Modlab at Yale and a voyage to Italy

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Carol Chiodo

It’s day 1 of the ModLab Workshop at Yale with Dean Irvine, Matt Huculak, Kirsta Stapelfeldt, and Alan Stanley.  We have great group of participants from across the disciplines – from anthropology to East Asian studies and from English to film studies. Several participants have DH projects under their belts, but many are just starting out.

I handed over my files to Dean yesterday, newly digitized reproductions of glass lantern slides from the early 20th century. They gathered dust for decades in a black box forgotten in the corner of a campus office, their technology obsolete.  I took this photowhile I was still trying to find someone to fund digitizing the box’s fragile contents. Fortunately, the Instructional Technology Group stepped in with the necessary funds and ITS Academic Technologies provided the expertise.

The collection is a valuable visual archive in multiple respects. The photographs were taken during several grand tours of Italy between 1904 and 1912 and provide a unique perspective on the history of Anglophone tourism in Italy. They also provide precious historical documentation of cultural heritage sites in cities such as Florence, Venice, Assisi and Rome. Finally, the technology employed to reproduce these photographs indicates that their use was a public one: whether in the classroom for the undergraduates of Yale College or at public lectures, the lantern slide was the technology of choice for projecting images for a large audience.

In 1903, at a meeting of the New Haven Medical Association at the medical school, Dr. Robert Osgoode, greatly impressed his audience with a splendidly illustrated lecture on “The Interpretation of X-ray findings in suspected diseases of the bone or soft parts” with an assortment of lantern slides.   Their extensive use in education at the turn of the 19th century is also evinced by the large number of lantern slides found in a number of repositories at Yale.

Beyond those found in the Harvey Cushing/ John Hay Whitney Medical Historical Library (including Dr. Osgoode’s), the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses William McClintock’s 1500 hand colored lantern slides of the Blackfoot Indians in the Yale Collection of Western Americana. The Yale Peabody Museum’s Division of Historical Scientific Instruments also has over 800 lantern slides, many of which contain material for physics lectures.

While I still don’t know exactly in what context these slides were used, I could turn to the  extensive William Inglis Morse lantern slide collection found  in the Visual Resource Collection at the Robert B. Haas Family Library. While not as meticulously annotated as our mysterious black box, this collection also documents the Grand Tour in Italy and was probably used as an instructional technology tool for Yale College courses.  The images collected by Morse, a philanthropist, historian, and clergyman are a particularly appropriate point of reference in this case given that Morse, like our instructors, came to Yale from Nova Scotia. In fact, Dalhousie University also houses Morse’s  ‘scholar’s library‘ which, as he noted, “if properly selected and studied, is one’s best monument.” (from his Preface, Catalogue of the William Inglis Morse Collection at Dalhousie University Library (London: Curwen Press, 1938).

Let’s hope Day 2 provides some valuable digital tools to better understanding and disseminating this unique visual archive which also serves as a valuable reminder of technological obsolescence.

cross posted at [archive]

Posted in Research and Teaching Tools, Yale Projects, Yale Resources | 1 Comment

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Draft

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Joseph Yannielli

I am an inveterate Mac user. Some might say I’m a fanboy. Although I like to think that my brand loyalty is due to a cleaner, easier, more pleasing operating experience, there are other factors. Part of my attraction stems from the “Think Different” ad campaign of my youth – flattering for any impulsive iconoclast. Or maybe it’s that soothing chime. I don’t agree with everything Apple has ever done, especially now that they’ve thundered into the mainstream, but I still think that, when all is said and done, they can produce a better quality product than the competition (now if only they could do it humanely). Apple devices are marketed as polished, eloquent, intuitive. A common complaint about Microsoft, on the other hand, is that they have trouble releasing a finished product. Windows is notorious for being incomplete, buggy, awkward, in need of an endless cascade of updates and service packs. Of course, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and every other decent piece of software does exactly the same thing. OS X has endured at least seven major revisions in the past decade, while Windows has suffered maybe three (it all depends on your definition of “major revision”). This endless turnover used to bother me. Does Firefox really need to release a new version every other day? How much useless bloat can software designers cram into MS Word before it finally explodes? Lately, however, I’ve come to accept and even embrace this radical incompleteness.

YouTube Preview ImageThe age of static print was defined by permanence. You had to work for a long time on multiple drafts, revisions, and proofs. The result was a clay tablet, or scroll, or codex book. With the onset of the printing press, it was easier to make corrections, appended, expanded, revised editions. Still, the emphasis was on stability. The paperback book I have on my desk right now looks pretty much exactly the same as it did when it was first published in 1987. And it will always look that way. A lot of effort went into its publication because it would be extremely difficult to revise it. It is a stable artifact. Digital culture, on the other hand, is a permanent palimpsest. What is here today is gone tomorrow, all that is solid melts into air. Digital publications do not have to be fully polished artifacts because they can be endlessly revised. There are benefits and drawbacks to this state of almost limitless transition. But now that the Encyclopedia Britannica has thrown up its hands and shuttered its print division, perhaps it is worth asking: what do we have to gain from adhering to a culture of permanence?

In the world of static print, errors or inaccuracies are irreversible. Filtration systems, such as line editing or peer review, help to mitigate against this problem, but even the most perfectionist among us are not immune from good faith mistakes. We have all had those moments when we come across a typo or an inelegant phrase that makes us cringe with regret. How wonderful would it be to correct it in an instant? And why stop at typos? Less than a year after I published an article on abolitionist convict George Thompson, I was wandering around in the vast annex where my school’s library dumps all of its old reference books. Here were hoary relics like the National Union Catalog or the Encyclopedia of the Papacy. I picked up a dusty tome and, by dumb luck, found an allusion to Thompson’s long-lost manuscript autobiography. When I wrote the article I had scoured every database known to man over the course of two years, including WorldCat and ArchiveGrid. But the manuscript, which was filed away in some godforsaken corner of the Chicago History Museum, had no corresponding  entry in any online catalog. I had to e-mail the museum staff and wait while a kindly librarian checked an old-school physical card catalog for the entry (so much for the vaunted age of digital research). Although it was too late to include the document in my article, at least I had time to include it in my dissertation. But what if I could include it in the article?

No doubt this impulse to continually revise is what led George Lucas to update the first three Star Wars films with new scenes and special effects. Many fans thought that the changes ruined the experience of the original artifacts. The perfectionist temptation can be disastrous, and it may be better in some cases to leave well enough alone. Yet there is something to be said for revision. One of the things I love about the Slavery Portal is that it is constantly evolving. I am always adding new material or tweaking the interface. When I find a mistake, I fix it. When new data makes an older entry obsolete, I update it. Writing History in the Digital Age, a serious work of scholarship that is also technologically sophisticated and experimental, uses Commentpress to enable paragraph-by-paragraph annotation of its content. Thus a peer review process that is usually conducted in private among a small group of people over a long period of time becomes something that is open, immediate, collaborative, and democratic. Projects like this have landmarks, qualitative leaps, or nodal points, just like software that jumps from alpha stage to beta release or version 10.4.11 to 10.5. But they are always in process. For every George Lucas, there is a Leonardo da Vinci. The Florentine Master only completed around fifteen paintings in his lifetime and was a consummate procrastinator. His extensive manuscript collection remained unpublished at the time of his death and largely unavailable for a long time thereafter. What if da Vinci had a blog? (I can just imagine the comment thread on Vitruvian Man: “stevexxx37:  wuz up wit teh hair? get a cut yo hippie lolz!”)

Although I sometimes still agonize about fixes or changes I could make to older work, I have found that dispensing with the whole pretense of permanency can be tremendously therapeutic. Rather than obsess over writing a flawless dissertation, I have come to embrace imperfection. I have come to view my thesis or my scholarly articles not as end products, but as steps in a larger progression. In a sense, they are still drafts. In the sense that we are always revising and refining our understanding of the past, all history is draft. Static books and articles are essential building blocks of our historical consciousness. It is hard to imagine a world where the book I cite today might not be the same book tomorrow. And yet, to a certain extent, we live in that world. When Apple finds a security loophole or a backwards compatibility issue in its software, it releases a patch. If I find a typo or an inaccuracy in this post three days from now, I can fix it immediately. If I come across new information a year later, I can make a revision or post a follow-up. Everything is process. The other day, I updated the firmware on a picture frame.

I will, of course, continue to aim for the most polished, the most perfect work of which I am capable. As much as I would like, I cannot write my dissertation as a blog post. I will edit and revise, edit and revise. Sometimes you do not know what you need to revise until you make it permanent. At the end, maybe, I will have a landmark. And I will welcome its insufficiency. There is something liberating about being incompl…

Posted in Digital Scholarship, Random Thoughts | 1 Comment

De nostri temporis studiorum ratione: Giambattista Vico and digital ecosystems

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Carol Chiodo

It might seem anachronistic to call on the work of an eighteenth century philosopher to elucidate some of the issues at play in the debates swirling around the digital humanities, but Giambattista Vico has been on my mind lately as we prepare for a conference on his work today and tomorrow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Vico (1668-1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician and jurist. He worked in relative obscurity during his lifetime teaching rhetoric at the University of Naples. His succinct De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709) provides a useful lens through which we might consider the digital humanities.  The work, known in the English translation as On the Study Methods of Our Time, was Vico’s first foray into philosophy, and was the seventh in a series of inaugural lectures given at the University of Naples in his position as professor of rhetoric.

In his lecture, Vico took aim at the inadequacy of the critical and pedagogical methods of his contemporaries while weighing the comparative merits of classical and modern culture. In order to discern just how current “study methods” might be superior or inferior to the Ancients, Vico sets up a distinction between the new arts, sciences and inventions – the constituent material of learning – and and the new instruments and aids to knowledge – the ways and means of learning.

Vico’s critique of the Moderns took issue with the logicians of Port-Royal, and their Cartesian method of compartmentalizing knowledge. For Vico, this reductive method of study precludes the human, and is inferior to that of the Ancients: “We devote all of our efforts to the investigation of physical phenomena, because their nature seems unambiguous; but we fail to inquire into human nature which, because of the freedom of man’s will, is difficult to determine.” The result, Vico warns, is that students “because of their training, which is focused on these studies, are unable to engage in the life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence.” By reducing what there is to know, he argues, we limit our ability to engage with the world on a broader scale. Diminished by our learning, we will be incapable of dealing practically with issues of change or transformation, which require the ability to recognize and follow the most suitable or sensible course of action.

For Vico, the methods of logicians such as Antoine Arnaud and Pierre Nicole and their followers established the constituent material of learning through a process of narrowing the domain of knowledge. Much in the same way that Francis Bacon took issue with the syllogisms of the scholastics to argue that knowledge of the world should be grounded in carefully verified facts, Vico doesn’t limit himself to providing a new method to achieve old-fashioned knowledge. He redefines what it means to know.  And, since the instruments (including logic) used by his contemporaries, those ways and means to that material which constitutes knowledge, were antecedent to the task of learning, the knowledge they yielded was determined by their premisses for their creation. In the technology they harnessed, and in the aims they fulfilled, these instruments were restricted by the discourses which produced them. In reducing knowledge to the unambiguous, the logicians of Port Royal reduced knowledge to what their brains and their technology enabled them to master.

For the digital humanities, it is this category — the ways and means of learning — that carries within it a transformative potential for the constituent material of learning, but in a radically different way from that to which Vico directed his critique. In a scribal or a print environment, the constituent material of learning is often shaped and transformed by its means of transmission (see for example the work of Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass); that which is yielded instrumentally, will “speak” a language inherent in the design of the instrument. The critique Vico levelled at Cartesian method, that critics had placed “their fundamental truths before, outside, and above every bodily image of reality” illustrates an extreme case of how the instrument of logic could override the countenance of real life.  In other words, if the only instrument available to us is a hammer, by constraint of  circumstances, everything looks like a nail.

In our current digital environment, we are only beginning to see how the consituent material of learning is radically transformed by the ways and means in which it is transmitted. Rather than dealing with a reduction of knowledge, this time technology has allowed us to expand knowledge into a boundless domain, one whose complexity trumps theory and whose scale defies our individual and physiological capacity to grasp it. The digital humanities is currently grappling with this conundrum: by transforming what it means to know something, particularly in a boundless domain of culture, a discipline is emerging which attempts to come to terms with current interaction of millions of different pieces of human culture, past and present, digital and analog, while critically reflecting on the very nature of human knowledge itself.

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David Weinberger has addressed this very problem in his book Too Big to Know.  Weinberger makes a pithy call for a “rethinking of knowledge now that the facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room.” One wonders what Giambattista Vico would have made of such a room. . .

Cross posted at HASTAC

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A boundless domain of culture?

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Carol Chiodo

Debates and the digital humanities

There has been a flurry of debates recently surrounding the digital humanities, sparked in part by the publication of Matthew Gold’s volume, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Stanley Fish’s extended responses in the New York Times. Annual conferences for both the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association featured numerous roundtables and panels concerning the humanities computing, digital pedagogy and electronic infrastructures for scholarly work. The text based scholarship so vital to the work of the humanities (and its related infrastructure) is both complicated and broadened by digital technologies and the digital humanities has emerged front and center proclaiming its suitability as the discipline best positioned to explore a post-Gutenberg galaxy.

Nearly sixty sessions at this year’s MLA had a digital humanities connection (see Mark Sample’s post).  During a session on Literary Research in/and Digital Humanities convened by James R. Kelly,  a Humanities Bibliographer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Heather Bolwby discussed some of the factors involved in successfully launching Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King as a digital resource. In her presentation, Bowlby pointed out some of the considerations she had to take into account with the project,  including locating the necessary technical support, determining how the resource would  function within different scholarly contexts, securing an enduring online space to house the resource, and collaborating with librarians and other professionals in related fields to fit the resource within pre-existing institutional frameworks.

So the stately Queen abode
For many a week, unknown, among the nuns;
Nor with them mix’d, nor told her name, nor sought,
Wrapt in her grief, for housel or for shrift,
But communed only with the little maid,
Who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness
Which often lured her from herself.
(Idylls of the King, Book XI – l. 144-150)

 

[Julia Margaret Cameron, 'The Little Novice and the Queen', plate XI from The Idylls of the King, albumen print 1874]

Bowlby’s project aimed at the reproduction of the physical object as much as possible in an electronic format while maintaining the appropriate scholarly framework. Yet reproduction, as anthropologist Marilyn Strathern reminds us, involves two processes. The first, is the process of replication, when the original material is duplicated. The second process is one of expression, when the replication of the original material takes shape within a new context.  Bowlby presented her efforts as “case study of the problems facing graduate students involved in similar digital projects.”

The digital duplication of the physical object, whether it be a rare photograph, a manuscript or a scholarly monograph, no longer poses difficulty, but the process of its expression and its context is at the crux of many of the debates surrounding digital humanities today. What form will that expression take? Will it conform to current (and future?) standards for preservation and sustainability? And what is the appropriate context for that expression? Will it ensure its continued expression over time? Will it allow the expression to be accessible to many or to a select few? Will the context overwhelm the expression? And will that context be re-iterated or aggregated in other contexts? If so, how? Just as the potential for duplication is seemingly endless in a digital context, so too is the potential for expression and for an infinity of contexts within this boundless domain.

Pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was particularly sensitive to questions of reproduction and expression in her photographs for Tennyson’s work. Using a new and challenging medium such as photography in such unique ways for the time, Cameron’s illustrations deliberately imitated the oil paintings in the style of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite painters.  Why? As she explained simply, “my aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and ideal sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.” Her project to “ennoble photography” is similar to the project of many digital humanists today: to ennoble their field as one worthy of expression and of context. What must the digital humanities find then to secure for it “the character and uses” of a discipline or a scholarly presence within a boundless domain of culture?

cross posted at HASTAC

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Digital History 2.0

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Joseph Yannielli

The title of this blog is intentionally oxymoronic. Digital History stands for the fresh, the new, the innovative; Yale is a byword for the ancient, the traditional, and the conservative. The two terms stand in an awkward tension. I have always thought that if the digital humanities – as a methodology, as a practice, as a discipline – could thrive at a place like Yale, they could thrive anywhere. As an arbiter of the establishment, Yale offers a challenging test case for the digital revolution. The Past’s Digital Presence, a conference hosted here two years ago, was an important first step. (Most of the conference presentations are available online, so if you missed it the first time around, you can relive it at home!) Exciting new initiatives like Historian’s Eye or the recently adopted Digital Himalaya project, show Yale faculty experimenting with new forms and engaging new technologies to drive their scholarship.

In this forward-looking spirit, I am proud to announce the rebirth of Digital History at Yale as a group blog. So keep a lookout for some new names in the time to come – graduate students like myself who have a thing or two to say about the digital humanities, or whatever else is on their mind.

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