ALitA 2010, Session 4B, The Varieties of Digital Experience: Digital Scholarship across American Literature
Matt Cohen (UT–Austin), “Digitization and Colonization”
Amy Hungerford (Yale), “Post*45 Goes Digital”
Elizabeth J. Vincelette (Old Dominion), “Methodology, Transparency, and the Digital Archive”
Amanda Gailey (U Nebraska), “Collected Editions and the Canon in the Digital Age”
Gailey moderated because Edward Whitley couldn’t attend.
Cohen began by reading a bit of Whitman’s verse—1891 “Passage to India.” Focus: issues from digitizing two kinds of resources—[ack, something I missed] and attempts to build “cultural resources for indigenous peoples.” Ethics and digitization, building new futures from the past, archives and creations. There is no discovery per se in an archive. Preservation schemes are at the forefront of intellectual property issues.
As examples of relevant digital archives Cohen showed two, briefly: Early Americas (MITH) on Samson Occom, and Dartmouth’s MS scans of Occom letters. Occom was a member of the Mohegan tribe.
Cohen mentioned ALibA’s concept of TCEs (Traditional Cultural Expression principles). Hitherto, indigenous media have been considered part of public domain because they’re old, but there has been activity to extend protection of burials and material artifacts to include textual artifacts. What happens re: repatriation if these MSS are held already by a research institution?—change in access policy? What about sacred content? That might apply to non-indigenous materials as well; who adjudicates, especially when there’s a conflict with library practice? (Libraries are sometimes also the adjudicators themselves.)
It’d be difficult to say that Americanists have shared core values, but there are some loci of overlap. Mukurtu as an example tool—you register and define certain indices about yourself (gender, relationship to the tribe, etc.), and it grants access based on those indices.
What if we approach via collaboration, rather than the EEBO/Elsevier way? We will write better histories, but sometimes collaboration will be impossible. Still, a habit of collaboration will enable revision of biased “certainties.”
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Amy Hungerford gave an overview of Post*45 [i.e., work on American lit since 1945]: they began(?) trying to establish a web-based journal last year. When focusing upon relatively recent materials, examples included in an article (video clip, etc.) are more likely to have copyright difficulties.
post45.research.yale.edu used to exchange papers
www.sup.org/browse.cgi?x=series&y=Post*45 is launching a monograph series under the Post*45 name
arcade.stanford.edu is an example of curated scholarly conversation
senseofcinema.com is based on periodic issues
hilobrow.com is a model for user interface
mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence has full text of a book about scholarly internet publishing and peer review; it’s a model for Post*45 (how to make it count towards tenure for someone to publish with their journal—public and useful both to writer and reader)
Three spaces—work in progress, curated, and “contemporaries” for reviews/merging of creative and critical. Will it be possible to keep the conversation up to a standard of quality to which the group is committed? Some sites try to do some of what they’re building.
Final piece is readability—harder to retain things when scrolling (little spatial impact). Scribd.com is one example that imposes visual structure with paper-like pages.
Sustainability of site: relatively relaxed sense of frequency of posting, due to other kinds of commitment that also want substantial time/effort.
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Elizabeth J. Vincelette is interested in political concerns of “recovery archiving.” Digital humanities would gain by exploring strategies from library/info studies and rhetoric/composition—importance of metacommentary, in the sense of the overt unmasking of a project’s methods (step by step) and methodology (stance/approach).
Digital archives like her dissertation project, “Independent Women,” can reveal social networks amongst now-dead individuals. When interacting with individuals’ stories, we become part of something we want to represent, critically. There’s an archiving-editing-authoring continuum, to tell stories from archives based on how the objects were used.
There are destructive activities “necessary” for preservation, e.g. dismantling a scrapbook and removing context to save the pieces that were pasted in. Then too, preserving an item does not mean “finishing” it—archives are not graves. At which point are metadata self-serving [to the researcher? unclear], and at which point extraneous?
[I missed parts of this due to post-lunch sleepiness, but what I caught also did not teach me anything new. No doubt mileage varies.]
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Amanda Gailey began by discussing the genre of the collected edition. Generally, we think of them now as posthumous sweep-ups, since Chaucer edn of 1526; example of Poems of Philip Freneau 1786(?). Boundaries are drawn around the author’s creative property and linked to sense of ownership (when texts pass from private to public ownership). Sometimes two women or minor deceased children shared a collected edition; Phyllis Wheatley C19 edn shared covers with another writer—less sacrosant property rights than imagined for white men.
[Here follows a short history of post-Bowers and Gregg American textual editing, which I didn’t bother to note down.] With the development of a visible apparatus that aspired to scientific vigor, textual editing became more professional. Now, McGann’s principles underlie “most well-funded digital editions.” [hmm—it’s not as though American textual editing grew in a USian vacuum.] NEH now requires TEI use for the Scholarly Editions grant.
Editing, and women and minority authors: need to incentivize editing of their work. Literary criticism of women and minority authors is less likely to be hagiographic than lit crit of male authors since mid-C20. During the 1920s, the main mode of textual editing was devotional.
Slide: comparison between current digital single-author projects on McGannian model (all but one, Cather, about men), versus multiple-author projects (either about women or mixed-gender). [Odd selection of projects, given that McGann thing: includes Brown’s Women Writers Project.]
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Q&A
Hungerford: Post*45 vets individuals more than content, for simplicity.
Q: what about when funding dries up?
Hungerford: from her research funds—but had to convince Yale that it should support something of use to multiple institutions’ affiliates.
Q (me): 1920s primarily devotional seems odd, a bit: was this mostly American editors working on American authors? because there were also American editors of European texts (medievalists and classicists), and those edns included apparatus.
Gailey: yes—and perhaps, till the Cold War, there wasn’t so much sense that American authors were worth the same kind of scholarly treatment.
Q: odd selection of projects on those slides—Dickinson is on the “multiple” side mostly because Harvard controls her estate.
Gailey: Dickinson got unusual attention (1892 on) because there are short texts, mostly, and is rather an anomaly in terms of how critics have always approached her.
Q: seems as though the future of digital humanities will track the future of the internet.
Gailey: one way of ameliorating the problem is via semantic web techs—declare entities and relationships amongst them (RDF).
Hungerford: at least for Post*45, trying to pull back on ultra-interactive, user-generated model, because there’s a lot of useless content and talk for talk’s sake out there. Still want to preserve some of the community-building aspect, even so.
Cohen: it’ll track how social formations change as a function of the internet, how we socialize and exchange critique.