Marginal Notes, vol. 2

Apologies for the delay - I'm currently working on a funding proposal, and catching up on my Open University "Reading Classical Latin" course, so it's been a busy period for me. Still, without further ado, here's a collection of noteworthy links. I've organised them a little better this time, but expect these updates on a bi-weekly basis in future.

So to begin...

Higher Education
Thomas Benton argues that it's just not worth going to grad school anymore in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He puts this down to "a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary", but I can't help but wonder if the same applies to many professions in today's economic climate.

Speaking of the tough economic climate, the New York Times asserts that the Humanities must justify their worth as higher education institutions are faced with painful cuts - implying that the Humanities are somehow less valuable than other disciplines and therefore need to explain why they are still necessary in changing socioeconomic times.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond the arts and humanities have seen a dramatic decrease in research funding following this week's announcement of how funding will be distributed as a result of the RAE (see the full tables for how much funding was allocated to each discipline here). Although it all seems pretty bleak, Anthony Grafton rightly points out that if we don't start posing the tough but necessary questions now, then "we will see another generation’s relationship [w]ith the university ruined by our refusal to face and discuss facts."

On the brighter side of all this, Geoffrey Rockwell reminds us that these next few years will present opportunities as well as challenges: "Let us build something that celebrates what we do together rather than begging apart", he says, and proposes some credible starting theses. He ends with a rousing call to arms:

"Do research not regrets and hold out your hand to those less fortunate as you would want a hand held out to you. Be liberal in your arts and humanity and the liberal arts will thrive"

Here here!

Digital Humanities
As I think about what sort of employment I'd like to take up when my PhD is all over, I do wonder about the possibility of doing work on digital research tools at some (fantastical) higher education institution someplace. Imagine it - to obtain funding to write code to create a programme to be used in the pursuit of humanistic learning, and then write papers on how these tools might be used for the benefit of teachers and researchers. Well, Caveat Lector has a similar vision, but implies that the odds are stacked against those like myself who see this as a credible employment option: "A very, very few digital humanists will run the entire vicious gauntlet and survive in regular humanities departments". At the same time, the University of Lethbridge is playing with the idea of establishing a course which provides "skills, knowledge, and experience a typical undergraduate ought to have if they were to be certified as being basically competent in contemporary web technologies alongside their core domain", indicating that these are necessary skills for graduates, and such skills are nurtured in certain (praiseworthy) institutions.

Speaking of web technologies, it's worth noting that Zotero 1.5b1 has just been released, and much is already being written about how we can use its new features together with other applications in meaningful ways.

Finally, in a lengthy but engaging piece posted last year, Kathleen Fitzpatrick proposes a new way forward for academic publishing in the digital age. Fitzpatrick's appropriation of scholarly terms within a digital framework ("scholars must consider how peer review might usefully transform into something more like peer-to-peer review”) reinforces the need for institutions to reassess their outdated modes of academic review and publication, just as the electronic publishing units should seek to adopt "a broader view of textual structures, seeking not just the replacement for print-on-paper but an updating of the codex for a networked environment". Well worth a read.

Website Focus
The Guardian has recently put together a list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read, usefully broken down into categories including "Science fiction & fantasy", "War & travel", "State of the Nation" etc - thanks to bookn3rd for pointing it out. Also sourced via bookn3rd is a remarkable online exhibition called Making Visible Embryos; compiled by the University of Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the site illuminates key questions and concerns by "contextualizing images [of human embryos] that have become iconic or were especially widely distributed in their own time" - weird and wonderful stuff.


And Finally...

Hark! A Vagrant is a webcomic by Katie Moira featuring an array of famous (and indeed infamous) historical figures. Ever wondered how Mary Shelley felt in that remote Swiss villa with Lord Byron and her husband? Find out by clicking the image above!

Last week I finally received my copy of Eluvium's boxset, Life Through Bombardment. Eluvium, a.k.a Matthew Cooper, is an ambient electronic musician who incorporates a variety of instruments into his ethereal palette, and the boxset (containing all of his releases) was well worth the money and the wait. The artwork was drawn by Jeannie Paske, and I strongly urge you to visit her website to see more samples of it. If Elvium's work sounds like something you could get into, then why not try downloading the following track from his latest release, Copia (right-click and save): Prelude For Time Feelers

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'Humanist' Discussion Group, Vol. 22, No. 392

Dear colleagues,

Those relatively new to Humanist may not know that each year at this time I indulge in a long, personal and somewhat whimsical meditation to mark the holidays. A celebratory, generous but still not, I hope, unreasoning mood dominates. On this particular Solstice I find in fact several very good reasons to celebrate. It is true that they are unlikely to impress the taxi driver who asks you what you do for a living, or the person who cuts your hair and wants to know what the social benefits of your research might be. And while these reasons to celebrate are less spiritually transformative than was meant by the Zen master when he said, "I drank a cup of tea and stopped the war", they do help to keep the emotional carborundum at bay, and so us in a better state to answer the hard questions of taxi drivers and cutters of hair -- and to attempt an understanding of how seriously that Zen master meant what he said.



My first reason to celebrate is Humanist's new, shiny (but to you almost entirely invisible) vehicle. It replaces an editorial mechanism for processing messages originally designed and implemented by Michael Sperberg-McQueen, then after many years reworked by Malgosia Askanas. Her perl-scripts lasted for quite a while -- more than 8 years, I think it has been. But during this time changes in the complexity of e-mail communications and development of supporting systems made those scripts increasingly inadequate, my job more and more frustrating. Then, over the last many months, thanks to the extraordinary generosity of the
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO, www.digitalhumanities.org), Malgosia was paid to rethink, redesign and rebuild all of the mostly invisible infrastructure. Hallelujah!

[All those unaffected by British popular culture should skip immediately to the next paragraph. For those who are affected, I intend no X Factor! Rather, as antidote, substitute Jeff Buckley's version, which is much,
much better.]

Now is the first occasion in some years, I think, that Hanukkah itself begins on the Solstice. I looked up the date because I wanted to send proper greetings to a Jewish friend of mine. This in turn prompted me with extra urgency to make sure the annual Humanist message was sent out on the Solstice. In addition my Muslim neighbours, whose children are deeply fascinated by our Christmas tree, reminded me that Muharram
(Islamic New Year) begins on 29 December. Other festivals for very good reason cluster around this time and give varying light in the gloomy darkness. But here I must of course relativize my cozy picture of a gathering of candles in the darkness, connoting unity in the diversity of the world, since the world is in fact round and orbits the sun in a particular way. An Australian colleague, finally handing in a chapter of a book I am editing, commented that now he could go off to enjoy the lazy days of Summer. I still find the reality of a blazing, hot Christmas impossible to get my mind around, having been Downunder only once during the Summer, and then rather further south than the really hot weather reaches. (In mid Summer Tasmania can be quite chilly!) So I hope friends and colleagues in Australasia can forgive all the cozy darkness that has crept into my prose, and perhaps they can contribute some of their warmth.

And that's not all. I must also acknowledge my quite inadequate experience of winter darkness in comparison to that of friends in the REAL north. An Australian ex-pat living in Umea, Sweden, once attempted to describe to me, on a very sunny late evening in mid Summer, a typical season of darkness there. He spoke of vivid, hallucinogenic dreams. But then he was Australian and had not lived there all that long.

On the home-front geographically speaking there is, I think, good cause to celebrate our growing and developing PhD in Digital Humanities at King's. Its principal constraint is funding, not interest in it from
potential students, which is strong, nor the willingness of colleagues in other departments to collaborate. It will surprise no one that the degree is primarily collaborative: a majority of our students with other departments, e.g. Portuguese, History, Byzantine and Modern Greek and the social sciences. But a majority of these have come to the degree because of the "digital humanities" label, and so we have had the pleasure of inviting other departments to participate. There are a few potential applicants in the wings developing their ideas, potentially with English, Computer Science, Philosophy and perhaps Geography. We could easily have 3 or 4 times the number currently enrolled if the funding were in place. We're working on that and on ideas, such as the "semi-distance PhD" I've mentioned before.

There now can be no doubt that our subject is capable of vigorously healthy research at the most advanced degree level. Put that under your tree!

And there is no end to the intellectual ferment the combination of computing and the humanities brings to the older disciplines, as our colleagues in other departments will attest. Two of the areas that particularly concern me are the development of an historical sense in the field, with the light that throws on the affected disciplines, and the particular way we do interdisciplinarity. I'm astonished at how much raw historical material there is. Even a rather shallow sampling turns up many if not most of the intellectual concerns on our plate today and
exhibits great intelligence and imagination. Such has been our progress-driven habit of mind that we've often lost sight of such valuable work. It's not so much that we end up "reinventing the wheel" (an example of a misleading metaphor, as if ideas, and ideas in software, were stable objects like wheels) but that we get caught up in an endless cycle of forgetting. As a result we have great difficulty developing a disciplinary sense of ourselves and so a helpful sense of our disciplinary relations. Every once in a while someone notices that
we've not had an IMPACT on a particular field of research. (Feel the billiard balls collide, o wooden heads!) Such complainers seem oblivious to the long history of complaint, dating back to the early 1960s, and so miss the highly intelligent responses to these litanies of failure, the very useful misunderstandings they illuminate and the parallel phenomena in the wider culture. It's a curious shtick but, as I say, helpful as a
clue.

I digress away from celebration and so beg your forgiveness. Allow me to return via a problem I find particularly fascinating at the moment: the relation of progress (characteristic of technology) to questioning (characteristic of the humanities). The fact that the former cannot be denied seems new in the humanities, at least since codex technology became part of the furniture. Recently a classicist friend of mine wanted to know why it was that I keep going on about changing things. Did I have imperial ambitions? he asked. This got me to thinking about the origins and effects of my progress-affected field, and especially about the fact that new tools actually can augment the intelligence with which we begin and so enable us to think in new ways. So I began to
wonder about what the leaven of progress is doing to the bread we bake.

In sum the imaginative richness of our own brief past is surely a fine Christmas present to be unwrapped -- again and again. Is there room under the tree?

And finally in my catalogue is a great cause to celebrate, directly for us in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, indirectly for the digital humanities as a whole: the result of the U.K. 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, to which we were submitted as an academic department for the first time in this round. The details are complex, but suffice it to say that as these things are measured our field now has robust standing among the disciplines in the U.K. de jure as well as de facto. Whatever one may say about such processes -- indeed, there is much to say both positive and negative -- gaining recognition of this kind allows many good things to happen that would otherwise have little chance nowadays. (Thank you Harold!)

Again, being a northern hemispherean, what strikes me is the playing off of our cozy warmth and good cheer against the chill and, and on this day, darkest time of the year. Yes, we are all, as John Donne said, riding westward. But what a ride! Perhaps life would be better at this moment on a beach somewhere in the sun. I certainly hope it is good for computing humanists enjoying such circumstances (with a fast wireless connection, of course).

Anyhow, for the twenty-second time I wish you all a happy, merry Christmas, a joyous Hanukkah, a hopeful Muharram and as many sweet etceteras as there are at hand to be enjoyed.

Yours,
WM

--
Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing,
King's College London, staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/;
Editor, Humanist, www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist;
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, www.isr-journal.org.

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Footnotes

Two links here:

Peter Barry (author of the useful "Beginning Theory") writing in the Times Higher Education supplement on the conflicting demands on research grant applicants posed by the AHRC and the RAE, and how postgrads might be taught to bridge the divide.

A call for papers - Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. I've been thinking a lot about the Digital Humanities recently, and this might be something for me to seriously look into.

That's all for now!

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