Front Page News

Well, the MLA blogger meet-up made front page news—at the new Inside Higher Ed, published by Scott Jaschik (formerly of the Chronicle).

The article (actually the F2F discussion that produced it) spurs me to say a little more about my own blogging practices, which I’ve never explicitly addressed here. It’s true, as stated in the article, that I assume my department chair (and other colleagues) might see anything and everything I write. I also assume my wife will see anything and everything I write. And my students. Maybe even my parents. (The horror!) My blog is largely a professional venue—”public workbench” is the phrase I fall back on. So most of what I post falls into the catagory of things at least loosely related to my academic life. I don’t know about you, but I gave up trying to organize my bookmarks some time back around 1996. So my blog, as a searchable database, functions in part as a professional organizer. There’s also the occassional bit of whimsy.

People often assume blogs must be about politics. That’s only because the high-profile bloggers in the media write about politics. I’m thinking of people like Wonkette or Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan. But there’s no reason why politics must be the default modality for blogging. A blog is a piece of software, or, more prosaically, an empty vessel. A blog is whatever you do with it.

I have my political convictions, but I don’t write about them here. My blog sits on an institutional server and I respect that. If I want to blog overtly political topics then I can go and get a third party ISP. Truth be told, I suspect my political views are pretty pedestrian for a white, male, thirty-something junior academic raised in an upper middle class more or less progressively-minded household. Blogging my predictable outrages doesn’t seem like the best use of my time, or yours.

During our conversation with Scott, the question came up as to whether we wanted our blogs to count toward tenure. The answer there too is: it depends. Blogs are heterogenous. You can’t essentialize the genre. This blog, even though it’s often focused on my teaching and research, does not in itself constitute something I see as a professional accomplishment. (I would, however, include the work I’ve done with blogging in the classroom.) GHW, Chuck, on the other hand, pointed out that his Chuck’s blog, with 40-50 substantive film reviews, is in itself almost a book.

Speaking of books, where I’m most aggresive, I suppose, is posting bits and pieces of my scholarly writing. This is a practice that goes back to my disseration days, when I was inspired by a stunt Harlan Ellison once pulled, writing a short story in the window of a bookstore. I always like that image, and I always had the instinct that it could be generative for academic work, at least given my work habits. Years ago I hoped to write my disseration live, on the network. That proved unfeasible, largely due to issues like version control—every morning I changed a comma in the online version I spent all afternoon also changing it in the various other locales where the files lived. What I wanted, I now realize, was a blog. Has anyone out there started a disseration blog yet? I’d like to know.

The first question people always ask about posting my work is about plagiarism. That’s a red herring. Blogs and other online venues are the ideal vehicles for putting your ideas in circulation, for associating them with you. Poe’s purloined letter is a story about stolen words, but it’s also about hiding in plain sight. As work picks up on my book this spring I expect to post a number of additional excerpts here.

So thanks to Scott for talking to us, and to my fellow bloggers for the face time and reflections. See everyone next year in Washington, when the moiling chaos of the MLA is on my home turf.

Young-Hae Chang's Heavy Industries

Thanks to Nick Montfort for turning me on to this.

Start with Dakota. Turn your speakers up loud.

Design at a Distance

eMachineShop. Fabrication on demand.

MLA Blogger Meet-Up

Interested? Check in here.

Computing-Related Sessions at MLA

Courtesy of John Lavagnino: The ACH Guide to Humanities-Computing Talks at the 2004 MLA Convention. Broadly defined, from cultural studies to linguistics.

The Coolest Thing Ever

Via Ross Scaife at the Stoa: “Unwrapping the Secrets of Damaged Manuscripts.”

Basically, using a combination of medical imaging technology and sophisticated reconstruction algorithms, researchers are able to scan an object such as a closed scroll or a crumpled wad of paper in three dimensions and then virtually unroll or unwrap it to reveal writing or other marks on the interior surfaces. Without disturbing the original. This work is being led by Brent Seales in the computer science department at the University of Kentucky; I knew Brent when I was there, and he’s clearly one of two or three people at the forefront of digital library imaging. Apparently he’s also now known as “Audible Gasp,” for the reaction this work provoked when presented to an audience of archivists.

Update: No, I mean it: this really is the coolest thing ever. I mean, you got a better candidate? If so, post it!

New Gear

Sent to me by a former student (thanks Annie!) Putatively from a 1954 Popular Mechanics. The caption is priceless . . .

Update: The more I look at this the more I wonder if it’s a hoax. The caption is just a little too priceless (or precious). “With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.” And the suit looks like he’s superimposed—maybe. Oh, and that wheel. Opinions?

Scarlet Letter Proofs Sold

A printer’s copy of the The Scarlet Letter, annotated with some 700 marks in Hawthorne’s own hand, was sold at auction at Christie’s for $545,000. According to Terry Belanger on the SHARP-L list, “The winning bidder was The Nineteenth Century Shop in Baltimore; the hammer price was $480,000. The University of Virginia was the underbidder.” The sale price doubled expectations.

More information here and here.

We get The 19th Century Shop’s catalog, and they’re gorgeous productions in their own right. Not that we can afford to buy anything, but if you’re a bibliophile you really should be on their mailing list. One hopes there will be some provision for scholarly access, since the importance of this literary artifact cannot be overstated; it’s worth noting that C19 American literature is where Fredson Bowers put his influential theories of critical editing to the test, precisely because of the lack of extant manuscripts corrected by their author.

Stocking Stuffer

Now available: the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth.

Tabke of contents below the fold. Note the heavy representation of UMD folk: in addition to Susan’s leadership in co-editing the volume, I contributed the chapter on “Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability” and Martha Nell Smith contributed the chapter on “Electronic Scholarly Editing.” Go terps!

Notes on contributors

Foreword: Roberto Busa

Introduction: Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth

Part I: History:

1. The History of Humanities Computing: Susan Hockey (University College London)
2. Archaeology: Nick Eiteljorg
3. Art History: Michael Greenhalgh (Australian National University)
4. Classics: Greg Crane
5. History: Will Thomas (University of Virginia)
6. Lexicography: Russ Wooldridge (University of Toronto)
7. Linguistics: Jan Hajic (Charles University)
8. Literary Studies: Thomas Rommel (International University Bremen)
9. Music: Ichiro Fujinaga (McGill University) & Susan Weiss (Johns Hopkins University)
10. New Media: Geoff Rockwell (McMaster University) and Andrew Mactavish (McMaster University)
11. Performing Arts: David Saltz, UGA
12. Philosophy and Religion: Charles Ess (Drury University)

Part II: Principles:

13. How Computers Work: Andrea Laue (University of Virginia)
14. Classification and its structures: Michael Sperberg McQueen
15. Databases: Steve Ramsay (University of Georgia)
16. What is Already Encoded by the Text: Jerry McGann (University of Virginia)
17. Text Encoding: Allen Renear
18. Perspectives and Communities: Perry Willett (Indiana University)
19. Models: Willard McCarty (King’s College London)

Part III: Applications:

20. Analysis and Authorship Studies: Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle, NSW)
21. Preparation and Analysis of Linguistic Corpora: Nancy Ide (Vassar College)
22. Electronic Scholarly Editing: Martha Nell Smith (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities)
23. Textual Analysis: John Burrows
24. Thematic Research Collections: Carole Palmer (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
25. Print Scholarship and Digital Resources: Claire Warwick (University College London)
26. Digital Media and the Analysis of Film: Bob Kolker
27. Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary Imagination: Ian Lancashire (University of Toronto)
28. Multivariant Narratives: Marie-Laure Ryan
29. Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing: Johanna Drucker (University of Virginia) & Bethany Nowviskie (University of Virginia)
30. Robotic Poetics: Bill Winder (University of British Columbia)

Part IV: Production, Dissemination, Archiving:

31. Project Design: Daniel Pitti (University of Virginia)
32. Conversion of Primary Sources: Marilyn Deegan (Oxford University) & Simon Tanner (Kings College London)
33. Text Tools: John Bradley (Kings College London)
34. Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability: Matt Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland, College Park)
35. Electronic Publishing: Michael Jensen
36. Digital Libraries in the Humanities: Howard Besser (New York University)
37. Preservation: Abby Smith

Index

And in Other News . . .

. . . nothing much is happening in the digital library world.

The Cecil B. DeMille Syndrome

The Cecil B. DeMille Syndrome. n. 1. Named for the Hollywood director famous for his casts of thousands—The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, Cleopatra, and many others. 2. The tendency of student writers to begin their essays, no matter how small the topic, with epic, overarching observations about history, society, and the human condition. 3. Recognizable by the appearance of one or more of the following in the opening sentences of the paper: “centuries,” “civilization,” “history,” “society.” Also “often,” “throughout,” and “many.” 4. The problem of beginnings. And knowing where you stand. 5. See also, “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, the World, the Universe.”

Paragone Nouveau

The paragone, the contest between the arts, is an ancient tradition. The term is first used by da Vinci, but like most such things it goes back (at least) to Plato. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon (1766), which details the struggle between word and image, is the archetype of the form. Now, it seems, we have a new paragone on our hands: word and game, or if you prefer, the interactive image. Witness the following, from an article entitled “It’s No Contest” in the Outlook section of the Washington Post (free registration required):

It’s not the most profound thing I’ve read on the subject, but it does prompt some responses, the first of which is that all of this is immediately apropos of what was discussed at the Reading at Risk? session. Second, in the article, the author makes a gesture toward the neuroscience that backs up some of the more Sven Birkerts-like laments for the loss of “deep reading.” We need to see a lot more of that. Not that our pokings and probings of the brain are the final authority on such matters, but (and this is a point Kari makes often) contemporary cognitive science needs to be part of any serious conversation about attention and imagination.

The author, of course, is a teacher of English (secondary school or college, I’m not sure which). I’m not thrilled to see members of my profession out flogging Grand Theft Auto and even Halo 2 with All the Pretty Horses and The Song of Solomon. Not sure where that’s going to get us, other than contributing to an image of literature as something like eating your vegetables (“aw, Mom . . . but there’s icing on the Xbox!”) I think there’s a lot of room for advocacy and public education here, both by individuals and by groups like the Electronic Literature Organization. We need to begin to articulate a middle ground between Halo 2 and Shakespeare for an audience that doesn’t yet receive the MIT Press catalog. People need smart, accessible, and yes, cool examples of interactive narrative. For the masses. Right here, right now.

But we also need more. Robert Pinksy will be speaking on campus tomorrow. Pinsky, as some will know, is the author of an electronic novel (interactive fiction) called Mindwheel, from 1984. He’s also one of the most famous living American poets. What if he had continued producing electronic literature? What if electronic (or procedural) literature was no longer segregated by its medium (though we always impose our segreations, don’t we? Witness my characterization of Pinsky as an American poet, for example). What if new media simply became a part of what writers and artists did, not something special or new? Perhaps the paragone would collapse before it even got going. Move along, nothing to see here. No contest after all.

If You Choose to Read Some Fine Work, Turn To . . .

The Choose Your Own Adventure assignments from my Computer and Text course turned out rather well this semester. Here’s one particularly accomplished project by one particularly accomplished student, Greg Lord. The map is first rate, and the analytical essay includes a number of subtle insights into the materiality of CYOA as a cybertext form—for example:

The unique scenario created by these juxtaposed outcomes creates from the text a kind of meta-narrative, wherein one is engaging the process of the cybertext more than the plot itself. Upon deciding whether to betray or follow the mind-controlled captain on page 12, for instance, one is rewarded with both outcomes on the adjacent pages 24 and 25. Their blithe obedience may have cost them their death in the story, but at the same time they need look no further than the other open page to have made the “correct” decision. This scenario openly reveals the manner of causality that fuels a cybertext, giving the reader at least the occasional “safe” vantage point. In effect, both decisions — including the “correct” one — are available to the reader, and the voyeuristic vantage point of the standard literary reader is temporarily restored.

Finally, Greg’s glossary of terms—”Decision: The basic instance of story progression, through branching paths, as per Marie-Laure Ryan’s tree model, wherein the reader/player decides between two or three given choices”—struck me as a particularly useful contribution, something that other researchers should be aware of.

I’m continually struck by the quality of work our undergraduates can be capable of producing. They’ll be more end of the semester projects to post here soon.