DHNow will return on May 22

May 11, 2012

Digital Humanities Now will be offline next week, May 14-18, to close out the semester. Look for our return on May 22 with a new twice-weekly publication schedule for the summer.

Editors’ Choice: Alexandria is a Port: The Digital Library in Physical Space

May 11, 2012

By Amanda French

There is no Frigate like a book
To take us lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of Prancing Poetry
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a human Soul.

–Emily Dickinson, www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19730

Alexandria is a port, the busiest seaport in Egypt. Of course it is: where else could the most famous library of antiquity have been built but in a city with a busy port? That’s almost a contradiction in terms, that phrase “busy port” — the safest, most sheltered waters are those that must inevitably be roiled by everyone’s embarkings and disembarkings. Such places earn the hubbub of a hub precisely through their initial state of calm repose.

And if books and pages are ships and horses in Emily Dickinson’s formulation, then libraries too are busy seaports and coaching inns and highways “without oppress of toll.” Libraries and archives and museums, like ports, including airports, are still and primarily places we come to to get somewhere else, to be transported. And this is as true or even more true of digital libraries as it is of physical libraries: on the web, many sites are only as powerful as their ability to get you somewhere else as quickly as possible. Google, notably, does its utmost to get you off Google.com as fas as it can: Google accrues power by giving it away.

I have argued elsewhere — or, rather, elsewhere I have released a small balloon of an idea into the atmosphere — that the DPLA should or at least could be rooted in a physical space, a building. The genesis of that idea did not, in fact, come from my deep love of libraries as places, although that is a love that goes back to my childhood. Standing in a library, for me, is as heady as standing by the ocean, and in both places I always have similar vague impulses to escape to barely imagined islands just across the horizon. But no: the first notion I ever had that a digital library could be a physical library was sparked by nothing less than learning that one exists.

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Editors’ Choice: Podcast, Johanna Drucker: “Designing Digital Humanities”

May 11, 2012

By Johanna Drucker and text by Andrew Whitacre

What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide the platform for research, pedagogy, access, and use. The current challenge is to take advantage of the rich repositories and well-developed online resources and create innovative approaches to argument, curation, display, editing, and understanding that embody humanistic methods as well as humanities content. Designers have a major role to play in the collaborative envisioning of new formats and processes. Using some vivid examples and case studies, this talk outlines some of the opportunities for exciting work ahead.

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.

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Editors’ Choice: The digital humanities postdoc

May 10, 2012

By Miriam Posner

In the last few years, I’ve noticed a certain kind of job ad appearing with more and more frequency. I think of it as the “make digital humanities happen” postdoctoral fellowship. Often based in a library, these positions’ descriptions include some combination of “liaison,” “catalyst,” and “hub,” with a heavy dose of coordinator syndrome thrown in. The person is meant to generate enthusiasm for DH among faculty, perhaps serve as a consultant, and head up a new DH initiative. I do understand why a postdoc is attractive to institutions.

1. They know that faculty like talking to people with Ph.D.s.
2. They’re not sure they want to go all-in on DH, and thus the built-in term limits of the postdoc make sense.
3. They want someone young and hungry, willing to take direction, with a lot of ideas and energy.
4. Often, the source of funding for this position is insecure; perhaps it’s provided by a grant.

I’d like to suggest that this particular kind of postdoc, except under very special circumstances, is not, in fact, a postdoc, but a temporary staff position. A postdoc, I maintain, should be characterized by some combination of generous mentorship and/or the freedom to do one’s own research. Many of these postdocs provide neither; indeed, in some cases, the hiring institution has not even worked out who this person will report to.

…

There are good DH postdocs out there, definitely, but they do not involve being dropped, resource-less, to serve as a “catalyst” in an institution with no DH activity.

Institutions considering hiring a “make DH happen” postdoc, should I think, reconsider. Not because it ain’t right, which it ain’t, but because it won’t work. A postdoc, no matter how committed, ingenious, and entrepreneurial, cannot just make digital humanities happen at any institution…

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Editors’ Choice: MLA 2012 Electronic Literature Exhibit: Impact Report

May 9, 2012

By Dene Grigar, Kathi Inman Berens, and Lori Emerson

Introduction

by Dene Grigar

Associate Professor and Director, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program, Washington State University Vancouver.

The Electronic Literature Exhibit at the 2012 Modern Language Association Convention was a watershed moment for both the MLA and for e-literature. Never before in its 129 year history had the organization held an exhibit in conjunction with its annual convention; never before had born digital works reached so many literature and humanities scholars.

My curators, Kathi Inman Berens and Lori Emerson, and I, knew going into the project that the exhibit would be impactful and, so, were not necessarily surprised by the positive outcome later reflected in our Impact Report. The story that I find more interesting about curating the exhibit is the preparation we undertook in order to make the right kind of impact. My comments in this introduction to the report, therefore, focus on the research methodology upon which we built the exhibit, the multisensory appeal we tried to design into it, and the ethical choices we felt we had to make in order to lay the groundwork for other electronic literature exhibits we hope will come in the future at other conferences specializing in literature, humanities, and writing.

Research Methodology

Curating works of multimedia, such as electronic literature, is a form of scholarship whose methodology lies in action research. It is research through practice and involves an understanding of the creative process. The work we curators did to create the exhibit was “systematic”, “inquiry-based”, “knowledge-directed”, and “communicable”. (Vannotti 1) Evidence of this approach can be seen on the project’s archival website. One can find, for example, on the “Resources” page, a thorough literature review of the major books published on the topic of electronic literature. Links to major databases of literary works are also available to scholars interested in learning more about the topic. On the “Scholarship” page we offer information about the beginning of the field, particularly in the U.S., and suggest ways to begin a study of electronic literature. Each “Curatorial Statement” is intended to convey our vision of the exhibit, explain our methodology for selecting work, and provide a context for the exhibit.

As scholars we felt it important to show others our own exploration into electronic literature, so on the “Scholarship” page we offer evidence of our own involvement in research into and creative practice of electronic literature. This archive was made available before, during, and now after the exhibit and is itself archived in several databases associated with electronic literature. We purposefully created it so that it would show the scholarship we all undertook in order to develop an effective exhibit and, at the same time, serve as a scholarly record itself.

Multisensory Appeal

Curating is a form of stewardship in the sense that artists who place so much creative energy into the production of a work rely on curators to show the work at its best and to help interpret it so that others can engage with it meaningfully. For Kathi, Lori, and I this responsibility implied that we had to take great care in the design of the exhibit. Visitors to the exhibit, for example, would have entered a large space with 10 black matching computer monitors sitting atop black gallery pedestals. They would have noticed that the gray color of the walls provided a neutral backdrop that made it possible for the works of electronic literature to “pop” from computer screen. On the wall above the tops of the computer screens hung large posters. These posters followed the color and design scheme of the website and each listed the artists and works found on a particular station. Visitors could see the poster for Computer Station #1 located near the station and know what to expect on the computer of that station.

The stations were laid out in pairs of two so that all them, together, were in the shape of an X. This design gave us five main areas (one pair at each of four ends and one pair in the center) and allowed us to spread out the stations and provide ample room in which visitors could move around the space. The pedestals themselves were high enough so that one could comfortably stand and engage with the work without leaning over and becoming fatigued. Pedestals also meant that people could perambulate about the space, stand and talk among the stations, to duck in and out of the exhibit space easily and quickly between conference sessions. Headphones were available at each station so that the sound contained in some of the works that offered it remained in the visitor’s ears and did not disrupt other visitors in the space.

Approaching the various computer stations, visitors would have noticed that the screens were imaged with the same design, and that the layout of the works available for viewing was all the same. Visiting one computer station and engaging with the works meant that one could visit all of the rest of the stations and comfortably understand quickly how to navigate the interface and access works.

Five undergraduate docents were on hand to reset stations and keep the computer screens cleaned up so that all computers were always ready for use. The docents also greeted visitors as they walked into the space and assisted them with the technology and the works when needed. Many times the docents would ask visitors about the kind of literature they liked to read and then would lead visitors to the station that most likely fit the visitors’ interests.

The works on the stations themselves were organized so that they would make sense to a new audience of viewers. In this regard, we avoided categorizing works by genre. A flash narrative could have been confused with short fiction rather than understood as a story created with Flash software. We also felt that structuring and, then, naming the 10 categories to fit terminology that our audience may have already understood would help to make the experience with interacting works more familiar. Thus, we opted to organize electronic literature with a gameful approach under the rubric of Literary Games, for instance, and called those that were narrative in nature Multimodal Narrative.

Our user-friendly design encouraged visitors to return often and to linger long. It also fostered conversation, first, among visitors as they viewed the works nearby on the pairs of computers and, second, with the docents as the docents walked around the stations and checked on the visitors.

Ethical Choices

Finally, curating is a form of judgment that requires a clear sense of ethics so that the choices made are respected and taken seriously. Invited shows, as the Electronic Literature exhibit was, can be very tricky. As Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization, I knew very well as friends and close colleagues, for example, many of the artists that Kathi, Lori, and I would be inviting to our exhibit. And so it was important to develop criteria for selection and communicate those criteria so that others would understand our choices.

Looking at the archival site at the list of works in the exhibit and the information we relayed about them, one can see that we picked a wide variety of work, both national and international, to reflect the broad interests of humanities scholars. Second, we contextualized the exhibit historically and, so, showed works dating back to the origins of electronic literature in the U.S. Third, we exhibited works that had already been published in online journals, been written about by scholars, showed in exhibits previously, or won awards. Put briefly, the works invited to show in the exhibit had already been evaluated for their excellence and importance.

One other critical choice we made was not to show our own creative work. Speaking frankly, curating one’s own work is not a common practice in the art world; speaking logically, it is not a common practice because it is difficult to think about other work in an exhibit if one’s own work needs attention.

As suggested by the data found in the Impact Report, the exhibit did much to forward electronic literature in the minds of scholars, especially those who had never experienced it or knew of its existence and to promote digital born literature to the digital humanities. But also important, no one visiting the exhibit could have walked away unaware of that there was a strong sense of scholarship underpinning our show, that attention had been paid to the tiniest detail, and that much care and contemplation went into the choices of the works shown. We were delighted that the MLA invited us back to curate an exhibit for the 2013 convention to be held in Boston and that the Library of Congress, having learned about the MLA 2012 exhibit, invited us to host a showcase featuring an exhibit, a keynote, panel discussion, and literary readings.

There was, indeed, a method to our madness, and the Impact Report reflects how, sometimes, madness matters…

1. Stefano Vannotti, “Let Us Do What We Do Best: But How Can We Produce Knowledge by Designing Interfaces?”, in Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, and Dorothée King, eds., Interface Cultures: Artistic Aspects of Interaction, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008. pp. 51-60.

Read the Full Impact Report Here

PDF of Report Available Here

Editors’ Choice: Women in the libraries

May 9, 2012

By Ben Schmidt

It’s pretty obvious that one of the many problems in studying history by relying on the print record is that writers of books are disproportionately male.

Data can give some structure to this view. Not in the complicated, archival-silences filling way–that’s important, but hard–but just in the most basic sense. How many women were writing books? Do projects on big digital archives only answer, as Katherine Harris asks, “how do men write?” Where were gender barriers strongest, and where weakest? Once we know these sorts of things, it’s easy to do what historians do: read against the grain of archives. It doesn’t matter if they’re digital or not.

One of the nice things about having author gender in Bookworm is that it opens a new way to give rough answers to these questions. Gendered patterns of authorship vary according to social spaces, according to time, according to geography: a lot of the time, the most interesting distinctions are comparative, not absolute. Anecdotal data is a terrible way to understand comparative levels of exclusion; being able to see rates across different types of books adds a lot to the picture.

In this post, I’m going to run through a lot of basic metadata about the gender composition of libraries very quickly, because I need to know it to work with this data. Although this is the bookworm database, the rules for inclusion in Bookworm are so simple (Open Library page, Internet Archive downloadable file) that at least up to 1922, the results here should be broadly similar to any large selection of texts that draws heavily from the Google library-scanning project. (Most notably: HathiTrust and Google Books). And those are so similar to the composition of the university libraries that humanists have been using for decades, that even non-digital researchers should have some use for similar statistics.

…

If I were to draw a preliminary conclusion, it might be: established institutions–the state, the universities–seem to most strongly suppress women, presumably because there are more hurdles to jump. In certain areas, things have changed. In others, they haven’t–I ran some of this on the ArXiv author lists, and the 10-15% figures hold in the sciences. There’s no reason to think that the same massively distortionary effects aren’t still going on in academia, particularly on behalf or against social structures in addition to gender.

Keep in mind: women are the only discriminated-against group that we can pull out of library catalogs, but hardly the only ones in the 19th century. Surnames might get ethnicities–I haven’t had much luck with that–but race and class are virtually impenetrable. I suspect that access to print is at least as strongly skewed by income and race as it is by gender. I don’t think–I have to write this up at greater length–it makes any sense to not use libraries as they are not “representative.” They are what they are–libraries are interesting. Everything that anyone ever said would be interesting, too. We have one of these: we’ll never have the other.

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Editors’ Choice: Exercises in democracy: building a digital public library

May 8, 2012

By Megan Geuss

Most neighborhoods in America have a public library. Now the biggest neighborhood in America, the Internet, wants a library of its own. Last week, Ars attended a conference held by the Digital Public Library of America, a nascent group of intellectuals hoping to put all of America’s library holdings online. The DPLA is still in its infancy—there’s no official staff, nor is there a finished website where you can access all the books they imagine will be accessible. But if the small handful of volunteers and directors have their way, you’ll see all that by April 2013 at the latest.

Last week’s conference set out to answer a lot of questions. How much content should be centralized, and how much should come from local libraries? How will the Digital Public Library be run? Can an endowment-funded public institution succeed where Google Books has largely failed (a 4,000-word meditation on this topic is offered by Nicholas Carr in MIT’s April Technology Review)?

Enthusiasm for the project permeated the former Christian Science church where the meeting was held (now the church is the headquarters of Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive). But despite the audience’s applause and wide-eyed wonder, there’s still a long way to go.

As it stands, the DPLA has a couple million dollars in funding from charitable trusts like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund. The organization is applying for 501(c)3 status this year, and its not hard to imagine it running as an NPR-like entity, with some government funding, some private giving, and a lot of fundraisers. But outside of those details, very little about the Digital Public Library has been decided. “We’re still grappling with the fundamental question of what exactly is the DPLA,” John Palfrey, chair of the organization’s steering committee, admitted. The organization must be a bank of documents, and a vast sea of metadata; an advocate for the people, and a partner with publishing houses; a way to make location irrelevant to library access without giving neighborhoods a reason to cut local library funding. And that will be hard to do.

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Editors’ Choice: Hacking Our Cultural Heritage Datasets

May 7, 2012

April 28 and 29 was Transparency Camp 12 (TCamp), an unconference to gather journalists, technologists, activists, and others to work on ways to promote and work with openness in government. The 30th was a special hack day on the Voter Information Project. Turns out, I was over my head in that context and couldn’t really contribute. So instead I ditched and built an Omeka site to display the data in the catalog of government agency datasets CSV file from Data.gov (full disclosure for those who don’t know me–I work on Omeka for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media)

Here it is

Here’s why.

Data Sets Are Cultural Heritage Artifacts

If we live in the “information age”, or better yet the “data age”, then the sets of data that we, as a society, collect and use reflect that fact. They are cultural products of the time. What data was collected (and how, and in what formats), say something about this cultural moment. As such, they deserve to be treated as part of our cultural heritage just as much as artifacts from, say, the “space age”. So, using Omeka to republish a dataset makes sense.

“Hacking” Need Not Be Reserved For Techies

I have to say I was a little surprised that I didn’t see more of the DIY spirit at TCamp. Maybe that’s because of my expectations from THATCamps. Either way, during one of the sessions the state of Data.gov was discussed. There was much dissatisfaction with the site, in terms of UI and UX, updating, and more. But I still think it is remarkable that there is so much data there to grab and play with. That situation reminded me of the sagacity of Butthead when he said, “This sucks! Change it!” Putting aside for the moment the issue of data not being updated, if some useful and interesting data is there for the download but packaged in a bad site, I want to do something about it.

I’ll call that hacking, even if it doesn’t involve touching any code at all. It’s taking data, manipulating it, and repurposing it. That’s what coders do. But, with the data available, noncoders can also engage in that activity of hacking. I want to send that message to the TCamp crowd to encourage more people to engage in low-tech-level hacking on the data that’s there.

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Editors’ Choice: ORBIS: The next step in Digital Humanities

May 4, 2012

By Scott Weingart

Every once in a while, a new project comes around bearing a message loud and clear: this is a sign of things to come. ORBIS, the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, is one such project.

ORBIS was created by Walter Scheidel, Elijah Meeks, and a host of others. At the very beginning, I should point out I am not a classicist. The below review is of the nature rather than the content of ORBIS as a scholarly product.

ORBIS is many things but, most simply, it is an interface allowing researchers to experience the geography of the Roman world from an ancient perspective. The executive summary: given any two cities in the ancient world, it returns the fastest, cheapest, or shortest route between them, given the month, the mode of transportation, and various other options. It’s Google Maps for the ancient world, complete with the “Avoid Highways” feature.

I was among the lucky few to see an early version of the tool, and after sending back an informal review, Elijah Meeks invited me to review the site publicly via my blog. The first section explains what I feel is the most important contribution of ORBIS to the Digital Humanities; it is a reflexive tool that allows the humanist to engage with the process as well as the product. I then highlight some of the cool features, and finally list some rough edges and desiderata for future iterations or similar projects.

…  The tool itself is profoundly impressive and will prove useful for a variety of research, but what stands out from the humanities standpoint is the explicit nature of the the ORBIS underbelly. It blurs the line between tool and argument. There are other profoundly impressive and useful tools out there (topic modeling comes to mind). However, with topic modeling, the assumptions are still obscure to the unfamiliar, despite my own best efforts and the even better efforts of others. This is because the software topic modeling is packaged with, the software we use to run the analyses, does not simultaneously engage in the process of its own creation in the way that ORBIS does. Going forward, I predict the most used (or at least the most useful) digital tools for humanists will include that engagement, rather than existing as black boxes out of which results spring forth, fully armed and ready to battle as Athena from Zeus’s forehead. ORBIS is by no means the first to attempt such a feat but, I think, it is as-yet the most successful.

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Editors’ Choice: Notes towards a Deformed Humanities

May 3, 2012

By Mark Sample

I’ve gone on record as saying that the digital humanities is not about building. It’s about sharing. I stand by that declaration. But I’ve also been thinking about a complementary mode of learning and research that is precisely the opposite of building things. It is destroying things.

I want to propose a theory and practice of a Deformed Humanities. A humanities born of broken, twisted things. And what is broken and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer of knowledge. The Deformed Humanities is an origami crane—a piece of paper contorted into an object of startling insight and beauty.

I come to the Deformed Humanities (DH) by way of a most traditional route—textual scholarship. In 1999 Lisa Samuels and Jerry McGann published an essay about the power of what they call “deformance.” This is a portmanteau that combines the words performance and deform into an interpretative concept premised upon deliberately misreading a text, for example, reading a poem backwards line-by-line.

As Samuels and McGann put it, reading backwards “short circuits” our usual way of reading a text and “reinstalls the text—any text, prose or verse—as a performative event, a made thing” (Samuels & McGann 30). Reading backwards revitalizes a text, revealing its constructedness, its seams, edges, and working parts.

… However much deformance sounds like a progressive interpretative strategy, it actually reinscribes more conventional acts of interpretation. Samuels and McGann suggest—and many digital humanists would agree—that “we are brought to a critical position in which we can imagine things about the text that we did not and perhaps could not otherwise know” (36). And this is precisely what is wrong with the idea of deformance: it always circles back to the text.

Even the word itself—deformance—seems to be a hedge. The word is much more indebted to the socially acceptable activity of performance than the stigmatized word deformity. It reminds me of a scene in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, where the adult narrator Alison comments upon her teenage self’s use of the word “horrid” in her diary. “How,” Bechdel muses, “horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror…then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it” (Bechdel 174). In a similar fashion, deformance appears to embrace the actual deformity of a text and then at the last possible moment sidesteps it. The end result of deformance as most critics would have it is a sense of renewal, a sense of de-forming only to re-form.

To evoke a key figure motivating the playfulness Samuels and McGann want to bring to language, deformance takes Humpty Dumpty apart only to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

And this is where I differ.

I don’t want to put Humpy Dumpty back together.

Let him lie there, a cracked shell oozing yolk. He is broken. And he is beautiful. The smell, the colors, the flow, the texture, the mess. All of it, it is unavailable until we break things. And let’s not soften our critical blow by calling it deformance. Name it what it is, a deformation.

In my vision of the Deformed Humanities, there is little need to go back to the original. We work—in the Stallybrass sense of the word—not to go back to the original text with a revitalized perspective, but to make an entirely new text or artifact.

…The Deformed Humanities—though most may not call it that—will prove to be the most vibrant and generative of all the many strands of the humanities. It is a legitimate mode of scholarship, a legitimate mode of doing and knowing. Precisely because it relies on undoing and unknowing.

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