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

I decided to work with the great nineteenth century Brazilian author Machado de Assis (author of Brás Cubas), and analyze the results in a more careful way than when I am researching for my study. It was not easy to find a great variety of titles by this author, so I had to choose from a selected group of titles that had full text versions available (because most of them were protected for copyright reasons). In Gutenberg Project, I only found two of the books that Machado wrote, so I decided to work with Varias historias (Many stories) a collection of sixteen short stories that was published in 1896, in Google Books, HathiTrust and Internet archives. I did not know I was going to find so many problems!

Google Books

The first option has only a snippet view, and it is a translation into Spanish, actually. So I went to the second option to read it in full, and I saw that it is from the Library of the University of Texas at Austin, a 1903 edition. It is a text that was first published in 1896, so this edition comes just seven years after that. Google books only offers the name of the publishing house, H. Garnier, the year, 1903, and the number of pages, 282 pages.  The formats offered are: plain text, PDF, EPUB. You can download the text, and in the online version the table of contents has links to the different parts of the book. It is possible to read it in “Google play”, as well, a kind of digital cloud to store books, music, etc. So, you can make your own google books library.

As far as restrictions on the digital contents are concerned, users are not allowed to sell the digital content or remove the watermark or other sign that says it belongs to Google. These are the same restrictions that HathiTrust and Internet Archive have.

The scanned version had all the pages. But I realized that the print copy itself had a lot of problems instead!  In one instance, the page number was reversed (175 instead of 157), and there was a line mistakenly inserted in a dialogue. But, fortunately, one of the readers of this book in its printed form corrected the mistake, so we can now “read it the way it should be”.

The copy was full of marks that made the reading really annoying. In addition to this, another reader, who seems to be learning Portuguese, tried to “help” by translating some words he did not know!

My question is: What is the advantage of having access to an edition like this? Why digitize such a poorly printed and preserved copy? And it is the first option when Google digitized many other versions of this book?

Internet Archive

The copy I was looking for appears in the entry as written in Spanish! The site says that the publisher is Casa de las Américas, its year of publication, 1904 (which is the first problem, because “Casa de las Américas was created after Cuban Revolution), its language is Spanish, and it belongs to the collection of an “unknown library.” But when I “opened” the book, the first thing that appeared is the bookplate of Stanford University, it is a book in the Portuguese language, and digitized by Google. When I searched in the catalog of Stanford University, the book appeared there, of course.

So, why did they say they do not know the origin? Why is the information so poor? There is a mix of correct information of this book (the publication year) with another book: its translation into Spanish more than sixty years after, published by Casa de las Américas. But if the two entries were few, when I began reading the book’s inside cover I found a third bibliographical entry on a post-it!

This copy was published by the same publishing house just one year later than the copy I found in Google books: the edition was corrected, and (fortunately) the copy was clean! The formats offered were PDF, EPUB, Kindle, DJVu, Metadata. But if you want to read it online, there are many problems with some pages, they look like this:

It’s frustrating! This aside, the catalog record is incorrect. And that annoys me a lot, because I see once again the same mistake: thinking that Portuguese and Spanish is the same.  I found that there is an “editable web page” through “Open Library.” So I created an account to see what options I had to correct the mistake. It said that it had four revisions, but none of them changed the bibliographical entry. Now I had the chance to add some information about the book, and CHANGE the information given. So I changed the information about the publishing house, date, language…I was feeling much better after that! BUT I could not change the Language edition… it is like a curse… Spanish is NOT Portuguese… so I just added a comment warning that it was the original Portuguese edition, instead of the Spanish one that it announced.

HathiTrust

The copy I found here belongs to the New York Public Library, and it was digitized by Google (even though it is not possible to read in full in Google books).

The publishing house is the same as the others, H. Garnier, but they do not know the date of publication. It should be after 1903, because it is a corrected version. It is strange because the data does not appear where it appeared in the other two versions. There was only one format, PDF, but it is possible to read it online as well. But this copy is almost illegible!

Many stories lack from one to three pages, a whole story is missing, and there is one page that was attacked by a cannibal or something:

HathiTrust has a feedback form to report problems. But if problems come from books digitized by Google, they only say that “Google is continually improving the quality of images and OCR it delivers to HAthiTrust partners.” So, the real answer is: wait.

It is possible to read the text in a Classic view, Scroll, Flip, Thumbnails and Plain text, which I found interesting and useful – but not so useful if the copy lacks pages and sometimes it is almost illegible!

You can download the PDF version only if you are part of the partner institutions (American universities, basically, and just one from Spain and France). You can create a collection (that can be private or public) and add the book.

Yes, digitization has a long way to go, but there are things that can be done just paying more attention to the information that is posted. The quality of the scan is sometimes very poor, if not the original!

My book of choice for any bibliographic project will usually be Moby-Dick. Katie and Susie can both attest to this after having to sit through a semester of me geeking out over the textual history of the novel. Of course, by posting later than some of the others, I can only echo what they have said: Project Gutenberg provides the most formats for a given text, including an audio option, which neither HATHITrust nor Google Books gives you (as they only allowed for pdf downloads, and with HATHITrust permission was required, and Google payment), and it was the certainly the easiest to download, because it came with virtually no strings attached. But while I have traditionally always turned to it first for my canonical etext needs, I found it the least transparent of the three versions of Moby-Dick I collected.

For those unfamiliar with Melville scholarship in general one name pretty much reigns as the foremost editor of Melville’s novels, especially Moby-Dick: Hershel Parker. He has edited since the 60s three ‘authoritative’ versions of MD that have formed the foundation of most of Melville scholarship and editing practices since. As someone heavily invested in Melville, Parker’s imprint is typical in any edition I come across, and the lack of it is suspicious. It is not a bad thing, of course, but it raises questions. Project Gutenberg does not note an editor or recognize their copy-text in either of the two full-text editions of MD, but instead does include the note:

Produced by Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger

I do not recognize any of the names personally, and these people are not specifically named as editors, so it is difficult to determine what sort of mark they may have left on the text, and without providing information about the copy-text, the text’s specific origins are unknowable to an outsider. Of course, Project Gutenberg provides a (somewhat reasonable) defense for this:

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties.

This is what made Project Gutenberg’s text of MD so easy to acquire, versus HATHITrust and Google, who expressed copyright claims to their digital versions and locked the downloads behind certain obstacles, and while I can appreciate the reverence paid to access, the unclear provenance of the text, other than its recognition as a “public domain text” does not point me to the copy-text being reliable. This perhaps is fine for a general reader, but unsettling for a scholar.

On the other hand, HATHITrust and Google Books both provide some more concrete information because the book is viewed through images of a scanned hard copy. What is unfortunate is that the two public domain editions available on each platform were also very dated. HATHITrust’s edition of MD is from a 1929 Macmillan edition (which is about the time Melville was rediscovered but well before academics began critically editing his work) and Google Books full text edition is from the 1851- the year the book was published. Google’s edition wins, for me at least, because the 1851 edition at least is more reputable than whatever edition served as the copy-text of Project Gutenberg’s edition, and it stands to reason may have served as the copy-text for HATHITrust’s version. Easily accessing the first edition of the book leaves little questions to scholars as to what they are working with, and can actually be very useful not only as a text itself, but as an artifact of the novel’s original form (before critical editing).

Of course, I can’t spend all my time musing on editions and validity. The formatting of the texts is also interesting for one major reason: in the Gutenberg edition, since it does not mimic the page scrolling format Google Books and HATHITrust adhere to, we find awkward moments in the text where the body of the text is interrupted by Melville’s footnotes (which he typically wrote in to clarify any esoteric nautical information). In the page scans from the other two databases, this does not occur, because they reproduce the pages and so the text remains in a more traditional form (with footnotes at the bottom, clearly demarcated as outside of the body).

In response to the Duguid article, where one of the primary critiques of Google Books is the poor scanning of pages and distorted words, Google’s edition of MD looks to be pretty polished. In my sampling of the scanned pages, I did not find cut edges, distortions at the spine, or anything of that sort. That problem, however, was prevalent in the HATHITrust version, where the illustrations of the cover page were cut off near the spine, and some marginalia went over the edge of page (someone made a note on the Table of Contents that spanned the margin between Chapters XIII and XVIII that I think might have said ‘BORING!’ , but I cannot be sure).

Finally, in terms of feedback, HATHITrust made the process the easiest by providing, on the same page as the book was read on, a little button that opened a survey asking about the quality of the book, where any errors could be reported including missing, distorted, curved, and blurry text. Google unfortunately, only allowed users to review the book, which could be more concerned with plot and enjoyment, instead of textual quality. Project Gutenberg did not provide any easily accessed method of evaluation, but does include links on the home page to get in contact with them, and to submit missing pages for texts (which I suppose counts as one form of correction).

I was surprised, especially after reading Duguid, of what I found in Google Books. Their images of the Moby-Dick text looked more professional and refined than the HATHITrust edition, was an 1851 first edition, and posed no issues in the formatting of the text. The same could not be said of the HATHITrust and Project Gutenberg versions, whose scans were less sophisticated, contained marginalia (incomplete and cutoff at that) or posed formatting issues by presenting a text with footnotes incorporated into the body without separating them in any way. As I said, the Duguid article made me fearful of what I would find on Google, and their issues with Tristram Shandy are of course valid concerns, but perhaps it’s possible Google has learned or has improved their process since that article was published in 2007, since while Google Books’ major downside was the lack of a reporting feature, of the three editions I have looked at, it was surprisingly the one that needed it the least.

Hi everyone!  I’m a second year M.A./Ph.D. student; I’m specializing in medieval and early modern literature; I’m particularly interested in Old English Poetry.  The reason I am in this class is because I am not a digital humanist and I want to find out whether I ever could be (or if I would want to become) one.  I like the phrase Katie offered with the Prensky article:  I am a digital immigrant.  When reading Trubek’s statement “Do not tweet because you have been told to, or because you feel you ‘should,’” I wondered “Should I just leave now, then? Is there no hope for me as a DHer if I don’t feel moved by an overwhelming urge to tweet?”  I find DH counter-intuitive and mysterious, but that is why I decided that I need to give it a proper investigation and a fair try.

I was intrigued by the statement in D_H by Burdick et al. that raises a similar issue to the article to which Katie pointed us:

The lack of conventions and the opportunity to imagine formats with very different affordances than print have not only brought about recognition of the socio-cultural construction and cognitive implications of standard print formats, but have also highlighted the role of design in communication.  (10)

Hey, everyone.  Chip here.  A quick introduction to me: I’m a first-year PhD student in English here at the University of Maryland.  I just finished an M.A. in English at GWU last year, so I’ve been in DC for a little while now.  For the last couple of years I was really interested in looking at the intersections of postcolonial theory and queer theory, as a way to understand how sexual behavior becomes increasingly politicized in times of political change.  Of late, I’ve started contemplating a future-leaning look at how science fiction projects the next wave of colonial expansion.

As far as my DH background goes, it’s not too extensive.  I took a course last semester with Kari Kraus, and we examined the history and future of the book, and more general of humans’ interactions with text.  I got a pretty decent look at some of the DH debates around the physical media that carry text, and I’m excited to have an opportunity to learn more in this course.

In the readings for today, I was most interested in a theme raised by a couple of the quick definitions in the DDH article “Day of DH: Defining the Digital Humanities.”  Mark Marino and Ed Finn both point to what they see as the impending obsolescence of the very idea of Digital Humanities.  They suggest that very soon there will be no sense of Digital Humanities as something separate from simply…humanities, as everything will become somewhat digitally-inclined as our society as a whole (including the academy) becomes more digitally integrated.  I found this to be a particularly interesting take, because it simultaneously foregrounds the importance of Digital Humanities (since everything is about to become digital) while acknowledging that DH as its own entity is doomed (and in fairly short order).  So I wonder if I’ve already missed the boat, in a sense, as far as DH goes?  By the time I get comfortable enough with DH to call myself a DH’er, will doing so seem a little bit like putting “Proficient with Word-processing Software” on a resume?

My name is Paul Evans, and I am currently a PhD candidate in the Medieval and Byzantine Studies program at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. I am also a graduate research assistant at UMD’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), working as a Scala/Lift developer on MITH’s NEH-funded Active OCR project (http://mith.umd.edu/research/project/active-ocr/).

Before that, I had a number of previous academic and professional lives. My undergraduate degree was in the History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe. I then spent 23 years working in the computer industry, for the first ten years as a UNIX system administrator, and then as a manger, director and VP of IT.

My PhD dissertation is focused on the evolution of Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140), the foundational text of medieval canon law. So I’m working on a traditional topic, using a traditional approach (think 19th century German textual scholarship, like the Monumenta Germaniae Historiae). My tools, however, are not traditional. I transcribe the texts from digitized images (still a manual process), encode the transcriptions in XML, and then write web applications in Java, Python or Scala that help me to visualize the variants. To see a sample, check out http://http://ingobert-app.appspot.com/.

Having read the other introductory blog posts, I feel under-qualified to discuss the critical-theoretical issues raised by the readings that the rest of you have engaged. I will limit myself to the issue of whether or not one has to know how to write code in order to be a DHer in good standing. As the person in the room with (I think) the most technical experience, I’m going to take the counter-intuitive position that the answer is “no” or at least “not much”. I think it’s more important to be able to tell a story that someone (yourself or someone else) can turn into code. To understand what I mean by “tell a story”, read Getting Real, a book on software development by 37 Signals, the people who brought you Basecamp.

I’m looking forward to the discussion tonight.

My name is Melissa, and there are a couple of reasons why I feel relatively comfortable not defining digital humanities (plural), or at least, not making myself anxious about its various definitions. The first reason is personal and anecdotal, so I’ll start with that by way of an introduction.

When I think back on my own experiences with technology [as a feminist autobiographer a "memory audit" like this one is a necessary first step for me in thinking about gendered histories of technology and power], I realize that I’m not afraid of it because tools and machines were part of my milieu from an early age. Now that I’m thinking about it, I see that this has everything to do with being from a working-class family. There are infamous pictures of me as a toddler in a leopard leotard on the seat of my uncle’s yellow bulldozer. My grandfather was a tool and die maker–he worked on machines that made other machines, but before that he worked in a paper factory. I can distinctly remember my excitement watching paper being made, excitement that was magnified when he brought home boxes of it to feed through the typewriter he found at a garage sale for me. So my love of literature is intimately bound up with material production itself; it has as much to do with the feel, smell, and sound of paper and the thoroughly nostalgic and satisfying experience of (loudly) making words appear on the page with a machine as it does with the words themselves. [Speaking of words, I also argued as a child with my grandfather about why the "square" used to measure angles was triangular.]

My mom dated and eventually married a mechanic who is also a carpenter, plumber, and, though he probably wouldn’t admit it, a lay engineer and inventor. I grew up in garages and hardware stores, watching him “hack” things–whether it was a new foundation for a very old house or an engine fix that, while unorthodox, was “close enough for government work,” in his words. He is a maker to his core, so I probably got to play with more weird tools and ancient, highly specific machines than most tomboys. Meanwhile I was happily word processing with Mavis Beacon on Windows 95, dabbling in early virtual worlds on a dial-up connection, and beating Nintendo games. All of this, I think, prepared me to not care very much when I was one of about five women in my Advanced Placement computer programming class in high school. In turn, and to come back to the purpose of this post, that programming class is what helped me not be daunted by some of my colleagues’ thinly veiled fear and disdain for digital humanities.

So, I know I am, and will continue to be, a cyborg whether or not others consider me to be a digital humanist. Which brings me to the second reason I’m not getting anxious about definitions of digital humanities. I recently read Robyn Wiegman’s brilliant book Object Lessons, which argues, in short, that the critical desires that motivate our scholarship (in the case of Women’s Studies and other minoritarian “identity knowledges,” the desire to do justice) can tell us much about disciplinary norms and imperatives. Wiegman pays attention to the often bitter and snarky conflicts that take place in academic journals and conference presentations in moments of field formation and consolidation. I cannot help but take an object lesson from debates surrounding the origins and the futures of digital humanities work. The obvious anxiety that surrounds “who’s in and who’s out,” “the cool kids’ table,” and “the big tent” are not new–they are part and parcel of capitalist academic institutions that value shiny newness and sexy neologisms ["intertwinglings" is my new fave], entrepreneurship and innovation narrowly and profitably defined, and competition that leads to “progress” for only a select few.

It’s not surprising that, as David Golumbia points out in “‘Digital Humanities’: Two Definitions,” multiple and contradictory assertions of what digital humanities are “about” and what they do are circulating simultaneously. In fact, while they appear to be contradictory, the “big tent” definition and the “tools and archives” or “making and building” definition might actually be achieving the same purpose, which is allowing universities and eventually the state to profit off whatever they think digital humanities are. I’m not trying to make this sound like a conspiracy theory with no accountable actors–there are powerful individuals making big decisions with huge amounts of money here. You and me could argue till the cows come home about what digital humanities mean, but in the end our language is going to have to match the assumptions of the funding agency we want to support our project, as the “Short Guide” offered by the authors of Digital_Humanities makes (somewhat implicitly) clear.

In short [or maybe at length], what are our investments in making, building, geeking out, hacking, coding, designing, reading (socially or otherwise), theorizing, critiquing, navelgazing? I come down hard on the side of Bianco when it comes to critical-creative praxis–I did so when I thought I was just a writer and I do so now, in the process of shifting my identity to that of maker. I don’t think writing, reading, and thinking critically and creatively can be excluded from the category of “doing,” as a recent twitter spat I had with another attendee of the Digital Humanities Winter Institute can attest. But rather than arguing about who’s cool or sexy, we need to seriously interrogate the kinds of cultural and academic capital attached to the practitioners who get to inhabit those labels, as well as the cost to those who don’t.

Hi, all!  I’m Katie Kaczmarek, and I “fell into” digital humanities when I was searching for a category to define my interests when applying to doctoral programs.  During my five years as a high school English teacher, I had to take classes on using technology in the classroom, where I came across this article by Marc Prensky which describes that the current generation of students growing up with technology literally have a different process of reading than those of us who grew up before it was omnipresent.  So I’m interested in investigating what features of online/hypertext literature or interactive media Young Adult print authors are using to appeal to those types of readers.  The more I learn about Digital Humanities, the more excited I am to become a part of it, because like Charity, I want my work to have some practical use to the colleagues I left behind.

After looking at all the readings, the digital humanities field seems to be suffering from the tension between wanting to be expansive and inclusive (Building doesn’t mean just coding!  Collaboration is key!) and from wanting to have clear and specific boundaries (You’re not a digital humanist just because you have a blog!  How is this different from what you could have done in print?).  Golumbia points out that even the Digital_Humanities book uses both the narrow definition of digital humanities as “tool-and-archives” and the “big tent” definition without distinction, though it leans towards the narrower definition.  I’m wondering how much of this need to draw boundaries and create a specific definition is born from a desire to legitimate the field within academia.  Universities already struggling to figure out how to assess digital humanities project-work no doubt appreciate the guidelines suggested in the “Short Guide to Digital Humanities”.  But the ability for people with so many diverse interests to participate in the field is part of what gives it vitality, and as Bianco notes, when you start reducing heterogeneity to create standards, you start to limit diversity, and lose potential ideas and results.

One of the other unique features of digital humanities that I find exciting and refreshing for the academic world is the fact that in the project-based world of DH, 1) failure is to be expected and 2) projects are encouraged not only to build off of previous work, but to be continued.  The fact that failure is an acceptable step in the process makes DH a much less intimidating field to step into, especially for a recovering perfectionist like me.  I also like the encouragement to collaborate with others and take their work farther, and the fact that your work can have even more of a lasting impact.