2009 3.3
Special Cluster: Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present, and Future
Editors: Amy Earhart and Maura Ives
Front Matter
Introduction
Amy Earhart, Texas A&M University; Maura Ives, Texas A&M University
Articles
The Ends of Editing
Peter M. W. Robinson, University of Birmingham
Many ends of editing in the digital world may be distinguished.
One may speak of end as in the supersession of one model of editing (the
intentionalist,
definitive-text model) by another (the multiple texts, multiply-intentioned views enabled by digital methods). One may speak of end as in aim: not only the aim of the author or authors, but also the aims of the editor or editors. These questions were already complicated in the print world; the advent of digital methods has both focussed and widened the contests around these concepts. The essay reviews some of these questions, with examples drawn from (inter alia) the utterances of the two George Bushes, from editions with which the author is associated of Chaucer, Dante, and of Armenian texts, from the eColi genome, and from Barack Obama's discussion of different viewpoints on the Constitution of the United States. The essay concludes that a huge shift is indeed underway in the editing world, towards a more open and participatory model of editing and reading.
Picture Problems: X-Editing Images 1992-2010
Morris Eaves, University of Rochester
After centuries of image deprivation, we now bathe in a sea of pictures, most of them
digitized at some stage. In the 1990s, as humanists began to sense the advantages of networked
computing on the web, they conceived major new editorial projects that would depend to an
extraordinary degree upon the documentary power of pictures. Despite evident progress in
devising sturdy and responsive standards, images, and tools, stubborn problems persist in several key areas that are explored here through an overview of issues that arise as the William Blake Archive acquires images, prepares them for reproduction, and makes them available for manipulation by its users. Editing electronic images in so unsettled and unsettling an environment generates the provisional success — weak success — that is utterly characteristic of X-editing, electronic scholarly editing in our time. Our dependence on current technology and the expertise of others is not a remediable condition. We must play the game as it presents itself, making the compromises that are necessary, and move ahead.
Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What's in a Name?
Kenneth M. Price, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
What are the implications of the terms we use to describe large-scale text-based electronic scholarship, especially undertakings that share some of the ambitions and methods of the traditional multi-volume scholarly edition? And how do the conceptions inherent in these choices of language frame and perhaps limit what we attempt? How do terms such as edition, project, database, archive, and thematic research collection relate to the past, present, and future of textual studies? Kenneth M. Price considers how current terms describing digital scholarship both clarify and obscure our collective enterprise. Price argues that the terms we use have more than expressive importance. The shorthand we invoke when explaining our work to others shapes how we conceive of and also how we position digital scholarship.
How Literary Works Exist: Convenient Scholarly Editions
Peter Shillingsburg, Loyola University Chicago
This is the second of two essays on the nature of electronic representations of literary texts, the first focusing
primarily on the original textual material and the materiality of literary works, and the present essay focusing first
on the nature of the electronic surrogates to those material forms and, second, on the ways our decisions about how to
create them can be affected by our notions of use.
The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship
Julia Flanders, Brown University
Despite prevailingly progressive narratives surrounding the impact of digital technology on modern academic culture, the field of digital humanities is characterized at a deeper level by a more critical engagement with technology. This engagement, which I characterize as a kind of "productive unease", is focused around issues of representation, medium, and structures of scholarly communication.
Articles
The Radical Historicity of Everything: Exploring Shakespearean Identity with Web 2.0
Katheryn Giglio, University of Central Florida (English Department); John Venecek, University of Central Florida Libraries
This article presents the results of a semester-long project designed to
determine how effectively interactive Web 2.0 technology can facilitate collaborative
research in undergraduate learners. The study was conducted during a 2007 advanced Shakespeare course at the University of Central Florida that focused heavily on a new historicist approach to studying literature. In this paper we first establish the theoretical foundation for this particular approach to literary studies, then discuss more in-depth how the collaborative, inter-connective nature of wikis allowed students to witness first-hand some of the concealed assumptions enmeshed in the creation of historical explanation or narrative. We also discuss how, in thinking about the past, this technology allowed our students realize some of the stakes in describing history for the present. In other words, having students create wikis based on the social identities that recur in Shakespeare’s works developed an implicit awareness of motives for doing history. We also show how employing open source technology in a localized classroom setting can assuage some of the gaps we experience in trying to provide enough period coverage while also attending to theoretical apparatus and students’ experience of meaningful connections to material. On a larger scale, creating inquiry-based projects can alleviate some of the humanities’ disengagement from the real world that many have been suggesting of late.
XML, Interoperability and the Social Construction of Markup Languages: The Library Example
Jerome McDonough, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The past decade has seen XML widely adopted within a variety of communities, including the digital library community. While it now plays a critical role in the infrastructure of many digital library operations, XML's promise of interoperability of data across systems and organizations has not been fully realized within digital libraries. The reasons for this are not primarily technical in origin, but social, and relate to the cultures of XML's designers and XML language implementors, and a failure on the part of the digital library community to grapple with the sociotechnical nature of XML and its implementation. Possible strategies for addressing these issues of interoperability might include reduction of the flexibility afforded by specific XML-based markup languages used by the digital library community, and an increased focus on standardizing translations between various communities of practice use of such markup languages.
Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities
Patrik Svensson, Umeå University
This article presents an examination of how digital humanities is currently conceived and described, and examines the discursive shift from humanities computing to digital humanities. It is argued that this renaming of humanities computing as digital humanities carries with it a set of epistemic commitments that are not necessarily compatible with a broad and inclusive notion of the digital humanities. In particular, the author suggests that tensions arise from the instrumental, textual and methodological focus of humanities computing as well as its relative lack of engagement with the digital as a study object. This article is the first in a series of four articles attempting to describe and analyze the field of digital humanities and digital humanities as a transformative practice.
Avatari: Disruption and Imago in Video Games
Philip Sandifer, University of Florida
This article offers an analysis of the video game in terms of the experience of gameplay, starting with the concept of the avatar, which is central to all video games. The avatar is typically described as our second self in the virtual world of the game. The paper challenges this theory, suggesting that the avatar is better understood as a set of possible interactions, and proposes a second concept, the avatari. If the avatar is our second self, the avatari is the rebellious figure on the screen that we cannot quite control, and that jumps into the pit, gets hit by the enemy, or otherwise fails despite our best efforts to succeed. Conceptualizing video games in terms of the avatar and avatari enables thinking about video games via a more sophisticated and productive model of interactivity than many of the existing paradigms.
Designing Data Mining Droplets: New Interface Objects for the Humanities
Scholar
Stan Ruecker, University of Alberta, Canada; Milena Radzikowska, Mount Royal College, Canada; Stéfan Sinclair, McMaster University, Canada
In this paper, we describe the design of a number of alternative interface droplets
that are intended for use by humanities scholars interested in applying data mining
and information visualization tools to the task of hypothesis formulation. The
trained droplets provide several functions. Their primary purpose is to encapsulate
the results of the software training phase. They can be saved for future re-use
against other collections or combinations of collections. They can be modified by
having the user accept or reject features identified by the data mining software.
Finally, they can also contain choices for how to display and organize items in the
collection. The opportunity to develop a new interface object presents the designer
with the challenge of effectively communicating what the tool is good for and how it
is used. This paper outlines the design process we followed in creating the visual
representations of these interface objects, describes the communicative strengths
and weaknesses of a number of alternative designs, and discusses the importance of
the study of new interface objects as the means of providing the user with new
interface affordances.
