DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2009
Volume 3 Number 3
Volume 3 Number 3
Introduction
Abstract
This is the introduction to the issue of DHQ that grew out of the October 2006 Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future Symposium held at Texas A&M University.
This issue of DHQ grew out of the October 2006 Digital
Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future Symposium held at Texas A&M University.
The symposium brought together pioneers in the field and emergent scholars, who, through
a series of talks and an evening poster session, responded to our charge to address the
current state of the field and to muse on important issues that continue to challenge
digital textual scholarly work. As Peter Robinson recalls, “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 DHQ presented an ideal venue through which we could provide a
more dynamic view of the energy and ideas generated at the symposium by inclusion of the
full range of presented materials: both the invited speakers’ formal essays and the more
informal posters.
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). Our attention is increasingly drawn to questions of scale, of what humanities
scholars might do, or do differently, with a million (or a few million) books, rather
than to questions about how to define, implement, support, and engage with more focused
collections whose value lies in careful management of the details of remediation. These
questions, expressed both in practical and theoretical terms, remain central to the work
of digital textual scholars, but it would be a mistake to assume that they are not
equally relevant to mass digitization or to the myriad commercial full text databases
that try to offer the best of both worlds through some measure of focused selection,
technological transparency, and scholarly oversight.
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 Blake Archive. As Eaves
observes, our everyday and scholarly lives increasingly unfold within a “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 Whitman Archive and other digital projects, Price considers
whether our reliance on terms from print might curtail the possibilities of the digital,
weighing the implications of using terms such as edition,
project, database, archive and thematic
research collection to describe text-based electronic scholarship. He suggests
that we should adopt a new term to represent the possibilities for exploration within
the new environment and proposes arsenal as a term that conceptualizes our
common and collaborative endeavors and reflects the ways in which humanities scholars
are repurposing commercial and (in the case of the Internet) military technological
tools to serve our own needs and purposes.
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 Paradise Lost, Eugene Lyman’s Elwood viewer, or the representation of
Quixote Iconography under development by Eduardo Urbina, Richard Furuta, and Steven E.
Smith. Mapping is used for innovative purposes in Amy Roundtree’s rhetorical and ethical
analysis of Hurricane Katrina, while Amy Earhart experiments with Google map hacks to
develop an interface for literary materials. Wesley Raabe and Laura Mandell’s poster
suggests that the digital is a way to correct and recover literary texts. Raabe’s work
with Uncle Tom’s Cabin deconstructs the myth of the flawed
digital text, demonstrating that the electronic version of the text is the most accurate
available for scholarly use, while Mandell’s poster demonstrates the creation of the
Poetess archive, a digital project that recovers the crossnational history of women’s
popular poetry.
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’ A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States
(November 2008), point to an encouraging level of attention, and of focused discussion,
of support needs within, across, and beyond institutional boundaries. We present these
essays and posters in recognition that the past is indeed prologue to a bright, yet
unpredictable, digital future. And we call for continued exploration into this future,
asking as does Peter Robinson, “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?”
Works Cited
The Universal Digital Library
The Universal Digital Library. Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.ulib.org/.
Unsworth, et al. 2006
Unsworth, John, et al. Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The ACLS Report. 2006. http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/ourculturalcommonwealth.pdf.
Zorich 2008
Zorich, Diane M. A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States. Washington DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2008. http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub143abst.html.