If you search the string "marianne moore" in Google Scholar, what you get is this:
That one book citation is the only reference to the poet Marianne Moore on the page. It is not the best.
Showing posts with label humanities computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humanities computing. Show all posts
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Reflecting on the Drucker article mentioned below reminded me of one more instance of a tool working well for some fields and not for others.
If you search the string "marianne moore" in Google Scholar, what you get is this:
That one book citation is the only reference to the poet Marianne Moore on the page. It is not the best.
If you search the string "marianne moore" in Google Scholar, what you get is this:
That one book citation is the only reference to the poet Marianne Moore on the page. It is not the best.
Friday, May 1, 2009
"The design of digital tools for scholarship is an intellectual responsibility, not a technical task."
Skg sent me this link to a very interesting article by Johanna Drucker. Drucker points out that even though humanities research depends on libraries and archives, faculty tend to take a bizarrely hands-off attitude toward the development of the library. Even as they are aware that print culture has changed and continues to change, they believe that librarians and other information specialists will take care of it -- and take care of it in a way that will suit scholars' needs.
Robin G. Schulze makes a similar argument about textual editing in her bluntly titled essay "How Not to Edit: The Case of Marianne Moore" [Muse]. On one level, the article is a detailed critique of Grace Schulman's edition of Moore's poems (Viking, 2003). The edition has some virtues, but logic and accuracy are not among them. But Schulze is also sounding the alarm about the assumption that editing will take care of itself, that it is a merely technical task to be farmed out to publishing houses (even commercial houses like Penguin/Viking) rather than a scholarly intellectual task. Such an attitude has real practical consequences for literary criticism and teaching.
Similarly, Drucker argues, if we fail to value, support, and require the intellectual labor of designing tools for digital scholarship, we risk making all our work more difficult, or worse, conforming our work to tools designed to meet the entirely different demands of the corporate world. We're all familiar with something like this already, with Microsoft Word's (irritatingly persistent) defaults apparently set explicitly to baffle MLA or Chicago style.
I think Drucker and Schulze are both right about the need to value (and promote, and fund) the intellectual work that must go into making texts accessible. Both Drucker and Schulze seem to propose that the way to do it is for academic departments to take over some of this work, I think rightly. But what's difficult about that solution is that departments have fewer and fewer tenure-track/tenured faculty, and thus barely have the resources to cover their current undergraduate courses. In other words, these articles could be misinterpreted as a call to shift resources away from existing specialties toward the editing and dissemination of text, when really departments need to hire -- and be authorized to hire -- scholars who specialize in these areas.
* * * * *
Another addendum to recent posts: Marc Bousquet's response to Mark Taylor is excellent:
The design of new environments for performing scholarly work cannot be left to the technical staff and to library professionals. The library is a crucial partner in planning and envisioning the future of preserving, using, even creating scholarly resources. So are the technology professionals. But in an analogy with building construction, they are the architects and the contractors. The creation of archives, analytic tools, and statistical analyses of aggregate data in the humanities (and in some other scholarly fields) requires the combined expertise of technical, professional, and scholarly personnel.Just as problematic is the hand-waving approach so often taken toward technology: technology is the future; technology is magical; technology will fix things. It's as if the issue were whether to be pro-technology or anti-technology. But, as Drucker observes, different technologies do different things in different ways. The question is how will we use which technologies, and to what ends?
Robin G. Schulze makes a similar argument about textual editing in her bluntly titled essay "How Not to Edit: The Case of Marianne Moore" [Muse]. On one level, the article is a detailed critique of Grace Schulman's edition of Moore's poems (Viking, 2003). The edition has some virtues, but logic and accuracy are not among them. But Schulze is also sounding the alarm about the assumption that editing will take care of itself, that it is a merely technical task to be farmed out to publishing houses (even commercial houses like Penguin/Viking) rather than a scholarly intellectual task. Such an attitude has real practical consequences for literary criticism and teaching.
Scholars ... need to speak out and up on the matter of bad editions — the louder the better — because if they don't, bad things can happen. Indeed, Moore scholars now face a serious danger. In October of 2003, Publishers Weekly forecast that Schulman's edition would "supplant Moore's 1967 collection for course assignments, making for steady sales over the long run" (79). Thankfully, this prediction has not yet come to pass, in part because Moore scholars have been reluctant to bring the book into the classroom. Penguin, however, is the publisher of both the Complete Poems [Clive Driver and Patricia C. Willis's "final authorial intention" edition] and Schulman's edition. Eager to boost sales of the Schulman edition, Penguin could well discontinue the Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. If that happens, scholars will literally have no reliable classroom edition of Moore's poems from which to work—a sad day indeed for Moore's literary reputation.
Similarly, Drucker argues, if we fail to value, support, and require the intellectual labor of designing tools for digital scholarship, we risk making all our work more difficult, or worse, conforming our work to tools designed to meet the entirely different demands of the corporate world. We're all familiar with something like this already, with Microsoft Word's (irritatingly persistent) defaults apparently set explicitly to baffle MLA or Chicago style.
Many humanities principles developed in hard-fought critical battles of the last decades are absent in the design of digital contexts. Here is a short list: the subjectivity of interpretation, theoretical conceptions of texts as events (not things), cross-cultural perspectives that reveal the ideological workings of power, recognition of the fundamentally social nature of knowledge production, an intersubjective, mediated model of knowledge as something constituted, not just transmitted. For too long, the digital humanities, the advanced research arm of humanistic scholarly dialogue with computational methods, has taken its rules and cues from digital exigencies.
[...]
Unless scholars in the humanities help design and model the environments in which they will work, they will not be able to use them. Tools developed for PlayStation and PowerPoint, Word, and Excel will be as appropriate to our intellectual labors as a Playskool workbench is to the chores of a real plumber.
I think Drucker and Schulze are both right about the need to value (and promote, and fund) the intellectual work that must go into making texts accessible. Both Drucker and Schulze seem to propose that the way to do it is for academic departments to take over some of this work, I think rightly. But what's difficult about that solution is that departments have fewer and fewer tenure-track/tenured faculty, and thus barely have the resources to cover their current undergraduate courses. In other words, these articles could be misinterpreted as a call to shift resources away from existing specialties toward the editing and dissemination of text, when really departments need to hire -- and be authorized to hire -- scholars who specialize in these areas.
* * * * *
Another addendum to recent posts: Marc Bousquet's response to Mark Taylor is excellent:
But sure, you’re right. The problem is that we need to end tenure. When we end tenure, the market will insure that these folks are paid fairly, that persons with Ph.D.’s will be able to work for those wages.
Oh, crap, wait. As anyone actually paying attention has observed, we’ve ALREADY ended tenure. With the overwhelming majority of faculty off the tenure track, and most of teaching work being done by them, by students, and professional staff, tenured appointments are basically the privilege of a) a retiring generation b) grant-getters and c) the candidate pool for administration.
How’s that working out? Well, gee, we’re graduating a very poor percentage of students. Various literacies are kinda low. We don’t have a racially diverse faculty, and women, especially women with children, are far more likely to have the low-paying low-status faculty jobs.
Nice! Let’s get more of that!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
This so-called "iced cream"
In the recent Chronicle article "Literary Geospaces," Jennifer Howard leads with the following:
Hmm. These crazy trends, these sexy digital humanities.
* * * * *
In one of the most recent public eulogies for literary studies, a Nation essay that ran online in March decried the "trendism" on display in the Modern Language Association's job listings.
"The major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy," wrote William Deresiewicz, an associate professor of English at Yale University who has since left the profession. "Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism — whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children's literature, even in something called 'digital humanities.'"
Hmm. These crazy trends, these sexy digital humanities.
* * * * *
Burns: I feel like such a free spirit, and I'm really enjoying this so-called...iced cream.
Friday, December 28, 2007
MLA 2007: some notes
It's the second day of MLA, and I'm sort of horrified that there's just as much more to come.
I've heard many good talks and some miserable ones, and some in between. Here are some highlights so far:
Session 21: The Challenge of a Million Books
The crappy panel title notwithstanding, I thought this session, run by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (program here), was very good. Each of the presenters discussed computational methods in literary research. Brad Pasanek and D. Sculley (the latter not present at the panel) used a classification algorithm to test how well patterns in metaphor predicted political affiliations; they have a database of metaphors at http://metaphorized.net, which could come in handy sometime. Glenn Roe and Robert Voyer used text mining to try to understand the classification of knowledge in Diderot's Encyclopédie, and Sara Steger used similar techniques to try to make more precise the formulaic quality of sentimental writing. Good times. I would be especially interested in learning more about pedagogical applications for these techniques.
Session 85: Micro: Studies in the Very Small
Wai Chee Dimock gave the first paper, "Fractals: The Micro in a Global World," and much as I respect Dimock as a scholar, I must say that I found her use of "fractals" entirely specious. She began by suggesting a loosening of the idea of fractals in order to think of self-similarity in terms of scalablility and the structural self-similarity of epic as a genre. Perhaps I was missing part of what was going on, but Dimock's paper struck me as an old-school organic unity paper with the word "fractal" stuck on it. By loosening the definition of "fractal," the usefulness of which I was already dubious, I felt that she robbed it of its power as a concept. She also used the term "recursion" to mean, more or less, repetition, again diluting the meaningfulness of the concept of recursion. It is possible that the short format of the talk prevented Dimock from supplying some crucial justifications for these moves, but I simply came away from the talk with the sense that she has little understanding of complex dynamics, and that they bear no relation whatever to the epic as a genre.
I found Robert Rushing's paper, "Fractal Microscopy: Blowup, Greene, Calvino" more convincing and quite entertaining. Rushing discussed how three texts try to assimilate the traumatic sublime of quantum mechanics (its impossibly small scale, its discreteness, its counterintuitiveness) to everyday life through ideologically charged metaphors. This was my favorite talk in the panel, and came away with an urgent feeling that I need to see Antonioni's Blowup.
Anna Botta gave a paper on dust. I more or less liked it, but can't say much about it, since it was mainly an art history paper and discussed a lot of works that I wasn't familiar with.
James Ramey gave an interesting paper called "Micropoetics: Nabokov's Small-Scale Parasites," which refreshingly used science in a legitimate way. Ramey explored how Nabokov uses the metaphor of the parasite to characterize creativity, especially literary creativity--a sinister generativity. I wound up asking him a question at the end about the difference between being the gestating egg and the egg-laying parent bug, since Nabokov seemed to be enormously interested in the "sting" of the egg-laying. (Some dim person in the audience turned around and suggested that it would help to think of the parasite as species rather than as individual bugs, as if I were confused about it. Sigh.)
Session 93: The Press
This session was arranged by the Division on Nineteenth Century French Literature.
I really enjoyed Cary Hollinshead-Strick's paper, "Personifying the Press: Newspapers on Stage after 1830," which looked at how vaudeville and the press spoke to and about one another.
I also enjoyed Marie-Eve Thérenty's paper, "Vies drôles et scalps de puces: Des formes brèves dans les quotidiens à la Belle Epoque," which looked at a hitherto little-noted genre of short, humorous newspaper pieces. It was a very interesting talk, but as it was in French, I'm sure I only caught about a third of it.
Evelyn Gould's paper, "Among Dreyfus Affairs: The Emergence of Testimonial Chronicle," similarly engaged in a kind of genre study, this time of very long works somewhere in between journalism and autobiography. I'm not really sure I understood how she was theorizing "testimonial chronicle," but she discussed the texts in interesting ways.
I went to a mostly miserable panel late on Thursday evening. It will remain nameless.
I also went to a panel today solely because a friend was presenting a paper on it. In my completely unbiased view, hers was the best paper on the panel, which was on nineteenth century American women's religious poetry. Apart from my friend, one panelist seemed to be trying to recuperate this corpus, which has been widely charged with crappiness, but she seemed to want to do so by pointing out a few exceptional writers (i.e. yes, this genre is crappy, but here are a few diamonds in the rough), and by valorizing these writers in spite of form. I'm baffled. I do want to check out her book, however. The other panelist seemed to have, um, missed the last 30 years of feminist studies?
Session 324: Brave New Worlds: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Early American Studies
I mostly liked this panel; I didn't come away with anything portable, but I learned some stuff about Samson Occom, and am interested in the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive, which draws on fourteen different physical archives, which must be a giant pain in the butt for the people on the project. Interestingly, one presenter was Michelle Harper, the director of project management for Readex. Apparently they're coming out with an interesting feature in which you can annotate digital editions from their archive. It looks cooler that I'm making it sound here, but my notes are sadly devoid of detail, and I'm too spaced out now to remember it.
I gave my paper this evening, but perhaps I'll post on that panel separately, or not post on it at all.
Today I ran into some friends, a former professor, and a woman from Stanford with whom I once took summer German, which was nice. Margery Kempe was right, though: MLA is a desperaat tryal and a terribil oon amonges devils and hir ministeres and necromanceres.
I've heard many good talks and some miserable ones, and some in between. Here are some highlights so far:
Session 21: The Challenge of a Million Books
The crappy panel title notwithstanding, I thought this session, run by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (program here), was very good. Each of the presenters discussed computational methods in literary research. Brad Pasanek and D. Sculley (the latter not present at the panel) used a classification algorithm to test how well patterns in metaphor predicted political affiliations; they have a database of metaphors at http://metaphorized.net, which could come in handy sometime. Glenn Roe and Robert Voyer used text mining to try to understand the classification of knowledge in Diderot's Encyclopédie, and Sara Steger used similar techniques to try to make more precise the formulaic quality of sentimental writing. Good times. I would be especially interested in learning more about pedagogical applications for these techniques.
Session 85: Micro: Studies in the Very Small
Wai Chee Dimock gave the first paper, "Fractals: The Micro in a Global World," and much as I respect Dimock as a scholar, I must say that I found her use of "fractals" entirely specious. She began by suggesting a loosening of the idea of fractals in order to think of self-similarity in terms of scalablility and the structural self-similarity of epic as a genre. Perhaps I was missing part of what was going on, but Dimock's paper struck me as an old-school organic unity paper with the word "fractal" stuck on it. By loosening the definition of "fractal," the usefulness of which I was already dubious, I felt that she robbed it of its power as a concept. She also used the term "recursion" to mean, more or less, repetition, again diluting the meaningfulness of the concept of recursion. It is possible that the short format of the talk prevented Dimock from supplying some crucial justifications for these moves, but I simply came away from the talk with the sense that she has little understanding of complex dynamics, and that they bear no relation whatever to the epic as a genre.
I found Robert Rushing's paper, "Fractal Microscopy: Blowup, Greene, Calvino" more convincing and quite entertaining. Rushing discussed how three texts try to assimilate the traumatic sublime of quantum mechanics (its impossibly small scale, its discreteness, its counterintuitiveness) to everyday life through ideologically charged metaphors. This was my favorite talk in the panel, and came away with an urgent feeling that I need to see Antonioni's Blowup.
Anna Botta gave a paper on dust. I more or less liked it, but can't say much about it, since it was mainly an art history paper and discussed a lot of works that I wasn't familiar with.
James Ramey gave an interesting paper called "Micropoetics: Nabokov's Small-Scale Parasites," which refreshingly used science in a legitimate way. Ramey explored how Nabokov uses the metaphor of the parasite to characterize creativity, especially literary creativity--a sinister generativity. I wound up asking him a question at the end about the difference between being the gestating egg and the egg-laying parent bug, since Nabokov seemed to be enormously interested in the "sting" of the egg-laying. (Some dim person in the audience turned around and suggested that it would help to think of the parasite as species rather than as individual bugs, as if I were confused about it. Sigh.)
Session 93: The Press
This session was arranged by the Division on Nineteenth Century French Literature.
I really enjoyed Cary Hollinshead-Strick's paper, "Personifying the Press: Newspapers on Stage after 1830," which looked at how vaudeville and the press spoke to and about one another.
I also enjoyed Marie-Eve Thérenty's paper, "Vies drôles et scalps de puces: Des formes brèves dans les quotidiens à la Belle Epoque," which looked at a hitherto little-noted genre of short, humorous newspaper pieces. It was a very interesting talk, but as it was in French, I'm sure I only caught about a third of it.
Evelyn Gould's paper, "Among Dreyfus Affairs: The Emergence of Testimonial Chronicle," similarly engaged in a kind of genre study, this time of very long works somewhere in between journalism and autobiography. I'm not really sure I understood how she was theorizing "testimonial chronicle," but she discussed the texts in interesting ways.
I went to a mostly miserable panel late on Thursday evening. It will remain nameless.
I also went to a panel today solely because a friend was presenting a paper on it. In my completely unbiased view, hers was the best paper on the panel, which was on nineteenth century American women's religious poetry. Apart from my friend, one panelist seemed to be trying to recuperate this corpus, which has been widely charged with crappiness, but she seemed to want to do so by pointing out a few exceptional writers (i.e. yes, this genre is crappy, but here are a few diamonds in the rough), and by valorizing these writers in spite of form. I'm baffled. I do want to check out her book, however. The other panelist seemed to have, um, missed the last 30 years of feminist studies?
Session 324: Brave New Worlds: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Early American Studies
I mostly liked this panel; I didn't come away with anything portable, but I learned some stuff about Samson Occom, and am interested in the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive, which draws on fourteen different physical archives, which must be a giant pain in the butt for the people on the project. Interestingly, one presenter was Michelle Harper, the director of project management for Readex. Apparently they're coming out with an interesting feature in which you can annotate digital editions from their archive. It looks cooler that I'm making it sound here, but my notes are sadly devoid of detail, and I'm too spaced out now to remember it.
I gave my paper this evening, but perhaps I'll post on that panel separately, or not post on it at all.
Today I ran into some friends, a former professor, and a woman from Stanford with whom I once took summer German, which was nice. Margery Kempe was right, though: MLA is a desperaat tryal and a terribil oon amonges devils and hir ministeres and necromanceres.
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