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.