Amy Earhart is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her work has appeared in
Maura Ives is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Humanities Program at Texas A&M University. She works in 19th century print and digital textual studies, focusing on Victorian women writers (especially Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow) and on bibliographical and literary subgenres of Victorian women's religious writing (hymns, devotional calendars, illuminated texts, periodicals).
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
This is the introduction to the issue of
Introduction to DHQ issue based on the Oct. 2006 Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present, and Future Symposium, Texas A&M University.
This issue of
This was an opportunity to refresh the community, and to consider, collectively, where we are and where we are going.The symposium was invigorating and exciting, the more so because of ample opportunities for broad and wide-ranging discussions among participants and attendees. At the close of the symposium our focus on the future of digital textual scholarship took a more immediate and practical turn as we considered how best to bring our discussions to the broader digital humanities community. The then-new journal
A keynote talk by Jerome McGann, though not reprinted here, helped to frame the
symposium’s central concerns, situating our particular moment within the rich, if still
surprisingly recent, history of digital innovation in the world of textual and
hypertextual studies. Much of what has happened in the field of digital textual studies
has happened in localized environments, supported by innovators like McGann who took
advantage of reputations developed in print work to advocate for digital work,
convincing recalcitrant disciplines and colleagues to support and accept experimentation
in the digital, and urging us to see the necessity of continued engagement on the part
of humanities scholars in the remediation of our cultural heritage. The development of
digital humanities centers and working groups has helped to provide infrastructure to
nurture work that often resists standard modes of humanities scholarship. In retrospect,
even the largest of scholarly digital projects, produced independent of publishers and
in collaboration across multiple disciplines, still seem to represent a space that is
not only quantitatively but qualitatively distinct from the projects such as Carnegie
Mellon’s Universal Digital Library, which aims to
capture all books in digital format
http://www.ulib.org/ULIBAboutUs.htm#visionBkMark
In considering the various ends
– understood not only as aims or goals, but also
in terms of shifts in editorial methods, concepts, and media – that have reshaped the
field, Peter Robinson traces the emergence of digital editing from the larger field of
textual studies, establishing a history of the conflicts of theory and practice within
the digital environment and pointing to the continuing challenges that digital work
presents for humanists who embark on a digital scholarly edition. Editorial work,
especially digital editorial work, is both labor intensive and dependent upon access to
expertise and resources that are often scarce or unsuited to the needs of humanities
scholars. Specifically, in the absence of easily mastered digital tools, humanists have
depended upon access to technical experts
in order to carry out their work – a
broken model
that has restricted the development of digital editing to a few
scholars at a few institutions that can provide the level and continuity of technical
expertise that this work requires. Robinson calls for freely available texts and robust
digital tools that empower humanities scholars to engage in digital work, and allow for
collaborative textual scholarship.
Focusing on the specific technological and institutional concerns presented by digital imaging, Morris Eaves traces the history of the incorporation of images into digital materials through his work with the
sea of images, most of them digitized; it is now impossible to imagine textual scholarship without high-quality images, yet digital images present a variety of challenges for digital projects. Intellectual property restrictions complicate the acquisition of images for open access electronic projects, while technological concerns include the particularly knotty question of the outdated jpeg format, as well as the problems of appropriately attaching metadata and search terms to images, and maintaining image quality in the face of another sea of
image robbers: service providers, operating systems, browsers, video cards, display settings, displays, and the user’s own highly variable eyes and brain.Eaves, like Robinson, recognizes the need for further development of technologies that support digital textual scholarship, a problem made more complicated by the degree to which
[i]n technical areas we are, much of the time, pathetically dependent on the expertise of others whose investments are elsewhere.Compromise remains a practical editorial necessity.
In Kenneth Price’s discussion of naming, the shifting technical boundaries of digital
work are mirrored by the shifting vocabularies with which we attempt to define and
explain that work. As Price argues, terminology matters: The shorthand we invoke when
explaining our work to others shapes how we conceive of and also how we position
digital scholarship.
Interestingly, Price discovers that the technological limits
that emerge in this context have to do not so much with digital tools but with framing
mechanisms that derive from the technologies of print. Drawing examples from the
Like Peter Robinson, Peter Shillingsburg acknowledges the need for better digital tools
and a collaborative editorial environment, and advocates making digital editions and
archives more accessible and convenient
for readers and editors. But
Shillingsburg offers a cautionary approach to digital editing, arguing that to date, the
model for most digital humanities projects has been to solve problems in ways that are
local, limited, proprietary, and/or inapplicable to the problems of others.
Shillingsburg imagines a future in which instead of having electronic editions
conceived, constructed, and completed by an editor and published like books to sit
neglected on the shelf, electronic textual scholarship will occupy a communal space
where the intellectual work of the future will be built on the textual foundations
laid down electronically by the present generation,
and proposes the creation of
a centralized editing space for communal work to create holistic projects.
Julia Flanders’s essay reminds us that the lack of appropriate tools for digital
humanities research exists alongside an unprecedented technological abundance that has
shaped the way we think about digital scholarship. Noting the ubiquity and unprecedented
capacity of computers --quickly becoming not a specialized tool but part of the
tissue of the world,
-- as well as the successful development of specialized
tools such as XML text encoding, Flanders recognizes that while the digital humanities
often participate a generalized narrative of technological progressivism, resistance to
that narrative produces an unease
that constitutes a productive force for
critical inquiry. These disruptions in our understanding of the significance of medium,
of the institutional structures and scholarly protocols that shape our work, of
representation and scale, promise to give us new ways to think about our world.
The posters included in this issue shift our attention away from the history, theory,
and intellectual positioning of digital textual studies to speak instead to the
engagement of textual studies with emergent trends in digital humanities, including
mapping, visualization, recovery and more. For example, a number of posters suggest how
digital add-ons
might benefit the more static representations of manuscripts,
such as Olin Bjork’s audio and annotation program attached to
While some of the poster participants are attached to major digital humanities centers, such as IATH, a surprising number of poster participants are working on small scale projects at institutions that have little institutional structures to support digital humanities work. While we praise the work occurring in the multiple areas, it does serve as a note of caution that the institutional frameworks to fully support this work have not kept pace with the rapid emergence of this developing field. Still, much has changed since 2006: the National Endowment for the Humanities now sponsors an Office of Digital Humanities, and a growing number of foundational documents, such as the final report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences released in Fall 2006, and the Council on Library and Information Resources’
We are moving, certainly: but where are we moving? Do we know where we want to go, and how we are going to get there? And where, exactly, are we heading?