A lecture series titled “Situating the Humanities” will be held at Brown this fall. It is, the poster says, “a series of lectures highlighting new and provocative work across the humanistic disciplines. The series addresses issues of ethics, aesthetics, cultural translation, and the fate of reading to engage critically pressing problems confronting humanitstic inquiry today.” Here’s the list of lectures, some of them more directly relevant to us here than others:

• Monday, Sept. 13. “The History of the Book and the History of Literature,” Seth Lerer, Stanford University
• Monday, Sept. 27. “Politics and the Aesthetics of Culture,” Michael Steinberg, Cornell University
• Thursday, Sept. 30. “The Fort-Da of Old Age: Cyberspace, Televisiual Space, Psychic Space,” Kathleen Woodward, University of Washington
• Monday, Oct. 4. “The Ethics of Close Reading,” Jane Gallop, University of Wisconsin
• Tuesday, Oct. 12. “Taxonomy and the Translation of Culture: The Case of the Arabic Yoga Text,” Carl Ernst, University of North Carolina
• Monday, Oct. 18. “The Humanities and the War on Terror,” Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University
• Monday, Oct. 25. “Wordsworth’s Empire,” David Simpson, UC Davis

All lectures take place at 5pm in the Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall, Brown Universtiy. Alumnae Hall is accessible from Meeting Street, half a block from the corner of Thayer.

Things are starting off a bit quiet here, not least because most participants are still on vacation, traveling, moving states and the like. Perhaps this is a good time to talk about some general theory.

I saw a call for papers recently that prompted me to pick up some of Edward Hall’s writing. Beyond Culture looks very interesting, although because of time constraints I only read the first couple of chapters; and Understanding Cultural Differences, although not as relevant, has a few good quotes in the introductory section. He cowrote this one with Mildred Reed Hall.

p. 3: “It is possible to say that the world of communication can be divided into three parts: words, material things, and behavior. Words are the medium of business, politics, and diplomacy. Material things are usually indicators of status and power. Behavior provides feedback on how other people feel and includes techniques for avoiding confrontation.”

The authors talk of monochronic vs. polychronic time. This, on p. 13: “Monochronic time means paying attention to and doing only one thing at a time. Polychronic time means being involved with many things at once. Like oil and water, the two systems do not mix. […] Monochronic time is divided quite naturally into segments; it is scheduled and compartmentalized, making it possible for a person to concentrate on one thing at a time.” American business, the Halls say, is dominated by monochronic time.

In contrast, “[p]olychronic people live in a sea of information. They feel they must be up to the minute about everything and everybody, be it business or personal, and they seldom subordinate personal relationships to the exigencies of schedules or budgets.” (p. 16)

We’ve all heard this complaint, which is becoming more and more common: too much information. It’s difficult to concentrate on anything at work. We’d like to easily juggle twenty tasks at any one time, but that wears you out quickly.

Academic pursuits, especially ones that happen largely online, are no exception to this trend. There are always too many papers to read and web-based projects to play with – so much output by smart people whose work is interesting and relevant to our own! Being constantly bombarded by useful and potentially useful information through weblogs, mailing lists and other happenstance, it’s difficult to carve out even an hour a day to, for example, write. Because writing something intelligent and original involves knowing your own opinion, and that requires us to know where the polyphony in our heads stops and our own voice begins. Plus, a cup of tea or what have you, and some peace and quiet.

At VHL, we’re working on creating a place online where scholars will be able to annotate several-hundred-year-old texts. Web sites, generally speaking, don’t need to specifically accomodate people whom the Halls characterize as monochronic. Information is presented in relatively easily digestible chunks, and you’re invited to print out longer articles. In the Editing House (which is what I’ll call the Virtual Editing House from now on, it seems less clunky), you will likely be working exclusively online with material of a contemplative nature.

I wonder how people will end up using it. Will they grab their nearest copy of Boccaccio’s Esposizioni, curl up with it in an armchair, write down their annotations on paper and then only sit in front of a computer for long enough to type in the annotation? Or will they collaborate with each other via a (pipe dream alert) chat medium? Perhaps they’d even use something like SubEthaEdit to annotate texts together? Academic reading and thinking tends to be a monochronic activity, web browsing – polychronic; which one is literary annotation, and will the Editing House encourage a positional change on this particular spectrum?

Project Gutenberg has put up Gustave Doré’s illustrations to the first canticle of the Divine Comedy. Here it is.

Today is the first day I’ve looked at Project Gutenberg in months, perhaps as long as a couple of years. The interface has changed, and is more pleasing to the eye; but as the link above illustrates, there’s still much to be desired. List of files without names: which file contains what? Unknown, until you’ve clicked on the link and scrolled down a lot to see the contents.

Don’t get me wrong: I like and appreciate PG. It’s just a shame that they still haven’t mastered simple interface design, after all these years on the web. One of these days, I’d very much like to hear someone say “I love Project Gutenberg” without the usual “but…” Anyone know whether their proofreading procedures have changed recently?

[updated 2004-09-08]

Welcome to the Virtual Humanities Lab! With this weblog, we hope to both document our progress and facilitate feedback on our work.

The VHL is a two-year project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are based at Brown University, and the project builds on the work done in the Scholarly Technology Group and in the Department of Italian Studies, in collaboration with scholars elsewhere.

Over the past few years, a series of freely accessible networked resources for late Medieval and Early Modern Italian Studies have been developed at Brown University. They include:

• the Decameron Web, a growing online archive of textual and contextual materials for the studying and teaching of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1375), conceived as an encyclopedic gateway into late Medieval life and culture;
• the Pico Project, a collaborative online edition and commentary of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity (1486), focused on Pico’s idea of a fundamental convergence among major theological and philosophical traditions (Muslim, Jewish and Christian);
• the Florentine Tratte and Catasto, a searchable database of tax information for the city of Florence in 1427-29, with information about office holders of the Florentine Republic during its 250-year history (1282-1532).

More recently a new project was launched: Heliotropia, a peer-reviewed electronic journal created to provide a widely and readily available forum for research and interpretation to an international community of Boccaccio scholars. Together, these projects provide valuable primary tools for studying and teaching the literary, intellectual, economic and social history of 14th- and 15th-century Italy.

We are now ready to enter a new phase. With the support of the NEH, we plan to develop diverse digital resources into an experimental model for collaborative scholarship and pedagogy. What we envision is a highly interactive website where educators, scholars, students and other interested users will find not only a wealth of information about the civic experience and the literary and intellectual culture of Early Modern Italy (Florence in particular), but also a variety of tools for collaborative teaching and research – specifically, annotation and discussion of primary texts – organized as a multidisciplinary “virtual laboratory” for the humanities.

Because of its pioneering history in humanities computing, its open curriculum, and its dual identity as a university-college where teaching and research are often intimately intertwined, Brown is an ideal venue for such an experiment, able to act as a useful testing ground for a wide range of institutions, from small community colleges to leading research universities.

The VHL will be organized into a Virtual Editing House and a Virtual Seminar Room and will provide a platform for a number of shared activities, ranging from scholarly editions and publications to team-taught online workshops and seminars. Scholars working in teams, from a variety of international locations, will be able to contribute to user-oriented annotated digital editions, commentaries and interpretations of key texts of the Italian humanist tradition (see below). Educators from anywhere will be able to adopt and test these digital editions in their multidisciplinary teaching. We hope that the VHL weblog will also become a forum used by scholars and educators for discussions about current developments in contemporary humanities scholarship and pedagogy, including reviews and critical evaluations of related projects and resources available online.

The new texts we will be putting up include Giovanni Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante and portions of Giovanni Villani’s Croniche. In addition, we will apply VHL’s Virtual Editing House tools to the texts available through the Pico Project and, in the future, the Decameron Web texts. Heliotropia, the online journal of Boccaccio studies currently in its second year of publication, will also be part of VHL.

Many people have come together to make VHL possible. Our contributors, and your hosts at this weblog, are:

• Guyda Armstrong, Consultant, Esposizioni (email)
• Francesco Borghesi, Consultant, Pico Project (email)
• Rala Diakite, Consultant and Encoder, Villani (email)
• Cristiana Fordyce, Consultant, Esposizioni (email)
• Michael Papio, Consultant, Heliotropia Editor (email)
• Massimo Riva, Principal Investigator (email | web)
• Matthew Sneider, Consultant and Encoder, Villani (email)
• Vika Zafrin, Project Director (email | web)

Other contributors to the project include:

• Dino Buzzetti, University of Bologna (Pico Project consulting)
• Paul Caton, Scholarly Technology Group (technical expertise)
• Elli Mylonas, Scholarly Technology Group (technical expertise)

One of the major goals of this weblog is for our work process to be transparent; if some details of what we are doing are obscure, please leave us a comment or send e-mail. We hope you’ll enjoy the reading and contribute your thoughts.