-
All of the conversations about gender, Digital Humanities, coding, archives, silences, and the like have made me really begin to think about this sense of isolation that many technologists, alt-ac, and Digital Humanists may feel. This might come from the fact that some live on university campuses that provide no infrastructure for their work. Yet others may be isolated by the lack of funding for embarking on or continuing digital projects because the standards required for peer-reviewable material are unachievable in their current positions. Whatever it is, something else happened today to make me extremely aware (and frustrated)that perhaps there’s a real misunderstanding about just how destitute my university (and by that virtue, myself and my students) are in comparison to other public universities. I don’t mean how much I get paid or how many resources I have access to. Instead, it’s the social aspect: my students work full time; I teach a 4-4 load within an over-taxed department. My students lack some privileges that are provided at other universities. But, I’m less interested in complaining and more interested in finding solutions — because my students’ situation mirrors my own, and I don’t want to hand over the DH issues of my career to them.
-
“Today, a stark reality hit me square in face: difference bw my type of univ & others & just how underfunded we are. not sure how to resolve
-
Then Tanya posted about TEI and the importance of visualizing the page as a digital replication of the printed object.
-
“I’m in the process of fighting for the importance of visualizing line and stanza breaks when visualizing poems. This is my life.
-
-
Kirstyn Leuner has kept me informed about her work at the UC Boulder Special Collections on women poets. The collection parallels the work I’ve done with British Literary annuals, the Poetess Archive Database, and the Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive. We are always exchanging information while I’m waiting for my MS on the history of British literary annuals to wind its way through a publisher’s process.
-
“in #wprp TEI encoding the letter we have from Mary Cockle to Jane Porter on Anna Maria Porter’s death (1833), w/unpubd elegy within
-
“@triproftri Mary Cockle was a contributer to The Keepsake , it looks like #wprp
-
Because I work on literary annuals (like the Keepsake) primarily pre-1835 and have amassed a private collection of literary annuals.
-
-
“@KLeuner ooo, fmn 1829, iris, & juvenile keepsake….interesting. can supply u w/fmn texts if necessary #wprp
-
“@triproftri Looks like Mary Cockle (“Mrs Cockle”) authored a poem called “Woman’s Love” on page 289 of the 1829 FMN
-
Kirstyn worked on the Poetess Archive Database doing TEI mark-up before she and I met virtually (via Twitter and Laura Mandell, general editor of the Poetess Archive Database). I have scanned images of the Forget Me Not 1823-1831 but not full text. Because each volume contains upwards of 300 pages of poetry, prose, engravings, and paratext, it became almost impossible to scan, encode, and embed (by myself) even those 25 volumes of the Forget Me Not with my heavy teaching load. So, the existing Forget Me Not Archive has scans and transcriptions (not TEI) of tables of contents and engravings, along with other materials relevant to a scholarly edition.
-
“@triproftri great idea – do you have the xml, or I bet @mandellc does in Poetess Arch. Or perhaps linking to PA wd be best. Will think on it
-
“@triproftri Act never mind — I can get the xml right off the web (and I might even have the file on my harddrive from PA work — ha!
-
Those scanned images from the Forget Me Not Archive that were ported over to the Poetess Archive Database.
-
“1829 Forget-Me-Not TOC bit.ly/xb4Bax find “Mrs Cockle” listed as author on page ix
-
The poem:
-
“@KLeuner yep, just 2pp. proly not accompanied by engraving. she wasn’t famous enuf to ask for an ekphrastic rendering, rt?
-
“@triproftri nope, not famous enough (to my knowledge). Do you have this FMN in your personal collection?
-
“@KLeuner excellent! don’t think the full text of the 1829 fmn is available, but toc & engravings shd b on PA, yes?
-
Harry Hootman’s index of British Literary Annuals is indispensable; Prof. Hootman said yes to integrating his work into the Poetess Archive but we haven’t quite gotten to that yet.
-
“@KLeuner yeah, and hootman’s index is pretty accurate. don’t think we got all of hootman into the PA db, tho. (? @mandellc )
-
I receive a lot of requests for scans of the literary annual contents (about 4-7/year); because it’s just me, I can’t accommodate them and often send scholars to libraries that can handle the labor of such tasks. But, even those library collections are limited: NYPL CRL, British Library, University of South Carolina, Miami University in Ohio. Kirstyn, along with Lindsey Eckert, are working intensely with the literary annuals, something I haven’t seen from many graduate students. This is primarily because most scholars don’t have access to a significant run of literary annual titles and can’t really assess the genre. No access = little scholarship on the genre with the exception of entering via a canonical author such as John Clare or Sir Walter Scott.
-
“@KLeuner yep…u know, I shd just send u list of what I’ve got so u can ping me if u need s/t. btw, all fmn images on PA are from my coll
-
“@triproftri W00t! that would totally rock. It would be wonderful to supplement our data with some from your collection. I’ll keep thinking.
-
“@KLeuner k…and do check out harry hootman’s index of british literary annuals: bit.ly/wkmGRF
-
I’m getting a little tired of waiting for funding to do the work of mark-up that will take years to complete. I think I’d rather have dirty OCR or plain text of at least 600 British literary annuals so I can begin to ask some big, hard questions about the poetry, engravings, prose, authorship, editorial decision, bindings, etc. I’ve been waiting around for 7 years to find funding…and time. And, it’s time for me to stop defending the study of literary annuals to other scholars (believe me, I still get the “value” question at conferences) and get to work on the analysis.
-
“@KLeuner I’m already itchin to have deep markup on those PA pgs — want to search across all annuals for compare lang by men v women
-
“working on British literary annuals as a digital edition might be a lifetime/career’s worth of happy labor. So looking fwd to it.
-
…and this is where I realized that because I’m isolated at my university and unaffiliated with a supportive DH center, my project languishes. This is a little bit of “it doesn’t seem fair” but also a query asking those who are offering standards for digital edition to recognize that there’s an economic impediment and inherently a class structure that’s becoming part of doing DH projects.
-
“also thinking (don’t hit me) that TEI on such projects becomes a gigantic $ burden & debilitating hurdle for isolated or un-affiliated DHers
-
Sharon re-tweeted my comment.
-
“@sleonchnm any ideas on solutions? I’m all for standards & whatnot, but it seems nigh impossible to achieve them sometimes.
-
Like the conversation I had with Ted Underwood, and shades of Matt Jockers’ DHC 2011 presentation about his work on Irish novels, Sharon offers a disciplinary distinction.
-
“@triproftri I wish I knew. We historians tend to go for plain-text plus metadata, but that’s because of the scale of the collections.
-
I wonder if trying to produce a digital scholarly edition is feasible given my current teaching position?
-
“@sleonchnm yeah, I’m thinking that the 300 vols (x300 pgs/ vol) will never get OCRed even. Wd b so beneficial to text mine just plain txt
-
Yes, Laura Mandell and I have tried for NEH funding on several occasions and to different departments…and it takes a turn for the philosophical…
-
“…also apparent that some isolated DHers (like myself) may have to operate outside their institutional culture & only “sneak in” DH
-
““sneaking it in” is what many bk historians/textual scholars articulate for introducing these topics in the classroom.
-
A colleague and I tried to publish a cluster of articles on this very topic with one of the major journals. The reviewers (non-book history people) were not kind in the reviews, indicating that the articles weren’t sophisticated enough in the pedagogy discussion for their readers. It seemed to further marginalize history of the book in literature curriculum.
-
“how do we get around this sneaking into the classroom or abating the isolation issue w/severely underfunded scholars?
-
Of course, I go back to what I’m teaching to my students (who receive no credit for their project…again, outside the institutional structure):
-
“asking all of this bc the BeardStair grp will have difficulties crafting their digital project in TEI/XML bc of time/labor issues.
-
“we created the BeardStair group outside the dept’s curriculum. rcvd kudos all over univ from admins/other depts but no financial support
-
[deep sigh]
-
“…am I forcing them to become as isolated as I am…or, at the very least, w/o a dept home? ugh, really want to avoid replicating that sit!
Living Outside the Institution but Inside DH
11 comments
Comments RSS and TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Trackbacks
- Doing the Risky Thing with a Gothic Critical Archive « triproftri
- Risking Failure, A CUNY DHI Talk « triproftri
- NITLE Digital Pedagogy Seminar « triproftri
- Playing Around with DH Workshop « triproftri
- Towards a Successful Sabbatical « triproftri
- Implementing Screwing Around in my post-sabbatical classrooms « triproftri
Katherine D. Harris
Top Posts & Pages
triproftri researching, writing, triathloning
triproftri 
@footnoterising suggests a DHC 2010 presentation as solution: http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-692.html
This project maintains a DH ethos: get it out there to the public instead of waiting to conform to standards.
Yes!
LikeLike
I can’t really give advice, because I am not as immersed in book history and may not fully understand the goals of your research.
But I will say that doing collection development, with TEI, on a large scale, without much institutional support … sounds to me like a forbidding task. I believe in the importance of TEI, and where institutions actually dedicate substantial resources to collection-building I believe in using TEI.
But I don’t believe we can expect that kind of digital collection to be developed by individual scholars, without resources, on a volunteer basis. As individuals, we’re understandably going to tackle projects that have a possibility of scholarly return over a fairly short time-frame. Depending on the nature of your research goals, you might need TEI for that … or might not. I personally don’t use it much. But in any event, I don’t think it can be a question of *conscience* where you feel obligated to do it for the larger good of DH. At least, my altruism wouldn’t stretch that far.
LikeLike
Thanks for the response, Ted. I think was dismayed with myself this morning when I realized that I’m teaching the BeardStair students into a veritable corner and ensuring that they will feel as isolated as I do. I hope that’s not happening, but it might be. As we move further into their project, we have to start tackling the digital representation if we’re going to meet the June deadline. So far, we haven’t come up with a platform that’s adequate for this project’s needs. Then there’s the markup. They don’t have the expertise for this. We have a library science student involved who can ostensibly construct metadata (and already knows how to do this) but how much time do these already super-busy students have to learn not just this new style of project but also mark up? And, then who will maintain it when it breaks?
So, I’m thinking now that it’s more important to get the project out there than to have it peer reviewed by an entity that requires the project be in TEI. Does this mean that their contribution to public scholarship is any less valuable? (There’s no other digital project on these particular books and very little written about one of the artists.)
They’re also relying quite heavily on methodologies from history of the book, textual studies, and bibliography to articulate their ideas. It’s a lot to throw at 4 people who work full time jobs (some of them have 2) and carry a full course load.
I’m stuck on what to do next. What decision to make about TEI & platform. It feels like a big decision. If we don’t commit to TEI, then they don’t get a peer-reviewed project. Have I let them down? am I just engrossing them in the drama of my own digital project and academic career?
Ugh….
They’ve never been to a conference or created a poster or submitted a research proposal. We just don’t offer that kind of experience at our university. I guess I’m teaching/collaborating with them as if we were at a small liberal arts college.
On the other hand, Diane Jackaki reminded me about her teaching success with a student-created scholarly edition (which she’ll report on at RSA) where she fielded SEVENTY-FIVE students!
LikeLike
There’s no question that resources are thin and that it’s damn hard to scrape together the money and time – especially when institutional structures don’t value the corpus the way they should.
Having recently seen a couple of models where a class essentially fields the labor for a research collection, I wonder if this isn’t something to explore. I’d also mention, as I’m sure you know, there are a lot of levels of “doing TEI” – one need not commit to a deep level of markup. There are a lot of different layers to markup and I think that a balance between what can be done and what has to be done to ask the research questions is critical, if really hard. This then leaves me wondering if a hybrid approach – OCR with some correction and light interpretive markup in the context of a course could work. I know there are always all of these damnable pressures from curriculum committees etc., but I wonder.
Finally – two last thoughts. First, is this viable workstudy work? I think so. Second, let’s take a look at the Scripps Denison collection and think about whether or not there’s room for collaboration…
LikeLike
You might note that my response doesn’t really help with this particular course iteration…but the bigger issue.
LikeLike