I attended Dr. Beth Hewett’s lecture Wednesday on “The Challenge of Online Writing Instruction.”  I found it intriguing that her talk was not billed as a DH event (and she did not frame it as such during the lecture) even though she discussed some topics that have particular relevance to our course readings last week and this week.  Hewett is primarily a rhetoric/composition scholar (as were many in her audience) and she spoke about the problems teachers may face when they are asked (as increasingly high numbers of them are — willingly or otherwise) to teach partially or wholly online composition classes.  She focused on several points for which she urges teachers to fight; among these were that online writing instruction (OWI) classes need to be capped at 20 students (ideally 15) because they involve a 200% higher literacy load.  Hewett feels strongly that online and in-person classes should be treated as having equal validity, but that, in order for them to work, it is necessary to realize that individual students’ learning styles may be much better met by one or the other of them.  Though she believes that OWI can be fruitful, she described a MOOC as “a big-ass classroom where people drop out like flies and nobody does the work;” she stressed instead that personal connection between teacher and students is necessary (for instance, she uses online course management software with a chat function by which she greets students — sometimes freaking them out in the process — and she feels that some difficult situations need a phone call to resolve them).  She also finds it very important to use platforms that enable students to talk to each other (though she cautioned teachers against using this increased visibility of student thought-in-progress to grade more harshly than they might in traditional classrooms) and — perhaps most importantly — allow OWI teachers to talk to each other.  Support for teachers who find themselves suddenly thrust into online classrooms (many of whom having been told in no uncertain terms that they will lose their jobs if they refuse), is crucial.  Hewett said “If you are teaching an online writing class and you haven’t received training, shame on the administration.”

I am curious about why there seems to be such a sharp divide between self-proclaimed DHers and rhet/comp folks who work in digital environments.  (Could this be echoing the making/critiquing divide in DH circles?)  The issues about which she spoke — social support between teachers, structural support from administrators, support for students via recognition that online and in-person environments address different needs — are at the heart of the MOOC question we will discuss in our next class.  The defining feature of MOOCs that Hewett condemns (their massive, impersonal character) is the problem, not the digital nature of the class itself.  This would seem to support Richard Grusin’s point in “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities — Part 2″ that administrators are wont to see MOOCs as shiny, easy things that fit into agendas of “quick fixes and bottom line approaches to the structural problems facing higher education today” instead of looking for ways to make their online course offerings actually helpful to students.  It seems that everyone would benefit if the people who make the online course management software and the teachers who use it were able to work more closely with one another.  (Perhaps rhet/DH collaboration could even help counteract the administrative neglect from which Hewett describes the OWI world as suffering?)

In Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence, she tackles the crisis in scholarly publishing (as traditionally conceived) and encourages her readers to develop institutional and electronic cultures in which an alternate, healthier model can flourish.  She specifically states in her conclusion that she has “tried to avoid the prescriptive, focusing less on what the future of scholarly publishing will look like than on how we’ll need to think differently about our relationships – as scholars, publishers, librarians, and administrators – to the process of publishing” (195) as she feels certain that “the contradictions in our current systems are simply too great to be sustained” (194).  I appreciate her openness about the fact that she cannot offer definitive solutions, but I find that (even though she avoids prescriptive directions) my strongest impression of the book is that it is primarily about our need as academics to find better ways of thinking of ourselves and the social/hierarchical world of Higher Education.

In the Introduction and in Chapter One, Fitzpatrick draws the outline of the Problem for us.  In a nutshell, the current scholarly publishing system is broken – mainly because it is being asked to do too many contradictory things by the Powers That Be in the world of Academia.  Administrators want to use the existence and number of a job or tenure candidate’s publications (from established scholarly presses that use traditional closed peer review systems, and, to a lesser extent, in traditional print-based journals) as a simple scale by which to evaluate said applicant’s suitability for the position and ultimate worth as a scholar.  Problems with this role include 1) Scholarly presses just don’t have enough money to print everything that deserves their “seal of approval”; 2) Holding out from disseminating research that can’t be traditionally published harms the field because much that should be said isn’t — it’s dumb financial luck, not academic worthiness that is in the driver’s seat; and 3)  When scholars spend their entire professional lives being taught that their worth depends solely on finished, marketable, singly-authored projects that exist in print form, the kinds of work they attempt – the ideas they regard as thinkable – become unjustly diminished.  The system we now have is ailing and will die in the reasonably near future, but this is not because it has been neglected and needs us to take better care of it; it is ailing because it is simply not equipped to handle the expectations different groups of users place on it.  As Fitzpatrick puts it in her introduction:

“In the end, what I am arguing is that we in the humanities, and in the academy more broadly, face what is less a material obsolescence than an institutional one; we are entrenched in systems that no longer serve our needs.  But because we are, by and large, our institutions – or rather, because they are us – the greatest challenge we face is not that obsolescence, but our response to it.” (13).

Of course, the flip side to the problem of very little getting through the System to readers is how can we ensure the quality of the work that gets seen if we delete the System?  Fitzpatrick argues that we shouldn’t.  Instead of gatekeeping on the front end of the “publication” process, we need to create a scholarly environment in which everything can be “published” AND THEN evaluated by knowledgeable and helpful reviewers who can help guide readers to the best work and that which is most relevant to their needs.  Fitzpatrick acknowledges that it will be hard to create such a new system and that doing so depends on finding a way to reward competent reviewers for their time and effort, moving toward a “gift economy” in which scholars help each other for the good of their fields.

In Chapter Two, Fitzpatrick explores the often counterproductive ways in which we think of ourselves as “Authors.”  She argues that we academics are firmly habituated to thinking of our own writing in ways that, ironically, ignore the death of the author as we readily apply the theory to the writing of others.  We have pinned our very identities as scholars to notions of originality, individual creativity, and solitary intellectual labor; these beliefs about ourselves are deeply held, and so will be very hard to change, but they do not accurately describe the writing process as it actually is or as it should be.  Focusing only on academic labor as traditionally conceived can push us toward self-defeating evaluations of our own work; by internalizing the (broken) System’s values, we may feel that “as long as we are in the process of writing, we have not yet completed it, and without completion, we cannot get credit for what we have produced; we haven’t accomplished anything” (68).  She argues that we need to reconceive ourselves, our institutions, and our work in ways that allow the work-in-progress to mean something to our administrators, our communities of networks between scholars working in the same fields, and – most crucially – to ourselves.

Questions for Discussion

Fitzpatrick’s recommendations depend on the accuracy of her analysis that the so-called “scholarly publishing crisis” is real and operates in the way she describes.  Do you find her argument convincing?  Have you had personal experience with the publishing industry that might support or contradict her conclusions?

Who do you think is Fitzpatrick’s audience for this book?  When she hails her reader using “we,” she nudges that reader toward seeing him/herself as a part of a group about which she makes certain assumptions and in which she explicitly includes herself.  When she says “we,” do you think that she is talking to you?  We have a good mix of people on different career paths and at different stages of those careers in our class; I’m curious about what the multiple “audience” of our class finds relevant (or not) for our own work.

How do think of yourself in relation to your own writing?  Is Fitzpatrick’s diagnosis that “we” tend to semi- or unconsciously regard ourselves as Authors (with a capital A) applicable to you?  Or do you think of yourself in a different mode?  Does your self-identification change based on the type of writing you are doing, i.e. traditionally-published scholarly work, essays for classes, blogging, or content you post on personal and/or professional social media accounts?

Which of the models that Fitzpatrick suggests as possible solutions to the Problem do you think sound most promising?  What flaws seem most worrying?  Can you think of anything else that we might try?

Multimodal Stuff:  Do you make it?  Do you want to make it?  What (if anything) might you do (or do you do) with it?

How does Fitzpatrick’s Conclusion – a case study of her own book’s publication process – affect your evaluation of her argument?  Based on the evidence she provides, would you consider taking a similar approach if/when you write a book?

I’m going to have a go at making a functional link to my Twine story.

Get a Job

Will someone please let me know if it works?

This week, I have repeatedly found myself wondering about the modes of self-identification that games and other stereotypically “nerdy” pursuits can evoke or hinder in their participants.  Jane McGonigal’s “Growing Up Gamer” is intriguing to me because of the fervency with which she feels compelled to defend the type of self that she chooses to describe with the word “gamer.”  I’m not sufficiently steeped in Althusserian theory to give a full analysis of hailing “gamers,” but I do find it curious that the appellation seems such a slippery one.  Patrick Jagoda’s essay “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities — Part 3″ includes the statement that there “approximately 183 million American ‘active gamers’ (that is, people who claim to play digital games an average of 13 hours a week).”  Who has determined that this is the threshold for claiming the identity of “active gamer”?  By treating the term as one that needs further explanation, Jagoda implicitly acknowledges that  the definition he is using is not necessarily self-evident.  I am now pondering these questions alongside my experience at the GEO conference this past weekend.  During the “Cyber-Realities” panel, Kevin Kilroy began his presentation “Kurzweil, the Cyberman” by asking the audience whether they knew what “cybermen” are.  The audience (including me) were silent, so he explained that they were monsters from the British television show Doctor Who.  At this, several audience members (including me) gave a murmur of recognition.  Actually, Doctor Who is among my favorite shows and I did immediately think of it when I heard his title.  Why, then, did I assume he was talking about something else — something with which I was unfamiliar?  Perhaps because I was in a session of presentations that was prominently labelable as being about Digital Humanities (capital D, capital H) and I therefore assumed that the presenters held deeper knowledge of the field than I (digital immigrant that I am) possessed?  All I can say for certain is that Kilroy hailed “people who know what cybermen are” and I did not think he was talking to me.

Also during that session, I was fascinated by Nigel’s brilliant presentation.  He raised questions about the implications of achievements in games that had never occurred to me, but about which I now can’t not think.  What surprised me most was that I was able to follow what he was talking about, even though I went into the session thinking that my only reason for being there was as moral support to my friends.  In other words, since I have frequently felt bewildered or wrong-footed as I try to forge onward into new realms of digital existence (a phrase which here means “I had never before heard of most of the things we have talked about in this class before it began”), I assumed that any research project in a Digital Humanities topic would be mostly over my head (at least, if it involved stuff we haven’t gone over in class).  Nigel’s presentation used World of Warcraft as a focal point in discussing how achievement systems work.  I started playing it a few months ago, so I was familiar with the system and can now contemplate how my own game-playing behavior is affected by or reflected in the achievement log.  However, I don’t consider myself a “gamer.”  I don’t play every day (or even every week) and I certainly fall short of the 13-hour-per-week threshold for “active” gamership according to Jagoda.  However, I enjoy playing often enough that I consider it worthwhile to subscribe; Blizzard Entertainment is quite happy to consider me an “active” player in that I have a valid credit card and fork over their monthly fee (which would be the same whether I played for one hour per month or 24/7).  When I tried to determine why I, a player of this game, do not call myself a “gamer,” I came up with two possible reasons:  1) I haven’t been doing it for very long, so I don’t have the lifetime of social memories that McGonigal connects with her gamership and I could therefore imagine myself ceasing to play with no emotional trauma, and 2) I’m not very good yet, so I don’t have the warm aura of accomplishment that I could imagine feeling if I was actually really awesome at smacking monsters with a giant virtual hammer (though it has been ages since I died by falling off of buildings, thank you very much).

So, fellow DH-ers, my question is this:  How do you identify yourselves in the digital world?  Are you a gamer, a game-playing non-gamer, a nonplussed non-gamer, a digital native, digital immigrant, “active” [blogger, tweeter, Facebooker, instagrammer, etc.], conscientious objector, or none of the above?  Why?  How do we decide what to call ourselves, and how (if at all) does that decision impact the reality of of our digital lives?

Over the past week, it came to my attention that I have not been doing a very good job of not panicking in this class.  While I did suspect that Matt was not likely to assign a failing grade to the majority of the class for not having Paper Machines working by the end of the meeting (the stated assignment), I spent most of that session feeling miserably confused.  I probably looked quite grumpy.  (I apologize to anyone at whom I may have inadvertently frowned.)  While conversing with classmates in the days that followed about this thing that felt like a disaster — I had after all (for the first time ever) failed to complete a pass/fail assignment — I started slowly realizing that I may not be as hopelessly behind the curve as I felt.  From the start, I was uncertain what to make of the assertion that failure is a good part of DH work; I thought “That’s all very well if you’re trying to make something just because you want it, but what about when my grade/job depends on success?”  I realize that I have not been a very active participant in class so far, but I think I figured out that my real problem may not be that I am technologically inept (though I am), but that I habitually operate under assumptions about good academic work that are entirely incompatible the way DH defines good work.  It will not be easy to murder the little perfectionist angel/devil on my shoulder, but it will probably do me some good if I manage it.

So, moving on, I went in search of the reason I ever even considered signing up for this class.  Last year, I attended a Digital Dialogues lecture by Mike Witmore (the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library) called “Shakespeare from the Waist Down.”  I had seen flyers for other dialogues, but I didn’t think they applied to me (due to the technological ineptitude thing), but I was curious enough to go to this one because it mentioned Shakespeare in the title.  I was astonished by the idea that something as simple as pronoun patterns could enable a computer to tell the difference between comedy, history, and tragedy, and that it could identify the late romances (a modern editorial categorization).  The link to the podcast of that talk is here, if anyone wants to watch it:  http://mith.umd.edu/digitaldialogues/mp3/dd_2012_02_21.mov.

I am also really looking forward to the Folger visit tonight.  The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is the first thing we’ve studied that I’ve actually seen before!  I don’t know exactly what I may do, but I hope to pursue it further.  Collation and archiving seem the sorts of things I am most likely to use in the future, so I’m happy to be on somewhat more familiar territory!  So, stay tuned; I promise I’ll have something more interesting to say soon.

(And maybe, someday, I’ll even figure out how to take screenshots!)

I selected Shakespeare because I recently had to explain to a student why the $1.99 complete works he found for Kindle would not suffice for the work we will do in class.  I was giving the standard “you need to get the books for this class ASAP” speech during our first discussion section, and I said something to the effect of “It’s ok if you have or want to use a version other than Signet, but be sure that it’s a reputable edition with good notes.”  I was astonished when this student asked “What do you mean by ‘notes’?”  I tried to explain the necessity of footnotes glossing words that persist in current usage but had different meanings during the early modern period.  Later, the student emailed me a link to Amazon’s page for the edition he had, asking if I thought it was good enough.  He said “I don’t see anything obviously wrong with it other than that it has no notes.”  I saw something else wrong with it:  It did not list the name of the editor or contain any textual information or any clues as to the principles by which the text was prepared.  I used King Lear as an example.  The text as we have it comes from two sources (the 1608 Q1 and the 1623 F1) and so an editor must either print one of those or conflate the two.  When I pointed out that – in the absence of any editorial notes identifying what was on his electronic pages – he might end up reading something very different than what the rest of the class was seeing, he decided to buy the recommended print edition.  (I didn’t even get into variations between copies of those early printings.)

I’m sharing this story because it seems that this student is exactly the sort of reader whom makers of electronic texts hope to reach: he wanted something both inexpensive and reliable.  He just didn’t find the information to evaluate whether or not the Kindle product at which he was looking answered his needs.

So, King Lear.

I started with Project Gutenberg.  I thought it interesting that ssing the “search” feature yields a disorganized mess that uses “by popularity” as the default ordering system.  I tried again by browsing.  Under Shakespeare’s author heading, one may find four texts for King Lear.  The first is helpfully accompanied by “Scanner’s notes” explaining that it is a reproduction based on the first Folio and pointing out that different copies of F1 differ from each other.  The scanner (who sounds like an editor) provides his rationale for spelling alterations and gives his name and email addresses, encouraging readers to contact him if they find mistakes or disagree with his choices.  This seems sound, but I am bothered by the “Executive Director’s notes” that precede the “Scanner’s notes.”  That note reads as follows:

In addition to the notes below, and so you will *NOT* think all the spelling errors introduced by the printers of the time have been corrected, here are the first few lines of Hamlet, as they are presented herein:

Barnardo. Who’s there?
Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold
your selfe

Bar. Long liue the King

***

As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words or letters they had often packed into a “cliche”. . .this is the original meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwilling to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions that look very odd. . .such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, above. . .and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . .

The answer is that they MAY have packed “liue” into a cliche at a time when they were out of “v”‘s. . .possibly having used “vv” in place of some “w”‘s, etc. This was a common practice of the day, as print was still quite expensive, and they didn’t want to spend more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.

You will find a lot of these kinds of “errors” in this text, as I have mentioned in other times and places, many “scholars” have an extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a very high place in the “canon” of Shakespeare. My father read an assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the purpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available . . .in great detail. . .and determined from the various changes, that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous for signing his name with several different spellings.

So, please take this into account when reading the comments below made by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errors that are “not” errors. . . .

So. . .with this caveat. . .we have NOT changed the canon errors, here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of King Lear.

Michael S. Hart
Project Gutenberg
Executive Director

This is a very peculiar appeal to authority.  While it is good that Hart wants readers to understand something of the wobbly nature of early modern spelling practices, he is more or less claiming that we should trust the contents of Project Gutenberg’s books because the Executive Director of the company had a well-read father and is telling us that he knows what he is talking about.  As a scholar, I find it offensive to be called a “scholar” by Hart.  I do not need scare quotes, thank you very much.  His overt meaning is that one does not have to be an expert to make sound judgments about texts (which is, after all, the ideal toward which open access strives), but his implication is that experts are actually mucking up the process of letting people understand the play by nostalgically clinging to insubstantial quibbles.  Needless to say, this edition is not annotated.  As an attempt to faithfully reproduce the text of F1, it could have uses to some people (such as scholars who already have some understanding of what to expect, and would not need to lean as heavily on the notes as would a beginner), but Hart’s note could steer people away from more helpful formats for their needs.

Next, I tried Google Books.  A search for King Lear produced “ About 2,740,000 results.”  Following Duguid’s point that Google’s sorting is a powerful force on the reader who does not know what he or she is seeking, I decided to investigate the first hit.  It was the “Dover Thrift Study Edition” which contained word-definition footnotes.  The copyright page (which was visible in the preview) explains that Dover has reproduced “the unabridged text of King Lear, as published in Volume XVII of The Caxton Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, Caxton Publishing Company, London, n.d.” which is accompanied by a study guide made by test prep company R.E.A. and notes that “were prepared” for Dover by a nameless editor.  Yes, they did indeed cite “n.d.” instead of – for instance – checking WorldCat to determine that the Caxton edition was published in 1910.  I thought I’d try again, but this was a mistake.

The first free edition in the listings is from 1808 and is keyed to performance at Drury Lane and Covent Garden.  There are some scanning oddities, but those are minor in comparison to the real problem:

THIS IS THE HAPPY ENDING VERSION.

It was dreadful (though popular) enough when Nahum Tate decided to “improve” (scare quotes warranted) the play for the tastes of the Restoration stage, but for Google Books to offer this version without a prominent disclaimer is unconscionable.  A version of the play in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after could appropriately be called a work “based on” or “inspired by” Shakespeare’s play, but this IS NOT Shakespeare’s play.  Google is doing its readers a major disservice and doesn’t even have the decency to give a person’s name to whom we can complain about shoddy (lack of) cataloguing.

Searching HathiTrust, the first item I found is the New Variorum Shakespeare edited by Horace Howard Furnace, Ph.D., L.L.D and published in 1880.  It appeared to be a fine, responsibly-prepared edition that reflects the critical tendencies of the nineteenth century.  The notes consist largely of collections of famous critics’ opinions about the text, but – as they are well marked as such – unlikely to offer serious trouble to the beginning reader.  There were many fingers, slightly crooked pages, and corner shadows in the scanned images, but I found that the clarity of the text and flexibility of the online viewer made it more pleasant to read than the other scanned versions I found.  While the old-fashioned, ivory tower model of scholarly authority was clearly present in this edition, I think that, of the ebooks I’ve discussed here, this would be the most helpful to a beginner because at least it clearly represents itself for what it is.  The multiplicity of the notes (which may look a bit daunting at first – but the reader would find a similar landscape if she wandered into a bookstore and picked up the modern Arden Shakespeare) draws attention to the fact that editors make choices in presenting texts; the first-hit items from Project Gutenberg and Google Books did not.  HathiTrust’s site layout is more user-friendly than Project Gutenberg’s and its sorting principle is likelier to lead the reader to something useful on a first try than is Google Books.

After this research, if I had the conversation with which I began this post to do over again, I would still advise my student that it would be much easier to spring for the $4.95 Signet Classics Lear in physical form