Words’ End

Here’s one for history buffs. If you know anyone interested in this sort of thing, please pass it on: I’d love to know more about The League of Roland.

In 2002 I had the opportunity to visit the Oxford libraries repeatedly, and to dig out Really Obscure Stuff relating to Roland. Right now I’m looking at [part of] Roland: Country First, “published privately by The League of Roland, 45a, High Street, Market Harborough, Leicestershire.” They seem to have been a group of folks dissatisfied with the state of England, and proposing some crackpot ideas as to how to restore the Empire’s former glory.

It couldn’t be more stereotypically British, really. Check out the first paragraph:

This league is founded in loyalty to all existing institutions, by men confident in the health of the British people and their government, to help to fulfil the destiny of the British Empire and all Britons overseas. Its first aim is to support the government in winning the war.

The dedication reads: “To three trusted men – Mr. Winston Churchill – Lord Beaverbrook – Mr. Ernst Bevin – they are excellent.” So that helps date the piece: “the war,” one presumes, is WWII.

My question to you: who are/were these people? Google, Britannica and Wikipedia know nothing about them. Any information at all, including pointers as to where else I might look, would be appreciated. Please don’t suggest I go back to the UK, though: my resources are so scarce and the desire to see those hallowed shores so vast, that a suggestion of this sort would break my heart.

Great, now I’m starting to sound like them. Anyone? Bueller?

[Edit: what I'm looking for is information on The League of Roland, not the Churchill & co.]

Behold what I found googling around tonight: the Digby 23 project at Baylor University. From their home and “About” pages:

The Digby 23 Project is an electronic archive devoted to the study of Oxford Bodleian MS Digby 23. This codex contains two works, copied during the twelfth century and assembled at a later date: Plato’s Timaeus in the Latin translation by Calcidius, and the Old French Chanson de Roland.

[...]

Upon completion, the Digby 23 Project will include:

(1) Detailed XML transcriptions of the Latin and Old French texts (including all marginalia and scribal notes)

[...]

(4) A database for the study of the language, themes, and poetics of the Old French Roland: by adopting a compatible format with the Charrette Project, scholars will be able to explore the similarities and differences between eleventh-century epic and twelfth-century romance;

(5) A detailed critical apparatus for the study of the manuscript.

Please, just try to imagine my glee right now. I just sent an email to the project’s general editor, with a Roland-related question and introduction. We’ll see if she responds; but man, the project is just starting out, and they’re doing (semantically encoded, I’m assuming) themes! I’d love to talk to these folks about Roland, and what themes they see fit to encode.

Ohboyohboyohboy. I feel about ten years old now.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, which hosts a series of informal Digital Dialogues, has put up podcasts of the talks that have already taken place this semester. One of them’s my November talk about the Virtual Humanities Lab.

Do you know what I did today? I worked on Roland. It was bliss.

Partly it was bliss because I worked on Roland, which hadn’t happened (not reliably or for any significant length of time) for a couple of weeks. I did more dissertation work when I was traveling – in the interstices among those five trips in the space of two months, the last of them being in mid-November – than I did in the last two weeks.

At least, for once I wasn’t slacking. During that time I wrote something like 8000 words in different venues, most of which writing was “public” (like the final NEH report for the two-year Virtual Humanities Lab). I think, all things considered, things went pretty well with all the obligations. Only a few relatively minor balls dropped, unless someone isn’t telling me something big.

Then there was Thanksgiving! And it was grand! For the first time in a long time I wasn’t with my family. That wasn’t the part that was grand; the good part was that I got to meet my two, uh, half-brothers-in-law. Who are in their early to mid-20s, and both funky and interesting and smart and well-traveled. It was good to spend time with Ethan’s family again, those I’d met before and new acquaintances. Including the puppy, to whom I didn’t become allergic for hours. Hooray for modern medicine.

Then we came home, and this week we have a cold. Nasty cold, too: I took yesterday off from work completely… eeexcept for the totally-burning stuff.

And tonight, I started in on Roland again. I have to encode everything I’m going to encode for the thesis (which is not all of Roland’s corpus, that’ll take years more than I have) by the end of December, so thought I’d make a list of everything that still needs to be encoded. Oh boy, it’ll be a fun month! Good thing I’m lovin’ it. tm.

I’m so tired of travel.

On Friday I came back from the latest – to Maryland on Tuesday, to give a talk at MITH; and then DC for the Reinvention Center conference. This was my fourth trip in just under two months: the other three were to Nebraska (digital humanities workshop), Fredericton (text-analysis conference) and Chester, Vermont (Readex Digital Institute, which got extensively blogged here). On Tuesday I leave for Chester again, to return on Wednesday after a meeting. This is the blessed last trip for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong: all the events I went to have been fabulous (see below), and I’m looking forward to going back to Readex. But – and I’ve known this from the start – this is too much travel right now.

The talk at MITH went well. I guess the crowd was a bit diminished compared to their usual; it was election day, and there was a Human-Computer Interaction event precisely coinciding with my talk. Nevertheless, it was a good group, and boy, they really mean it when they call these things “Digital Dialogues.” They jumped right in about five minutes into my talk, and the lively conversation didn’t stop for the next hour and a half or so. I showed the Virtual Humanities Lab and we talked about collaboration, its logistical issues and benefits-vs-drawbacks and ways in which VHL can be made a more friendly collaboration environment. It was great to receive feedback from people not only interested, but way more knowledgeable about the state of the field. It felt easy to be there; they’ve created a great atmosphere both for conversation and for work.

Wednesday I took advantage of MITH’s generous offer to use their “coffeehouse” space for work. That evening I found myself at the downtown Washington hotel where the Reinvention Center conference was to take place in the next two days.

I’ve a ton of notes from that conference. I only got to go because my dissertation director was leading one of the sessions, and asked me to be his session recorder; this way the Center gives a few grad students the opportunity to see what’s going on in research universities around the country, while at the same time getting young’uns to more or less write the proceedings. A more than fair price, I must say.

So I’d been reasonably interested in the conference, but had no idea how useful it would be and how much new information I would get that will be applicable in my near-future work. For one thing, I saw the largest concentration of high-level university administrators that I’ve ever seen before. Not sure what the ratio of administrators (and staff, like librarians) to faculty was, but it felt something like 2:1 or maybe even 3:1, and perhaps 300 people in attendance. (I may be wildly off here. It’s just an estimate.) I’ll have to go over my notes later and perhaps write it up here, if I get to it.

If I get to it. Friday I came back; and yesterday my adored husband took me out for a romantic evening out that stretched well into this morning. I had no idea what we were doing; turned out, we were going to an Ani DiFranco concert. Well, holy shit: I hadn’t been to a concert in a long, long time, and had only seen Ani in concert once. It was a treat. Not only does she rock the the house, but she is touring while quite pregnant, and her happiness with where she is and what she’s doing could be felt all the way at the back bar where we were standing. She had with her a stand-up-bassist and a percussionist with a xylophone and a steel drum and a bunch of other unusual rhythm instruments. Beautiful sound, mostly good crowd, amazing energy.

Then we reconnected over dinner and conversation and general dalliance. This past summer, going into early fall, was difficult for both of us. We both had to reduce and eventually stop taking anti-depressants: welcome to U.S. health care, which left us scrambling for two months (three in Ethan’s case). In the fall we both dove into new work, and have been trying to catch up with each other ever since. Last evening (orchestrated in part by a kind friend – many thanks!) was a badly needed one.

And now… now there’s more work. The final VHL report to the NEH is due at the end of the month. My write-up of our session at the Reinvention Center conference is due at the same time. I’ve got a job app to send out tomorrow, blessedly almost done but still on the to-do list. Tuesday-Wednesday there’s the trip, and my next task for the dissertation is the transcription and encoding of around 600 lines of poetry. Then there’s another fellowship app to get together.

And then there’s the social life, without which Vika gets to be a dull and sad girl. Tonight we were treated by our fabulous housemate to Marie Antoinette the movie, which had an unexpected soundtrack (Aphex Twin!) and was generally not half bad. Monday (tomorrow!) we have a friend visiting. Haven’t seen her in a long long time, so I’m really looking forward to it, and to the inevitable good food associated with the visit.

So what do I do? Instead of getting some sleep I write a long blog entry. Ah well, at least now I have a de facto to do list. There’s more to write about – details of the movie, Sean McMullen’s The Miocene Arrow which I’m enjoying these days, my relationship with the uncertainties of life after May, various anxieties about whether I’ll finish the dissertation in time. But all these can wait. Good night now.

Work is getting easier – sitting down and actually working, that is, as opposed to dreading it and feeling guilty about not doing it. I’ve been on the same primary source since last Thursday, but it is big (over 2700 lines), so I have sixteen whole excerpts from it. Only the Song of Roland has more excerpts. Plus, this one (Otuel and Roland) is in Middle English. Instead of translating it – at which I’d do a miserable job – I’ve written a mini-guide on pronunciation that should take the reader pretty far, and am encoding translations for the particularly obscure words using the glossary at the end of the book. This is adding a lot of encoding time, but should be cool if I can figure out how to make the translations appear on mouseover. (If I can’t figure out, there’s always Ethan to beg for help, but if it can be done with XSLT/CSS, I shouldn’t need to.)

Right. To work.

[Psst... Livejournal readers – just a reminder that if you comment on the feed, I don't get notified, and at the rate things are going, am unlikely to go back to past posts and check to see whether there are any comments. Instead of clicking on "leave comment," click the URL for the post, and you'll be magically transported to a comment interface on Words' End.]

Ethan’s taken geeky anti-vandal measures. Plus, we now have a set of functioning motion-sensor floodlights. Come back, kid. I want you to show your face.

This repeated-senseless-violence thing has been… distracting; I had been unsuccessfully trying to work for two days and instead somehow getting sucked into the WaiterRant archives again and again. But lo, as soon as I sit down to read/annotate some primary sources (instead of writing the second chapter, which is due – oh – at the end of the month), work gets interesting again. Go figure.

Reading and annotating, in this case, is a lot of pattern-searching. All afternoon and evening my peripheral vision has been crazy-sensitive. I wonder if the two are related.

Work on the thesis is being done in spurts. Partly of necessity: I’ve managed to schedule myself for five out-of-town events, in four trips, all within the same two months. Plus there’s a possibility of getting to spend time with the Nephew, who is turning into an excellent if willful little person, and while I like having him over, I’ve discovered that zero work gets done when he’s around. I suspect it’d be different if we lived closer together, but so it goes.

Anyway, my mental pattern with regard to thesis work has been repeating – rather predictably so; this pattern has existed since long before Roland. It goes something like this:

Before the work period starts: attitude cavalier, anxiety far at bay. Usually, during this time things are happening that make me feel good – conferences, family time, just-breaks with good books.

First day of work period: attitude of “ok, here I am buckling down.” Permitting myself to spend this one day Organizing, which never takes just a day, so the day almost inevitably ends in a vague state of many things accomplished but not enough, damnit.

Second day: overwhelmed and in denial. Repeat mantras of the “I’m smart enough and diligent enough to do this in time – but it won’t happen if I keep succumbing to the anxiety and denial, for they evilly drain energy, confidence and time” sort. Keep having to remind myself that I love this stuff (and I do, it’s the time pressure that’s a bitch to deal with).

From this second day on, if I manage to get myself to start working sometime before 10, life is good. If I don’t, I lose days to self-loathing, or thought patterns less dramatic but just as draining.

The hardest thing is not knowing how long this thesis will take, or how much work it will be. I’ve set myself a hard limit – graduate next spring – but what if I don’t get the work done? If I could see the steps clearly, it would be easier to work. As it stands, it’s hard to even know which large swathes of work will turn out to be useless for the current purposes. There’s no way I can do justice to the Roland corpus in the course of this dissertation; defining its limits in a field of material that I don’t know that well (there’s SO MUCH of it!) seems like a futile exercise.

Outlines don’t help, either. They take so much time to make, and then I have to change them a million times over. My working outline helps me organize whatever it is I want to do next, I guess. But since it isn’t representative of the final thesis structure (as I discovered rewriting chapter the first), it’s not an indicator of how far along I am.

These are some of the things that make thesis writing hard – I’ve read and heard this from many sources. The resultant anxiety is a pest, and I resent it for that. Go. Shoo!

Whew, that was grand. Just one thing about the closing panel discussion, while it’s fresh in my mind.

This year’s CaSTA was billed as “a joint computer science and humanities computing conference.” And it was! And [we saw that] it was good. Of the five keynote speakers, three were humanists and two – computer scientists. The final discussion was called “Humanities Computing Science??”.

William Arms, in his remarks during the panel, said that during the conference a word was frequently used that isn’t generally used in his usual [computer-science] circles. That word – knowledge. He, and just about everyone at the panel, said that what they primarily want from the “other side” is dialogue.

In light of that, what I’d like to see in this continuing dialogue is a bit of discussion of the word science. As it’s been used lately (in the last, what, 200 years?), it implies “HARD.” Humanities implies “soft.” That’s a major point of contention.

But given that “science” pretty much means “knowledge,” should we revisit our use of the word?

Ray Siemens is a computing humanist and Renaissance scholar working at the University of Victoria. The full title of his paper is “Knowledge management and textual cultures? Work toward the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn, pron. “reckon”) and its professional reading environment (PReE).”

REKn seems to be aiming to amalgamate and integrate knowledge in its area. Its implementation is based in the study of disciplinary activity of, and professional interaction among, those in the humanities. It’s founded in concepts of knowledge representation and modeling. A short description of the project can be found here.

Knowledge representation: draws on the field of AI and seeks to produce models of human understanding that are tractable to computation. Modeling: REKn/PReE model data, intellectual processes, and beyond.

Key elements of REKn’s model:

- representation of archival materials

- analysis/critical inquiry originating in those materials

- the communication of the results of these tasks (the dissemination of primary and secondary materials)

REKn’s assumptions: all of the above are interrelated and inseparable, and electronically representable.

They’ve collected primary and secondary sources, and have built tools for working with them (the tool-building process seems to have been multi-stage: many tools built and discarded as inadequate). They’re looking to long-term partnerships with Renaissance materials providers in the future. Right now REKn has about 13,000 primary sources and over 80,000 secondary sources. About 1500 of these resources are currently available for public use, but the majority are not open-access.

So that’s REKn, the text base. What about PReE, the reading environment? It’s a rudimentary document viewer, and analysis and communication facilitator. Currently the UI is a “down-and-dirty prototype,” as they’ve been concentrating on making things work in the back end. [vz: he's showing PReE in Windows; I wonder what it's written in.] They’ve made several analytical tools for the encoded texts. Primarily, though, analysis will be carried out using TAPoR tools.

Communication facilitated electronically: they’re attempting to provide a system by which people can manage their professional interaction.

Short-term goals:

- integrate better with TAPoR and the Public Knowledge Project reading tools

- conduct usability studies

- consult with “contextual” stakeholders, including acad. publishers

- move prototype to a web environment

- scale up!

And that’s Ray’s talk, the last talk of this conference. Next is the panel discussion, titled “Humanities computing science?”. The panel will consist of the five keynote speakers. I’m not sure whether I’ll be taking notes on this; it’ll be video recorded, and there’s little probability that I’d do it justice. Again, I’ll update when the webcasts are up.