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Julia Flanders @ MITH

INTRODUCTION

In preparation for our discussion with you today, Martha gave us a list of questions to focus our thoughts and indicate some of your interests as you launch a new humanities technology center. Here they are:

In response, I've created a narrative which is a pretext for talking about the issues they point to. I hope I’ll be able to address their spirit, if not their full specificity. A word on my background will be in order by way of disclaimer or disclosure. First, my degrees are in literature and history, not in a technical or scientific field. My presence at the WWP began as an accident and developed under the force of serendipity. I owe my involvement in the humanities computing world to Allen Renear, my fellow speaker today, so I fundamentally agree with almost everything he says, but in order to make this interesting I will try to offer as different a perspective as possible. I'm going to start by talking generally about humanities computing, what is it and where it seems to be going. Then I’ll consider its impact on humanities research, and then some issues which seem to me to be indirectly related to humanities computing: teaching with technology and the problem of interdisciplinary work. And finally I would like to give these thoughts a more specific relevance by considering what these issues mean (in practical terms) for organizations like MITH, or STG, or the WWP.

HUMANITIES COMPUTING

What is it and where is it going?

The nature, shape, and future of humanities computing is a topic of much debate, not all of it productive. That is, much of the debate is motivated not by a sense that the answer will help move humanities computing forward, or make it more useful, but by anxieties or goals which are external to it: motives which say more about the relationship of other disciplines to humanities computing, and how this field is viewed and assessed. However, certain lines of fissure within these debates are instructive. One such division is about how much humanities computing’s methodology should draw on the methodologies of the sciences at a deep level. This concern emerges in questions like "what constitutes good humanities computing research?" and "how can we encourage/teach such research?" The problem centers on the relationship between technology and humanistic study—always an uneasy one of admiration, envy, fear, emulation, rejection, focused not only on technology but also more generally on numbers, quantification, and questions of methodology.

Another line of fissure is about whether humanities computing should be a broad and inclusive area of work, or whether there are advantages to defining it more narrowly. For the latitudinarians, humanities computing is really a set of research problems and questions which you need many different kinds of people to solve (humanities people, computer people), and for which you want a very eclectic, inclusive community. According to this view you can't hope to develop a single field which will cover everything, and you shouldn’t want to. Their opponents believe that humanities computing is a discipline defined (or at least potentially definable) by certain methodological commitments, which could be taught in a methods course and could be used to evaluate research and publications. From this viewpoint, disciplinary specificity is an asset and an indication of the maturity of the field, whereas from the latitudinarian standpoint it could pose a threat to the eclecticism and inclusiveness on which humanities computing has flourished thus far. This question emerges in discussions of pedagogy—How do you teach humanities computing? How do you learn it?—and also of professional standards—How do you judge contributions to the research literature? How do you judge job candidates? How do you prepare for a job in humanities computing? Who are the experts?

Another line of fissure similar to the above concerns the domain and scope of humanities computing. Does it include things like hypertext theory, new media, web design, cyberart? And if not, is it simply for historical reasons, or because there is some important difference here worth preserving, something essential about the field that these things don’t possess? This line of questioning also leads to issues of how the field is developing and changing: should it include a broader domain of research? Would it be enriched or vitiated thereby?

These questions are all highly charged for a number of practical and political reasons. Institutional politics are among the most potent, raising a number of thorny issues: where will humanities computing activity be located, and what will it look like—will it be a research center, a teaching unit, or both? how will it be funded? how will it be colonized, or whom will it colonize? who will teach it? who needs to learn it? Another inflection of this problem is the question of disciplinary boundaries, of whether humanities computing should be a department, or should be located within a department, or whether it is simply a set of undertakings. One of the reasons I liked humanities computing when I first entered the field (all of 7 or 8 years ago) was that it seemed to have no disciplinary boundaries: on the contrary, it seemed to draw opportunistically on a number of disciplines and areas of expertise, avoiding the dogmatism under which most disciplines suffer (which makes them ask questions like "What is humanities computing?"). However, as the field becomes more firmly institutionalized, its disciplinary affiliations and differentiations matter more, and its practitioners feel the need to identify what they do as a discipline; they acquire the same attitudes about what it means to be a discipline—to be able to say "that's the kind of thing we do" and "that's not the kind of thing we do". And finally, as the total digital world grows bigger and more complex, humanities computing (whatever that is) feels the need to differentiate itself from whatever else is going on (hypermedia, e-commerce, computer science, computer-supported collaborative work, and so forth) since it can't plausibly claim to include all of these.

So what is humanities computing? Having sketched the landscape of motives that will color any answer you get from anyone, I will now confess which of these apply to me. As I said, I like the non-disciplinary quality and the eclecticism, the quality of bricolage; in fact, I am deeply suspicious of disciplines and of our preoccupation with them. I don't think that HC will benefit intellectually from being able to formulate a clearly defined methodology, about which it can develop an attitude of purism. However, any organization embarking on work in this area (like MITH, or STG, or the WWP) needs to think about how it will conceptualize its relationship to this domain, and how this relationship will affect its institutional affiliations and intellectual commitments. Groups like ours need to be able to answer questions about what kinds of projects they will take on, what kinds of research they will support, what kinds of funding they will hope to seek, and what kind of organization they will look like to funding bodies. They also need to know what kinds of skill sets they will be drawing on, what kinds of staff they will need and how to train them. And finally, they will need to figure out what kind of intellectual satisfaction—in lieu of industry-grade pay—they will be able to offer to attract and retain high-quality personnel.

The WWP's conceptualization of humanities computing has coalesced around a few important points. First, we believe that we can support new kinds of research and teaching which depend on encoded texts and tools which exploit these texts. We also believe that we can do useful research on methods of preparing encoded texts, and (more importantly) on the theoretical foundations for these methods: putting these methods on a firm intellectual footing. Finally, we believe that there are interesting and important relationships between how a text is prepared and encoded and how it can be used, how it functions in the entire textual and social economy.

So based on these points, we believe that humanities computing

Humanities computing’s relation to humanities research generally

Clearly from what I've just said the question of the impact of humanities computing on humanities research is another deeply vexed issue, both descriptively, at the level of “has it?” and normatively, at the level of “should it?”. Furthermore, it prompts us to ask what kind of impact we envision: by changing things in what I think of as a "liberal" way—by increasing efficiency, opening up access, doing the same thing better and including more people? or by changing things in what I think of as a "radical" way, by changing something fundamental about the way people think and work?

Once you start thinking about the possibility of radical change, it's heady stuff—nothing else looks worth taking seriously. At some level we don't just want more academics writing more of the same articles faster and easier. But at the same time we need to take seriously the possibility that radical changes may seem to be for the worse, at least when viewed from our current frame of reference: they may create habits and methods so unfamiliar, so askew to our own, that they look like a demolition of all that we currently know and care about.

In a sense, this may already have happened, if we believe the claim that students of the new generation (raised on MTV and Cheetos) are much more visually oriented, and have a different relationship to language and images—perhaps one whose difference is only now becoming fully apparent to us. These claims may or may not be true, but one can see that what's described as a kind of epidemic dyslexia by people like Sven Birkirts can also be described by people like George Landow and Jay David Bolter as the overthrow of the Logos and its stranglehold on the mind.

The WWP, as I said before, has a mission to think critically and progressively about humanities research and teaching, and about how the resource we are creating may influence these things. We have also had a huge opportunity and motive to think about these things in the process of designing a product and a publication system around our collection—making assumptions about how it will be consumed in the short term and in the more remote future. We have been thinking very hard about how to provide what people want and need, but also about how to encourage some new kinds of desires.

As a result, there are a number of ways in which we see humanities research emphatically not changing under the influence of digital resources. From what we can observe, people are still thinking in essentially the same way about text and about research methods. The answers to questions like “how do you read?” or “what counts as a good question?” or “how do you formulate an argument?” seem comparatively stable, and as a result digital resources of this type must fit into existing research habits and assumptions in order to find an audience. Projects like ours need to provide methods of citation, documentation of the source, and a clear sense of textual boundaries and hierarchies. Above all, they must avoid precisely that dizzying sense of being in a new kind of space that would reveal that radical change is occurring.

But we may be able to see some changes which are small in themselves but which may be the beginning of larger and deeper changes. Think for instance about the use of simple searching tools. These may well be the thin end of the wedge: as people grow more familiar with them, they begin using them not just to find a passage they want, but as a new strategy for reading the text, where “reading” involves not just experiencing the text in sequence but identifying textual patterns and using them as a way to organize and motivate one’s consumption of the text. This is a wedge whose thicker end involves more intensive use of computational tools, as one's analytical requirements outstrip one's own brain's ability to do the processing. Jerome McGann? has described, for instance, techniques of sampling and querying a text or visual object which create a revealing deformation, a rereading or even a misreading of the text which foregrounds features for analysis that would otherwise be invisible.

Consider another area of change: the reader’s increasing exposure to editing as part of the experience of the online medium. Resources which exploit this possibility may change our understanding of the nature and function of editing (and its implication in the reading process). Already examples such as the Canterbury Tales project and its underlying software have demonstrated how the exposure of editing as a process of reading can become an inextricable part of one’s work with the text; to read it, we must edit it. In this conception, the text becomes a kind of database rather than as a narrative: a system of relationships between words, lines, textual components - relationships which are themselves objects of study, susceptible to manipulation and inquiry. It conceptualizes the editing project as a manipulation of that data and those relationships, rather than as an interaction between an editor and an authorial product. For the user, the result is that the edition is no longer presented as a fait accompli, a sutured "real" which offers no purchase on its createdness, but rather functions both to expose that createdness and to place the user at the center of it. In practical terms, this approach also allows for the creation and packaging of individual edited versions which can be used much like conventional editions (e.g. for reading, teaching, etc.) but does not require the presence of these. But even at their most minimal, these kinds of resources ask the reader to understand that editions are made and not born - that "mediation" is part of what "media" is.

These kinds of changes which affect the deeply-rooted assumptions we have about the nature of reading and texts seem to me to be potentially radical in the critical purchase they open up for us. But at the same time, I have to assume that at my stage of life anything that looks like a good idea to me is less and less likely to be truly radical. I also recognize that it's hard for me even to think about what would constitute a truly radical change: I don't know what directions to look in. I can tell that my mind is fundamentally oriented towards an older way of thinking, which has worn indelible ruts that guide my ideas in certain paths - a reflection which is very humbling.

A FEW PERIPHERAL OR RELATED ISSUES

Teaching with technology

My take on "teaching with technology" (both the phrase and the thing itself) comes out of an interest in what we mean by "technology" in this kind of context. "Technology" usually suggests an instrumental sort of relationship: we are going to use machines external to ourselves (and, by implication, external to the natural processes that emerge from us) to accomplish some goal (more efficiently, faster, cheaper, etc.). In this sense, "teaching with technology" implies "bringing computers into the classroom", or "bringing a virtual reality cave into the classroom", or even perhaps "taking the class to the digital music lab". The focus is on the technology and on strategies for using it in a classroom setting without derailing the teaching. The relationship may in fact be very smooth, very tightly integrated, very skillfully handled, but nonetheless there's a sense that the "technology" is a piece of equipment.

The WWP thinks of itself as a "technology" project, and as part of the Scholarly Technology group we have to pay attention to what we mean by technology; MITH also has the T-word in its name and is probably going to spend some time thinking about this as well. My sense of the word in this context is that it has a different emphasis, one which considers not so much the machine as the data, or rather the intellectual structures that make the data what it is. "Scholarly technologies" in this sense have been around for quite a long time: they include things like indexes, concordances, tables of contents, alphabetization, thesauri, classification systems, ordering systems, referencing systems: in other words, systems for managing information and making it tractable to the human mind at work. All of these are brought to a new level of effectiveness in the online medium, but they are not dependent on it or identical with it.

If this sense of the word seems to drain it of a useful specificity, consider this: why does the machine loom so large in our imagination—why does it seem to be the really significant thing about what's going on in the technology classroom?

At projects like STG and MITH we need to think about what we really need to teach people—what is the really significant set of skills and concepts that students and faculty need to learn in order to function effectively in the new research environment? Is it HoTMetaL? and Filemaker Pro? or is it database design (which goes back to classification systems and indexing) and text encoding (which goes back to genre theory and the ontology of text)? Which of these is going to be the more lasting? This is not to say that every course needs to be transformed into a course on data structures—clearly some people still want to teach English Literature and want to use the new online resources to do it, and they will need practical knowledge of the best way to accomplish this. In this context, the technology really is quite instrumental: it is a portal, an access point which depends on very specific electronic technologies to function as it does. However, I think the classrooms that do the best with this new kind of technology will be the ones that also integrate an awareness of the intellectual technologies which make online research possible; these will ultimately produce the most effective researchers and users of the new medium.

Interdisciplinary work...

...and does humanities computing tend to encourage it?

In one sense, humanities computing makes interdisciplinary work necessary, by providing tools and methods which can't be used in a straight-up single-disciplinary way (unless you're a corpus linguist). This is simply because the things these tools help you do are not part of the recognized practices of the standard disciplines; in fact, in some cases your discipline will disown you for undertaking this kind of work, and certainly won’t grant you tenure for doing it.

In another sense, though, as humanities computing seeks legitimacy, and as humanities computing projects try to achieve stability and success, they are working hard to create tools which aren't just for geeks, but can be used in the academic mainstream. As a result, they address themselves precisely to serving the disciplines: offering a research environment which is founded on disciplinary assumptions. To the extent that they support interdisciplinary work, it's the kind that has already been naturalized within the disciplinary structure (e.g. the kinds of cross-fertilization that exist between historical and literary study)—it doesn't amount to a critique of or departure from the assumptions and methods of the parent disciplines. Or, even less interestingly (though quite usefully), it amounts to just providing access to a variety of different resources: the Catasto census database right next to the Boccaccio project.

Because the term "interdisciplinary" implicitly assumes the presence of disciplines, it may get us off the hook from imagining whether there exist humanities computing methods or technologies which directly seek to erase disciplinary distinctions, or remain disciplinarily agnostic—that is, not just combining or blending disciplines but thinking outside their structures, perhaps conducing to the eradication of such structures.

WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE ISSUES FOR ORGANIZATIONS LIKE MITH, STG, AND THE WWP?

These kinds of organizations all have a mandate to support academic work, directly or indirectly, by developing better online tools and teaching people to be better users of them. So when we think about our identity and our institutional location, we're really asking ourselves what kind of humanities computing we're committed to practicing, where we think our work will have the best effect. This is where the real responsibility lies—not in providing the most up-to-date equipment, or the most funding for faculty projects, or the best web site for students, though all of these things are extremely important, but in helping people conceptualize their work in this area so that their efforts are well-directed. The greatest waste—and one of the saddest reasons why humanities computing projects fail—is when money and time are expended on purely instrumental activities: on building some particular thing, or creating some particularly spectacular lab, without understanding the context in which such an undertaking functions.

The other significant issue for groups like MITH or STG to be aware of (which goes back to the "what is humanities computing" question) is how to staff such an organization: what kinds of people to hire; at what stage in their lives and careers; at what level of pay; with what sort of division of labor. And believe it or not, the answers to these apparently practical, mundane questions are intimately bound up with one's assumptions about what humanities is. If you believe that humanities computing is the support (by technical people) of humanities research online, then you will think you need a set of scholars to do the "scholarly work" (or work which is in some other way positioned as central and motivating: developing curricular materials, an online edition, etc.). These people will probably be paid their regular salary as tenured faculty and get release time to work on the project. And in addition, you will also think you need a "staff" of technical people to do the "technical work". These will be paid a salary but not be tenured, and they will probably not be "real" technical people, since you can't afford to compete with industry; they will probably be people you're lucky to get for a while, perhaps literature graduate students with an interest in computers, who will get a "real job" and leave eventually.

If, on the other hand, you believe that humanities computing is a field of research which integrates humanities questions with an interest in intellectual "technologies" and applies these to the development of new tools and methods, then you will know that you need a set of hybrid people who understand the full nature of the problem. You will want a much tighter integration between the various kinds of work; most of the time, everyone will be doing some of each, and if someone comes in with one kind of expertise, they quickly find they need to pick up the other(s). If you have good sense, you will pay these people competitively and give them the intangibles that will keep them with you: flexible hours, congenial colleagues, a lively intellectual environment, professional recognition. And perhaps they will stop looking for "real" jobs and settle down nearby and work their hearts out for you for a long time.

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