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?

This is another short podcast episode featuring a presenter from The Past’s Digital Presence Conference.  Rachael Sullivan’s presentation at the conference is titled ““Dickinson Meets DoubleClick: Remediating Poetry”.

Rachael holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is currently an M.A. student in Literary and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her scholarly interests include contemporary poetry, media history and theory, and electronic literature. Her current project examines the implications of hybrid literary texts, particularly lyric and confessional poetries, that have both a print and digital identity or version. Next fall, she will begin a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in Media Studies.

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Laila Shereen Sakr‘s presentation at The Past’s Digital Presence conference is titled “On Implementing the Digital Form: an Arabic-English Web-based Archive.” She is a poet, activist, scholar, and digital artist. Her work critically examines the nature of digital information and cyber existence in a post-9/11 world. She is primarily concerned with digital compositions, particularly in Arabic. In her art practice, she aims to bypass the notion of critic as authority who controls narrative. Instead, she aims to create a new authoritative but participatory role that resonates with web culture: that of co-editor, co-curator, and co-producer all at the same time. This is done by building and performing her work in digital and new media: her current projects include R-Shief, an Arabic-English web-based archive for exchange among activists, scholars, and new media artists; and VJ Um Amel, an interactive, live cinema narrative about an animated cyborg who is also an Arabic-speaking mother. Previously, she co-founded media and art collectives in Washington, DC, including the Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency and Word of Mouth. Presently, she is lecturer and research associate in the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz.

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This is the first in a series of short podcast interviews with presenters from the upcoming conference at Yale, “The Past’s Digital Presence.”

Lauren Klein’s presentation at the conference is titled “Towards an Ethics of Electronic Research: Accounting for Absence in the Jefferson Digital Archive”.  Lauren is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and American Identity, 1732-1865, centers on representations of food and eating in early American literature.  In addition to her current role as an Instructional Technology Fellow at the CUNY Honors College, Lauren works as an educational technology consultant for various organizations, including One Laptop per Child. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard University.

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• Stewart Campbell, Columbia University, “Eugène Atget and the Digital Archive”

Art-historical self-critique through an analysis of the commercial practice of photographer Eugène Atget remains one of the great tasks undertaken in this discipline in the past 20 years. The most prominent example is Molly Nesbit’s Atget’s Seven Albums, published in 1992, which significantly altered the way art historians understand the archive’s place in historical research. This presentation investigates the institutional discourse of Atget’s work and argues that the Museum of Modern Art’s digital catalog extends the institutions careful editing of Atget’s work required to support the narrative of modern photography, which is often incompatible with the multiple discursive spaces that his images occupy. In comparison to its vast collection of his work, totaling around 3000 images, the 58 pictures visible online to the public are easily codified in aesthetic categories that were not the primary concern for Atget when he produced his them. As we digitize the exhibition space of photography, we must reconsider not only whether, and if so, in what ways, this space replicates the discursive possibilities of the physical archive, but also what methodologies we must produce for investigating and critiquing the role of power in digitally regulating the discourses of photographic history.

• Julie Meloni, Washington State University, “Toward a Realization of the n-Dimensional Text”

In this paper I build on recent and ongoing discussion among practitioners of humanities computing about the remediation of texts and the relationship between printed texts and their digitized counterparts, with specific regard to the impulse to capture and recreate the experience of the text in multiple dimensions. In the 2007 PMLA issue on “Remediating Genre,” esteemed literary scholars discuss the concept of the database and its potential uses and misuses with regard to digital scholarship, but this discussion lacks a certain technical depth and detail in the same way that a discussion about literary texts by computer scientists might lack certain critical nuances. After addressing some of the realities of technology that have gone missing in discussions surrounding the use of databases in the study of literature, I return to Jerome McGann’s theories of quantum and n-dimensional texts as indicated in Radiant Textuality and “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions,” and I offer a tangible starting point toward implementing a system that allows the scholar to study texts in the multiple dimensions McGann describes (linguistic, graphical/auditional, documentary, semiotic, rhetorical, social), both in isolation and combined.

• Alexandre Monnin, Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University, “What is a Tag: Digital Artifacts as Hermeneutical Devices” [abstract not available]

How-To Digital Humanities
Room 120

• Shane Landrum, Brandeis University, “Camera, laptop, and what else?: Hacking Better Tools for the Short Archival Research Trip”

This talk examines the finer points of doing archival research with the aid of a digital camera, drawing on my experience with these methods at about 15 archival repositories across the US. Here, I focus on my work with the papers of the US Children’s Bureau, a large (1400 cubic foot) collection held by the National Archives, which holds important primary sources about American women’s history. First, I discuss some practical details of hardware and procedure for shooting research-quality photos of archival materials. Second, I describe the techniques and tools I’ve found useful for organizing my research images, both at the library and away from it, and I explore some of the challenges I think historians face in using commercially-available software tools to organize our research. Finally, I propose some ideas for future software–desktop, cloud-based, and social— that could make this style of work less frustrating and open new avenues for creative, collaborative research.

• April Merleaux, Yale University, “Reimagining Ethnic Studies in the Era of Digital Research” [abstract not available]

• Sharon Teague, University of Toronto, “Accessing Wills: MS Access as a Tool for
  Historians”

My paper is divided into four sections. First I describe why I chose Access as my research tool and how I developed my Wills’ Format. Second, I illustrate, through a tour of my data base, how I used Access’ data-crunching ability to generate the raw material I needed to answer questions posed by my dissertation. Third, I discuss how Access, in general, or the S/T format developed to analyze wills, in particular, might be adapted for use by other scholars. And finally, I touch upon the issue of bias, posing a series of questions that I hope will spark a discussion: does the very act of placing data in searchable “boxes” of our own creation, in fact, bias our results?

• Katherine Liu, Folger Shakespeare Library, “The Folger’s Evolving Response to the Information Age: Digital Image Database” [abstract not available]

• Rachael Sullivan, University of Texas, Dallas, “Dickinson Meets DoubleClick: Remediating Poetry”

On the Internet—where banner, pop-up, and in-text ads interweave with content—literature and seemingly unrelated words and images collide. When poetry is remediated on the Internet, the boundaries we set between the poetic object and contextual frame become apparent as choices that are worth interrogation. Emily Dickinson’s poetry appears on a variety of scholarly and nonscholarly web sites, some of which are filled with online ads. Without a doubt, her words have come a long way from the manuscripts and fascicles that once filled the drawers of her desk in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yet, tracing origins does not always bring clarity to texts. As Sharon Cameron points out in Choosing Not Choosing, unity or understanding is not produced through reading Dickinson’s poems in a fascicle context. “What is more radically revealed,” Cameron writes, “is a question about what constitutes the identity of the poem” (4). Online advertising, as it becomes more intrusive and targeted, also reveals questions about what constitutes a literary text and a poem in particular. The Internet is not so much a threat as it is a new textual dimension from which we can learn to be more attentive to language and the interpretive choices we make as readers.

• Austin Graham, University of California, Los Angeles, “The Digitized Blues: Listening to Langston Hughes in the Age of the Online Sound Archive”

The digitization of sound and the advent of the mp3 have made the music of the early twentieth century, once confined to the wax cylinder and the phonograph record, considerably more accessible than had been the case even ten years ago. As a result, twenty-first-century scholars are now enabled to resurrect the largely forgotten musics that once inspired artists of the modernist period. “The Digital Blues” explores these new interpretive possibilities by focusing on the blues poet Langston Hughes, finding that the online availability of century-old blues records — by black and white singers alike — situates his work within an interracial aesthetic that has too often gone unheard.

Finding the Words: The Digital Linguistics Database
Room 120

• Eugenia Kelbert, Yale University, “Ménage à trois, or
  General Theory of Communication” [abstract not available]

• Paulina Bounds, University of Georgia, “Large-Scale Digital Audio Archiving”

This paper is a case study of how to create a digital audio archive which can be used by both scholars and the general public based on Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States turned into digital media. LAGS will be publicly available, with over 7000 hours of linguistic interviews illustrating how language was spoken in the 70s throughout the southeast United States. Reel to reel tapes with the interviews were digitized into uncompressed .wav format, so they could be used for acoustic phonetic analysis. The files were then divided into 4 to 5 minute segments and labeled to create an index. The segments were then converted into .mp3 audio files so they could be easily downloaded in a reasonable time via the Internet. Digitally archiving LAGS permitted long term preservation since the audio tapes have long past their rated life. Possible applications of this database include language analysis, cultural analysis of the informant’s stories and documentation of historical information provided during interviews

• Micah Stupak/Garret Voorhees, Rochester Institute of Technology, “Digital
  Kiksht” [abstract not available]