Observing that humanities scholars rarely jointly author articles, as I did in my last post, comes as no surprise.  As Blaise Cronin writes, “Collaboration—for which co-authorship is the most visible and compelling indicator—is established practice in both the life and physical sciences, reflecting the industrial scale, capital-intensiveness and complexity of much contemporary scientific research. But the ‘standard model of scholarly publishing,’ one that ‘assumes a work written by an author,” continues to hold sway in the humanities’ (24).   Just as I found that only about 2% of the articles published in American Literary History between 2004 and 2008 were co-authored, so Cronin et al discovered that just 2% of the articles that appeared in the philosophy journal Mind between 1900 and 2000 were written by more than one person, although between 1990 and 2000 that number increased slightly to 4% (Cronin, Shaw, & La Barre).   Whereas the scale of scientific research often requires scientists to collaborate with each other, humanities scholars typically need only something to write with and about.  But as William Brockman, et al suggest, humanities scholars do have their own traditions of collaboration, or at least of cooperation:  “Circulation of drafts, presentation of papers at conferences, and sharing of citations and ideas, however, are collaborative enterprises that give a social and collegial dimension to the solitary activity of writing. At times, the dependence of humanities scholars upon their colleagues can approach joint authorship of a publication” (11).

Information technology can speed and extend the exchange of ideas, as researchers place their drafts online and solicit comments through technologies such as CommentPress, make available conference papers via institutional repositories, and share citations and notes using tools such as Zotero.  Over ten years, ago John Unsworth described an ongoing shift from cooperation to collaboration, indicating perhaps both his prescience and the slow pace of change in academia.

In the cooperative model, the individual produces scholarship that refers to and draws on the work of other individuals. In the collaborative model, one works in conjunction with others, jointly producing scholarship that cannot be attributed to a single author. This will happen, and is already happening, because of computers and computer networks. Many of us already cooperate, on networked discussion groups and in private email, in the research of others: we answer questions, provide references for citations, engage in discussion. From here, it’s a small step to collaboration, using those same channels as a way to overcome geographical dispersion, the difference in time zones, and the limitations of our own knowledge.

The limitations of our own knowledge.  As Unsworth also observes, collaboration, despite the challenges it poses, can open up new approaches to inquiry: “instead of establishing a single text, editors can present the whole layered history of composition and dissemination; instead of opening for the reader a single path through a thicket of text, the critic can provide her with a map and a machete. This is not an abdication of the responsibility to educate or illuminate: on the contrary, it engages the reader, the user, as a third kind of collaborator, a collaborator in the construction of meaning.”  With the interactivity of networked digital environments, Unsworth imagines the reader becoming an active co-creator of knowledge.  Through online collaboration, scholars can divide labor (whether in making a translation, developing software, or building a digital collection), exchange and refine ideas (via blogs, wikis, listservs, virtual worlds, etc.), engage multiple perspectives, and work together to solve complex problems.  Indeed, “[e]mpowering enhanced collaboration over distance and across disciplines” is central to the vision of cyberinfrastructure or e-research (Atkins).  Likewise, Web 2.0 focuses on sharing, community and collaboration.

Work in many areas of the digital humanities seems to both depend upon collaboration and aim to support it.  Out of the 116 abstracts for posters, presentations, and panels given at the Digital Humanities 2008 (DH2008) conference, 41 (35%) include a form of the word “collaboration,” whether they are describing collaborative technologies (“Online Collaborative Research with REKn and PReE”) or collaborative teams (“a collaborative group of librarians, scholars and technologists”).  Likewise, 67 out of 104 (64%) papers and posters presented at DH 2008 have more than one author.  (Both the Digital Humanities conference and LLC tend to focus on the computational side of the digital humanities, so I’d also like to see if the pattern of collaboration holds in what Tara McPherson calls the “multimodal humanities,” e.g. journals such as Vectors.  Given that works in Vectors typically are produced through collaborations between scholars and designers, I’d expect to see a somewhat similar pattern.)

I was having trouble articulating precisely how collaboration plays a role in humanities research until I began looking for concrete examples—and I found plenty.   As computer networks connect researchers to content, tools and each other, we are seeing humanities projects that facilitate people working together to produce, explore and disseminate knowledge.  I interpret the word “collaboration” broadly; it’s a squishy term with synonyms such as teamwork, cooperation, partnership, and working together, and it also calls to mind co-authorship, communication, community, citizen humanities, and social networks.  In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky puts forward a handy hierarchy of collaboration: 1) sharing; 2) cooperation; 3) collaboration; 4) collectivism (Kelly).  In this post, I’ll list different types of computer-supported collaboration in the humanities, note antecedents in “traditional” scholarship, briefly describe example projects, and point to some supporting technologies.  This is an initial attempt to classify a wide range of activity; some of these categories overlap.

–FACILITATING COMMUNICATION AND KNOWLEDGE BUILDING–

ONLINE COMMUNITIES/ VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS

• Historical antecedents: conferences, colloquia, letters
• Supporting technologies: listservs, online forums, blogs, social networking platforms, virtual worlds, microblogging (e.g. Twitter), video conferencing
• Key functions: fostering communication and collaboration across a distance
• Examples:
  • Listervs: Perhaps the most well-known online community in the humanities is H-NET, which was founded in 1992  and thus predates Web 2.0 or even Web 1.0.  According to Mark Kornbluh, H-Net provides an “electronic version of an academic conference, a way for people to come together and to talk about their research and their teaching, to announce what was going on in the field, and to review and critique things that are going on in the field.”  Currently H-Net  supports over 100 humanities email lists and serves over 100,000 subscribers in more than 90 countries.  Although H-Net has been criticized for relying on an old technology, the listserv, and is facing economic difficulties, it remains valued for supporting information sharing and discussion.  For digital humanities folks, the Humanist list, launched in 1987, serves as “an international online seminar on humanities computing and the digital humanities” and has played a vital part in the intellectual life of the community.
  • Online forums: HASTAC, “a virtual network, a network of networks” that supports collaboration across disciplines and institutions, sponsors lively forums about technology and the humanities, often moderated by graduate students.  HASTAC also organizes conferences, administers a grant competition, and advocates for “new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology.” In my experience, online communities often break down the hierarchies separating graduate students from senior scholars and bring recognition to good ideas, no matter what the source.
  • Online communities: Since 1996, Romantic Circles (RC) has built an online community focused on Romanticism, not only fostering communication among researchers but also collaboratively developing content.  Romantic Circles includes a blog for sharing information about news and events of interest to the community; a searchable archive of electronic editions; collections of critical essays; chronologies, indices, bibliographies and other scholarly tools; reviews; pedagogical resources; and a MOO (gaming environment).  Over 30 people have served as editors, while over 300 people have contributed reviews and essays.  Alan Liu aptly summarizes RC’s significance: “Romantic Circles, which helped pioneer collaborative scholarship on the Web, has become the leading paradigm for what such scholarship could be. One can point variously to the excellence of its refereed editions of primary texts, its panoply of critical and pedagogical resources, its inventive Praxis series, its state-of-the-art use of technology or its stirring commitment (nearly unprecedented on the Web) to spanning the gap between high-school and research-level tiers of education. But ultimately, no one excellence is as important as the overall, holistic impact of the site. We witness here a broad community of scholars using the new media vigorously, inventively, and rigorously to inhabit a period of historical literature together.”In building a community that supports digital scholarship, NINES focuses on three main goals: providing peer review for digital scholarship in 19th century American and British studies (thus helping to legitimize and recognize emerging scholarly forms), helping scholars create digital scholarship by providing training and content, and developing software such as Collex and Juxta to support inquiry and collaboration.
  • Advanced videoconferencing: With budgets tight, time scarce, and concern about the environmental costs  of travel increasing, collaborators often need to meet without having to travel.  AccessGrid supports communication among multiple groups by providing high quality video and audio and enabling researchers to share data and scientific instruments seamlessly.  AccessGrid, which was developed by Argonne National Laboratory and uses open source software, employs large displays and multiple projectors to create an immersive environment.   In the arts and humanities, AccessGrid has been used to support “telematic” performances, the study of high resolution images, seminars, and classes.

CollabRoom by Modbob

COLLABORATORIES

• Historical antecedents: laboratories, research centers,
• Supporting technologies: grid technologies/ advanced networking, large displays, remote instrumentation, simulation software, collaboration platforms such as HubZero, databases, digital libraries
• Key functions: fostering communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and research regardless of physical distance
• Examples:

William Wulf coined the term collaboratory in 1989 to describe a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries.” Most of the collaboratories listed on the (now somewhat-out-of-date) Science of Collaboratories web site focus on the sciences.  For example, scientific collaboratories such as NanoHub, Space Physics and Astronomy Research Collaboratory (SPARC) and Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) have supported online data sharing, analysis, and communication.

What would a collaboratory in the humanities do? The term has been used in the humanities to refer to:

• a network of scholars and centers (HASTAC)
• a national coordinating body and “knowledge resource” for digital humanities scholarship (Digital Humanities Observatory, DHO);
• an interdisciplinary research unit (the University of Kentucky’s Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities, RCH)
• a collaboration among supercomputing centers to support humanities scholars in their use of high performance computing (Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory)
• a university-based team that supports teaching and research bringing together computing and the humanities (Wayne State’s Digital Humanities Collaboratory);
• a scholarly web space that supports collaborative annotation and publication (Finding the Celtic)

“Collaboratory” has thus taken on additional meanings, referring to “a new networked organizational form that also includes social processes; collaboration techniques; formal and informal communication; and agreement on norms, principles, values, and rules” (Cogburn, 2003, via Wikipedia).

“Virtual research environment” seems to be replacing “collaboratory” to refer to online collaborative spaces that provide access to tools and content (e.g. Early Modern Texts VRE, powered by Sakai). Through its funding program focused on Virtual Research Environments, JISC has sponsored the Virtual Research Environment for Archaeology, a VRE for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts, Collaborative Research Events on the Web, and myExperiments for sharing scientific workflows.

–SHARING AND AGGREGATING CONTENT—

DIGITAL MEMORY BANKS/ USER-CONTRIBUTED CONTENT

• Historical antecedents: museums, archives, personal collections
• Supporting technologies: Web publishing platforms (e.g. Omeka, Drupal), databases
• Key functions: “collecting & exhibiting” content (to borrow from CHNM)
• Examples:
  When the Valley of the Shadow project was launched in the 1990s, project team members went into communities in Pennsylvania and Virginia to digitize 19th century documents held by families in personal collections, thus building a virtual archive.  As scanners and digital cameras have become ubiquitous and user-contributed content sites such as Flickr and YouTube have taken off, people can contribute their own digital artifacts to online collections.  For example, The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank collects over 25,000 stories, images, and other multimedia files about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  Using a simple interface, people can upload items and describe the title, keywords, geographic location, and contributor.  The archive thus becomes a dynamic, living repository of current history, a space where researchers and citizens come together—or, in the terminology of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), a memory bank that “promote[s] popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.”  As the editors of Vectors write in their introduction to “Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Preserving the Stories of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma,” “Their work troubles a number of binaries long reified by history scholars (and humanities scholars more generally), including one/many, closed/open, expert/amateur, scholarship/journalism, and research/pedagogy.”  CHNM also sponsors digital memory banks focused on Mozilla, September 11, and the Virginia Tech tragedy.  Likewise, the Great War Archive, sponsored by the University of Oxford, contains over 6,500 items about World War I contributed by the public.

CONTENT AGGREGATION AND INTEGRATION

• Historical antecedents: museums, archives
• Supporting technologies: databases, open standards
• Key functions: making it easier to discove, share and use information
• Examples:
  Too often digital resources reside in silos, as each library or archive puts up its own digital collection.  As a result, researchers must spend more time identifying, searching, and figuring out how to use relevant digital collections.  However, some projects are shifting away from a siloed approach and bringing together collaborators to build digital collections focused on a particular topic or to develop interoperable, federated digital collections.  For instance, the Alliance for American Quilts, MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online, and Michigan State University Museum have created the Quilt Index, which makes available images and descriptions of quilts provided by 14 contributors, including The Library of Congress American Folklife Center and the Illinois State Museum.  As Mark Kornbluh argues, interoperable content enables new kinds of inquiry: “In the natural sciences, large new datasets, powerful computers, and a rich array of computational tools are rapidly transforming knowledge generation. For the same to occur in the humanities, we need to understand the principle that ‘more is better.’ Part of what the computer revolution is doing is that it is letting us bring huge volumes of material under control. Cultural artifacts have always been held by separate institutions and separated by distance. Large–scale interoperable digital repositories, like the Quilt Index, open dramatically new possibilities to look at the totality of cultural content in ways never before possible.” Other examples of content aggregation and integration projects include the Walt Whitman Archive’s Finding Aids for Poetry Manuscripts and NINES.

DATA SHARING

• Historical antecedents: informal exchange of data
• Supporting technologies: databases (MySQL, etc), web services tools
• Key functions: support research by enabling discovery and reuse of data sets
• Example projects:
  By sharing data, researchers can enable others to build on their work and provide transparency.  As Christine Borgman writes, “If related data and documents can be linked together in a scholarly information infrastructure, creative new forms of data- and information-intensive, distributed, collaborative, multidisciplinary research and learning become possible.  Data are outputs of research, inputs to scholarly publications, and inputs to subsequent research and learning.  Thus they are the foundation of scholarship” (Borgman 115).  Of course, there are a number of problems bound up in data sharing—how to ensure participation, make data discoverable through reliable metadata, balance flexibility in accepting a range of formats and the need for standardization, preserve data for the long term, etc.  Several projects focused on humanities and social science data are beginning to confront at least some of these challenges:
  • Open Context “hopes to make archaeological and related datasets far more accessible and usable through common web-based tools.”  Embracing open access and collaboration, Open Context makes it easy for researchers to upload, search, tag and analyze archaeological datasets.
  • Through Open Street Map, people freely and openly share and use geographic data in a wiki-like fashion.  Contributors employ GPS devices to record details about places such as the names of roads, then upload this information to a collaborative database.  The data is used to create detailed maps that have no copyright restrictions (unlike most geographical data).
  • Through the Reading Experience Database researchers can contribute records of British readers engaging with texts.

–COLLABORATIVE ANNOTATION, TRANSCRIPTION, AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION–

CROWDSOURCING TRANSCRIPTION

• Historical antecedents: genealogical research(?)
• Supporting technologies: wikis
• Key functions: share the labor required for transcribing manuscripts
• Examples:
  Much of the historical record is not yet accessible online because it exists as handwritten documents—letters, diaries, account books, legal documents, etc.  Although work is underway on Optical Character Recognition software for handwritten materials, making these variable documents searchable and easy to read usually still requires a person to manually transcribe the document.  Why not enable people to collaborate to make family documents and other manuscripts available through commons-based peer production? At THATCamp last year, I learned about Ben Brumley’s FromthePage software, which enables volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents through a web-based interface.  The right side of the interface shows a zoomable image of the page, while on the left volunteers enter the transcription through a wiki-like interface.  Likewise, the FamilySearch Indexing Project, sponsored by the LDS, recruits volunteers to transcribe family information from historical documents.   (See Jeanne Kramer-Smyth’s great account of the THATCamp session on crowdsourcing transcription and annotation.)  Not only can collaborative transcription be more efficient, but it can also reduce error.  Martha Nell Smith recounts how she, working solo at the Houghton, transcribed a line of Susan Dickinson’s poetry as “I’m waiting but the cow’s not back.’’  When her collaborators at the Dickinson Electronic Archives, Lara Vetter and Laura Lauth, later compared the transcriptions to digital images of Dickinson’s manuscripts, they discovered that the line actually says “‘I’m waiting but she comes not back.”  As Smith suggests, “Had we not been working in concert with one another, and had we not had the high quality reproductions of Susan Dickinson’s manuscripts to revisit and thereby perpetually reevaluate our keys to her alphabet, my misreading might have been congealed in the technology of a critical print translation and what is very probably a poetic homage to Emily Dickinson would have lain lost in the annals of literary history”(Smith 849).

  Efforts to crowdsource transcription seem similar to the distributed proofreading that powers Project Gutenberg, which has enlisted volunteers to proofread over 15,000 books since 2000.  Likewise, Project Madurai is using distributed proofreading to build a digital library of Tamil texts.

COLLABORATIVE TRANSLATION

• Historical antecedents: translation teams, e.g. Pevear and Volokhonsky
• Supporting technologies: wikis, blogs, machine translation supplemented by human intervention
• Examples:
  Rather than requiring an individual to undertake the time-intensive work of translating a complex classical text solo, the Suda Online (SOL)  brings together classicists to collaborate in translating into English the Suda, a tenth century encyclopedia of ancient learning written by a committee of Byzantine scholars (and thus itself a collaboration).  In addition to providing translations, SOL also offers commentaries and references, so it serves as a sort of encyclopedic predecessor to Wikipedia.  As Anne Mahoney reports in a recent article from Digital Humanities Quarterly, an email exchange in 1998 sparked the Suda Online; one scholar wondered whether there was an English translation of the Suda (there wasn’t) and others recognized that a translation could be produced through web-based collaboration.  Student programmers at the University of Kentucky quickly developed the technological infrastructure for SOL (a wiki might have been used today, but the custom application has apparently served its purpose well).  Now a self-organizing team of 61 editors and 95 translators from 12 countries has already translated over 21,000 entries, about 2/3 of the total.  Translators make the initial translations, which are then reviewed and augmented by editors (typically classics faculty) and given a quality rating of “draft,” “low,” or “high.”   All who worked on the translation are credited through a sort of open peer review process.  Whereas collaborative projects such as Wikipedia are open to anyone, SOL translators must register with the project.  Mahoney suggests that the collaboration has succeeded in part because it was focused and bounded, so that collaborators could feel the satisfaction of working toward a common goal and meeting milestones, such as 100 entries translated.  According to Mahoney, SOL has made this important text more accessible by offering an English version, making it searchable, and providing commentaries and references.  Moreover, “[a]s a collaboration SOL demonstrates the feasibility of open peer review and the value of incremental progress.” Other collaborative translation projects include The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, Traduwiki, which aims to “eliminate the last barrier of the Internet, the language’; the WorldWide lexicon project; and Babels.

COLLABORATIVE EDITING

• Historical antecedents: creating critical editions
• Supporting technologies: grid computing, XML editors, text analysis tools, annotation tools
• Example Projects:

As Peter Robinson observed at this year’s MLA, the traditional model for creating a critical edition centralizes authority in an editor, who oversees work by graduate assistants and others.  However, the Internet enables distributed, de-centralized editing.  To create “community-made editions,” a library would digitize texts and produce high quality images, researchers would transcribe those images, others would collate the transcriptions, others would analyze the collations and add commentaries, and so forth.

Explaining the need for collaborative approaches to textual editing, Marc Wilhelm Kiister, Christoph Ludwig and Andreas Aschenbrenner of TextGrid describe how 3 different editors attempted to create a critical edition of the massive “so-called pseudo-capitulars supposedly written by a Benedictus Levita,” dying before they could complete their work.  Now a team of scholars is collaborating to create the edition, increasing their chances of completion by sharing the labor.  The TextGrid project is building a virtual workbench for collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of texts.  Leveraging the grid infrastructure, TextGrid provides a platform for “software agents with well-defined interfaces that can be harnessed together through a user defined workflow to mine or analyze existing textual data or to structure new data both manually and automatically.” TextGrid recently released a beta version of its client application that includes an XML editor, search tool, dictionary search tool, metadata annotator, and workflow modules. As Kiister, Ludwig and Aschenbreener point out, enabling collaboration requires not only developing a technical platform that supports real-time collaboration and automation of routine tasks, but also facilitating a cultural shift toward collaboration among philologists, linguists, historians, librarians, and technical experts.

SOCIAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES, COLLABORATIVE FILTERING, AND ANNOTATION

• Historical antecedents: shared references, bibliographies
• Key functions: share citations, notes, and scholarly resources; build collective knolwedge
• Supporting technologies: social bookmarking, bibliographic tools
• Projects:
  With the release of Zotero 2.0, Zotero is taking a huge step toward the vision articulated by Dan Cohen of providing access to “the combined wisdom of hundreds of thousands of scholars” (Cohen).  Researchers can set up groups to share collections with a class and/or collaborators on a research project.   I’ve already used Zotero groups to support my research and to collaborate with others; I discovered several useful citations in the collaboration folder for the digital history group, and with Sterling Fluharty I’ve set up a group to study collaboration in the digital humanities (feel free to join).  Ultimately Zotero will provide Amazon-like recommendation services to help scholars identify relevant resources.  As Stan Katz wrote in hailing Zotero’s collaboration with the Internet Archive to create a “Zotero commons” for sharing research documents, “For secretive individualists, which is to say old-fashioned humanists, this will sound like an invasion of privacy and an invitation to plagiarism. But to scholars who value accessibility, collaboration, and the early exchange of information and insight -– the future is available. And free on the Internet.”

  Similarly, the eComma project suggests that collaborative annotation can facilitate collaborative interpretation, as readers catalog poetic devices (personification, enjambment, etc.) and offer their own interpretations of literary works.  You can see eComma at work in the Collaborative Rubáiyát, which enables users to compare different versions of the text, annotate the text, tag it, and access sections through a tag cloud.   Likewise, Philospace will allow scholars to describe philosophical resources, filter them, find resources tagged by others, and submit resulting research for peer review. Other projects and technologies supporting collaborative annotation include Flickr Commons,  Aus-e-Lit: Collaborative Integration and Annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities, NINES’ Collex, and STEVE.

COLLABORATIVE WRITING

• Historical antecedents: Encyclopedias
• Supporting technologies: Wikis
• Key functions: sharing knowledge, synthesizing multiple perspectives
• Examples:
  With the rise of Wikipedia, academics have been debating whether collaborative writing spaces such as wikis undermine authority, expertise, and trustworthiness.  In “Literary Sleuths Online,” Ralph Schroeder and Matthijs Den Besten examine the Pynchon Wiki, a collaborative space where Pynchon enthusiasts annotate and discuss his works.  Schroeder and Den Besten compare the wiki’s section on Pynchon’s Against the Day with a print equivalent, Weisenburger’s “A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion.”  While the annotations in Weisenburger’s book are more concise and consistent, the wiki is more comprehensive, more accurate (because many people are checking the information), and more speedily produced (it only took 3 months for the wiki to cover every page of Pynchon’s novel).   Moreover, the book is fixed, while the wiki is open-ended and expansive. Schroeder and Den Besten suggest that competition, community and curiosity drive participation, since contributors raced to add annotations as they made their way through the novel and “sleuthed” together.

GAMING: “Collaborative Play”/ Games as Research

• Historical antecedents: role playing games, board games, etc.
• Key functions: problem solving, team work, knowledge sharing
• Supporting technologies: gaming engines, wikis, networks
• Example Projects:
  Perhaps some of the most intense collaboration comes in massively multiplayer online games, as teams of players consult each other for assistance navigating virtual worlds, team up to defeat monsters, join guilds to collaborate on quests, and share their knowledge through wikis such as the WOWWiki, which has almost 74,000 articles.  Focusing on World of Warcraft, Nardi and Harris explore collaborative play as a form of learning.  They also point to potential applications of gaming in research communities: “Mixed collaboration spaces, whether MMOGs or another format, may be useful in domains such as interdisciplinary scientific work where a key challenge is finding the right collaborators.”

  Sometimes those collaborators can be people without specialized training.  Recently Wired featured a fascinating article about FoldIt, a game to come up with different models of proteins that is attracting devoted teams of participants (Bohannon).  The game was devised by the University of Washington Departments of Computer Science & Engineering and Biochemistry to crowdsource solutions to Community-Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP), a scientific contest to predict protein structures.   Previously biochemist David Baker had used Rosetta@home to harness the spare computing cycles of 86,000 PCs that had been volunteered to help determine the shapes of proteins, but he was convinced that human intelligence as well as computing power needed to be tapped to solve spatial puzzles.  Thus he and his colleagues developed a game in which players fold proteins into their optimal shapes, a sort of “global online molecular speed origami.” Over 100,000 people have downloaded the game, and a 13 year-old is one of the game’s best players. Using the game’s chat function, players formed teams, “and collective efforts proved far more successful than any solo folder.”  At the CASP competition, 7 of the 15 solutions contributed through FoldIt worked, and one finished in first place, so “[a] band of gamer nonscientists had beaten the best biochemists.”

  How might gaming be used to motivate and support humanities research?  As we see in the example of FoldIt, games provide motivation and a structure for collaboration; teamwork enables puzzles to be solved more rapidly.  I could imagine, for example, a game in which players would transcribe pieces of a diary to unravel the mystery it recounts, describe the features of a series of images (similar to Google’s Image Labeler game), or offer up their own interpretations of abstruse philosophical or literary passages.  In “Games of Inquiry for Collaborative Concept Structuring,” Mary A. Keeler and Heather D. Pfeiffer envision a “Manuscript Reconstruction Game (MRG)” where Peirce scholars would collaborate to figure out where a manuscript page belongs. “The scholars rely on the mechanism of the game, as a logical editor or ‘logical lens,’ to help them focus on and clarify the complexities of inference and conceptual content in their collaborative view of the manuscript evidence” (407).  There are already some compelling models for humanities game play.  Dan Cohen recently used Twitter to crowdsource solving an historical puzzle. Ian Bogost and collaborators are investigating the intersections between journalism and gaming.  Jerome McGann describes Ivanhoe as an  “online playspace… for organizing collaborative interpretive investigations of traditional humanities materials of any kind,” as two or more players come together to re-imagine and transform a literary work (McGann).

PUBLISHING

• Historical antecedents: exchange of drafts, letters, critical dialogs in journals
• Supporting technologies and protocols: CommentPress, blogs, wikis, Creative Commons licenses, etc.
• Projects:
  Bob Stein defines the book as “a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate.” Recent projects enable readers to participate in all phases of the publishing process, from peer-to-peer review to remixing a work to produce something new.  For instance, LiquidPub aims to transform the dissemination and evaluation of scientific knowledge by enabling “Liquid Publication that can take multiple forms, that evolves continuously, and is enriched by multiple sources.”  Using CommentPress, Noah Wardrip-Fruin  experimented with peer-to-peer review of his new book Expressive Processing alongside traditional peer review, posting a section of the book each week day to the Grand Text Auto blog.  Although it was difficult for many reviewers to get a sense of the book’s overall arguments when they were reading only fragments, Wardrip-Fruin found many benefits to this open approach to peer review: he could engage in conversation with his reviewers and determine how to act on their comments, and he received detailed comments from both academics and non-academics with expertise in the topics being discussed, such as game designers.  Similarly, O’Reilly recently developed the Open Publishing Feedback System to gather comments from the community.  Its first experiment, Programming Scala, yielded over 7000 comments from nearly 750 people. New publishing companies such as WeBook and Vook are exploring collaborative authorship and multimedia.

SOCIAL LEARNING

• Historical antecedents: Students as research assistants?
• Supporting technologies: blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social bibliographies
• Motto: “We participate, therefore we are.” (via John Seely Brown)
• Example:
  As John Seely Brown explains, “social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions.”  Social learning involves “learning to be” an expert through apprenticeship, as well as learning the content and language of a domain.  Brown points to open source communities as exemplifying social learning.  I would guess that many, if not most, collaborative digital humanities projects have depended on contributions from undergraduate and graduate students, whether they digitized materials, did programming, authored metadata, contributed to the project wiki, designed the web site, or even managed the project.

  Why not create a network of research projects, so that students studying a similar topic could jointly contribute to a common resource?  Such is the vision of “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman,” led by Matthew Gold.   Working together to build a common web site on Whitman, students will document their research using Web 2.0 technologies such as CommentPress, BuddyPress (Word Press + social networking), blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, etc.m  Students at City Tech, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology and New York University will focus on Whitman in New York;  those at Rutgers University at Camden will look at Whitman as “sage of Camden”; and those at the University of Mary Washington will examine Whitman and the Civil War.   Similarly, Michael Wesch, the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities, asks his students to become “co-creators” of knowledge, whether in simulating world history and cultures, creating an ethnography of YouTube, or examining anonymity and new media.

While collaboration in the humanities is certainly not new, these projects suggest how researchers (both professional and amateur) can work together regardless of physical location to share ideas and citations, produce translations or transcriptions, and create common scholarly resources.  Long as this list is, I know I’m omitting many other relevant projects (some of which I’ve bookmarked) and overlooking (for now) the challenges that collaborative scholarship faces.  I’ll be working with several collaborators to explore these issues, but I of course welcome comments….

Works Cited

Atkins, Dan. Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure. NSF. January 2003. <http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp>.
Bohannon, John. “Gamers Unravel the Secret Life of Protein.” Wired 20 Apr 2009. 26 May 2009 <http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-05/ff_protein?currentPage=all>.
Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007.
Brockman, William et al. Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment. CLIR/DLF, 2001. 24 Jul 2007 <http://www.clir.org/PUBS/reports/pub104/pub104.pdf>.
Cohen, Daniel J. “Zotero: Social and Semantic Computing for Historical Scholarship.” Perspectives (2007). 27 May 2009 <http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2007/0705/0705tec2.cfm>.
Cronin, Blaise, Debora Shaw, and Kathryn La Barre. “A cast of thousands: Coauthorship and subauthorship collaboration in the 20th century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54.9 (2003): 855-871.
Cronin, Blaise. The hand of science. Scarecrow Press, 2005.
Kelly, Kevin. “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online.” Wired 22 May 2009. 26 May 2009 <http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all>.
Kornbluh, Mark. “From Digital Repositorities to Information Habitats: H-Net, the Quilt Index, Cyber Infrastruture, and Digital Humanities.” First Monday 13.8: August 4, 2008. 
Kuster, M.W., C. Ludwig, and A. Aschenbrenner. “TextGrid as a Digital Ecosystem.” Digital EcoSystems and Technologies Conference, 2007. DEST ‘07. Inaugural IEEE-IES. 2007. 506-511.
Mahoney, Anne. “Tachypaedia Byzantina: The Suda On Line as Collaborative Encyclopedia.”  Digital Humanities Quarterly. 3.1 (2009). 22 Mar 2009 <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/003/1/000025.html>.
McGann, Jerome J. “Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What Is to Be Done?.” New Literary History 36.1 (2005): 71-82.
Nardi, Bonnie, and Justin Harris. “Strangers and friends: collaborative play in world of warcraft.” Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work. Banff, Alberta, Canada: ACM, 2006. 149-158. 18 May 2009 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1180875.1180898>.
O’Donnell, Daniel Paul. “Disciplinary Impact and Technological Obsolescence in Digital Medieval Studies.” A Companion To Digital Humanities. 2 May 2009 <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-4-2&toc.id=0&brand=9781405148641_brand>.
Schroeder, Ralph, and Matthijs Den Besten. “Literary Sleuths On-line: e-Research collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki.” Information, Communication & Society 11.2 (2008): 167-187.
Smith, Martha Nell. “Computing: What Has American Literary Study To Do with It.” American Literature 74.4 (2002): 833-857.
Unsworth, John M. “Creating Digital Resources: the Work of Many Hands.” 14 Sep 1997. 10 Mar 2009 <http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/%7Eunsworth/drh97.html>.

Revisions: Fixed From the Page link, 6/1/09; Tanya ] Tara, 6/2/09; fixed typos (6/14/09)

Recently I heard the editors of a history journal and a literature journal say that they rarely published articles written by more than one author—perhaps a couple every few years.   Around the same time, I was looking over a recent issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing and noticed that it included several jointly-authored articles.  This got me wondering:  is collaborative authorship more common in digital humanities than in “traditional” humanities?

“Collaboration” is often associated with “digital humanities.”  Building digital collections, creating software, devising new analytical methods, and authoring multimodal scholarship typically cannot be accomplished by a solo scholar; rather, digital humanities projects require contributions from people with content knowledge, technical skills, design skills, project management experience, metadata expertise, etc.  Our Cultural Commonwealth identifies enabling collaboration as a key feature of the humanities cyberinfrastructure, funders encourage multi-institutional and even international teams, and proponents of increased collaboration in the humanities like Cathy Davidson and Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford cite digital humanities projects such as Orlando as exemplifying collaborative possibilities.

As a preliminary investigation, I compared the number of collaboratively-written articles published between 2004 and 2008 in two well-respected quarterly journals, American Literary History (ALH) and Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC).  Both journals are published by Oxford University Press as part of its humanities catalog. I selected ALH because it is a leading journal on American literature and culture that encourages critical exchanges and interdisciplinary work—and because I thought it would be fun to see what the journal has published since 2004. (The hardest part of my research: resisting the urge to stop and read the articles.)  LLC, the official publication of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities, includes contributions on digital humanities from around the world—the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, Greece, Italy, Norway, etc.—and from many disciplines, such as literature, linguistics, computer and information science, statistics, librarianship, and biochemistry.  To determine the level of collaborative authorship in each issue, I tallied articles that had more than one author, excluding editors’ introductions, notes on contributors, etc.  For LLC, I counted everything that had an abstract as an article.  While I didn’t count LLC’s reviews, which typically are brief and focus on a single work, I did include the review essays published by ALH, since they are longer and synthesize critical opinion about several works.

So what did I find? Whereas 5 of 259 (1.93%) articles published in ALH—about one a year–feature two authors (none had more than two), 70 out of 145 (48.28%) of the articles published in LLC were written by two or more authors.  Most (4 of 5, or 80%) of the ALH articles were written by scholars from multiple institutions, whereas 49% (34 of 70) of the LLC articles were.  About 16% (11 of 70) of the LLC articles featured contributors from two or more countries, while none of the ALH articles did.  Two of the five ALH articles are review essays, while three focus on hemispheric or transatlantic American studies.  Although this study should be carried out more systematically across a wider range of journals, the initial results do suggest that collaborative authorship is more common in digital humanities. [See the Zotero reports for ALH and LLC for more information.]

Why does LLC feature more collaboratively written articles than ALH? I suspect that because, as I’ve already suggested, digital humanities projects often require collaboration, whereas most literary criticism can be produced by an individual scholar who needs only texts to read, a place to write, and a computer running a word processing application (as well as a library to provide access to texts, colleagues to consult and to review the resulting research, a university and/or funding agency to support the research, a publisher to disseminate the work, etc.).   Moreover, LLC represents a sort of meeting point for a range of disciplines, including several (such as computer science) that have a tradition of collaborative authorship.  Whereas collaborative authorship is common (even expected) in the sciences, in the humanities many tenure and promotion committees have not yet developed mechanisms for evaluating and crediting collaborative work. In a recent blog post, for example, Cathy Davidson tells a troubling story about being told (in a public and humiliating way) by a member of a search committee that her collaborative work and other “non-traditional” research didn’t “count.”  Literary study values individual interpretation, or what Davidson calls “the humanistic ethic of individuality.”

While individual scholarship remains valid and important, shouldn’t humanities scholarship to expand to embrace collaborative work as well?  Indeed, in 2000 the MLA launched an initiative to consider “alternatives to the adversarial academy” and encourage collaborative scholarship.  (By the way, I’m not criticizing ALH; I doubt that it receives many collaboratively-authored submissions, and it has encouraged critical exchange and interdisciplinary research.)  Of course, collaboration poses some significant challenges, such divvying up and managing work, negotiating conflicts, finding funding for complex projects, assigning credit, etc.    But as Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford point out, collaborative authorship can lead to a “widening of scholarly possibilities.”  In talking to humanities scholars (particularly those in global humanities), I’ve noticed genuine enthusiasm about collaborative work that allows scholars to engage in community, consider alternative perspectives, and undertake ambitious projects that require diverse skills and/or knowledge.

What kind of collaborations do the jointly-written articles in LLC and ALH represent? Since LLC often lists only the authors’ institutional affiliations, not their departments, tracing the degree of interdisciplinary collaboration would require further research.  However, I did find examples of several types of collaboration (which may overlap):

• Faculty/student collaboration: In the sciences, faculty frequently publish with their postdocs and students, a practice that seems to be rare in the humanities.  I noted at least one example of a similar collaboration in LLC—involving, I should note, computer science rather than humanities grad students.
  • Urbina, Eduardo et al. “Visual Knowledge: Textual Iconography of the Quixote, a Hypertextual Archive.” Lit Linguist Computing 21.2 (2006): 247-258. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/2/247>.
    This article includes contributions by a professor of Hispanic studies, a professor of computer science, a librarian/archivist/adjunct English professor, and three graduate students in computer science.
• Project teams: In digital humanities, collaborators often work together on projects to build digital collections, develop software, etc.  In LLC, I found a number of articles written by project teams, such as:
  • Barney, Brett et al. “Ordering Chaos: An Integrated Guide and Online Archive of Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts.” Lit Linguist Computing 20.2 (2005): 205-217. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/2/205>.
    Members of the project team included an archivist, programmer, digital initiatives librarian, English professor, and two English Ph.Ds who serve as library faculty and focus on digital humanities.
• Interdisciplinary collaborations: In LLC, I noted several instances of teams that included humanities scholars and scientists working together to apply particular methods (text mining, stemmatic analysis) in the humanities.  For example:
  • Windram, Heather F. et al. “Dante’s Monarchia as a test case for the use of phylogenetic methods in stemmatic analysis.” Lit Linguist Computing 23.4 (2008): 443-463. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/4/443>.  The authors include two biochemists, a textual scholar, and a scholar of Italian literature
  • Sculley, D., and Bradley M. Pasanek. “Meaning and mining: the impact of implicit assumptions in data mining for the humanities.” Lit Linguist Computing 23.4 (2008): 409-424. 5 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/4/409>.
    Authored by a computer scientist and a literature professor.
• Shared interests: Researchers may publish together because they share an intellectual kinship and can accomplish more by working together.  For instance:
  • Auerbach, Jonathan, and Lisa Gitelman. “Microfilm, Containment, and the Cold War.” American Literary History 19.3 (2007).  I noticed that Jonathan Auerbach and Lisa Gitelman thank each other in works that each had previously published as an individual.

Observing that LLC publishes a number of collaboratively-written articles opens up several questions, which I hope to pursue through interviews with the authors of at least some of these articles (if you are one of these authors, you may see an email from me soon….):

1)    What characterizes the LLC articles that have only one author?
Based on a quick look at the tables of contents from past issues, I suspect that these articles are more likely to be theoretical or to focus on particular problems rather than projects.  Here, for example, are the titles of some singly-authored articles:  “The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship,” “Monkey Business—or What is an Edition?,” “What Characterizes Pictures and Text?” and “Original, Authentic, Copy: Conceptual Issues in Digital Texts.”

2)    Why was the article written collaboratively?

What led to the collaboration?  Did team members offer complementary skill sets, such as knowledge of statistical methods and understanding of the content? How did the collaborators come together—do they work for the same institution? Did they meet at a conference? Do they cite each other?

3)    What were the outcomes of the collaboration?

What was accomplished through collaboration that would have been difficult to do otherwise?  Would the scale of the project be smaller if it were pursued by a single scholar? Did the project require contributions from people with different types of expertise?

4)    How was the collaboration managed and sustained?

Was one person in charge, or was authority distributed? What tools were used to facilitate communication, track progress on the project, and support collaborative writing? To what degree was face-to-face interaction important?

5)    What was difficult about the collaboration?

What was hard about collaborating: Communicating? Identifying who does what? Agreeing on methods? Coming to a common understanding of results? Finding funding?

We can find answers to some of these questions in Lynne Siemens’ recent article “’It’s a team if you use “reply all” ‘: An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments.”  Siemens describes factors contributing to the success of collaborative teams in digital humanities, such as clear milestones and benchmarks, strong leadership, equal contributions by members of the team, and a balance between communication through digital tools and in-person meetings.  I particularly liked the description of “a successful team as a ‘round thing’ with equitable contribution by individual members.”

In doing this research, I realized how much it would benefit from collaborators.  For instance, someone with expertise in citation analysis could help enlarge the study and detect patterns in collaborative authorship, while someone with expertise in qualitative research methods could help to interview collaborative research teams and analyze the resulting data.  However, I think anyone with an interest in the topic could make valuable contributions.  This is by way of leading up to my pitch: I’m working on a piece about collaborative research methods in digital humanities for an essay collection and would welcome collaborators.  If you’re interested in teaming up, contact me at lspiro@rice.edu.

Works Cited

Davidson, Cathy N. “What If Scholars in the Humanities Worked Together, in a Lab?.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 28 May 1999. 18 Apr 2009 <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v45/i38/38b00401.htm>.

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA 116.2 (2001): 354-369. 18 Apr 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/463522>.

Siemens, Lynne. “’It’s a team if you use “reply all” ‘: An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments.” Lit Linguist Computing (2009): fqp009. 14 Apr 2009 <http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqp009v1>.

In this final installment of my summary of Digital Humanities in 2008, I’ll discuss developments in digital humanities research. (I should note that if I attempted to give a true synthesis of the year in digital humanities, this would be coming out 4 years late rather than 4 months, so this discussion reflects my own idiosyncratic interests.)

1) Defining research challenges & opportunities

What are some of the key research challenges in digital humanities? Leading scholars tackled this question when CLIR and the NEH convened a workshop on Promoting Digital Scholarship: Formulating Research Challenges In the Humanities, Social Sciences and Computation. Prior to the workshop, six scholars in classics, architectural history, physics/information sciences, literature, visualization, and information retrieval wrote brief overviews of their field and of the ways that information technology could help to advance it. By articulating the central concerns of their fields so concisely, these essays promote interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration; they’re also fun to read. As Doug Oard writes in describing the natural language processing “tribe,” “Learning a bit about the other folks is a good way to start any process of communication… The situation is really quite simple: they are organized as tribes, they work their magic using models (rather like voodoo), they worship the word “maybe,” and they never do anything right.” Sounds like my kind of tribe. Indeed, I’d love to see a wiki where experts in fields ranging from computational biology to postcolonial studies write brief essays about their fields, provide a bibliography of foundational works, and articulate both key challenges and opportunities for collaboration. (Perhaps such information could be automatically aggregated using semantic technologies—see, for instance, Concept Web or Kosmix–but I admire the often witty, personal voices of these essays.)

Here are some key ideas that emerge from the essays:

1. Global Humanistic Studies: Both Caroline Levander and Greg Crane, Alison Babeu, David Bamman, Lisa Cerrato, and Rashmi Singhal call for a sort of global humanistic studies, whether re-conceiving American studies from a hemispheric perspective or re-considering the Persian Wars from the Persian point of view. Scholars working in global humanistic studies face significant challenges, such as the need to read texts in many languages and understand multiple cultural contexts. Emerging technologies promise to help scholars address these problems. For instance, named entity extraction, machine translation and reading support tools can help scholars make sense of works that would otherwise be inaccessible to them; visualization tools can enable researchers “to explore spatial and temporal dynamism;” and collaborative workspaces allow scholars to divide up work, share ideas, and approach a complex research problem from multiple perspectives. Moreover, a shift toward openly accessible data will enable scholars to more easily identify and build on relevant work. Describing how reading support tools enable researchers to work more productively, Crane et . write, “By automatically linking inflected words in a text to linguistic analyses and dictionary entries we have already allowed readers to spend more time thinking about the text than was possible as they flipped through print dictionaries. Reading support tools allow readers to understand linguistic sources at an earlier stage of their training and to ask questions, no matter how advanced their knowledge, that were not feasible in print.” We can see a similar intersection between digital humanities and global humanities in projects like the Global Middle Ages.
2. What skills do humanities scholars need? Doug Oard suggests that humanities scholars should collaborate with computer scientists to define and tackle “challenge problems” so that the development of new technologies is grounded in real scholarly needs. Ultimately, “humanities scholars are going to need to learn a bit of probability theory” so that they can understand the accuracy of automatic methods for processing data, the “science of maybe.” How does probability theory jibe with humanistic traditions of ambiguity and interpretation? And how are humanities scholars going to learn these skills?

According to the symposium, major research challenges for the digital humanities include:

1. “Scale and the poverty of abundance:” developing tools and methods to deal with the plenitude of data, including text mining and analysis, visualization, data management and archiving, and sustainability.
2. Representing place and time: figuring out how to support geo-temporal analysis and enable that analysis to be documented, preserved, and replicated
   
3. Social networking and the economy of attention: understanding research behaviors online; analyzing text corpora based on these behaviors (e.g. citation networks)
4. Establishing a research infrastructure that facilitates access, interdisciplinary collaboration, and sustainability. “As one participant asked, “What is the Protein Data Bank for the humanities?””

2) High performance computing: visualization, modeling, text mining

What are some of the most promising research areas in digital humanities? In a sense, the three recent winners of the NEH/DOE’s High Performance Computing Initiative define three of the main areas of digital humanities and demonstrate how advanced computing can open up new approaches to humanistic research.

• text mining and text analysis: For its project on “Large-Scale Learning and the Automatic Analysis of Historical Texts,” the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University is examining how words in Latin and Greek have changed over time by comparing the linguistic structure of classical texts with works written in the last 2000 years. In the press release announcing the winners, David Bamman, a senior researcher in computational linguistics with the Perseus Project, said that “[h]igh performance computing really allows us to ask questions on a scale that we haven’t been able to ask before. We’ll be able to track changes in Greek from the time of Homer to the Middle Ages. We’ll be able to compare the 17th century works of John Milton to those of Vergil, which were written around the turn of the millennium, and try to automatically find those places where Paradise Lost is alluding to the Aeneid, even though one is written in English and the other in Latin.”
• 3D modeling: For its “High Performance Computing for Processing and Analysis of Digitized 3-D Models of Cultural Heritage” project, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia will reprocess existing data to create 3D models of culturally-significant artifacts and architecture. For example, IATH hopes to re-assemble fragments that chipped off  ancient Greek and Roman artifacts.
  
• Visualization and cultural analysis: The University of California, San Diego’s Visualizing Patterns in Databases of Cultural Images and Video project will study contemporary culture, analyzing datastreams such as “millions of images, paintings, professional photography, graphic design, user-generated photos; as well as tens of thousands of videos, feature films, animation, anime music videos and user-generated videos.” Ultimately the project will produce detailed visualizations of cultural phenomena.

Winners received compute time on a supercomputer and technical training.

Of course, there’s more to digital humanities than text mining, 3D modeling, and visualization. For instance, the category listing for the Digital Humanities and Computer Science conference at Chicago reveals the diversity of participants’ fields of interest. Top areas include text analysis; libraries/digital archives; imaging/visualization, data mining/machine learning; informational retrieval; semantic search; collaborative technologies; electronic literature; and GIS mapping. A simple analysis of the most frequently appearing terms in the Digital Humanities 2008 Book of Abstracts suggests that much research continues to focus on text—which makes sense, given the importance of written language to humanities research.  Here’s the list that TAPOR generated of the 10 words most frequently used terms in the DH 2008 abstracts:

1. text: 769
2. digital: 763
3. data: 559
4. information: 546
5. humanities: 517
6. research: 501
7. university: 462
8. new: 437
9. texts: 413
10. project: 396

“Images” is used 161 times, visualization 46.

And here’s the word cloud. As someone who got started in digital humanities by marking up texts in TEI, I’m always interested in learning about developments in encoding, analyzing and visualizing texts, but some of the coolest sessions I attended at DH 2008 tackled other questions: How do we reconstruct damaged ancient manuscripts? How do we archive dance performances? Why does the digital humanities community emphasize tools instead of services?

3) Focus on method

As digital humanities emerges, much attention is being devoted to developing research methodologies. In “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?,” Tom Scheinfeldt suggests that humanities scholarship is beginning to tilt toward methodology, that we are entering a “new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not by ideas, but once again by organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work.”

So what are some examples of methods developed and/or applied by digital humanities researchers? In “Meaning and mining: the impact of implicit assumptions in data mining for the humanities,” Bradley Pasanek and D. Sculley tackle methodological challenges posed by mining humanities data, arguing that literary critics must devise standards for making arguments based upon data mining. Through a case study testing Lakoff’s theory that political ideology is defined by metaphor, Pasanek and Sculley demonstrate that the selection of algorithms and representation of data influence the results of data mining experiments. Insisting that interpretation is central to working with humanities data, they concur with Steve Ramsay and others in contending that data mining may be most significant in “highlighting ambiguities and conflicts that lie latent within the text itself.” They offer some sensible recommendations for best practices, including making assumptions about the data and texts explicit; using multiple methods and representations; reporting all trials; making data available and experiments reproducible; and engaging in peer review of methodology.

4) Digital literary studies

Different methodological approaches to literary study are discussed in the Companion to Digital Literary Studies (DLS), which was edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens and was released for free online in the fall of 2008. Kudos to its publisher, Blackwell, for making the hefty volume available, along with A Companion to Digital Humanities. The book includes essays such as “Reading digital literature: surface, data, interaction, and expressive processing” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “The Virtual Codex from page space to e-space” by Johanna Drucker, “Algorithmic criticism” by Steve Ramsay, and “Knowing true things by what their mockeries be: modelling in the humanities” by Willard McCarty. DLS also provides a handy annotated bibliography by Tanya Clement and Gretchen Gueguen that highlights some of the key scholarly resources in literature, including Digital Transcriptions and Images, Born-Digital Texts and New Media Objects, and Criticism, Reviews, and Tools. I expect that the book will be used frequently in digital humanities courses and will be a foundational work.

5) Crafting history: History Appliances

For me, the coolest—most innovative, most unexpected, most wow!—work of the year came from the ever-inventive Bill Turkel, who is exploring humanistic fabrication (not in the Mills Kelly sense of making up stuff , but in the DIY sense of making stuff). Turkel is working on “materialization,” giving a digital representation physical form by using, for example, a rapid prototyping machine, a sort of 3D printer. Turkel points to several reasons why humanities scholars should experiment with fabrication: they can be like DaVinci, making the connection between the mind and hand by realizing an idea in physical form; study the past by recreating historical objects (fossils, historical artifacts, etc) that can be touched, rotated, scrutinized; explore “haptic history,” a sensual experience of the past; and engage in “Critical technical practice,” where scholars both create and critique.

Turkel envisions making digital information “available in interactive, ambient and tangible forms.”  As Turkel argues, “As academic researchers we have tended to emphasize opportunities for dissemination that require our audience to be passive, focused and isolated from one another and from their surroundings. We need to supplement that model by building some of our research findings into communicative devices that are transparently easy to use, provide ambient feedback, and are closely coupled with the surrounding environment.” Turkel and his team are working on 4 devices: a dashboard, which shows both public and customized information streams on a large display; imagescapes and soundscapes that present streams of complex data as artificial landscapes or sound, aiding awareness; a GeoDJ, which is an iPod-like device that uses GPS and GIS to detect your location and deliver audio associated with it ( e.g. percussion for an historic industrial site); and ice cores and tree rings, “tangible browsers that allow the user to explore digital models of climate history by manipulating physical interfaces that are based on this evidence.” This work on ambient computing and tangible interfaces promises to foster awareness and open up understanding of scholarly data by tapping people’s natural way of comprehending the world through touch and other forms of sensory perception. (I guess the senses of smell and taste are difficult to include in sensual history, although I’m not sure I want to smell or taste many historical artifacts or experiences anyway. I would like to re-create the invention of the Toll House cookie, which for me qualifies as an historic occasion.) This approach to humanistic inquiry and representation requires the resources of a science lab or art studio—a large, well-ventilated space as well as equipment like a laser scanner, lathes, mills, saws, calipers, etc. Unfortunately, Turkel has stopped writing his terrific blog “Digital History Hacks” to focus on his new interests, but this work is so fascinating that I’m anxious to see what comes next–which describes my attitude toward digital humanities in general.

[Note: Typically my blog focuses on digital humanities research, but this post discusses some of my related work examining software that helps archives streamline their workflows.]

As archives acquire collections, arrange them, describe them, manage them, and make them publicly available, they produce data in multiple formats, such as notecards, Word documents, Excel files, Access databases, XML (EAD) finding aids, web pages, etc.  Chris Prom suggests that some archives use so many tools in creating this data that their workflows “would make a good subject for a Rube Goldberg cartoon.”   As a result, archives replicate data and effort, struggle with versioning control, face challenges finding and analyzing archival information, and have difficulty making that information publicly available.   By using archival management systems such as Archon and Archivists’ Toolkit, however, archives can streamline the production of archival information; make it simpler to find information and generate reports; enable non-professionals to more easily create archival description;  conform to archival standards; and share information such as finding aids with the public.  To help guide the archival community in selecting the appropriate archival management system, I recently wrote a report for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

Working on the report led me to several (admittedly non-revolutionary) insights:

1. If you want to know what features software users need, ask them.   In the course of interviewing over 30 archivists and developers, I gained a greater understanding of key criteria for archival management software including flexibility, conformity to standards, support for an integrated workflow, ease of use, remote access (since archivists may do initial work processing collections off site), customization capabilities, ability to import and export data, etc.
2. There is no one-size-fits-all tool.  Some archives prefer to use open source software; others are leery of open source, need a hosted solution, or require lots of support in importing and exporting data, customizing the user interface, etc.  Some archives need a way to publish archival information on the web; others want to export finding aids and pull them into existing publishing tools.
3. Reports go out-of-date as soon as they are published.  Why not release the report as a wiki so that the community can keep it current and relevant?  With the support of CLIR, I’ve created a wiki called Archival Software.  Right now it more or less replicates the structure and content of my original report, but I hope that it evolves according to the needs of the community.   I invite members of the archival community to update the information, add new sections, restructure the wiki, and do whatever else makes it most useful.
4. If archival management systems integrate and streamline the archival workflow from accessioning the collection to describing it to managing it to making it publicly available, what would an integrated research tool for the humanities look like–or would such a tool even be desirable or possible, given the variation in research practices? My first thought: Zotero with add-ons for analyzing information (perhaps similar to the tools under development by SEASR), authoring and sharing research  (like the Word plug-in or plug-ins for multimedia authoring or mashup creation, sharing via Internet Archive collaboration), etc.

On March 31, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) will offer a web seminar, Archival Content Management Systems, that is based upon my report.  The webinar will examine the case for archival management systems, explore selection criteria, and provide brief demonstrations of 3 systems.  I think there’s still time to register.  (Apologies for the self-promotion, but I wanted to get the word out…)

Open access, just like dark chocolate and blueberries, is good and good for you, enabling information to be mined and reused, fostering the exchange of ideas, and ensuring public access to research that taxpayers often helped to fund.  Moreover, as Dan Cohen contends, scholars benefit from open access to their work, since their own visibility increases: “In a world where we have instantaneous access to billions of documents online, why would you want the precious article or book you spent so much time on to exist only on paper, or behind a pay wall? This is a sure path to invisibility in the digital age.”  Thus some scholars are embracing social scholarship, which promotes openness, collaboration, and sharing research.  This year saw some positive developments in open access and scholarly communications, such as the implementation of the NIH mandate, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Science’s decision to go open access (followed by Harvard Law), and the launch of the Open Humanities Press.  But there were also some worrisome developments (the Conyers Bill’s attempt to rescind the NIH mandate, EndNote’s lawsuit against Zotero) and some confusing ones (the Google Books settlement).  In the second part of my summary on the year in digital humanities, I’ll look broadly at the scholarly communication landscape, discussing open access to educational materials, new publication models, the Google Books settlement, and cultural obstacles to digital publication.

Open Access Grows–and Faces Resistance

In December of 2007, the NIH Public Access Policy was signed into law, mandating that any research funded by the NIH would be deposited in PubMed

Ask Me About Open Access by mollyali

Central within a year of its publication.  Since the mandate was implemented, almost 3000 new biomedical manuscripts have been deposited into PubMed Central each month.  Now John Conyers has put forward a bill that would rescind the NIH mandate and prohibit other federal agencies from implementing similar policies.  This bill would deny the public access to research that it funded and choke innovation and scientific discovery.   According to Elias Zerhouni, former director of the NIH, there is no evidence that the mandate harms publishers; rather, it maximizes the public’s “return on its investment” in funding scientific research.  If you support public access to research, contact your representative and express your opposition to this bill before February 28.  The Alliance for Taxpayer Access offers a useful summary of key issues as well as a letter template at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/HR801-09-0211.html.

Open Humanities?

Why has the humanities been lagging behind the sciences in adopting open access?  Gary Hall points to several ways in which the sciences differ from the humanities, including science’s greater funding  for “author pays” open access and emphasis  on disseminating information rapidly, as well as humanities’ “negative perception of the digital medium.”   But Hall is challenging that perception by helping to launch the Open Humanities Press (OHP) and publishing “Digitize This Book.”  Billing itself as “an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory,” OHP  selects journals for inclusion in the collective  based upon their adherence to publication standards, open access standards, design standards, technical standards, and editorial best practices. Prominent scholars such as Jonathan Culler, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jerome McGann have signed on as board members of the Open Humanities Press, giving it more prestige and academic credibility.  In a talk at UC Irvine last spring,  OHP co-founder Sigi Jӧttkandt refuted the assumption that open access means “a sort of open free-for-all of publishing” rather than high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship.  Jӧttkandt argued that open access should be fundamental to the digital humanities: “as long as the primary and secondary materials that these tools operate on remain locked away in walled gardens, the Digital Humanities will fail to fulfill the real promise of innovation contained in the digital medium.”  It’s worth noting that many digital humanities resources are available as open access, including Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Rossetti Archive, and projects developed by CHNM; many others may not be explicitly open access, but they make information available for free.

In “ANTHROPOLOGY OF/IN CIRCULATION: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies,” Christopher Kelty, Michael M. J. Fischer, Alex “Rex” Golub, Jason Baird Jackson, Kimberly Christen, and Michael F. Brown engage in a wide-ranging discussion of open access in anthropology, prompted in part by the American Anthropological Association’s decision to move its publishing activities to Wiley Blackwell.  This rich conversation explores different models for open access, the role of scholarly societies in publishing, building community around research problems, reusing and remixing scholarly content, the economics of publishing, the connection between scholarly reputation and readers’ access to publications, how to make content accessible to source communities, and much more.   As Kelty argues, “The future of innovative scholarship is not only in the AAA (American Anthropological Association) and its journals, but in the structures we build that allow our research to circulate and interact in ways it never could before.”  Kelty (who, alas, was lured away from Rice by UCLA) is exploring how to make scholarship more open and interactive.  You can buy a print copy of Two Bits, his new book on the free software movement published by Duke UP; read (for free) a PDF version of the book; comment on the CommentPress version; or download and remix the HTML.  Reporting on Two Bits at Six Months, Kelty observed, “Duke is making as little or as much money on the book as they do on others of its ilk, and yet I am getting much more from it being open access than I might otherwise.”  The project has made Kelty more visible as a scholar, leading to more media attention, invitations to give lectures and submit papers, etc.

New Models of Scholarly Communication, and Continued Resistance

To what extent are new publishing models emerging as the Internet enables the rapid, inexpensive distribution of information, the incorporation of multimedia into publications, and networked collaboration? To find out, The ARL/ Ithaka New Model Publications Study conducted an “organized scan” of emerging scholarly publications such as blogs, ejournals, and research hubs.  ARL recruited 301 volunteer librarians from 46 colleges and universities to interview faculty about new model publications that they used.  (I participated in a small way, interviewing one faculty member at Rice.)  According to the report, examples of new model publications exist in all disciplines, although scientists are more likely to use pre-print repositories, while humanities scholars participate more frequently in discussion forums.  The study identifies eight principal types of scholarly resources:

• E-only journals
• Reviews
• Preprints and working papers
• Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and annotated  content
• Data
• Blogs
• Discussion forums
• Professional and scholarly hubs

These categories provide a sort of abbreviated field manual to identifying different types of new model publications.  I might add a few more categories, such as collaborative commentary or peer-to-peer review (exemplified by projects that use CommentPress); scholarly wikis like OpenWetWare that enable open sharing of scholarly information; and research portals like NINES (which perhaps would be considered a “hub”).   The report offers fascinating examples of innovative publications, such as ejournals that publish articles as they are ready rather on a set schedule and a video journal that documents experimental methods in biology.   Since only a few examples of new model publications could fit into this brief report, ARL is making available brief descriptions of 206 resources that it considered to be  “original and scholarly works” via a publicly accessible database.

My favorite example of a new model publication: eBird, a project initiated by  the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audobon Society that enlists amateur and professional bird watchers to collect bird observation data.  Scientists then use this data to understand the “distribution and abundance” of birds.  Initially eBird ran into difficulty getting birders to participate, so they developed tools that allowed birders to get credit and feel part of a community, to “manage and maintain their lists online, to compare their observations with others’ observations.” I love the motto and mission of eBird—“Notice nature.”  I wonder if a similar collaborative research site could be set up for, say, the performing arts (ePerformances.org?), where audience members would document arts and humanities in the wild–plays, ballets, performance art, poetry readings, etc.

The ARL/Ithaka report also highlights some of the challenges faced by these new model publications, such as the conservatism of academic culture, the difficulty of getting scholars to participate in online forums, and finding ways to fund and sustain publications.  In  Interim Report: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication, Diane Harley and her colleagues at the University of California Berkeley delve into some of these challenges.  Harley finds that although some scholars are interested in publishing their research as interactive multimedia, “(1) new forms must be perceived as having undergone rigorous peer review, (2) few untenured scholars are presenting such publications as part of their tenure cases, and (3) the mechanisms for evaluating new genres (e.g., nonlinear narratives and multimedia publications) may be prohibitive for reviewers in terms of time and inclination.” Humanities researchers are typically less concerned with the speed of publication than scientists and social scientists, but they do complain about journals’ unwillingness to include many high quality images and would like to link from their arguments to supporting primary source material. However, faculty are not aware of any easy-to-use tools or support that would enable them to author multimedia works and are therefore less likely to experiment with new forms.  Scholars in all fields included in the study do share their research with other scholars, typically through emails and other forms of personal communication, but many regard blogs as “a waste of time because they are not peer reviewed.”  Similarly, Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education (published in 2008) found that “faculty decisions about where and how to publish the results of their research are principally based on the visibility within their field of a particular option,” not open access.

But academic conservatism shouldn’t keep us from imagining and experimenting with alternative approaches to scholarly publishing.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “book-like-object” (blob) proposal, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, offers a bold and compelling vision of the future of academic publishing.  Fitzpatrick calls for academia to break out of its zombie-like adherence to (un)dead forms and proposes “peer-to-peer” review (as in Wikipedia), focusing on process rather than product (as in blogs), and engaging in networked conversation (as in CommentPress). (If references to zombies and blobs make you think Fitzpatrick’s stuff is fun to read as well as insightful, you’d be right.)

EndNote Sues Zotero

Normally I have trouble attracting faculty and grad students to workshops exploring research tools and scholarly communication issues, but they’ve been flocking to my workshops on Zotero, which they recognize as a tool that will help them work more productively.  Apparently Thomson Reuters, the maker of EndNote, has noticed the competitive threat posed by Zotero, since they have sued George Mason University, which produces Zotero, alleging that programmers reverse engineered EndNote so that they could convert proprietary EndNote .ens files into open Zotero .csl files.  Commentators more knowledgeable about the technical and legal details than I have found Thomson’s claims to be bogus.  My cynical read on this lawsuit is that EndNote saw a threat from a popular, powerful open source application and pursued legal action rather than competing by producing a better product.  As Hugh Cayless suggests, “This is an act of sheer desperation on the part of Thomson Reuters” and shows that Zotero has “scared your competitors enough to make them go running to Daddy, thus unequivocally validating your business model.”

The lawsuit seems to realize Yokai Benkler’s description of proprietary attempts to control information:

“In law, we see a continual tightening of the control that the owners of exclusive rights are given.  Copyrights are longer, apply to more uses, and are interpreted as reaching into every corner of valuable use. Trademarks are stronger and more aggressive. Patents have expanded to new domains and are given greater leeway. All these changes are skewing the institutional ecology in favor of business models and production practices that are based on exclusive proprietary claims; they are lobbied for by firms that collect large rents if these laws are expanded, followed, and enforced. Social trends in the past few years, however, are pushing in the opposite direction.”

Unfortunately, the lawsuit seems to be having a chilling effect that ultimately will, I think, hurt EndNote.  For instance, the developers of BibApp, “a publication-list manager and repository-populator,” decided not to import citation lists produced by EndNote, since “doing anything with their homegrown formats has been proven hazardous.” This lawsuit raises the crucial issue of whether researchers can move their data from one system to another.  Why would I want to choose a product that locks me in?  As Nature wrote in an editorial quoted by CHNM in its response to the lawsuit, “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.”

Google Books Settlement

Google Books by Jon Wiley

In the fall, Google settled with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over Google Book Search, allowing academic libraries to subscribe to a full-text collection of millions of out-of-print but (possibly) in-copyright books.  (Google estimates that about 70% of published books fall into this category).  Individuals can also purchase access to books, and libraries will be given a single terminal that will provide free access to the collection.  On a pragmatic (and gluttonous) level, I think, Oh boy, this settlement will give me access to so much stuff.   But, like others, I am concerned about one company owning all of this information, see the Book Rights Registry as potentially anti-competitive, and wish that a Google victory in court had verified fair use principles (even if such a decision probably would have kept us in snippet view or limited preview for in-copyright materials).  Libraries have some legitimate concerns about access, privacy, intellectual freedom, equitable treatment, and terms of use.  Indeed, Harvard pulled out of the project over concerns about cost and accessibility.  As Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard Library and a prominent scholar of book history, wrote in the NY Review of Books, “To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access… would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere.” Although the settlement makes a provision for “non-consumptive research” (using the books without reading them) that seems to allow for text mining and other computational research, I worry that digital humanists and other scholars won’t have access to the data they need.  What if Google goes under, or goes evil? But the establishment of the Hathi Trust by several of Google Book’s academic library partners (and others) makes me feel a little better about access and preservation issues, and I noted that Hathi Trust will provide a corpus of 50,000 documents for the NEH’s Digging into the Data Challenge.  And as I argued in an earlier series of blog posts, I certainly do see how Google Books can transform research by providing access to so much information.

Around the same time (same day?) that the Google Books settlement was released, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) reached an important milestone, providing access to over a million books.  As its name suggests, the OCA makes scanned books openly available for reading, download, and analysis, and from my observations the quality of the digitization is better.  Although the OCA’s collection is smaller and it focuses on public domain materials, it offers a vital alternative to GB.  (Rice is a member of the Open Content Alliance.)

Next up in the series on digital humanities in 2008: my attempt to summarize recent developments in research.

A few days ago a commenter on my blog asked how he could learn to develop rich historical web sites “that would allow me to bring primary sources/scholarship from centuries ago to a wider audience.”  I had a hard time thinking of digital humanities programs that provide training in authoring digital media (George Mason? Georgia Tech?).  But then I heard about the new Masters concentration in History and Media at the University at Albany, which promises to prepare students to develop historical web sites, documentary films, oral histories, and other forms of media.   Albany seems to be well-positioned to offer such a program; for instance, it published the late lamented Journal for Multimedia History, a groundbreaking journal focused multimedia explorations of historical topics. In a recent discussion about “The Promise of Digital History” published in the Journal of American History, Amy Murrell Taylor, one of the professors developing Albany’s program, makes a persuasive case for thinking about digital history as a medium, “as the production of something that can stand alongside a book, something that takes a different form but nonetheless raises questions, offers analysis, and advances our historiographical knowledge about a given subject.”

Here’s the announcement, taken from H-Net:

The University at Albany’s Department of History has introduced a new 36-credit History and Media concentration to its Masters program, allowing students to learn and apply specialized media skills — digital history and hypermedia authoring, photography and photoanalysis, documentary filmmaking, oral/video history, and aural history and audio documentary production — to the study of the past. The History and Media concentration builds on the Department’s strengths in academic and public history and its reputation as an innovator in the realm of digital and multimedia history.

Among the History and Media courses to be offered beginning in the fall of 2009 are: Introduction to Historical Documentary Media; Narrative in Historical Media; Readings and Practicum in Aural History and Audio Documentary Production; Readings and Practicum in Digital History and Hypermedia; Readings in the History and Theory of Documentary Filmmaking; Readings in Visual Media and Culture; Introduction to Oral and Video History; Research Seminar and Practicum in History and Media.

Instructors in the History and Media concentration will vary but will include a core faculty including:
Gerald Zahavi, Professor; Amy Murrell Taylor, Associate Professor; Ray Sapirstein, Assistant Professor; Sheila Curran Bernard, Assistant Professor.

For more information, contact Gerald Zahavi, zahavi@albany.edu; 518-442-5427.

When I wrote a series of blog posts last year summarizing developments in digital humanities, a friend joked that I had just signed on to do the same thing every year.  So here’s my synthesis of digital humanities in 2008, delivered a little later than I intended. (Darn life, getting in the way of blogging!) This post, the first in a series, will focus on the emergence of digital humanities (DH), defining DH and its significance, and community-building efforts.   Subsequent posts will look at developments in research, open education, scholarly communication, mass digitization, and tools.   Caveat lector:  this series reflects the perspective of an English Ph.D. with a background in text encoding and interest in digital scholarship working at a U.S. library who wishes she knew and understood all but surely doesn’t.  Please  add comments and questions.

1.    The Emergence of the Digital Humanities

This year several leaders in digital humanities declared its “emergence.”  At one of the first Bamboo workshops, John Unsworth pointed to the high number of participants and developments in digital humanities since work on the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report (Our Cultural Commonwealth) began 5 years earlier and noted “we have in fact reached emergence… we are now at a moment when real change seems possible.”  Likewise, Stan Katz commented in a blog post called “The Emergence of the Digital Humanities,” “Much remains to be done, and campus-based inattention to the humanities complicates the task. But the digital humanities are here to stay, and they bear close watching.”

Emergence: Termite Cathedral (Wikipedia)

Last year I blogged about the emergence of digital humanities and I suspect I will the next few years as well, but digital humanities did seem to gain momentum and visibility in 2008.  For me, a key sign of the DH’s emergence came when the NEH transformed the Digital Humanities Initiative into the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), signaling the significance of the “digital” to humanities scholarship.  After the office was established, Inside Higher Ed noted in“Rise of the Digital NEH” that what had been a “grassroots movement” was attracting funding and developing “organizational structure.”  Establishing the ODH gave credibility to an emerging field (discipline? methodology?).  When you’re trying to make the case that your work in digital humanities should count for tenure and promotion, it certainly doesn’t hurt to point out that it’s funded by the NEH.  The ODH acts not only as a funder (of 89 projects to date), but also a facilitator, convening conversations, listening actively, and encouraging digital humanities folks to “Keep innovating.” Recognizing that digital humanities works occurs across disciplinary and national boundaries, the ODH collaborates with funding agencies in other countries such as the UK’s JISC, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and Germany’s DFG; US agencies such as NSF, IMLS and DOE; and non-profits such as CLIR.  Although the ODH has a small staff (three people) and limited funds, I’ve been impressed by how much this knowledgeable, entrepreneurial team has been able to accomplish, such as launching initiatives focused on data mining and high performance computing, advocating for the digital humanities, providing seed funding for innovative projects, and sponsoring institutes on advanced topics in the digital humanities.

It also seemed like there were more digital humanities jobs in 2008, or at least more job postings that listed digital humanities as a desired specialization.  Of course, the economic downturn may limit not only the number of DH jobs, but also the funding available to pursue complex projects–or, here’s hoping, it may lead to funding for scanner-ready research infrastructure projects.

2.    Defining “digital humanities”

Perhaps another sign of emergence is the effort to figure out just what the beast is.  Several essays and dialogues published in 2008 explore and make the case for the digital humanities; a few use the term “promise,” suggesting that the digital humanities is full of potential but not yet fully realized.

• “The Promise of Digital History,” a conversation among Dan Cohen, Michael Frisch, Patrick Gallagher, Steven Mintz, Kirsten Sword, Amy Murrell Taylor, Will Thomas III, and Bill Turkel published in the Journal of American History.  This fascinating, wide-ranging discussion explores defining digital history; developing new methodological approaches; teaching both skills and an understanding of the significance of new media for history; coping with impermanence and fluidity; sustaining collaborations; expanding the audience for history; confronting institutional and cultural resistance to digital history; and much more. Whew! One of the most fascinating discussion threads: Is digital history a method, field, or medium?  If digital history is a method, then all historians need to acquire basic knowledge of it; if it is a medium, then it offers a new form for historical thinking, one that supports networked collaboration.  Participants argued that digital history is not just about algorithmic analysis, but also about collaboration, networking, and using new media to explore historical ideas.
• In “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions”  (subscription required, but see Participatory Learning and the New Humanities: An Interview with Cathy Davidson for related ideas), Cathy Davidson argues that the humanities, which offers strengths in “historical perspective, interpretative skill, critical analysis, and narrative form,” should be integral to the information age.  She calls for humanists to acknowledge and engage with the transformational potential of technology for teaching, research and writing.
  

  Extra Credit, by ptufts

  Describing how access to research materials online has changed research, she cites a colleague’s joke that work done before the emergence of digital archives should be emblazoned with an “Extra Credit” sticker.  Now we are moving into “Humanities 2.0,” characterized by networked participation, collaboration, and interaction.  For instance, scholars might open up an essay for criticism and commentary using a tool such as CommentPress, or they might collaborate on multinational, multilingual teaching and research projects, such as the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project.   Yet Davidson acknowledges the “perils” posed by information technology, particularly monopolistic, corporate control of information.   Davidson contributes to the conversation about digital humanities by emphasizing the importance of a critical understanding of information technology and advocating for a scholarship of engagement and participation.

• In “Something Called ‘Digital Humanities’”, Wendell Piez challenges William Deresiewicz’s dismissal of “something called digital humanities” (as well as of “Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism”).  Piez argues that just as Renaissance “scholar-technologists” such as Aldus Manutius helped to create print culture, so digital humanists focus on both understanding and creating digital media. As we ponder the role of the humanities in society, perhaps digital humanities, which both enables new modes of communicating with the larger community and critically reflects on emerging media, provides one model for engagement.

3.    Community and collaboration

According to Our Cultural Commonwealth, “facilitat[ing] collaboration” is one of the five key goals for the humanities cyberinfrastructure.   Although this goal faces cultural, organizational, financial, and technical obstacles, several recent efforts are trying to articulate and address these challenges.

To facilitate collaboration, Our Cultural Commonwealth calls for developing a network of research centers that provide both technical and subject expertise.  In A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States, Diane Zorich inventories the governance, organizational structures, funding models, missions, projects, and research at existing DH centers.  She describes such centers as being at a turning point, reaching a point of maturity but facing challenges in sustaining themselves and preserving digital content.  Zorich acknowledges the innovative work many digital humanities centers have been doing, but calls for greater coordination among centers so that they can break out of siloes, tackle common issues such as digital preservation, and build shared services.   Such coordination is already underway through groups such as CenterNet and HASTAC, collaborative research projects funded by the NEH and other agencies, cyberinfrastructure planning projects such as Bamboo, and informal partnerships among centers.

How to achieve greater coordination among “Humanities Research Centers” was also the topic of the Sixth Scholarly Communications Instititute (SCI), which used the Zorich report as a starting point for discussion.   The SCI report looks at challenges facing both traditional humanities centers, as they engage with new media and try to become “agents of change,” and digital humanities centers, as they struggle to “move from experimentation to normalization” attain stability (6).   According to the report, humanities centers should facilitate “more engagement with methods,” discuss what counts as scholarship, and coordinate activities with each other.  Through my Twitter feeds, I understand that the SCI meeting seems to be yielding results: CenterNet and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) are now discussing possible collaboratiions, such as postdocs in digital humanities.

Likewise, Bamboo is bringing together humanities researchers, computer scientists, information technologists, and librarians to discuss developing shared technology services in support of arts and humanities researchers.  Since April 2008, Bamboo has convened three workshops to define scholarly practices, examine challenges, and plan for the humanities cyberinfrastructure.  I haven’t been involved with Bamboo (beyond partnering with them to add information to the Digital Research Tools wiki), so I am not the most authoritative commentator, but I think that involving a wide community in defining scholarly needs and developing technology services just makes sense–it prevents replication, leverages common resources, and ultimately, one hopes, makes it easier to perform and sustain research using digital tools and resources.  The challenge, of course, is how to move from talk to action, especially given current economic constraints and the mission creep that is probably inevitable with planning activities that involve over 300 people.  To tackle implementation issues, Bamboo has set up eight working groups that are addressing topics like education, scholarly networking, tools and content, and shared services. I’m eager to see what Bamboo comes up with.

Planning for the cyberinfrastructure and coordinating activities among humanities centers are important activities, but playing with tools and ideas among fellow digital humanists is fun!  (Well, I guess planning and coordination can be fun, too, but a different kind of fun.)  This June, the Center for New Media in History hosted its first THATCamp (The Humanities and

Dork Shorts at THAT Camp

Technology Camp), a “user-generated,” organically organized “unconference” (very Web 2.0/ open source).  Rather than developing an agenda prior to the conference, the organizers asked each participant to blog about his or her interests, then devoted the first session to setting up sessions based on what participants wanted to discuss.  Instead of passively listening to three speakers read papers, each person who attended a session was asked to participate actively.  Topics included Teaching Digital Humanities, Making Things (Bill Turkel’s Arduino workshop), Visualization, Infrastructure and Sustainability, and the charmingly titled Dork Shorts, where THAT Campers briefly demonstrated their projects. THAT Camp drew a diversity of folks–faculty, graduate students, librarians, programmers, information technologists, funders, etc.  The conference used technology effectively to stir up and sustain energy and ideas—the blog posts before the conference helped the attendees set some common topics for discussion, and  Twitter provided a backchannel during the conference.   Sure,  a couple sessions meandered a bit, but I’ve never been to a conference where people were so excited to be there, so engaged and open.  I bet many collaborations and bright ideas were hatched at THAT Camp.  This year, THAT Camp will be expanded and will take place right after Digital Humanities 2009.

THAT Camp got me hooked on Twitter.  Initially a Twitter skeptic (gawd, do I need another way to procrastinate?), I’ve found that it’s great way to find out what’s going on digital humanities and connect with others who have similar interests.  I love Barbara Ganley’s line (via Dan Cohen): “blog to reflect, Tweet to connect.”  If you’re interesting in Twittering but aren’t sure how to get started, I’d suggest following digital humanities folks and the some of the people they follow.  You can also search for particular topics at search.twitter.com  Amanda French has written a couple of great posts about Twitter as a vehicle for scholarly conversation, and a recent Digital Campus podcast features a discussion among Tweeters Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt and skeptic Mills Kelly.

HASTAC offers another model for collaboration by establishing a virtual network of people and organizations interested in digital humanities and sponsoring online forums (hosted by graduate and undergraduate students) and other community-building activities.  Currently HASTAC is running a lively, rich forum on the future of the digital humanities featuring Brett Bobley, director of the NEH’s ODH.  Check it out!

A couple of days after returning from the MLA (Modern Language Association) conference, I ran into a biologist friend who had read about the “conference sex” panel at MLA.  She said,  “Wow, sometimes I doubt the relevance of my research, but that conference sounds ridiculous.” I’ve certainly had my moments of skepticism toward the larger purposes of literary research while sitting through dull conference sessions, but my MLA experience actually made me feel jazzed and hopeful about the humanities.  That’s because the sessions that I attended–mostly panels on the digital humanities–explored topics that seemed both intellectually rich and relevant to the contemporary moment.  For instance, panelists discussed the significance of networked reading, dealing with information abundance, new methods for conducting research such as macroanalysis and visualization, participatory learning, copyright challenges, the shift (?) to digital publishing, digital preservation, and collaborative editing.  Here are my somewhat sketchy notes about the MLA sessions I was able to attend; see great blog posts by Cathy Davidson, Matt Gold, Laura Mandell, Alex Reid, and John Jones for more reflections on MLA 2008.

1)    Seeing patterns in literary texts
At the session “Defoe, James, and Beerbohm: Computer-Assisted Criticism of Three Authors,” David Hoover noted that James scholars typically distinguish between his late and early work.  But what does that difference look like?  What evidence can we find of such a distinction? Hoover used computational/ statistical methods such as Principal Components Analysis and the T-test to examine the word choice in across James’ work and found some striking patterns illustrating that James’ diction during his early period was indeed quite different from his late period.   Hoover introduced the metaphor of computational approaches to literature serving either as a telescope (macroanalysis, discerning patterns across a large body of texts) or a microscope (looking closely at individual works or authors).

2)    New approaches to electronic editing

The ACH Guide to Digital-Humanities Talks at the 2008 MLA Convention lists at least 9 or 10 sessions concerned with editing or digital archives, and the Chronicle of Higher Ed dubbed digital editing as a “hot topic” for MLA 2008.   At the session on Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century: Digital Media and Editing, Peter Robinson (whose paper was delivered by Jerome McGann and included passages referencing Jerome McGann) presented the idea of “Editing without walls,” shifting from a centralized model where a scholar acts as the “guide and guardian” who oversees work on an edition to a distributed, collaborative model.  With “community made editions,” a library would produce high quality images, researchers would transcribe those images, other researchers would collate the transcriptions, others would analyze the collations and add commentaries, etc. Work would be distributed and layered.  This approach opens up a number of questions: what incentives will researchers have to work on the project? How will the work be coordinated? Who will maintain the distributed edition for the long term?  But Robinson claimed that the approach would have significant advantages, including reduced cost and greater community investment in the editions.  Several European initiatives are already working on building tools and platforms similar to what Peter Shillingsburg calls “electronic knowledge sites,” including the Discovery Project, which aims to “explore how Semantic Web technology can help to create a state-of-the-art research and publishing environment for philosophy” and the Virtual Manuscript Room, which “will bring together digital resources related to manuscript materials (digital images, descriptions and other metadata, transcripts) in an environment which will permit libraries to add images, scholars to add and edit metadata and transcripts online, and users to access material.”

Matt Kirschenbaum then posed the provocative question if Shakespeare had a hard drive, what would scholars want to examine: when he began work on King Lear, how long he worked on it, what changes he made, what web sites he consulted while writing?  Of course, Shakespeare didn’t have a hard drive, but almost every writer working now uses a computer, so it’s possible to analyze a wide range of information about the writing process.  Invoking Tom Tanselle, Matt asked, “What are the dust jackets of the information age?” That is, what data do we want to preserve?  Discussing his exciting work with Alan Liu and Doug Reside to make available William Gibson’s Agrippa in emulation and as recorded on video in the early 1990s, Matt demonstrated how emulation can be used to simulate the original experience of this electronic poem.  He emphasized the importance of collaborating with non-academics–hackers, collectors, and even Agrippa’s original publisher–to learn about Agrippa’s history and make the poem available.  Matt then addressed digital preservation.  Even data designed to self-destruct is recoverable, but Matt expressed concern about cloud computing, where data exists on networked servers.  How will scholars get access to a writer’s email, Facebook updates, Google Docs, and other information stored online?  Matt pointed to several projects working on the problem of archiving electronic art and performances by interviewing artists about what’s essential and providing detailed descriptions of how they should be re-created: Forging the Future and Archiving the Avante Garde.
3)    Literary Studies in the Digital Age: A Methodological Primer

At the panel on Methodologies Literary Studies in the Digital Age, Ken Price discussed a forthcoming book that he is co-editing with Ray Siemens called Literary Studies in a Digital Age: A Methodological Primer.  The book, which is under consideration by MLA Press, will feature essays such as John Unsworth on electronic scholarly publishing, Tanya Clement on critical trends, David Hoover on textual analysis, Susan Schreibman on electronic editing, and Bill Kretzschmer on GIS, etc.   Several authors to be included in the volume—David Hoover, Alan Liu, and Susan Schreibman—spoke.

Hoover began with a provocative question: do we really want to get to 2.0, collaborative scholarship? He then described different models of textual analysis:
i.    the portal (e.g. MONK, TAPOR): typically a suite of simple tools; platform independent; not very customizable
ii.     desktop tools (e.g. TACT)
iii.    standardized software used for text analysis (e.g. Excel)

Next, Alan Liu  discussed his Transliteracies project, which examines the cultural practices of online reading and the ways in which reading changes in a digital environment (e.g. distant reading, sampling, and “networked public discourse,” with links, comments, trackback, etc).  The transformations in reading raise important questions, such as the relationship between expertise and networked public knowledge.  Liu pointed to a number of crucial research and development goals (both my notes and memory get pretty sketchy here):
1)    development of a standardized metadata scheme for annotating social networks
2)    data mining and annotating social computing
3)    reconciling metadata with writing systems
4)    information visualization for the contact zone between macro-analysis and close reading
5)    historical analysis of past paradigms for reading and writing
6)    authority-adjudicating systems to filter content
7)    institutional structures to encourage scholars to share and participate in new public knowledge

Finally, Susan Schreibman discussed electronic editions.  Among the first humanities folks drawn to the digital environment were editors, who recognized that electronic editions would allow them to overcome editorial challenges and present a history of the text over time, pushing beyond the limitations of the textual apparatus and representing each edition.  Initially the scholarly community focused on building single author editions such as the Blake and Whitman Archives.  Now the community is trying to get beyond siloed projects by building grid technologies to edit, search and display texts.  (See, for example, TextGrid, http://www.textgrid.de/en/ueber-textgrid.html).   Schreibman asked how we can use text encoding to “unleash the meanings of text that are not transparent” and encode themes or theories of text, then use tools such as TextArc or ManyEyes to engage in different spatial/temporal views.

A lively discussion of crowdsourcing and expert knowledge followed, hinging on the question of what the humanities have to offer in the digital age.  Some answers: historical perspective on past modes of reading, writing and research; methods for dealing with multiplicity, ambiguity and incomplete knowledge; providing expert knowledge about which text is the best to work with.  Panelists and participants envisioned new technologies and methods to support new literacies, such as the infrastructure that would enable scholars and readers to build their own editions; a “close-reading machine” based upon annotations that would enable someone to study, for example, dialogue in the novel; the ability to zoom out to see larger trends and zoom in to examine the details; the ability to examine “humanities in the age of total recall,” analyzing the text in a network of quotation and remixing; developing methods for dealing with what is unknowable.

4) Publishing and Cyberinfrastructure

At the panel on publishing and cyberinfrastracture moderated by Laura Mandell, Penny Kaiserling from the University of Virginia Press, Linda Bree from Cambridge UP, and Michael Lonegro from Johns Hopkins Press discussed the challenges that university presses are facing as they attempt to shift into the digital.  At Cambridge, print sales are currently subsidizing ebooks.  Change is slower than was envisioned ten years ago, more evolutionary than revolutionary.  All three publishers emphasized that publishers are unlikely to transform their publishing model unless academic institutions embrace electronic publication, accepting e-publishing for tenure and promotion and purchasing electronic works.  Ultimately, they said, it is up to the scholarly community to define what is valued.  Although the shift into electronic publishing of journals is significant, academic publishers’ experience lags in publishing monographs.  One challenge is that journals are typically bundled, but there isn’t such a model for bundling books.  Getting third party rights to illustrations and other copyrighted materials included in a book is another challenge.  Ultimately scholars will need to rethink the monograph, determining what is valuable (e.g. the coherence of an extended argument) and how it exists electronically, along with the benefits offered by social networking and analysis.  Although some in the audience challenged the publishers to take risks in initiating change themselves, the publishers emphasized that it is ultimately up to scholarly community.  The publishers also asked why the evaluation of scholarship depended on a university press constrained by economics rather than scholars themselves–that is, why professional review has been outsourced to the university press.

5) Copyright

The panel on Promoting the Useful Arts: Copyright, Fair Use, and the Digital Scholar, which was moderated by Steve Ramsay, featured Aileen Berg explaining the publishing industry’s view of copyright, Robin G. Schulze describing the nightmare of trying to get rights to publish an electronic edition of Marianne Moore’s notebooks, and Kari Kraus detailing how copyright and contract law make digital preservation difficult.  Schulze asked where the MLA was when copyright was extended through the Sony Bono Act, limiting what scholars can do, and said she is working on pre-1923 works to avoid the copyright nightmare.  Berg, who was a good sport to go before an audience not necessarily sympathetic to the publishing industry’s perspective, advised authors to exercise their own rights and negotiate their agreements rather than simply signing what is put before; often they can retain some rights.  Kraus discussed how licenses (such as click-through agreements) are further limiting how scholars can use intellectual works but noted some encouraging signs, such as the James Joyce estate’s settlement with a scholar allowing her to use copyrighted materials in her scholarship.  Attendees discussed ways that literature professors could become more active in challenging unfair copyright limitations, particularly through advocacy work and supporting groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

6) Humanities 2.0: Participatory Learning in an Age of Technology

The Humanities 2.0 panel featured three very interesting presentations about the projects funded through the MacArthur Digital Learning competition, as well Cathy Davidson’s overview of the competition and of HASTAC.  (For a fuller discussion of the session, see Cathy Davidson’s summary.) Davidson drew a distinction between “digital humanities,” which uses the digital technologies to enhance the mission of the humanities, and humanities 2.0, which “wants us to combine critical thinking about the use of technology in all aspects of social life and learning with creative design of future technologies” (Davidson).    Next Howard Rheingold discussed the “social media classroom,” which is “a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, and video commenting are the first set of tools.”  Todd Presner showcased the Hypercities project, a geotemporal interface for exploring and augmenting spaces.  Leveraging the Google Maps API and KML, HyperCities enable people to navigate and narrate their own past through space and time, adding their own markers to the map and experiencing different layers of time and space.  The project is working with citizens and students to add their own layers of information—images, narratives—to the maps, making available an otherwise hidden history.  Currently there are maps for Rome, LA, New York, and Berlin.   A key principle behind HyperCities is aggregating and integrating archives, moving away from silos of information. Finally, Greg Niemeyer and Antero Garcia presented BlackCloud.org, which is engaging students and citizens in tracking pollution using whimsically designed sensors that measure pollution.  Students tracked levels of pollution at different sites—including in their own classroom—and began taking action, investigating the causes of pollution and advocating for solutions.  What unified these projects was the belief that students and citizens have much to contribute in understanding and transforming their environments.

7. The Library of Google: Researching Scanned Books

What does Google Books mean for literary research?  Is Google Books more like a library or a research tool?  What kind of research is made possible by Google Books (GB)? What are GB’s limitations?  Such questions were discussed in a panel on Google Books that was moderated by Michael Hancher included Amanda French, Eleanor Shevlin, and me.  Amanda described how Google Books enabled her to find earlier sources on the history of the villanelle than she was able to locate pre-GB, Eleanor provided a book history perspective on GB, and I discussed the advantages and limitations of GB for  digital scholarship (my slides are available here).  A lively discussion among the 35 or so attendees followed; all but one person said that GB was, on balance, good for scholarship, although some people expressed concern that GB would replace interlibrary loan, indicated that they use GB mainly as a reference tool to find information in physical volumes, and emphasized the need to continue to consult physical books for bibliographic details such as illustrations and bindings.

8. Posters/Demonstrations: A Demonstration of Digital Poetry Archives and E-Criticism: New Critical Methods and Modalities

I was pleased to see the MLA feature two poster sessions, one on digital archives, one on digital research methods. Instead of just watching a presentation, attendees could engage in discussion with project developers and see how different archives and tools worked.  That kind of informal exchange allows people to form collaborations and have a more hands-on understanding of the digital humanities. (I didn’t take notes and the sessions occurred in the evening, when my brain begins to shut down, so my summary is pretty unsophisticated: wow, cool.)

Reflections on MLA

This was my first MLA and, despite having to leave home smack in the middle of the holidays, I enjoyed it.   Although many sessions that I attended shifted away from the “read your paper aloud when people are perfectly capable of reading it themselves” model, I noted the MLA’s requirement that authors bring three copies of their paper to provide upon request, which raises the question what if you don’t have a paper (just Powerpoint slides or notes) and why can’t you share electronically? And why doesn’t the MLA  provide fuller descriptions of the sessions besides just title and speakers?  (Or am I just not looking in the right place?)  Sure, in the paper era that would mean the conference issue of PMLA would be several volumes thick, but if the information were online there would be a much richer record of each session.  (Or you could enlist bloggers or twitterers [tweeters?] to summarize each session…) After attending THAT Camp, I’m a fan of the unconference model, which fosters the kind of engagement that conferences should be all about—conversation, brainstorming, and problem-solving rather than passive listening.  But lively discussions often do take place during the Q & A period and in the hallways after the sessions (and who knows what takes place elsewhere…)

To what extent can digital collections such as Google Books help to reconstruct us to the history of readers’ responses to literary works–in my case, readers’ responses to Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), which I’m using as a case study of doing research in the Library of Google?  (For an account of my post-marital fascination with bachelors, see my last post.) Readers’ enthusiasm for this sentimental work stirred up my own interest in it.  At Yale’s Beineke Library, I examined a cache of fan letters in which readers rhapsodized  over the bachelor’s

Patrick Henry's annotations to Reveries

reveries and connected them to their own experiences.  As one correspondent, a doctor, wrote,  “I have found it really a book of the heart—of my heart—an echo of my own reveries.”  At Yale I also examined Emily Dickinson’s copy of Reveries, where she (or perhaps someone to whom she loaned the volume) made marks next to significant passages. At the University of Virginia Library, I stumbled across an 1886 edition of Reveries heavily annotated by a young man named Patrick Henry.  In a passage where Mitchell described “a Bachelor of seven and twenty,” Patrick crossed out the seven and wrote in “four,” signaling his own intense identification with the bachelor narrator.  Drawing on these and other examples, I wrote a dissertation chapter on readers’ responses to Reveries (later to morph into a 2003 article in Book History) that challenged the notion that sentimental readers were passive.  But I was examining a fairly limited set of reader responses–about 25 letters from the 1850s to the late 19th century, plus a couple of annotated copies of Reveries.  I could offer an even richer analysis of readers’ reactions to Reveries by examining journal entries, memoirs, and letters, as well as even more annotated copies.  I’m especially interested in whether readers’ views of the book changed over time, given that the book was popular from 1850 into the twentieth century. Could I find such evidence in Google Books?

What I Found

Here’s what I found doing a keyword search in Google Books “Reveries of a Bachelor”; I still need to process the hundreds of results I got searching for “Ik Marvel” and “Ike Marvel” (the pen name of the author of Reveries), as well as searching for those terms in the Open Content Alliance.

• Recent secondary sources on reading that include short passages on Reveries:
  • Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray’s 2006 account of a would-be suitor attempting to woo an already-engaged woman by giving her a copy of Reveries; she noted in her diary that she would prefer to read the book than spend time with him
  • Claire White Putala’s Reading and Writing Ourselves Into Being, which discusses how Joe Lord recommended Reveries to Eliza Wright Osborne immediately before she married another man
  • Alan Boye’s account in Tales from the Journey of the Dead of a soldier suffering from a broken heart who read Reveries in a Confederate camp
  • So, hmm, Reveries seems to have been read by heartbroken men, who seemed to use the book to express how they felt to the women they were pursuing.  All three of the above books are based on archival research, which leads me to suspect that I would find a number of references to Reveries in archival collections (if I had the time and money to visit them).
• Memoirs that include brief mentions of Reveries:
  • Mountaineer Belmore Browne’s association of Reveries with melancholia in The Conquest of Mt. McKinley (first published 1913): “I know of nothing in this world that will produce a stronger attack of melancholia than reading The Reveries of a Bachelor on a fog-draped glacier!”
  • Philosopher Morris R. Cohen’s sense that Reveries stimulated feeling and brought relief: “Today I felt very relieved by reading Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor. It aroused new strains of feeling I don’t know whether I should be ashamed of wishing…”  [snippet view]
  • Richard St. Clair Steel’s description of the beauty of Reveries
  • My questions: Did women memoirists likewise praise Reveries? Why did the book have such emotional resonance?
• Evidence that Reveries was embraced by educational, religious, and cultural authorities
  • the University of the State of New York Regents High School Exam, American Literature section included questions about Reveries in 1906, 1894, 1908, 1899, 1903, and 1897 (for whatever reason, I discovered this information not in my original search for “Reveries of a Bachelor,” but in a later search  for “”Reveries of a Bachelor” enrica”, Enrica being the name of one of the women for whom the bachelor longs)
  • Reveries was excerpted in several literary anthologies, including Harper’s First [ -sixth] Reader (1889),  The Ridpath Library of Universal Literature (1898), and American Literature Through Illustrative Readings (1915)
  • Reveries was recommended  for the high school reading list (essays) by the National Council of Teachers of English (1913).  It also appeared in quotation books.
  • The author of the satiric “Reflections of a War Camp Librarian” (1918) notes that American citizens sent Reveries and other gift books to soldiers on the battlefield in WWI, not exactly the kind of reading material soldiers craved
  • A “Country Parson” noted in 1862 how Reveries brought about “revelations of personal feeling” among the unmarried
• Reveries appeared in many printed library catalogs from the 1850s to the 1920s, including catalogs for the Boston Public, Detroit Public, New Zealand Parliament Library, Princeton University, Library company of Philadelphia, and the British Museum Dept. of Printed Books
• Reveries was not only read in private, but re-imagined as tableaux and read aloud at home and in public
  • A passage from Reveries was read at a 1908 Christmas program at a nursing school
  • An Index to Poetry and Recitations: Being a Practical Reference Manual for the Librarian, Teacher, Bookseller, Elocutionist, Etc., Including Over Fifty Thousand Titles from Four Hundred and Fifty Books (1918) references Reveries several times
  • Both Good Housekeeping (1902) and Good Housekeeping Hostess (1904) describe a popular “dream picture called ‘the reveries of a bachelor.’ The scene represented a bachelor’s den. A man with pipe and book sat musing before the fire. After a moment or two music began to play very softly and one by one the Reveries–always taking the form of pretty girls–drifted into the room.” An earlier tableau (1896) features in an old bachelor dreaming about his lost loves.
• Reviews of Reveries
  • I found over 20 reviews of/ literary notices for Reveries from 1850 to 1908. Even in 1851, Reveries was  described as a work particularly appealing to “those who enjoy the retrospect of youthful days” as well as one that was “charming” and “wins our heart and stirs our sympathies.” (1884)  The book’s association with youth intensified by the turn of the century, as literary appreciations mentioned the book’s “youthfulness” (1899), noted how it “appealed to the emotions and ambitions of young manhood” in the mid-19th century (1906), and contended that “The fact that the Reveries and Dream Life have had a steady sale for half a century is a reassuring sign that the reading public does not really grow old” (1908). In a 1910 Scribner’s article, the author describes how he bought a “shabby” copy of Reveries annotated 50 years before by a young man who gave it to his beloved, along with a flower from Shelly’s grave.  The anonymous reader recorded his “heart outpourings” by marking up the book for the woman he hoped would make him a bachelor no longer.

Google Books as a Research Source

• Except for the reviews (many of which I had already consulted) and the secondary sources on reading (which I probably would have consulted), searching Google Books enabled me to find many resources that I probably never would have discovered, including memoirs, high school curricula, and guides to performing (reciting/acting out) Reveries.  Although these sources (which I haven’t fully analyzed) haven’t radically changed my view of Reveries, they do give me a better sense of the cultural impact that the book had, as well as its personal significance to readers, who read it while climbing mountains, dealing with emotional turmoil, etc.
• I had hoped to find annotations in scanned versions of Reveries collected in Google Books and Open Content Alliance.  However, in the copies I examined (and I should say that I glanced over them rather than scrutinized every page), I only found minor annotations–people would typically write their names in their books or inscribe a message to the recipient of the gift book, and a few readers made marks next to passages, but I found nothing like Patrick Henry’s ecstatic annotations.
• For the texts are only available as fragments around a search term, Google Books functions as a ramped-up research index, pointing me to materials that I often need to consult in the print to put the search results in context, at least until Google Book Search settlement goes through and the out-of-print materials are also available as full text.  (For some of the limited preview books, such as reference books, however, I’m able to pull out enough information from the pages that are available without having to see the whole book.)

At the upcoming Modern Language Association conference, I will join Amanda French and Eleanor Shevlin on a panel called “The Library of Google: Researching Scanned Books,” which is sponsored by SHARP and will be moderated by Michael Hancher.  Google Books has already scanned over 7 million volumes (more than many research libraries hold) and, according to Planet Google, aims to scan every volume in the WorldCat catalog, around 32 million. Our panel will focus on the significance of Google Books for literary research, looking at questions such as whether scholars can trust it and how they should deal with such plenitude.  I plan to discuss my study examining how many of the works in my dissertation bibliography are now available electronically, as well as more recent work using Google Books and other online sources to explore the history of a nineteenth-century bestseller, Donald Grant Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor (1850).  Reveries fascinates me—not so much because I identify with the bachelor narrator’s fantasies and fears of what it’s like to be married (actually, I find the book kind of cloying), but because I’m intrigued by Reveries‘ cultural impact from the 1850s into the early twentieth century.  It sold at least a million copies and appeared in dozens of editions,  from a cheap edition selling for 8 cents to a $6 gift volume in an exquisite morocco binding.  Emily Dickinson loved it, as did readers who evinced their admiration by sending fan letters to Mitchell or making marks in the margins of their book.  In this blog post, I’ll focus on how I’ve employed Google Books to illuminate Reveries‘ publishing history; future posts will look at reader responses, textual history, and authorship.

For a graduate seminar on textual editing way back in the 90s,  I developed an online critical edition of the book’s first reverie.  I also wrote an article analyzing a series of letters that Reveries’ publisher, Charles Scribner II, sent to Mitchell to negotiate the pricing and physical form of new editions between 1883 and 1907, as the publisher and author worked to sustain the popularity of the book and maintain their hold on the market after their copyright expired.  But my publishing history is incomplete; I want to know more about the different forms Reveries took, how it was advertised, what the prices were at different times, how well the book sold, what marketing strategies Scribner and other publishers pursued, and whether Reveries is a unique case or fairly typical, at least for a nineteenth century bestseller.

By using Google Books, I’ve been able to fill in some details about the book’s publishing history, particularly about pricing and advertising.  As amazed as I am by ability to search across millions of books for references to Reveries, I’m also somewhat frustrated by the strange ways that Google Book search works (or doesn’t work) and disappointed that some materials don’t seem to be available.

Title page of 1850 Reveries of a Bachelor

What I already knew:

• The authorized publisher of Reveries, Scribner’s, issued many editions, including:
  • 1850 first edition
  • 1852 illustrated edition, with illustrations by Darley
  • 1863 revised edition
  • 1877 (copyright renewed)
  • 1883 new revised edition
  • 1891 Cameo Edition (first published in 1888)
  • 1907 The Works of Donald Grant Mitchell, Edgewood Edition [final edition before Mitchell's death]
    I’ve found most of these editions not in Google Books, but in the Open Content Alliance collection.
• Copyright on Reveries expired in 1892, which meant that other publishers could legally come out with their own editions of the book.  Charles Scribner II wrote to Donald Grant Mitchell to discuss how to respond to this challenge, particularly the threat from Altemus, which he characterized as a “piratical publisher.” Scribner proposed offering a cheap (30 cent) edition “to make it so unprofitable that the publisher [Altemus] will not be encouraged to take up the other books [by Mitchell],” along with a moderately-priced (75 cent) edition.  At the suggestion of Mitchell, Scribner also advertised that the company remained the only authorized publisher of Reveries.
• Undeterred, many publishers issued unauthorized editions, including Henry Altemus Company, Optimus Printing Company, The Rodgers Company, Donohue, Henneberry, & Co, Porter, W. L. Allison Company, F. T. Neely, Thomas Y. Crowell Company Publishers, The Mershon Company Publishers, G. Munro’s Sons, H. M. Caldwell Company, The Henneberry Company, M. A. Donohue & Company, Homewood Company, A. L. Burt Company, The F. M. Lupton Company, H. M. Caldwell Co., Strawbridge & Clothier, The Edward Publishing Company, W. B. Conkey Company, Acme Printing Company, The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers, and R. F. Fenno & Company (BAL, 240-1; NUC, 664-667).   While I was researching Reveries at Yale, I came across several of these volumes, one of which had annotations such as “The illustrations are [most of them] execrable, & there is an occasional ‘mending’ of the text…”  In the preface to the 1907 Author’s Complete Edition of Reveries, Mitchell fixated on the problem of piracy, noting that he had amassed a collection of over 40 imprints of Reveries, only one of which brought him any money.  Apparently Mitchell’s collection–and annotations–ended up at Yale.

Method

To determine how many Reveries related works were available in Google Books, I did a keyword search for “Reveries of a Bachelor.”  The total number of results fluctuated; one day it was 641, another 916, another 809.  But forget about getting to result #641.  One result screen says: “151 – 200 of 809,” but then the next one says “Books 201 – 220 of 220.“  Huh? So what happened to everything else?  Perhaps duplicates are eliminated as you make your way through the results (although there were plenty of duplicates in the results I looked at), perhaps the algorithm used to calculate the number of results is, er, inexact and shifting, or perhaps Google figures you don’t really want to look that many results anyway.  Whatever the explanation, I can’t help wonder about what I’m not getting to see, so my trust in Google Books is diminished a bit, even as I feast on the plenty that is available. 

In any case, I looked at each result available to me, discarding those that weren’t really focused on Reveries and grabbing the bibliographic info for the rest through Zotero.  (I love Zotero, but I was a little frustrated that it didn’t capture the URL and publisher info for  Google Books, which may have to do with the way that Google makes available that information.)  When I wasn’t impeded by texts that offered only snippet views or no preview at all, I copied out a chunk of text that contained the Reveries reference and dumped it into a note in Zotero.  Categorizing as I waded through the results, I added a tag or two for each work, such as “reveries_ad” or “reveries_review.”

Since Mitchell used the pen name “Ik Marvel,” I also searched for “Ik Marvel” (1285 results, today) and “Ike Marvel” (606 results); I’m still working through those results.   I used TAPOR to generate a list of word pairs in Reveries that I hoped to use in searching for works connected to Reveries, but there were only a few pairs that seemed at all unique, such as “Aunt Tabithy,” the name of a character in the book.

Bobbs-Merrill Ad for Reveries

What I discovered about publishing history using Google Books

• Pricing: By searching book catalogs, advertisements, and old issues of Publishers Weekly, I was able to track the price for different versions of Reveries between 1851 and 1906.  The pricing data reveals the many choices enjoyed by consumers who wanted to buy a copy of Reveries, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century, when competing publishers entered the market.  Say a consumer in the late nineteenth century wanted a cheap copy of Reveries.  How about paying 8 cents for the “Ideal Library” version, or 18 cents for “Handy Volume” edition? How about a moderately priced edition?  The price of Scribner’s standard duodecimo edition remained fairly steady between 1854 and 1903: $1.25.  If people craved a fine edition, they would have many choices, such as the 1903 Dainty Small Gift Books, Agate Morocco Series with gilt edges for $2.25, the 1906 Bobbs-Merrill Ashe Illustrated Gift Edition for $2, the 1903 Limp Walrus Edition for $2,  the 1903 Limp Lizard Series for $1.50,   (If I start a band, I’m going to call it Limp Lizard.)Big gaps in my knowledge remain–I wasn’t able to find pricing information for the 1850 first edition or the 1907 Edgewood Edition, or for many of the unauthorized editions.   However, without the ability to search across a vast collection of texts I doubt I would have been able to find much of the pricing information at all, particularly in the book advertisements that appeared in magazines and at the end of books, as publishers promoted other books in their catalog.  I probably should have known to look for information about Reveries in book catalogs and late nineteenth-century issues of Publisher’s Weekly, but Google Book Search sure made it easy for me to find relevant information.
• Response to the copyright expiration: In one of Scribner’s letters to Mitchell, I found a copy of an ad Scribners planned to run advertising its cheap edition and asserting that some portions of Reveries (the new prefaces) remained in copyright.  In Publisher’s Weekly from 1893, I found what I think is that very ad.  I wondered if Scribner’s was unique in handling copyright expiration by releasing a cheap edition and asserting continued copyright over some section. Apparently not. Right after a Scribner’s ad warning that “An action will be promptly brought against any one infringing upon the author rights,” I saw a similar ad from J. B. Lippincott Company for Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, reminding “the trade” that the illustrations remained in copyright and promoting a new 75 cent cheap edition.
• Marketing: By examining over 25 ads for Reveries available through Google Books, I’ve noticed some (fairly unsurprising) patterns:  Although the book was in Scribner’s catalog throughout the late 19th century, promotion of the book was ramped up when new editions were issued; the publisher often took out full page ads or put Reveries at the top of ads announcing several books.  By the 1890s, Scribner’s was describing Reveries as “an American classic” and predicting that the book would win over “fresh fields” of new readers.  Although I’ve found few ads from competing publishers, Bobbs-Merrill came out with an eye-catching ad for its illustrated gift edition in 1906.   So that I have a visual record of stuff I’ve look at, I’ve set up a Google notebook with clippings of ads for and reviews of Reveries that I found in Google Books.  Creating the notebook was easy; if the book is in the public domain, you can clip out sections of text and post them to your Google Notebook or Blogger blog. (If only you could post to a WordPress blog, or Flickr…)
• Versions of Reveries: I expected to find more editions of Reveries in Google Books.  When I did a title search for “Reveries of a Bachelor,” only 21 results were returned, and only 4 of those are available as full view, even though 20 were published before 1921 and are in the public domain. (Another is a large print reprint edition from 2008.)  By contrast, the Open Content Alliance provides full access to 18 versions of Reveries, including an 1889 edition marked “Book digitized by Google from the library of the New York Public Library and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.” (By the way, tpb has apparently uploaded a number of Google Books into the Open Content Archive, prompting some folks to complain about the “pollution” of the OCA by “marginal” Google content.) So why are so many public domain texts in Google Books not fully available?  I’m not really sure, although Planet Google says that Google Books contains metadata (catalog) records for works that it did not digitize and thus are not in its collection.  In any case, if you’re interested in the physical form of books, the Open Content Alliance seems to be a better source than Google Books, since every page is scanned in full color (except, of coure, what’s been uploaded from Google Books) and is presented in a book-like interface, with flippable pages.  You can download pdf, plain text, and DJVU versions, which promotes (re-)use and analysis of the books. I should note that the Open Content Alliance has its own quirks.   OCA content appears to be available through two online collections: the Internet Archive and Open Library.  It’s not immediately obvious how to do a full-text search in OCA. It seems that you can only search bibliographic metadata in the Internet Archive, but you can do full text search at the Open Library.  To do so, go to the advanced search (http://openlibrary.org/advanced) and enter your query into the search box at the bottom.  Another quirk:  you can’t see front covers in OCA in the flip-view interface, but you can if you look at the DJVU files. But it’s even easier to put page images from OCA content into a Google Notebook; whereas in Google Books you have to crop out a section of a page and select where to send it, with OCA you just right click and send the entire page image to your notebook. (For instance, I created one for different editions of Reveries, documenting illustrations, title pages, etc.)

Limitations of Google Books

• As noted above, not all public domain materials are available
• Weirdness in retrieval of search results; 800 results suddenly become 220 when you work your way through the results
• OCR errors: Among the different variations of “Ik Marvel” and “Reveries of a Bachelor; A Book of the Heart” that I found:
  o    IK MABVEL
  o    Heveries of a Bachelor (a search for this term yields 10 results in Google Books)
  o    REVERIES OF A BACHELOR; or, a Rook of the Heart
  o    REVERIES OF A BACHELOR; or, a Bonk of the Heart.
  o    Reveries of a Bad elor.
  o    REVERIES OF A BACHELOR, a Boob of the Heart. By IK. MAETEL
  You have to be resourceful, then, in how you construct a search, taking into account OCR problems.  That said, “Reveries of a Bachelor” returned hundreds of results.
• Google Books does not contain archival materials. (Google has moved into digitizing newspapers and magazines, so who knows–maybe archives are coming? But it would be very tricky and expensive for Google to undertake such a project.)  Although searching Google Books is certainly more convenient than visiting an archive, I love being in archives, looking at stuff that few others have seen.  Even though I found a lot of useful resources in Google Books, I learned the most about the publishing history of Reveries by examining the letters from Charles Scribner II to Mitchell held by the Beinecke Library at Yale and by examining the volumes referenced in the letters.
• If you’re interested in bibliography, as I am, looking at even a high quality scan can’t substitute for examining the physical volume, studying details such as the size of the book, the quality of the paper, the bindings, etc. But scans can give you an idea of what the volume looks like and help you to identify it.

In my next post, I’ll look at how using Google Books is helping me reconstruct the history of readers’ responses to Reveries.