HPCwire: The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: 18thConnect

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HPCwire >> Industry >> Academia & Research

November 24, 2008

The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: 18thConnect

by Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez'G, ICHASS

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In this series of articles Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez'G examine computational tools and approaches at the interface of humanities, arts and social science.

18thConnect: Digitizing the Canon

For the humanities scholar who may have only recently mastered library and archival finding aids beyond the archaic card catalog, the possibility of retrieving source materials at the flash of a keystroke (well maybe a few...) is very heady stuff. Very. But even as scholars rub their hands together and salivate at the possibilities that advanced computer technologies bring to the archival table, questions of open access and issues of intellectual ownership and copyright infringement have emerged as fast as the world's knowlege repositories (and Google) are digitizing texts. Accessibility is particularly important to historians, for example, where research in primary sources can often only be accomplished with an expensive plane ticket, extended sabbatical leave, and a pocketful of increasingly dwindling research monies. University humanities, arts and social science departments often suffer from second-string status when it comes to federal funding, alumni gifting and corporate grants, compared to those received by the "hard" science community. The global financial crisis will of course only make matters worse. The ability, then, to tap into the world's archives from your desktop becomes not only very appealing but even -- dare we say it -- necessary.

For Laura Mandell and Robert Markley, professors of English at Miami University-Ohio (MU) and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), respectively, the possibilities of internet-enabled research are tremendous. Mandell and Markley are the lead organizers of 18thConnect, a collaboration between MU, UIUC, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which will provide the first comprehensive means of digitally organizing materials produced before 1800. Like its sister site, Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), for which Mandell is also Associate Director, 18thConnect will bring together in one forum separate digital collections and texts as well as allow interdisciplinary collaborations by publishers, libraries and scholars. Markley and Mandell both bring considerable scholarly interest in and experience with the digital humanities to this visionary project, and here tell us about 18thConnect's inception and future prospects:

How did you get involved in this area or research?

Mandell: I first began thinking about how literary and cultural texts can be transformed into digital data when Jerry McGann, professor of English at the University of Virginia and founder and director of its Applied Research in 'Patacriticism, gathered together a group of people in order to create NINES. McGann is, first of all, one of the most generous scholars ever, since he used the $1.5 million that he received from the Mellon Foundation as a "lifetime achievement award" to start NINES. None of us knew at the outset what NINES would be. Jerry just kept saying that the archive is going digital, and scholars have to be at the table, helping to shape it. All we knew is that NINES had to be a scholarly body that would make digitizing worth it professionally for younger scholars so that they would be able to participate in this important work. NINES would peer-review digital scholarship according to the highest standards to which printed texts are held. But then, what else would it be or do? We thought that it could be a kind of digital anthology published by a university press, but copyright issues proved insurmountable. We finally realized that NINES would aggregate rather than publish data: it would be an online finding aid, leaving all the participating digital archives exactly where they live. NINES would be a place for scholars to come to do research into digital archives, and to interact with each other in the process. To work, NINES had to be a comprehensive research environment, the first place you would come. To make that possible, we decided to bring together commercial, library, and open access digital records, texts, and images. All NINES records are freely available, the free-culture items immediately accessible, the others only if the scholar's library subscribes. We built a tag cloud for note taking, and an exhibit builder is on the way, coming in December. As a finding aid and a venue for social scholarly interaction, NINES is the place to be: it means something to have a digital archive peer-reviewed and accepted by NINES.

Markley: In 1997, I started working on a large-scale digital project with colleagues at Washington State University-Vancouver. This was the first of a series of scholarly DVD-ROMs, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars, which appeared in the digital dark ages of 2001. Over the course of this project, we quite literally had to adapt to changing hardware and authoring software, doing in incredibly laborious fashion the sorts of video capture and editing that is now routine. My colleagues and I ended up co-authoring an article on this process. While Red Planet and the other titles in the series were all content driven, we had to grapple constantly with a host of deeply embedded disciplinary assumptions: humanists write the content, software designers provide authoring tools, and retrained MFAs design web sites. Much of my time in authoring and serving as a series editors for these DVD titles has been spent in exploring the mutually constitutive relations among content, digital form, and evolving technologies.

In an important sense, 18thConnect represents, for me, a continuation of an incomplete revolution within the digital humanities that must deal, in a variety of ways, with entrenched beliefs among my colleagues in the humanities. There's a fundamental assumption that the content of the humanities, the canonical texts we have always taught, stay "the same" but now can be delivered through different media. For some scholars, digital media means that downloading pdfs is simply an alternative to xeroxing articles from journals. One of the ironies in the digital humanities is that these kinds of assumptions allow many scholars to persist in the belief that digital technologies reinforce the boundaries between disciplines rather than causing us to rethink them. In this respect, it sometimes seems that literary studies is more conservative, more wedded to simplistic understandings of technology, than it was a decade ago. As the late historian and anthropologist Greg Dening put it: "Surrenders to conventionality are what disciplines are." So, in my mind, the ongoing challenge for digital humanities remains to fashion dialogic means of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

What is the origin of this project?

Mandell: The whole time that I was participating in NINES, I deeply regretted that it did not include 18th-century materials. Romanticists and nineteenth-century scholars are incredibly active in producing digital materials. There are of course 18th-century projects, and Jack Lynch of Rutgers University is a tireless tracker of those resources. But there aren't as many, and it is for one simple reason: people believe that "Gale Group" has taken care of it. Gale produced ECCO, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, a dataset that seemingly single-handedly solves the problem of transferring 18th-century texts to digital media. There had been a microfilm project for capturing all the eighteenth-century texts listed in a renowned bibliography in the field -- all 400,000 of them. It had begun in the late 1970s, and libraries all over the Anglo-American world had participated, beginning with the British Library. Gale had taken over that microfilm collection and created digital image files out of 138,000 of the 200,000 that had been filmed. But image files aren't data. Having images online makes them easier to look at but not fundamentally different from microfilm. Leaving those texts as image files is almost as good as burying them in the backyard.

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