anecdotal prelude

Improper use of technology—or perhaps misplaced technological priorities—is a danger that we might already be falling prey to. We might be able to better frame the digital challenges facing early modern texts and modern organizational technologies with an analogy to the world of printing in the later 19th century. It was then that letterpress printers found themselves competing with newer and sexier printing techniques, like chromolithography and engraving. Those products were hand-drawn and therefore allowed much greater freedom in design. Soon after, technical advances in letterpress print technology itself (brighter and faster drying inks, new typesetting techniques) allowed letterpress printers to flex their own design chops, and to develop what came to be known as “artistic printing.”

Despite the name, it wasn’t really artistic at all—at least not in the sense that it could be characterized by superior aesthetics per fine art standards. The predominant feature was ornamentation—excessive ornamentation: grandiose borders, highly stylized typefaces, bizarre color schemes, and non-linear design elements—employed to rival materials printed with newer printing technologies, even when those weren’t characterized by such ornamentation. Printers’ content was thus dictated by technology; the medium had overtaken the message.

Critics reacted strongly against printers making their content subservient to “barbaric” excessive ornamentation and “degenerate” ostentatious flourishes. They lamented how printers focused on the immediate and low-hanging technological fruit ahead of fundamental typographic principles. The extra ornament was considered a sham, a form of concealment.

Where letterpress printers did not, we must constantly reflect on our priorities and values as we embrace new technologies for organizing our overwhelmingly large and still growing archive of early modern sources. 21st-century organization of early modern texts must not be seen only as a technological prosthetic that enhances traditional practices, but rather an opportunity for creating and engaging with a new kind of archive.

modern information overload

As we all know, information overload is not new. One salient reminder comes from Ann Blair and her book Too Much To Know, in which she describes how early modern scholars developed various procedural strategies and textual apparati (many of which we still use) to help find and to organize the vast amount of information flooding into their personal libraries. In part, we have the same problem; we too have access to more texts than ever before.

Having access to more texts facilitates more opportunities for applying our traditional methods for organization. We might be tempted to emulate our early modern predecessors, but with modern equivalents—no longer curating shoeboxes of 3×5 cards, but rather Zotero libraries; perhaps moderating virtual group libraries instead of emailing bibliographies. On the whole, we—as did early modern scholars—tend to think in terms of individual technology solutions with some social tentacles, like Zotero and RefWorks. Even on the web, we do this also. We continue to create isolated databases, search engines for them, and even lists of links to help organize and connect early modern texts. But are we creating these because they are the most productive, or because they are most easily accessible technology “solutions”? Have our databases become our ornamental borders?

Unlike previous instances of information overload, however, organization is no longer an individual problem. Rather, it’s one that exists at the level of scholarly societies and broad research communities (notice that i’m not including libraries; more on why later). Our unprecedented access to the early modern period means that we have the potential for a vastly larger and much richer archive than we’ve had before. We must take an active role in organizing that archive to make it available, visible, and fully usable.

I want highlight two facets of the digital archive that will be crucial as digital methodologies become more integrated with our research practices: metadata and text transcriptions. In other words: creating and connecting texts.

2 important caveats
1) I want to emphasize at the outset that both of these are fundamentally social challenges, not technological ones. This is not about what technical standard to follow. This is not about which interface components or which ornamental border to use. These are important questions, but ones that should and will naturally follow a deliberate attempt to make archival content a value problem rather than a technology problem.

2) When speaking about metadata and text—and maybe even the digital humanities at large—skeptics often immediately seize upon the very impersonal and non-humanist kind of inquiry that seems to underlie techniques like text mining, or any vaguely quantitative methodology. Aren’t we simply outsourcing our interpretive powers to complex algorithms and code? NO. These are tools to help us do our work, not strategies for having the computer do interpretive work for us. The goal is to make the fullest use of the early modern record that has come down to us.

ethics and metaphysics of metadata
(connecting text)

It’s hardly news that finding relevant online resources can be problematic for many early modern scholars. As we all know, the bibliographic data we rely on—whether from Google Books, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and even fully controlled catalogs like the Library of Congress—can be a mess, confused by lengthy and sometimes bizarre titles, language variants, non-standardized author names, foreign characters, uncertain dates…the list could go on and on.

Rejoinders against such mess typically frame these problems as repository problems (eg Google Books has failed us because its metadata is so poor). The problem here is that this kind of thinking embraces the traditional delineation of the researcher as a mere consumer of data. But using poor metadata as the sand in which to bury one’s head in is not a productive way forward. We need to consider the ethics and metaphysics of metadata: Exactly what does it take to create metadata? Whose responsibility is it?

It seems that many metadata critiques treat metadata as objective, descriptive information that simply should be correct. But anyone who’s ever produced any serious amount of metadata knows that it’s quite subjective, confusing, and takes considerable expertise to do properly—especially for early modern sources. Because we’re the ones with this expertise, we must be not only consumers, but also producers of this data.

But isn’t creating and improving metadata the work of librarians and archivists, you ask? Surely, research scholars don’t have the time, inclination or expertise to deal with metadata. We produce knowledge, not metadata!

Except that we don’t live in the binary producer/consumer world anymore. Even if we did, there is simply too much data to deal with. Its stewards simply do not have all necessary expertise or resources to organize it most effectively and flexibly. Without doubt, this involves plenty of technical challenges (standards, interfaces, infrastructure). But these are trivial in comparison to the real challenge: shifting community expectations that erroneous metadata can and should be edited by researchers themselves. And while we’re at it, we might broaden our view of metadata to include not only the usual fields (author, date, etc), but additional description as well (abstracts, section headings, keywords, etc) that makes the texts more findable.

The idea that we share a communal responsibility for metadata requires changes to typical research practices that need to happen more or less simultaneously.

a) The research community must recognize the scholarly value of this work. Making such contributions is the kind of peripheral scholarly work that we already do because we recognize its importance and necessity, such as peer review, review articles, editing, chairing sessions, etc. And we have to recognize that such effort does not have to stem from sheer altruism, as it helps us take fuller advantage of the vast archive we have at our fingertips. It’s far from value neutral, and it requires considerable expertise.

b) Repositories of information need to facilitate metadata suggestions from the scholarly community. This does not mean that they ought to adopt, anonymous, real-time data revisions. Instead: a controlled, but open community effort to improve data. As researchers, we must voice our desire to help make data more usable. Librarians and archivists are nothing if not sensitive to the needs of their constituents.

Framed in this way, the problem isn’t the erroneous metadata itself (woeful as it can be). The problem is that a) we continue to reinforce a division of labor that doesn’t make sense anymore, and b) remain bit too myopic about the kind of work we value as a scholarly community.

early modern übertext
(creating and using text)

Textual organizational challenges are not just about the connective tissue between texts (like metadata), but also part of the challenge of helping to produce the texts themselves.

There is no doubt that the rhetoric of the digital humanities embraces the bird’s eye view of text. Digital methodologies leverage the computer’s ability for mindless drudgery to help us do and see more than we would otherwise—and hopefully make discoveries that would otherwise go unnoticed. Like repairing metadata, such a perspective suggests a new expectation for our archival work: making text/data visible and available. Again, this is not so we can get the computer to interpret it for us. It’s about futzing around with our hermeneutical prism and engaging with the historical record by all available means (and texts).

Ongoing digitization projects, both small- and large-scale operations, are making the early modern world more accessible each day. Resources like Google Books, HathiTrust, EEBO, ECCO, etc, make access to primary sources easier than ever—at least in terms of facilitating our traditional strategy: search, find, and read closely. But image-only archives stored in carefully constructed databases, as useful as they are for improving accessibility, cannot be our only interest. We must not let them become our ornamental borders!

Imagine all the personal notes stashed on hard drives, all the long quotations stashed in notes in nearly impossible to find monographs. How might our interpretations change if we had access to that text?

To truly understand the early modern text (writ large), we need textual transcriptions. Now I am not suggesting that we all spend our time creating transcriptions for our unadulterated love of plain text. But we do an awful lot of work in transcribing for our own scholarship. Imagine all the personal notes stashed on hard drives, all the long quotations stashed in notes in nearly impossible to find monographs. What would our historical archive be like if we had access to that text? What if we put them all together? How would our interpretations be different? What else could we find out?

This isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. The many (wildly) successful transcription projects (Transcribe Bentham, etc.) suggest the success of collaborative participation, patience, and persistence. The problem is that we don’t value this work as much as we should. As with metadata, it should be considered important scholarly work (but perhaps not scholarship per se). Various technologies and standards with linked open data are creating the connective tissue—but we need the bits to connect.

Several problems with text creation that require attention (merely mentioned here):

These are problems that will continue as long as we maintain a too narrow definition of useful work that doesn’t include creating and connecting texts, and as long as we expect other people to make texts available and useful for us.

• Favoritism: Text creation projects tend to favor the texts we already know—a bias of funded projects that must justify expense with appeals to established utility to a broad audience.
• Access: Full-text resources tend to be behind expensive pay walls, and usually mediated by well meaning but clunky search engines.
• Visibility: Our typical practices don’t support publishing these texts. We need to supplement our traditional forms of scholarship with co-publications on our blogs.
• Authority/Expertise: How do we know where metadata and text have come from? Do we trust them? We learn to make these judgments about scholarship generally; we can learn to do it for data, too.

The reason I mention these challenges (even so curtly), is to point out that they are neither library nor archive problems, nor are they reasons to avoid creating texts. They are our problems that will continue as long as we maintain a too narrow definition of useful work that doesn’t include creating and connecting texts, and as long as we expect other people to make texts available and useful for us. Open access is not a challenge for only archivists, librarians and publishers. It’s one that pervades the entire scholarly community to publish and preserve work they consider valuable.

More importantly, these problems persist especially when we employ individual organization solutions, even ones that attempt to aggregate information. We don’t need more search engines or more APIs. We need visible text. Use a database to store your text, but don’t make me interact with it. Databases are like closed stacks; the best retrieval mechanism doesn’t make either of them particularly visible and usable. Even if we have our eyes on the prize of linked open data, we must not forget about this first crucial step of creating texts to link to—and they should be openly published online.

So why bother creating and organizing such a textual archive? Not everyone will be interested, and that’s fine. But one can hardly ignore the potential here in terms of getting out of scholarly ruts. The literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith has suggested that the literary text acts “to shape and create the culture in which its value is produced and transmitted and, for that very reason, to perpetuate the conditions of its own flourishing” (Contingencies of Value, 1988). We could say the same thing about our digital organizational practices as well, as many important techniques that take broad views of texts and data can only be realized when we have an adequate, accessible and visible archive of digital, discrete, malleable, text. If we privilege only traditional archival strategies, we miss out on virtually all historical perspectives that aren’t exposed by those methodologies.

One obvious case is massive searching, which is self-explanatory. More important is malleability: combining unusual sets of texts to get a bird’s eye comparative view. This should not instantly conjure images of massive scatterplots and necessarily large-scale efforts. Small-scale work is also extremely valuable, especially when combining text across archives and disciplinary boundaries.

One of the most important reasons to value the creation of full text is the way searching is moving from linear to algorithmic searching. Our organizational strategies (databases, lists, catalogs, etc.) tend to re-enforce traditional, linear research practices. But the future of searching is not simply finding what you’re looking for. Having more text (and better metadata) allows us to take advantage of finding not only what we are looking for, but also what we’re not looking for—but should be. Imagine a “show me more like this…” feature that worked for our primary sources. Algorithmic searching is, of course, what Google does, but I’m not suggesting that their mysterious PageRank algorithm should reign over our sources. But as we think about how to organize an unprecedented volume of text, we also have to think about future access technologies. We need to think about the principles of data architecture (typography), and to be sure they are not being applied as technological band-aids (fanciful mauve borders).

Again, all of these efforts (fixing metadata, text encoding, creating and publishing transcriptions) require an expansion in the kind of scholarly work we value and reshaping relationship between producers and consumers of data. Simply waiting around for better data or better tools will make for both inferior tools and scholarship. While there are many examples of text creation projects—and such projects have produced excellent results—they tend to be specially grant-funded projects that create unnecessary labor bottlenecks. This model is wholly unsustainable. Worse yet, the products of such projects tend to reside in databases that we say are open, available, and connected, but are only trivially so, since so few people know about them or can access them.

imagining the future

If what I’ve described sounds like some fantasy utopia…let me reassure you: it is. But the imaginative possibilities are indeed tantalizing, and even such a utopian vision should guide our values and priorities. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but imagination is its milk.

Will our scholarship be reduced to overwrought font faces and massive visualizations that merely add knowledge without value?

With such a vastly accessible archive at our fingertips, Mike Witmore (who commented on the conference panel where an early version of this essay was presented) asked if we will lose our ability to ask good questions? Or will we simply be tinkering with texts because they are there? Will our questions still be meaningful? I interpret this as: Will our scholarship be reduced to overwrought font faces and massive visualizations that merely add knowledge without value? It remains to be seen, but I don’t think that fully exposing and connecting our early modern texts (and ways of accessing them) will jeopardize our critical faculties or ability to identify and frame interesting questions. Various digital humanities projects have already started to do that. As do new visualizations, a new kind of archive will facilitate new kinds of questions—ones that cannot possibly grow out of the textual archive the way we have traditionally organized it.

In terms of establishing values, our teaching is crucial. As educators of future early modernists, we have to increase awareness of and discuss new textual analytical techniques, and how to establish their requisite infrastructure (like metadata and the value of textual openness) in our courses. Furthermore, our teaching can contribute to the project of making more texts available and visible. We can take advantage of the necessary repetition that happens in both grad and undergrad training to shape the early modern archive into its most usable form. Ars longa, vita brevis. Other sessions have already suggested what a great process transcription is for teaching about editing and understanding the notion of a text.

As with our earlier letterpress printers, we’ll have our share of overly ornamented communication failures, where technological fascination obscures analytical objectives. And that’s okay. In a way that typical scholarship does not, we must embrace productive failure—tools, interfaces, processes that help us shape the resources at our disposal. Best practices for improving metadata or associating text with images are unclear: it’s not at all obvious whether we should be using Betamax or VHS right now. In the end, it doesn’t matter, as long as we must value the larger goals more than any particular technology.

We have to be thinking of books and texts not only in their contemporary contexts, but also in their modern digital contexts as well, and how we employ technologies to connect them to as many other relevant texts as possible (obvious: author, year, place, subject; cooler: word frequency, tone, style), and how we can profitably put these texts in conversation with each other. That is the organizational challenge ahead. At a superficial level, it’s not at all a new problem. Beneath the surface, though, it’s an entirely different kind of challenge that has the potential for an entirely new kind of early modern text and interpretations of it.

[This talk is a slightly revised version of a presentation from the 2012 Renaissance Society of America meeting in Washington, DC.]

Mark’s proposal highlighted for me two particular issues that warrant further discussion (as he intended), namely incentivizing participation in open peer review and the obligation of the review platform to facilitate that. Even though i disagree with Mark on a number of points, what follows is not intended as a criticism of the post itself—a deliberately rapid but insightful reaction to a Twitter flurry that followed the announcement about JDH itself—but a short stroll down the important path that Mark has thankfully pointed us down. In particular, i want to explore not only motivational forces, but also the nature and status of the scholarly work that open reviews can produce.

do we need to motivate peer review?

Rightly concerned with a principle obstacle to successful open peer review, Mark addresses the problem of providing motivation for diverse and qualified reviewers to do difficult and time consuming work (at least to do it well) who might not really get credit for doing it. With only a few hours per week for such work, how can such invisible labor be justified against the incessant ticking of a tenure or review clock? Or even other pressing deadlines? Even if we know that the work as useful and stimulating, why should it be a priority when it’s not properly recognized?

Mark offers an elegant plea that it is at least partially incumbent on the journal (or whatever) to incentivize and diversify the peer review process. One of his suggestions: badges. For roughly a zillion reasons that i won’t go into here, i remain highly skeptical of the utility and viability of badges. He might be right: something like badges could conceivably provide a tangible way to assess the productive contributions that an individual has made in evaluating and critiquing the work of colleagues. But Marks’s reason for writing, as I take it, isn’t to demand badges per se, but to highlight the need for a motivating force.

We should keep in mind, however, that contributions to an open peer review (even if not easily measured or validated) are already motivated by the grubby, practical realities of professionalization (thankfully made easier by a generally welcoming DH community). Participating publicly in the conversation, the critique, is a crucial form of community engagement (if not a kind of necessary performance) that is far from invisible. As Mark points out, knowledge creation doesn’t happen in solitary archives, but within broader communities. The open forum—and its space for insightful comments and questions—presents an almost unprecedented opportunity for preening. Akin to the really great question from an audience member that swivels heads after a conference paper (and perhaps is remembered even more than the paper itself), it affords one the chance to strut one’s stuff, so to speak. It helps establish one’s own value to a community. This very real value provides an indispensable foundation for many recommendations (either via formal letters or informal conversations), whether for a new job, tenure, or promotion. Furthermore, such public work can lead to more tangible opportunities as well, like collaborations on high-profile projects, solicitations for contributions to journals or edited volumes, etc—all of the kinds of measurable productivity that even most traditional evaluators want to see on a CV.

All this is to say that at least one major incentive (besides sheer altruism) that helps to cultivate a diverse pool of reviewers and fuel the review process itself already exists. This might be pointing out the obvious, but I would submit that this and other incentives (and their implications) are much more complex than we’ve appreciated so far. In general, we have not typically discussed how peer review participation fits into the larger structures of professionalization because, simply, it hasn’t. Peer review has remained a rather exclusionary tribal ritual where the elite exert a uni-directional downward force on the semi-initiated masses. Yet even as this begins to change in the wake of some early open peer review projects, there has not been much discussion (as Mark points out) about how to situate the products of peer review in a larger professional scholarly context. Of course it all starts with people making comments—so exactly what role should the review platform play in such considerations?

the role of the reviewer

A mechanism like badges—or any similar mechanism—places a significant onus on the review platform to facilitate—if not manage outright—some kind of participation metrics or credentialing process. Partially because of existing motive forces as explained above, I’m not yet convinced this is fully necessary. But it raises what seems to be a large and pressing question: What are the functional obligations of the journal or press that conducts open peer review?

DH projects have well demonstrated that “if you build it, they often don’t come.” Simply enabling and promoting open peer review is no recipe for either getting good comments or for changing the way such knowledge-work and community engagement can be appreciated. There can be little doubt that success in shifting (broader humanities) community values w/r/t open peer review will depend intimately on the aesthetics and interface design and functionality that creates a new kind of scholarly experience (more on why theory helps with this below). But thinking about particular functional or usability requirements that might help incentivize participation at the platform level cannot be our only (or perhaps even first) concern. In order to understand the functional obligations of the publisher and review platform, we need to understand the larger social obligations that such review work might create. As a start, i’d like to affirm the importance of the agency of the reviewer in promoting and establishing the value of review contributions. Up until now, this agency has been approximately zero. But that’s not the case anymore.

To complement Mark’s proposal, i would suggest that considerations of motivations and mechanisms for open peer review (and obligations of the platform) must go well beyond the review platform itself. For example, reviewers themselves might experiment with new approaches to presenting (dare i say marketing?) their review work. Of course it’s not the case that reviewers have simply been lazy about documenting their effort. Review work has remained invisible not just because of individual scholars, but because of the generally cloaked process of peer review, which has remained a highly mediated and private exchange. Open peer review, however, largely alliviates the expectation of future secrecy.

Reviewers who have done work they are proud of (even if unrecognized or unacknowledged) might, for example, cultivate something like a digital portfolio of their review contributions, each in a short (and i mean it!) essay form that describes the broader value of each review. Of course there is the issue of external validation of quality, a concern that something like badges might address in the way they could serve as a community nod to good work. But would such a mechanism be too abstract for its own good? Perhaps editors or authors whose work has been substantially improved by a reviewer could attest to such efficacy with a brief comment in the reviewer’s portfolio. Especially if from a major press or established scholar, could this be viable grist for the promotion committee’s mill? There are some reasons not to do this, not least of which is the extra work it would entail, but bear with me for a moment longer.

I wonder, too, if expectations that we might showcase our own value as a reviewer, and possibly solicit appraisals from relevant parties, wouldn’t help make our critical engagement with each other’s work—even while in progress (it’s like 95% done, right?)—much more permanent and useful. Perhaps we might think in terms of a new social contract of scholarly publishing that presents to readers not just a polished and vetted product (whether a book or blog post), but a glimpse into the forces that have shaped that product. Such machinations won’t always be interesting, but that’s where the magic of jQuery comes in.

Beyond visibility and transparency (to say nothing of the pedagogical potential here) the expectation that we should repackage our review contributions to get more credit for them might encourage reviewers to focus on broadly useful comments, whether concerning historiography, theory, practice, structure, or style. Not all comments should address only the big picture, obviously, but i would argue that most helpful, substantive comments (and ones we hope to get credit for) are more along those lines than of the line-item correction variety (and no, this does not disparage the difficult and under-appreciated work of quality copyediting). But has any scholar not received sadly myopic comments that threw the whole process of peer review into question? Admittedly, any sort of repackaging would be much easier when properly enabled by the review platform. And this emphasizes Mark’s larger aim in writing (in my view): the extent to which the review platform should provide such services (or badges) requires much more discussion.

At any rate, the broader point here is that open peer review affords us new ways of capturing and leveraging our critical engagement with each other’s work. As a result, we need to think more carefully about the lifecycle and status of our review work, even beyond how we might credential it at the site of production. At all levels of rethinking how to motivate and recognize reviewing efforts, we should be limited by creativity, not convention. We cannot simply appeal to existing procedures and venues; we might well need new ones.

where does it fit?

My remarks thus far have obviously privileged the spirit of discussion over practical solutions. As Mark immediately recognized, it’s a conversation well worth having. It will help establish conventions for not only how we can provide more effective critiques, but also how we can incorporate that work into a larger scholarly discourse. As past open review projects have demonstrated, some very insightful comments and discussions take place in the margins—sometimes just as valuable as the original piece.

But then shouldn’t we just do it? Do we really need to talk about doing it?

We might look to Salerno, Italy in second half of the twelfth century for an answer. (perhaps not the most obvious place, i know…) As theory-heavy Greek and Arabic medical (and other philosophical) works were translated into Latin, physicians struggled to assimilate and situate medical knowledge in the larger hierarchy of knowledge and to craft a curriculum for physicians studying at the burgeoning universities. Their main challenge was to address the theory/practice divide. Medicine was seen fundamentally as an art or craft and therefore had little place among the true sciences, like ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Bartholomaeus of Salerno, a physician and teacher who became one of the most influential leaders of the charge to legitimate medicine as a science (and thus worthy of a place in a university curriculum), argued successfully (not for the first time, but perhaps most influentially) that practice cannot exist without theory. This may sound absurd (as in: i do stuff all the time without having theorized about it beforehand!), but of course he was really saying that all practice is informed by theory whether we know how it is or not.

In terms of open peer review, we need to get clear about what we want (both socially and technically) out of new review practices, as well as how they should serve not only a publication and its readership, but also the process of knowledge production. I say “should” because such reflection might involve reshaping practices as much as appealing to them, as was the case at Salerno. And as Salernitan physicians (and their followers) did, we also must consider—and argue for—where review work should stand in the larger ecosystem (if not hierarchy) of scholarly discourse and knowledge. Is open peer review an opportunity to highlight some very important intellectual work that we’ve kept under the table? Is it best left by the wayside? Should our professional websites aggregate and highlight our public review work that can be supported/verified by the community? Would this help or hinder either the quality or quantity of reviews?

Hashing out our underlying needs and wants and the causal forces that will drive them (ie theorizing about best practices) will help ensure that we don’t see our open peer review efforts as deterministically and self-evidently improving peer review by dint of their mere existence. Instead we’ll be able to deliberately pursue and defend targeted strategies to make the entire process and its products more useful, sustainable, and transformative both within and without the digital humanities community.

This [original] post is a moderately revised version of a talk I gave as part of MITH’s Digital Dialogues series, titled “Criticism in the Digital Humanities.” The original audio and slides have been posted; this version has benefitted from the thoughtful questions and comments that followed my presentation. Many thanks to MITH for both warm hospitality and provocative discussion.

My interest in the role and nature of criticism in the Digital Humanities grows out of a question that Alan Liu has asked in a few places this year: Where is the cultural criticism in the digital humanities? Although i’m not convinced that DH needs its own brand of cultural criticism beyond what its constituents would normally do as humanists, the question resonated with me because it made me wonder (with only silence to follow): where is the criticism in the digital humanities?

My ideas center around 3 main points that i’ll very briefly sketch out here.

1) DHers have not created an effective critical discourse around their work.
By this i don’t mean that we haven’t gone far enough in publicly trashing each others’ goals and results. Nor do i mean simply that there hasn’t been enough peer review (though it’s true). Rather, i suggest that DH criticism needs to go beyond typical peer review and inhabit a genre of its own—a critical discourse—that itself provides a valuable service both inside and outside the community. More importantly, criticism and the intellectual work that it does makes the value of our work clearer to those outside of the DH community.

2) To achieve more effective criticism, we need more rubrics for evaluating DH work.
Although scholarly communication and peer review have been highly active topics in DH circles for several years, especially this last one, i haven’t seen truly useful evaluative criteria emerge from these discussions that appreciate the differences between digital and traditional work (not that there is a strict dichotomy). If some are around, they’re not nearly as pervasive as they need to be. Everyone in the field knows that the most innovative DH projects cannot be fully evaluated through the traditional, critical, and theoretical lenses of the humanities. But what lenses do we have? How do we know when to use them? How can we help others outside the field use them?

3) DH work requires a different kind of peer review to produce effective criticism.
Effective single-author reviews are almost an impossible expectation given the complexity of most DH work. A new peer review that’s based on a new kind of collaborative, self-mediated peer review will make for much more effective criticism. Not only do we need a more crystallized rubric, but new models of publishing now require a fundamentally new kind of peer review—and i don’t mean simply online peer review or open peer review, two efforts that i think have gotten the lion’s share of (much-needed) attention when it comes to reforming antiquated review processes. The multifaceted nature of DH requires a different kind of critique than is typical in the humanities because it puts rather unique demands on both critics and criticism itself.

I: towards a critical discourse

We all know that disciplinary boundaries are notoriously difficult to define. Yet they do somehow exist beyond professional titles and departmental affiliations. This boundary problem also gives rise to the question of whether there is any real difference between the humanities and the digital humanities—an interminable debate that need not detain us now. It will suffice for present purposes to say that digital humanities is different enough from the analog humanities, at least at the moment. But allow me a brief moment of justification that will be important later on. The digital humanities are of course not fundamentally different in any larger epistemological or hermeneutic sense from the humanities at large. Both are fueled by humanistic inquiry about the human condition and good stuff like that. But there are lots of different methodologies, many objects of study, and many ways of writing about them. Why should the digital be any different?

Part of what defines a discipline is its rhetoric and the aesthetics of its scholarly discourse. Philosophy texts sound different from history texts, which sound different from literary analysis. These differences become especially apparent during collaborative projects. As much as we champion cross-disciplinary work, there is an inherent unease to it, in no small part because it becomes harder to tell how to evaluate it. Given a particular piece of scholarship: How should one read it? Which criteria should be applied? Of course these lines in the sand are easily blurred and effectively dissolve if one looks too closely. But in the larger view, they’re there.

If rhetoric and aesthetics can help characterize and delineate different kinds scholarly work, it’s manifest to no small degree by a critical discourse shaped by community consensus, convention, and by defining practical and theoretical ideals. One major way in which DH is in fact separate from the humanities (again, at least for now) is in that it requires new ways of evaluating very complex work in terms that are often unfamiliar to most humanists.

One major way in which DH is in fact separate from the humanities (again, at least for now) is in that it requires new ways of evaluating very complex work in terms that are often unfamiliar to most humanists.

One of my favorite illustrations of this is William Thomas’s article, “Writing a Digital History Journal Article from Scratch.” The article is from 2007, but describes events that seem ancient now, circa 2003. How did analog historians critique history scholarship in the form of a website? Despite the project’s many virtues, reviewers could only wonder what it did better than the standard practice, and whether “the rewards [of the electronic article] were simply not commensurate with the effort and confusion involved.” Well, it was a long time ago, you say. Agreed. But i’m not sure that a similar exercise today would yield significantly different criticism from a non-DH audience. There is indeed more sensitivity to digital work, but the work itself has gotten considerably more complex as well.

This is not to criticize the average humanist for not knowing the value of normalized datasets, relational databases, or valid XML. This is to say that those who do know their value haven’t been particularly clear about why these things are useful in the context that they are employed. What we might perceive as ignorance on the part of reviewers is at least in part because the rhetoric and aesthetics of DH work is not particularly well established. In other words, the critical sphere has not yet materialized.

Why might this be? One reason for difficulty in fostering a critical discourse might center around the nature of the DH community—a rallying point for many, if not most, self-proclaimed digital humanists. As a community, we’ve been encouraging and supportive, tending to include and welcome everyone with open arms. The Big Tent theme from the 2011 Digital Humanities Conference suggest it’s ongoing. Such an approach has been essential and ultimately very successful in terms of broadening the scope and influence of the field. This should, and hopefully will, continue.

However, such strong community solidarity and support may inadvertently curtail public criticism. This is not to say that we should become rude, exclusionary, and inwardly hostile. But we can’t be unhappy that tradition-bound hiring committees, promotion and tenure committees, deans, and other humanists don’t appreciate the value of our work when we haven’t really outlined how it’s different and how it should be appreciated. In other words, we haven’t provided a public critical discourse that offers the traditional signals to those who are not expert as to what work is good and what is not—and thus serves as a compass for practitioners, critics, and outsiders alike.

We haven’t provided a public critical discourse that offers the traditional signals to those who are not expert as to what work is good and what is not—and thus serves as a compass for practitioners, critics, and outsiders alike.

In sum, DH needs more critical theory that grows out of its own work and also from farther afield, drawing on critical methods from those working in new media and history of technology, as well as platform, hardware, and software studies.

Post-talk chatter via Twitter prompts me to clarify two important points: To argue for a critical discourse is not to suggest that DH projects are inherently flawed and must offer more tempered epistemological claims and greater transparency—and that they should be criticized when they don’t. Good criticism will, of course, address these issues, but that’s not really the point here. Criticism serves a much larger role beyond pointing out flaws, as i try to argue in the following section. I should also emphasize that to suggest that there is an insufficient critical discourse surrounding DH work does not inherently suggest that DHers are uncritical idiots. We’ve all criticized projects, approaches, results, and what-have-you behind closed doors. We always want learn from and improve upon past work; we all think carefully about how to do our best work and sound scholarship. But the most useful critical discourse is a public one. Exactly what constitutes the sound scholarship that we want to do (and actually do) is not nearly as apparent to others, especially those outside the DH community, as it should be. It befalls the producers of that good scholarship to explain what is and what is not considered good, and why.

II. the value of criticism

What is the function of the critical discourse? Certainly not for simply lambasting each other’s work. Criticism is fundamentally about interpretation. It outlines utility and value, blemishes and flaws; it identifies sources, commonalities, and missed opportunities. It points out true innovation when it’s perhaps not obvious that paint slopped onto a canvas is actually worth thinking about. It points out when success claims point to little more than—to adapt a phrase from Michael Joyce—technological frosting on a stale humanities cake.

This is just one instance where a critical discourse for DH would be far more valuable than grant applications that sell potential work and post-facto white papers that champion whatever work happened to get completed.

Have we not all not seen intriguing, if not jaw-dropping, visualizations that made virtually no sense? Of course the real thrill of these is to recognize the beauty in that some obscene amount of data could be viewed in a small space, possibly interactively. Anyone who’s even thought about trying it knows how difficult it is. But what does everyone else think? We need to discuss, for example, the value of being able to automate the creation of such visuals apart from the communication that happens as a result of their design. Is this a methodological triumph, or an interpretive one? How can an explanation of the creation of such visuals ease fears of black-box manipulation? This is just one instance where a critical discourse for DH would be far more valuable than grant applications that sell potential work and post-facto white papers that champion whatever work happened to get completed. We need more than traditional journal articles that describe the so-called “real” humanities research that came out of digital projects.

Perhaps most importantly, as I’ve already suggested, criticism serves a crucial signaling function. Matthew Arnold in his The Function of Criticism at the Present Time defined it as “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known as thought in the world.” (1864/5, 75) I think that this pretty well describes what we need to do. The staggering rate of DH project abandonment has caused some alarm of late. We’re painfully aware that most academics aren’t that good at marketing beyond their disciplinary peers. Criticism selects and propagates projects that deserve merit and to serve as models. To continue with the previous example, we need criticism that praises technological achievement of visualizing, while condemning poor design practices; we need criticism that lauds the interpretive potential while critiquing the extent to which anyone can use the methodology. Again, the point of such criticism isn’t to ridicule or minimize difficult work, but to advance the field.

Of course criticism has to be good and original, not dogmatic. Irving Howe, the influential cultural critic from the mid-20th century, remarked that “power of insight counts far more than allegiance to a critical theory or position…No method can give the critic what he needs most: knowledge, disinterestedness, love, insight, style.” It’s not easy to have these! But when someone does, and can write clearly, the resulting criticism performs extremely valuable scholarly work—work that goes far beyond the original project, but makes it even more useful at the same time. Such criticism is especially good at establishing and debating terms of how to analyze a particular work. This discourse of critique where new standards get hammered out. It’s the connective tissue of projects that pronouncements from on-high simply cannot have.

so what do we look for?
This last year in particular has seen much energetic rethinking of scholarly publishing. Part of this discussion recognizes that what we’re publishing is different. There is the MLA site that outlines types of digital work;  guidelines for evaluating digital work. To their credit, the MLA has been one of the most visible scholarly societies in facilitating these kinds of discussion. BUT, here and elsewhere, the focus has remained on getting non-print work recognized and promoting the value of process over results.

These were important arguments to make (and to continue in some cases), but we have to go beyond that now as well. Even if digital work is more acceptable, we haven’t really created sufficient guidelines for evaluating digital work (broadly defined) on its own terms. As far as the MLA goes, the guidelines for evaluating digital work are not all that different from evaluating analog work. On one hand, that is exactly their point! On the other hand, it’s perhaps a bit counter-productive because it doesn’t consider what’s unique about digital work. More helpful, i think, are NINES guidelines for peer review. But they are at once too general to enable rigorous criticism, and too specific to NINES projects. They are, however, an excellent starting point.

I’d like to outline a few very general criteria that might be broadly applicable to digital work, as disparate as it can be. Certainly this list is not comprehensive, but rather a starting point. I won’t dwell on them here; i don’t pretend to have all the answers. I only hope that this list can serve as a small step in furthering the discussion.

Transparency

“I used a certain proprietary tool to get this complicated visualization that took a gazillion hours to encode everything in my own personal schema–I won’t bore you with the details–but here’s what we learn…”

Can we really understand what’s going on? If not, it’s not good scholarship. “I used a certain proprietary tool to get this complicated visualization that took a gazillion hours to encode everything in my own personal schema–I won’t bore you with the details–but here’s what I learned from the diagram…” This cannot be considered good scholarship, no matter what the conclusions are. It’s like not having footnotes. Even though we don’t check footnotes, generally, we like to think that we can. So it’s natural to expect resistance when the footnote resembles a black box. DHers have gained some traction in encouraging others to value process over product. Transparency helps us to evaluate whether a process is really innovative or helpful, or if it’s just frosting.

Reusability

Discussion about what must be and what cannot be reusable will get worked out in a vibrant critical discourse about both concrete work and in abstract theoretical terms.

Can people take away what you’ve done and apply it to existing or future projects? This embodies so much of what is central to the ethos of the community. We’re always looking for better ways of doing things. This applies to methodology, code, and data; it applies also to both process and product. It creates interesting gray area for generalized tools. Are these to be shared? For now, i would say: absolutely! It’s part of the effort, as Matthew Arnold put it, to propagate the best. Obviously, not everything is reusable, but discussion about what must be and what cannot be are important theoretical positions that will get worked out in a vibrant critical discourse about both concrete work and in abstract theoretical terms.

Data

It’s not good enough to point people towards a raw data source only to say: “well, I cleaned this up, standardized it, reformatted it…but I’m going to keep that work invisible and hoard it.” It’s like footnotes without page numbers.

Needless to say, most if not all DH projects rely on data. It must be available! Not just for retesting, but for use in other places. Exactly how data should look is far from obvious. If nothing else, discussing a project’s use of data will encourages conversations about ownership, copyright, the limits of what can be shared, and so on. Those issues are becoming more relevant than ever as we create new research corpora that bridge historically separate datasets. I think that a critical discourse about our projects is a fruitful venue for this, and perhaps more effective on the ground than more abstract, theoretical proclamations (like this essay…). It’s unacceptable to just simply keep our data hidden to avoid the difficult issues. In reality, it’s necessary sometimes. But it’s not good enough to point people towards a raw data source only to say: “well, I cleaned this up and standardized it, and reformatted it…but I’m going to keep this work invisible and hoard it.” It’s like footnotes without page numbers.

Design

Design is not only graphic in nature: it must also apply to the decisions behind database design, encoding, markup, code, etc.

There is great value, I think, in representing humanities scholarship in non-traditional forms. We’re seeing more scholarship online, and new kinds of “publications”. However, academic convention dictates that—it least in terms of scholarly content—we privilege content over form. In reality there is a palpable tension between the separation of content and form. On one hand, especially in the context of new media, web design separates these; on the other hand, as McLuhan pointed out long ago: the medium is the massage. Even more broadly, by ‘design,’ i really mean organizing principles. Why is a particular design strategy the best one or not? DH projects might be more explicit about such choices, but certainly our critique of such work must address these issues as well. Design is not only graphic in nature: it must also apply to the decisions behind database design, encoding, markup, code, etc.

III: New kinds of peer review / criticism

Again, my point isn’t just that DH projects should embrace these values. Obviously, many already do. My point is that they need to get critiqued explicitly and publicly. But how do we really DO it?

As everyone is well aware, the nature of publishing has changed; we now do many digital projects that are never really done or officially published (with an imprimatur of review and vetting and so on). This means that the typical review process has been turned on its head. Getting a grant is too often an end in itself, taken to justify even the completed work. But this signing-off by the scholarly community happens before any work gets done. While traditional scholarship (books and articles) is held accountable to its stated goals and methodologies (as far as the medium permits), digital projects have not had that accountability from the scholarly community. This is a grave disservice in two ways: Projects learn less from each other, and projects remain isolated from relevant scholarly discourse.

It may sound as if i’m simply advocating for more peer review, and conversations about scholarly communication have often made similar suggestions. For example, in late spring of this year, Jennifer Howard wrote a very nice piece for the Chronicle titled “No Reviews of Digital Scholarship = No Respect.” The gist of the article is evident from the title. She ends by saying that scholarly societies and editors of traditional journals need to step up and encourage this work. I think that this has been a popular viewpoint.

Obviously, i agree with Howard’s point that peer review is necessary for legitimization. However, while change on the part of societies and journals would be nice, i think that is entirely incumbent on the practitioners to set the terms. Let’s not wait for a few gatekeepers to dictate terms to us. More importantly, i’m not sure that getting a formal review and thus the imprimatur of serious scholarship is enough. Let’s be honest: we do need more peer review! But that’s not all. We need a fundamentally different kind of peer review. Just as the nature of publishing is changing, the nature of peer review must evolve, especially for large DH projects, but even individual ones as well. Digital humanities work requires a different kind of criticism than most academic criticism because of the very nature of the work. DH projects often serve much broader audiences, and embody interdisciplinary in a way that eludes traditional models of critique.

As a way of fostering useful criticism, peer review needs be more collaborative than before. I mentioned earlier the unease of situating interdisciplinary work in professional pigeon holes. It makes for difficult reviews as well, which need to be collaborative in two ways:

• More people to review individual projects. How many people can really critique various facets of a digital humanities project, when they range from graphic design, interface design, code, encoding standards, etc. Even if one could, it’s a herculean task not befitting the typical lone reviewer
• Collaborate to organize these reviews. Given the nature of complex publishing models of DH projects, why not move away from editor-mediated peer review, which minimizes the public effect of the critique? What is the code like? What is the data like? What conversations is it trying to join? What work does it enable at either methodological or interpretive levels?

Furthermore, it is incumbent upon the projects to build time for these critiques into grants and get this feedback during and after the project. They should get not just empty, laudatory critiques but ones that try to shape the project in productive, if challenging, ways. They should be published as part of the project, as it helps to foster a vibrant critical discourse is crucial. DH work is often iterative in nature, and the review process needs to be as well. Just as digital humanities projects are inherently more public than the typical humanities project, everyone benefits when their critiques are more public.

A project without accountability, without connectedness, without critique, simply fills another plot in the DH project graveyard.

Funders need to broaden expectations of sustainability beyond access and infrastructure, to include also how a project situates itself within the larger scholarly discourse. In other words, projects need a social contract to the broader scholarly community, not just funder. Funders must prioritize and encourage public critiques as a way of establishing scholarly value, rather than through grant selection alone. A project without accountability, without connectedness, without critique, simply fills another plot in the DH project graveyard.

Not only do we need to do this ourselves, but it needs to be part of the DH curriculum. It seems like there’s a new slate of DH classes each year, if not each semester. These courses need to explicitly teach critical methods for the unique issues in confronting DH work. Both theory and practice is essential here. We must have more than gossipy complaints that don’t go beyond the classroom walls, or vapid reviews that fill the backs of most printed journals. Good criticism is very difficult. Students need practice pointing out what’s good and lacking in a project in a way that benefits both the project and the average humanist who needs to understand (and not just evaluate) it.

IV: lastly

The criteria i mentioned (transparency, reusability, data, design) operate in a larger theoretical framework as well. We can benefit, i think, from considering an adaptation of a well-known diagram of criticism from M. H. Abrams. With DH work at the center, four proximal spheres of criticism might guide our approach. The formalist critique examines the form of the work, examining how well its structure, form, and design serve its purpose in the context of similar works; didactic criticism focuses on the ability for the work to reach, inform, and educate an audience; mimetic criticism might evaluate how well the DH work is truly humanist work or facilitates it (this replaces “universe” in the original diagram); expressive critique discuss how the work reflects the unique characteristics and style of the creator(s). Here the “team” anchor replaces the original “artist” label, but only reluctantly, since DH projects require, as I have argued, a more complex kind of criticism than the typical scholarly work, perhaps one more akin to literary criticism. Of course these spheres are not entirely separate. Throughout each of them, for instance, we must remember that code and metadata, as well as data and whatever structures govern it, are not entirely objective entities but are informed, attacked, and defended by ideology and theory. Perhaps not to the same extent as a work of art, but they matter and they need to be discussed. These spheres of criticism are of course applicable to any humanities research; they are especially crucial to digital work when so much of it is misunderstood.

In the end, I hope I’ve suggested how it would be useful for our projects to have their own kind of critical discourse that will do the essential work of outlining what’s good and why. My remarks and exhortation to criticism should absolutely not be taken as any kind of attack on the worth or value of the Digital Humanities or its practitioners. Obviously, i am offering criticism of existing practices (including my own), but only because I want the DH community to enjoy even greater, more efficient success and broader acceptance within the humanities at large. A more sophisticated critical discourse seems like one productive, if not essential, avenue towards those goals.

There have been some very good digital humanities definition pieces recently (those by Rafael Alvarado and Matt Kirschenbaum spring to mind). But many of the longer ones, as smart and provocative as they are, often muddy the introductory waters more than clarify them. Sometimes that’s precisely their point, but I’m always on the lookout for a reductionist, well-precipitated overview mixture for my class (and for myself, when I get confused) that can be progressively dissolved into a more homogenous solution. I wanted a list of acceptable DH definitions that was as simple as possible—but no simpler—from the community itself. Even better, i wanted a shortlist of types of definitions that sketch out the contours of the field.

For this kind of exercise, there’s no better resource than the TAPoR wiki on “How do you Define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities?“, which presents pithy definitions from ~170 people, who for one reason or another were compelled (thankfully) to offer their own take on the nature of digital humanities or humanities computing. The format surely encouraged sound bites rather than nuanced formulations, but the quick take still reveals the sentiment of the community—perhaps better than longer essays would have. What follows is my categorization of the responses from 2011. I raced through these at the end of #clioF11(tues)’s first meeting, so I post them here mostly as a reference for my whiplashed students. But I’d love to know if anyone else finds it useful.

At first glance, it appeared that the fascinating but disparate variety of responses more closely resembled an unruly pile of pick-up sticks than any useful guide to the DH community. After a bit more perusing, however, i found that the definitions could be cleanly sorted into a relatively small number of categories. Needless to say, my scheme is neither the only possible grouping, nor necessarily the best. But i found mutually exclusive sorting to be simple and easy, perhaps an indicator that i wasn’t being too arbitrary or forceful. Surprisingly few definitions landed on the boundaries between categories. In those cases i filed them under what i took to be the predominant sentiment. A handful responses that did not seem to really say anything (besides explicit refusals to offer a definition) were left uncategorized (my working label was “what?”).

Due to a few tricky category decisions, categorical gray areas (though i tried to minimize possible overlap), and arithmetic failure, the numbers themselves are meaningless as precise counts. But i think that they are rather suggestive and illustrative as to how the Wiki contributors see the field. What’s most interesting is how the relatively few categories themselves grew organically from the responses—with what i consider very little invention on my part.

The Categories (and some observations)

55 – variation on “the application of technology to humanities work”
22 – working with digital media or a digital environment
15 – minimize the difference between DH and humanities
12 – umbrella or blanket nature of DH label; issues that humanists now face
12 – using digital AND studying digital
12 – refusals to define the term
10 – methods AND community
9 – digitization / archives
9 – studying the digital

The most popular response—the application of technology to humanities work—was unsurprising to say the least. It is perhaps worth noting that phrases like “application of technology to humanities work” were about 3 times as common as those like “intersection of technology and the humanities”. Either way, i still can’t shake a vague unease about defining DH in such broad technology terms (the umbrella responses described below focused less on technology per se), and i think it raises important questions about the nature of how much technology (given its pervasive nature) needs to explicitly figure into the digital humanities. As other respondents hinted: isn’t everyone using technology in the humanities these days? And increasingly so? Perhaps it’s innovative use that’s important (as Doug Reside suggests), but isn’t innovation always required in scholarly pursuits? Or maybe we just need to be technologically innovative w/r/t the analog humanities? But does a technology emphasis detract from the humanistic value of our work, and shift the focus to research methodologies rather than results?

Reluctance to foreground research (dare i say computing?) over communication and workflows perhaps led some respondents to emphasize the use of digital media, or publishing and collaborating in new media environments. Though responses took the nature of “the digital” as crucial to DH, ranging widely across the spheres of publishing and networking within humanistic scholarship. Obviously there is a fine (if extant) line between using new media and using technology. But i think the responses—in both spirit and language—warrant separate categories between using technology and using digital media, even if that difference can be considered one of emphasis rather than of kind.

The next cluster of four categories, most explicitly the (usually glib) refusals, foreground the difficulty in crafting any kind of definition. Others responded more thoroughly, and more helpfully, but refused to differentiate digital humanities from the humanities at large. This is a valid point, but to hold this position is to suggest that DHers don’t have any different kind of concerns (methodological, theoretical, practical, professional) than anyone else in the humanities. This doesn’t seem to be true right now. Truer to the status quo, in my opinion, were the several responses in that same category that emphasized the (ideally) fleeting nature of any difference between the digital humanities and the humanities—that is, digital humanities as the future of the humanities; different in some ways now, but not fundamentally so. Or, perhaps digital humanities is simply akin to new media in that its core characteristics ride the wave of technological change.

The responses I have labeled as umbrella- or blanket-like, I think are some of the most helpful because they pursued a discriminatory inclusivity—a middle ground between open arms and gate-keeping—that embraced the variety of issues that digital humanists like to talk about (in addition to new research methods and digital media of the other categories) like copyright, access to information, curation and use of digital resources, publishing, and so on, without making it inordinately difficult to think of something that wasn’t included under the DH tent.

A solid group of responses must be located at the intersection of using the digital and studying the digital. In a way, this group overlaps with the “applying technology” group, but are singled out here for the insistence that studying the effects of the digital is just as important as using it. These two efforts might well be two shows under the same DH tent with different performers and audiences. Whether this is mutually beneficial or distracting remains an open question, i think.

Not surprisingly, community and methodology tended to get mentioned together; i wouldn’t characterize any definition as pointing to one without the other. But it isn’t just methods that make the community, either: respondents rightly and broadly construed “methods” as ranging over various aspects of research, teaching, and broader communication, all the while embracing the variety of methodological approaches that their colleagues take. To me, this suggests that the community has some autonomous existence outside of methodological similarities.

Responses that foregrounded digitization or studying the digital (without consideration for the affect on humanities scholarship itself) thankfully received the fewest nods. At least as formulated on the wiki, these definitions were the most restrictive, and in many ways fundamentally contrary to the general sentiment of the community about what kinds of efforts really characterize the digital humanities. This is not to say that digitization efforts and the corresponding challenges are not to be included as part of the digital humanities (they are!), but that a useful definition must be more inclusive.

Some representative (usually short) examples of the categories:

some variation of “the application of technology to the humanities”

The intersection of humanities and computer technologies -Lorna Richardson, UCL, UK

Digital humanities is the intersection of work in the humanities (research, teaching, writing) with technology (tools, networks, interactions), when the practitioner is consciously exploring a humanistic subject and a technological method, at the same time. -Elli Mylonas, Brown University, United States

Digital Humanities are the application and the use of computing tecnologies for the research, teaching and investigation in the disciplines of the humanities. -Ali Albarran, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

5 responses included in the above category emphasized computing

Using computational tools to do the work of the humanities. -John Unsworth, University of Illinois, USA

The theorizing, developing and application of/on computational techniques to humanities subjects. -Edward Vanhoutte, Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies / Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Belgium

Use of digital media/medium/environment

Anything a Humanities scholar does that is mediated digitally, especially when such mediation opens discussion beyond a small circle of academic specialists. -David Wacks, University of Oregon, USA

The performance of humanities related activities in, through and with digital media. -Christopher Long, Penn State University, USA

For me, but this is very specific, Digital Humanities is to interconnect humanities researchers, software developers and infrastructure providers in order to contribute to the research and the research possibilties in this discipline. -Douwe Zeldenrust, Meertens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), The Netherlands

Emphasis on its umbrella or blanket nature

I think of digital humanities as an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of digital work in the humanities: development of multimedia pedagogies and scholarship, designing & building tools, human computer interaction, designing & building archives, etc. DH is interdisciplinary; by necessity it breaks down boundaries between disciplines at the local (e.g., English and history) and global (e.g., humanities and computer sciences) levels. -Kathie Gossett, Old Dominion Univ, USA

We use “digital humanities” as an umbrella term for a number of different activities that surround technology and humanities scholarship. Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others. -Brett Bobley, NEH, United States

Refusals

With extreme reluctance. -Lou Burnard, UK

I hate this question, and I don’t have an answer for it. Neither, it seems, does a large portion of the people who might be called Digital Humanists. I’ll leave it at that. -Justin Tonra, University of Virginia, USA

Studying the digital

An area of study that focuses on the digital in our daily lives–how we study, think, and interact. -Pollyanna Macchiano, , US

Digital Humanities is the acknowledgement that human creativity is, for the moment, deeply entangled with our technological tools and networks. The media extensions cannot be separated from our reality. -Anastasia Salter, University of Baltimore, USA

explicitly using digital AND studying digital

I am currently using a short definition, which is that Digital Humanities is a combination of using computer technologies to study human cultures and studying the effect of computer technologies on human cultures. -Scott Kleinman, California State University, Northridge, USA

I see ‘Digital Humanities’ as an umbrella term for two different but related developments:1) Humanities Computing (the specialist use of computing technology to undertake Humanities research) and 2) the implications for the Humanities of the social revolution created by ubiquitous computing and online access. Since the late Noughties the latter seems to have become the driving force in DH with responsibility for much of the ‘boom’ in public interest and funding. -Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, UK

method AND community

It is both a methodology and a community. -Jason Farman, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Somewhere between a toolset and a mindset, to do DH is to confront the assumptions and implications of the long analog history of the word. -Matthew Fisher, UCLA, USA

The digital humanities is a name claimed by a community of those interested in digital methodologies and/or content in the humanities. -Rebecca Davis, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, United States

Minimal difference between DH and humanities

“We don’t distinguish digital sociology or digital astronomy, so why digital humanities? Just because computers are involved doesn’t mean the basic nature of the subject area is any different than it has been been traditionally.”

Digital Humanities is, increasingly, just Humanities – as far as I’m concerned. New tools lead to new methodologies, new perspectives, and new questions that all humanists should be aware of and concerned with. -Benjamin Albritton, Stanford University, USA

Humanities gone digital and vice versa -Anna Caprarelli, università degli studi della Tuscia (Viterbo), Italy

5 included in the above category emphasized the fleeting nature of any present difference

A name that marks a moment of transition; the current name for humanities inquiry driven by or dependent on computers or digitally born objects of study; a temporary epithet for what will eventually be called merely Humanities. -Mark/Marino, University of Southern California, USA

Digital Humanities is what humanities will be in the future. It is public, dialogical, collaborative and made of collectives. It allows for remixing and re-imagining how we think and analyze traditional forms of knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge storage. -Jade E. Davis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Focus on Digitization and Archives

Digital libraries are a great example of an outcome of Digital Humanities. The interaction and combination of the new digital era with history, librarianship, literature, etc. gives a wider frame for researchers of all different branches to work in. Now the full texts of important writers are just a click away! -Ines Jerele, National and University Library, Slovenia, Slovenia

Developing tools and workflows to create comprehensive, interoperable, and innovative digital resources. -Jennifer Stertzer, Papers of George Washington, University of Virginia, USA

So what?

The categories here are hardly surprising. More interesting, to me at least, was that one needs only a handful of categories to cleanly parse so many formulations; and these categories deliberately highlighted rather subtle differences in definitions.

Even if attempts at constructing (and reading) definitions grow tired, periodically taking the pulse of the DH community seems worthwhile in that it reflects both recent and future developments in how the field is being shaped by those who consider itself its practitioners. Scholarly legitimacy, for which DH work seems continually reaching, requires some disciplinary boundaries, at least for now. Without it, people who will make important judgments and decisions about our scholarship, funding, and jobs cannot properly evaluate our proposed or completed work (hence Matt Kirschenbaum’s apt definition of DH as a “term of tactical convenience”). Feeling out boundaries is not always fun. I admit that I vacillate between wanting to draw some disciplinary lines in the sand, to pee on some research hydrants, and to simply throw up my hands in the face of an utterly pointless and futile debate.

The relatively few categories suggest some important questions: Are all of the definitions and their crucial qualities (community, communication, methodology, digitization, etc) worth equal emphasis? Are some more representative of “the field” as it is or as it should be? Perhaps the DH label has gotten enough traction within the broader community that the more pressing question is: what should NOT be included within the big tent of the digital humanities? That’s the subject for a different essay, of course.

Although I haven’t attempted a comparison to 2010, my sense from the definitions (especially with the many references to digital media and studying the digital) was that the field seems to be sending out tendrils in all directions, and in particular moving away from its original Humanities Computing roots. I couldn’t make a cruder measure, but i found it interesting that “computing” appears about 30 times among 170 total responses in 2011, and about 40 times among 70 total responses in 2010.

In the end

I must tip my cap to Eric Forcier, whose reply adroitly eschews disciplinary rigor in favor of admirably capturing the spirit of the DH community—especially in painting DH as an ephemeral, seemingly idiosyncratic curiosity that either attracts or repels people, and often changes them fundamentally:

When I first applied to this grad program, my understanding of what DH was all about was crystalline in its purity. Not so today. My idea of DH is that it’s sort of like a highway oil slick on a sunny day. When you look at the slick, depending on the angle, you might get a psychedelic kaleidoscope of reflected colours; if you’re lucky you might spot your reflection in it; then again, all you might see is darkness. And if you feel compelled to step in it, don’t be surprised if you slip. Those stains will not come out. -Eric Forcier, University of Alberta, Canada

On this issue I have remained on the fence for some time, but as I continue to experiment with various text mining projects, and continue to fiddle with my digital history course, I am now convinced that basic techniques for data manipulation should be taught as part of the humanities curriculum. Firstly, it’s as fundamental as any other skill related to reading texts (broadly conceived), including sorting and organizing source material. Of course not all humanists use texts as their primary object of inquiry, but because textual sources often feature prominently (if not exclusively) in research, humanists in general have much to gain by learning how to manipulate the growing body of digital texts with simple but powerful tools. Secondly, not only is data manipulation not antithetical to humanistic research methodology, but it facilitates exactly what the humanities are about: embracing multiple perspectives and engaging with source material in multiple ways. As more and more sources become available online as data (not just as images), humanists need tools to manage and explore it. As Ann Blair has recently described of the early modern period, information overload is hardly a new problem. But if the problem of abundance worries the humanist who relies on project-delimiting scarcity, it is a problem to be embraced rather than avoided.

Stephen Ramsay’s provocative post on using the command line (and a follow up) extols the freedom one gains from not being limited to any particular graphical interface. The command line is “faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps.” I fully support Ramsay’s energetic and engaging plea to be more efficient and autonomous with our digital tools. (I often wonder why more people don’t learn simple keyboard shortcuts for things they do all the time…) But his comparison of the command line and graphical interfaces can sound like a replacement argument that may simply be going too far for most humanists. Design matters—especially for new or infrequent tasks and for visual learners—and minimizing the impact of design because the result is faster and simpler does not make processes more efficient in terms of practical use.

Even if I disagree with the extent of Ramsay’s argument, his point about flexibility is spot on. Whether with the command line as he argues, or, as I argue here—with basic tools and techniques for manipulating texts—researchers gain much greater freedom of exploration. Humanists should not be limited to whatever texts are easily viewable, physically or digitally. Nor should they be limited to using only those texts that are digitally findable or available for download. But one cannot simply ignore them. The combinatorial approach is obviously most powerful here. Furthermore, it is no secret that libraries and archives struggle mightily against budget (and many other) constraints to digitize and to make archival and textual data available to us. We cannot also expect them to provide and maintain comprehensive and intuitive interfaces to access and manipulate that data as well.

Is data manipulation really necessary, though? It’s as necessary as any other methodology we learn. Humanists spend inordinate amounts of time learning how to read texts and how to read between the lines in case their research brings them to certain kinds of sources. We learn how to search, how to identify and explore relevant contexts, and how to fairly extrapolate (or do i mean create?) evidence from the tiniest molecule in a primordial semiotic soup. This isn’t limited to literal texts. Images, art, film, games, and of course the conventional text: each of these has ‘textual’ challenges, but we are trained to deal with them to the extent they are relevant for our research interests. But what happens when we have more sources that we can really deal with by hand? Can we just zero in on the sections that are most relevant? What can we see, not with beautiful visualizations, but simply reformatting a text file to highlight different aspects of it? Like reading 10,000 documents 50 different times, looking for something else each time…but in a few hours. Simple scripting tools give us amazingly powerful tools for this—tools that complement methods we already use.

This freedom to explore sources can be wickedly addictive. Recently, after offering some basic CSS training to a former student who was curious but knew nothing about it, I was reminded of one of the reasons that I’ve always enjoyed learning rudimentary scripting languages and why I’m going to teach them from now on: Even the tiniest ability to make a computer do what one wants rather than only what software allows is tremendously empowering. This experience alone could encourage more historians to take up new digital methodologies; the reason for incorporating scripting and manipulation techniques into courses isn’t necessarily to impart any particular technical skill. Learning any particular scripting language is far less important than taking steps to unlock exploratory potential that really allows you to dig into the new kinds of research questions that everyone has been promising for so many years. Unfortunately, it seems that the rhetoric about new possibilities is far more prominent in project grants than in humanities courses. Humanists get excited about complex tools that can do new things, but then lament that they cannot really use them in they way they need to.

Isn’t writing code just too technical for a historian? I could answer ‘no’, but in fact I reject the premise of the question: that somehow the level of difficulty of learning essential methodologies for source material could be a legitimate criterion for what counts as appropriate or necessary. But even if it’s not too technical, isn’t programming just a different kind of job than what the typical humanist does (or wants to do)? It is difficult to believe that someone who can learn to read, if not speak, several languages, decipher cryptic handwriting, analyze abstract concepts and synthesize hundreds if not thousands of complex documents is somehow fundamentally incapable of learning how to string together a handful of instructions that perform simple tasks like finding a certain string in a text file. As Ramsay points out, scripting languages are orders of magnitude simpler than the ones we use everyday and should not be seen as only for elite power users.

Although it may seem pedantic, a distinction between programming and scripting may be useful to lower the entry barrier. I don’t here attempt to construct a rigid philosophical distinction that will hold up at all levels of scrutiny, but one to illustrate my point. Good scripting might be considered as the creative combination of simple and straightforward commands, even if the syntax can get a little ugly. Programming, on the other hand, might be considered as requiring a much higher level of sophistication and complexity, solving much more elaborate problems (security, accessibility, scalability, reusability) that take considerable design and coding experience to accomplish successfully. Of course scripting can get very complicated, and it can be considered a kind of programming. Scripting is like following a recipe, in many ways not unlike the various research methodologies we learn in order to read different kinds of texts. As one learns basic techniques, creative and exploratory potential increases exponentially.

I don’t mean to suggest that teaching programming to historians is a new idea. About three years ago, Bill Turkel and Alan MacEachern published online the “Programming Historian,” which introduced basic python scripting to the historian. Perhaps they were ahead of their time, and historians could not see the value in learning what looks prima facie like a cryptic language. Maybe they simply didn’t consider themselves programmers. At any rate, the discussion about coding continues, and the idea is worth revisiting.

This post is meant to provide the motivation for and introduction to a series of posts that will attempt to explain to historians—especially those without substantial technical experience, but with curiosity and fortitude—how to accomplish some simple scripting tasks like basic web scraping, word frequency analysis, collocation inquiries, and basics reformatting data using publicly available historical sources. The tutorial at large is meant to showcase basic practices that can be reused across a variety of fields and datasets—yet another reason why working with data is more important than ever. Although historical research has used, for example, diaries, newspapers, census records, and of course printed texts in conjunction with each other, these varied sources (especially when used together) have not typically been used at large scales because of practical constraints in terms of gathering and analyzing them. My hope is to walk the user through small exercises that will reveal how easy it is to harness the computer’s tolerance for repetitive drudgery that can be put to good use in humanities research, especially in illustrating how to create and manage ad-hoc collections of historical data.

I have no desire to change the working habits of historians who enjoy whatever processes and tools that allow them to be successful. But it seems that not teaching students the most basic of tools to query a large and ever-expanding subset of source/data does them a fundamental disservice in limiting the kinds of material they can use, the kinds of questions they can ask, and perhaps even the kinds of careers they can have. Whether it can be done well remains to be seen, but it seems both a necessary and fruitful undertaking.

After students finished their articles, we discussed (on several occasions) the process and their products. I wanted their perspective on some of the above questions, and a better sense if it was worth doing again. Despite the variety of topics they wrote on (the transit of Venus, science in the early modern university, lesser known figures of early modern science, etc), and having rather limited technical skills, the students considered it an overwhelmingly positive and useful experience both for learning and connecting course materials as well as for thinking about historical scholarly practice in the 21st century.

For just about (if not actually) everyone, students were resolutely enthusiastic for the assignment because they felt like they were making a real contribution to the historical conversation. It was a learning exercise, but the work really mattered. They reported that they worked on their articles much more than other typical class assignments (not just those in my course) because of their visibility: they knew that anyone could see their work at any time, and that it would persist long beyond the course. Most student edited articles related to their own, fixing small issues on relevant topics and adding links to their own articles. They were proud of what they had done and wanted it to be used. This was done with full knowledge that they didn’t own their article or have their name attached to it.

They were surprised, unnerved, and glad to find that their articles were edited almost immediately. Most changes were trivial (adding categories, fixing small typos, standardizing citations, etc), but they illustrated the collaborative process that humanists often talk about but rarely embrace. An active (if not slightly bizarre) discussion page for one topic (the university), brought up a number of issues about possible western bias in the article, which added a new dimension to our conversation. Discussions about bias in Wikipedia can often accelerate down the path to nowhere, but they provided a perspective on relevant topics that transcended the usual course boundaries and encouraged further reflection upon bias in more typical scholarly work.

Discussions about the assignment itself led to productive conversations about the nature of scholarship in the digital age. We discussed scholarly legitimacy and authority, and critiqued processes of knowledge production in terms of new media. Although they did not consider Wikipedia as scholarship per se, students questioned why they had been told to stay away from it by other professors. They got the impression that it was entirely untrustworthy and worthless. It led to a discussion of digital literacy, scholarly values, and the nature and aesthetics of scholarship. What is it supposed to look like? How flexible are the accepted modes of knowledge production? Can scholarship happen on a wiki? Perhaps more practically, how do we understand and discuss the limitations of Wikipedia? Contrary to the approaches they had encountered before, they gladly kept their heads out from under the sand.

The assignment also induced discussions about intended audience, writing style, content organization, web formatting and layout, and the challenge of situating ideas in complex hyperlinked spaces. Needless to say, these kinds of issues should be considered for any assignment. But because this wasn’t the largely invisible x-page essay for a course, these questions had no easy answers and thus encouraged more engagement with them. Our first post-mortem discussion (as well as the articles themselves) revealed that just about everyone had operated under totally different stylistic presumptions. They energetically discussed and reevaluated those once we looked at the range of articles they produced. Students in my Digital History course always enjoy these topics, but now it’s obvious that students benefit much more when they struggle with these issues first-hand, rather than just discuss them in theoretical terms.

There were no technical difficulties, even though I provided absolutely no technical guidance. I simply pointed students to the Wikipedia introductory pages. At the beginning of our meetings, some students reported trouble with a particular formatting code; invariably, other students who had already addressed the challenge would share their wisdom. They had no trouble with the wiki format and language, and I think just about everyone found it considerably easier than they expected it would be.

What would I do differently next time? I deliberately left the assignment vague to see what people would do rather than to see how well the students would follow specific directions (which might be too restrictive, anyway). It was perhaps a bit too vague. In retrospect, and now that I have a better idea of what to expect, I would point to a range of example articles, and be more explicit about issues (audience, style, etc) to consider before writing. A number of authors deliberately imitated a bland encyclopedic style at the expense of their usual engaging and energetic style that they used on the class blog. They recognized, perhaps later than would be ideal, that their participation was helping to shape the very nature of the modern encyclopedia.

I didn’t indicate strongly enough how much their articles should integrate course materials and relevant outside resources, so many articles tended to draw from a small number of (academic) sources. Of course one does not require many sources to write a good encyclopedia article, but one motivation of the assignment was to encourage synthetic work, and I wasn’t fully satisfied with the extent to which that happened—but it seems that more direction upfront is the relatively easy solution. Even though many students did it anyway, I would explicitly require that they add links back to their articles on pages of related topics in order to encourage careful thinking about topic selection and their contribution to a larger knowledge network.

I’ve long considered experimentation to be a cornerstone of my teaching philosophy, and I’ll be the first to admit that many of my experiments don’t work out so well. So it’s a pleasure to report when one far exceeds expectations, even if crucial improvements are now obvious. More importantly, I hope it’s a kind of assignment that others will consider as well. Perhaps most valuably, it can help students engage with skills that are far too often reserved for communications or “digital” humanities courses, but provide a digital literacy that should underlie every university degree.

Abstract

The Digging Into Data Challenge encourages humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis, challenging scholars to develop international partnerships and explore vast digital resources, including electronic repositories of books, newspapers, and photographs to identify new opportunities for scholarship. The Challenge was announced in 2009 by four leading research agencies: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada. Eight collaborative international teams received grants to explore a wide range of topics, many of them historical.

Chaired by NEH ODH director Brett Bobley, this roundtable will include a handful of fantastic scholars who will speak about some of their current projects.

Gregory Crane

Towards Dynamic Variorum Editions creates a framework to produce “dynamic variorum” editions of classics texts that enable the reader to automatically link not only to variant editions but also to relevant citations, quotations, people, and places that are found in a digital library of over one million primary and secondary source texts.

Dan Edelstein

Digging into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters seeks to recover the scholarly communities and networks of knowledge between ca. 1500-1800 through an exploration of empirical data gleaned from correspondences, publications, and travel records, combined with the interpretive expertise of historians and literary scholars.

Tim Hitchcock

Using Zotero and TAPOR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent uses an API approach to expose the 120 million words of the Old Bailey Proceedings, first to Zotero, where libraries of trials and can created and manipulated, and then to Voyeur, which allows advanced linguistic and datamining tools to be
applied to the text.

William G. Thomas III

Railroads and the making of Modern America–Tools for Spatio-Temporal Correlation, Analysis and Visualization creates a framework and software engine for integrating spatio-temporal historical data from diverse sources for correlation, analysis, and visualization by focusing on one of the most significant transnational processes in history–the development of railroads.

In addition to showing the scholarly results of these projects, the panel will discuss what they discovered in the Digging into Data program in general, issues related to collaboration in digital history, and the potential for similar work in other areas of history.

But while citation formatting is one major reason to use bibliographic software, it isn’t necessarily the only or even primary reason, especially in the humanities. We should also think more broadly about the curation and sustainability of our reference libraries and how we might shake up our assumptions about what we value in our tools. The inevitable advice that one should employ the tool that best fits your needs or workflow is correct, provided we’re able to step back and evaluate whether aspects of our workflow couldn’t be improved. I worry that feature by feature comparisons don’t really facilitate such reflection or highlight the values that aren’t so easily compared head to head.

As wholly dependent as i am on Zotero for managing my reference library, i don’t use it for creating footnotes (or endnotes, which i hate). This may be considered anything from stupidity to blasphemy (or both). It certainly wasn’t a decision taken lightly. But after experimenting with many different workflows, i realized that i had drunk the citation insertion kool-aid, which made perfectly accurate citations coming directly from Zotero (or whatever) more important in theory than it ever became in practice.

Besides general organization, one reason i first used reference management software was because i wanted all references tied to some tool that could reformat all citations with a few clicks. What if i needed to reformat all my citations to submit to a particular journal?!? It turns out that after many years I’ve never done that or even known anyone who has wanted to do that (of course in theory people have found this very valuable). Similarly, i thought i would want to cite the same source in multiple places and should be able to do so by clicking on an item in my library rather than copy and paste. Turns out that i don’t really do this very much, either. Both of these “needs” ended up being more extreme use cases than practical ones. But maybe i’m just not as productive as i should be.

So why don’t i use the citation functionality? As robust and powerful as the CSL formatting language is, it doesn’t work all that well with the rather messy variety of sources i cite and how i like to splice commentary in with citations in footnotes. This is not to say it’s impossible, but that it takes me more time to battle Zotero than to manage the notes independently. This is what i find remarkable about the ubiquitous debate about citation accuracy amongst various software options and citation mechanisms. It doesn’t take that long to manage citations by hand (while you’re walking uphill to/from school in the snow, etc.). Yes, i have to manually correct ibids and short and long titles, but i just do this as a last revision so that i’m not constantly redoing it. It takes a little extra time, but seriously less time than trying to get Zotero (or especially anything else) to output the exact format i want.

To create the reference in the first place, i usually copy (or drag and drop) the citation from Zotero to Word to get the bulk of the thing, then edit by hand. I rarely need to edit it again, and i don’t have to worry about any particular formatting problems or losing edits when Zotero reformats citations. If you’re citing mostly more recent and standardized sources, and you don’t pollute your notes with prose, these concerns are less relevant. But anyone who regularly deals with non-standardized sources might refocus from citation formatting (regardless of software preference) to other virtues that facilitate long term library maintenance and organization. As for creating bibliographies, i maintain (with surprisingly little effort) a collection of works cited for each writing project, readings course, etc. When i need a bibliography, i can simply generate one from the collection and edit it as need be. Usually the need is rather little, as bibliography formatting is usually more straightforward than that of notes.

As for speed, I think it’s the ultimate red herring in bibliographic software. Granted, efficiency is a real concern and i get a blood pressure spike whenever i see the spinning color wheel for any reason. Other similarly impatient folks have legitimately complained that Zotero is too slow under certain (sometimes bizarre) conditions. Some of this is due to its dependency on Firefox, a dependency that is being dissolved as i write. But the amount of time i spend waiting on Zotero in comparison to the time i spend researching and writing (not to mention other distractions) is so absurdly small, it’s laughable—even if it’s an easy an check in the +/- columns of a tool comparison. But missing the big picture in favor of the obvious metrics is not unlike the beer-bellied cyclist spending an extra $1000 for a lighter bike or a high-performance derailleur. Actually, just skip lunch.

OK. i lied. I do care about speed in one respect, namely the way that Zotero is magically convenient for quickly getting references from library catalogs or databases into a library (which i usually do by hand rather than via massive searches; i prefer a lean library), thus saving tons of time otherwise lost to manually populating Zotero items. More important for my sanity and future utility of my library, it’s a snap (in the process of saving an item) to get references into the right collections and subcollections. I use collections to denote stuff i need to read on a certain topic, stuff i’ve read but need to work into a project, stuff i have consulted but won’t use or cite, stuff i need to consult on my next visit to national library of medicine, etc. Of course Zotero is not the only tool that can help keep your library organized (nor are collections), but i’ve found this method the easiest, even though i resisted collections for some time simply because they were a new way of organizing for me.

Incidentally, i might mention another way that Zotero is flexible that i came to appreciate later on–namely in note-taking with the detached tinyMCE window next to the PDF i’m reading, or just if i want a small window because i’m doing other things at the same time. And those notes are of course immediately available from wherever i’m accessing my library. Once upon a time i thought i should be annotating PDFs, but found that i preferred to have notes in a simple text box that i can see at a glance. The annotations were, like citations, more interesting in theory than in practice for me. Zotero is not flexible in all ways, of course. I have remained frustrated by its lack of custom item types for many years. I won’t enumerate the many more valuable features that have been implemented in the meantime. When I stopped worrying about citing everything with Zotero, I stopped caring as much about custom item types.

Flexibility can built into workflows as well. People have also complained about wanting to use other browsers than Firefox; some have even abandoned Zotero because they prefer another browser. Preserve workflow at all costs! I have found it perfectly easy to use Firefox for finding and saving references and to manage my library, while using Chrome for everything else. Having Firefox open just for Zotero is really no different than running a standalone application like EndNote. In any case, as Zotero decouples from Firefox, browser issues are a diminishing concern for the end user.

Citations, speed, and other automation features aside, one simply cannot neglect the value of openness. One commenter mentioned that openness should have been a part of the original comparison, and Croxall defended its omission by saying that it’s not a concern of the general user, even if it should be. But it IS a crucial concern for long term use, which is where any bibliographic manager pays real dividends. It’s about neither the philosophy nor the supposed moral superiority of open source. With EndNote (and others), you’re buying into a system that the producer has every incentive to keep you locked into. Are you then obligated to buy upgrades? If you don’t, can you still get your data (and modifications to it) out? I completely agree that it’s not unreasonable to pay even $100 for software you that you like and use. But it’s not just a one time payment, but that amount every few years. Or your library won’t sync. Or you can’t import new records. Or it won’t work with your OS upgrade. Or whatever. But there will be a reason why you’ll need to pay again, indefinitely.

Yes, virtually all reference managers can all export in various standard formats. But i’m sure i’m not the only one who has moved libraries more times than i care to admit and who has concluded that it’s never easy, never lossless, and only slightly preferable to, say, contracting the plague. This is especially true if you have non-standard or modified items in your library. Openness does have real implications for the average user, and not just because closed source and proprietary formats are the kryptonite of the digital humanities. Even if typical users do not value openness, comparative articles ought to explain why they should.

It is indeed convenient and useful to compare products and establish winners and losers in functionality. The enthusiastic response to Croxall’s informative and well-written article shows how much so. But in looking for the “best” software for managing citations, we can’t lose sight of the long term sustainability of our libraries in favor of marginal differences between routine tasks. And we need to shed our workflow blinders to recognize other possibilities and features of the tools besides those that fit well with old habits—or desired new ones, like a possibly utopian need for seamless citation integration.

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that my priorities or methods should be anyone else’s. I do enjoy reading how people use the same tools i do, as i can always learn something. But if we do want to put products head to head, i think it’s worth considering how Zotero is about far more than citing references, especially in terms of openness and flexibility that results from it not having a financial agenda tied to how we use it or its social network.

Though I’ve been getting to know him anecdotally for the last 18 months, the ceremony to rename CHNM to the Roy Rosenzweig CHNM and the discussion it generated served as something like a formal introduction. Not surprisingly, it took a half dozen speakers, a large space in a relatively new building dedicated to innovative research, a glitzy and inspiring metal-worked logo, and a large crowd to represent—still insufficiently—everything Roy stood for.

Some of his close friends and colleagues, all of whom spoke with admiration and a sense of loss, helped formalized what I’ve been trying to internalize since I arrived at CHNM. They spoke about how Roy refused to accept the status quo, of even the history profession and its societies and traditions, when he thought it could be improved for the better—and better for everyone in the broadest sense. They spoke about his constant push for openness and cooperation. They spoke, nostalgically, about Roy’s ways as a gentle taskmaster, who encouraged and helped his collaborators achieve more than they ever thought they could.

CHNM director Dan Cohen and History Department chair Brian Platt together made the point that tens of thousands of people benefit everyday from Roy’s tireless efforts and his vision, even though so very few of these people have any idea of the man himself or how he made the Center’s work possible. Numerous mentions were made of how Roy wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Still, I count myself among those who are hopeful that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will remind everyone not just of the man himself, for those lucky enough to have known him, but also for everything he stood for. His name and watchful presence ought to remind us not only what we’re to be doing, but why.

Working at a place whose people and projects have taken on so many of the qualities that Roy embodied, I can’t help but feel that he and I have somehow already met. But I also know that if I ever could meet him after everything I’ve learned about him, despite his affability, humility, and his constant encouragement of junior faculty, words would fail me. Surely I’d be forced simply to read from my coffee mug as I do each day: Thanks, Roy.

Always on the lookout for relevant readings that might be useful for my digital history course, I finally got around to reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. I have assigned his provocative 2008 Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” to good effect, where he questions whether we’re losing our ability for deep thinking and sustained concentration because we flit around from webpage to webpage, hyperlink to hyperlink, becoming the robotic humans of 2001: A Space Odyssey (in contrast to the seemingly emotional but monotone Hal). I thought that the book version might provide a deeper critique of how people are changing how they process information and what that might mean for academics and their work–and thus help motivate course topics about history and new media. To that end, I thought I would post my thoughts about the Carr’s book in case anyone else had similar inclinations.

From the article, Carr’s interesting questions and engaging writing sets high expectations for the book. Unfortunately (at least for my purposes), rather than elaborating on the nature of and larger cultural implications of shallow thinking, Carr endeavors to prove the tenet of his article: that our brains are rewiring themselves to deal with our media environments. As a result, we can’t concentrate like we used to. He ultimately focuses too much on the scientific proof of the immediate adaptability of our brain rather than exploring the cultural implications (and legacy, considering this isn’t exactly new criticism) of how new media perhaps does challenge traditional thought patterns.

Carr’s goal for the early chapters is to put into plain language some of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the effects of media on our consciousness. Carr does this pretty well, and then attempts to combine these sentiments with some recent studies on cognition and memory. But it’s here where he spends far too much time explaining, in excruciating biological detail, how our brains re-wire themselves when faced with new stimuli. Consequently, as our brains adapt to our supersaturated media environment, we lose the ability to engage in movement from working to long-term memory. It’s during this process where our brains can make important creative connections and do other important thinking in the humanities. But without this process, our thinking is becoming, literally and figuratively, too shallow.

I’m not convinced that the studies Carr references shows what he wants them to show. For example, Carr cites numerous studies that demonstrate that people who watch a newscast remember less of it when there is other information appearing on the screen. This is presented as evidence for shallow learning as a result of being distracted. But perhaps the people subjected to more information learned more and connected more data points even if the main message was learned less well. In this example and others, Carr makes a case for a lack of depth without seeing how the test doesn’t recognize wider learning that, in theory, could provide the stimulation of creativity and meaning that he argues is being sabotaged by the way we use the Internet. Of course these studies are not unchallenged: Jonah Lehrer’s review of Carr’s book points to other contradictory studies (which led to a interesting discussion between the two of them); Steven Pinker and others have argued against the brain’s biological imperative to adapt almost instantaneously. Lehrer says that Carr is most successful with his cultural criticism, but I don’t quite see it. Because Carr never really engages with prior technological naysayers, nor applies any of their ideas to the present day, his cultural criticism comes off more as the neighbor’s annoying yappy dog than the elephant in the room.

In trying to see past the biological trees for the cultural forest, I wonder if the deep/shallow dichotomy really exists or is helpful. Or if it was emphasized to make the studies on multitasking seem more clear-cut than they really are. Carr’s claim is that by not engaging with books with longer arguments and sentences, we’re unable to really appreciate them. But what is the constraining factor about online environments that force shallow connections? Are we not simply temporarily smitten with the novelty of the hyperlink (at least in practice if not theory)? The dichotomy is most unfortunate because, in Carr’s analysis, it’s an either/or proposition. We can’t have shallower but broader thinking. Or if we can, it’s not as good as what we had before. But where does the value judgment between shallow and deep come from? Doesn’t volume matter? Aren’t we simply taught to value “deep” thinking out of tradition rather than innate superiority? Nature wins over nurture in Carr’s analysis. There is nothing about educational priorities or media literacy in the book, which seems an unfortunate omission given the negative judgments and grave concerns he has about how new media is shaping our thinking.

The book (and, more understandably, the article) suffers throughout from monolithic characterizations. This is one area where I thought the book might add nuance and weight to the article. However, Carr’s ongoing discussion of “the book” circumscribes itself to generalizations that cannot help but to weaken any force of his argument. Similarly, Carr problematically equates single-tasking with reading and multi-tasking with websites. I was disappointed that he does not grapple with the extent to which web design (still in its adolescence if not infancy) could make for rather different user experiences than we have now. Nor does he consider the many tools that help the more easily distracted of us readers and writers block everything else off our screens (i.e. people have already recognized and started to solve the problem Carr points out). For Carr, books are good. What kind of books? The great classics of literature, of course. But it’s not clear that the internet or any media has substantially decreased consumption of these kinds of books or what we get out of them. But for Carr, if we weren’t mindlessly following scripts on the web we’d be deepening our humanity by reading Keats.

Given it’s content, I wasn’t surprised after reading the book to learn that it’s categorized/labeled as “science.” Yet it seems that the reason Carr wrote the book was not give us a science lesson, but to underscore the importance of humanistic thinking. Yet he remains silent on exactly what this importance is–that is, why we should care about the scientific studies he cites. This made me wonder about his intended audience, which proved an elusive concept. On one hand, he labors over technical biology terminology; on the other hand, he addresses an audience for whom reading is difficult: “…I appreciate your fortitude in staying with me.” Throughout the book, Carr mixes urgency (“The electronic revolution is approaching culmination…”) (?!) with a healthy dose of doom (“We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls…” and “…we’ve numbed an essential part of ourself”). There is hardly lip service to the fact that we’re in the relatively infancy of web technology, where growing pains in both production and use are inevitable.

From a media studies standpoint, Carr doesn’t offer anything beyond the notion that the “medium is the massage”, though the cited studies give some grounding to the older theories (though they needed about as much proof as the theory of gravity). From an intellectual history standpoint, it’s far too lightly sampled to take seriously. From a cultural criticism standpoint, it’s derivative, and frankly, vapid. Carr neither outlines any larger implications of his claims that we’re flattening our intelligence into singular artificial intelligence, nor shows any evidence for a decline of culture and creativity. Nor does he show that any similar decline happened after transformations brought by printing, radio, and television as critics predicted would happen in the same way Carr claims is true for the Internet. But that’s the book I was hoping for, not necessarily what Carr wanted to write. But these omissions make Carr’s book another hollow reverberation in the echo chamber of resistance to technological change.