Category: digital [humanities|libraries]

I’m at The Face of Text, a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, near Toronto. Only half of the first day has passed, and already I could spend the rest of the day blogging my thoughts. Luckily, I’m taking careful notes, and plan to write more later on tonight, or this weekend (although the fun over here lasts through Sunday).

Meanwhile, a short comment on John Unsworth‘s keynote, titled Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation. During the thought provoking, hour-long talk, he has mentioned what he sees as a problem with visualization of knowledge in the humanities. The prettier it gets (think QuickTime movies showing the reconstruction of a temple from blueprints or archeological data), the harder it is for the viewer to know what is actually known, and what is hypothesized. That’s a fair criticism, and it seems to me that the problem is easily remedied. More than that: there already exist a number of ways to remedy it.

The simplest is documentation. Humanities computing projects suffer from appallingly sparse documentation. Tell me what is known and what is hypothesized, before, during and/or after I view the pretty movie.

Then there’s the CAVE. These 3D modeling environments are gorgeous but hugely expensive to build and maintain. There are, I think, six publicly accessible CAVEs in Europe (one of them at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria). None of the several CAVEs in the States are publicly accessible. So, even though there are at least a couple of humanities projects being done there, for now there remains a problem of dissemination and real dialogue based on these projects.

At least one of them, however, addresses precisely the issue of what is known vs. what is hypothesized. The ARCHAVE, based on a temple excavation project in Petra, Jordan, takes as a central premise the idea of modeling as a way of making an argument. They’re excavating, they find a shard of pottery, and they reconstruct what the vessel must’ve looked like. Then they place that vessel in the same place, inside the virtual reconstruction of the temple, where the original shard was found. The idea is, when they’re done, to invite archeologist colleagues and encourage them to play around, pick up objects, contest their placement, etc. Modeling as argument at its best – at least it seems that way. We’ll see if it works.

Until CAVEs are at least as accessible as personal computers, there are ways (besides documentation) to make your pretty model transparent with regard to that crucial difference between what is known and what – debated. John kindly pointed me to a proof of concept they did at the University of Virginia: the Pompeii Forum Project. Apparently, it involves layers of images that make certainty differences more obvious. I’ll have to check it out later: the next session has already begun.

Looking back at October‘s CIT Infobits, I see an entry abstracting Andrea Foster’s article about the use of Creative Commons licensing in academe. I was curious and checked it out. It’s a pretty short article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a blurb really, and it says nothing new: Creative Commons has existed for a while now, and is catching on very slowly in academic circles.

Sure, no surprise. I know humanist academics who still don’t really use email or the web much, certainly not for research purposes. Inertia (which, to be fair, is mentioned in Foster’s write-up) is a huge part of the academic way of doing things. Even if authors do know their options with regard to copyright, many academic publishers have not yet had time to evolve to the point where they include such licensing in their vision of what publishing is. While not immutable, currently tenure reviews are what they are: people have been talking for a long while about the need to revise that process so that credit may be given for work performed electronically, but that too will take time. In the meantime, authors are often faced with the choice of either publishing their work online under a Creative Commons license, or having it published on paper and acquire the necessary gravitas in the eyes of their employers, but not both. In this case, the choice is clear: print publication takes precedence, especially since print publishers will often allow authors to publish their works online following a specified time period after the print publication comes out.

Not having published a whole lot in print yet, I haven’t looked into the issue too closely. Are any of the established print publishers amenable to working with an author to allow for the release of an article in electronic format, concurrently with the publication date of the print version?

Am I nuts? Perhaps (see SAD, earlier – and still, but no matter right at the moment). But I’m not about to write a novel, either. Instead, I’ll pretend that the National Novel Writing Month is actually the National November Writing Month. In the following way: I will write, every day of November including today but not including Election Day, a thousand words of material relating to humanities computing. It may be paper proposals, or code, or weblog posts; it may relate to VHL or to my Roland work. None of it will be fluff. At the end of the month, I’ll have twenty-nine thousand words.

Whee!

I’m reading Peter Suber’s article titled Promoting Open Access in the Humanities. It talks pretty thoroughly, and – refreshingly – with no obvious bias or bitterness about the differences in funding between the humanities and the STM (science-technology-medicine) fields. One part amused and struck me in particular:

The most succinct wisdom on the usefulness and fundability of humanities research was uttered by Aristippus, a Greek philosopher who sought patronage from one rich Athenian after another. Dionysius once asked him, “Why do I always see you philosophers knocking on the doors of the rich, but I never see the rich knocking on the doors of philosophers?” Aristippus replied, “Because philosophers know what they need and the rich don’t.”

Hear, hear. What a great testimony to the necessity of the humanities, and it’s coupled with an attitude I share: I’ve got a pretty low patience threshold for defending my subject matter. If an adult I’m talking to doesn’t understand the necessity of knowing and practicing the arts, literary arts included, they’re probably beyond my help.

Happily, the people I surround myself with generally don’t need to be convinced of this. But chances are, the person next to me in the supermarket line is a different matter. Sometimes that makes me sad, and reminds me that not being in this for the money is the only sustainable option.

I’d love to go to HT04. Sadly, it’s not in the cards this year, but next year for sure. (That’s what I’ve been telling myself for the past three, but well, see my previous post.)

Doug Engelbart will give a keynote there. Here are a few pertinent interviews, including one with him.

This past Monday, I started my new job as Project Director of the Virtual Humanities Lab, a new NEH-sponsored project based here at Brown.

But what about your studies, you’ll ask? Dissertation and all that? Degree? Well, it went like this.

This past spring, the Virtual Humanities Lab Project was awarded a new NEH grant. Sadly, for a variety of reasons our Project Director Cristiana Fordyce was unable to stay with VHL. Suddenly, the project was in need of a director, and the position was offered to me. I considered the implications carefully, and accepted.

The core team for the project is one I’ve been a part of for years, with the Decameron Web. I know most of the quirks, and think that we’ll work really well together.

It’s a great opportunity. I will be working closely with both scholars and STG folks to create an infrastructure to enable collaborative scholarly annotation online, as well as to promote pedagogical use of our texts (which now include more than just the Decameron, and other authors besides Boccaccio). The principal elements of the job include grant report writing, research and paper writing (for conferences and publication), team management (gosh, but I dislike the T word…), technical documentation writing and complex Web tool design. I feel up to all of this, and think that it will significantly expand my skillset.

I was worried, of course, about the dissertation writing issue. Having seen too many of my colleagues struggle with this, and knowing my own weaknesses, I don’t expect to be able to write the dissertation in off-work hours. The decision was complicated also by the fact that the Graduate School had awarded me a dissertation fellowship for the next academic year.

This complication, however, turned out to also be the solution: the Graduate School agreed, contrary to its usual procedure, to defer the fellowship; so that I am assured to have it for the 2006-7 academic year, when I’ll hopefully be finishing up the degree.

The research and paper writing I mentioned above, which comprise a significant percentage of the job time-wise, should be more or less directly applicable to some of the theoretical parts of my dissertation. I also plan to continue hunting for more primary sources for Roland^HT, and encoding them for experimentation during the intervening two years.

I should note that, although Cristiana has taken a [great!] job elsewhere, we still plan to work together, even with our third British musketeer Guyda Armstrong, on Boccaccio’s Esposizioni. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.

And that’s my news. The above is a modified copy-and-paste from an e-mail I sent to my dissertation committee; if it seems dry, it’s because I wasn’t sure they’d approve. So far, though, they seem to think this is a good thing, and I’m very glad for that. Their collective brilliance rather intimidates me on a regular basis.

Hopefully, this’ll mean I’ll be blogging more, too, and getting much more use out of that “humanities computing” category. Maybe I’ll even redesign my weblog, and port it to WordPress. Who knows?

Scaramuccia [It.] = skirmish. Both are of unknown origin, probably derived from Old French (according to the OED, anyway). See also scrimish, scrimmage, and forms of rubbish.

Go ahead, pronounce it. Let it roll off your tongue.