Day two, Saturday, started with Julia Flanders’ keynote titled “Text Analysis and the Problem of Pedantry.” Julia is an engaging speaker, and it is tough to do descriptive justice to any talk she gives. McMaster techies recorded the entire conference (or was it just the keynotes?) on video, which they will be making available on the conference website. When this is done, I highly recommend watching Julia’s talk. In the meantime, here are some disjointed notes (any particularly clever turns of phrase are Julia’s own; most of the rest I’m paraphrasing):

- Why do we feel the way we do about detail? How do our tools engage detail-related concerns?
- Expressions such as “…and the like” and “et cetera” connect details to a larger whole. (vz: It occurs to me that providing one or two detailed examples followed by “et cetera” makes them more than mere examples: it singles them out as exemplary of a category, elevates their status.)
- Textual analysis is caught up in a methodological bind. Historically, it has tried to be Scientific; at the same time, alliances with the more empirical sciences are treated with suspicion.
- Pedants, far from being innocuous grudges, hold standards and convictions about scholarship. These are loudly voiced and hard to evade.
- The mark of a pedant is “the itch of contradicting great men on very slight grounds.” (This quote was borrowed from Richard Bentley, 18th-century textual critic.)
- So attention to detail is both important and unattractive.
- Tools (!) like TextArc may make quantitative analysis more attractive to people who do not consider themselves That Kind of Scholar.
- We are challenged to project ourselves through detail on to a larger something-else. Use pattern as a clue to something, a further causality.
- The role of the interface (there’s that all-important visualization again) in expressing text analysis has changed. It heightens and alters our perceptions, seeks to stimulate an open-ended interpretive process.
- Pedantry makes explicit (postmodernism provides other clues) that totality - of a text, a corpus, a biography - is an illusion.
- We have to not only seek and value the pattern, but be inquisitive as to why certain patterns seek us out, and why we build the tools we build to seek them.

The concept of completeness in presenting research results has long bothered me. Conference papers, articles, books - especially books - are expected to be nigh unto perfectly researched. The impossibility of such an endeavor (nothing would ever be written!) does not entirely discard this expectation. I think VHL is partially addressing this issue. One of our aims, as I understand it, is to allow scholars to annotate a tiny bit of text, perhaps draw a parallel between two or more segments where the connection may not be obvious… It’s crucial to have a space where people can present an idea that may well be more free-discourse than the result of months of research. This kind of environment has the potential to stimulate public humanistic conversation on a large scale, unhindered by the months it takes to publish an article or a book and possibly years to see a published response to it.

The morning session brought us Claire Warwick’s analysis exploring whether scholars of English literature actually use computational methods in their research. Her findings are predictably disappointing; there are smatterings here and there, but humanities computing continues to be on the fringe in English studies. In the end, the presentation confirmed, for a specific field of literary inquiry, what we already knew about the general [non-]use of computing in the humanities.

Following this, Susan Brown presented The Orlando Project, which - hooray, finally! - is going at least partially public. The public site contains no more than teasers, but it is a very exciting women’s-writing project indeed.

Finally, Paul Scifleet and Concepcion S. Wilson from South Wales spoke about “The Markup Analysis Engine.” These are heavily technical application development folks; I did not understand much of their talk. The abstract, though, is available here.

After a break, another keynote, this time from John Bradley. “What you (fore)see is what you get,” he bluntly states in the title. A clear, mostly easy-to-follow presentation of some complex models, all of which speak to a known truth: our tools affect what we do, and what we can do. Bradley quoted a 2001 paper by Brockmann et al.: “[T]he functions on which research in the humanities depends are neither well understood nor well supported by librarians.” Before we build tools, we need to figure out what scholars actually do. Through the analysis of scholars’ practices, Bradley said, we can conceptualize the type of information environment that would best support their activities.

Simple enough. Who are your users? What are they likely to do with your gadget? But first - what do they do now, and how will your gadget help them do it better?

In the course of his talk, Bradley presented four models (or perhaps categories?) of a computing humanist’s mental activity. I’ll try to quickly summarize them here; perhaps they will be useful to us in the future.

- The conduit model. The web itself; digital editions; digital libraries. Paradigm: “user has access — user will be supplies.” Really, this is the point of view of an editor. It does not take into account what the user will actually do.
- The markup model. Editor works with the tags, not with the concepts that the tags represent. (Here I have to disagree: how are the tags created in the first place? Shouldn’t you find the concepts you want to encode, before you encode them? Perhaps the point here is, sometimes encoding happens without a whole lot of thought put into the actual tagging scheme.)
- The transformation model. User controls transformation automaton (tool), sees results. Text passes through transformation automaton, into results.
- The object model. User/researcher reads text, records and organizes notes into an annotation collection. The text in question is connected to each of the notes in the annotation collection. Of course, users of a particular resource may have different levels of access.

A chock full of McMaster presentations was next. Jenna Wells and Madeleine Jeay presented Hyperlistes (site in French). Their project presents medieval French texts in which long lists - of things, actions, human qualities - were a common trope. The lists are cross-linked, so that a user may find, for example, all of the texts containing lists in which one of the items is wine. Or thieving. Or Gawain. You get the idea. This project is particularly near to my heart; both the primary texts and the researchers’ approach to them resemble my own work on Roland.

Nicholas Griffin (McMaster) and James Chartrandhe (Open Sky Solutions) presented the Bertrand Russell Archives, a well-done project about the British philosopher. To finish up, Stéfan Sinclair gave us a more in-depth tour of HyperPo. I’ve raved about it before; seriously, the only way to fully grasp its coolness is to go play with it. Well, what are you waiting for? Click! Play!

Afternoon session brought us a demo of LetSum, a legal text summarizer developed at the Université de Montréal (abstract, tool is not online from what I can see), a paper on the Trend Mining Framework (an approach to research that seems to combine the dream of the semantic web and the never-ending search for pattern), and a presentation on just-in-time text analysis by two researchers attempting to hack Google.

Thus ends the second day… or the official part of it, anyway. A tasty and jovial banquet was held, at the end of which many of us decided that we hadn’t had nearly enough of each other and headed to the bar for beer and pool. We played in pairs; my partner, who was most excellent, was also supremely patient.

Day three, perhaps, tomorrow.