Posts filed under 'disciplinarity'
I was only able to attend a morning panel today but it was excellent: Futures of Scholarly Editing II, chaired by T.H. Howard-Hill. The papers synthesized and clarified a number of issues I’ve been pondering here and there.
Andrew Stauffer layed out the issues that must be tangled with in the future of digital editing. He began by identifying two aspects of the term edition that apply to print. An edition is (1) the textual product of the act of editing as well as (2) a print run of a limited number of copies of a book. In digital editions aspect (2) is lost, which leads to potentially dire consequences.
A limited print run of a book constitutes a relatively stable, known set of errors and variations. Since a digital edition can be silently emended on the fly, changes and corrections are no longer recorded. Errors and variations, which are important markers of the reception history of a work, disappear in the digital realm and prevent textual scholars from knowing the genealogy of a text. This means that certain questions we’re used to will no longer be answerable in the future.
I don’t think this assessment is completely accurate. After all, wikis automatically save version histories of all changes, so it shouldn’t be difficult to apply that principle rigorously in a digital edition. Besides, Karsten Kynde and Kim Ravn of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center demonstrated a functionality in their digital archive of Kierkegaard’s papers that allows readers to see the version history of particular elements. The interface did not seem very intuitive (granted, I did not have a chance to play with it), but at least it allows access to the history of mistakes or to previous versions of the archive. That is helpful, of course, if you quote from it in a certain way and then need to go back to it later after it’s been revised. He made the very nice point that we owe future scholars our mistakes.
Andrew ended with a discussion of digital preservation that led naturally to the next talk, by Barbara Bordalejo. Andrew said that it is not possible to preserve all digital editions, archives, and other works. Since they’d have to be backed up on tape or redundant hard drives, access becomes a serious issue. This becomes worse as technologies become outdated and won’t be able to red the auto-archived material, meaning that we’d have to be selective about what gets archived. Much would be lost.
Barbara’s talk focused largely on preservation, too. She made the very good point that digital formats will eventually become outdated and unreadable by newer machines, so the old machines themselves need to be preserved. This will lead to a situation in which a rare digital book will become even less accessible than the rarest print book.
Peter Robinson gave a fascinating demonstration of an archive he’s developing with people at U Birmingham, Münster, St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, and the British Museum. They’re digitizing all the leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus MS. I don’t have time to describe it in full, but they’ve made a beautiful AJAX-y interface that accounts for correction histories and does a number of wonderful things. Will write more on this later.
March 17th, 2007
Today was the first day of panels and plenaries at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, held at NYU. I attended a plenary and a panel in the morning and demonstrated the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive in the afternoon. I’ll only summarize what happened here but will elaborate in more detail later on.
The plenary was titled, “Book History, Textual Criticism, and Bibliography: Relating and Distinguishing the Sub-Disciplines.” Since I entered late, I can’t really summarize it, but it seemed to be about defining the discplinarity of book history. Ezra Greenspan talked about how book histories tend to have a national focus — the history of the book in China, India, the nations of Latin America, etc. — and that there needs to be a transnational focus on geographic trends. He also mentioned that his journal was the first, during the early 90s, to use GIS to map trends in book readership and distribution.
David Greetham asked an astute question about why the term “book” in “book history” seemed to have been ignored. Given the contextualization of studying books as objects in their national, economic, political, and cultural contexts, does it matter whether the book has a substantive essence of its own? What could be the influence of the book itself on its own history?
There was also a palpable disdain of digital text and electronic editing. One audience member mentioned his project that seeks to digitize the papers, letters, notes, and other artifacts of a Canadian writer and make them accessable through a website. He raised the intensely interesting question of how his project relates to the sub-disciplines of book history. There was virtually no response from the panelists, though Katherine Harris, a digital archivist in the audience, made an attempt to further the conversation.
After the plenary I thoroughly enjoyed the panel “The Modernist Material Text: Gender, Politics, Versions,” composed of four grad students from U Michigan. Russell McDonald talked about D.H. Lawrence and cross-gender collaboration. Jenny Sorenson analyzed Virginia Woolf’s play on genre and material text in Flush (a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel). Olivia Bustion discussed gender and priority in versions of three early poems by Marianne Moore. And Jamie Olson focused on cosmopolitanism in Seamus Heaney. All the papers were very good, and I especially liked the Woolf one for its smart discussion of genre.
Questions of genre were prominent in the Q&A during my own panel in the afternoon. It was a fascinating mix. Karsten Kynde and Kim Ravn of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center demonstrated their archive of Kierkegaard’s papers (http://sks.dk). Jennifer Stertzer, an archivist at UVA, addressed the issues faced during the digitization of George Washington’s papers. Those two presentations contrasted nicely with this site, which archives a motif of the Recherche as opposed to the disparate materials of writer.
The moderator, Peter Robinson, at one point challenged the notion of whether this is really an archive. I thought it was a great question because this site aims to do exactly that (among other things): apply the archival model in such a way that its nature becomes exposed and directly questioned. Can this site be considered an archive if what it collects and makes available are the instances of a narrative motif and images associated with it? I think the answer is yes, as did the audience, to my delight.
After the panel finished I had a really good conversation with a junior faculty memember at my alma mater, Providence College. William Hogan made some interesting points on how this site isn’t quite an archive, not quite an edition, but it’s somewhere in between and more Internet native than the other resources available.
I’ll have more to say on this soon. Time to get some sleep.
March 16th, 2007
The Institute for the Future of the Book was generous enough to let me write a post on their blog, which can be found here:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/02/ecclesiastical_proust_archive.html
The post was picked up by RSS feeds all over the world. Thanks!
In addition, Dave Davison, who has a blog called Thoughts-Illustrated, posted a comment comparing this archive to his project of “editorially segmenting and tagging encapsulations of longer serial archives such as recorded speeches, audiovisual/video content, and finally ‘Networked Books’”. Admittedly, I haven’t had time yet to read his blog in depth, but what I’ve seen so far is a series of very interesting posts on annotating visual media for better reading and reducing Constant Partial Attention, a term he picks up from Linda Stone.
With the explosion of technologies like RSS and Web 2.0, it’s very important that educators help students think critically about managing information. That might include using technology to tag longer pieces used in courses — whatever media might be used — and evaluating research sources.
I’ve seen a demonstration of courseware that takes this into account at Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CNMTL). One of CNMTL’s applications, VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning), is an environment that allows students to play digitized movies and music, select segments, annotate those segments with as much text as they like, and file the segments with annotations for when they write their integrative multimedia essays — all in the courseware. Granted, this type of activity occurs in controlled learning environments where the media are pre-selected by the professor. I wonder if the courseware allows students to import, segment, and annotate media they’ve garnered through research — or even digitize it. Applications like VITAL (but with the ability to act upon any media the reader might import, including text) ought to be readily available to students as stand-alone tools, especially now that much of their research will involve multimedia.
I could see using such a technology to teach novels. It would enable students to archive, tag, and illustrate passages, connect them to articles and other sources they’ve researched and imported into the environment, and so on. This might spark a radical (and possibly unfortunate) change in the English major. One of the unquantifiable skills that the English major has been touted to impart is the ability to see the Big Picture in a complex, hazy jumble of information and ideas. At the center of that is a highly flexible memory that is both detail-oriented and conceptually driven.
It’s important, as technology is increasingly appropriated to our intellectual pursuits, not to become too dependent on it. But if it’s used in such a way that it enhances those personal skills, then so much the better.
Obviously, one task accomplished by the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is to serve as the memory for the vast amount of material I want to study but couldn’t physically remember in its entirety. Sure, my unaided memory will recall the most important material: the early descriptions of the Église St-Hilaire at Combray, of Marcel’s epiphany with the twin steeples of Martinville, and sundry short passages that made impressions on me while reading the Recherche. And I’ll remember where to find them when I need to write about them. The usefulness of this archive, however, is a virtue of its “narrow” focus that keeps the field of information from assimilating and ballooning endlessly, like The Blob. (I say narrow, but really — this archive comprises 336 passages, 184,181 words, over 700 associations, and roughly 500 images.) The focus on churches keeps the project thematically and conceptually unified.
I’m starting to think, as a result of writing this post, that opening this archive to the inclusion of passages and paratextual information not related to churches is probably not the way to go. (Read this post and this post for more on that topic.) There’s enough that could be done under the church rubric — say, a variorum of different translations and editions — to make it textually and scholarly interesting. The vast jumbled archive of editions, translations, articles, books, pamphlets, websites, films … … is already there. One could simply use a wiki, perhaps with customized search tools, to make sense of all of them, which would be great. But this archive is really a tool for narrative and textual analysis.
February 14th, 2007
About two weeks ago I met with a few folks from the Institute for the Future of the Book to talk about starting collaborative communities. Right before our meeting I had a couple of ideas about creating commentary space within the archive search results and making the whole thing more editable by readers. So I went to the Institute’s place in Williamsburg thinking we’d have two “separate” discussions about community and interactive functionality. But once the brainstorming session got going I was struck by how intimately the two were bound together.
One of the recurring points was that this archive, as currently constructed around the church motif, is “my reading” of Proust. I began to see that it would probably be difficult to interest others in participating when their readings of the Recherche — re: gender, airplanes, phenomenology or whatever — would have little impact on the archive itself. There was also a sense that it would be difficult to form a community around a project that an individual has already brought to a fair level of completion.
Most literary digital archives provide scholars with material but go no further. The value here would lie in taking the next step of providing commentary space within the search results themselves — not just in the blog and discussion board spaces. The ability of readers to add images, tag passages, or even add new passages would take that principle even further and make the archive itself a collaborative reading of the Recherche. And of course making the commentary searchable would add yet another dimension.
But why bother? What purpose(s) does this archive serve? What would it contribute to the field of literary scholarship?
Put plainly, The Archive has changed. The traditional model of humanities research commonly identified as ‘the lone scholar in the archive’ has been opened by digital networks and social software. This has been the case for years, especially since blogs and wikis became popular. Yet scholarly blogs tend overwhelmingly to be individuals’ personal web journals, which means that the model of the lone writer — despite post comments — still persists. That’s not a bad thing, and I’m not saying it should go away, but neither is it an effective use of the advantages offered by the technology.
The distributed, long-term conversation that has been happening in articles, books, conferences, and classrooms over the years will continue, of course, and it should. But social software allows us to publish at will, to communicate with similarly interested scholars wherever they are, whenever we like, and thereby to generate and hone ideas collaboratively as they are being developed.
A couple of interesting experiments along this line have been tried by Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at NYU who has been collaborating with the Institute for the Future of the Book. He put up a blog where his book on the history of atheism, Without Gods, was discussed, challenged, corrected, and questioned by readers during the composition process. Similarly, he put up a paper designed as a discussion: The Holy of Holies features a more effective commentary space, developed by the Institute, that ties comments to specific paragraphs. I could see working something like that into the search results of this archive. There was word, too, of making that comment functionality a WordPress plugin, which would be very useful for a number of projects.
This archive could take some lessons from the collaboration of Mitchell, his readers, and the Institute. I envision the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive as a more open-ended work of collaborative literary criticism, one that has the purpose of thinking and writing about Proust for its own sake, of developing ideas in conversation, but also as a space for spawning other projects. That is to say, blog members need not write about Proust and churches, but as long as there’s some focus on Proust or other related topics such as technology, media, publishing, theory, and so on, it could have that eclectic interest but guided by a common thread. And one of the possibilities could be that people working on books or articles might develop them collaboratively at the archive.
That suggests to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could instead become something with a broader focus, where people can enter and tag passages, images, and other media to influence the structure of the archive with their own readings. The issue of copyright (I had to pay for the use of the text featured here) is a can of worms I don’t have space to address in this post. Regardless, the amount of development required to expand this archive as mentioned would likely necessitate substantial funding. So probably a preliminary group would need to figure out what needs to be done in order to apply for a grant and then take it from there.
But the point is that if this is to become a useful resource where people think and also learn by doing, it will have to become editable by readers in some form or other, and by that very admission I can’t determine it all by myself.
So, this is a preliminary step to see what kind of feedback is out there. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, suggestions or criticisms. And I would especially like to thank Ben Vershbow, Jesse Wilbur, Eddie Tejeda, and Dan Visel for taking the time to meet with me. If anyone is interested in participating somehow, please don’t hesitate to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu.
January 29th, 2007