The Keynote address at The Past’s Digital Presence conference, given by Peter Stallybrass on Feb. 20, 2010 at Yale University.  Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at University of Pennsylvania.

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The more we talked the more I realized that we really didn’t have a whole lot in common except, perhaps, an enthusiasm for this thing called “Digital Humanities.”  But as we attempted to define Digital Humanities we saw that it was a big tent and none of us really fit into it the same way.  For example, I call myself a “digital humanist” because I’m a tool user and because I enjoy the kinds of projects and conversations that hover around the field.  But others in the group seemed to define themselves as digital humanists because of the nature of their research sources, or because of their IT background, or because of a particular pedagogical approach.

So my question is: do you consider yourself a digital humanist?  If so, why?  And, do you think there are benefits to keeping the DH tent wide open to anyone who chooses to define themselves this way, or is their value to assigning a specific definition to who is and who isn’t a digital humanist?

Saturday, February 20
10:15-11:45 a.m.
Whitney Humanities Center

Digital Politics and Society

Chair: Joseph Yannielli, Yale University
Moderator: David Blight, Yale University

• Lauren Klein, City University of New York, “Towards an Ethics of Electronic Research: Accounting for Absence in the Jefferson Digital Archive”

The Jefferson Digital Archive, hosted by the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, contains nearly 2000 letters written to or from Thomas Jefferson, an annotated bibliography of scholarship about the President, a virtual tour of the UVA campus he helped to create, and more. By most measures, the Jefferson Digital Archive appears to encompass the full range of his life and work. But much like his own written records, the Jefferson archive merely hints at the presence of his many slaves. Using the example of James Hemings, whom Jefferson took to France and had trained as his personal chef, and yet whose contributions go unrecorded in the Jefferson archive, this paper asks: How does one account for absence in the digital archive? What are the techniques of interpretation that are required in order to move “from sense to reference” in online research? How can—or should—a digital archive supply the critical context for such interpretive techniques? And is there an ethical responsibility to acknowledge absence on the part of the archive, itself? Synthesizing scholarship on the ethics of literary criticism with my own experience of using the Jefferson archive for my dissertation research, I will demonstrate the ways in which the traces of James Hemings can be detected in the Jefferson Digital Archive, and illustrate how his historical shadow both exposes the “ethical dimension” of the digital archive and suggests a model for an ethics of electronic research.

• Lauren Gutterman, New York University, “OutHistory.org: An Experiment in LGBTQ Community History-Making”

This paper describes the challenges and successes involved in launching OutHistory.org, a MediaWiki website on LGBTQ US history hosted by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. OutHistory.org’s most radical feature is not its subject matter, but its message that people outside of academia can contribute to the historical understanding of sexuality: OutHistory.org invites everyone to be an historian. This aspect of OutHistory.org has raised some resistance from scholars who fear that community-created histories are unreliable and insubstantial. At the same time, building a community of active users who contribute to OutHistory.org has been much harder than its creators imagined. Digital humanities are often described as capable of democratizing knowledge production. Using OutHistory.org as a test case, this paper will examine how the democratic potential of the digital humanities is, in practice, very difficult to achieve.

• Laila Shereen Sakr, University of California, Santa Cruz, “On Implementing the Digital Form: an Arabic-English Web-based Archive”

The emergence of digital media has revolutionized the functions of authorship, knowledge production and communication, and the processing of information in a manner that demands attention be paid to the medium as agent. Integrating art, technology, and reporting in the artistic production, the digital medium itself functions as a creative and dynamic producer, not just reporter, of knowledge. As a relatively new form, digital media’s contributions and potential in the field of knowledge production have neither been examined nor assessed fully in other disciplines. R-Shief, the project proposed in this paper, serves as an application of the theoretical premise concerning the agency of the medium, thus providing a case to illustrate its contribution in the production of knowledge. [full abstract]

The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities
February 19-20
Yale University

Full Conference Program Available Here

How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities? If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media? What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete? What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use? What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them? Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked? Graduate students from around the globe will address how databases and other digital technologies are making an impact on our research in the humanities during this interdisciplinary symposium.

Keynote Speaker: Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

Colloquium Speaker: Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor, University of Chicago

Closing Roundtable:
Rolena Adorno, Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish, Yale University
Edward Ayers, President, University of Richmond
Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing, King’s College London
George Miles, Curator, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

For the latest updates on conference happenings, follow PDP2010 on twitter.

Torget, perhaps best known for his efforts on the Valley of the Shadow archive, spoke primarily about his latest work on slavery in Texas. As he addressed the specifics of his project he also spoke of the potential of digital history, even as he acknowledged its limitations. I especially appreciated his explanation of how data must be contextualized. As in the example of his current project, knowing when the numbers of slaves increased doesn’t answer the how or why–that’s where the work of the historian figures in, because as he said “digital data is agnostic as to causality.”  With this type of project his data sets are transparent to anyone who might want to challenge or build upon his work, which is quite different than a traditional history project where the work behind the project is generally hidden from anyone but the historian himself. Torget repeatedly emphasized that digital projects such as his foster greater collaboration among researchers.

Rogers’ presentation centered around the use of available digital tools: Wordle and TokenX. He applied these in a textual analysis of documents related to the Utah War.  His presentation offered a solid example of how a researcher with limited programing background can still use digital tools to enhance their research.  My own observation about Rogers’ work was that as he showed the outputs of his text mining, the visuals from Wordle were difficult for many audience members to understand–they wondered why some words were larger, or sideways, or in different colors?  For those of us who are used to seeing ‘word clouds’ this was self-evident, but for a different generation of historians this was mystifying.

In the Q&A portion of the session I asked the panelists what digital tools they thought every graduate student should know.  The initial response was fairly vague, Torget noting that you should learn that tools that are most relevant to your work (and my pained sigh…what if you’re on your own with this and you don’t yet know which ones are most relevant?).  But Torget and Rogers did suggest the following links to specific tools or to sites that host a variety of tools:

Wordle
MIT-Simile project
Stanford’s Spatial History Project
Tools from GMU/CHNM
Google suite tools
ArcGIS (though offered with the caveat that it can be overwhelming and KMZ is much more easily learned)
Both SHANTI and UNL Tool Reviews were recommended as good places to learn more about digital tools

The session ended with a note of frustration about the way the academy continues to dismiss the efforts of digital humanists.  Torget lamented that such projects are always done ‘on the side’ and don’t count towards tenure and suggested that there should be larger conversations happening at the AHA to affirm the value of digital projects.

As an audience participant in this session I found it disheartening that it was not more widely attended, that the audience had very few women (none were on the panel itself), and that there were only two projects featured (as opposed to other panels which typically had 3 or 4 presenters).   In my experience, data or text mining projects are best presented in an informal environment where audience members  can ‘play’ with them and experience their varying levels of functionality–so I’d like to see next year’s WHA offering a ‘hands-on’ session to teach participants how to access and use existing projects.*  It would also be ideal for the WHA to offer a training session for members who are new to text or data mining tools, especially for those of us who are affiliated with departments that don’t have strong digital presence.

*Note: I found it ironic that a conference titled the “Wired West” had very few presentation rooms with projector setups and no free wireless offered to attendees.  Though I understand that this was due to the budgetary constraints of the hotel venue, perhaps such services can be negotiated into the contracts for future WHA conferences, so all participants have access to digital resources.

Additionally, I felt this rundown of Digital Humanities, especially the section on OpenAccess initiatives, was helpful in summarizing the state of the field. Do you find the momentum for this building at other campuses like it is here at UCIrvine?

Earlier this month I attended UCLA’s Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities. Rather than braving the freeways and heading to Los Angeles, I attended Tara McPherson’s lecture Second Life. The technical difficulties of the SL world made it difficult for me to get as much out of the lecture as I would’ve liked, but it still offered a good entree to Vectors Journal and the efforts of those who are on the forefront of ‘multimodal’ scholarship. Perhaps you’ll join me/us–virtually or in avatar form–for the next lecture on March 9th.