The Humanities and Computerization

Brendan Rapple LIS413

7 July, 2009 Simmons College

• Following slides owe much to Perry Willett, “Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes,” A Companion to the Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004): 240–53.

• Early Use of Computers by Humanities Scholars

• Today

• Word processing

• Online scholarly communication – publishing and e-mail

• Electronic access to textual, visual, and audio material

• Processing of quantitative data

account for most use by humanists

Electronic Communication for Humanists

E-MAIL

– News of work in progress, often including exchange of copies of papers.

– Ongoing conversation with specialists elsewhere.

Perhaps some younger faculty use Facebook. Certainly grad students do.

Will there be a growth in Web 2.0 applications?

A Scholar can Consult

• Digital image collections from the Vatican or the Louvre

• Digital text archives/projects universities & elsewhere

• Online journals

• Bibliographies

• Information on scholarly societies

• Moving images

• Online catalogs

• Dissertations

• Sound files

• Syllabi for thousands of academic courses

• And other works pertinent to the humanities

Digital Images in Humanities Scholarship

• Archaeologists, art historians, geographers, and historians are making increasing use of digital image processing.

• The database ARTstor

• Many museums, large and small, host online exhibitions – one in effect goes on a virtual tour of the galleries.

Boolean Searching of Full-Text

• One may trace concepts and important keywords over time both within and among various authors’ works.

• Or search the letters of Matthew Arnold for any occurrence of the word “education” within, say, 20 words of Germany.

• Greek scholars have been employing this sort of analysis for years utilizing the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG).

• Likewise, French scholars have used ARTFL ( American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language).

Other Publishing Benefits of the Web

• Illustrations and even animation on Web pages -- increasingly multi-media.

• One can be very innovative with respect to style:• the power of easy linking• the aesthetic attractiveness displayed by many Web pages• lengthy footnotes• inclusion of raw data

• Great increase in the usage of video:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1932680749298113789&q=owner%3Aucberkeley+bancroft+centennial&pr=goog-sl

Egalitarian Access to Scholarship and Archives/Manuscripts

• Many lack access to major research libraries.

• They may live in countries without access to good collections in foreign languages.

• Books themselves may be rare and physically available at only a handful of libraries.

• “The poetical works of ‘minor’ writers are often hard to obtain since they exist only in early editions, which are typically rare and can be quite expensive” (Jerome McGann)

Full Text Projects

• More than just the actual text

• Examples:– The Newton Project

http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1

– The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online– http://darwin-online.org.uk/

– Aspects of the Victorian Bookhttp://www.bl.uk/collections/early/victorian/intro.html

– The Walt Whitman Archivehttp://www.whitmanarchive.org/

– The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emersonhttp://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/

• Often this type of project provides access to all manuscript versions allowing the user to trace the development of a work through its variants.

Humanities/Technology Centers

• Growing number of such centers, e.g.– Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (U. of Virginia)

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/

– Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (U. of Glasgow)

http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/

– Rice University's Center for Digital Scholarship

http://library.rice.edu/about/departments/CDS/digital-library-initiative/

General Objections to Technology Include

• Missing, defective, or outdated links

• Difficulties in ascertaining the authority behind most Web sites

• Some humanists are just anti-technology!

• In many institutions there’s a woeful lack of an appropriate technology infrastructure: personnel, equipment, etc.

• Humanists perceive that much of the material on the web is “junk”.

• Printed page is highly valued by Humanities scholars.

• A distinct “pecking order” of publishers.

Other General Objections Include

• Fear of Humanists of losing their priestly status in the anarchic welter of unfiltered, unrefined voices.

• Humanists may want the actual text in hand -- may consider that the digitized text cannot adequately replace the document itself.

• Getting text into digital format is error prone– Keyboarding– Digital image– OCR

• Many web sites can’t keep up. See Voice of the Shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu/.

• Still, many extremely large e-text collections, e.g. Making of America

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ and American Memory http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html have been created using “rough OCR” or “dirty OCR”.

Role of Copyright

• Many (most?) collections were selected, in large part, for digitization because they were in the public domain.

• Two results:

– Most digitized collections consist of pre-early 20th cent. authors

– New editions of above earlier authors are generally excluded – also subject to copyright.

• Those interested in more contemporary literature have far less access to digital texts.

• “Copyright is the hidden force behind most electronic text collections.”

Fact Remains . . .

• It is still somewhat hard to find many scholarly articles that cite e-texts collections as sources.

Neo-Luddite or Lover of Books?

• “Most libraries have become information centers, posts and outposts in the world of information science. The average librarian these days, like many members of various departments in the humanities, has become hostile to books and hostile to reading. The technocrat looks forward to the day when books no longer have to be purchased, shelved, repaired, replaced, when everything is on microfilm or can be found on the Internet.”

• George Gore. Virginia Quarterly Review (2003)

Probably the Parallel Paths Will Continue – Print and Digital

in Research Libraries

• Still, the feasibility of achieving comprehensive, research-level print collections in more than a few locations is likely to continue to decline because of funding constraints.

E-Books (or All E-Research)

• A work may never be considered as completely finished.

• Very idea of what constitutes a publication may change.

• Fundamental revolution in communication.

Good Training and Support Essential

• Humanists need adequate training and support services

• Too few have understanding of available resources

• Successful projects in humanities computing/publication will increasingly involve collaborative efforts of:

scholars, librarians, and technologists from different fields and

institutions.

The Individual Scholar as Publisher

• Simplest approach is for individual scholar to do it herself -- however, many need help.

• Though much nonsense is on the web, it’s still an excellent medium for publishing serious, scholarly work.

• No longer any need for most people to learn the intricacies of HTML code.

Advantages of Publishing on WWW

• Comparatively little cost involved.

• Bypass often lengthy processes of print publication. Personal web sites have a high degree of immediacy and accessibility.

• Offers the possibility of reaching a new audience -- not limited to world of colleges/universities/scholars.

• Contact between user of a Web site and its authors can be direct and immediate.

The Return of the Armchair Scholar

• “The twenty-first-century social scientist, at first glance, appears not to manifest any similarities with his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors. However, with the development of digitization and the availability of numerous online full-text databases, the possibility of doing research at home, from an 'armchair,' and perhaps unschooled in the rigours of academic research, once again exists. Libraries and archives that required researchers to schedule appointments, travel to inconvenient locations, and spend endless days researching a topic can now, in many cases, be accessed from a computer, with source materials available online. This 'democratization' of research is reminiscent of the early amateur social scientist or scientist who studied what was of interest to him and did not need credentials to present his findings, either in early journals or at meetings of the newly formed associations.”

• Sandra Shoiock Roff. Journal of Scholarly Publishing 36.2 (2005) 50.

Disadvantages of Publishing on WWW

• A poorly designed Web site may appear amateurish and non-scholarly.

• Self-published e-texts have, generally, bypassed system of peer review/“quality control.”

• Individually published e-texts may disappear without a trace.

• Need to be integrated into broader framework, where potential users are likely to find them.

– For example, 19th century literature texts ought to be in the lists of links offered by such scholarly sites as VICTORIANWEB.

• Not enough to put up a Web site and hope that interested people will find it.

Sound Files

• Delivering sound files across a network enhances online scholarship in music.

• The Journal of Seventeenth Century Music, a refereed journal, provides audio.

• Podcasts are increasingly common -- oculture.com is a very useful site

Retroconversion Projects

The great advantage is access to rare texts or other materials that are

brittle, damaged, or not easily accessible.

Original and Creative Works

• For example:

numerous online poetry journals -- hypertext links, audio

archives, and accompanying images.

Preservation of Digital Data

Considering how quickly software and hardware become obsolete, the

danger is clear.