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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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]

Elisa New
Professor of English, Harvard University
“Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; a Memoir in Five Generations”
Monday 22 March 2010, 4 p.m., room TBA
All are welcome

Praised as “an imaginative recreation of two vanished worlds,” and “a moving and powerful memoir, weaving together past and present, public and private,” Jacob’s Cane (2009) is Elisa New’s exploration of a Jewish history spanning continents and generations.  It considers the challenges of uncovering a family past often at odds with conventional narratives of the immigrant experience; the intersection of private lives and larger historical currents; and choices of voice and poetics used to convey these stories.  A striking change from New’s previous research and writings on American literature, it will be the subject of a wide-ranging conversation about the past and its tellings.

Elisa New is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches American literature with special interest in American poetry; American literature to 1900; and religion and literature.  Her work includes The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (1999); and The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (1993).

At the end of this year, John Demos will retire from his position as Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University. For the past decade, Professor Demos has offered a course on “Narrative and Other Histories” for graduate students, and encouraged innovative writing and the conversation between history and fiction in the classroom, in academic journals, and after hours, through support for the Writing History colloquium at Yale.

Too modest by half, in this interview, Demos doesn’t describe his role in fostering the careers of Jill Lepore, Jane Kamensky, Jennifer Price, Aaron Sachs, Wendy Warren, and others who have trail-blazed innovative historical writing in recent years, nor does he mention the namesake John Demos Prize in American Studies, at Barnard College. But he does offer insights into how his career has embraced numerous historical styles, including the Bancroft Prize-winning Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England(1982) and The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Ray Allen Billington Prize and finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. And he discusses the openness and curiosity he considers essential to finding the best historical methods for a project and how to have confidence in one’s voice as a writer.

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Practically anything written by Professor Spence can offer up questions about the nature of historical writing, weighing evidence, and spinning imaginative tales, so I have chosen selections from books old and new, as well as a few other sources that might provide different angles. They are:

• Chapters 6 and 8 of his newest book, Return to Dragon Mountain

• the final 25 pages of The Death of Woman Wang

• comments on Margaret Atwood from John Demos and Jonathan Spence in the American Historical Review, with reaction to letters

• For those with a bit more time, I’d highly recommend reading Woman Wang, Return to Dragon Mountain, The Question of Hu, or another Spence book cover to cover. I’d also suggest Professor Spence’s 2005 AHA presidential address, which discussed the same material and some of the themes of Return to Dragon Mountain, to open yet another angle on how free to be, and to what audiences.