Category Archives: Digital Humanities

Why digital humanities is already a basic skill, not just a specialist niche–Matthew Kirschenbaum

Sometimes I think we humanists “of a certain age,” to put the issue politely, imagine digital humanities as an optional activity that will be filled by an interesting niche of young professors who take their place in the academy as yet another niche sub-discipline, something that research universities hire for and small colleges struggle hopelessly to replicate. It may be indeed that small colleges will struggle to integrate digital humanities in to their own infrastructures, but I think the general picture of Digital Humanities as an optional sub-discipline will simply be unsustainable. The argument smells a little of the idea that e-books are a nice sub-genre of texts, but not something the average humanist has to worry that much about. I think, to the contrary, that digital humanities and the multitude of techniques that it entails, will become deeply integrated in a fundament way with the basic methodologies of how we go about doing business, akin to knowing how to do close reading or how to maneuver our way through libraries.

Although pointing out this fact is not his main point, Matthew Kirschenbaum–already a Digital Humanities patron saint in many respects–has an essay in The Chronicle that points to this fact. Kirschenbaum is currently interested in how we preserve digital material, and the problems are just as complex if not moreso than the general question of how and when to save print materials. Moreso to the degree that we cannot be sure that the current forms in which we place our digital intelligence will actually be usable five years from now. The consequences for humanities research and writing are profound and must be considered. From Kirschenbaum:

Digital preservation is the sort of problem we like to assume others are thinking about. Surely someone, somewhere, is on the job. And, in lots of ways, that is true. Dire warnings of an approaching “digital dark ages” appear periodically in the media: Comparisons are often made to the early years of cinema—roughly half of the films made before 1950 have been lost because of neglect.

But the fact is that enormous resources—government, industry, and academic—are being marshaled to attack the problem. In the United States, for example, the Library of Congress has been proactive through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Archivists of all stripes now routinely receive training in not only appraisal and conservation of digital materials but also metadata (documentation and description) and even digital forensics, through which we can stabilize and authenticate electronic records. (I now help teach such a course at the University of Virginia’s renowned Rare Book School.) Because of the skills of digital archivists, you can read former presidents’ e-mail messages and examine at Emory University Libraries a virtual recreation of Salman Rushdie’s first computer. Jason Scott’s Archive Team, meanwhile, working without institutional support, leaps into action to download and redistribute imperiled Web content.

What this suggests is that Rushdie’s biographers will have to not so much know how to sift through piles of letters, but how to recreate digital archives that authors themselves may not be interested in preserving. Biographers of the present and surely the future, will have to be Digital technicians, as well as close readers of the digital archives they are able to recover.

Kirschenbaum goes on to suggest that most of us must do this work on our own, and must do this work for ourselves, in preserving our own archives.

But despite those heroic efforts, most individuals must still be their own digital caretakers. You and I must take responsibility for our own personal digital legacy. There are no drive-through windows (like the old photo kiosks) where you can drop off your old floppies and pick up fresh files a day or two later. What commercial services are available tend to assume data are being recovered from more recent technology (like hard drives), and these also can be prohibitively expensive for average consumers. (Organizations like the Library of Congress occasionally sponsor public-information sessions and workshops to teach people how to retrieve data from old machines, but those are obviously catch as catch can.)

Research shows that many of us just put our old disks, CD’s, and whatnot into shoeboxes and hope that if we need them again, we’ll figure out how to retrieve the data they contain when the time comes. (In fact, researchers such as Cathy Marshall, at Microsoft Research, have found that some people are not averse to data loss—that the mishaps of digital life provide arbitrary and not entirely unwelcome opportunities for starting over with clean slates.)

This last, of course, is an interesting problem. Authors have often been notoriously averse to having their mail probed and prodded for signs of the conflicts and confessions, preferring that the “work” stand on its own. Stories of authors burning their letters and manuscripts are legion, nightmarishly so for the literary scholar. Such literary self-immolations are both harder and easier in a digital world. My drafts and emails can disappear at the touch of a button. On the other hand, I am told that a hard drive is never actually erased for those who are really in the know. Then again, the task of scholar who sees a writers computer as his archive is in some ways vastly more difficult than that of the writer who was an assiduous collector of his type-written drafts. Does every deletion and spell correct count as a revision. What should we trace as an important change, and what should we disregard as detritus. These are, of course, the standard archival questions, but it seems to me they are exponentially more complicated in a digital archive where a text may change a multitude of times in a single sitting, something not so possible in a typewritten world.

Well, these are the kinds of things Kirschenbaum takes up. And having the tools to apply to such questions will be the task for every humanist in the future, not a narrow coterie.

Living in an e-plus world: Students now prefer digital texts when given a choice

2 Replies

A recent blog by Nick DeSantis in the Chronicle points to a survey by the Pearson Foundation that suggests Tablet ownership is on the rise. That’s not surprising, but more significant is the fact that among tablet users there’s a clear preference for digital texts over the traditional paper codex, something we haven’t seen before even among college students of this wired generation:

One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years—a 15 percent increase over last year’s survey. More than a third said they intended to buy a tablet sometime in the next six months.

This year’s poll also found that the respondents preferred digital books over printed ones. It’s a reversal of last year’s results and goes against findings of other recent studies, which concluded that students tend to choose printed textbooks. The new survey found that nearly six in 10 students preferred digital books when reading for class, compared with one-third who said they preferred printed textbooks.

I find this unsurprising as it matches up pretty well with my own experience. 5 years ago I could never imagine doing any significant reading on a tablet. Now I do all my reading of scholarly journals and long form journalism–i.e The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, The Chronicle Review–on my iPad. And while I still tend to prefer the codex for the reading of novels and other book length works, the truth is that preference is slowly eroding as well. As I become more familiar with the forms of e-reading, the notions of its inherent inferiority, like the notions of any unreflective prejudice, gradually fade in the face of familiarity.

And yet I greet the news of this survey with a certain level of panic, not panic that it should happen at all, but panic that the pace of change is quickening and we are hardly prepared, by we I mean we in the humanities here in small colleges and elsewhere. I’ve blogged on more than one occasion about my doubts about e-books and yet my sense of their inevitable ascendancy. For instance here on the question of whether e-books are being foisted on students by a cabal of publishers and administrators like myself out to save a buck (or make a buck as the case may be), and here on the nostalgic but still real feeling that I have that print codex forms of books have an irreplaceable individuality and physicality that the mere presence of text in a myriad of e-forms does not suffice to replace.

But though I’ve felt the ascendancy of e-books was inevitable, I think I imagined a 15 or 20 year time span in which print and e-books would mostly live side by side. Our own librarians here at Messiah College talk about a “print-plus” model for libraries, as if e-book will remain primarily an add on for some time to come. I wonder. Just as computing power increases exponentially, it seems to me that the half-life of print books is rapidly diminishing. I now wonder whether we will have five years before students will expect their books to be in print–all their books, not just their hefty tomes for CHEM 101 that can be more nicely illustrated with iBook Author–but also their books for English and History classes as well. This is an “e-plus” world where print will increasingly not be the norm, but the supplement to fill whatever gaps e-books have not yet bridged, whatever textual landscapes have not yet been digitized.

Despite warnings, we aren’t yet ready for an e-plus world. Not only do we not know how to operate the apps that make these books available, we don’t even know how to critically study books in tablet form. Yet learning what forms of critical engagement are possible and necessary will be required. I suspect, frankly, that our current methods developed out of a what was made possible by the forms that texts took, rather than forms following our methodological urgencies. This means that the look of critical study in the classroom will change radically in the next ten years. What will it look like?

Should Humanities students learn to code?

Libraries of the self: Or, are print books more ephemeral than e-books, and is it a bad thing if they are?

5 Replies

There’s a remarkable consistency in the way that readers write about their libraries. Tropes of friendship, solace, and refuge abound, as well as metaphors of journey and travel that tell the tale of intellectual sojourn that books can occasion and recall for their readers. Though I cannot recall the details of their first readings, I still treasure my Princeton paperback editions of the work of Soren Kierkegaard, the now ratty Vintage-Random House versions of Faulkner with their stark

Man made of books

white on black covers and yellowing pages, my tattered and now broken copies of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems, and his Selected Essays, held together by a rubber band, the band itself now so old it threatens to crumble into dust. I keep these books now, not so much because of the information they contain. Even the notes I’ve written in them aren’t all that entertaining and hold only a little nostalgic value: I was a much more earnest reader as a younger person, but also duller, less informed, and more predictable, at least to my 51 year old eyes. Still, these books are the talismans of a journey, and I keep them as stones set up to my memory of that journey, of the intellectual and imaginative places I’ve come to inhabit and the doorways I passed through to get here. In that sense, a library represents both time passages and the attendant loss as much or more than they represent the knowledge and the information that has been gained.

Ariel Dorfman has a very nice meditation on the relationship between his library and his intellectual, political, and material journey in the September 23^rd edition of the Chronicle Review. In it Dorfman tells the story of his lost library, a library that he had to leave behind in Chile at the beginning of his exile. The library was partially destroyed in a flood during his absence, and then partially recovered again when he returned to Chile in 1990. As with many memoirs of reading, Dorfman understands the library as a symbol of the self.

Those books, full of scribbled notes in the margins, had been my one luxury in Chile, companions of my intellectual voyages, my best friends in the world. During democratic times, before the military takeover, I had poured any disposable income into that library, augmenting it with hundreds of volumes my doting parents acquired for me. It was a collection that overflowed in every impossible direction, piling up even in the bathroom and the kitchen.

It was a daily comfort, in the midst of our dispossession in exile, to imagine that cosmic biblioteca back home, gathering nothing more lethal than dust. That was my true self, my better self, that was the life of reading and writing I aspired to, the space where I had been at my most creative, penning a prize-winning novel, many short stories, innumerable articles and poems and analyses, in spite of my own doubts as to whether literature had any place at all in a revolution where reality itself was more challenging than my wildest imaginings. To pack the books away once we fled from the country would have been to acknowledge our wandering as everlasting. Even buying a book was proof that we intended to stay away long enough to begin a new library.

But, of course, Dorfman did begin a new library in his many years of exile, and his Chilean library was altered not only by the natural disaster of the flood, but also by the human transience whereby Dorfman himself changed and so changed his relationship with his books. The changing shape of Dorfman’s library becomes an image of historical and personal change that must finally be embraced since it is unavoidable.

Six months later I had left Chile again, this time of my own free will, this time for good. I have puzzled often how I could have spent 17 years trying to go back and then, when I did indeed return, I forced myself to leave. It is still not clear to me if it was the country itself that had changed too much or if I was the one who had been so drastically altered by my exile that I no longer fit in, but whatever the cause, it left me forever divided, aware that my search for purity, simplicity, one country and one language and one set of allegiances was no longer possible.

It also left me with two libraries: the one I had rescued back home and the one that I have built outside Chile over the years and that is already so large that not one more new book fits in the shelves. I have had to start giving hundreds of books away and boxing many others in order to donate them to Duke University, where I teach. But no matter how many I get rid of, it does not look likely that there will ever be space to bring my whole Chilean library over.

And yet, I had already lost it once when I left my country and then regained half when that phone call came in 1982, and rescued what was left yet again in 1990 and can dream therefore that perhaps, one day, I will unite some books from Santiago with the thousands of books bought during my long exile. I can only hope and dream that before I die, a day will come when I will look up from the desk where I write these words, and my whole library, from here and there, from outside and inside Chile, will greet me, I can only hope and dream and pray that I will not remain divided forever.

It’s possible, of course, to lament our losses, and I suppose in some sense the vision of a library of the self is a utopian dream of resurrection wherein all our books, all the intellectual and imaginative doorways that we’ve passed through, will be gathered together in a room without loss. But I also sense in Dorfman’s essay a sense that loss and fragility is one part of the meaningfulness of his books and his library. I know that in some sense I love my books because they are old and fragile, or they will become that way. They are treasured not only for the information they contain, but for the remembered self to which they testify.

I started this post thinking I would focus on the ways we sometimes talk about the ephemera of electronic digital texts. There is something to that, and we’ve discussed that some over at my other group blog on the Digital Humanities. At the same time, there is another sense in which e-texts are not ephemeral enough. They do not grow old, they are always the same, they cannot show me the self I’ve become because that implies a history that e-texts do not embody. While looking at my aging and increasingly dusty library, I feel them as a mirror to the person I’ve become. Looking at my e-books stored on my iPad I see…..texts. Do they mirror me? Perhaps in a way, but they do not embody my memories.

If I give a book away to a student, I always miss it with a certain imaginative ache, knowing that what was once mine is now gone and won’t be retrieved. Somehow I’ve given that student something of my self, and so I don’t give away books lightly or easily. If I give a student a gift card for iTunes….well, perhaps this requires no explanation. And if I delete a book from my iBooks library I can retrieve it any time I want, until the eschaton, one imagines, or at least as long as my iTunes account exists.

Michael Hart and Project Gutenberg

1 Reply

I felt an unaccountable sense of loss at reading tonight in the Chronicle of Higher Education (paper edition no-less) that the founder of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart, has died at the age of 64. This is a little strange since I had no idea who had founded Project Gutenberg until I read the obituary. But Project Gutenberg I know, and I think I knew immediately when I ran across it that it was already and would continue to be an invaluable resource for readers and scholars, this even though I’ve never been much of a champion of e-books. I guess it felt a bit like I had discovered belatedly the identity of a person who had given me a great gift and never had the chance to thank him.

One aspect of Hart’s vision for Project Gutenberg struck me in relationship to some of the things I’ve been thinking about in relationship to the Digital Humanities. That’s Hart’s decision to go with something that was simple and nearly universal as an interface rather than trying to sexy, with it, and up to date. Says the Chronicle

His early experiences clearly informed his choices regarding Project Gutenberg. He was committed to lo-fi—the lowest reasonable common denominator of textual presentation. That was for utterly pragmatic reasons: He wanted his e-texts to be readable on 99 percent of the existing systems of any era, and so insisted on “Plain-Vanilla ASCII” versions of all the e-texts generated by Project Gutenberg.

That may seem a small—even retro—conceit, but in fact it was huge. From the 80s on, as the Internet slowly became more publicly manifest, there were many temptations to be “up to date”: a file format like WordStar, TeX, or LaTeX in the 1980s, or XyWrite, MS Word, or Adobe Acrobat in the 90s and 2000s, might provide far greater formatting features (italics, bold, tab stops, font selections, extracts, page representations, etc.) than ASCII. But because Mr. Hart had tinkered with technology all his life, he knew that “optimal formats” always change, and that today’s hi-fi format was likely to evolve into some higher-fi format in the next year or two. Today’s ePub version 3.01 was, to Mr. Hart, just another mile marker along the highway. To read an ASCII e-text, via FTP, or via a Web browser, required no change of the presentational software—thereby ensuring the broadest possible readership.

Mr. Hart’s choice meant that the Project Gutenberg corpus—now 36,000 works—would always remain not just available, but readable. What’s more, it has been growing, in every system since.

This is no small thing. The ephemeral character of digital humanities projects bothers me. By ephemeral I don’t mean they are intellectually without substance. I think the intellectual character of the work can be quite profound. However, the forms in which the work is done can disappear or be outdated tomorrow. Hart’s decision to use ASCII is in some sense an effort to replicate the durability of the book. Books, for all the fragility of paper, have a remarkable endurance and stability overall. The basic form doesn’t change and the book used by an ancient in the middle ages is, more or less, still usable by me in the same fashion. By contrast I can’t even open some of my old files in my word processor. I think the work I did was substantial, but the form it was placed in was not enduring. Harts decision makes sense to me, but I’m not sure how it might be extended to other kinds of projects in the digital humanities.

Discussion of Henry Jenkins and Lev Manovich

More observations on getting started with Digital Humanities

1 Reply

On the train home after a good day in Philly. The afternoon sessions focused a good deal on project management. David and I both agreed that in some respects it was a session that could have been presented at any kind of meeting whatsoever and didn’t seem particularly geared toward digital humanities issues. However, I do think that it is germane to humanists simply because it goes back to the whole issue of working collaboratively. I think we are more or less trained to work alone with a very few exceptions in our humanities disciplines; indeed, we glorify, support, and materially reward working alone as I suggested in my last post on THATCamp Philly. So I think it is helpful for humanists to think through very basic things like what it takes to plan a project, what it takes to run a meeting, what it takes to break a project down in to workable parts, what it takes to keep people running on schedule, what it takes to make people actually collaborate instead of setting off on their own (and instead of just providing them with information or telling them what to do–i.e. holding non-collaborative meetings). These are all issues that do not come naturally to humanists, and in many respects I think I am only figuring them out now after 7 years as a department chair and three years as a dean. These skills are essential if digital humanities requires collaborative work in order to function at any kind of high level.

Among the very simple gains from the day was an introduction to the possibilities of Google Docs. This comes as no surprise to the rest of the world, I’m sure, but I really have not moved out of the structured environs of a office software suite and/or a learning management system. IN my very brief exposure, google docs made these methods of doing work seems really quite clunky and inconvenient, though I haven’t actually tried to work with Google docs at this point. I really want to figure out a way of conducting some of my basic work in this environment, with shared documents in the cloud. We need to be having upside down meetings in some respect–where a lot of stuff gets done in virtual or distanced environments so that face to face meetings can be used for other kinds of high level issues. I’m not sure where to begin, but I want to experiment a little more personally and then see if there’s any way of incorporating it in to some of the meetings I’m responsible for as a dean.

David and I both agreed that we were terribly out of our league when it came to understanding some of the basic language and references to what was going on. We are both disappointed that we won’t be able to come back tomorrow since we both intuited in some sense that it would be better to gain this knowledge by actually plunging in and trying to make sense of what people are doing on actual projects, rather than trying to fill in all the background before we ever get started. If I’m right that this is a great deal about gaining facility in a language, I think both David and I arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to somehow learn by immersion rather than believing that we should learn all the grammatical rules. In that sense, maybe there is no right place to start, and we just have to have a practical goal. Where would we like to get in the landscape and start walking there. We’ll figure out what we need as we go along.

A couple of final notes:

I am getting too old to get up at 4:00 after going to bed at 11:30.

Trying to keep up with Facebook while also listening to a lecture does not work, no matter what my students say.

Peter Kerry Powers

Home of "Read, Write, Now: All things reading and writing"