We have reached a point in our biennial NEH grant period when we can make a general assessment of our progress and look carefully at upcoming challenges. I would like to publicly praise our project director for her tireless efforts in keeping all of us committed and getting things done. Thanks to Vika and Paul, great progress has been made in the overall design infrastructure of VHL. One of the major challenges we have encountered so far is the relative gap in the advancement of the various projects that compose VHL (Esposizioni, Conclusiones and Cronica). The encoding of Esposizioni is proceeding at good pace (thanks in particular to the excellent work done by Roberto, this semester, but also thanks to feedback from all members of the team, Mike in particular, and Guyda). The Pico Project is now ready to enter a new, exciting phase, that of active, collaborative annotation, involving some 25-30 scholars over three continents (our thanks to Francesco Borghesi for all his painstaking work of coordination, over the past few months). Pico and Esposizioni are more advanced than the Villani project, and a genuine effort will have to be made now for the latter to meet the goals we assigned ourselves for the second year of our grant. While the different stages of development of the various projects do not represent a problem per se, it is of the utmost importance that we try to bring them all to a level in which the common framework and interface provided by the VHL can be effectively exploited. This is particularly true for the Boccaccio–Dante-Villani component, as the possibility of cross-referencing these texts is greater and also depends on our encoding choices. First of all, it is crucial that the XML encoding schemes for both Esposizioni and Villani continue to be publicly discussed and tested, hoping for a feedback from the scholarly community at large. Documenting our encoding practice, as we go, is therefore essential. The blog is an excellent tool for this purpose. The more we blog about our work-in-progress, including our doubts, problems and difficult choices, the more feedback we can expect from our team members as well as scholars elsewhere. Moreover, we can now begin to at least think forward to further developments of VHL. As you remember, its two fundamental components are what we call the Editing House and the Seminar Room. Both together make up our Laboratory (or Workshop). Both share the same platform and a suite of tools to be developed as we go. Let’s think of these two components as both virtual meeting and working spaces and a set of scholarly and pedagogical practices. While the Editing House is taking shape, we should also begin to envision what the Seminar Room may be like. Searchable and interactively annotated editions of our texts provide also a platform for a number of learning activities. When we look at encoding, we should always keep this (its potential application in the “virtual classroom”) in mind. On the annotation side, the Pico Project may serve as a prototype. The experiment in collaborative annotation about to begin can also be a test for interfacing research and pedagogical activities: annotating can be conceived as an ongoing seminar in which participants learn from each other (the complexity of Pico’s text imposes more than allows this). I expect our weblog to be also a venue where methodological discussion about the annotation process and its procedures takes place. Next semester, the Decameron Web will also be “reactivated” for the course I’ll be teaching again for the first time in four years: I hope this will offer us another opportunity for a general updating of its content as well as for thinking about its potential improvement within the framework of VHL.

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?

There’s an article in today’s Guardian online about academic weblogging; there are lots of links, and some thoughts about issues such as educational applications, questions of copyright, and the implications for research and peer-review.

I received my PhD in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College. From 2001 to 2003, I was the NEH Decameron Web Project Director in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University. From 2003 to 2004, I was a post-doctoral fellow in the same department working on the Esposizioni, and the Decameron Web. Presently, I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. My areas of research are Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, and the Florentine intellectuals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. My research interests are: rhetoric, linguistics and the medieval art of preaching. I am also a member of the editorial board of Heliotropia.
For the VHL, I work on the Esposizioni   with particular attention to the Florentine audience and the reception of Boccaccio’s commentary. Being an editor for the Esposizioni allows me to dive into a newly found passion: markup theory.

I finished my PhD in Italian Studies at Brown in 1998 with a dissertation on Masuccio Salernitano and am currently Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. My current research interests include Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, the Italian novella and the teaching of literature in the hypertext environment. Publications include Keen and Violent Remedies: Social Satire and the Grotesque in Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino (2000), Concordance to the Decameron (2001) and articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Masuccio, the novella, Fellini and the Tavianis. I’m editor of Heliotropia, online editor of Lectura Dantis, co-editor of the Progetto Pico and two NEH-funded projects: the Decameron Web and the present Virtual Humanities Lab. My work on this latter project will be directed principally toward the Esposizioni.