Wed 6 Jun, 14:00-15:30
Session 7: Digital Humanities and the Solitary Scholar
David J. Birnbaum, Michael L. Norton, Linda E. Patrik, Dorothy Carr Porter, Geoffrey Rockwell, Helen Aguera
D. Porter’s introduction touched upon a panel from last year’s MLA, where someone said that collaboration that began midway through a project ended up changing the project’s scope.
D. Birnbaum spoke from the position of someone with no grants, no colleagues doing similar work, no grad student help, and no prospects for a change in circumstance. He did receive a computer from his dean, and his institution has recently begun an undergraduate apprenticeship program, albeit for freshmen. Suggestions: concentrate on low-cost projects; data entry is expensive. Try to encode semiautomatically rather than manually, and emphasize system design in order to make a contribution (vs. yet another repository). Learn to fish: do your own programming, and choose technologies you can handle yourself (try Py thon instead of Java, e.g.). [Sorry about the spacing; WP is cranky about unspaced “Py thon,” stupidly.] Join discussion listservs; though you’ll delete most messages unread, it’s helpful to be able to post inquiries cogently when truly stuck. Go to conferences to build/maintain contacts and glean ideas. Talk about your work; people in the audience may be able to help you improve it in unexpected (and useful) ways.
M. Norton began as a medieval musicologist, then worked as a programmer for twenty years because he couldn’t find work in musicology yet had learned computing skills to deal with his manuscripts. Now he teaches in a computer science department…. He found during his research that the n+1 round of questions kept changing his project’s direction and scope because he didn’t have quite enough information at any given stage of his work (during the mid-1980s); automation tech has caught up, perhaps, but now he has the problem of time (approaching retirement) and is considering a merge with extant projects to share resources.
G. Rockwell discussed two models: (1) get a grant, buy toys, hire staff, set up one’s own lab; (2), which we’re nearly able to do: use existing online services, infect the net, be (as the primary researcher) a network node, stay off the university so that they don’t own your work, and apply branding to a distributed site. Basically, autonomous vs. embedded. What can you use? —blog, wiki, Facebook, Ning, wiki, Tiddlyspot, Scribd, del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Aigaion. . . . [Linking the ones you might not know; hadn’t heard of Aigaion myself. One could add Diigo, Zotero, and photobucket.] Thus, you’re affecting random users who might talk about your work. Rockwell also suggested [I think] that one visit TAPoR and add links to a collection. Consider trading resources with local projects/centers, talking to a teaching-and-learning unit or a supercomputing group (if available).
L. Patrik teaches at a SLAC and is part of a project working on Tibetan manuscripts with people in Kathmandu and in Seattle, WA. TEI pulled her in. People who’re trying to keep up, she said, are addressing digital pedagogy: don’t only learn things for your own work, pass them to your students. It’s difficult to attract funding at a SLAC because there’s little/no IT support (often a crucial component of a grant) and no grad students. Also, deans rarely have a strong grasp of digital work (distraction from “real” research or a vital part of it?), which complicates institutional support. Patrik talked about a number of SLAC-based projects in progress, and ended by repeating her advocacy that instructors teach their students the digital techniques that they’ve come to use.
H. Aguera is an NEH program officer. She talked about an initiative with three institution-targeted programs and two intended for individual researchers; the latter are start-up grants and fellowships.
Discussion:
S. Bauman noted that not everyone can develop their own stuff, or learn tools the way that Birnbaum has.
Someone noted that forgiving someone for not learning Latin if they wanted to study medieval manuscripts would be laughable, yet one’s forgiven, often, for not “being able” to learn JavaScript and for hiring programmers instead. [Excellent point.] Norton replied that some people aren’t wired for things. Birnbaum added that some people used to be forgiven for not being able to type; now people who can’t type have trouble finding certain kinds of jobs. When many people are doing something, it’s not weird anymore. Birnbaum also said that doing your own program makes you a better philologist, in a way, than hiring a programmer, because you think about the data differently. Rockwell said that when BASIC and SmallTalk were developed, they were meant for the liberal arts and kids. Patrik said that a wider range exists, too: audio, multimedia texts.
Someone else said we’re forgetting a type of solitary scholar who gets some institutional support but has too many people to please in order to get anything out. Rockwell replied that it’s a good reason to go viral and avoid the institution.
W. McCarty [I think] concurred that viral production enables you to move before articulating precisely where you think it’s going: grants require you to tell lies and universities require that you become good at telling lies. The better one gets at something, the less one knows about the exact route a project will take till one’s nearly finished, and time becomes increasingly valuable.
V. Zafrin also agreed with the viral idea: solitude can be mediated by communication online. Being willing to talk isn’t entirely easy but is worthwhile. Is formalizing that sort of informal communication possible? Porter indicated Sinclair and Rockwell’s talk and said that in some ways there’s no such thing as a solitary scholar. Rockwell adduced Descartes’s discourse on method: one needs solitary moments of doubt in order to reflect, but scholarly solitude is a trope, really.
Someone commented that the faculty she works with aren’t reluctant so much as overwhelmed by how much time learning this stuff requires. Patrik reiterated that the interface with students has been declining.
Going back to the typewriter comment, either people will become better at simple programming concepts or the tech will become simpler to meet people.
McCarty noted that often, collaboration works well when two people with glimmers of each other’s specialities can fill some of the space between them.
People began drawing lines in terms of competencies that “ought” to pertain, and eventually D. Pitti spoke up (explicitly as support staff) about doing research with faculty (who don’t always recognize that staff are also contributing towards research goals), doing one’s own research despite having even fewer institutionally recognized paths than faculty, and so on. Staff rarely have the chance to say, “Oh, I couldn’t participate in that, it’d kill my career,” whereas pre-tenure faculty can choose to some extent. I added that some of us are technically qualified on both sides.
Patrik noted that if faculty won’t budge, appeal to deans with institutional pressure (that other school is doing something cool, and we should too).
McCarty said that because the UK does class overtly, it’s less visible in universities, whereas because Americans profess not to do class, it enters covertly into university structures and elsewhere.
Rockwell pointed out that whether you’re faculty or staff or otherwise, it’s a job. If you’re called to do something else, do it, even if it’s very very slow during off hours. [Word.]
Porter added that very few pre-tenure faculty in the U.S. will risk working on digital projects, in her experience, because they need to produce a book. Someone else noted that some Canadian universities consider digital work equal to print-based work; Porter replied that MLA says something similar but in practice, we’re not there yet.
Birnbaum noted the distinction between peer-reviewed print, long established, and electronic publications that often aren’t peer reviewed [or, I’d add, cannot be: someone would need to assess most pieces for more than one field].