DRSI, Day 1 Thoughts and Questions

I'm very lucky to be a Fellow in the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities Digital Research Summer Institute, led by my recently graduated colleague from the English Department, Jentery Sayers. The other Fellows are from a range of different fields: genetics, social work, anthropology, comp lit, women's studies, and musicology.

The DRSI is a pilot program, so what each of us will take away from it is uncertain (though I have no doubt that it'll be useful). One of the points that came up in that first meeting is that reflective writing and documenting process is valuable -- not a new insight, but it's good for me to be reminded of it.

There are a few useful questions that I thought were raised just in the first session, and that I want to hang onto.

Neena's Sindhi Voices Project is working to provide an archive for narratives from Sindhi elders (defined as "individuals that, after the 1947 partition of India, left Sindh, stayed in Sindh, migrated from India into Sindh, and those that received emigrant Sindhis"), and a field kit, available in multiple languages, to help people gather those stories. The archive is ubiquitous in literary and historical studies, so I was thinking of the project as an archive, but on reflection, 24 hours later, I think I'm wrong to do that -- the field kit, and other materials like it, that the SVP produces, are central, rather than just being apparatuses that allow the archive to be created. I say this thinking of Neena's comment that one of the responses to the project is excitement from young women who have helped gather stories, because the project is helping them gain primary experience in what journalism is. However, as she herself acknowledged, one of the challenges of the SVP is finding a way to bring the stories to the elders themselves, and that will probably involve something like a traveling exhibit, or other hybrid version.

The question that this raises, for me, is how does the digital facilitate and support the nondigital?

Mary's Georgian in Seattle website is also what I think of as a community cultural site, bringing together stories, and eventually film and music. Its title ties it directly to the population in Seattle, while its eventual goal (if I understand correctly) is to present Georgian culture that informs users both about what Georgia is, and its conflict with Russia. Listening to Mary speak, I was struck by her emphasis on how many people assume that Georgian means "a subset of Russian" (-- in fact I made the same sort of careless mistake in thinking that Velimir Khlebnikov was Georgian because he'd been associated with the Futurist movement in Tbilisi). In one sense, then, the website is meant to be a repository of art that might help outsiders get a clearer sense of what it means to be Georgian. Emphasizing both Seattle and Georgia prompts me to think about the relationship between the local and the global, because the local will never go away, at least; I doubt it will in my lifetime. Can a local area become a satellite of advocacy/culture for a different local area, or for a place to which it's only connected through the technology of globalization? In regards to Mary's website, this is a geopolitical question; however, it has ramifications for the development of digital humanities resources, specifically digital humanities centers, as the landscape of academia shifts towards distance learning.

The other thing I heard, however, was how small the Georgian community in Seattle is: everyone knows everyone. And what I hear in her presentation, and see in her website, is the importance of creating a digital homestead, and I hear in that the echo of the excitement of Geocities neighborhoods, back in the late 90's. Her site, I think, will have a different meaning (and serve a different purpose) for those people who produce it, than for those who read it. When we evaluate the worth of a site, we need to look at its value for both producers and users. Sometimes those will be the same group of people -- but not always.

I'm still thinking about this, because near the end of the day, we were reading Sharon Daniel's narrative of her Public Secrets project in her article "Hybrid Practices," which appeared in Cinema Journal 48.2, as part of a thematic section on digital scholarship and pedagogy. In the article, Daniels writes that "the women who have participated in Public Secrets are highly politicized and are seriously committed to this endeavor. They are quite literally historians and theorists who speak out in an effort of collective resistance" (157). I reacted poorly to that statement, because Daniel was defining historian as someone who had undergone a particular experience, rather than someone who had completed a specific program of formal studies. It's the problem of evaluating the authority of primary vs. secondary sources -- and it's not a new problem to be sure, but it feels perilous when I think about it in terms of digital humanities projects, because the goal of so many technologies is to create the illusion of unmediated, raw, data. The intro to Public Secrets, in which Daniel provides the context for the project, is accompanied by a button in the lower righthand corner of the screen, inviting users to "skip sequence," as though the "real" substance of the project.

And the voices of the women who contributed are the substance of the project -- and they are historians and theorists, and anyone who says otherwise, including me, probably needs to check their privilege. I'm still struck, though, by Daniel's self identification as a "context provider" (her phrase), when the most overtly visible sign of her contextualizing is something that people are invited to skip. Every aspect of the site is part of the context that Daniel is providing, of course -- but it's a graphical context, and easy to dismiss as presentation, rather than as part of the research.

On the one hand, this reminds me of scholarly editions whose editors have attempted to minimize, or erase entirely, their editorial presence, as though they made no decisions, and came as close as possible to traveling back in time to bring you the original texts. I find these efforts disingenuous, even when having a seemingly pristine edition seems useful: the Editor(s) made decisions in producing it; and chances are, the Editor(s) got the privilege of making those decisions by exerting their authority and knowledge in overt ways, i.e., by demonstrating their comprehensive scholarship regarding the author and text.

No one has said, "oh, digital humanities is all about producing primary sources and getting rid of those nasty pedantic scholars," at least, not to my knowledge -- but in thinking about Public Secrets, and how Daniel herself presents it, I realize that it needs to be. (ETA: Or rather, I'm acutely aware that it makes me feel highly vulnerable as a young academic to describe myself as a context provider, in terms of how people might interpret that role, and its connection to the years I've spent in a formal uni program. And I'd like to feel less vulnerable, or figure out why I'm feeling vulnerable and what I can do about it.) Digital humanities methodologies are attractive because they facilitate making primary sources accessible -- but how do these same methodologies affect our standards for good secondary criticism?

This last question is probably the one that has the most relevance for my own project (link coming soon!), which involves specific mentions of prices in a wide range of different types of documents: partially, because my project, like so many, can give the illusion of magically summoning prices together, untouched, from their source texts, for users to compare -- and also, because the project develops directly from an argument that I'm making about the grounds for literary economic criticism. However, I think that needs to be its own post. Suffice it to say, DRSI is going to be a really interesting workshop, and I think I'll get a lot out of it.

In which I attempt to catch up, at least on blogging about teaching

I'm finally coming out of the most ghastly bronchitis bug that I've tangled with since my sophomore year of college. 16 days, and I'm still dealing with a lingering cough, altered voice, and an inability to function in polite company without Kleenex handy.

I've never been so ill at the start of a quarter, and so it's both a blessing and a curse that I've ended up teaching a writing course linked with a political theory course, and which has only 5 students in it. (The writing links were underenrolled, and my section was the earlier of the two offered, and the professor teaching the poli sci course emphasized how hard the writing load would be. I can't say I'm surprised that some students shied away from both his class and mine, since we both have separate essay assignments (even if they are oriented towards the same readings).

I planned a number of things for this quarter: perhaps most importantly, a course website, and the intention of having the students blog throughout the quarter. In the past, I've had them use Catalyst GoPost, and I'll say up front that I haven't been all that smart about how I used it -- both in terms of thinking about making it a mini-knowledge site; and in terms of creating useful and specific assignments for the students. Instead, I wanted them to respond to each lecture, and A) that's too much, and B) it's not effectively goal-oriented -- so it didn't succeed in creating a genuine conversation between my classroom and the lecture classroom.

This time, I used and added to several of the blog assignments linked to in this Profhacker post; and used a rubric. I've encouraged the students to use the blog in the way that helps them -- i.e., as a space to talk about the more formal writing assignments, and as a space to apply the political theory texts that they're reading to current events, or other situations as they see fit. The rubric still dictates that they have to display a high level of engagement with the text, but I'm hoping that the blog will give them the space to engage with Aristotle, Locke, etc., in multiple ways (which they are explicitly not encouraged to do in the formal essays for either the lecture course, or mine.

In my case (and I suspect in the POLS professor's, too, but I can't speak for him), it's not that those alternative methods of engaging with a text aren't valid, but just that the focus of the course is to have them practice a very specific style of essay writing that is widely demanded in academia, and in poli sci specifically. I explained that. Rather than have them write texts that were supposed to be about practicing academic writing, and which I would have to constantly nudge them back towards more focus and seriousness, I'd much rather say that the blog is a space where they have more freedom, and that their goal is to demonstrate a range of engagements with the course subject matter.

I'm doing everything I can to make the course website a good knowledge site as well -- posting answers to questions that I get asked each quarter; posting links to sites like Memidex and Natural Readers under a writing hacks tag. I only have two so far; I need more, but I think if I keep posting steadily, that part of the site will get better and better.


I've asked the students to tag their posts (in fact, I've made it a requirement for them to get credit). None of them had blogged before, so I wanted to avoid overloading them with new tech, but I did want the site to be a useful tool, in some way other than merely making it searchable. So far, it's working. The first week, only 3/5 students posted in time to get points, and I had to remind them all to tag their posts. This week, they all posted on time, and I didn't have to do any reminding about tagging.

But I don't like asking students to do random stuff, so I'm trying to make tagging and classification a major subtext of the class. That's where my personal property classification assignment comes in. To give credit where credit is due, it was inspired by a comment by Johanna Drucker, who said that she asks students to develop such a system in her classes -- but that was all she said, and I didn't get a chance to ask her more.

I wanted to develop it for use with political theory partly as an interesting personal essay (more interesting than the literary autobiography that I've used in the past with comp classes), and as an introduction to the idea that classification is an inherently political act (whether arbitrary, material, or any one of numerous binary organizations), and suggest that thinking about texts in terms of the authors' classification schemes is a useful way of making heavy content more clear, and breaking it into manageable chunks.

I also really wanted to have the students develop something that was their own thinking, but was not a traditional argument.

The essays have been turned in, and I'll look at them tomorrow, and report back in terms of what I've got. I think that classification is helpful in terms of reading texts, but it's a little hard to say. The Nicomachean Ethics are hard no matter what you do with them; and I think that it'll take a little while for classification as reading to catch on (and no doubt, I can learn to teach it more effectively) -- but I'm excited to keep working on that.

And today, Susan Brown, of the Orlando Project, visited and gave a wonderful, 2-hour demo of the textbase, and then, after less than an hour's break, another talk(!), and I probably don't need to tell you, but I will anyways, how exciting it was to read the scholarly introduction, and see the following statement, and feel like I'd made exactly the write choice in deciding to work on foregrounding classification in this course, and in future courses:

We observe simply that while the work of recovery made a broader literary history both newly possible and newly necessary, the unanswered criticisms of the genre contributed to the continued absence of integrating histories of women's writing, or of revised general histories that take women's writing into account.

But the Orlando Project, and why it's important to me, deserve a whole separate post, and I think I need to save it for later this weekend.

Using Twitter at #sts11, and at academic conferences in general

On the last day of the conference, Barbara Bordalejo was gleefully tweeting about showing Twitter to Paul Eggert and Peter Shillingsburg, and then Marta Werner, which is excellent — I wish I’d thought of showing them myself, because they’ve certainly all shown me amazing things, and it would be only courteous to return the favor. But I can still do that. This post, then, is written for an audience who haven’t used Twitter before (at all, or who use it, but not within a conference.) It’s long, but broken up into sections; read one, or all, as you like. I want to avoid asserting baldly that everyone should be on Twitter when they attend a conference. Different styles work best for different people. But if you're curious about it, then this post may be useful to you.

Tweeting to promote, and document
Tweeting to interact
Twitter can make conferences more professionally useful
Too big to tweet: Peter Shillingsburg’s Presidential Address
Twitter and conflict; or, Twitter isn’t enough — but sometimes, neither is spoken discussion.
Tweeting in a textual context
But can’t you get ADHD from Twitter?
What I don't know

Tweeting to promote and document

This was my first time tweeting at a formal conference (as opposed to at a THATCamp); which meant I had to figure out what I wanted to say. At the first session I attended on Wednesday afternoon, How to Do Things with NINES, there were only 3 people, including me, and tweeting wasn’t especially conducive to interacting fully with them; but I did send out a couple of messages describing what we were doing; knowing that people in the other sessions would be doing the same. And Typewright, which we ended up discussing as much or more as NINES itself, is worthy of more buzz: it’s a tool for crowdsourcing OCR correction in databases like ECCO, and one of the most exciting features of it is that once a user has corrected a full text, Gale will give him/her the rights to it. (My podcast scholarly edition, which I spoke about at MLA 2009, languishing in part precisely because of rights issues), should finally become a reality, once Typewright goes live).

On the chance that other people hadn’t heard about Typewright I wanted it to become part of the #sts11 tweetstream; and also briefly think, publicly, about how users might be credited/identified with their work. (The creators haven’t decided how the attribution system will work, and there are still issues with Typewright to be worked out — for example, what if some lines are partially corrected, but not fully? How will their status be recorded in the system? One of the lines we looked at had a word with an ink blot at the beginning, and as far as we could tell, it said “bish’d” — so though that line has been mostly fixed, it isn’t entirely legible.) Andy Stauffer is excited about the potential of using Typewright in the classroom, and so am I, but I’m also excited about it as a potential gateway drug for more intense work using digital tools. It’s simple enough that it should feel accessible to scholars who are leery of using a computer for anything more than word processing, it’s accompanied by definite rewards in the form of the textual rights (though I wonder how much people will be motivated to work on editions of Pamela and/or Clarissa.

I also want to know what happens once an edition has been corrected. Once someone’s claimed the first edition of Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” by correcting it, will it no longer be possible for anyone else to do the same thing? What if I find that someone has corrected half of a pamphlet, and I finish up the other half? Do I have to make a distinct change in every line, or only click the button to show that I’ve reviewed it and it’s correct?

Enough about Typewright, for the moment — back to tweeting.

Tweeting to interact

In the panels themselves, I tweeted to describe content and approach (which seemed especially important in the more non-digitally oriented panels, to break down any assumptions that there was a straight-up divide between the digitalists and textualists. I tweeted to capture any single phrase, idea, or question, quoting it if possible, given space. And I tweeted to ask questions; sometimes questions that I planned to ask the panelist, but which seemed more widely applicable, and sometimes questions that someone else might answer.

I marked when someone said something that thrilled me, or that captured something of the reasons that I have been drawn to this work. Is this any different than complimenting someone less publicly, at the end of a panel, or when you encounter them in the hallway at a conference? No, not in one sense, if the person is on Twitter, and yes, in another, because in order to make that compliment public, I needed to at least attempt to articulate it in a form that would be coherent for others. I think of this sort of complimenting as akin to exchanges that I’ve heard offline among academics, where someone praises a book, or a scholar, and this is where I sound cynical, because sometimes the praise sounds like namedropping, and what I like about reading people’s tweets about something that impressed them is that I often get a much more particular than general, non-specific sense of “X is so great.”

I met people through interacting via Twitter whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise. And because I met them through Twitter, I’m more likely to be in touch with them in future months, rather than depending on remembering to email them (and trying to say something intelligent in said email).

Twitter can make conferences more professionally useful

Every time there’s a meeting at my university for dissertating (or about-to-be-dissertating Ph.C.s who are preparing for the job market, someone asks “should I go to conferences?” And without fail, the Placement Committee says, “no, probably not. Conferences aren’t really useful at that stage.” You may or may not end up at a panel at 8:30 a.m. on the first day, or at 4:00 p.m. on the last day; you may or may not have an opportunity to meet senior scholars. To be maximally successful at conferences (especially those labelled as “important,” which are usually large), especially as a graduate student, you need to be adept not only in producing intelligent content for your paper, but also at self-presentation. This includes the ability to be involved in cogent, concise conversation, and to respond with provocative questions. Neither of these are skills that are taught in graduate school in most humanities departments (excepting theatre); they’re part of what’s often thought of as natural talent or charisma, or an aspect of mentoring. Oh, and speaking of mentors, that’s something else you often need to succeed at an important conference: a senior scholar who knows you and gives you introductions, and credibility. And just to be in the right place at the right time, poised for an interaction with someone who is not rushing to another panel, or to meet someone else.

A digital forum that’s simultaneous with an academic conference (be it on Twitter, or identi.ca) changes that, because your interactions with other people, be they senior or junior, take place over a few days, rather than in 5 minutes, and more likely, when the people you’re interacting with have enough energy to be social.

Too big to tweet: Peter Shillingsburg’s Presidential Address

Sometimes it was easy to draw out single thoughts for repetition, but tweeting the STS banquet, and Peter Shillingsburg’s presidential address, was extraordinarily challenging, because the address was beautifully written, and bold and cogent, and yet most of Shillingsburg’s points would not have fit within 140 characters, and his words were so carefully chosen that I could not entirely feel comfortable trying to paraphrase him with shorter synonyms. I tried to condense occasionally, because I did think it important to amplify his voice to an outside audience, who might not encounter the speech when it is (I trust) published in the Textual Cultures journal. I think it will be an address that is remembered and studied in years going forward, but studying textual transmission has taught me just how much transmission (or transformission) and preservation is the work of many, rather than one, and it is precisely because of that learning that I found it important to tweet.

Yesterday morning, at 5 a.m., I encountered Peter in the hotel lobby, as we were both on the way to the airport, and as impressed as I was the night before, I was even more impressed because he was articulate enough at the arse-crack of dawn to say that he’d read the tweets attempting to capture some of his ideas. “Some of it seemed like transcription,” he said, “and some questions, and some misunderstandings.” I had acknowledged that it had been challenging to capture, though both Barbara Bordalejo and I had felt that it was important to do so. Peter said that he wasn’t sure whether he should get in and start clarifying, or let it be; and I didn’t have an immediate answer that I could give as I headed out the door to the shuttle. As I thought about it more, I’m inclined to say that while he could respond by joining Twitter, it’d be more effective for him to respond with a post on a website. He could even use Storify to do so. The primary purpose, though, of tweeting, was to accent the address as the finale of the conference, both to pique interest in it immediately, and later, when anyone searches the #sts11 tweetstream, and eventually, when it’s published in print. The secondary purpose, at least for me, was to think actively and respond, as I would in a classroom or in conversation; because I articulate differently when I am doing so publicly than privately*. I don’t think anyone reading the tweetstream would ever think to formally quote Peter via @paigecmorgan, @bordalejo, or others; the tweets serve more as constellations — navigational guides twinkling in the dark (but beware of will’o’wisps, which conceivably exist.) And I note that no one, including me, made purely descriptive statements, like: “Shillingsburg is discussing the intersection of bibliographical criticism and McKenzie’s sociology of texts, and the issues that arise for scholarly editors from their intersection.” It would have taken two tweets, but we could have — and chose not to. Why is that?

Twitter and conflict; or, Twitter isn’t enough — but sometimes, neither is spoken discussion.

There was a great moment in the end of the spatial technology roundtable on Thursday afternoon, when @samplereality tweeted “Data visualizations are a symptom of screen essentialism.” This comment might have stayed submerged in the backchannel if @mkirschenbaum hadn’t asked him about it directly during the question-and-answer/discussion section. And I’ve been thinking about the exchange ever since, and not just because it raised interesting questions for me about the approach of digital humanists vs. traditional textualists (about which I’ll say more later), but because I think it captured a certain richness of dialogue that’s only possible with both backchannel and spoken discussion. Sample’s statement was so compact that it sounded dismissive; whether to sound dismissive was his intention or not, I won’t speculate. But his point about the danger of uncritically accepting data visualizations is quite valid. If I recall correctly, he was on the point of leaving the room when Kirschenbaum called attention to his statement; but as a result, the panel, and the rest of the room, had a chance to respond to it.

I don’t know why Sample was only willing to issue his critique on backchannel, rather than vocally, but I also don’t know whether, if he had phrased it as a spoken question, the statement would have had the same compactness and weight that it did, which for me, helped to characterize the urgency of the critique. It would have been a different discussion if it had been conducted entirely audibly, not least because I think that it would have been much more challenging to articulate a potential problem with data visualizations while effectively managing vocal tone. When voiced, it sounded less barbed, because Matt Kirschenbaum was reading it, rather than Mark Sample saying it. If he'd spoken, rather than tweeted, we would have had a different version of the discussion — and I think I prefer the one that we had.

Tweeting in a textual context

I’m sure that someone before me has made the connection between Jerome McGann’s radial reading, as discussed in ch. 5 of The Textual Condition, and Twitter, even though I don’t see any blog posts on it in a preliminary search. For any non-lit-crit readers, radial reading, in McGann’s own words, “involves decoding one or more of the contexts that interpenetrate the scripted and physical text” (119), and it’s associated with intertextuality and allusion, which have long been foundational tools in academic writing, especially in the humanities. It’s the idea that no text exists in a vacuum, and that in many cases, authors intentionally direct readers to read other things.

To tweet at a conference, which often involves reading (albeit quickly), the tweets arriving in the hashtag stream, is to read radially. Is it to write radially, as well? Transcribing and summarizing isn’t what I’d originally conceived of as radial writing, but I think that’s because my preconception is that radial writing has to involve a more brilliant/exalted response than just repetition. Some radial writing does, obviously. However, I think to dismiss the value of transcribing and broadcasting through repetition or paraphrase is to uphold the bias towards solitary authorship (and implicitly, against collaboration) that’s been longstanding in the humanities. McGann acknowledges that radial reading is “the most advanced, the most difficult, and the most important form of reading because radial reading alone puts one in a position to respond actively to the text’s own (often secret) discursive acts” (122). Tweeting at a conference is advanced, not because it uses technology, but because it requires decision making about what to type, and how to type it (this should be familiar to writers everywhere), and that’s difficult to do. I haven’t heard any discussions about conferences as texts, and I’d bet that’s because the discursive acts that they represent often are secret, or rather, secreted — in electronic files, which may be forgotten, or may appear in journals and books months or years later, and may or may not be available at an affordable economic price, and may or may not be found by conference attendees.

From reading tweets, throughout the conference, I gained a sense, sometimes very specific, sometimes not, of what was going on in other panels. I didn’t always read these tweets as they were being sent; checking the hashtag was something to do at breaks, lunch, and in the evening. Sometimes I found it difficult to tweet and focus at the same time; but other times, the listen-and-transmit mode wasn’t an obstacle at all. I know that there are things that I missed; that tweets don’t adequately substitute for the experience of being at a panel. But I could hardly help but be appreciative of them. Some of the things that I’m thinking about as a result of the #sts11 twitterstream that I would otherwise have missed:

1) Platform studies, which I’d never heard of, via @mkirschenbaum: Editing is platform studies and platform studies is editing. This seems obvious in retrospect. #sts11

2) How location affects reading, via @samplereality: How can we talk about books without talking about where we are when we read them? The location and posture of our physical bodies. #STS11

3) via @KLeuner: martha nell smith: Is it a fantasy that texts are more dynamic in the digital world? #sts11

4) via @KLeuner: Marta Werner notices there are only women at Editing Digital Feminisms panel #sts11

5) After the discussion about data visualization started in the geospatial tech roundtable, I was wondering how crowdsourced data might affect the degree of trust we put into it. But I wondered if I was being silly to ask such a thing. @mattlaschneider encouraged me to do so, and also reminded me of Randall Munroe's crowdsourced color survey.

I haven’t seen very many statements trying to define what Twitter is for, in the context of a conference. Maybe that’s because no one wants to try and limit what micro-blogging can do — but here’s an alternative reason: it’s controversial to suggest that Twitter is useful because saying so calls attention to the weaknesses in current academic infrastructure and culture. By weaknesses, I mean not only the factors that have made conferences less productive in the past, but also economic constraints that I’ve heard referenced that make it less common to have teaching appointments funded by more than one department; and the often intense workload that non-tenured faculty members face. It calls attention to the common tendency to assume that only faculty and graduate students hoping to become faculty are scholars, while staff members aren’t.

In short, the discomfort surrounding Twitter, and the potential advantages of using it (whether using means actually tweeting, or just reading) are entangled with the social structure and customs of academia (and probably broader literary culture, as well.)

But can’t you get ADHD from Twitter?

The concerns I’ve seen raised most often about Twitter-use during conferences (and at other meetings, too, but for this post, I’m not addressing those other settings) is 1), that users who are tweeting aren’t listening to the talk, and 2), which follows that concern, that users who are tweeting are being disrespectful. The first is a little tricky, because users who are new to the platform will certainly find the multitasking of tweeting and listening challenging. Then again, when I’ve relied on writing notes at conferences, I’ve often heard the speaker say something that flashes in my mind, and sets off a whole chain of other ideas and questions. In those situations, I have to choose whether to try and write them down before I forget them, sacrificing my attention to the speaker; or keep focusing, and hope that I can remember what started the domino chain of ideas. In short, this multitasking problem has existed for as long as we’ve been taking notes, no matter in what format. Furthermore, short attention spans are hardly endemic only in tech use — if anything, the traditional conference format, with concurrent panels and minuscule breaks between sessions, does far more to promote brief encounters that are never followed-up on than a site like Twitter, where anyone who adds me as a result of what I said at #sts11 will keep seeing what I say (or drop me for posting too much about sci-fi and cats).

As for the idea that tweeting during a session is disrespectful, even when the tweets are positive — well, I haven’t heard that particular judgment from any of the textualists that I know, and I’m glad, because it would be just as easy for people to question the respect or disrespect arising from the work of producing critical apparati, and emphasizing the collaborative authorship of single works, or whole oeuvres. I’d stake a lot on Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius being unwelcome to at least a few of its subjects. I also think that the idea that tweeting during lecture is disrespectful is not a new conflict. Long before Twitter, I heard teachers expressing either perturbation that their students were frantically writing notes without looking up, or alternatively, that their students stared at them, and never wrote anything down. In that sense, Twitter really is just the pen and notepad in a different shape. **

It would be interesting to talk more about the ethics of radial reading on the internet, and our habits in doing so, because the choices that people have made in radial reading, and continue to make, have considerable force in arenas outside of academia. When I say this, I’m thinking about everything from radial reading habits as they effect our consumption of news (especially political content) to situations where people produce content both under their own name and under a pseudonym, and the controversies that arise therein.

What I still don’t know

I hardly think that this post is definitive on the subject of tweeting at academic conferences; so here are the things I don’t know:

1. Do you have to be participating as a Twitter-user in order to get the benefit of a conference stream? Does it work as well if you’re just reading? (As someone looking forward to reading the #asecs11 stream, I think that reading is valuable — but that’s partly because I can respond to the Twitterers if I choose to. Someone without an account can’t.

2. A question especially for people like Peter Shillingsburg, Paul Eggert, Marta Werner, and Martha Nell Smith, all of whom had remarks tweeted throughout the conference — but this goes for anyone whose work is talked about in Twitter, but doesn’t have an account. What does the discussion look like to you? And if you decide to respond, what format might you take?

ETA, a restatement of the above question from Kirstyn Leuner, which I think is more effective and direct at what I was trying to get at with question #2: Are all conferences and conference papers equally public? And is it *always* ok to tweet out conf papers, as convention?

3. Who do conference tweeters see as their audience? And what choices are they making in order to serve that audience? (Links, non-links, use of twitlonger, etc.

4. Is there a minimum number of people who need to use Twitter in order to make a conference twitterstream useful? How do we say when a stream is helpful and when not?


*This is not to say that one is better than the other; or that what is true for me is true for anyone else, but I find that when I am thinking privately, I tend to be documenting, and when thinking publicly, I tend more towards constructing. I wanted to be constructive at STS in general, and with the Presidential Address in particular, because I find I am often able to reach new heights when I do, in a way that I cannot always do in private.
** Also, though I’m saying so flippantly, I can’t help but think about what it would look like to compare the rudeness of tweeting during a panel with the rudeness of the printed matter created as a rivalry between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll.

what might an interdisciplinary research methodologies course look like?

This morning, I was sorting through readings by E P Thompson, James Chandler, Ian Duncan, Fredric Jameson, and Alex Dick this morning, and juggling various strong opinions on the intersection of literature and economics, literary history, and the relation of history and historicism to the formation of political economy and economics. And I'm getting somewhere good with this, rather than just somewhere horribly muddled. But I felt a bit disheartened, too, because if I think back in my coursework, I can remember a lot of discussions tremendously well, but among them, there's little or nothing about how to develop a research methodology, or choose one (or most likely, a combination of those two) that addresses the challenges of interdisciplinary research.

The closest thing to a discussion like this took place in a Textual Studies course on early printed texts, which in addition to looking at the development of print from Caxton through the 18th century (the professor was a specialist in 18th century novels and dramas), and also covered the history of the emergence of textual studies/bibliography, and its fractious relationship with literary criticism in the 20th century. And that was nice, but it didn't address the issue of textual studies as interdisciplinary, understandably, because the whole point was to valorize it as worthwhile.

What I was wishing for this morning, was the memory of seminar discussions about the challenges of writing literary history, of balancing between close readings of literature and combining them with detailed factual and statistical research, not just on issues like book buying and readership (which I think of as a fairly usual place for lit critics to go to when they want to buff up an argument with historical data), but also poverty, famine, religion, politics, agriculture.* I don't mean that I wish someone had taught me how to do it "right," because it's entirely clear that there's not one single right way -- but I wish I had memories of discussions about the different effects of choosing one approach vs. another.

Part of that is no doubt that I'm working with three fields that really do have a fraught relationship. I can point to booklength discussions about whether literary history is or isn't possible, essays on the same, and quick little daggers flung in reviews about attempts to write literary history, directed, I think, at practitioners from both lit and historical backgrounds. Meanwhile, I'm still talking with several people who work on lit and econ. about the grenade that Mary Poovey lobbed when she published Genres of the Credit Economy in her assertion that literature simply wasn't a good medium for studying economics.

Anyway, assuming that I'm not the only one who wishes that there had been a course to directly address the issues of interdisciplinary research methodologies, here is a rough vision of what a course might look like, and/or might cover.

Disclaimer: I'm in a lit. program, and for the moment, I'm imagining this course based on what I wish had existed. I'd love to hear suggestions that might make it a course that would be useful for students in other disciplines as well. I think it might work best if it were oriented towards interdisciplinary research methods in the humanities, rather than IDRM across the board encompassing everything -- but that's just my temporary, preliminary opinion.

1. I think it would start by looking at disciplines that are so interwoven with literature that we barely even think of them as separate anymore: classics, history, and psychology. It would look at the emergence of literature departments in the 19th century as a separate discipline from classical studies, and probably review the literary/historical biography/New Criticism debates.

I know that these are old chestnuts, but I'd like to think that there are worthwhile and useful questions and points to consider, in terms of the intentions behind these early disciplinary combos, and in terms of the objections that were raised to them. And at the very least, I think that they merit being reviewed as formative influences on the discipline of literature today. The same goes for theory and psychoanalytic criticism.

How much time was spent on any of these would depend on the professor, but I imagine that this would account for between 30 and 50% of the entire course.** Readings, off the top of my head, might include: E.P. Thompson, Terry Eagleton, David Perkins, Rita Felski, Martha Nussbaum, Clifford Siskin, John Guillory, a selection from Theory's Empire...this list is not definitive.

2. From there, the course would shift into a more focused look at specific areas of interdisciplinary research that are currently active. Lit./econ. would be the subject of one week, and it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to spend another week on New Historicism. Other focuses might be anthropology/social sciences, public humanities and/or activism, history of science.

This would be the most challenging part of the course to put together, because the subject material would largely consist of a couple of readings from each of the interdisciplinary areas, in which the authors made direct claims or comments on the nature of the study, or which were otherwise emblematic of the particular area. Alternately, there's no reason that source material couldn't consist of digital archives, tools, etc., where those were available.

3. An exhausted, overcommitted professor could run this course and have it be useful just by using the standard method of having the students sign up to present on the readings and raise discussion questions each week. He or she would provide perhaps the most leadership in the beginning of the course, during those weeks where the focus is on literature and its origins as an interdisciplinary field. (I suppose that if I have an agenda for the course, that's part of it - the idea that literature has always been interdisciplinary).

I don't mean that he/she could tune out for the rest of it, because I would be counting on him/her to provide the sort of guidance and knowledge that only comes with having been a professional academic for longer than grad students have been -- for being familiar with different trends in research that have risen and fallen over time. I strongly suspect, however, that if the students were given some guiding questions to use: what specific goals arise in interdisciplinary research? What types of arguments does IDR lend itself to? What relationships can we see between the disciplines that are joined? -- that they could have lively and useful discussions which might later be useful to them while they were writing dissertation chapters. There's a lot of material that could be covered, but I've had some courses, one in particular, that overwhelmed with reading, and yet the massive avalanche of material, not to mention the syllabus itself, was useful and valuable, and I can still remember it in a fair amount of detail.

4. What would students get out of this? Primarily, an acquaintance with a bunch of readings outside their primary areas, in a context which included focused discussion about methodology -- what the authors were trying to do, and why. Probably, a useful final project/essay for this class would be to undertake an interdisciplinary research project/paper in one's own area. This assumes that the students are interested in IDR, but surely that's a safe assumption. It's an opportunity, then, for the student who's interested in literature and gender, to work on developing an argument that is overtly interdisciplinary, while thinking critically about what it means to be interdisciplinary, in terms of the types of sources used, and the types of questions raised.

Secondly, I hope the class would provide students with a space to think about the politics of interdisciplinary work, and probably the politics of the humanities in general. There's lots of territory there for literature, and surely for history, and library science, and philosophy, too. It's possible that what I really want, and am not fully articulating, is a class on the politics of literary study. (I do want that class.) But what I really wanted this morning, is a class where we might read Stephen Greenblatt one week, and Bruce Robbins Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State the next, and later, read Amartya Sen, and ask, in each case, what are they doing, and how, and why? And what does it look like when we discuss them as part of a sustained exploration? Are there techniques that are shared between all three? And assuming that there common techniques, that there are also differences, then what are they?

This is just one way that such a course could be put together. There are tons of others. The brilliant thing is that though such a course couldn't cover everything, that it would prompt insights and questions that would be transferable to other areas of interdisciplinary research, that might provide at the very least, a starting point for thinking about choices that one makes in developing an interdisciplinary research methodology.

But this is only a rough draft. How would you improve it?

ETA: I realized that by some standards, this may not look like an interdisciplinary research methodologies course at all -- surely that would involve techniques like statistics and ethnographic research being taught, right? I heartily agree, and if someone offered that class, I would have camped out all night in front of registration, just to make sure I got in.

One reason I didn't propose that class is that at the moment, my department would say "we don't have anyone who could teach that." I think a lot of departments might be in those straits. But the other reason I didn't propose that class is that there seems to be plenty of interdisciplinary work that shows up in books and essays even without bringing in quantitative research, and yet, is quite central to the author's main argument and/or his or her grounds for raising questions. And maybe that's Cultural Studies 101 stuff, but I sure would love it if we could interrogate it in the process of constructing seminar papers, conference papers, essays, abstracts, and dissertation chapters.




*And I don't just mean how to write Marxist criticism, though that certainly would be an applicable discussion to have.
**I'm thinking in terms of quarters, since that's the only system I've worked in. Semesters might work differently.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: why it matters

Part one

So, yes, there's a big conflict between economics and the humanities. I think that literature becomes a major face of the humanities in that conflict, and so does art -- there are more stories about flaky artists and poets than there are about flaky historians and philosophers. But that's not really important. What's more important is that the conflict is also between economics and everyone else. That's a grammatically crude way of putting it, I know, but it's also a crude, rough conflict, messy because it can be fought on the grounds of knowledge or on the grounds of wealth. Both knowledge and wealth are forms of power, but they're not quite the same, are they? Or are they? Is one superior to the other, and why? There's no universal answer; and attempting to find one gets into even more unanswerable questions and sensitive subjects, such as the unpleasant question of whether I'm genuinely smart, or just lucky.

One consequence of the baggage surrounding economics is that it ends up buried in layers of mystification, political partisanship, and probably just general caution. Discussing it is like bringing up religion at a dinner party -- a risky idea. But the consequences of our reluctance to attempt to make finance a more public subject* is that financial illiteracy is a huge concern.

My ideas for classes aren't going to solve these problems. It'd be foolish of me to claim anything more definite than that I think they might help, rather than aggravate further. I think my point, my reason for bringing this up, is that it's really difficult to develop an effective interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics without at least some consideration of these issues. What you get, most likely, is the same dull round of literary authors critiquing the market, and an arc that's meant to develop the realization that their thoughts regarding the market were actually more complex.

Let me be perfectly fair and direct: unless you are willing to develop a more interdisciplinary pedagogy, you cannot escape that same dull round. Therefore, it's not the fault of the instructors who teach such classes that they're stuck here; and I do not intend these posts or my ideas as a critique of their work. Institutional support is often low or nonexistent for any interdisciplinary work,** and the combination of literature and economics is not exactly an intuitive combination.

I should also note that the conflict between literature and economics isn't one that's only important to the practitioners and students of literary studies, or to the general population at risk for financial illiteracy. It's also important for economics, as Richard Bronk explains here, in a brief essay about his book, The Romantic Economist:

My starting point for The Romantic Economist was an observation made during seventeen years working in the world of finance. I was struck by an important mismatch between the way economists usually model economies and the way markets often work in practice. Economists normally rely on essentially static equilibrium models to make predictions about markets, and they assume that economic actors optimise their trading possibilities on the basis of rational expectations. Yet, as we are daily reminded, markets are dynamic and creative processes characterized by relentless innovation, self-reinforcing emotional spasms and massive uncertainty. And, in this uncertain world, individuals are driven as much by emotion, sentiment, intuition and imagination as by rational calculation and probability forecasts of future utility.

Bronk, whose book I haven't finished in entirety yet, but which I recommend, is a very rare creature indeed, which is to say, someone approaching the two discourses from a background with more experience in finance than in academic studies of literature. He's not the only one to remark on the importance of emotions and sentiment -- the topic of behavioral finance and its implications for the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), is being considered by others as well.

And it would be interesting to have a class looking specifically at sentiment in the markets, and sentiment in the novel. But I'm not proposing that, at least, not quite yet.

*And no, I know that this wouldn't be easy, that there are myriad issues of embarrassment and self-consciousness and dangers of ostracization and so forth.

**I am lucky to be at an institution where the support for interdisciplinary pedagogy is pretty damn good.

interdisciplinary pedagogy for literature and economics: some background

I'd like teach classes that integrate literature and economics. Not just classes where the theme is credit satires of the 18th century or Victorian portrayals of the working class, but classes where it's foregrounded that literature and economics are two different knowledge producing disciplines, and that share methods. In both, imagination, metaphor, and logic are vitally important tools.

There's a lot of fractious posturing and well-rehearsed conventional thought about how literature* and economics aren't compatible. Those wacky poets and novelists, they have no head for money; while the cold-blooded economists have no heart, and maybe even no soul.

Among academics, there's also a lot of discussion about how both literature and economics are genres that could be called creative writing -- you write a poem, I write a check, and hey, both of them are creating something that isn't really there!. Money is valuable because we agree that it is, says John Locke; we agree that "a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn" (Sec. 37). It's really no different than the suspension of disbelief that we use when we're reading novels.

It became trendy a while back to suggest that lit. and econ. were rather two halves of one discourse, separated at the fall like the original humans in Aristophanes' account. Mary Poovey goes the farthest in that regard, writing that imaginative writing (as we would define it today) was one of three genres in existence at the end of the seventeenth century, whose main purpose was to mediate value. (The other two were money itself, and writing about money: shipping ledgers, economic theory, etc.) Marc Shell and Kurt Heinzelman, who produced some of the earliest writing on the genre, made similar moves; Heinzelman, if I recall correctly, is the first to wonder whether it would be possible to identify a point at which the discourse of literature and that of money really and truly parted ways for the first time. Money and fiction, like Sophie Zawistowska and Nathan Landau, the original star-crossed lovers. Or maybe more like George and Martha.

This idea of the two as separate halves of the same discipline has been made credible in part by the recognition that the Romantic poets and writers weren't quite so staunchly anti-commercial as previously thought; that their views on the subject were more complex than those of the stock character artists and writers in La Boheme. I'm summarizing here, and compactly, but Philip Connell's Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of 'Culture' provides a lot of historical data on the details.

Truthfully, I'm a little leery of the positioning of lit. and econ. as sundered discourses, because, as Rob Mitchell writes, "while metaphors, tropes, and modes of perception originating in finance may infiltrate literary discourse (and vice versa), if such slippage characterizes every other cultural discourse -- law, politics, medicine, etc. -- then finance and literature begin to seem like arbitrary points of departure and analysis" (8). But it might be right. My problem with it, and this is something I bring up because it's central to the question of a pedagogy uniting the two, is that it ends up being more distracting than useful. It's a move that feels defensive to me, like the lit. side is trying to passively and subtly assert its own importance in relation to finance, by connecting the two.

The conflict between them is huge -- let's acknowledge that. It's not just a catfight -- professional organizations in the humanities are counseling academics to find ways to "emphasize its practical and economic value." It's being called the "Crisis of the Humanities," and looking back over the multitude of articles covering it in the last three years (more than I can list here), there's been little or no development in the argument. It just gets more and more dire as arts and foreign language departments are shuttered.

I don't have an answer to that conflict, or some big insight that solves that problem. But I do think that it, meaning the conflict between the two, needs to be actively considered in the process of developing courses and pedagogy that brings the two subjects together, because otherwise, I don't think those arguments can move forward -- or at least, it's much less likely that they will.

I'll start addressing how we might surmount this problem in my next post in this series.

*(which, for today's purposes, I'm using to mean both the creation of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction AND the study of said literature)

Twenty-First Century Literacies: Navigating works in progress

I've seen a lot of discussion recently about 21st century literacies: at Cathy Davidson's HASTAC blog, Howard Rheingold's series of posts on "infotention," and Annette Vee's blending of programming and writing as "proceduracy."

The posts, and their comments, are better read than summarized; so I'm not trying to encapsulate them by saying that they address the ways that digital productions command and affect attention differently, and promote different sorts of interactions among readers than print productions; and that it's important to reevaluate how we define the units of production: a tweet, a blog post, an essay, a command, a method, a program...

There's one topic that I don't see being discussed; or not directly. Perhaps it's because it's a type of reading, i.e., a type of literacy, and already ingrained in everyone's thought on this issue; but to me, it seems absent when it needs to be in the foreground.

Is there a literacy for works-in-progress? At first it sounds redundant, because most, if not all, of the digital humanities projects online are "in progress" -- so many, that the Spring 2009 issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly featured a cluster of articles on "completion and incompletion in the digital humanities." Sometimes, this is the result of the creators' particular position on editing (for me, Morris Eaves' introduction of the term x-editing will always spring to mind first, but it's not the only strategy of its kind). And part of the point of electronic productions was that they were more flexible than their printed counterparts. I'm using "production" rather than "edition" because this applies whether what's being produced is a scholarly edition or an essay, or a project like the Keyword Collaboratory for the volume Keywords in American Cultural Studies. From another standpoint, all digital productions must be forever works-in-progress because they continually require funding and maintenance.

In short, we're already evaluating works-in-progress, all the time. Why say that reading them requires a new literacy?

First, because the ways that digital productions are dramatically different from print productions includes the fact that printed books are nearly always finished, Hyperion and Edwin Drood not withstanding. In discussions of authoritative sources vs. non-authoritative ones, like Rheingold's Crap Detection 101 or Clay Shirky's Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority, I see talk of good sources and bad sources (and often, discussion of single-author or small-author-group vs. crowdsourced sources), but not consideration of finished and unfinished productions. Can a clearly unfinished site contain authoritative (and unique to it) statements; or can it be presenting valuable ideas while obviously incomplete? Do we have ways of teaching students to evaluate authority on sites that are clear works-in-progress (an evaluation that is surely more complex than identifying the site owner, or being aware of the implications of a .com vs. a .org or .edu domain name).

I recognize that it's easy to be suspicious of clearly unfinished productions because ambition is free, and often, so is registering a blog name or putting up an index.html page on a university website. In a course I took a couple of years ago on hypertext and digital editions, a classmate pointed us to a Swarthmore edition of Tristram Shandy -- or at least, the first two volumes of it. I have no doubt that there are similar projects in existence, whether left incomplete at the close of a class, or because the creator's attention was drawn elsewhere. However, other productions are incomplete because they are in early stages. (Full disclosure: I have one such production.) Clearly there are ways of evaluating these early stage works-in-progress, because they are the recipients of grants that help advance them. But the type of evaluation done in grant giving is usually done by the most authoritative experts available. It's not quite the same as a literacy for reading works in progress that a majority of participants in a field would be conversant in.

Secondly, one of the primary goals of literacy is to promote composition (or production, if you prefer a term that is not quite so verbal). Or, even more broadly, response. What format that response takes is uncertain: a blog post, a contribution (to an exhibit-based production supported by Omeka), or in some cases, a purchase. It's fair to say that the mix of litcrit and technological skills that are involved in digital humanities makes this a challenging issue, and I have listened to those who have substantial skills in one area complaining about those who lack them (and who are usually experts in the other area.) The danger is that these conflicts tend to move immediately into evaluating end-products with little or no consideration of the literacies from which they developed. And by literacies, I'm referring to several mentioned in Cathy Davidson's post: participation, design, narrative/storytelling, among others. Several of these could also be called "standards" -- or as Mark Sample suggests in comments, "practices." But Sample's suggestion gets at a subtle but important aspect of learning: literacies, as they are gained, become practices. Standards. Techniques. But they start as something different. Nor are they entirely encompassed by any single programming language, or indeed even a group of programming languages and tools.

What I see most when I'm talking bout any mixing of technology and humanities with people who are new to DH is the assumption that they are barred from participating because they don't know any HTML (or XML) (and feel they have no aptitude for programming); or that if they could afford to hand off their research to someone with tech skills, their work could be "digitized" within a matter of weeks or months. Anyone who's started building a new tool or a new project knows that this isn't the case -- that there are decisions to be made that don't fit neatly into either programming skills or lit-crit acumen. But it's difficult to teach this sort of understanding by showing users around a fully-developed or well-advanced website.

I'm resisting writing more about this today, when it's a topic that warrants more than one blogpost. There are other reasons for thinking about a literacy for works-in-progress that are more based in constraints, such as a lack of funding necessitating that the production be developed in small parts, or a lack of time. The second is an issue that's particularly relevant to graduate students and to professors on the way to tenure, since the value of digital productions as compared with monographs and essays is still in debate. For now, I'll end on a question: how do we assess the potential of a resource as it's being developed? How do people with different levels of experience assess a project differently? And, if Matt Kirschenbaum asks "How do we know when we're done?," then I'm asking "How do we know when we've started?"