I’ve just posted some thoughts about different approaches to presenting and distributing academic knowledge. Please opine if you are so inclined. I have a feeling I’ll be roundly chastised for some of the things I said, but discussion is sort of the idea. :)
Surface, breathe, sync
My cousin from Australia is visiting the Boston area and staying with us. She’s a fun chyk, just graduated from Melbourne U’s law school (!), will be starting a job in March, and in the meantime is seeing the world. It’s good to meet her.
Last night I didn’t sleep much. When I did sleep, the dreams were mostly nightmares about: (a) wedding planning and food not quite going as planned; (b) stories of the Japanese ambassador and the entire associated wedding party being poisoned; and (c) the church grounds suddenly being as large as a large high school, and myself being lost and pursued.
Hm, time to chill out. Unfortunately, it’s also time to do wedding planning more quickly.
In two days, I participate in the Teaching in the Digital Age Faculty Showcase. Should be awesome.
The first draft of my very first semi-annual interim report to the NEH is complete. Seeing as it’s not due until the 31st, I’m rather proud of myself. Of course, we’ll see what my boss says; but it’s always much easier for me to revise than to write from scratch.
I feel numb.
Born Digital competition
I’ll go back to the food porn shortly. (Yesterday evening I had an excuse for not writing: a hot date. Today I have no such excuse.)
Meanwhile, there’s a competition going on at futureofthebook.org:
Our first competition calls for a reinvention of the illuminated manuscript. How will this ancient art evolve as multimedia begins to take a central role in our reading experience? Send us a single illustrated page that exploits the unique possibilities of the digital medium while preserving the classic illuminative relationship between text and image.
Nice! Were I at all good at graphic design or video work, I’d totally go for it with Roland. As it stands, I’ll sit back and watch the results, which should be beautiful.
And some days…
you just want to put your head through the wall.
Good god, I have the thinnest skin of any human I know.
I have been interacting with some people about some work they wanted done. They thought I was their guy, I thought I was their guy, then we all separately started having our doubts, and in the end it didn’t pan out.
But it didn’t pan out in the worst way possible. In the way that makes me doubt that I’ll ever improve my diplomatic skills. In the way that makes me doubt whether I’m good enough at interpersonal politics to make it in academe. In the way that makes me angry because they contacted me and then failed to read the detailed explanation I was sending them at their own request. And, immediately after feeling angry, I feel stupid and inadequate and childish, and it’s all irrelevant anyway because although I won’t be doing this project (a good thing, if the past two weeks are any indication), I’m left with all this frustration at myself and others.
But mostly at myself.
It’s not all that bad, of course. If I am to believe my coworkers and immediate boss (and I have no reason to disbelieve them), my main job is going quite well. But, see, there nobody questions my competency, implicitly or explicitly. Nobody interrupts me every second sentence. Nobody ignores lengthy emails and asks me the questions answered in those emails. And, for the most part, I seem to be getting along with my team – and with my boss – just fine.
Of course, they all have known me for years. Surely that helps. But, damnit, I have a thin skin because I care about my coworkers and my work and the humanities and humanity. Diplomatic skills be damned; although I like to think that I am improving those. What you get is unadulterated me, throwing all my knowledge and energy and passion at most things I touch.
Now, just to figure out a way to harness this passion and not be hurt by responses to it. Simple.
YAWP.
Hyperlist(e)s
Jenna Wells, a student at McMaster, is presenting a site that hadn’t been on my radar previously, but is actually somewhat similar in concept to RolandHT. The site, written entirely in French, is Hyperlistes, and treats a body of medieval French poetry. Apparently, listing things in your poems was a popular thing to do; the project’s participants have encoded items in these lists and cross-referenced them by theme. Nifty.
EDIT, with notes to self: just talked to Madeline Jeay, originator and brain behind Hyperlistes. She mentions that street poets in Brazil did something called poésie de cordel, in which… I think they hung sheets of paper off of ropes in sequence and then sang the songs. Or something. I must research this further, because Madeline seems to remember some of those stories being about Roland. She says that Paul Zumthor’s Introduction a la poésie orale may mention it; she vaguely remembers Zumthor talking about it when she studied with him. (!)
Modeling the humanities
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.
Creative Commons and the academic endeavor
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?
NaNoWriMo
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!
Salon.com takes on Lynne Cheney.
Looks like Mrs. Cheney is pretty ruthless in showing her disapproval of academic dissent with conservatism.
Disgusting and dispiriting. And this, just an hour after I read Allen Renear on getting government and university funding in humanities computing, from 2000:
But we must also be prepared for these efforts to fail. And if they do fail, when we fail at them, it must be with the grace that allows us to at once fail, and at the same time remain in the game, continuing our work. This means that we must give up the ‘everlasting delusion… [the] utopianism’ and instead ‘…cheerfully accept [our] inexorable destiny’. That destiny being that we will have to make our own way in the world, sustained by our conviction, courage, and skill, by our colleagues, students, and friends… and, above all, by the never-failing excitement of the work.
This is from “Humanities Computing 2000: Passion and Authenticity,” pp. 27-39 in: Domenico Fiormonte, ed. Informatica umanistica. Dalla ricerca all’insegnamento (Humanities computing. From research to teaching), Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2003. Renear quotes from J. Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University, London: Routlege, 1998.
I’ll be drinking to that tonight. It’s been a day of extremes.
Open access and funding.
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.
