, but there’s that resolution part. Humm. Railroads, there conflict, conflict, conflict.

In any case, what I needed was a “treatment.” In this encounter with the producer, it was clear that everything could be reduced to “a treatment”. It was also clear as I stumbled to explain the digital project and the book–that we were worlds apart. I’d been to Key West but not his Key West. I could not translate the way the book and digital project worked together, the role the digital project played in shaping my argument.

More seriously, this interest, however unexpected, does indicate something we also often forget–we work on subjects of great appeal and audiences are enthusiastic and compelled by the stories we tell in history, art, literature, poetry.

It turns out that the digital project was my sub sub-library to borrow a phrase from Herman Melville and Moby-Dick. And the work of the sub sub-librarian was one of classification and interconnection–it required getting out in the world too, talking with other collectors and librarians. In a way it is a different scholarly identity.

This is a role that in the digital humanities we embrace as public not private–and reverses what had been the practice for generations of guarding your sources and research plans. Here’s a test: who checks that box at the Special Collections sign-in “Yes, I am willing to be contacted about my work”? This public role of collecting, sharing, and opening the sub sub library is one that I have found I cherished.

Even so, as Melville warned, the archive “however authentic” offers only “a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.”

There was a further problem with the idea of a film script. Much of what I was doing–spatial approaches to history and, even, network approaches to history–was about understanding process rather than explaining causation, it was about exploring the making of modern America. I wanted in the book to hold up a correlation I saw in the archive: between what had been separately told stories–the Civil War and the expansion of railroads. The goal in the book was to explore this correlation and to tell the story of these processes unfolding simultaneously.

In this view history is interactive not static, the digital project offers an immersive experience rather than a linear one, a way for readers to participate in the reading of history, in exploring the correlation I was seeing.

When we produce a work of scholarship in whatever form, Jerome Mcgann reminds us that “to make anything is also to make a speculative foray into a concealed but wished for unknown.” I assure you that what I wished for in setting out on my digital project was not to produce a movie with Mr. Rochman or any other equally famous director, though I have not ruled out such a venture. This is a guiding principle of DH: keep your options open for as long as possible.

So, the digital work that we create, Mcgann tells us, “is not the achievement of one’s desire: it is the shadow of that desire. . .”

I am particularly aware of Mcgann’s disjunction right now, (and of Melville’s caution), I suppose, because my project on Railroads and the Making of Modern America is at the end of 5 years. With the Center here, we have created a large digital archive, databases, experimented with visualization models, and produced some scholarly research publications. We have a cohort of graduate students in digital history trained and experienced and new students interested and involved. We have an audience of readers, students, and citizens, the public, general interest reader.

But Mcgann’s comment keeps raising its head. What we think we will build and what we build are not the same thing in digital humanities. Our archive might be only a “glancing bird’s eye view.”

This is as true of a book or a film as it is of a digital work. But right now, at this moment in the development of the digital medium, I think we can see how far we are from understanding the genre–of how far we are from being able to say send me “a treatment”. The distance between our wish and our object is often so great because the forms and practices and procedures of creation in the digital medium remain profoundly unstable and speculative.

Mcgann’s premise might be restated (he might not agree with this, I don’t know): if you have produced what you thought you would, perhaps you’ve not created anything really; if a digital project becomes what was specified it might not be a digital humanities work.

We have been asked to speak about challenges and opportunities today. I’ll suggest a few examples from our experience in the last few years with the Railroads project. What we really are asking today is how does scholarly practice change with digital humanities? Or how do we do humanities in the digital age?

This is very new. Everything is changing — our audiences, our procedures, our institutions.

So, one question we face is in Digital Humanities is:

1. IS AN ARCHIVE AN ARGUMENT? and a related question WHERE IS OUR SCHOLARSHIP?

Most projects in digital humanities begin as a digital archive, creating a collection of documents that are digitized. I want to encourage this–in the disciplines we need more attention to this work as scholarship. But digital scholars also seek to both assemble and analyze, both examine and interpret.

Five million books might be digitized, but the millions and millions of cubic feet of archival railroad records, well that was something else. What is a representative sample of railroad records?

We built a digital archive topically arranged for easy access and usability by the widest audience possible. Railroad texts were structurally so dissimilar that we confronted a major classification problem, one that we could not effectively address.

The point is that the architecture and encoding of a digital archive–what Johanna Drucker calls “creating the intellectual model”–must be undertaken speculatively. It must be adjusted, changed, explored. Interpretive archives cannot be built to spec.

At least in digital history, on one level, it is the diversity of document types that has yet to be fully confronted. We can build models from long runs of legal case files or printed texts or runaway slave newspaper advertisements, but when we turn to a domain such as railroads, or slavery, or genocide, or the family, the intellectual model behind an archive, so often expressed in encoded texts, becomes unwieldy.

This challenge is our opportunity–to reconsider the “digital archive” as intentional and interpretive–in our case to offer a new way to encounter the railroad–rather than focus attention on the board room, or the directors, the archive would open up a diverse array of railroad users and interfaces. Its argument would be to expose the ways railroads were used and thought of. We want to create a new history of the railroad.

But as we create interpretive archives we need to be able to answer the question: where is our scholarship. This is where we need allies–libraries in particular–as partners in modelling, preserving, and making available this scholarship.

The second question we face in digital humanities right now is how do we work differently.

2. TEAMS OF SCHOLARS IN THE HUMANITIES:

Digital humanities projects are often characterized as collaborative. In many respects this is the most obvious change in scholarly practice–we work with librarians, programmers, and colleagues in other disciplines.

The opportunity here seems self-evident. But the model of historical and humanities scholarship has been sole-author, sole-researcher for a long time, and for most universities the evaluation for hiring, promotion, and tenure proceeds to assess candidates on this basis.

In the Railroads project I wanted a team of graduate students to have the opportunity to gain experience in digital work, to advance their own scholarship, and where possible to participate in research publications. The challenge for digital humanities now is to make this work count where appropriate. We have begun keeping track of all research publications associated with the project–and we will be co-authoring new articles for the project with teams of researchers. In the early phase of digital humanities we built teams, and teams built projects. But now we are seeing teams contributing to publication streams.

The social structures for these contributions are not as yet settled. At the beginning of the project, I had only a vague idea how student colleagues would participate beyond building the digital project. Now, we are beginning to see projects build in publication objectives and contributions at the start.

A third question we face in digital humanities right now is:

3. WHAT DOES SCHOLARLY ARGUMENT LOOK LIKE IN DIGITAL FORM?

My colleagues at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and my graduate students in the Department of History patiently bore with me on this one. From the first I hoped to experiment with a new form for our historical interpretative work, and this is what we began to call an “assemblage” or a “view.” The view is a framed set of materials on a given subject that integrates sets of evidence and data around a specific historiographical problem or question, without directly narrating the subject. We wanted the views to inspire investigation and focus attention, to serve as interrelated starting points. We could have hundreds of views that build out of the collection.

The tools to assemble a view proved challenging to create–we were after all asking for an authoring tool for the digital medium. The rise of the blog in this same period reduced the incentive for experimentation with scholarly argument and hypertext.

The humble footnote is still the mark of scholarship and now we need to consider how we will migrate footnotes–the links and scholarly apparatus of a work–to digital form. This challenge and opportunity is surprising because the web is so good at linking. But we’ve not experimented as much as we could with discursive notes, linking, and narrative argument in digital form.

The changes in publication models should be an opportunity. We are on the cusp of a new genre of hybrid digital and print publishing. Books are and will be supported with digital sources and verifiable links to the elements that went into the study. Journals will move into the publication of born-digital work also, integrating print and digital formats.

In the humanities scholarly practice might shift toward a more fluid and open exchange of ideas and arguments characterized by a different sequence of activities:

- from openly available original research

- to pre-print presentation

- to peer review publication

- to a period of open verification

- to a period of adjustment and re-examination.

We know that opportunities and challenges here remain. We are in the early stages of this medium. We should look for ways to enchant readers, to hold attention, and to create long-form argument. Here we might be working against the medium (jumping through links) but the iPad and tablets appear to be opening up new opportunities for our scholarship.

Finally, we are in a transition phase. We call what we are doing “digital humanities” or “digital history” but really we are doing humanities in the digital age, we are doing history in the digital age. This work might be characterized increasingly by three qualities:

1. increasing the scale of research and data involved: 5 million books, 100,000 newspaper articles–this is the least important characteristic actually because it is limited to scholars, but the challenge will be not only to support this research with infrastructure but to come up with intellectual models for such large scale interpretation. Imagine how these “distant readings” fit in a U.S. history or literature survey.

2. addressing the global distribution of discourse and materials: sources all over the world need to be brought together and the challenge will be to create new linkages in the cultural records of the world, from Cairo to Seville to London to Chicago. Language differences, copyright, and sheer distance will need to be overcome.

3. using new models of production: we have students as colleagues and citizens as colleagues, and the challenge here will be to validate and credit their contributions, integrate their work, and do so in a way that enables further scholarship.

We are doing nothing less than redefining our practices and at the same time the relationship of our society to the past, our literature, history, and culture.

Our digital age presents a different medium in which to convey multiple sources of information and to render interpretive arguments. It is instantiating different ways of knowing, different ways of seeing, reading, and learning. What we think we will build and what we build are not the same but we can and should celebrate and inquire into the difference. And one day, when the call comes, you might be able to say, “Sure, I’ll send you my treatment.”

Much has been made in our circles about Charles Joseph Minard’s map of the Napoleonic March, but Minard drew his first such graphs for railroads in France and developed his technique in works combining traffic and distances. In 1845 he published what he called his first “figurative map”

Minard’s work, however, took more than 15 years to reach the sophistication we so admire. These 15 years years witnessed the vast expansion of railroad culture in Europe and the U.S. Minard experimented with the forms for conveying multiple sources of information, but the disjunction between what he wished to build and what he built took time to resolve.

We are, Robert Darton argues, perhaps in a similar position–15 years into what he calls the 4th great Information Age in human history. We are learning how right now how to adjust!

An Addendum:

In the area of opportunities, I’ve lay out these, rather quickly and without any checking–areas of engagement in Digital Humanities research that are either being funded, or conducted, or appear to take the field in important new directions (these are not in order of any rank–the titles are mine and made up)–and as a word of caution I know little about many of these areas.

A.) Big Data and Cyberinfrastructure: of the sort being done in NEH Digging into Data and various Mellon projects. These projects are following the directions largely pointed to in the 2005 ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report (Unsworth et al.). It seems unlikely that this trend will slow down and indeed all signs (n-grams) point to quite the reverse. The project most in the public is “culturomics”– Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel on “What we learned from 5 million books.” Although their example of “slavery” and its spike in the 1860s and 1960s seems strikingly obvious, the n-gram and big data approach potentially challenge what has been a defining DH practice: building an intellectual model around interpretive digital archives.

B.) Brain Science and Humanities: This research would be an area of work suggested by Cathy Davidson’s new book, Now You See It, and the PBS digital nation special last year. Other recent research in this area includes for example the Center for Applied Linguistics’ Brain Research: Implications for Second Language Learning.

C.) Performance/Materiality of Scholarship in DH/”Embodied” Research: the latest issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, we see a piece directly on this subject from Helen J. Burgess and Jeanne Hamming and we have already seen some clear indications of this work in the Nebraska Digital Workshop, its range, significance, and theoretical and methodological tendencies. In fact, across the field of History, we are seeing more research focused on “sensory” history. Margaret Jacobs Bancroft Prize-winning work here at Nebraska on the removal of indigenous children and boarding schools adopts this analytical method. DHers are beginning to push toward broader “embodied” scholarship and explore how the multimedia technology would represent or immerse this scholarship.

–Virtual Realities: This could be its own grouping probably but it seems to me to have shifted somewhat as a major area of research and could be subsumed under the above heading. Harvard’s “Mixed Reality City” and UCLA’s Hypercities are next generation virtual reality environments, as are dozens of other GPS enabled encoding projects (Philadelphia, Richmond, Chicago, . . .). These projects have a different set of research objectives from their virtual reality predecessors.

D.) Beyond Markup–Hermeneutics and Encoding Theory and Practice: Here I’m way out of my area, but the questions are big and important, and a great deal of Digital Humanities work remains to be done in this area. The problems surround XML encoding, TEI, and the questions of linearity, multidimensionality, fluidity, subjectivity, and multiple perspectives. A good example of this work is presented in Digital Humanities Quarterly by Fiormonte, Martiradonna, and Schmidt “Digital Encoding as a Hermeneutic and Semiotic Act” but Johanna Drucker has been writing about this and so has Jerome McGann, Stephen Ramsay, and Espen Aarseth. The point here is that the structures of XML encoding were designed for information storage and retrieval but we find ourselves in Digital Humanities perhaps as McLuhan stated in 1967 “in the name of progress our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.”

E.) New Scholarly Formats:here I would refer not to the technologies or social practices to enable open “digital commons” or to defenses of open access, but to the cluster of research agendas around discovering new forms of scholarly communication through multi-use, mixed new media, copyright clearance, mash ups, e books, and experimentation of any kind with the delivery, dissemination, or arrangement of scholarly work. The focus here is on authorship, creativity, design, “new model scholarship”, born digital work, and readership. Some of these efforts have taken place in History–the original AHR articles (mine included), and more recently the Writing History in the Digital Age (underway), and the Hacking the Academy digital cultures project (just released). Stephen Ramsay here has pioneered some of this with the blog to book project. And Douglas Seefeldt has with the Sustaining Digital History project and thinking about short-form digital history scholarship. We are, however, a long way from knowing how this will turn out.

F: Interfaces for Humanities: Johanna Drucker has written about this in SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, and Stan Ruecker has written about this widely.

Source URL: http://railroads.unl.edu/blog/?p=616

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