This one, or this one? This one.
Oh, how odd.
How's that?
Fine? Okay. No?
Yes?
Yes? Will this work? It's fine?
You want to up a little higher?
It feels so weird. My head's not big enough.
Yeah? Okay. Clearly. Yeah, I need to have bigger. More hair.
All right.
I want to start first with a disclaimer in some ways.
Obviously, what I want to start with is the theme of the conference,
Digital Diversity, Cultures, Languages, and Methods, which the conference
committee tells us focuses on the potential and impact of digital methods
and models in fostering multilingualism and multiculturalism
and on the challenges and potential presented to DH in terms
of linguistic and cultural diversity. My paper responds to
this conference theme by using cultural studies approaches, which Alan Lou
has argued has been noticeably absent from digital humanities
work, and I want to use these approaches to think about the way in which we are developing
a digital literary studies canon.
Now, obviously, here's the disclaimer part.
First of all, I sort of want to pull back a little bit
and explain my concern about discussing this topic within the context
of a DH conference, given some of the recent kerfluffles
about such cultural practices.
What clearly seems to be at issue
with cultural studies approaches within digital humanities is
they're often used as outside challengers, and what I would suggest
is a person who is trained in literary and race theory that it's imperative
that we need to include such analysis in our work, and to make
clear that I do this not to condemn contemporary work, but to
ask us to think about larger issues that
we need to discuss as we move forward. The other disclaimer
to this is, of course, this comes out of a book project I'm working on which examines
digital literary studies within an American context, and
every time I come to DH, I'm more convinced that what we need are lots of
these projects that look at the particular social and cultural environment
in which we are all working. Clearly, the German system
is very, very different than the American system, and the way DH
has developed and is played out is very different. So, most of my
examples I'll be using today are particularly looking at
how diversity of digital canons work within the American system,
and I invite you to comment, add to this question
within your particular environment that you're working in.
Alright, so, on to the talk. The literary
canon wars waged with particular vehemence in Reagans America
drove much of literary scholarship in the 1980s. Alan
Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and E.D. Hirsch's Cultural
Literacy, defended a select list of great writers,
mostly white men, considered under attack by scholars fighting
to expand the types of texts researched and taught who were interested,
these scholars were interested in issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Groundbreaking scholarships such as the Mad Woman
and the Attic by Gilbert and Gubbar argued for an expanded understanding
of the canon, heralding a new generation of critics that would bring
previously excluded writers into this literary canon.
But scholarly presses had limited budgets and numerous texts remained
unpublished, rejected because they were deemed non-commercially
viable. Further, scholars of African American, Asian American,
Native American, and Latino literatures charged that the white feminist movement
had not sufficiently attended to writers of color. Among the
texts that attracted their censure was another of Gilbert and Gubbar's
productions in Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, critique for its lack
of women writers of color, divergent classes, and pre-1800 women's
writing. And just a side note related to D.H. in terms of the
Norton, Julia Flanders had stated that one of the reasons the Brown Women
Writers Project was developed was in response to this problematic
Norton Anthology, so I think it sort of all circles around.
Print projects responded, including the very important kitchen table Women of Color Press,
responded, they noted that because of our need for autonomy,
our need to determine independently both the content and the conditions of our
work and to control the words and images that were produced about us
that we need to take control of the process. So this was
a print response to this issue. However, there remain canonical
allusions and some scholars from the feminist race and ethnic and gender
studies traditions hope that technological possibilities would prove
beneficial to revisioning the canon. It was sort of the great hope that once we
could move to the digital, sort of that particular moment at the
mid to late 1990s. By the 1990s
loss or excluded text began to be published on the net,
some developed by scholars, others by libraries and museums, and still others by
fans. And I want to sort of demarcate these projects I'm looking
at and sort of remind you that these projects are decidedly
outside of what was then humanities computing and is now digital humanities.
I'm looking at a particular sort of slice of projects that
were never brought into our community and I'll talk more about that in a minute.
For scholars interested in shifting the canon, the technological
possibilities were a boon. We imagined that the free access to materials
on the web would allow those previously cut off from intellectual capital
to gain materials and knowledge that might be leveraged to change social position.
The new space of the internet would allow those who had been silenced to have a voice.
This very idealistic kind of activist idea, right?
The sites built during this period were labors of love and allowed these scholars to
self-publish materials found buried in difficult to access rare book
written rooms, text hidden from scholarly examination.
From Judith Federley's Digital Bibliography, and these are actual screenshots
from their first versions, Glennis Carr's online archive of 19th century
U.S. women's writings. I always say that because they look so ugly.
To the voices from the gaps, such work
envisages digital literary scholarship as a tool that might be utilized to meet
the theoretical demands of scholarly work that reinserted women, queers,
and people of color into the canon. And some of our
colleagues within the digital humanities field also voiced this kind of
early hope. So the editors of Romantic Circles wrote,
The strength of web publishing is that it facilitates even favors
the production of editions of texts and resources of so-called
non-canonical authors and works. This is in a part
a function of the relative simplicity of HTML and all of the simpler
document type descriptions of SGML and of workstation publishing
in general when compared to commercial or academic letterpress
production and distribution methods. The ease of production
identified by the Romantic Circles editors was what allowed the broad range
of these small scale activist recovery projects to explode
in this early period, most of which were produced through simple
hand-coding of HTML or some of the early HTML editing programs
I don't know, Adobe page mill, and mounted on local servers.
These early projects
were simple projects that scholars completed without benefit of a digital
humanities centers or technological collaborators. Of the various
sites I've examined, a large subset were developed by individual scholars
not the preferred model of contemporary digital development
and most of these were sort of DIY projects I guess.
And I have a large section that I'm not going to talk about today about how these projects
in some ways connect to the DIY movement in both music and activism
particularly with like Riot Girl feminism in the US because there are some interesting
connections. Ask me more about that later.
So these were unfunded and produced without the support of digital humanities centers,
libraries, and you know, they're HTML, they're not even SGML,
we didn't even get that far, they have no database back ends.
But they suggest an important moment in digital scholarship
where scholars began to imagine how they could harness technology to self-produce
materials they believed they'd been excluded. My concern though
is that this early wave of small recovery projects has slowed and
even of course more troubling to me is that they've disappeared
as is apparent from looking through the vast number of projects that if we are lucky
are still ghosts on the way back machine or have completely disappeared.
And here I want to use Alan Liu's wonderful voice of the shuttle
as sort of a lens through which to think about what is missing and not missing.
His voice of the shuttle, if you look through his
minority studies section, under general resources in
minority studies, half of these can't be located at all,
like not even through the way back machine, not through like contacting people, they're just gone.
While the general resources in Chicano-Latino
literature section reveals that only 50% of projects are still online,
other areas such as in Asian American literature have a higher percentage of active
projects. Some projects are still online, such as
the Web of American Transcendentalism, which records very important
early, lesser known American female transcendentalists. These are the living
dead in many ways and haven't been updated for years.
I'll talk later about it but we've actually just taken on this project to recover it
and it's a mess, it's a mess as one might suspect.
Now, why does it matter if we lose these projects? We all could point to
many, many projects that have been lost, right? Why does it matter if we lose these
particular projects? Well, I would argue that if
these first generation recovery projects disappear, we then will mimic
the narrow canon found prior to the canon wars within our digital
environment. If traditional texts such as Whitman, Rossetti, and Shakespeare
are the primary digital literary text, we then
return to a new critical literary canon that's incompatible with our current
understandings of literature. And while we might be kind of sad, and I am,
and Bethany Nowicki's wonderful early digital project, the John Keats
Hypermedia Archive has disappeared, we can always go to the library and
find Keats text. These projects that I'm talking about are
not available in any other way easily, except
for these few little online places. Few of them are in print,
a few of them are more available through for-profit
databases on microfilm, but most of these projects that I've located
are only available if you trek back to that one library and dig through the
multiple stacks of newspapers and journals. I'm talking about work that is
not accessible even in any print version easily, okay?
And this is not a critique of the very fine projects I've mentioned.
We obviously need those projects. I don't want to declare war on those
works, but what I'm suggesting instead is that
the targeted preservation of such recovery materials is not
technical, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has taught us, but social.
As a field, we need to discuss the way by which our choices are constructing the
canon that scholars will examine in the future.
So, if these projects are this important, why then have they disappeared?
Some of these projects are meant to be just small projects. They're sort of
one-offs, right? Almost all of them are single-scholar,
non-team-produced projects. Most of them are outside of environments
which has any kind of digital structure, contemporarily. They don't have
digital humanities centers. They've never had funding. Almost all of them
are really just real low-end HTML. They've never even made it to
SGML. And almost all of the developers have
never been associated with our particular
group, with digital humanities or humanities computing. In other words, many of these
projects were born within infrastructure environments that are counter to
how we imagine DH production working. And I want to give you
just one example of this, a very interesting example. This is Jean
Lee Cole's Winifred Eaton Digital Archive. Eaton's a very
important writer. She's the first Chinese American
writer to be published in the United States. She provides just one example
of this. When Cole published her 2002 book
on Eaton, she, right after this book was published, found numerous
lost or unknown texts in a rare book room.
She was not able to secure a print publisher for this work, so she decided
to create a digital archive which was housed in the ETech Center in Virginia.
And it included 23 short stories, 2 novels, and 13 non-fiction
pieces, as well as an introduction to the archive and a search mechanism.
And I will say 75% of this material has never been published
in any kind of print version since its original. So we're talking about stuff that's really difficult
to locate, except through this archive.
Since the creation of the Eaton Digital Archive, of course, the ETech Center
has been absorbed into the Scholars Lab, and as part of the transition, most of the
ETech's materials are being cleaned and migrated to a stable repository.
The certain items are not going to be eligible for inclusion.
And what a huge task, I can't even imagine. Most of the ETechs then
will be preserved and available through a standard search of Virgo, the
University of Virginia library database. So you can find them through the database
as individual items. However, certain texts such as the novel
Miss Spring Morning, a very important novel, are missing, as is the introduction
to the archive and the checklist of materials. In other words, basically the critical introduction
that highlights who this writer is and why she's important is gone.
So when you go to the text, unless you know something about her, you will not
understand why she's so important.
This is not, again, to pick on ETech Center or Scholars Lab because God knows
I don't know how you would deal with all those materials. But to sort of just give you
one more example of the problems with it. Now, why do we have
these problems? I have about five minutes, so let me wrap it up. Some have suggested
that there's a structural problem in the emergence of digital humanities.
Martha Nell Smith, for example, contends that digital humanities developed as
a space to which practitioners hope to flee from the ships in the profession
that arose out of the cultural studies movement. She highlights that digital humanities
retreat into modes of analytics. Objective approaches a safe alternative
to the messy fluidities found in literary studies. So that's the kind of negative view of it.
Then others such as Ken Price see the funding mechanism as a contributing
factor to this increasingly traditional canon of digitized text.
For example, NEH in the United States has awarded
141 startup grants from 2007 through 2010.
Of those grants, only 29 were focused on diverse communities.
16 on the preservation or recovery of diverse community text.
And that's not, again, to condemn NEH. I know that we have
a criteria in the guidelines that says impact. So impact,
Shakespeare's going to make a bigger impact than some unknown writer
that no one's going to want to look at except for me and my friend.
So, again, I don't want to wholesale come down
on these individuals or groups. But I think it's a real problem
that when we don't, we are not seeing the kinds of text that sort of
flesh out our literary canon. Obviously, the other problem
which I'm not going to get into is cost both economic and human of preservation.
All right. So I'm going to wrap up this with a few
suggestions based on Dan Cohen's ideas of the importance
of just sort of finding a stopgap preservation mechanism
which is what he's argued. He says we should acquire artifacts and come up with some very
basic preservation strategies to kind of stop the loss of documents.
And I want to mimic Matthew Kirschenbaum's idea that preservation
is not so much a technical problem, but a social problem. And argue that we
as a community need to take this on as a social problem that we address.
All right. So here's some very brief examples. Scholarly editing
journal is produced at the University of Nebraska by Amanda Gailey and
Carol Jewell. This very small scale, small digital humanities
archive is designed to allow us to recover certain types of
text. So for example, my students and I completed a
project looking at Malcolm X notes. So the
autobiography of Malcolm X notes, which have never been published before
and they are going to be published through the scholarly editing collection. These are the kinds
of small scale sort of interventionist types of projects we can
utilize. Other kinds of ways that we can think
about bringing projects on board. We have some really great models
such as the Arc family, the Knys 18th Connect,
which has helped to preserve certain projects including the Charles Chestnut project.
These might be expanded. Another area
is to sort of harness existing digital projects.
So for example, my 19th century Concord project, we are taking
on the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and the American Transcendentalist projects,
which are effectively dead projects, and we are
bringing them in, preserving them, marking them in TEI, and then we're going to
pull them into our environment and develop some mapping tools with them. So other
projects can sort of, you know, we can piggyback on existing projects.
And so the sort of end game
I want to leave you all with is that I think it's really
really important that we begin this project immediately. We need a
targeted triage focused on digital recovery projects that allow access
materials that are not accessible in print or other digital
forms. We might use various existing structures of
support, but we need to make a community effort to do so.
And it seems to me that one of the most powerful things about this early period of digital
literary studies that I'm talking about is the very DIY approach that many scholars
embraced, the sheer joy and freedom of bringing important text to the larger
scholarly community. We need to
bring this back underway. We need to examine the canon that we as digital
humanists are constructing, a canon that skews toward traditional text
and excludes crucial work by women, people of color, and the GLBTQ
community, and we need to reinvigorate the spirit of previous
scholars who believe that textual recovery was crucial to the work, who
called the digital as a way to enact changes in the canon, and as Jerome
McGann has suggested, if the entirety of our
cultural heritage will be transformed and re-edited in the digital form,
then we must ensure that our representation of culture does not
exclude work by diverse peoples. Thank you.