Project report available

The report of this project by the Sustaining Digital Scholarship for Sustainable Culture group is now available as a pdf (web version coming soon). Lasting Change (available by clicking here) is a Knowledge Synthesis on the Digital Economy funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada from August to December 2010.

We would be happy to learn of people's reaction to the report via this blog.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this report either directly or indirectly.

Susan

Funders and Sustainability

Here's an interesting initiative on the part of the ACH to try to get DH funders to put guidelines in place for sustaining the results of the research they fund (reposting from Humanist List):

Bethany Nowviskie, on behalf of the ACH (Association for Computers in the Humanities) is seeking ideas for an open letter they are drafting to the funders of digital humanities projects, advocating for the establishment of data curation or management plans and open source / open access guidelines.

You can add your comments/thoughts to this Google doc or you can contribute to the discussion on DHAnswers.

Sustainability, History and Math

OK, so I'm finally posting.  Granted, at this point, I don't know if anyone is reading this anymore.

Preamble

 For the past few weeks, I have been working on a project in Ontario, Canada that is looking into the future sustainability of digital projects in Canada as a part of the federal governments policy on Canadas Digital Advantage. 

Because the project is based in Canada and addressing specifically Canadian concerns, we are coming to conclusions regarding sustainability that are radically different than, say, our American or British colleagues might.  For example, one of the holes in our knowledge on the digital academys influence economy comes from the sheer lack of quantitative studies regarding the cross pollination between what are (or start as) academic projects and the broader economy.  That is, no one has done any studies on the Canadian milieu, looking at specifically Canadian projects and how much those digital projects have contributed to the Canadian economy.  

 The present project, which is funded by SSHRC (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), is working on an incredibly, almost laughably, short time frame.  Though we expect to have a white paper ready for December 1, 2010, we are only really scratching the surface of what is out there in terms of scholarship on sustainability and are more often than not discovering that what is not out there is just as interesting as what is.

But that isnt exactly what I want to talk about

Neurotic Imaginings

All while doing this project on sustainability, I have had a recurrent image in my head. 

 See, in my other life I am an early modernist.  Actually, I think of myself primarily as an early modernist who has only a tangential interest in DH and the possibilities that it offers. 

 Im not so hip as to be a DH evangelical, but I do realize that the future of our discipline will involve closer integration with the digital world, to the point that those who do not stay at least partially abreast will be as antiquated in the future as bibliographic index card catalogue users are today. 

 Thus, sustainability is a problem not because things will be lost it is inevitable that things will be lost but because we have the opportunity to intervene in the process of forgetting, hopefully for the better.

The image that keeps coming into my mind in this project is here. 

This is a game from the medieval period called Rithmomachia.  For those of you with small Latin and less Greek, , means number and the suffix derived from , meaning battle. 

 The game itself is devilishly complex to a modern mind if only because it relies on knowledge of the relationships between whole numbers.  Gameplay involved moving pieces that designated whole number across a board that was twice as long but just as wide as a chess board.  One player could take the pieces of the other player by arranging the pieces/numbers in an arithmetic, geometrical or musical harmony (or any combination of them).  

It was called the Philosophers Game partially because it was only played by the erudite and partially because Rithmomachia was supposedly created by Pythagoras, though that genealogy is highly doubtful.    

Throughout the early modern period, the game was associated with hermetic magic and was played by some of the more well known figures of the European renaissance. 

Of course, we dont know about it anymore.  It has been totally forgotten by the culture in general and by all but those few interested scholars.  Why?

Well, you see, there was another game that was introduced to Europe at about the same time as we start seeing descriptions of Rithmomachia and that game was Chess. 

Both games are roughly as old as each other and both games were equally popular in the later middle ages, but only one of them has continued in cultural memory.  You can argue that the reason for that is that Rithmomachia is just inherently more difficult as a game describing musical harmonies of numbers is not as easy as, say, your pawn can open with a two space move or a one space move. 

I am not convinced by that, however. 

I think that the real reason for Chess living in our cultural memory and Rithmomachia as being forgotten comes down to the fact that the first universities took on Rithmomachia as a strategy by which to teach basic numeracy skills.

Its a strategy we are seeing today in the move to bring games (video games and otherwise) into the library system and into the classroom, and it is perfectly sound insofar as it does work. 

If you engage students, through games, through active learning principles, then students are more likely to retain the information or skills that you are trying to teach.  So I cannot fault the medieval scholastics who decided that they would put Rithmomachia into the curriculum.  They were only doing what modern scholars are trying to do by using Mass Effect as a way to explicate narrative non-linearity.  The theory, such as it was (and is), is sound. 

The thing is, as the years turned into decades and the decades turned into centuries, the university ossified, and with it, so did the game.

Ossifciation

Universities are inherently conservative institutions as bureaucracies, they are specifically designed to make it difficult to change things. 

When you have an institution such as a university taking on a new technology, like a game or a communications system, not only will it be difficult to integrate into the prevailing administrative structure, but there is always the threat that once it has become integrated into that administrative system, it will ossify. 

The administration of knowledge will weave its way in and around the new technology of knowing to the point that it becomes either culturally irrelevant and forgotten (Rithmomachia) or culturally irrelevant and clung to out of a mere sense of tradition (Im looking at you, robe and mortarboard).

The point is that the cultural amnesia regarding Rithmomachia brings up some of the most fundamental aspects of sustainability insofar as we have to ask, how much can we trust universities (these incredibly conservative institutions) to sustain digital projects that are by definition ongoing sources of knowledge? 

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the longest running continuously developing projects in the academy, but it is predicated on a very conservative model of knowing that there are words out there as objects of definition and that they will be described. 

No one would possibly suggest that the OED is not invested in what Bakhtin called the centripetal force, that works to bring language and meaning together under an objective umbrella.  Despite its yearly updates and continual re-editing, the OED is presenting an ossified image of the English Language and that is partly to do with the fact that it is housed under the auspices of a university.

Post-amble

So if we are looking to investigate long term sustainability, we have to ask the question of what are we willing to trade off?

If we want sustainability within the present institutional settings, then we have to accept the possibility that eventually, our beloved digital tool or project (be that project as genuinely useful as the Walt Whitman Archive or EEBO), will ossify and be forgotten. 

If we dont change the university culture a culture that has existed for a thousand years then we are likely to simply end up with projects that are snapshots of what was rather than producers of the new knew. 

If we do change the university culture, then that is a project that extends well beyond the individual institution or individual nation and demands a rethink of what it is we do in the academy, from the ground up. 

Of course, in the writing of a small white paper, due in such a short time, I doubt that we will come up with anything that will possibly answer how the university as an institution can be rebuilt.  

So which is it?  Or perhaps I am being reductive?


[Cross Posted w/ HASTAC, The Miscellany]

SPARC Canadian Author's Addendum

There are an increasing number of useful tools out there for academics interested in public licensing. The SPARC Canadian Author's Addendum is one of them:

http://www.carl-abrc.ca/projects/author/author-e.html#addendum

In brief, it's a PDF that you can attach to any publishing contract that allows you to post your article on your own web page, include it in your institution's open access repository, republish it, etc., without going cap-in-hand back to the journal for permission to do so, after you've ceded them your copyright for the privilege of being published. Here's how the site describes this document:

"Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum. The addendum is available in both French and English."



(On behalf of Darren Wershler)

Notes on Copyright

One issue that comes up immediately is the difference between the knowledge economy of the academy and the larger Canadian knowledge economy. There are points of overlap, certainly,  but they function according to different rules. 

The academy is a citation economy -- we're rewarded for copiously pointing to earlier sources and recontextualizing their worth in terms of the present milieu. Zizek -- after Deleuze -- argues that really, this process of locating something in the past and and recontextualizing it in the present is the origin of anything New. Knowledge creation always involves the repetition of something that could have happened but was betrayed be the actual course of history, and therefore remained in embryonic form.

Though there aren't really specific exceptions in current Canadian copyright law (as there are in the States) that make academic use of copyrighted cultural objects easier, we have a fairly wide berth in our daily practice of teaching and research (but only as long as we don't draw attention to what the daily practice of scholarship entails -- plenty of it is technically enfirngement, e.g. showing video clips in class without clearing them through the library, photocopying articles for students that they could obtain through library resources, etc.). It would be good to see exceptions for academic use enshrined in new copyright legislation, but there's nothing helpful in Bill C-32, so I assume that we'll be stuck in a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" regime of daily academic practice for the foreseeable future.

Problems arise at the points where the citation economy overlaps with the larger cultural economy, because the popular (and somewhat Romantic) belief is that ideas emerge ex nihilo and fully-formed, without any debt to tradition, and that all uses of such ideas should be remunerated.

As Siva Vaidhyanathan pointed out in Copyrights and Copywrongs, our major mode of cultural production (bricolage) is now entirely at odds with our common-sense belief that the intent of copyright is to wring every last cent of revenue out of the cultural objects that we (or our ancestors) created. Over the last decade, Lessig, Vaidhyanathan, Geist, Coombe et. al. have been at pains to demonstrate that this was not the intent of the creators of copyright, that it was invented as an artificial right granting a short-term monopoly to creators in order to provide them with enough time and enough money to create something else rather than sit back and realize profits from one object on perpetuity. Short-term copyright was designed to drive the creation of knowledge, in other words, but this is not what it does now. What copyright does now is encourage "individuals" (including, and especially, corporations) to corral as many copyrights as they can into a silo and then charge as many people as possible for their use.

I'm a pragmatist. I'm pretty sure that the two best things that could happen to encourage knowledge creation (shorter copyright terms and exceptions for academic use) are off the table  right now for political reasons. So: in a cultural moment when it's pretty clear that copyright terms aren't going to get shorter, and that there aren't going to be any exceptions in copyright law for academic use, the only pragmatic course of action is to begin to think about how academics can use copyright to enforce the circulation of our work rather than to limit it. This is what public licensing (e.g. Creative Commons or the General Public License) does: it attaches a series of clauses to a copyrighted object that insist that people who make use of that object to create something must also release their creations under a public license so that others can do the same. Open access journals, knowledge repositories at universities and other venues that use public licensing are also vitally important. 

The reason is that one of the keys to sustaining knowledge in a digital economy is to *circulate* it. We're living in an age of digital incunabula. New storage media and storage protocols emerge almost as quickly as the ones that we had thought were working just fine are abandoned. Much of what we produce for the next few decades, at least, will be lost forever, largely because there's an enormous profit to be made by companies that can develop near-monopolies on media formatting, forcing other alternatives (including their own earlier products) into the dustbin of history. The only way around this situation for academics is to commit to open protocols and open venues, so that knowledge can be included in as many different kinds of containers as possible. We're engaged in a gamble with posterity, and limiting ourselves to one technology or one repository for our research makes little to no sense at all.

It's important to emphasize, then, that the interests of academics engaged in knowledge creation and sustenance are markedly different than those of for-profit business. The increasingly popular paradigm of "knowledge work" (see esp. Liu, and Mosco & McKercher) tries to proceed as if there is no difference, and that the academy and business are both interested in the process of continuing education in the same ways, but it's simply not the case. The success of open source models in some contemporary businesses (mostly in the IT sector) means that there are some like-minded entities outside the academy, but at this stage, there simply aren't enough of them. We need to be thinking about educating not just our students about the importance of circulating knowledge, but members of the private sector, and government bureaucrats as well.

Moreover, there's still substantial resistance to open content practices inside many parts of the academy. Even at schools like Concordia, which officially endorse open access, publishing in for-profit international peer-reviewed journals still counts for more than publishing in open content journals (which are few and far between). Universities that really want to stand behind notions like open access need to consider what this means in terms of criteria for achieving tenure, merit and other institutional forms of reward.


(On behalf of Darren Wershler)

The State of Knowledge about “Living Archives, New Media Archives”

Now that I’ve had the opportunity to consider the bibliographical citations linked to my assigned area, I realize that trying to describe a “living archive” is very much like trying to describe the future. We can imagine it but we’re not quite there. And there is certainly not a wide body of research on this topic at all. The most useful citations were those related to open access (Gerhards and Schäfer) and (Morrissey) and “participatory archives” (Huvila). What I’ve realized through this research is that the work I have been doing with poet Erín Moure to build what we’re calling a “living knowledge site” will also function as an attempt to articulate this future.

The idea for “The Erín Moure Living Knowledge Site” originated in my work as compiler and editor of The Fred Wah Digital Archive. The “living archive” we have in mind will include a digital archive supplemented with annotated bibliographical information like the one I prepared on the work of Fred Wah. But “The Erín Moure Living Knowledge Site” will also be a portal to Moure’s current and new work. It will be a “living archive” also in the sense that it will be linked to the writers, editors, and artists with whom she collaborates and with whom her work directly engages, across national and linguistic boundaries. Moure describes it as:

A locus, a site, a place (not just a carrefour or intersection, there are structures there) where the highways in and out are visible and can be followed by other people … where knowledge is created, altered, comes to be when people can intersect with ideas, cause alterations, open discussions, involve the writer in discussions (not to sway critics from their forensic tasks but to give critics ways of performing new tasks, since they will be able to observe and even interact with the enzymatic reactions that actually go into creating literary works). (Moure email to Susan Rudy)

Our contention is that only with access to the broad range of Moure’s collaborators (including Nicole Brossard and Chus Pato, the living authors of texts Moure has translated), readers, texts, contexts, engagements, and identities, and through undertaking the task of generating new readings through a digital environment will scholars be able to grasp Moure’s project in its entirety.

Since there is as yet no clear consensus about what a “living” archive is or indeed even what exactly the term “new media” signifies, we will need to drawn on scholarship from a range of disciplines. In Digitize This Book! Gary Hall (2008) makes a compelling argument that the term “new media” itself should be replaced by "`emerging media,' as derived from Raymond Williams notion of the "dominant, residual, and emergent (Marxism and Literature 1977)”:

`Emerging media' has more of the sense of `becoming,' of things in process" (227-228) and is broader in scope than, say `computer media,' `networked media', or even 'digital media' with their privileging of the formal and the technical'. (Digitize This Book 228)

This notion of “emerging” is linked very much to the idea of an archive as living in the sense of “`becoming,’ of things in process.”

Stuart Hall, in “Constituting an Archive” (2001), argues that the construction of a “living archive” must be seen as “an on-going, never completed project" (89). Hall reminds us of Foucault’s notion (in The Archaeology of Knowledge) that the “archive” exists:

between the `language' in which artists practice--its langue--and what he calls `the corpus', which he defines as the relatively inert body of works which happen to be produced and survived. The `archive' he thinks of as something between the two. (90)

The “living archive” will therefore pose fundamental questions about sustainability since, as Hall also reminds us, "The question of technology, of access and therefore inevitably of funding are as central to a `living archive' as the aesthetic, artistic and interpretative practices" (91).

To broaden our thinking about how an archive might be “living” and to extend our thinking about how the work of poets is particularly important for this research area I have added the following resources: (G. Hall), (S. Hall), (“Archive of the Now”), (Louise Adair), (Rudy and Wah), (“Culture Machine: generating research in culture and theory”), and (Emerson).

Works Cited

“Archive of the Now.” Web. 2 July 2010.

“Culture Machine: generating research in culture and theory.” Culture Machine: generating research in culture and theory. Web. 8 Oct. 2010.

Emerson, Lori. “The Rematerialization of Poetry: From the Bookbound to the Digital.” 2008: n. pag. Print.

Gerhards, Jürgen, and Mike S Schäfer. “Is the Internet a Better Public Sphere? Comparing Old and New Media in the USA and Germany.” New Media & Society 12.2010 (2010): 143-160. Print.

Hall, Gary. Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. Minneapolis, Mn: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “Constituting an archive.” Third Text 15.54 (2001): 89. Web.

Huvila, Isto. “Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management.” Archival Science 8.1 (2008): 15-36. Web.

Louise Adair. “Growing Knowledge:
Is the physical library a redundant resource for 21st century academics?.” Web. 22 Oct. 2010.

Morrissey, Sheila. “The economy of free and open source software in the preservation of digital artefacts.” Library Hi Tech 28.2: 211-223. Print.

Rudy, Susan, and Fred Wah. “The Fred Wah Digital Archive | Fred Wah.” The Fred Wah Digital Archive. Web. 22 Oct. 2010.

DH and the production of knowledge

First, I would like to apologize for the poor quality of my written English. As I mentioned earlier to a few interlocutors in the context of our project, it would take me a little more time to make my style more acceptable, and I don’t happen to have that time right now. I thank you in advance for your patience. Having that said, I wanted to share a little of my thoughts regarding an aspect of the Digital humanities we haven’t seem to discuss much. One of my primary concerns in regard of sustainability is with the importance of developing and sharing tools that will allow humanities scholars to do the kind of work that is central to their research in the new digital environment, especially in the context of team work. I often find there is much emphasis on archiving, dissemination, and editing, and not enough on analysis and the management of ever-increasing bodies of information (especially in literary history). As a scholar working in the field of humanities, I do not want to aim most my work on preservation (even if I know there is money for that). Doing that, I think we then would start to do the same kind of work than archivists or librairians. Of course, we have to participate in the selection of what is aimed to last and needs to be collected, but, if you allow me a comparison with books, I do not want to be the one who will manage the preservation conditions. Especially in the context where we have less and less time for research in most of Canadian universities. I happen to think about the same regarding the links between scholarship and the cultural sectors. I agree that it is now and important field in the area of digital humanities (especially in the creation-performance domaine, notably in Quebec), as more and more what we call "recherche-création" is going on. But here again we might want to take care and not neglect the more "traditional" research. I consider that our work is about transforming something like raw literary material, and to produce new knowledge in understanding it. We might want to try to keep a place for this aspect within digital humanities. I paste here a link to a French site which really reflects my perspectives: http://socioargu.hypotheses.org/1095 Also, I take this occasion to invite you to consult a very well done review of what is happening in the digital humanities, done by my colleague René Audet at Université Laval. It considers material in English as well as in French, even if the comments are in French : http://carnets.contemporain.info/ex-situ/

second set of questions

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010) is, in my view, a key resource. Harvard professor of English and staff writer for The New Yorker, Menand contributes to the series on ideas that matter in the new millennium edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In keeping with the intent of the series to re-examine hand-me-down assumptions, Menand’s third chapter, “Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety” (95-125), concentrates on the Humanities, the reasons why interdisciplinarity is a “magic” word, and the backstory of disciplinary history and current context. His writing is clear, accessible, and widely informed. He was involved in the reform of the undergraduate curriculum at Harvard.

I especially liked his insistence on the fact that interdisciplinarity is not new, nor is it in itself “subversive or transgressive or transformational” (96). It doesn’t solve “the problem of disciplinarity” because it is “simply disciplinarity raise to a higher power, . . . the scholarly and pedagogical ratification of disciplinarity” (96-7). In answer to the second question, it seems to me in the library sources listed insufficient attention is paid to the truth that disciplinarity is the beginning of interdisciplinarity. Truth rather than shibboleth, I hope. In practice, as Menand observes, interdisciplinarity “tends to rigidify disciplinary paradigms” (119). Disciplinarity can also be “fetishized” and “Balkanized” (120). “Professors are still trained [yes, he uses this word, not ‘educated] in one national literature or artistic medium or another. In an interdisciplinary encounter, they just shout at each other from the mountain tops of their own disciplines” (120-21). His point is that the forms of knowledge production must change before any change will occur in knowledge dissemination. The “boundary-suspicious conception” (117) of scholarly inquiry has lots of potential, but it needs to be understood as quite different from an escape from disciplinarity. The promise of interdisciplinarity, as yet unrealized, is that “it will smooth out the differences between the empirical and the hermeneutic, the hard and the soft, disciplines. ‘If we could just get them in the same room together’” (118).

Although Menand doesn’t really address digital scholarship, there are many openings of opportunity in his argument. First, he maintains that one of the impediments to establishing interdisciplinary initiatives locally is the lack of interdisciplinarity nationally. Surely, with many examples to hand, digital interdisciplinary scholarship creates virtual communities. Second, his insistence that “a work of art is both an aesthetic object and a commercial good” (123) underscores the value-added, economic importance, and, as Stan would say, the enrichment, of the cultural sector. Third, digital scholarship can provide the meeting place of the empirical and the hermeneutic. That sounds rather grand, but in programming, design, aims, and accessibility, it can be a truly collaborative, inter-disciplinary undertaking. Fourth, it can connect us with “the reality checks outside the university.” He remarks: “we want to contribute to the culture and the society that is being created and lived all around us, and we are a little sick of the institutional armature we once may have desired to secure us” (124). Sustainable, interdisciplinary, collaborative, creative-commons digital work connects us to a larger society of interested interlocutors, challengers, and potential champions. Fifth, interdisciplinarity brings into our box “the dissonance and the struggles of competing interests, the risks of innovation and experimentation” (125). The “beasts of commercial and political interests . . . make the fight real.” Capacious, generous, even embryonic interdisciplinarity can be the administrative name for entering the wide field, for enlarging the box.

Pedagogy Summary

There are two main topics in the area of pedagogy. First, how do sustainable digital resources assist and change teaching and learning? Lynch (2008) argues that there is tremendous potential in digital resources, but they are primarily of benefit to students who can learn without being taught. In addition, with the rise of social media, the internet can now help support students who do best in peer learning environments. However, for the larger majority, we have yet to find ways of appropriately tailoring online education for individual students. Lynch concludes: "...we must be able to articulate clearly the differences between access to information resources and access to education." (p. 117). On a similar note, the exhaustive 326-page report by Hartley et al. (2006) of faculty members in California emphasized the importance of disaggregation in user studies of online digital materials for education. They point out that their study participants created and used a wide range of online materials: “almost every conceivable type of resource” (p. 180), but that there are real issues around communications between resource developers. Other researchers have suggested that radical changes to the university may be necessary, including changes to the structure of universities, the role of interdisciplinarity, the nature of evaluation and assessment, and the need for improved equity in access (e.g. http://www.ichass.illinois.edu/hastac2010/HASTAC_2010/Presentations/Entries/2010/4/15_The_Future_of_Thinking__Learning_Institutions_in_a_Digital_Age.html).

For unaccredited learning, there are initiatives like the social media site The School of Everything (http://schoolofeverything.com/) where students and teachers can get together on emergent courses, W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com/), where students can pick up web skills by doing interactive tutorials, or the Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) where over 1800 free videos are available on a range of topics in math and science. There are also many excellent tools for creating and sharing bibliographies, including Zotero and CiteULike, and also some authoritative sources such as the Oxford Bibliographies Online. For even more radical changes brought by the new affordances of the digital, there are advocates of teaching using computer games and virtual worlds, and also courses that teach computer game design and development (e.g. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/09/09/f-videogames-education-learning.html).

The second issue is how best to provide appropriate teaching and learning for students in the humanities to use digital resources, to critique existing resources, and to create new and better resources in the future. The digital humanities has a tradition of offering short workshops, including those held at Princeton and Duke in the 1980s and 90s and the ones currently offered each summer in Victoria and Dublin. More recently, we’ve seen the widespread interest in THATCamps, where people gather for a few days on an emergent agenda.

More formally, there are a few MA programs, including an MA in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, the genesis of which is discussed in Sinclair and Gouglas (2002), and a PhD in Humanities Computing at King’s College London. Hockey (1999) writes eloquently on the need for such programs, and Unsworth (2002) provides a discussion of what should be included, which revolves around a recognition that humanities computing is the practice of modeling humanities information to support both computation and human communication: “We should not refuse to engage in representation simply because we feel no representation can do justice to all that we know or feel about our territory. That's too fastidious.”

References
Hockey, Susan. (1999). “Is There a Computer in this Class?”
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/hcs/hockey.html

Lynch, Clifford. (2008). "Digital Libraries, Learning Communities, and Open Education." Ch 7. In Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar, Eds. Mass: MIT Press.

Sinclair, Stéfan and Sean Gouglas. (2002). “Theory into Practice: A case study of the Humanities Computing Master of Arts at the University of Alberta.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education. London: Sage. 1(2).

Unsworth, John. “What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?” (2002).
http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg02/unsworth.html

Reading Digitally

My most recent experience in a Faculty of Humanities has been teaching Introductory Creative Writing. In such a class, there are typically students who state that they had never written a poem or a story or a creative essay or a play before. This means that one of the first discussions we often have is about those ‘things’ (a poem or a story), what they might look like, and how a student might identify or study them before writing a creative 'thing' themselves; of course, the trick to this lesson is that a piece of creative writing is not the kind of object that can be noticed, identified, and claimed: "there. That's a poem. That's it." As simple as, that's an apple. It is only after comparing bpNichol to Don McKay that a student realizes the multiplicity, mutability, and malleability of ‘creative objects’—and that that’s half the fun of it.

That is, this is what used to be at the root of teaching creative writing. But now, standing on the curb of the digital future, the questions I am most often asked are different. They are far less interested in content, and even form, then the devices on which and with which we read and write; they want to know if they’re already writers because they have blogs, Facebook pages, and their own websites. The ‘objects’ that pepper the periphery of a student’s frame of reference are not books or individual pieces of writing, but digital devices and virtual platforms. Twitter was recently conceptualized for me by a professor at the University of Calgary, Susan Bennett, as, “like slyly passing a note in class.” In this sense, a student’s most persistent and prominent form of communication on a university campus is not necessarily out loud in the classroom, or one on one with a professor, but is the nudge, the reference, the allusion that requires minimal vocabulary, a knowledge of what symbols can stand for emotions, and a palm-size object that can be concealed below a desk or textbook.

The way a student participates and is present in a classroom today has thus changed significantly; of course, the way that students write and participate is going to change if the way we read has changed, on screens, or pads, or on Kindle. How, in this context, do we change the way that not only literature, but literature that is lengthy, and dense, and perhaps even not immediately accessible, is taught? It likely means taking back the whole notion of criticism, introducing our students to concepts such as slow reading and slow media, I think of Greg Garrard’s definition of slow reading: “like slow food, [it] is about savouring rather than gobbling” (please see his article in Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=412075, and posted under Reading Digitally on Zotero). Perhaps even a discussion of what we lose when we comment or respond anonymously, instead of taking responsibility for our authorship, for our own inventions, could be useful.

As a publisher (I work for Freehand Books, a small literary imprint of Broadview Press), I feel it’s my responsibility to engage in eBook production with thought to how those eBooks will be received by readers, as well as potentially adopted by courses and scholars. As a small press we are limited in some ways—we only publish 4-6 books a year—but we take our mandate, to publish books of literary integrity, by only Canadian authors, with exception design and production, very seriously. As we move forward with eBooks, we are involving a designer to see if some of the aspects that are currently lost in the translation from print to ePub—such as maintaining a designer’s carefully determined typeface—can be maintained. As well, if we are going to digitize the printed text, rather than a simple facsimile how can we augment the book? Add multimedia, hyperlinks, audio, video, and entice the reader to further engage with a book? With an eBook, the page doesn’t seem flat; if the reader interacts with it, it very well may respond. Publishers are also beginning to recognize the necessity of developing metadata, tagging the details of books with ONIX feeds, in order for the books to be available through online retailers but also, increasingly, websites that enable scholars to search for or archive or catalogue their own books (please see links for BookNet, Canadian Bookshelf, and LibraryThing on Zotero under Digital Archiving). These resources extend the opportunities that a scholar has to engage with a book, and seem in line with encouraging students to read more and in depth rather than skimming just because the mediums or search engines themselves are fast and efficient.

interview answers

1. Since I’ve worked with graduate students for the past four (actually six) years with two online projects (Women Writing and Reading and Canadian Women Writing and Reading from 1950) both originating in the Digital Humanities Research Studio (DHRS) at U of A, I am keenly interested in the sustainability and wide dissemination of these open-source products.

The first project, co-directed, was a series of digital and social experiments, involving different audiences and formats: interviews, video recorded panels and performances, sponsoring a hip-hop concert of poetry readings by street kids (ihuman), organizing an international conference on women’s writing, past and present, local and global, preparing different “skins” for the site to indicate different holdings–early modern, Victorian, contemporary. I wouldn’t want this site and all the work that went into it to simply evaporate and disappear from public view.

The second and current project consists of a massive database of Cdn women writers, mainly from 1950 to the present. The database considers women’s writing broadly; it includes the conventional genres of prose (short and long, fiction and non-fiction), drama, and poetry, as well as writing for children, journalism, letters, diaries, screen-writing, comics and graphic novels, popular romances, song-writing, musical composition), along with critical studies, time-lines, a catalogue of awards and prizes, selected interviews (with local and/or visiting writers). Such a resource needs to be maintained and updated. The current html format needs to be transferred to xml. And for inclusion in ORCA, bio-critical entries in Oxygen using an Orlando schema need to be completed. The continuation (maintenance, expansion, updating) of this project, which is one understanding of sustainability, is crucial.

2. Sustainability involves durability, relevance (yes, dreaded, contentious, and for some, archaic term!) and partnerships. I’ll start with the last one. I think it’s vital for Humanities and Computing Science people to communicate in mutually understood language, to collaborate in project design and implementation. What I’m talking about is much more than the meeting of “opposable minds” in an exercise of “integrative thinking,” as Roger Martin’s latest book (The Opposable Mind, 2009) is merchandising these concepts. I’m imagining a consortium or partnership or active collaboration possibly along the lines of Berkeley’s CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society). True, the Berkeley model is heavy on science, medicine, and engineering and light on the Arts, and their recent Sustainability Award was given to a Prof of Computational Linguistics. I notice that copyright reform and social media are topics in their Fall lecture series. Clearly there’s the value of networked projects and presentations. CITRIS also offers seed funding to colleagues at Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz. The funding page is worthwhile

Another feature of partnerships involves a range of funding opportunities. The Artmob project at York is partnered with Coach House Books, the Scream Literary Festival and the Cdn Writers in Person Lecture series; its funders include the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council, Canadian Heritage, and the Archival Community Digitization Program. They also issue quarterly email updates.

Durability and relevance are arguably interconnected notions. The announcement of an institutional repository ERA at the U of A is very welcome news. Like Cambridge’s DSpace it should provide maximum visibility and longevity. Relevance is, in a sense, distinct from safe storage. The topic of Canadian Writing embedded in CWRC should already argue for relevance as well as durability. It seems important to be able to update material or overlay with newer versions. The fact that the AHRC-funded Methods Network website will not be updated is a bit of a disappointment. However, the appearance of Hugh Brody, CRC in Aboriginal Studies, University of the Fraser Valley, as a researcher on their World Oral Lit project is intriguing.

3. It would be good if we could get a circulated transcript of Johann Drucker’s address in Edmonton in April, “Designing Humanities Tools in a Digital Context.”

The recommendations (pp. 29-40) of Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences are valuable benchmarks.

Canadian Journal of Higher Education 39, no. 3 (2009) Special Issue devoted to open access. Recommend Preface by Jean-Claude Guédon (i-v) and “Librarians and Libraries Supporting Open Access Publishing” (33-48) by Jennifer Richard, Denise Koufogiannakis, and Pam Ryan.