Noah Wardrip-Fruin (over at Grand Text Auto) posted a response to Liz Lawley et al.’s thoughts on academic blogging. Noah asks whether academic blogging is thought of in parallel to any other mode of academic publication. That got me thinking about the VHL blog; here’s what I wrote in a comment:

[T]he Virtual Humanities Lab blog was certainly conceived as a way for us to get feedback from colleagues on a project that is very much a work-in-progress. Having been blogging for a while, I was pretty excited about it, and tend to not be worried about reception.

But that’s not how everyone with an author account on VHL views it. Repeatedly now people have expressed to me a hesitation about putting their thoughts out there. At first glance, this may look like drawing a parallel between weblog and journal publication: there seems to be a heightened sense of responsibility, given that one’s words will be etched… somewhere… for a good long time.

But I think it goes deeper than that. Odd though it may be, humanist scholars don’t tend to sit around in coffee shops talking shop. We might talk about teaching, or paper proposals we’ve submitted, or the very general thematic strokes of our research; but unless we’re specifically getting together for a work session, we don’t idly discuss the minutiae of, say, approaches to text analysis.

I am hoping that this will soon be changing, that the tradition of polished scholarly discourse in the humanities (especially, I guess, in literary studies) will expand into a more fearless exchange of ideas.

To that end, I think blogging is indispensable. But it’ll take some time to re-program ourselves to both give it sufficient attention regularly, and do so fearlessly. The problem of never-enough-time is a serious impediment to the first of those goals; I’d wager that even fewer literary studies departments look at one’s weblog articles during tenure review than would be willing to consider electronic projects in general. But for weblogging to be viewed as a valuable tool it has to be used as such first; and this is one of the principal reasons that the VHL project has a weblog.

Editing one’s posts is, of course, an option, but we are not there yet mentally. It’ll take time. So, I don’t know that I’d draw a wholesale parallel between blogging and other modes of academic expression, Noah; to me, it’s more of a general-mindset issue.

I wonder if non-humanist and non-new-media scientists view and use weblogs differently, more or less than the groups mentioned above?

Comments?

Dear all,

Paul and I are working on building the overall VHL site these days. I need a bit of brainstorming help (and if anyone’s reading, please feel free to chime in).

Simply put: every time a user enters in a URL, that user’s browser “talks” to the server hosting the site. Sometimes, the server will store unique identifying information about that particular computer so that, for instance, you don’t have to re-enter your login information at nytimes.com between visits, it just “remembers” you.

For various reasons, within each session, the VHL site will want to remember what a user is doing. For this, we have to be able to store information dynamically; in other words, we have to not only be able to put files on the server and be able to deliver them to the browser, we must also have the possibility of taking information from a user (when they click on a link, or fill out a web form) and store that for later retrieval. The question is, what kinds of information to store? Paul came up with a list, and I’ve added to it. Please take a look and tell us if we’re missing something. The list items starting with question marks are only tentative suggestions; please let us know in comments whether you think they’d be useful or not, and why. The more detail, the better.

N.B.: this isn’t a full list of features for the site. It just tackles one area of technical development. More actual web-based fun coming soon.

And so: we want to store information on at least two things: annotations and people.

For annotations we want to store at least:

• a unique ID
• text of the annotation
• IDs of the text/texts the annotation is relevant to
• the specific word or phrase that the annotation refers to [if any]
• ? do we want to have different types of annotation (as in Pico); if so, what would the types be? (I would think at least two types – one being “normal,” prose annotation of a sentence or a paragraph, and another being a variant encoding. Thoughts?)

For people we want to store:

• user name
• password
• different levels of access: it’d be nice to have an admin level (can edit others’ comments and do everything else), a participant user level (can edit own comments and post new ones), and a registration option for guest users that would remember their login info and perhaps the posts they’ve made on a forum. (It would, I think, make the site a lot more widely useful if there were a place where anyone at all could post a question or comment, regardless of their stature.) Others?
• ? email address and institution, so that we may generate lists of annotators and send email to them as a group, if we need to?

So, o Team: what’s missing from this list?

I would like to introduce myself. My name is Rala Diakite, and as you have seen, I am working on the Villani portion of the VHL. My stint as a research fellow for the Decameron Web in the year 2000 was my first experience of this dynamic project. That period found me at Brown University, as a doctoral candidate in Italian Studies. I have since completed my degree (2003), with a dissertation that compares the political vision of Giovanni Villani to that of Dante, as well as exploring Villani’s role as an early reader of Dante. My interests are Villani, of course, as well as the genre of the Italian chronicle generally. I am intrigued by the contemporaneous blossoming of the vernacular chronicle and the novella in this period, and by their areas of intersection. As Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department of Fitchburg State College, I teach courses on Italian language and culture.

Buon giorno bloggatori!

We have divided our overall work into three parts:

• the encoding and the annotation of a single large section of Villani’s “Cronica”,
• the creation of a series of thematic “showcases” which collect annotated excerpts from the “Cronica” which would be useful to both students and scholars (possible themes include natural disasters, omens and portents, the florentine economy, Villani’s use of evidence, foreign lands, etc.),
• the English translation of the above.

For now we will be focusing on the first of these three parts. We’ve finally learned how to use XML and we are beginning to work on the encoding. We’ve decided to begin our work on the final book (book 13 in some editions and 12 in others).

In our discussions with each other and with Vika we decided to focus our initial attention on three areas of encoding. The first area involves the textual and temporal breaks—book, chapters, rubrics and dates—whose encoding will help us learn the ropes. The second area is thematic. The final book of Villani—especially the initial chapters—is much involved with the phenomenon of the “signore”. We are planning to encode in such a way as to bring into relief Villani’s preoccupation with this phenomenon. Ideally users should be able to search for passages treating “tyrannical” government—its rise, its installation, its actions, its judgment by the Florentine Villani.

We’ll then move to persons in Villani’s text. Here the attributes should be few initially—we’ll add more as we proceed. Of course choosing these attributes is painful…it seems to involve a tremendous amount of highly problematic simplification. I would welcome any comments. We might characterize people:

• as “real” or “mythical” in the manner of Roberto’s encoding;
• by their place or origin, their dwelling place or their citizenship;
• by the vision Villani has of their social status (if this is relatively clear);
• by the political role they fill at any given moment in the text (”official” roles like the priorate or “unofficial” roles like that of a faction leader).

We should mention that we were lucky enough to win a berth at the Kalamazoo conference in a special session on “Text and Image in Digital Scholarship” to present our component of the project.

-Matt and Rala

My task for the Esposizioni at this time is the analysis of the rhetorical structure; specifically, I am keeping track of the rhetorical division of the commentary, which Boccaccio implemented in the expositions of his lectures. By following the unexpected divisions in which not only the text but also the commentary gets to be broken down, we watch a ‘reconstruction’ of the original text which displays Boccaccio’s own interests as well as the expectations of his audience. However, it is not easy to follow the divisions presented by the commentator, especially when one considers that we are no longer familiar with the majority of the references. In order to fully follow the explanations, and references to the commented text, it becomes necessary to rebuild the ‘lectio’, and c lean it of the endless diversions and subdivisions which can represent a true challenge.
The encoding of this ‘structure’ aims to reveal not only the practical organization of the lesson but also, and foremost, the ideology Boccaccio often desires to transmit. In fact, when we closely follow the structure Boccaccio offers for the lecture, and collate the series of ‘subdivisions’ he presents (and discusses), one comes across new categories and definitions. We know this by the fact that a certain noun, or adjective is carefully explained and often receives a lot of attention several times over the same canto or within the consecutive ones.
An interesting thing, even if very elementary, is how Boccaccio organizes his commentary. While discussing a certain verse, for example, he anticipates, or postpones various elements without respecting the chronological order of the original. For the purpose of clarity and/or the benefit of giving a complete definition of Hell, for example, Boccaccio does not hesitate to compress, in a relatively brief passage, Dante’s description, his own interpretation, Dante’s sources, and the topic(s) most familiar to the Florentine audience.
In the true spirit of the lesson, Boccaccio’s divisions and subdivisions appear to be are more dense in the first part of the commentary, that is, at the precise point where the audience needs the most a mental organization ready to receive what will be exposed later on.

A quick update on the Pico Project, the third major component of our VHL (along with Boccaccio and Villani). We are now completing the English translation of the bilingual commentary (Latin-Italian) on Pico’s Oratio De Hominis Dignitate, the introductory speech to the Conclusiones Nongentae (or 900 theses). In the meantime, Paul Caton of STG is fine tuning the 900 theses site. As soon as this final tune-up is done, we will begin testing the tools the new site makes available to scholars. Testing will be done initially by members of the Oratio team (Francesco Borghesi, Pier Cesare Bori, Dino Buzzetti, Saverio Marchignoli, Giorgio Melloni, Mike Papio and myself). Once this initial testing is completed, a selected number of Pico scholars will be officially invited to collaborate and/or provide feedback on the tools etc.. One of our immediate priorities is also studying the most efficient way of crossreferencing the existing commentary and notes on the Oratio and the 900 theses. We will need to redesign the home page of the Pico Project, which will now encompass both the Oratio and the Theses, as well as new materials that we also plan to make available (such as a selection of letters from/to Pico, in Latin and translation, care of Francesco Borghesi and various essays as well as a gallery of related images).

As Vika mentioned, we’ve just submitted an article on the Esposizioni project, so most of my attention has been focused on that of late. I’ve been doing some general background on the commentary tradition, and thinking about the peculiarities of this text as an oral commentary, in comparison with the more usual written ones. Since my main area of responsibility on the project is the literary references, I’ve also been thinking about how they should be encoded. I’ve already come across some tricky questions, such as how to show references to multiple authored works such as the Bible. I have also been wondering how to represent those instances when Boccaccio uses Dante as an authority, citing further passages in the Commedia to illustrate his reading of the first 17 cantos of the Inferno. Should these just be treated like the citations of other authors, or could we do more?
One of my long-term projects is the compilation of an über-bibliography of Boccaccio’s works in English translation, and I’ve just discovered an English translation of part of the Esposizioni (Esp., X, 52-66) which I can include. The passage was translated by Maggie Günsberg, and appears in Michael Caesar, ed., Dante: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 169-71. I only know of one other English translation of part of the Esposizioni, the Accessus, which appears in Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval literary theory and criticism c.1100-c.1375 : The commentary tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 503-19 (translated by David Wallace). Cristiana, Mike and I are working towards a new English translation of the Esposizioni, but until that appears, as far as I can tell, this is all there is! (If anyone come across any extracts from Boccaccio in English translation, especially in anthologies, then do please let me know.)