Monthly Archives: March 2016


Exciting News! 1

[Students Congregating, Mid-1960s], UA104 Photographic Prints Collection, University Archives and Manuscripts, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC, USA. Downloaded: URL http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/u?/ui,53230, via DPLA http://dp.la/item/174b3922e5d4afb42ba088109b8ab117

[Students Congregating, Mid-1960s], UA104 Photographic Prints Collection, University Archives and Manuscripts, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC, USA. Downloaded: http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/u?/ui,53230, via DPLA http://dp.la/item/174b3922e5d4afb42ba088109b8ab117

We were happy to learn last week that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has approved our grant extension request, so we will be hard at work on Ohio Five Digital Scholarship through another academic year! We are grateful to the steering committee for their work in the minutiae of the request, and especially Susan Palmer, the Executive Director of the Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium, Mark Christel, the PI on the grant, and to Brenda Howard, the Assistant for Accounting and Budgets. We are also grateful to the Foundation, of course, for this opportunity to explore what it means to do digital scholarship in a dispersed consortial setting.

In the interest of sharing our experiences, I want to note here that the need for an extension grew out of two primary discoveries in the first couple of years of the grant: (1) we needed to continue to nurture the culture out of which large-scale projects would grow and (2) we wanted to involve students in meaningful ways. Taking the latter of these first, it was clear that, if we wanted to build sustainable infrastructure for project development, then outsourcing our computer programming and software development needs – at least in the traditional ways – was not going to be the best answer. It is often the fastest and easiest answer, but we thought we might be able to find opportunities, instead, to pay our liberal arts students for small-scale development projects. We might be able to tap into our classes – our curricular infrastructure, if you will – and to work with Educational Technology at times to identify student specialists with whom we might partner in the kind of building required by digital scholarship. This is not to say that students were merely entering data (although there is some of that as well), but developing apps and themes for use on our projects. Of course there was, at times, a negotiation between what project initiators might imagine and what we could responsibly expect of students that challenged their abilities while pushing our collective intellectual engagement with digital, scholarly endeavors. The negotiation, however, has been less about compromise than about basing “Projects and Pedagogy” on opportunities for the latter through the former.

It’s worth noting that, frankly speaking, the imagined scale of our projects has not often exceeded our technological ability to develop them. Rather, the challenge has been in establishing practical standards and useful workflows. This is not a statement about our abundant resources – far from it – but rather an acknowledgment that the digital culture in the Ohio Five continues to discover the possibilities in digital scholarship. This brings us back around to that other of the primary discoveries leading to our extension: that ours is a growing culture and I have had the opportunity to see the gap between imagination and possibility close incrementally as we have learned about, talked about, and kicked about tools, methods, and philosophies that push the boundaries of our pedagogical practices. This is to say that, while our projects to date have not all been at a grand consortial scale, we continue to have conversations about digital scholarship and to share the work that we do, thereby increasing our capacity to support this kind of Big Digital Scholarship simply as a function of our local, intentional, care-ful digital scholarship.

Looking forward, then, I (personally) will do my part to continue to build that capacity. I want to be a conduit for sharing and ideas, but I also want to be a bystander as that kind of sharing takes place. In other words, I hope that I’m able to help us think of a specifically consortial community of digital scholarship practitioners. I’d like for the consortium to be less of an abstraction insofar as digital scholarship is concerned, and more of a superstructure. Some of this is about resource management. To that end, in the near term, the grant is helping us to think through consortial digital preservation solutions and, perhaps more to the point, through philosophies about the preservation of the digital scholarship we are producing under the auspices of the grant and elsewhere on our campuses. To my mind, though, the consortial framework in this case is not as much about the technological solution as it is about the shared philosophies; about the investment, not in a tool, per se, but in a shared discourse about preservation tools. This is a microcosm, I hope, of a growing consortial discourse about digital pedagogies, collaboration on digital projects, and the evolving nature of knowledge production in higher education.

So, again, a heartfelt thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the opportunity to continue this invaluable work at this integral moment for digital scholarship and in the digital liberal arts.

 


“Between Alexandria and Babel” Dr. Paul Dilley presents at OWU 1

A couple weeks ago, Dr. Paul Dilley visited Ohio Wesleyan as a capstone (of sorts) to Dr. David Eastman’s grant-funded endeavors. Dr. Dilley is himself involved in a number of digital humanities projects at the University of Iowa and beyond, including multi-spectral imaging of ancient books (think here of the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest), the creation of Big Ancient Mediterranean (or BAM, an open-access project allowing the exploration and visualization of ancient texts in new ways), and the painstaking transcription and digitization of the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex.

Banner image for BAM.Especially in the case of the latter, we might imagine Dilley as any traditional scholar of (and in) the archives, laboriously attending to the minute details of the (barely) visible word, identified only as a trace. In his talk, Dilley led the audience from this imagined space into the virtual space afforded by computational technologies. Indeed, he made this connection explicit in framing his particular brand of digital scholarship as a kind of “digital philology,” which he defines in his forthcoming publication as a set of “[n]ew scholarly interpretive practices that both produce, and are enacted by, the transfer of texts from manuscripts and the printed page to digital files subject to computational analysis and visualization” (“Between Alexandria and Babel,” forthcoming).

The proliferation of these digital textual files affords scholars across disciplines the opportunities to push against the boundaries of traditional scholarly inquiry. Before discussing two ways in which we might do this – rich annotation and distant reading – Dilley underlined the importance of open, clean, and linked datasets. As a case in point he noted how propriety licenses on some collections of digital data may limit a researcher to “keyword search, which reproduces the functionality of the print index.” This, he adds, is to say nothing of the potential unreliability of the search: OCR’d textual data is often suspect, and one never knows what potential search returns may be missing as a result of bad OCR (optical character recognition). [Full disclosure: my last job was with the Early Modern OCR Project at Texas A&M, so bad OCR and/in old books are subjects near to my heart.]

Nevertheless, research opportunities for large corpora will also proliferate, allowing researchers to encode analytical readings into texts and to read them distantly. The latter, you may know, is a way of interpreting from a 10,000 foot view large collections of text that are otherwise unreadable by humans. While it is not dependent upon the former, encoded text, distant reading and other digital research are deepeneded by this brand of “rich annotation.” On this point Dilley cites the “Gentle Introduction to XML“:

“Encoding a text for computer processing is, in principle, like transcribing a manuscript from scriptio continua; it is a process of making explicit what is conjectural or implicit, a process of directing the user as to how the content of the text should be (or has been) interpreted.”

To Professor Dilley’s mind, the kind of large-scale work that one might do on a digital corpus – be it mark-up (i.e. encoding), distant reading, or any other interpretive practice afforded by computational methods – may best be thought of as “extended intelligence”: in no way “artificial,” it is a very real (and heretofore impossible) supplement to conventional literary criticism.

I’m sure Professor Dilley would love to hear from you if you have questions about his specific projects. If you’d like to know more about text encoding or distant reading of textual data (or bad OCR for that matter!), feel free to contact me!