• one focuses on opening out the conversations about Digital Humanities and scholarly editions
• the other focuses squarely on literary topics and is peppered with some talk about Digital Humanities (but not much).

While the first talk is specifically intended for scholarly editors and DHers, the second talk is intended as a bridge between DH and Humanities for a circumspect audience.  Both sets of audiences brought engaging questions to all of the projects and in fact have inspired me to revise articles about both topics. And, both talks and ensuing conversations got me thinking about the efficacy of scholarly communication. I use conferences and talks to elicit feedback on my work. There’s gotta be a better, more effective way of doing this, right? (Read on….my snark has a point.)

Before the start of the second talk, “Buried in the Archives,” I received word from the publisher of my print collection, Gothic Short Stories in British Literary Annuals 1823-1831, that he was working diligently to complete the edition but was somewhat behind and wouldn’t have the volumes done by our March deadline when I deliver a keynote for the Gothic Studies conference.

I know this publisher/editor well and went with this press because I was impressed with the freedom they allowed. The collection contains 100 short stories totaling over 700 typed pages with more than 20 engravings. A critical introduction accompanies the collection but no scholarly annotations will appear. The collection was just too voluminous to fully annotate — and after taking 3 years to transcribe all of the stories from the 28 volumes, annotation would have taken much longer. The editor/publisher allowed all of the short stories and engravings as well as writing into the contract that it would be published in 2 volumes and cost no more than $50. This means that the project would be accessible to all kinds of students and scholars of Gothic short stories!  We also negotiated that I could use the transcriptions for a digital project once the volumes were printed.  Huzzah!

At the moment that the editor notified me about the delay, though, I panicked. Only after some thought did I realize why: some of my colleagues have intimated that I will not receive promotion unless the printed version was delivered (as promised) prior to September 2012. “But, but, but…I don’t have control over the publisher’s timeline,” I remarked to one colleague.

In my dissertation prologue, I wrote something along the lines of being committed to open access publishing and have tried to stay the course throughout my career.  My blog has received more hits (not necessarily readers) than my 2005 article in PBSA. That article, in a long-standing, well-respected journal, is difficult to access and, for some, not available even through JStor. These comparatively brief blog posts demonstrate a record of participation in multiple fields and have received more hits in a single year than I think will ever happen with any print book or article that I have or will publish. Even click-throughs on my blog posts to related DH materials have occurred in more quantity than any readership for my scholarly print writings.

I began to think about getting this Gothic short stories print version done in time for the department’s demands. I was immediately drawn to the schedule and expectations of a tenure and promotion committee that last year attempted to deny me tenure and ignored every single one of my digital endeavors (see Greetham’s essay in Debates in the Digital Humanities). Long story resulting with being awarded tenure. The department committee in the Fall will be of a different membership, most assuredly. Nonetheless, with this news from the editor/publisher, I fell back into the dictum of getting something out just to get it out.

After I calmed down, I realized that what I really wanted to do was create a critical digital archive of these Gothic short stories — one where contributors could annotate the stories and engravings to amplify the collection’s value. On the same day that I received this news about delay, the Dickens Journal Online announced its launch after reaching its goal to crowd-source the transcriptions of Dickens’ magazines, open access and all! The Transcribe Bentham Project has also been overwhelmingly successful in this type of crowd-sourced open-access project. And, the NYPL Menu Transcription project has been, well, downright fun for a foodie like me.

I want that — the crowd-sourced, open-access digital annotated critical archive of Gothic short stories from British literary annuals 1823-1831.

Since the transcriptions have been completed for the print volume, we don’t need a transcription platform. We (I!) might have to return to scan the pages  — ok, doable. In the end, this project would represent a collective knowledge about all things Gothic, Romantic, Victorian, book history, print culture, literature.  And, the short stories show evidence of contributing to the development of the short story genre, in addition to changing the British Gothic imperative to focus on home rather than foreign lands — and this brings these short stories closer to the American Gothic short story construction.

See!

So, what platform? Omeka? WordPress? MediaCommons? How do I display the stories so the annotations appear alongside and a community can contribute and guide each other? To be included in the NINES collection, the project would need to be marked up in TEI. I could use something like Scripto or peruse the other tools available (thanks Jim Mussell).

…and here’s where I stop abruptly. TEI mark-up calls for an incredibly labor-intensive foundation to the project. Time. I don’t have time in that magnitude. Likely, I will continue to teach 4-4 each year. Students come to me for interesting projects, but they do it for free. I’ve committed to cease writing in the grant application genre because it became too time consuming and, quite frankly, my department didn’t count it towards my scholarly work.

This brings me back to the perceived pressures of getting it out there, perhaps too quickly and too sloppily for a project such as this one. I very much heed the call of Kathleen Fitzpatrick to do the risky thing and have been reading Planned Obsolescence. I’m no longer a junior scholar. But, my department (without any written tenure/promotion expectations) can decide that it doesn’t like any of my digital endeavors again. If so, I would remain a tenured Assistant Professor until the culture shifts. Or, I could just do the work, do it right, and ignore those pressures. After all, what I want to create is an enduring project that demonstrates the value of these almost completely inaccessible groupings of short stories — a dynamic, social edition (a la Ray Siemens, Martha Nell Smith and the like). And, then, I want to run some semantic network analysis on it. Coolness abounds.

I’m inclined, as a diligent and dedicated scholarly editor, to do it right instead of doing it right now.

But, I could use your input on making these decisions: not only on the project management side (tools, platforms, etc.) but also in the commitment to foregoing the usual institutional pressures and work towards a viable open access project that results in public scholarship.

Thoughts?

MLA 2012 Panel: Old Books and New Tools Roundtable

The Accidental Digital Archivist

I blame David Greetham for my ongoing bought of “archive fever.” And Jerome McGann for issuing a challenge to embrace Digital Humanities. But, that was back in 2000. I still find myself to be an accidental archivist, even today!

At the outset of my graduate work, I already knew that my dissertation would focus on a literary genre that straddled the British Romantic and Victorian eras. The genre, though, was a messy heap of multiple authors, literary genres, editors, publishers, painters, and, engravers, in addition to a multiplicity of sizes, bindings, and papers. The most difficult aspect of studying this particular genre was its number: from 1823-1860 more than 3000 volumes were published in Great Britain with a dozen or so titles gaining the most prominence in the early years. Each volume held approximately 10-12 engravings and upwards of 30 pieces of poetry, short stories, travel narratives, landscape and architectural descriptions, famous authors’ correspondence. Some volumes claimed to invent new typefaces while others heralded popular landscape paintings. All of them professed virtue and a didactic agenda. Most employed well-known contemporary authors to bolster sales. Others took on a decidedly religious, juvenile, or feminine overtone. Some of the writings in these volumes were profound, while others (such as “Epitaph on a Gnat Squashed in a Ladies’ Album”) signaled, let’s say, cultural value. This genre, the literary annual, was beautifully adorned and decidedly valuable. Patrons were encouraged to collect the same title each year and gift other volumes to their family, friends, and lovers. American, German, French, and Spanish authors peppered the pages. And the genre hopped across borders to enjoy both critical and popular success.

When I began working on the annuals, my queries were rooted in traditional humanistic inquiry: Why wasn’t a comprehensive and continuing history of this genre created? Why did the existing histories seem divided on the genre’s importance – most of them citing commentary by 19th-century vituperous reviews.

The primary impediment for offering such a literary history, at least in 2001, was that no scholar (graduate student or senior scholar) had been able to assess the entire genre due to lack of access. Since the literary annuals were eventually deemed inconsequential by reviewers in 19th-century England, 20th-century critics took them at their word, as did special collections curators and archivists. Any scholar would be hard-pressed to find a continuous run of, say, the Forget Me Not across all 25 years that it was published (1823-1847) – let alone in its original binding. Scholars, instead, had implemented case studies typically of only 1 or 2 volumes or entered into the conversation through a single canonical author across multiple volumes and titles. However, other than the initial studies in the 1920s and later feminist recovery efforts in the 1970s & 1980s, most scholars had ignored the physical object itself – the gorgeous gilt-edged, silk-covered duodecimo volume that could fit into the 19th-century literary woman’s skirt pocket. By ignoring the artifact, scholars erased the book history facet of literary annuals. And this is where I thought I would rectify the situation, at least for my graduate work in the field.

When I discovered these volumes in libraries scattered around New York City, and subsequently began building my own collection, my dissertation soon became a defense of the literary annual’s authority, validity, and place in the British Romantic and Victorian era. Critical analysis of the writings and engravings within were relegated to the last chapters (7-10) while I struggled to formulate a coherent and comprehensive literary history of the early annuals. Even in using my own fast-growing collection, I found it unrealistic to keep track of the connections across various volumes, titles, and decades. So, I did what any good graduate student would do: I heeded the call of my dissertation chair and created a digital version of 9 literary annuals – scanned at home and built into a frames-contingent environment.

With Greetham’s help, we determined that I was building an archive. With Jerry McGann’s encouragement (in an article, not to me personally), I built the digital archive that he had requested. But, that was simply one chapter of my very long dissertation. And then the whole thing went live. Since I had already been trained as an archivist while working at Fales Library, NYU, I understood that the architecture of an electronic project (as we called them in those days) was the most important aspect of the project. Kitty Ledbetter and Terry Hoagwood had just produced an electronic edition of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s work and accompanied the page images with essays explaining the value of the literary annual genre. However, Kitty’s project did violence to the book itself – at least in digital form. There was no rendering of the artifact, the material object. Once again, the literary text was privileged. In my opinion, that was the best way to guarantee that the genre would remain invisible, outside the purview of literary studies.

By 2005, when I hesitantly submitted my dissertation (only because I got a job!), the electronic edition had not yet gotten to TEI mark-up, databases, or the dynamic edition (a la Martha Nell Smith or Ray Siemens). Since it’s one of those underfunded projects, the Forget Me Not Archive sits in perpetual frames existence, but not without use.

To facilitate progress on the project’s architecture, the metadata and transcripts of the Forget Me Not Archive have become part of the Poetess Archive Database, which is primarily a database in TEI. It’s not an edition. And, it’s much wider in literary scope. We haven’t yet figured out how to successfully combine the aesthetics of the Forget Me Not Archive with the rich data in the Poetess Archive. Do we preserve the connections that I’ve made or do we present raw data?

What we really need to do is count: count the number of poems in each volume, the number of pages allotted to each short story, the number of portrait vs. landscape engravings, the repetition of important words and concepts (such as virtue or botanical identification), the editorializing annotations appended to some literature, the male and female authors, etc. But we can’t do that because we’ve digitized and rudimentarily marked up only 20-25 volumes – out of 3000.

These little books never quite leave me. In fact, I introduced them to my graduate Romantics Gustatory course this semester.

We spent an evening noshing in my apartment and gathered around my coffee table of only half my private collection. The only imperative was to read, wander, query through the books and talk to one another. To focus some of their searching, I supplied them with two bibliographies (one with a list of authors, the other with bibliographic descriptions of literary annuals).

They read through my Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America article on femininity and the material object as well as a draft of the introduction for my forthcoming collection of Gothic short stories from British literary annuals. I lamented the fact that we don’t have an adequate database of all the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, engravings, inscription pages, title pages, authors, publishers, etc. of the literary annuals. Looking at the books sitting on my coffee table was daunting. Where do they start without the benefit of that gateway?

We used the Poetess Archive Database and the Forget Me Not Archive to search for famous authors or other poetry of the same theme. One student found a very unflattering engraving of Byron (which dashed all of their thoughts about his attractiveness). Others found references to Shakespeare within a severely truncated playbook of Romantic-era productions. Yet others found silly poetry and insipid engravings. We were traversing these literary annuals as a moment to decipher this concept of aesthetics, taste, pleasure, leisure in the Romantic Era. Who decides the literariness of Literature? Are there some gems buried in the annuals? (My answer is, yes, unequivocally.) And what’s the difference between reading these poems and writings in an anthology versus read them in their original?

What could we do with access to these materials, both the printed word (those linguistic codes) and the bibliographic codes (spines, etc.) and allow for semantic searching of the images across all of these other projects ranging from the 15th Century to early 20th C to see how the literary annual genre resonated with earlier and later versions as well as its impact on, say, the short story genre. It’s a type of book that’s just begging to be digitized but isn’t because it lacks a) a single author, b) respect in libraries, c) is swept in with other genres, namely the periodical and the anthology.

While I wait for the annuals to be appropriately digitized and then re-presented with digital tools to aid in their study, some would call me a foolish scholarly editor, textuist, and Digital Humanist. But this is where our new-ish tools have and will continue to alter the Humanities: I ask a question based in humanistic inquiry, the question that has plagued and empassioned my scholarly work. It is a question that cannot be decided through case study. It is a question that is inherently involved in both close and distant reading. It is a question that requires careful study of old books, digital surrogates, data, codes, and patterns.

What is the value of the literary annual?

*****

This morning at the DH Commons workshop, I served on the panel “How to Get Started in Digital Humanities.” (See Twitter hashtags #dhcom and #mla12.) After sitting between the fabulous Amanda French and inimitable Julia Flanders, we broke into table sessions for two rounds. Much to my surprise and glee, both sessions were filled (over-filled, even) with various levels of the DH curious and skilled alike. After brief introductions, it became obvious that we need a dynamic portal for storing, archiving, demonstrating, and evaluating digital pedagogy — beyond a print text. During the in-between conversations, the attendees wanted more — more information, more access, more experts, more informal chatting about all levels of digital pedagogy. Below is a sketchy list of needs, desires, curiosities from both sessions:

• integrating digital skills into the curriculum of a single class (how-to?)
• desire for a community of dh pedagogues
• creating a community in the classroom using digital tools
• integrating large digital projects into the course (where students create/build in conjunction with the disciplinary content)
• create digital projects that are accessible to and useful for public audiences (scholars and more)
• creating a DH methods course
• creating an Intro to DH course (and the subsequent levels of courses after that)
• build an archive in the course of the semester
• creating a DH major outside disciplinary boundaries
• articulating transferrable skills between traditional and digital assignments, i.e., critical thinking
• discover a vocabulary for articulating the value of digital skills to students (that’s comparable to what they already know)
• cross-disciplinary undergraduate teams for digital projects
• introducing faculty (slowly) to the efficacy of using digital tools in the classrom
• teach digital critical editing skills
• teach TEI (or other mark-up language)
• scaffolding digital assignments
• focusing on project-based learning
• creating archives (with students) to expose public to invisible languages and authors (Chicana authors)
• incorporating social networking and e-literature assignments
• expand the digital toolbox (for a faculty member)
• create digital project (art) that exists beyond the classroom experience
• interactive assignments
• concern about using laptops in the classroom & lack of deep attention
• blogging about pedagogy
• having students move beyond theorizing and get the building the stuff

I did my best to lay out the various levels of digital pedagogy (see this video from THATCamp Pedagogy with my undergraduate, Pollyanna), and we did a lot towards identifying resources. I promised to email these resources to all of them, but it might better if I put them here.  And, this is by no means a complete list, just some rudimentary things off the top of my head scribbled while I come down from the sessions and sit in on another MLA panel (the very start of the convention).

• ThatCamp (quite a few of these unconferences each month available to any/everyone)
• Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria (offers scholarships; has week-long seminar on Digital Pedagogy in early June)
• NITLE (offers free webinars & more; they were one of our sponsors for the workshop)
• DH Commons (look for project, possibly pedagogically inclined)
• List of Digital Humanists of Twitter (follow people who talk digital pedagogy)
• DIRT (list of digital tools to use in a classroom; complete with reviews; eventually, they will attach pedagogical imperatives to the tools)
• Zotero group for Digital Humanities in general
• Zotero group for Digital Humanities syllabi & Lisa Spiro’s collection of DH syllabi
• CUNY’s Academic Commons managed to create an online community for all of its faculty — those who self-identify as DH and those who just want to use technology
• Lisa Spiro’s Blog on Digital Humanities (including her assessment of 134 DH syllabi)
• Pedagogy Forum, DH Answers (thank you, Bethany! added 1/6/12)
• Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom, MLA Panel, Friday 1/6, 12pm, Grand A, Sheraton
• Digital Pedagogy Poster Session, MLA Panel, Friday 1/6, 5:15pm, Grand A Sheraton

On your own campus, try to find examples of digital pedagogy in other departments and disciplines. Often, other departments are already doing it and are happy to talk to your department about using digital tools in the classroom. (Plus, they’ve already beta-tested it for students; use it!). Snoop around your libraries and librarians. They’ve been at the forefront of digital use for years. Composition & Rhetoric studies have also been engaged in digital pedagogy for at least thirty years. If your on-campus teaching and learning center has an Instructional Technologist, yank on that person for all he/she is worth. If you hold the purse strings, invest in this person. It will be worth your while.

We’ve come a long way since last year’s Future of DH panel organized by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. It seems that digital pedagogy no longer needs a champion. Lots of people are vocal about their successes and failures in using digital tools, crafting Introducing Digital Humanities courses, building student-driven projects, and more. Please add more in the comments section here. (Because I’m an archivist, I’m a bit chagrined that I couldn’t capture everything and convey everything to everyone — can you say mal d’archive?)

Rock on with your bad selves.

Edit (1/7/12): The workshop was attended by Professor Pannapacker, who wrote up an interesting piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the MLA and DH with specific reference to the pedagogy session and some of the above references.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 58 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

********

Ray Siemens graciously invited me to deliver a talk at the University of Victoria the week after our big MLA Convention gathering in Seattle. I know Ray from way back in 2007 when we did a symposium together at Simon Fraser University on Digital Humanities: Practice, Methodology, and Pedagogy (hosted by the Centre for Study of Print and Media Cultures).  The invitation, extended by Margaret Linley, was based on my work in literary annuals and as a digital scholarly editor on The Forget Me Not Archive. After that symposium, I bumped into Margaret, Ray, and Mike Everton (another interesting SFU faculty member) at various conferences on digital, book history, and textual studies.

Of late, my work has taken me into Digital Humanities a bit far afield from my original dissertation on British literary annuals — and it all began with Margaret’s invitation to SFU. After 4 years, I’m ready to return full force as a Romantic-era scholar and, more importantly, as a bibliography/history of the book/textual studies scholar. Though praxis, metadata, platforms, sustainability, and pedagogy still maintain their hold on my scholarly interests, this talk at the University of Victoria allows me to exorcise my dissertation and, finally, this literary history of literary annuals that I’ve been working on for, oh, including my dissertating years?, about 10 or 11 years.

These little books never quite leave me. In fact, I introduced them to my graduate Romantics Gustatory course this semester.

We spent an evening noshing in my apartment and gathered around my coffee table of only half my private collection. The only imperative was to read, wander, query through the books and talk to one another. To focus some of their searching, I supplied them with the Faxon and Boyle bibliographies (one with a list of authors, the other with bibliographic descriptions of literary annuals). They read through my PBSA article on femininity and the material object as well as a draft of the introduction for my forthcoming collection of Gothic short stories from British literary annuals. I lamented the fact that we don’t have an adequate database of all the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, engravings, inscription pages, title pages, authors, publishers, etc. of the literary annuals. Looking at the books sitting on my coffee table was daunting. Where do they start?

We used the Poetess Archive Database and the Forget Me Not Archive to search for famous authors or other poetry of the same theme. One student found a very unflattering engraving of Byron (which dashed all of their thoughts about his attractiveness). Others found references to Shakespeare within a severely truncated playbook of Romantic-era productions. Yet others found silly poetry and insipid engravings. We were traversing these literary annuals as a moment to decipher this concept of aesthetics, taste, pleasure, leisure in the Romantic Era. Who decides the literariness of Literature? Are there some gems buried in the annuals? (My answer is, yes, unequivocally.) And what’s the difference between reading these poems and writings in an anthology versus read them in their original? (We had to haul in extra light so everyone could read.)

I’m not quite sure how they perceived that day’s gathering or the efficacy of handling this type of collection. But, the final projects (as they’ve hinted at so far) are really interesting, far-reaching, exploratory, and delving into New Historicism methodology coupled with close reading. All of this, though, left me with a desire, perhaps that old mal d’archive, to finish this foundation, to complete the literary history of the annuals so I can move onto more literary criticism of things like the American publishers re-mixing/revising/re-using British literary annuals, the proliferation of botany in the annuals, the revision of Britishness for the ex-pat annual readers  in India.  These three chapters didn’t make it into the current book because, quite frankly, the book is already too long. (One chapter is 80 pages!!)

In January, at the start of my sabbatical, I return to these roots and commit to completing another book on the literary annuals. Perhaps I’ll even return to the tall order to digitize, encode, and revise the Forget Me Not Archive (maybe not?). I do know that if we can create a larger corpus of literary annuals, we will be able to study them much more fully.  Hey, I might even be able to craft an entire course on the topic?  We’ll see.

In the meantime, I accepted Ray’s kind offer and began coordinating with Jentery Sayers, U Vic’s most recent (enthusiastic and wickedly smart) hire. Details are below. I’m really looking forward to this talk. We’ll chat about archives, literary annuals, history, and dirty stories before moving briefly into the digitization of these gems, amulets, forget me nots, and keepsakes. I’m anticipating a wildly good time with the Canadians!

University of Victoria, Tuesday, January 10, 3pm
Buried in the Archives: Recovering British Literary Annuals from an ‘Unbawdy & Unmasculine Age’”

By November 1822, the British reading public had already voraciously consumed both Walter Scott’s expensive novels and Rudolf Ackermann’s exquisite lithographs. Audiences craved more decadent literary and visual representations of the burgeoning middle class. By wrapping beauty, literature, landscape art, and portraits into an alluring package, editors and publishers filled the 1820s with one of the most popular and best-selling genres, the literary annual. Despite being accused of causing an “epidemic” and inspiring an “unmasculine and unbawdy age,” the annuals captivated readers in early nineteenth-century England. Eradicating this powerful outbreak of femininity, though, was much more difficult than some literary traditionalists hoped. The annuals survived, even thrived from the attention offered by its readers despite – or as Harris argues, because of – its “feminine” writing and over-saturated, beautiful form. The annual’s history provides an integral view of public desire, literary development, authorial consciousness, and empowering femininity. Even literati Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson begrudgingly embraced both the genre and its overwhelmingly feminine audience. Relying on the material text, its literary contents, and contemporary reviews, Harris presents a literary history and digital archive that recuperate the annual as a literary genre, popular phenomenon in print culture, powerful feminine form, and cultural marker of early nineteenth-century “Englishness.”

1. See Pollyanna Macchiano talk about this project at THATCamp Pedagogy (video).
2. The Project submitted a research proposal to the CSU Student Research Competition and were chosen as one of four projects to represent the College of Arts & Humanities; they will now compete for one of the four spots to represent SJSU at the CSU-wide competition. Wish them luck!
3. The group will represent the project as a poster at the Re:Humanities Conference, a gathering run entirely by and for undergraduates who perform Digital Humanities research and scholarship, held at Swarthmore College in March.

***

In my recent tenure dossier, to my university’s administrators, at conferences, in coffee meetings, over lunch, across Twitter, in webinars, within Day in the Life of Digital Humanities, and in an occasional article I’ve been discussing the efficacy of bringing students into Digital Humanities. I’ve accomplished this (somewhat) by inviting them to use digital tools to collaborate on assignments (TechnoRomantic Timeline) or to simply to expose their ideas by posting to class-public fora. I’ve moved beyond PowerPoint in the classroom, not because PowerPoint is an inadequate tool, but because we have other ways of generating and demonstrating their mastery of information and knowledge. My latest experiment, a la Cathy Davidson, was a collaborative mid-term for the Gothic Novel and Horror Fiction course. Of course, inherent to all of these pedagogical experiments is a sense of productive failure — for both me and the students. (The difference, of course, is that when I fail in an experiment, I often give extra points to overcome the shock of failure for the students.) All of this falls under the catch-phrase of student-centered learning. What we would like students to become are lifelong learners. Does this type of classroom activity inspire that?

Collaboration is the lynchpin to supporting all of this productivity, learning, experimenting, and knowledge acquisition.  This unwritten goal was reinforced by a few tech industry magnates at Stanford’s BiblioTech Symposium last year: the CEOs want liberal arts and humanities doctoral students who can command language, interpret technical jargon into metaphor and narrative, and work collaboratively in team situations. Humanities scholars often think of themselves as the lonely bibliophiles in the library stacks, quietly slaving over monographs. But, Digital Humanities has altered that paradigm — even required that Humanists consider exposing their collaborative work, even if it isn’t digitally-inclined. Paul Fyfe even proposes that teaching can assume the tenets of Digital Pedagogy without pushing an ON button. Adding to that conversation, I propose that undergraduates and master’s students can offer intriguing, if not altogether unique, perspectives to work in Digital Humanities — beyond the limitations of classroom-specific assignments. That life-long learning that could translate so well to economic/employment success.

That’s what we’ve done here, in the Beard-stair Project. Or, rather, this is what four intrepid, interested, passionate students have decided to do. There’s a story to the beginning of this project. Bear with me:

ONCE upon a time in early September, Jesus found himself in possession of five slim volumes that weren’t the property of the library where he was working. Someone had dropped them into the outside library return bin for some odd reason. According to Jesus, this happens all the time. The library staff usually sends the books to Friends of the Library for sale to the general public.  Jesus, having already taken my book-history-infused Digital Humanities course, brought them to me. We chatted for a bit, ogled the gorgeous illustrations, and wondered about this rag-tag collection of disparate artists’ books. There was no doubt that they were of some value. The handmade paper and uncut pages in all of them signaled a potential research moment.

After sorting through WorldCat, I discovered that two of the books were extremely valuable. (Egads! What else could be in that store then?) Immediately, it was very clear that these were not books that I was to own. With the rarity of at least one, I felt it incumbent upon me to create a digital edition — which would be easy enough considering that there were only a few pages in each volume. But the art history value coupled with the provenance, book history, literary history, and Victorian/Modernist specifics meant that the topics were out of my realm of expertise. And, I didn’t have time to work on them if I wanted to finish my book projects by the end of my sabbatical in August 2012.

I tweeted about it, discussed it in my grad course on Romanticism, and emailed Jesus and another digitally-inclined student.  Colette jumped on board from Twitter and also happens to be a student at SJSU’s School of Library and Information Science. Doll is an engaged MA student in our English Department and gleefully took the opportunity. Jesus, an English major and our link to the books, stepped in with a passion. And, Pollyanna, another English major, has a penchant for figuring out, theorizing, and operating digital tools in addition to a passion for design. All four demonstrated an immediate enthusiasm for the initial, exploratory meeting. I set the first gathering: my apartment, sit-down dinner, peruse the books.  At that meeting, we ate (panko-encrusted chicken cutlets seared in brown butter), then fondled the books. I took notes on a whiteboard while they talked. Because we were wildly traversing disciplines and historical moments, I turned my television into a makeshift display with my laptop. We couldn’t keep up with the ideas and the questions!

We determined a two-fold approach to the project:

1. Fall semester goals: exhibit in Special Collections and research time to figure out the connections and contexts; and
2. Spring semester goals: construct a digital edition supported and maintained by the library and to be peer-reviewed by NINES, if at all possible.

My goal: create a digital scholarly edition that would become a resource for scholars. This means that their research and writing would have to match scholarly requirements. It also means that we need an out-of-the-box platform. The closest we could come up with was Omeka with a WordPress plug-in, but the team isn’t necessarily satisfied with that.

After describing archival research and the exploratory impetus behind doing this kind of work, the team committed to follow any path or avenue that was compelling. And, more importantly, they agreed to update each other over our Google Group and to exchange books at each meeting. This way, each person would spend four weeks with a single volume. They were committed to going down the rabbit hole. (To tell you the truth, I think this is what drives them: not knowing what questions to ask but knowing that there’s more out there to discover. Derrida’s mal d’archive is written all over them.)

This Fall, we’ve met once each month, at my tiny apartment, where all I can do is encourage and feed them while they chat. I take notes, set goals for the month, post interesting/relevant links to our Google Group, look for funding, and send out reminders for the next meeting. I’m a project manager. They are the scholars. Each month, I keep expecting someone to fall away or become overwhelmed with the work (because they’re all taking a full course load+). But each month, they return enervated about their discoveries and inspiring each other to dig deeper into histories. They’ve recently decided that they will consult other researchers and scholars, but they would like to maintain the sanctity of the group and write this material themselves.  They don’t want to be scooped! (Ah ha! they are indeed scholars now!)

Two of them submitted a proposal to the Re:Humanities conference; next semester, the four of them will submit a proposal to CSU’s research competition with the hope that they will be selected to demonstrate their project at a CSU-wide conference. One, Pollyanna, co-presented a bootcamp with me at THATCamp Pedagogy and described the project towards the conclusion of the presentation (see video in link above).

But, there’s a hitch with this incredible project-centered course. No one is getting credit for it. It became too complicated to involve the SJSU administration and various disciplines. We would have to request independent study for everyone, and with the budget crunch, my department frowns on that solution. Additionally, independent study shows up on their transcripts under the associate chair, not me. Consequently, it didn’t make sense. Quite frankly, this frees me from assessing their work — because assessing digital projects requires a different framework than assessing course work. I’m not focusing on the outcome, the product. Instead, we are engaged in a process; one that will take a year to come to fruition. They consider this project and our meetings their fun time. FUN TIME!

So, we gather, talk, eat, sometimes drink, touch books, exchange stories, make progress, ask questions, laugh, celebrate. But, most importantly, we collaborate. Correction. They collaborate.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with next, what they solve, what they query, where this project takes them.

This is the kind of teaching that I’d like to do: project-centered courses that resolve real-time issues.

Now, how can I get this written into the curriculum here at SJSU? Guess I’ll have to work on that one m’self. In the meantime, I’m preparing the menu for our next meeting. Lamb Tagine? or Braised short ribs?

[Note: Acknowledged as Editor's Choice (11/28/11), Digital Humanities Now]

From Conduct Books to Idiot’s Guides: Literary Forms of “Feminine” Instruction

Distinguished Speaker Reading Series, Southern New Hampshire University, March 27, 2006.

I want to thank Southern New Hampshire University for inviting me to speak during Women’s History Month – and specifically

• Eleanor Dunfey-Friburger, Papoutsy Distinguished Chair in Ethics
•  Jane Yerrington, Professor Dunfey-Freiburger’s assistant
• Dean Ernest Holm, School of Liberal Arts
• Adrian Wisnicki and the Department of English

When Dr. Wisnicki first invited me, I thought I’d talk about my latest research on British 19th  century literature and definitions of femininity. But, as I read through the poetry and prose within these texts, I realized that some of these definitions were familiar to me – not because I had come across them in my research, but because I recognized them from our modern literary and popular culture.  The conduct manuals of late 18th century England offer a “Rules” of sorts that address fashion, coquettish behavior and education.  The conduct manuals of the early 21st century also offer advice on these same issues, but it’s under the guise of self-help books, in other words, Idiot’s Guides.  I began to wonder how “femininity” had been defined and re-defined between these two particular points.  Is there a definitive feminine voice?  as authors? as readers? in the texts themselves?  What follows is perhaps less answers to these questions than more questions piled on top of it all – especially in our age of $400 high heeled shoes made popular by “Sex and the City” stars who act more masculine than they do feminine.
[pause]

During the late eighteenth-century, conduct books competed with the novel for a “proper” young lady’s attention.  One conduct manual encouraged women “to conceal any blemishes and set off your beauties” using dress, dancing, music and drawing (1778 A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter).  The other supposedly corrupted its female readers by displaying, and thereby encouraging them to commit, wild acts of unrestrained passion – certainly the opposite intent of any conduct manual!  The 19th century audience accepted the passionate form and clamored for more women’s voices.  As a result, literary annuals and women’s magazines overwhelmingly captured the fancy of 19th century middle class women in England and America.  But how far did any of these literary forms stray from the original conduct manual?  Even in its appearance, the literary annual represented a delicate femininity clothed in a silk dress; magazines entertained women with recipes and the latest fashions. Though these literary forms all attempt to define “femininity,” and some even to revolutionize it, we still seem to be struggling with this issue.

Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 advice in Sex and the Single Girl is a very early precursor to our own group of gals from “Sex and the City.”  Both the 1962 book and the HBO series advocate women adopting a masculine demeanor about finance, business and relationships, while remaining very stylish.  Our contemporary instructive manuals appear as the Idiot’s guides (and others),  addressing women’s desires to “perform” masculinity.  Our twenty-first -century version of “femininity” seems to encourage both the passion promoted by reading novels and the propriety suggested in conduct manuals.

In this talk, I will address the feminine identity offered by each of these literary forms and question just how far we’ve moved away from the feminine ideal offered by late 18th century definitions of femininity.

***********

Virtue, sexuality and motherhood – the holy trinity of “good girls” at the end of the 18th century.  Virtue was fragile and irrecoverable;  sexuality could be exposed with a blush; and motherhood became not just essential to propagating the race, but also fashionable.  Many of these feminine traits are apparent in recently incarnated genre called “chick lit” – to be distinguished from “chick films” where crying and sentimental hugs constantly invade the screen.  Hailed as the new woman’s novel, the previously pejorative “chick” of this literature is recuperated, empowering its female characters to become sexual predators or stay-at-home moms: (slide) Bridget Jones’ Diary, The Nanny Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada, anything by Candace Bushnell or in Oprah’s Book Club. The genre offers a range of female protagonists and are usually written by women for women – different from the bodice-busting romance novels that include 1980s Italian heart-throb, Fabio, (slide) and his glistening chest, on its cover.  Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice is hailed as the original chick-lit masterpiece and was recently made into a movie in which Elizabeth and Darcy don’t leave sexuality to the imagination – completely in violation of Austen’s original intent.  Somewhat formulaic, much like the 1790-1830 moralistic novels of sensibility, chick-lit novels have become big business – signaled by the first “how-to” by Cathy Yardley: Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel.  (slide)

Late 18th century conduct manuals are not the openly cabalistic and erotic prose of our romance and chick lit novels.  Instead, with the help of teachers, parents, preachers and novels, the conduct book represented one of the most prominent aids to proper education.  They focused on making “young women desirable to men of a good social position” and “represented a specific configuration of sexual features as those of the only appropriate woman for men at levels of society to want as a wife,” as Nancy Armstrong points out in Desire and Domestic Fiction (59).  Their titles proselytized for this restraint, promising an education in “female” manners:

Lectures of Female Education and Manners (John Burton, 1793)
The Excellent Female (Amos Chase, 1791)
Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (Hester Chapone, 1802)
Letters on the Intellectual and Moral Character of Women (William Duff, 1807)
Self-Control (Mary Brunton, 1811) and
John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1778)

In the revolutionary and polemical 1792 Vindications of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft politicizes female manners and conduct.  (slide) The 1792 treatise points out that because men wrote most conduct books, patriarchal hegemony dictated female conduct and created a totally unrealistic ideal of femininity:

One cause of this barren blooming [of vacuous female manners] I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers. . . (Wollstonecraft 112)

A few women, Wollstonecraft included, wrote not conduct manuals but alternative literary anthologies or redemptive tracts:  Lady Sarah Pennington (slide) was accused of acting “coquettishly” and forced into a legal separation by her husband.  She wrote these pamphlets as advice to her daughters cautioning them against “inward instruction and approval of their own consciences” (Before Victoria online).  In other words, women were not to trust themselves – this seems a precursor to our own therapy-age where we second guess ourselves in voice-over like indecision.

Before we go any further, let’s define masculinity and femininity as defined in conduct books of the late 18th century .  (Slide) Nancy Armstrong suggests that conduct manuals focused on producing a woman who was educated enough to perform her duties:

This writing assumed that an education ideally made a woman desire to be what a prosperous man desires, which is above all else a female.  (click) She therefore had to lack the competitive desires and worldly ambitions that consequently belonged – as if by some natural principle – to the male. (click)  For such a man, her desirability hinged upon an education in frugal domestic practices.  (click) She was supposed to complement his role as an earner and producer (click) with hers as a wise spender (click) and tasteful consumer.(click)  (59)

Inherent to being all things “female” is the sequestered body of the young woman.  Prior to marriage (for an upper class woman), she entices a young man with a blush, her wit, humor, fashionable dress and an appropriate amount of humility.  After marriage, she would continue to maintain her honor and reveal her blush only to her husband.  We see the results of an indiscriminate smiler and blusher in Robert Browning’s 1849 parodic poem, “My Last Duchess,” in which the Duke hints that he has murdered his last wife because she indiscriminately gave away smiles and blushes.  It is this type of trading on feminine beauty and ignorance to which Wollstonecraft objects.  However, women continuously are portrayed as objects of desire and beauty as well as virtuous mothers in many 19th century images (see several images & explain some).  Even an exposed breast is not eroticized when it’s associated with maternity.  (Slide)

Wollstonecraft takes exception with this definition of femininity and refuses to posit women as victims.  Instead, in the Vindications Wollstonecraft admonishes women for their heresies of “false delicacy” – in which over-refinement supposedly rendered them “weak, artificial beings trapped in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone” (qtd in Belinda, nt 43).  She writes the Vindications directly to them:

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood . . . [¶] Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, . . . I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.  (Women 8)

Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary words are not without cause:  John Gregory’s Legacy manual was written in the guise of a dying father who wants to bequeath the only thing that his they could inherit – advice on love, friendship, money, intellect and fashion, among other things. Women were bound by coverture, laws which prohibited married women from owning property, voting and earning money.  She existed only as an extension of her husband.  Marriage then became a game of flirtation and bargaining.  Gregory’s conduct manual was more lamentable because the girls would apparently be without their mother (because she was dead – a popular, if not disturbing rhetorical device).  He felt that his specter would live in his published words. Jacqueline Pearson, in reviewing the Gregory’s manual, finds that marriage is necessary to control femininity: “femininity is ‛natural’ and innate, yet a constant struggle is needed to maintain it” (Women’s 47). Offering to haunt their lives ever-after, Gregory’s soon-to-be deceased self gives some of the following advice: (slide)

Modesty:

1. ONE of the chief beauties in a female character is that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye, and is disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration. – I do not wish you to be insensible to applause. If you were, you must become, if not worse, at least less amiable women. But you may be dazzled by that admiration, which yet rejoices your hearts.
2. Converse with men even of the first rank with that dignified modesty, which may prevent the approach of the most distant familiarity, and consequently prevent them from feeling themselves your superiors.

Beauty:

1. When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of beauty. That extreme sensibility which it indicates, may be a weakness and incumbrance in our sex, as I have too often felt ; but in yours it is peculiarly engaging. Pedants, who think themselves philosophers, ask why a woman should blush when she is conscious of no crime. It is a sufficient answer, that Nature has made you to blush when you are guilty of no fault, and has forced us to love you because you do so.–Blushing is so far from being necessarily an attendant on guilt, that it is the usual companion of innocence. (26-27)
2. Dress is an important article in female life. The love of dress is natural to you, and therefore it is proper and reasonable. Good sense will regulate your expence in it, and good taste will direct you to dress in such a way as to conceal any blemishes, and set off your beauties, if you have any, to the greatest advantage. But much delicacy and judgment are required in the application of this rule. A fine woman shews her charms to most advantage, when she seems most to conceal them. The finest bosom in nature is not so fine as what imagination forms. The most perfect elegance of dress appears always the most easy, and the least studied. (55-56)

Propriety:

1. Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must be guarded with great discretion and good-nature, otherwise it will create you many enemies. Wit is perfectly consistent with softness and delicacy; yet they are seldom found united. Wit is so flattering to vanity, that they who possess it become intoxicated, and lose all self-command. (29-30)
2. Humour is a different quality. It will make your company much solicited ; but be cautious how you indulge it.–It is often a great enemy to delicacy, and a still greater one to dignity of character. It may sometimes gain you applause, but will never procure you respect. (31)
3. The intention of your being taught needle-work, knitting, and such like, is not on account of the intrinsic value of all you can do with your hands, which is trifling, but to enable you to judge more perfectly of that kind of work, and to direct the execution of it in others. Another principal end is to enable you to fill up, in a tolerably agreeable way, some of the many solitary hours you must necessarily pass at home.–It is a great article in the happiness of life, to have your pleasures as independent of others as possible. By continually gadding abroad in search of amusement, you lose the respect of all your acquaintances, whom you oppress with those visits, which, by a more discreet management, might have been courted. (51-52)

Virtue:

1. Virgin purity is of that delicate nature, that it cannot hear certain things without contamination. It is always in your power to avoid these. (35)

All of these “recommendations” cite public performance and caution the young women from exercising too much of any attribute.  Each “legacy” instructs the daughters on propriety, appearances and “getting a man” – not too far off from some of the marriage rules popularized today, one specifically:  The Rules: Time Testing Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, by Ellen Fein & Sherrie Schneider (1996) – you can read some of them up here (slide).  Many women rolled their eyes and then rushed to buy this book – it was published in 27 languages!  The authors now offer email consultations, schools and online advice.  They’ve even progressed with technology and published The Rules for Online Dating in 2002 (slide).  Some of these seem very similar to those legacies written by John Gregory in 1778.  Barbara De Angelis countered with The Real Rules in 1997 with chapters on “How to Stop Sabotaging your love life with the Old Rules.”  Her rules include:

1. Treat men the way you want them to treat you
2.  Remember that men need as much love and reassurance as you do
3. Stay away from men who don’t like the real rules
4. Don’t play games
5. Be yourself
6. If you like someone let him know

This courtship manual proposes a separate kind of femininity – one that proposes men and women as equals instead of game players.

Of course, in between conduct manuals and The Rules, women had won the right to own property, vote and control their bodies.  French and American feminism came in the form of first, second, third and post-waves.  And, of course, women began defining their own of femininity.

Long before the bra-burning began, though, women authors had begun to gain a voice in literary media, though they were still not welcomed by the time Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797 as is evidence by Richard Polwhele’s vitriolic critique of women authors in The Unsex’d Females published 1798.  (slide) In an adaptation of “The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain,” Johnson’s Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum for 1778 publishes an engraving which pasted the faces of “scribbling women” onto the muses’ bodies.   Though this engraving is intended to celebrate women authorship, it instead casts Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, Catherine Macaulay and others in the traditional role of the muse – female, passive, inspirational but voiceless.  You’ll notice that only two of these women are writing.  The others engage in a gathering which looks like gossiping or  painting or playing music.  Typically, women authors were equated with licentious rabble-rousers (including Mary Wollstonecraft).  (slide)  This 1815 hand-colored etching parodies a typical meeting of the Bluestockings – a set of authors (both men and women) who met regularly for a “salon” or session to discuss their writing, politics and other “masculine” topics.  In this wrestling melee, women’s undergarments are exposed, they’re faces are flushed, violence is being committed everywhere – as if the attempt to venture into masculine territory causes them to erupt against each other –  parallelling what it was to be a woman writer – exposed, improper and almost violent! (slide)

Like our “chick lit,” women wrote for women.  However, it was not always clear where women authors held their loyalties, offering divisive and confusing representations of femininity.
Before publishing her Vindication, Wollstonecraft assumed a masculine pseudonym (Mr. Creswick) to publish a literary conduct manual, The Female Reader: or Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads: for the Improvement of Young Women. By Mr. Creswick. Pub. London: Joseph Johnson (WF 52).  As Mr. Creswick, Wollstonecraft identifies the “improvement of her [a young lady’s] mind and heart” as

the business of her whole life; she must not mistake and call blossoms fruit, for the summer often proves the hopes of spring fallacious; and it must ripen the most promising to give it real value.  The plenty of autumn only rewards the industrious, and industry is never irksome when it becomes habitual. (Preface to The Female Reader)

The title obviously indicates that the volume contains materials to teach women propriety. But it’s ambiguity also refers to women who read, as if Wollstonecraft were going to discuss how a woman should read or describe the woman reader.

Wollstonecraft donned a masculine pseudonym for this publication, certain that advice from a woman author would not be considered authoritative for moral instruction of her own sex.  Armstrong points out that conduct books meant to reinforce “domestic ideology and [articulate] a specific understanding of the relationship between reading, sexuality, and social control”(qtd. in Pearson Women’s 46).  These manuals are teaching tools to enact an idealized femininity and do not invoke a leisure-reading experience.  (slide) Anna Barbauld’s poem, “On a Lady’s Writing” which was included in The Female Reader, seems to reinforce this:

HER even lines her steady temper show ;
Neat as her dress, and polish’d as her brow ;
Strong as her judgment, easy as her air ;
Correct though free, and regular though fair :
And the same graces o’er her pen preside
That form her manners and her footsteps guide.

The woman writer is here represented not as an imaginative self, but as a diligent and studious practitioner of copying. Though Barbauld did not wholly agree with Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary arguments, she still understood the binds that were placed on women, especially authors.  This is where I take exception with Armstrong’s argument.  With Barbauld’s poem in this collection, it does not seem that The Female Reader offers the typical message of a conduct manual.  Barbauld’s poem, though seemingly compliant with an idealized femininity, is much too rigid in its control and presents a transparent view of the rigidity of feminine constraints.  Lisa Vargo refers to the poem as “the construction of the bourgeois woman in the eighteenth century through the related socio-cultural practices of penmanship, letter writing, and the conduct book.”  The strict rhyme scheme and meter dictate the representation of a woman held to an unnatural and forced standard.  If you look at the images of women writing (click), you’ll see that they were required to write in private, not necessarily as journalists or out in the open.  (click) Femininity and domesticity did not include publically exposing their thoughts.  In addition, Wollstonecraft is still fighting to prove that women have a soul and are natural creatures.  With Barbauld’s sardonic poem, there’s none of that Romantic idealized sublime imagination here.  It’s copy work – meant to strengthen her ability to produce text (like a Medieval scribe).
However, women novelists were the aberration to this formula.  The Gothic novel of the 1770s was incredibly popular and encourage women to write in a very formulaic script of landscape, hero worship and psychological trauma.  Most novels made it to the circulating library, which was one of the few places that women could go unaccompanied.  By the time Sir Walter Scott commanded huge sums for his novels, women novelists had over-run the profession, but without much respect from professional authors.  However, they were writing to and for each other:  (slide)

Elizabeth Inchbald concludes her seemingly moralistic 1791 novel, A Simple Story, by declaring that every daughter needs “A PROPER EDUCATION.”  However, Miss Milner, our protagonist is a willful, uneducated but socially sophisticated young woman who plays the coquette only after the object of her desire snubs her.  By playing the flirt, she gains her man and marries him.  She subsequently embarrasses her husband with an indiscretion, and he abandons her and their daughter.  The daughter is the exact opposite of the mother:  she receives a proper education for a lady and is the most dull and insipid character in the entire novel.  When she finally gains the attentions of her long-lost father again, he praises her education as something her mother lacked.  However, the novel’s moral is parodic at best.  The daughter is completely controlled by others and has no voice.  Miss Milner, however, had a distinct voice and was powerfully in charge of her own destiny despite her improprieties.

Maternal instincts were also fodder for parodies:  In her 1802 novel, Belinda, Maria Edgeworth pokes at this image of monied maternity – very similar to our own images of nannies and Park Avenue from The Nanny Diaries.  Lady Delacour relates to Belinda her 3 attempts at motherhood: a stillborn, a sickly child and a healthy child.  The 3rd child survived infancy not because Lady Delacour nursed, cared for and educated the girl, but instead because she had nothing to do with her.  The 2nd child was nursed, as was all the rage.  However, when she stopped after 3 months because it was too much trouble, the child died.  (slide)  Here’s an image of a fashionable lady waiting to go some place decadent contrasted against the ideal maternal image of the working woman in the painting behind her.  Lady Delacour was this type of woman.  With the living child, she sent her away to nurse and be educated even though it meant losing face in her incredibly judgmental social circles.
[PAUSE]

With the conduct manual as one of its guiding principles, the literary annual of the 1820s and 1830s presents itself as a fragmented physical and mental conflation of both masculine and feminine qualities.
Literary annuals are early 19th century British texts published yearly from 1822 to 1856 and primarily intended for a middle-class audience. The decoratively bound volumes – filled with steel plate engravings of nationally recognized artwork and sentimental poetry and prose – exuded a feminine delicacy that attracted a primarily female readership.  They were published in November and sold for the following year, which made the genre an ideal Christmas gift, lover’s present or token of friendship. Generally, 80 to 100 entries of prose and poetry were compiled for an annual, with over 50 different authors included in any one volume.  Ackermann’s original Forget Me Not stood at only 3” x 5”.  Richard Altick argues that these proportions were directly related to the size of ladies’ skirt pockets to allow freedom and portability.

The annual’s appearance attracted the interest of those who collected “beauty” and fashion.  Frederick Mansel Reynolds and Charles Heath allegedly stumbled onto a warehouse of red watered silk, bought 4000 yards at 3 shillings a yard and covered the boards of the 1828 (slide) Keepsake with it – thereby producing a textual object constructed from material normally used for a woman’s skirt.  By 1829, The Gem, The Bijou, and the Literary Souvenir all came to the debutante ball clothed in similar crimson silk.  By 1832, Ackermann had changed his paper pasteboards to the crimson silk in solidarity with the other “ladies.”

These crimson-covered annuals market a representation of the private female body:  a skirt not only creates a boundary between a woman’s body and the public, but it also shields them from the improper touch of a profligate public.  And, a silk skirt indicates a certain amount of wealth and class standing.  The long skirt, made of heavy silk and rustling about her legs, restricts her physically and reminds a woman of the moral boundaries of proper behavior — for lifting up her skirt is not only an act of defiance but also one of revelation to those around her.  Access to a woman’s skirt is similar to access to her dressing room, a view that Jonathan Swift inventories in filthy reality in his 1732 “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” The space, both under her skirt and within her room, even in the early 19th century, are still confidential and private.  The silk material used by Heath invokes that private space but titillates at the same time because a reader may open the skirted volume and venture inside.

This fashionable beauty is squarely couched in a supposedly less taxing literary model – a quality that is indicative of the fantasy of social control over femininity.  An article in The Monthly Review for November 1831 applauds the duality of a literary annual volume:

If the poetry be not in every instance of the best description, it is good enough for common purposes.  We have seldom detected anything either in the poetry or the prose that was calculated to misguide the taste, or vitiate the morals . . .  (371, emphasis added)

In applauding the annual, the reviewer also assigns it to the whitewashed polite literature meant to mildly and delicately educate (or train) female readers.  With this type of femininity commodified for public consumption, the publishers and editors of annuals, then, are part of this fantasy of social control previously championed by the conduct manuals.  However, during the 1830s, women will begin to edit and contribute substantially to the literary annuals, thereby once again converting, adopting, subverting and accepting variant forms of femininity – but at the same time empowering themselves by writing their identities into existence.  They became “masculine” in order to be feminine (slide) – many of these masculine qualities were exhibited in both the literary annual writings as well as the women authors and editors themselves.

Finally, by 1847, we see some clear progress in the definitions of femininity, especially marriage:  (slide)  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published more than 50 years later, ends with that famous line:  “and reader, I married him.”  After Jane spends years as a nanny, teacher and philanthropist, she is now ready to marry the fallen and physically deformed Rochester.  The novel ends with the main character speaking directly to the reader – a rhetorical move that indicates autonomy and self-awareness.  It was Rochester in the end who had to repent and learn humility and propriety, not Jane.  (However, she refused to marry him and live in a polygamist situation.  It would have been much more progressive of her to accept Bertha, the madwoman in the attic, and live in a happy commune of Rochester women.)  Bertha represents the complete absence of propriety and modesty and Jane is her foil, her opposite supposedly – two types of femininity, one unrestrained, the other educated and proper.  (slide)

Victorian England sees some backlash against this re-defined femininity.  Coventry Patmore publishes his 1854 poem, “The Angel in the House,” which details the perfect, demure wife who is completely submissive to her husband’s wishes.  It is this same angel that Virginia Woolf murdered in a lecture she gave to the Professional Women’s League in 1931 – just shortly before she declared that women should have a room of their own.

Now, women not only have a room of their own, they have multiple sets of books completely dedicated to education:  Contemporary versions of “how to” for women are couched more as suggestions in the form of Idiot’s and Dummies guides – and not just for women.  For instance, Menopause for Dummies is clearly intended for women (unless modern science has done something that we haven’t read about yet).  But it can be read by anyone:  men can read it to inform themselves about women in their lives who are “suffering” through this phase.  This is a difference from the conduct manuals.  Our contemporary guidance isn’t exclusive to gender. Taboo subjects of the 18th & 19th centuries are no longer off limits.  There are more books, though, that suggest how to be yourself & be a woman:

• Sex & the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown (1962) – advocating women to stay & enjoy being single – one of the first!
• The Go-Girl Guide: Surviving your 20s with Savvy, Soul & Style
• The Bad Girl’s Guide to Getting What You Want
• Three Black Skirts: All You Need to Survive
• A Guide to Elegance
• A Well-Kept Home
• The Modern Girl’s Guide to Life
• The Handbag Book of Girly Emergencies
• Cash in the City: Affording Manolo’s, Martinis and Manicures on a Working Girl’s Salary

When Helen Gurley Brown liberated single women’s sexuality in 1962, the reception was quite icy.  But, then, other areas opened up to women – not just birth control and the sexual revolution.  Authors began the how-to self-help genre which emphasized women’s needs, including business and finance: (slide)

• A Woman’s Guide to Successful Negotiating (keep clicking)
• Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office
• Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich
• How to Say It for Women
• Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman
• Smart Women Finish Rich
• Own a Successful Woman Owned Business!
• Why the Best Man for a Job is a Woman
• The Hip Girl’s Handbook: for Home, Car & Money Stuff
• How to Pee Standing Up:  Tips for Hip Chicks

Women are no longer confined by this ideal of femininity. “how to” books are about entering the masculine world.  But, confusing definitions of femininity still make their way into our modern conduct manuals. Smart Women Finish Rich by David Bach (2002) targeted women as his audience so he could teach them how to use their heads & hearts in making financial decisions.  He’s allowing for the emotional, sentimental side of women – that dominion over the breast that Anna Barbauld insists on.  Bach writes:

“Most women don’t receive a basic education in finance until it’s too late” (4)
“I wanted to help…. I laid out a simple but effective pathway that any woman could follow to achieve financial security and freedom” (4).
Women are better investors because they “commit” to an investment plan and then stick with it as opposed to men who traditionally suffer from “fear of commitment” (6)

Playing on stereotypes not unlike those implemented in conduct books (and those implicit to being male or masculine), Bach attempts to use women’s attributes to earn them power and financial security without the help of a male partner.  We also have Suze Orman cautioning everyone against making financial decisions based on their emotions – and she does this with both male and female callers.  What are her ethics of finance and her assumptions about masculinity and femininity?  There’s also the pseudo “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger who doles out harsh criticism of dead-beat dads and irresponsible mothers.  Motherhood and faith are two virtues not to be excused in anyone.  However, she most decidedly ridicules feminism and accuses feminists of denigrating motherhood:

So whereas in the past I might have thought Germaine Greer had earned her desolation [for waiting too long to have a child], that it served her right for the critical damage feminists did to all the women with their negative brainwashing about the value of motherhood, I mostly now pity her.  All that anger for so long has robbed her and so many others of he most incredible beauty that they as women could experience.  (slide)

Even the “Sex and the City” women are caught between being feminine – wearing 4” heels to walk 70 blocks in Manhattan – and masculine – prowling about for the next relationship or sexual conquest.
Jane Eyre, in the end, marries but is financially independent.  Is she really fully in charge of her destiny  by this time?  Maybe she could have used an Idiot’s Guide to relationships? or a Smart Women Finish Rich book?

I’ve already scheduled a few trips during the sabbatical (see Upcoming Talks) and in between all that, training for the longest triathlon that I’ve ever attempted.

In my original sabbatical proposal, I focused on my traditional print monograph, a literary history of the annuals. In August, I submitted that full manuscript to Wayne Storey, editor of the Textual Cultures series at Indiana UP. By January, it should be back from the readers and ready for revision, which I anticipate will take up that sabbatical time along with 3 other proposed articles that follow on the thread of the book.  But, let’s see. Another book just came out that covers the literary history of annuals 1835-1900. Luckily, or fortuitously, my scholarship on the annuals goes up through 1835 (!) only. They make a nice pairing, our work.

In any event, here’s what I proposed to work on during the Spring semester:

Sabbatical Leave Proposal: Katherine D. Harris

I propose to complete, and submit to a university press, a book-length study about nineteenth-century British literary annuals, a much-maligned but vitally important form that defined beauty, femininity and the “poetess” for massive reading audiences 1823-1860: “The Poetess and the Literary Annual in Nineteenth-Century British Print Culture.”

Description of Project & Preparatory Work

Despite critical claims that the 1820s in England were a dormant and unproductive decade in literary production, the landscape was fairly bursting with the “poetess” and her primary publishing venue, the literary annual. Two myths pervade the study of this immensely important and influential body of writing. One is that canonical writers shunned this work, refusing to publish in well-paying annuals and choosing instead to create great, high art; the other is that poetess poetry is “bad” writing.  Working in a vital transatlantic poetic tradition, the poetess wrote according to conventions collectively forming a “bourgeois” and “feminine” aesthetic.  This poetry has been rejected by the literary establishment until recently precisely because of its main strength: its intense popularity. Only the literary annual, a yearly publication form that was wildly popular 1820-1860 in both England and America, carried so many poetess writings. Consequently, critical reception of the annuals has suffered the same fate as the poetess aesthetic: continuously qualified as the “cakes of literature” but wildly popular with British and American Romantic-era audiences.

No comprehensive literary history of the annuals and their publishers, editors and authors exists due in part to a significant lack of accessible archival materials, especially of the most popular literary annual titles: Forget Me Not (1822-1847), Friendship’s Offering (1824-1844), The Literary Souvenir (1825-1835) and The Keepsake (1828-1861). With research already completed at the Pforzheimer Collection NYPL, based on my personal collection of annuals of all of the above annual volumes and in consultation with Miami University of Ohio and University of South Carolina’s collections of annuals, my book project links this literary form with its poetess tradition. Already-completed archival research into the publishers’ and editors’ correspondence has revealed a nineteenth-century consumer sponsorship of popular poetry that has not been previously discussed in scholarly work. As a member of the competitively-selected National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on Romanticism in June 2010, I worked with Professor Stephen Behrendt, a senior colleague in British Romanticism, to clarify this project’s purpose and create a reasonable completion strategy as outlined below.

Applicant’s Ability to Complete Project

As is evidenced on my curriculum vitae, I have presented portions of most chapters at national and international conferences, including most recently at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism International Conference and the upcoming Modern Language Association Annual Convention – both organizations representing the top in literary and Romantic-era studies. SJSU and scholarly organizations have awarded grants for the drafting of particular chapters and travel to London archives in association with this project. Versions of two chapters have been published as articles, and a version of another chapter will be published as the introduction to a scholarly edition of gothic short stories from the annuals. My biography of a prominent literary annual publisher is forthcoming with Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romanticism. Indiana University Press editor Wayne Storey has requested the full manuscript for review once it is complete [and now has it]. The sixty images of engravings, bindings, covers and handwritten annotations have been acquired and digitized for final publication. In turn, this literary history will contribute to further scholarly use of my existing digital archive, a scholarly edition of the text from literary annuals  – a project that has also been funded by grants from SJSU.  This is all to say that I have completed interim goals for this project and demonstrated my ability to complete other larger digital projects.

Benefits to the Profession & the University

Armed with basic information regarding the construction and evolution of the literary annual, this book will interest readers studying women authors, women readers, canonical authors, ekphrasis, art history, literary movements, economic and sociological shifts, and editorial and publishing innovations. The project will also encourage further research into the literary annuals and the poetess, most predominantly by using the digital archive that I have created as well as the Poetess Archive Database, which is an international peer-reviewed, freely available digital project working to provide full text of all nineteenth-century poetess writings in connection with several other prominent digital archives such as Brown Women Writers Project. As a member of the editorial board for the Poetess Archive Database and the sole editor of the Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive, my work on this book project will point scholars towards the digital work, which will in turn attract interest from an international audience ready to associate my comprehensive literary history with SJSU’s efforts to forward the open-access scholarship movement.

Students at SJSU will benefit from my continued research into publishing trends across the nineteenth century, research that will be incorporated into English Department courses that I teach regularly: Gothic Novel & Horror Fiction, British Survey 1800-Present, Romantic-Era Survey, Writing for English Majors, Graduate- level Romanticism, and Nineteenth-Century British Novel. In addition, colleagues often invite me to guest lecture in their undergraduate and graduate courses on this era of publishing history and poetic resonance.

Work Plan

January – February, 2011: Travel to various archives to complete the following tasks:

(1) Compare the first-established anthology (“anthologia”), published in 1750 and held at the University of Miami Ohio, to Robert Southey’s early version of a poetry anthology.

(2) Continue reading through the correspondence, ledgers and journals of London-area publishers, printers and binders to discern the trade practices of the early nineteenth-century literary annuals publishing industry and the commercialization of the poetess. Most of these documents are not collected in a single volume and require onsite visits to the British Library (London, England), University of Edinburgh Publisher’s Archives (Scotland), Rothschild’s Archive (London, England), Bryn Mawr Special Collections (Pennsylvania), Victoria and Albert Museum (London, England) and the Bodleian Library (Oxford, England);

(3) Compare the 25 volumes of The Forget Me Not annual in my collection with editions held in the Pforzheimer Collection NYPL (New York City) and the University of South Carolina Special Collections (Columbia, South Carolina) to discover if textual variants will indicate a breakdown in the publishing process. These types of variations offer insight into the piracy that so often occurred when the printing plates of British annuals were sold to American publishers.

April-May 2011: Revising Existing Chapters: At the conclusion of this archival research, the following previously-drafted chapters will be revised and completed.

(1) Introduction: Since a history of literary annuals must include the bibliographical (physical description of the object), cultural (economic and social influences), and literary (poetry, prose and engravings) to understand the success of this popular form and the poetess tradition, a theoretical and historical introduction will provide context for both textual debates and nineteenth-century publishing history;

(2) Defining What a Literary Annual is Not: The next chapter, an early version of which has been published, will define the literary annual form (a task which has never been done) with explicit textual evidence from its first publisher, Rudolf Ackermann;

(3) First-Generation Annuals, 1823-1828: By tracing both physical and literary modifications in the Forget Me Not (the first annual) and its competitors, this chapter analyzes the production and commodification of the poetess as a representation of British ingenuity;

(4) Second-Generation Annuals, Beauty and Comedy, 1828-1845: With the development of the Literary Souvenir and other less popular annuals, Ackermann’s utilitarian vision disappears and is replaced by the cult of “beauty” annuals, an incredibly competitive market from 1828 through the 1840s. This chapter assesses the alterations imposed by Heath’s Keepsake as well as Thomas Hood’s parodic, and sometimes highly political, Comic Annual

(5) The Annual’s Engraving “Copyists”: This chapter discusses the engraving process, its importance to the success of annuals and its impact on the poets who created ekphrastic renderings to accompany the images. By comparing original paintings to the well-copied, but much denigrated engravings, this chapter explores the production of portable artwork in the annual’s popularity;

(6) Printers’, Booksellers’ and Publishers’ Profits: It is a common misconception that editors and publishers of annuals earned a large profit from these sales. Using circulation and sales figures, this chapter chronicles the profits, losses and book-selling adventures of various editors, publishers, and literary annual titles;

(7) Influencing Public Response with Reviews and “Puffery”: In this chapter, I reveal the varied and complicated relationships among reviewers and literary annuals with the reviewers often situating themselves as gatekeepers of literary morality.

May-August 2011: Drafting Chapters: After defining the literary annual’s form and establishing its publishing history, I will complete three chapters that focus on critical studies:

(1) Female Readers Consuming the Literary Annual: In this chapter, the literary history relies on the previous chapters to study the literary annual’s impact on its readers. Readers and consumers of the annuals privileged its feminine aspects – not those promoted by patriarchal annual producers, but those aspects of these texts best suited to female writers and readers

(2) Subversive Feminine Voice & Authorial Identity: This chapter examines the role of women as authors, editors and contributors to literary annuals and the subsequent re-definition of femininity in the early 1830s;

(3) Gothic in the Annuals: This chapter focuses on the “new gothic” that was established with Mary Shelley’s first edition Frankenstein and solidified with the 1831 version. By surveying short stories published in the most popular annuals 1823-1831, this chapter (an early version of which will be published with a scholarly edition) provides evidence that the Gothic tradition and women’s authorship evolves as a result of the annuals’ popularity.

September – October 2011: This time will be spent compiling the full manuscript for submission to Prof. Wayne Storey at Indiana University Press by November 2011.

I do.

In my study.

Piled on my desk and in a cabinet.

My smallish collection of British literary annuals represents 15 years of bibliomaniacal collecting. I had to do it, though, to finish my dissertation. Even while in graduate school in New York City, I could never find a single point of access for these little gems. So, I began buying them online, in bookstores, anywhere. Paula Feldman (University of South Carolina) owns the largest private collection. One day, perhaps she and I will place our collections in the same library – but not any day soon. The combined collection will represent the largest set of British and American annuals, as well as their precursors. But, I digress.

The manuscript for this gothic short stories collection (not necessarily a scholarly edition) went to the editor last April. Some of you may have followed my gleeful tweets on the topic and saw my excitement about the analytics that Google offers through GDocs. Google had just figured out how to create dynamic charts based on spreadsheet data. I included my chart of data in the print version, but there’s no way to include the visualization of all that information in a static print document. The dynamic visualization represents what I already knew: that the Forget Me Not published more Gothic short stories and more pages 1824-1831 than any other literary annual. Ironically, Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley both published heavily in The Literary Souvenir and The Keepsake, but that didn’t catapault those annuals into the top short story numbers.

For details about how I defined “gothic,” my selection of the short stories, and a scholarly introduction about the annuals and their early gothic endeavors, you’ll have to see the print book. Once the book becomes available, The Poetess Archive will receive the full text of all 90+ stories to be TEI marked and available for some deep searching, along with the engravings.

(Alas, I can’t get javascript to work in WordPress posts without tweaking the templates or screwing with PHP.

A temporary solution: See my Google Docs Analytics spreadsheet (3rd one on the bottom). Click the play button.

After a fine 3 days of tweeting, conferencing, and questioning, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing kicked off their final plenary with a panel of Digital Humanists — tool builders and theorists alike: Matthew Kirschenbaum (MITH & the Deena Larson Collection), Brian Geiger & Ben Pauley (ESTC re-design), and Simon Burrows & Mark Curran (French Book Trade Project). SHARP conference organizer, Eleanor Shevlin, pulled me in to be a respondent to the final Digital Humanities plenary after some discussion about my role as editor of E-Resources for the SHARP Newsletter. I also organized a digital poster session with 5 projects demonstrated the day before to a crowded room.

The very active Twitterstream was filled with interesting commentary and sage reporting about most of the panels – a very helpful tool to make the conference open for even those who couldn’t attend. It also served me for some of my responses to the final plenary speakers, a sounding board of sorts guiding me to the areas of tension among the panelists’ projects and thoughts.

[The plenary began to run way over time so I posted my hastily sketched remarks and distributed them on Twitter just before the final speaker was to take the podium. We moved back the general meeting instead of cutting the Q&A and my remarks. There was some dismay expressed over Twitter that the only woman on the panel would be cut, but this was not to be so.] We’re in the plenary now. Due to some time issues, I probably won’t get to deliver these remarks. I’m much more interested in hearing questions from the audience and their ideas (as is evidenced already from the very active Twitter backchannel).

So, here are my hastily sketched ideas that were intended for the Response; I’ll return later to clean it up & revise for a better idea about our discussions:

Respondent’s Remarks:

Thank you to Eleanor for asking me to act as a respondent for today’s plenary and our esteemed panelists. As anyone knows who’s taken on the fool-hearty work of a digital project or archive, it’s frustratingly never complete because the technology possibilities are limitless. My job here today is to incite some argument; the boxing gloves will be handed out during the Q&A.

At last year’s Modern Language Association annual convention, there was much kerfuffle about the role and definitions of Digital Humanities. After the dust settled a few months later, we returned to the same conclusion as before: everyone is welcome, even those who eschew the title of Digital Humanist (and who buy the first round).

On our panel today, we experienced a wide variety of digital theorizing, tools, databases, and projects – a variety that symbolizes the inclusiveness of Digital Humanities. Book Historians, bibliographers and textual scholars have been at the forefront of testing new kinds of technology (lest we forget about our friends doing paleography). SHARP has been welcoming to digital inflections before the MLA kerfuffle, even if surreptitiously.

As a play on Matt’s title, we are often faced with “Future of the hysteria about the disappearance of the book” – even appearing in today’s New York Times opinion about using archival material vs. a digital facsimile. We all know in this room that the codex will not disappear. Instead, the methodologies that we use now on the physical artifact will, as Matt has so aptly demonstrated, serve us in considering the collection, preservation & study of software, hardware, and most importantly data. Matt also asks us to consider that we as scholars have to contend with the fact that the primary record can no longer be assumed to exist as a physical object. Matt describes MITH as a “safe harbor” for these materials, collections, archives – a place where intellectual inquiry into the history and hardware of computing is available. By archiving the Deena Larson Collection, we have to ask what’s really being archived, especially since Deena Larson is curating her own collection? And what questions will researchers ask in 20, 30 or 40 years? WE have to be comfortable with not knowing right now. And, book historians, bibliographers, and textual scholars are comfortable with this.

Brian follows Matt by discussing the value of metadata and digital archives and Google Books (the elephant in the room, someone has already tweeted). ESTC bibliographical entries would be wed to full text existing in Google Books and other digital surrogates (in various other digital projects as well). Brian points out that ESTC has to consider its users and is thinking about crowd-sourcing, really, this work or amending, editing and correcting the ESTC. We’ve been talking a lot about dynamic scholarly editions these days – indeed at the Digital Humanities conference back in June, there was quite an uproar about using the masses to coalesce authoritative information. Brian, with the help of a recent Mellon grant and seemingly as a rogue cowboy without the imprimatur of his planning committee, shows us a user curation overview complete with stick figures. And also proposes an editorial review organizational structure – it’s most interesting to me that ESTC is moving in the direction that scholarly editors of digital projects are pushing.

Ben pre-empts our questions about the existing issues with the Book Tracker (which George Williams reviewed for the latest issues of the SHARP newsletter section on e-resources). Ben highlights the Digital Humanities dictum: STOP REINVENTING THE WHEEL. And declares that the new ESTC Book Tracker will be more interesting for everyone, not just him. Isn’t that how we all convince ourselves to get into the long-suffering work of a digital project? “I know someone else will be interested in this!” I jest, but it’s true; there are many, many others who are interested in your/our work. Ben also continues this idea of crowd-sourcing collections.

Simon and Mark take us through what Simon called a “smaller” project, certainly not in importance, but in historical scope. They conclude our panel with discussion of a content-driven project that holds the “stuff,” a request I heard often at this year’s Modern Language Association panel – where’s the stuff? The French Book Trade Project is an intellectual project that demonstrates the history of the book trade along with the strength and vigor of all the latest digital tools to collate, visualize, compare, or map information and data.

As George Williams just tweeted, perhaps we can open up discussion post haste to play with ideas such as mashing up ESTC re-design with the French Book Trade Project.

[The Q&A then opened up with this very question. I also took liberty to ask Matt Kirschenbaum a question about the role of performance in 1) using digital tools, 2) in curating archival collections. And, Matt took the question to discuss this idea that the performance of using the tools is also valuable for intellectual inquiry to combat the final words by Mark that the book or the article is the final output -- and many disagreed that this final product should be the final product.]