Next Wednesday the 17th I’ll be in New York, to attend the presentation of the Richard Lyman Award to one of my favorite computing humanists, Willard McCarty. If you are interested in humanities computing, work in it, and/or know Willard, come show your support and appreciation, not to mention meet interesting people:

• 3-5pm Lyman Award recipients lead a discussion of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Report on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• 5-6pm Presentation of the Award to Willard McCarty, Reader in Humanities Computing, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London
• 6-7pm Reception in the Library’s Margaret Liebman Berger Forum

If you’d like to attend, please call Martha at 919.549.0661 ext. 156 to get put on the guest list. (It’s free to attend, but they’d like to know how many people are coming, and if you tell them you’re working on something related, they might be able to introduce you to like-minded souls.) And let me know you’ll be there, perhaps we can meet up!

Dear Readers,

I would like to invite you to an upcoming presentation

When: Wednesday, May 3rd, 2 pm

What: “History in the Digital Age: Medieval Chronicler Giovanni Villani Meets the Internet”

Who: Rala Diakite, Matt Sneider and Vika Zafrin

Where: Fitchburg State College, 160 Pearl St. Fitchburg MA / Miller Oval (in Miller Hall)

This talk will provide a quick overview of recent developments in the way historical sources are being presented for use by researchers and students via the internet. This as a preface to a guided tour of the Virtual Humanities Lab, and particularly of the segment dedicated to Giovanni Villani’s Cronica, a fourteenth-century Florentine chronicle. We will explain our encoding strategies and present our work thus far, as well as demonstrating some of the available and soon-to-be available tools on the site. We will conclude with a discussion of the pedagogical potential of our digitized Villani text.

Hope to see you there!

For further information, please contact Rala Diakite at 978-665-4706 or rdiakite@fsc.edu

Dear colleague / Caro collega,

Please pass this on to interested students and peers working in Italian Studies, medieval history and any other related fields.

La preghiamo di distribuire questo annuncio agli studenti, dottorandi e colleghi potenzialmente interessati. N.B.: La versione italiana di questo annuncio segue quella inglese.

=====

The Virtual Humanities Lab (VHL) at Brown University is seeking online collaborators to participate in verifying indexes generated from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedìa di Dante and Giovanni Villani’s Cronica Fiorentina.

Participants may be qualified graduate and undergraduate students and/or their instructors. Reading knowledge of Italian and the desire to do some literary/historical research is required. Group work as well as individual work is welcomed. Participation in this endeavor, while rewarding in itself, also provides excellent training in the fields of medieval Italian studies, history, humanities computing and philology.

Further information is available at:

http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/help/guidelines_indexing.pdf

General information about the project, as well as its texts and indexes, can be accessed from

http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/

We hope you will join us in this exciting venture.

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Il Laboratorio per le Scienze Umane Virtuali (Virtual Humanities Lab) della Brown University ricerca collaboratori a distanza (dottorandi, ricercatori o docenti) disponibili a verificare l’accuratezza degli indici dei seguenti testi generati su codifica xml: Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedìa di Dante; Giovanni Villani, Cronica Fiorentina. Si offre la possibilità di contribuire attivamente ad una comunità di formazione e ricerca, all’intersezione degli studi storico-filologico-letterari e dell’informatica umanistica.

Per ulteriori informazioni sul progetto:

http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/

http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/VHL/help/guidelines_indexing.pdf

Many apologies for my protracted silence. Would you accept some exciting news as penance?

The texts are entirely online, as are people and places indexes for both the Esposizioni and the Cronica. I have also put up an About page, which links to guidelines for index verification (PDF) and for annotation (PDF), and the beginnings of a FAQ. Feedback is most welcome on all of these. Please note that all of the above links lead to a development server, which may be unstable at any time. Also, some things are working less smoothly than others; we’re working on that. At this time there are no major problems with display and encoding.

Today I also sent out a Call for Participation. This was mailed to a long list of individual addresses as well as several mailing lists (I’m pretty sure we’ve got the Humanist, Digital Medievalist, Mediev-L, AAIS and Italian Studies lists covered). If you would like to help us disseminate the announcement, please feel free to forward it to potentially interested parties. I will post the CFP separately.

Rala and Matt’s poster on their Villani work was accepted at Digital Humanities 2006. The same conference has accepted Massimo’s and my paper on collaborative scholarship. In addition, a couple of VHL-related talks will be taking place in April and May; more information about those is forthcoming.

Paul has begun working on the search engine. I can’t wait to play with it.

This is progress, folks. We’re now public! Now, we wait and see if others will join us.

Last week, Inside Higher Ed published an article by Gina Hiatt titled “We Need Humanities Labs.” Gina is the mastermind behind the Academic Ladder site, and also runs academiblog. She is a psychologist by training and does dissertation and tenure coaching for a living.

Conferences and conventions offer important opportunities for scholarly dialogue, as do online blogs. However, there are limitations to conferences (too infrequent) and blogs. What I am advocating is injecting into the humanities department some of the freewheeling dialogue found in the halls outside the conference presentation or in some of the better scholarly blogs.

[…]

People should be encouraged to attend with partly formed thoughts, poorly written paragraphs, or just an idea they want to develop. The idea is to think of all such scholarly dialogue as a laboratory. Ideas are cooked up, thrown in the test tube, and mixed with human interaction, creativity and motivation. These experiments will produce better written and less painfully produced dissertations or publications, and might engender a “creative humanities hothouse.”

I’ve drafted a first version of the Guidelines for Annotating VHL Texts. It is available here [PDF]. I’d like to invite comments on it from now until Wednesday Nov. 2nd, at which point the final version will go up in the help section of the annotating interface. The document will also be linked from the discussion forum.

As we enter the next phase of the Pico Project (now migrating into VHL), a few issues are worth addressing. There are about 35-40 scholars worldwide now willing to participate in the annotation process. Needless to say, for this process to be successful, specific guidelines must be set in place (which we are currently discussing). For instance, a smaller group of scholars, located in Spain, Mexico and Argentina, are planning to work on the first ever translation of Conclusiones CM into Spanish. This brings up the broader question of whether translation (from Latin or Italian into English and Spanish) may become a consistent and relevant feature of VHL. For example, while we initially assumed that annotations to the Latin text would be done in English, we cannot exclude the possibility that scholars may prefer to write annotations in Italian or Spanish (or Latin, or French). On the technical side, Vika suggested that the Forum would be the appropriate medium in which issues rising from translation may be addressed. I look forward to Vika posting her thoughts about this.

Last week I attended the Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities at the University of Virginia. It was a great time, and in many ways a rather unusual conference. For one, this humanist event was in part sponsored by the National Science Foundation (!!), thanks to the tireless work of Anita Jones and others. Most notably, it was more of a workshop than a conference environment. We were specifically asked to talk not so much about our own projects as about the state of the field and where we, as tool builders, would like to take it. I knew about half the people there from past contact, and was glad to meet so many new (to me) scholars all of whom had interesting things to say.

On Wednesday evening there was a welcoming reception and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a well-spoken computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Here are some fragmentary notes from his talk.

Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.

Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.

Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.

Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.

We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail. (That is, as I understand it: email, web pages and other electronic artifacts have become so ubiquitous, and so central to everyday life, that we can no longer think of them as fakes, substitutes for physical things. They are just as real.)

Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.

Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.

Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.

Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.

Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorce between matter-noun and matter-verb.

Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (”if it’s human, it’s good”).

People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.

…..

On Thursday and Friday, we talked. And talked, and talked. Instead of trying to edit my aphoristic scribblings to recap all of what we talked about, I’ll point you to Geoffrey Rockwell’s (and, in small part, my) comprehensive summit notes on the TADA wiki. (TADA is the Text Analysis Developers Alliance whose motto is, endearingly, Real Humanists Make Tools.)

The main thing I came away with is this. There are many people currently building digital tools for the humanities. The tools themselves may be differently specialized, but there are many similarities in what motivates us and what we hope the near future will bring. On our way out of the summit many of us put our names down on one or more of the six (?) major topics discussed at the summit. I hope the conversations, and collaboration, will continue.

Posting the text of an email I’ve received:

ACLS OPENS COMPETITION FOR DIGITAL INNOVATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce its new Digital Innovation Fellowship program, in support of digitally based research projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. These fellowships, created with the generous help of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are intended to support an academic year dedicated to work on a major scholarly project of a digital character that advances humanistic studies and best exemplifies the integration of such research with use of computing, networking, and other information technology-based tools. The online application for the fellowship program is located at http://ofa.acls.org; applications must be completed by November 10, 2005 (decisions to be announced in late March 2006).

This is the first national fellowship program to recognize and reward humanistic scholarship in the digital sphere, and to help establish standards for judging the quality, innovation, and utility of such research. Many scholars have been working in the humanities for years with such tools as digital research archives, new media representations of extant data, and innovative databases—and now the ACLS sees an important opportunity to start identifying and providing incentive for distinctive work, on a national basis. “Information technology can be the means for scholars to answer new and old questions that have so far resisted our curiosity and our effort. This program will support a rising generation of scholars in making exactly that kind of progress,” says James O’Donnell, provost of Georgetown University, Chair of the ACLS Executive Committee of Delegates, and author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998).

Up to five Digital Innovation Fellowships will be awarded in this competition year, for tenure beginning in 2006-2007. As this program aims to provide the means for pursuing digitally-based scholarly projects, the fellowship includes a stipend of up to $55,000 to allow an academic year’s leave from teaching, as well as project funds of up to $25,000 for purposes such as access to tools and personnel for digital production, collaborative work with other scholars and with humanities or computing research centers, and the dissemination and preservation of projects.

The ACLS criteria for judging applications include the project’s intellectual ambitions and technological underpinnings, likely contribution as a digital scholarly work to humanistic study, satisfaction of technical requirements for a successful research project, degree and significance of preliminary work; potential for promoting teamwork and collaboration (where appropriate), and articulation with local infrastructure at the applicant’s home institution.

Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States as of the application deadline date and must hold a Ph.D. degree conferred prior to the application deadline. However, established scholars who can demonstrate the equivalent of the Ph.D. in publications and professional experience may also qualify.

Applications for the 2005-06 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program
Deadline: November 10, 2005
Contact: American Council of Learned Societies, 633 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Phone: (212) 697-1505
E-mail: sfisher@acls.org
Web: www.acls.org/difguide.htm

There’s a text analysis summit going on at McMaster University right now. It sounds like loads of fun. Thanks to G Zombie for the pointer to the Text Analysis Developers Alliance blog, adorably (?) subtitled “What Hackers Do When We’re Not Coding”.

I’m not clear on whether this blog is specifically for the summit or a more general enterprise, but regardless, I’m adding it to our list of links. Good reading.

Just to let you know, the inaugural issue of the Digital Medievalist is up, featuring our article: ‘Towards the electronic Esposizioni: the challenges of the online commentary’. A full list of the other articles is here (I’m having my usual browser troubles, so this is via the MEDTEXT-L archive). Enjoy!

This past Saturday I presented a paper titled “Commentary, Annotation and the Virtual Humanities Lab” at the annual NEMLA conference, conveniently held in Cambridge, MA this year. I was an odd fit into the panel on adaptation, but it seems to have worked out beautifully.

Sadly, Kim Honeyford didn’t make it to the convention because of illness. This left three presenters. Being held as it was at 8:30am on a Saturday, we weren’t really expecting much in the way of an audience. We got two people, which was… intimate, but actually rather lively.

Michael V. DiMassa, a librarian from Yale, talked about adaptations of Ivanhoe, particularly the 1952 film, which took something like a decade and a half to make and in the end was a surprising mix of faithfulness to period detail and complete disregard for some important plot points.

Mark Rowell Wallin, who organized the session, talked about adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. He discussed at length the broken-telephone chain of the 1995 BBC series (starring Colin Firth, and very much worth watching in your humble narrator’s opinion) and then Bridget Jones’ Diary, which is an adaptation not of Austen’s novel but of the BBC series.

And I presented the VHL. The audience was not very familiar with humanities computing, so the paper was mostly a basic introduction to semantic encoding and its possible function as a scholarly argument. A significant portion of the talk is about collaboration, but this part is a bit superficial and I plan to expand that topic much further, so any comments and criticisms and pointers to literature are most welcome. Naturally, I was inclined to talk about adaptation, which I address in the end of the paper. If you’d like to read it, you can find it here (PDF, 108K). The handout I gave to people is here (PowerPoint file, 999K).

Yesterday I gave a talk about VHL, online collaboration in the humanities and their impact on teaching at the day-long faculty showcase here at Brown. Although the Q&A was lively, overall I’d say the reception was lukewarm at best.

Presenting as I did in the afternoon, after having heard five or six speakers before me, I wasn’t surprised at the reception: everybody else was there to talk about WebCT, the course management software that Brown uses. This was WebCT’s show.

Given the title of the showcase, it was strange to me that the Instructional Technology Group representatives spoke of… well, nothing besides WebCT. It appears that many faculty members at Brown are being introduced to the pedagogical possibilities that computing affords only, or mostly, through WebCT. The brilliantly competent people at the ITG who create amazing Flash and Java animations at the professors’ request, and help out in general, seem to be doing this almost entirely within the WebCT framework. I think that this is a misguided strategy that is actually hurting the pursuit of knowledge.

Necessary disclaimer: I do not actually have a problem with the idea of course management software. But it seems that faculty here at Brown who come to using electronic tools in their teaching through WebCT seem to be by degrees less forthcoming to share the knowledge and tools they’ve created with people who do not work for them or study with them.

One big advantage of course management software is that it allows for electronic distribution of copyright-protected material to only those individuals registered for a course. An important feature, but one also available by other means: password-protecting individual files is easy. The same goes for electronic dissemination of grades: although, depending on the number of students involved, secure areas might take longer to set up, course management software is certainly not essential.

Our information technologists have integrated WebCT with wonderful electronic resources, such as the Brown Electronic Audio Reserve System (EARS). This has been rightly praised, but does not outweigh the negatives of using the software. These negatives are many.

The interface is clunky. About 70% of the people who had used it vocalized their frustration in this regard yesterday. It is not intuitive, it isn’t designed with multiple user types in mind, it does not allow a professor to see what a student would see, and it uses godawful mid-1990s icons. Okay, so the last one is an aesthetic preference, but really, aren’t we past clip art now?

Most importantly, course management software presumes that educators do not want to share their work. It gives you every opportunity to hide. Most materials contained in course management systems are unavailable for view by interested parties who are not directly involved with the course. Some systems (like CourseWorks, used by Columbia) permit faculty to allow greater access to their work. From what I’ve seen at Brown, however, faculty actually prefer to remain proprietary about the contents of their courses. Because we are at the beginning of a semester, and Brown has a class-shopping period for undergraduates, you can take a look at what’s on offer using a guest account. This account will be unavailable after February 11th, however; without it, most course websites look something like this. The most you get in these introductory pages is the occasional syllabus.

I talked about collaboration, of course, and about technologies that we plan to use for annotation of texts. Adapted, they could potentially help students to learn textual criticism techniques and professors to make comments on student work. But the mention of asking students to put their work on the web with unrestricted access was met with scepticism. Students, some said, need a safe space, a classroom or a closed community of some sort, to feel entirely free to express themselves. While feeling safe is important, students spend their lives online expressing their opinions in email, various forms of live chat and on newsgroups. Webcasting every class session might take the whole knowledge-sharing concept too far; but a faculty member who makes their materials widely available and/or asks students to publicly post some of their work does them a service. It’s rhetoric practice, and practice in expository writing. The feedback you get is both exhilarating (”I’m not learning in a vacuum, there are other people interested in the same thing”) and hugely useful in improving writing skills. I’d go so far as to predict that people who spend a lot of time communicating on the net will eventually make more engaging conference presenters. And goodness knows, we need some of that too.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare is the most shining example of what happens when you share your knowledge. The risk of people “stealing” your ideas and materials may be marginally greater than when you publish in print; but in the end, are we in the business of creating and passing on knowledge, or in the business of hoarding it? The world seems to be loving OpenCourseWare. MIT’s move promotes collegiality and sparks interest in “academic” subjects. It demystifies learning and makes it pleasurable, it sparks curiosity.

Course management software makes it easy for faculty to put stuff online even if they don’t really know what they are doing. But the resources Brown is spending on this could be put to better use by giving people support to disseminate knowledge, tools and materials in a way more balanced between public and private.

On Sunday, things were generally slower, as often happens on the last day of a conference. It was a half-day, and everybody was tired; consequently, although the presentations themselves were interesting, my notes on them ended up more laconic.

Jean-Guy Meunier talked of two related but distinct projects, CARAT and SATIM. (The latter had been presented in more depth the previous day by his student Dominic Forest.) CARAT is an approach that expands to “computer assisted reading and analysis of text”; SATIM is a tool, a piece of software, for text analysis. CARAT, Meunier said, is a refusal of viewing reading and analysis as automatable processes. The computer is seen as a tool, not a robot; the work is performed using an interpretive, as opposed to analytical, paradigm.

Here, Meunier is advocating for building software that learns, as opposed to software that only computes according to pre-established, static algorithms. The CARAT abstract from ACH/ALLC 2001 gives more detail on learning software, in section 2 titled “Methodology.”

Next, Pamela Asquith and Peter Ryan gave us a tour of the Kinji Imanishi Digital Archive Project, dedicated to a remarkable Japanese scientist and mountaineer. With this one… well, like HyperPo, it just has to be seen. What a well-made site, both information-wise and aesthetically.

In the course of presenting the project itself, Asquith and Ryan spoke of design types. I know next to nothing about them, but perhaps they are worth research. The four types of design mentioned are: system-centered; user-centered; interaction design (bridges the first two); and situated activity (unclear to me what exactly this is, but Lucy Suchman wrote about it in 1987).

Eugene Lyman presented the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. A good talk involving a lot of common-sense wisdom about usability. Ironically, the project’s site merely provides information about the project, which is being slowly released on a CD-ROM. And get this: you can only run the SGML version on Windows. If you’ve got a Mac, it’s HTML only, presumably with some semantic functionality missing. Usability, indeed.

Marc Pladmonton spoke of “Computer-assisted phonetic analysis of English poetry.” Can we quantify beauty, he asked? Can computers give us insights with regard to poetic beauty? His hypothesis was the following: poetry that is not melodious would have many unpleasant, hard-to-pronounce consonants, whereas melodious poetry would contain many pleasant-sounding vowels. Pladmonton did a phonetic analysis of poems by Browning and Tennyson, and found the results almost identical.

So he presented this approach as a tested one. Unfortunately, he has not tested it against a more random sample of the English language — prose, for example, or contemporary poetry. The approach is interesting, to be sure; but the research did not have a control group, and is thus not complete.

Jason Boyd spoke about REED (Records of Early English Drama). The site is dedicated to “Patrons and Performances,” and the project’s current aim is to “facilitate… research by undertaking the challenging task of abstracting the ‘hard’ data from these often ambiguous and imperfect historical documents and by enabling the user to effectively search this data through multiple avenues and angles which encompass a spectrum of research interests.” Interesting; certainly worth it to keep an eye on this one.

Finally, Elaine Toms presented the results of a web-based survey she and colleagues conducted, in a talk titled “Modelling the humanities scholar at work.” Is there a “generic” humanities scholar, they wondered, in terms of their use of e-texts and electronic text tools? If not, are there groupings with common sets of characteristics? Much statistical data flew about, and Toms made recommendations for where to go next in humanities computing. I admit to being sceptical about the results: the pool of surveyed humanists was both very small (under 300 people, I think) and heavily skewed towards computing humanists. In addition, from what I remember of the survey (which I took, and which is no longer online), it wasn’t constructed particularly well. Too bad, since the kind of data that Toms (along with Geoffrey Rockwell, Ray Siemens, Lynne Siemens and Stefan Sinclair) is after would actually be very useful. Perhaps, based on this experience, a more effective and thorough survey might be conducted in the near future, provided that the funding gods smile on the idea.

Picture this: Sunday afternoon. Everybody exhausted. The last keynote is coming up: how do you think it would go? Well, I’ll tell you what: Steve Ramsay made sure the conference went out with a bang. He didn’t just speak but performed, enthusiastically praising pattern and cracking effortless jokes of varying subtlety. His talk was so good that when the videos are published I’ll be watching it repeatedly, to relive the sheer pleasure of hearing it, and again to get inspired when I’m feeling down. Here are just a few things that Steve touched upon.

- It’s easy to use computers to amass empirical data about texts; it’s harder to make these data fully participate in the dialogue and research of the “hard” humanities.
- We [in humanities computing] are not out to provide objective solutions to interpretive problems.
- If you love computers very much, they will eventually lead you to study mathematics.
- Diagrams should offer readers the open possibility of interpretive insight. (insert pipe dreams of a 3D, rhizomatic diagram of, say, The Decameron)
- A good humanities research methodology should enjoy as much serendipity as possible. (I particularly like this one. It encourages us to expose ourselves to as many new experiences as possible, because otherwise, how are you going to get increased serendipity?)
- Some things you guess… or choose, based on past experience, possibly based on years of study. Or you could stand back and enjoy the variety of possibilities. A computer, however, refuses to choose arbitrarily, so you are forced to make concrete decisions.
- [Ergo,] Software must explicitly assert its utter lack of neutrality. (Through good documentation, sorely lacking in the field!)

There was much more, but I was too mezmerized to write it down.

Thus ends the Face of Text trip report. Corrections, conversation and competing conceptions cheerfully craved.

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.

[day one continued]

On to John Unsworth’s keynote, then. It was titled “Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation.” He spoke of the ways in which we value and attend to works of art, which segued into a discussion of how (and why) forms of attention in humanities computing change over time.

Most of the talk was about tools. Unsworth whizzed us through a fast and thorough history of humanities computing tools, starting with old gems like TUSTEP and mentioning also TACT. These are useful for gathering quantifiable data; but, Unsworth said, statistical methods have had a “limited vogue,” not because the tools aren’t there, but because up until lately, the available tools did not answer the questions that are most interesting to humanists. Such as: what don’t we know?

Humanities aren’t about problem solving, he said, but about appreciation. There are tools, and then there are texts as tools (like dictionaries). Archives are also tools, and here we heard of those sprouted by IATH, in particular the Rossetti Archive and the Blake Archive. (Unsworth did not fail to remark that none of these archives have a long-term plan for preservation; I wonder if computing humanists are using “Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature” in their work?)

These and other archives are fascinating projects that, among other things, model their subject matter. Modeling projects, Unsworth said, strives to show us not so much what’s there as what is no longer there; and there is a difficult problem inherent in distinguishing what you do and do not know for sure.

So he proposes that visualization is the Next Step in humanities computing. This proposal reiterates what has been proposed by others before, but contextualizes it perfectly. Unsworth’s talk showed a nicely presented, logical evolution of the field. Now that we’ve got a healthy amount of theory down, complete with as-yet unrealized Exciting Ideas and the beginnings of technology that will help us realize them, it’s time to focus on aesthetics. Visualization, then, seems a natural next point of focus. It’s no wonder that humanists don’t like the word “tool”: it carries implicit baggage of heavy, repetitive tedium. Wouldn’t it be nice someday, Unsworth asked us, instead of telling our colleagues “this is a tool for text mining,” to be able to propose to them: “would you like to play a game of text exploration?”

(Ivanhoe comes to mind again. Please oh please, someone, make this excitement public already…)

The audience chuckled appreciatively. Yes, we all want to play.

I confess, the afternoon sessions took place towards the end of a very long and saturated day. This batch was more presentation of specific projects than general theory; instead of trying to summarize them all here, I’ll cheat and point you to the five abstracts available online for your perusal.

Now that Thanksgiving has passed and my laptop has a shiny new hard drive (the old one died; and when did you last back up your data?), I am catching up on my blogging. It’s been quiet here. This trip report is rather long, so I will split it up into several posts. Any misrepresentation of what others said at the conference is, of course, entirely my fault, and corrections from participants are most welcome. My own reactions are interspersed; where it’s not obvious which thoughts are mine and which are the speaker’s, I’ve put mine in italics.

In late November, I went to McMaster for a most excellent conference organized by Geoffrey Rockwell and his colleagues. The Face of Text: Computer Assisted Text Analysis in the Humanities was a three-day extravaganza of lucid thought eloquently presented, stimulating conversation, and surprisingly good beer at the graduate student pub. As full disclosure, I’ll also state that I discovered my quota in playing pool: one ball in per game. It’s clear that I need to attend more conferences with pool tables.

Highlights in chronological order, then. Friday started off with Prof. Rockwell’s presentation of the conference and of TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), under whose auspices the conference was held. TAPoR is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and is co-hosted at six Canadian universities. It’s a wonderful project; their site is worth a look or three.

Stéfan Sinclair presented HyperPo, a toolset that he is currently developing independently from TAPoR, but that will be integrated into the portal later on. Sinclair wants to focus on tools that provide user friendliness, and so far he is succeeding admirably. HyperPo can take any reasonably short text you give it and present it in a number of ways that are both clear and fun to play with. Word frequency, cooccurrences, a concordance of sorts, word distribution graphs, Oulipian functions like the ability to search for palindromes, anagrams, pangrams… and that’s just for now. More exciting visualization toys coming soon, watch that space.

Jerome McGann’s keynote was the first of six. (!) I’d never heard him speak live; what a treat. McGann spoke of the gap in communication between computing humanists and non-computing humanists, something that became a recurring topic during the conference, and stated that the problem was institutional. Using the word “tools” with non-computing humanists will turn them off, he said; but he also claimed that throwing out common terminology, such as TEI and XML, turns off the minds of your interlocutors.

Terminology in conversation, and indeed in publication (which is one way of conversing for academics, no?), is indeed a fine line to walk. Still, the statements above were perhaps a bit too categorical for me, too black-and-white. Conversation starts small, and hopefully grows outward; so there is plenty of time to fine-tune your speech to your audience. McGann’s implicit point about keeping audience foremost in mind, though, is well taken.

We don’t have an integrity of approach to the new media in humanities computing as a whole. McGann, along with NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship), are going after this institutional problem.

NINES is based at UVA, but is separate from IATH. Its purpose is to integrate peer-reviewed electronic scholarly activity. They want scholars to go about doing their traditional work in an easy-to-grasp, non-forbidding electronic format. This goal is being pursued in two different ways. On one hand, they are putting together a set of traditional editorial boards, which will act as a peer-reviewing and vetting mechanism. On the other hand, easy-to-use tools are being built.

Sounds great. I haven’t looked at the NINES website in depth yet, but the NINES thinking along the lines of accessibility to non-computing humanists does ring a familiar bell, where VHL’s work is concerned. That’s gratifying.

Some of this keynote was, of course, devoted to the Ivanhoe Game. There was much discussion of the ludic in research, and whether the Ivanhoe Project is a game or a playspace; but it does not seem to be public yet, so I’ll not go into details here.

After a break, David Hoover spoke on “(De)Facing the Text: Irradiated Textuality and Deformed Interpretations.” Some of the key points from that talk:

- Thesis: valorizing instability of texts and celebrating indeterminacy of interpretation are likely to lead us astray.
- We forget that all texts are marked, semantically and graphically; they are not containers of meaning but rather algorithms for generating themselves.
- Hoover likes deforming poems, rewriting them as a sort of call-and-response with the original author. Is this interpretation or not? Hoover brings in McGann’s claim that “interpreting a poem after it has been deformed clarifies the secondary status of interpretation.” [But isn’t a deformed poem a different text altogether? What specifically does “deformation” have to do with the status of interpretation?]
-Useful reminder: it is important to discard “incorrect” interpretation arising from one’s own cultural context. (For example, Shakespeare’s use of the word “gay” does not in itself lend a work to queer-studies analysis.)

Ray Siemens spoke about “Modelling Humanistic Activity in the Electronic Scholarly Edition.” We model texts, Siemens said; but let’s go further and model humanistic activity itself, so that we may better understand how electronic environments can best serve that activity. Excellent paper, indeed so saturated with information that I failed to keep good notes, finally giving up and asking Ray for his PowerPoint presentation, which he graciously promised to provide. (As an aside, computing humanists’ generosity in sharing knowledge is astounding, and one of my favorite features of this field as a whole.)

Patrick Juola spoke of “Proving and Improving Authorship Attribution Technologies.” Authorship attribution is an old problem, he said, traceable at least to the late 19th century. The assumption seems to be: there exists an authorial fingerprint, omnipresent and unchangeable, and detectable by some sort of black magic (Patrick’s words). To get better results when proving authorship, we need to use more information, more common information, more unconscious information.

I confess, I am sceptical about (and thus biased against) the reliability of authorship attribution in any form. Patrick’s example of tracing a misspelled “toutch” to link different texts to the same person is all right, but there do exist common misspellings in any culture. How do you know which of a dozen teenage authors under consideration consistently use “wierd” instead of “weird”? Etc. I may be unfair here, but there has yet to be an authorship attribution tool that convinces me of its usefulness. So far, they all seem too unreliable.

I’ve arrived at John Unsworth’s keynote; it’s long, so I’ll finish this post here. Until next time, may the gods of computing and black magic be with you.

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?

James Cummings, on the Digital Medievalist mailing list, mentioned this project about the Cistercian Order based at the University of Sheffield in the UK. It’s an impressive, well-done site: informative, visually uncluttered and smooth. Check out especially the Multimedia section, with its informative little Flash movies and picture tours of the abbeys. Well done.

Meanwhile, the call for papers is out for ACH/ALLC 2005.

A major conference on paratexts will be held in Italy this November: I dintorni del testo: approcci alle periferie del libro. It’s a huge, weeklong event, with the first three days in Rome (15-17 November 2004), followed by two days in Bologna (18-19 November). To judge by the programme, the conference will cover all types of paratexts from the first printed books to the electronic age; there are several papers on digital resources and electronic editions, including one by George Landow on Hypertext as Paratext. The provisional programme is here, and the conference home page here
(all text in Italian).