Now on Facebook!

Dear readers, I bring news of our expansion: Modern Medieval now has a Facebook page. As of writing this post, we currently have 98 likes for our page, which is a great start, and we look forward to more. In the spirit of continuing to grow this community, we would be delighted if you would join our conversation there. Our hope is that this page will serve as a place of conversation about this blog and related topics, since, as our header says, "The Middle Ages still have something to say."

Hanging out at Kalamazoo

It has taken me about a week, but I am nearly recovered from a whirlwind tour through St. Louis, then Kalamazoo, and then some marathon grading. At least, I am recovered enough to gather some brief reflections on the most recent Medieval Congress. This was only my third Kalamazoo, yet in some ways it feels like I've been going forever, and in others, it all still seems vexingly new and overwhelming. After going to the New Chaucer Society in Portland, I was most struck by the various threads the conference organizers had created, giving a sense of several continuing conversations and mini-conferences. At Kalamazoo, however, any sense of unity must be user-generated. There are, to be sure, clusters of related panels, but because there are so many medievalists coming from so many disciplinary backgrounds, it can be difficult to find any sense of cohesion over several caffeine-fueled days. I do not offer this comparative observation as a criticism. Rather, it can be exhilarating to feel so lost sometimes.

So, how exactly did I choose what panels to go to? Usually, I find myself going to the panels most closely related to the work that I'm doing at the moment, but this time around I found myself exploring new areas, returning to old critical haunts, and attending sessions that were self reflective about the field and our position in it.

As luck would have it, I managed to attend several marvelous panels, including an excellent session on the "Versions of Piers Plowman" with Lawrence Warner, Stephen Shepherd, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. These papers revisited questions concerning manuscript illuminations, the binary or tension between scribe and author, and the role of early editors in determining what we now see as the different versions of the text. I cannot possibly do justice to the very specific positions and claims each speaker gave during their talk, but it was one of the more stimulating sessions I attended during the whole weekend. It also reminded me that I need to return to Langland. St. Erkenwald remains the text I am most fascinated by, but no other text challenges me as Piers Plowman does.

I also attended a panel called "The Prosthetic Impulse in the Middle Ages: Metaphor, Materiality, and the Promise of the (Post)human." This was one of those panels where I truly wished that all the papers were circulated ahead of time, not because the speakers were in any way lacking (in fact, they all gave quite engaging talks), but because there's so much to think about that I felt somewhat overwhelmed. Also, this was one of the first panels I attended that engaged with Disability Studies, and it was an intriguing introduction, especially for the ways that the panelists and the respondent considered the intersections with DS and the posthuman. Agatha Hansen's paper addressed a literal prosthetic hand in the Life of Saint Melor, while M. W. Bychowski and Craig Dionne considered the viability of the prosthetic as metaphor, especially in terms of narrative.

I was part of a Roundtable on the subject of "Productive Anachronism? The Promise and Peril of Historical Analogy in the Study of Medieval Culture," organized by Jonathan Newman and Anna Wilson. Although our session was at slotted for 7:30 PM, we had a surprisingly good turnout and a great discussion during the Q&A. I was also particularly pleased with how wide-ranging our papers and our discussion ended up being – Alex Mueller, Roland Betancourt, and Anna Wilson considered the role of anachronism in both our scholarship and in the subjects that we study, while I, Robin Wharton, and Alison Valk tackled the question of anachronism from a pedagogical angle. Despite the fact that there was a seeming split in our panel between pedagogy and scholarship, it was also clear that we were dealing with the same questions: How do we make sense of the past and present together? What can be gained by being more upfront about the ways in which we read the past through the present and vice versa?

The two Babel panels that I attended, one called "Thriving" and one called "Blunder," also featured a similar split, but this time it was between offering theoretical and contemplative readings of medieval texts versus discussions of the field in terms of professional life. For example, the "Blunder" session included an excellent paper by Mary Kate Hurley on "Blundering at the End in Beowulf" while Nancy M. Thompson and Maggie Williams spliced together lines from publishing rejection letters in a presentation called "Speculations." The highlight, though, was Asa Mittman and Shyama Rajendran presenting on the website "Fumblr," especially Asa's booming voice as he delightedly, and somewhat perversely, read out some of the submitted fumbles and failures. Everyone should check out the Fumblr website, and you should submit something. We all have something we could submit. Right? It's not just me?

The Congress has been over for about a week and a half now, but what still really sticks with me is the paper given by Patricia Ingham for the "Thriving" roundtable. Her paper, titled "Living and Thriving," is a discussion about finding her own place in Medieval Studies. I was moved by the paper, but I was really captivated by how it was delivered – she was not able to make it to Kalamazoo so the organizers arranged to have her teleconference in through a Google hangout. The video feed did sputter in places, and the whole panel ended up getting book ended by her paper since she had to finish up her final paragraph at the very end after some technical difficulties were smoothed out, but overall it was a fascinating experiment. And, I would say that using Google hangout was more or less a success here. Because conference travel can be so difficult for me (flying in a power wheelchair is frankly a major pain in the ass), I have thought at times about asking whether I could arrange something like what Patricia Ingham did. NCS Iceland comes to mind. And while I'm not too concerned (yet) about some dark future where conferences cease to exist and we all give our papers through video conferencing, there is something definitely lost through this use of technology. We all got to enjoy and be stimulated by her paper, but with the exception of her being "present" for the panel, she missed out on what makes these events so worthwhile: seeing everyone. We travel from distant places not so much to hear papers that we can easily read in the privacy of our own homes or offices, but we do all decide to come together precisely to be together, to engage in conversations, to ask questions, and to congregate at Bell's for some delicious beer.

I left Kalamazoo with some new thoughts about the intersections between our professional lives and our personal lives, between our scholarship and our teaching, and I continue to be captivated by the new ways we keep finding to engage with one another.

Anachronism as Responsible Pedagogy

I am finally back from a lovely and stimulating Kalamazoo. It was great to meet so many people, and to hear some excellent papers. 

I've posted here my contribution to the panel on "Productive Anachronism" organized by Jonathan Newman and Anna Wilson. It was excellent, and dare I say, productive. Our conversation considered the connections between our work as scholars and our work as teachers. Also, see here for Robin Wharton's (one of my fellow presenters) essay. I had hoped to clean this up and include notes, but like many of us (tell me I'm not alone!), I am returning to a mountain of grading. I plan on expanding this, actually, into a slightly longer piece. So, watch this space.

Anachronism as Responsible Pedagogy

Let me begin this short paper with an analogy—not a historical one, but hopefully a productive one nonetheless. In China Mieville’s The City and the City, citizens of Beszel live in a city that somehow shares space with another city: Ul Qoma. (It is never made clear if this is an alternate reality or if the situation is purely psychological bifurcation.) Citizens in one city can physically see citizens from the other, but because of some exceptional political mechanisms and long-standing social taboos, a Besz citizen must unsee a neighbor from Ul Qoma and vice versa. Typical spatial logic is broken up in the world Mieville creates, and so the two cities are interwoven as opposed to occupying discrete areas.  The result is that your neighbor just a few feet from your elbow might be in another city, and thus unseeable.  Mieville’s notion of unseeing has resonance with many contemporary concerns regarding how communities are created and maintained (including how some are excluded), but perhaps because I heard Carolyn Dinshaw’s excellent talk “All Kinds of Time” at NCS Portland during the time I was reading this book, I have also come to think that this idea neatly describes a dilemma of responsible historicism and interpretation. Apprehending the distant (and even the near) past creates an epistemological problem, for we want to understand the past in its own terms without imposing presentist biases. But, to apprehend the distant past without acknowledging that we see through other time periods and temporalities is to essentially unsee those times. In this short paper, I take the position that anachronism, as well as historical analogy, is not only a productive and responsible way to approach the past, but it is also perhaps the most intellectually honest way as well.  Specifically, I want to advocate that we encourage anachronism in the classroom, not just in discussion (this, it seems to me, is almost inevitable), but also in the written works and projects we assign.

            In my own experience in the classroom, my students often want to make anachronistic or analogous connections during discussion. Something we read reminds them of a movie or tv show or book, and when they start to make their point, it is always with embarrassment and self-consciousness. Sometimes they are just embarrassed to admit their viewing habits to me, but I am increasingly convinced that they feel like it is simply taboo to bring in their own life-worlds as a part of our analysis. Acknowledging that they come from a specific point of view would, they feel, shatter the claim to objectivity, which for them is the ideal they ought to reach for. What I repeatedly remind them of during the semester, however, is that objectivity in their writing is mostly a rhetorical fiction. Lee Patterson, in his Negotiating the Past, discusses the fault lines in any claim to objectivity in historical scholarship, observing: “Moreover, it must ignore the correlative fact that the objects with which the human sciences deal can never be wholly other from the interpreting self over against which they stand; on the contrary, they are themselves constituted by means of the very subjectivity that characterizes the interpreter.  Rather than a dangerous intruder that must not be allowed to contaminate the procedures of historical research, subjectivity is in fact the condition of all understanding: if texts are to be understood at all they must be capable of being taken up into consciousness and rendered part of the subject.” I quite love the term “dangerous intruder,” incidentally. The phrase truly captures how my students often react to the idea of using “I” in their essays. To do so, they have invariably been taught, is to allow a dangerous interloper, their own subjectivity (demeaningly cast as “mere opinion”) to run rampant through otherwise objective literary analyses. Even if they don’t acknowledge the “I” that is writing, I tell them, it’s there. We might as well embrace it.

            We cannot, then, separate so easily the interpreting-“I” from the object it surveys. This entwining of subject and object creates, as Dipesh Chakrabarty describes in Provincializing Europe, a sense of temporal heterogeneity, causing, at once, the subject analyzing to be out of sync with the present moment and the object analyzed to be contemporaneous. Chakrabarty writes “One could argue, for instance, that the writing of medieval history for Europe depends on this assumed contemporaneity of the medieval, or what is the same thing, the noncontemporaneity of the present with itself.  The medieval in Europe is often strongly associated with the supernatural and the magical.  But what makes the historicizing of it possible is the fact that its basic characteristics are not completely foreign to us as moderns.” He goes on to argue that for history to have any meaning for our own life-worlds, we must, in addition to historicizing, also think through anachronism, treating the past as contemporaneous rather than remote and distant.

With this in mind, I would like to now turn to how I have seen anachronism and analogy work in my own classes. When I wrote the abstract for this short paper, however, I suggested that I would share the fruits of my encouraging my students to embrace anachronism. Upon sitting down to write this, though, I realized that what I really want to talk about is they pushed me to think about the productive value of anachronism.

In the first instance, I offered a creative option as an assignment and let my students write a short scene that would occur within one of the narrative gaps of the text. One particular student decided to write about Caliban in the Tempest, and reimagined Caliban as a blogger. When I first assigned this creative option, I expected that everyone would write in the spirit of, shall we say, historical fiction. The student decided instead to move Caliban forward into the future. As a way to express his rage and his fondness for cursing, she gave him a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection. He impotently raged against Prospero, and it never was clear whether or not poor Caliban had any sort of readership. I thought that I was innovating by allowing a critical/creative assignment in my class, but my student challenged me to rethink the sort of creative work I was really after. In her imagining of Caliban’s blog, she helped me to see how modern a figure he might be, even if his modernity was undercut by his evident wildness. Caliban may exist as someone outside of time, a wild man figure, but he is also of the moment, painfully contemporary. For example, he may represent the latest spoils of colonialist exploration. The Tempest is a text imbricated with all sorts of time, and my student only heightened its sense of anachronism. In going back to her essay to write this paper, I also discovered a detail I had forgotten. As a component of the assignment I asked students to write what I call metacommentary, that is a self-reflective discussion of the choices they made as writers. In going back, I discovered that she was partly inspired by the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution. My student wanted to restore Caliban’s voice, just as the internet gave voice to the Egyptian people.

In my second example, another student of mine wrote her essay through the lens of a contemporary event. This time the text was Marie de France’s Bisclavret, which I have taught a few times. During discussion, most students initially feel a sense of revulsion against the lady. "How could she betray her husband just for a slight lycanthropic problem?" The lordly werewolf was the clear hero, and his one-time lady was a clear villain. No one seems particularly concerned at first with how the lady is tortured and punished. After pursuing such a reading for a while, I then pose the following question: "is there any way to read the lady as a victim?" After a few blank stares, they start to take to this new subject. They realize that the lay opens with a description of ferocious werewolves, and that this might be the only knowledge of the beast that the lady would have, and so the lady might be justifiable in her decision to escape her husband at any cost. At some point in this discussion, I state that although we could not necessarily read the text as a strict parable of domestic violence, the parallels should at least give us pause. In response to this, my student decided to explore this idea even further, reading the text in light of Congress's failure to authorize The Violence against Women Act. In her analysis, she was sensitive to historical readings of the place and power of women during the Middle Ages, and she did significant research on this subject. But in closing her essay, she sought to make a broader point, that Marie's text can serve as a reminder and as a warning about the fragile power structures that women still find themselves enmeshed in.

Now, in closing this essay, I want to return to the short quote I offered from Chakrabarty—immediately following it is a parenthetical that reads “(which is not to deny the historical changes that separate the two).” Taking the past as in some ways contemporaneous does not erase the efforts of historicism, which tries to understand the past in its own context. We need to do this work, and we need to encourage our students to do so as well, but we cannot easily claim that we can purge the present from our thinking. We cannot unsee other times when we view the past. Anachronism does not deny the difference between past and present, but it makes interpretation possible, and it bridges the gap between different times while also preserving and highlighting the distance between them, a distance that can only be crossed through subjective and creative apprehension. And, after attending postmedieval’s session today on Thriving, I am also reminded that anachronism can make this work joyful as well. Thank you.

MAA 2013

This past weekend, I attended my first meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, and had a great time at it. There were many good papers, good conversations, all with new friends as well as old. While I would love to write a full review of the conference, I find myself back to routine and crunched with the last weeks of the semester looming ahead of me. But I did tweet at various times throughout the conference, and constructed a story of these tweets over on Storify. I share it here, so that you may have a sense of my experience, at least in fits and bursts.

Here is my story (to read it chronologically, scroll to the bottom and follow it back to the top):

Narratives of #digitalhumanities

A few days ago, Melissa Terras posted some great thoughts about analyzing the unfolding history of the hashtag for #digitalhumanities on Twitter, largely focusing on the financial problems of accessing data. While some data has already been charted and analyzed, the large-scale project that she proposes sounds like a useful approach to the field. 

But I would like to offer a few caveats to consider in such endeavors. In following and interacting with digital humanities scholarship, I have noticed that #digitalhumanities is not the only hashtag to follow. I am relatively new to the digital humanities, and I offer these thoughts from more of a newbie's perspective. A little over a year ago, I started following trends in the field, including scholars and conversations on Twitter. I have mainly kept to reading and briefly responding (on Twitter and this blog), and only within the past few months have I begun to develop my own projects to contribute. To my point, the feeds of some of the scholars whom I have followed (representing medieval studies as well as digital humanities more broadly) present some other common hashtags: #dh, #WhatisDH, #transformdh; further afield are even more, such as #dataviz and #analytics, and no doubt others could be added within specific sub-fields that may not be particularly relevant for charting general trends. For myself, I often use #dh as a shorthand, especially since its brevity allows for inclusion in longer messages in the face of the 140-character limit.

This variety in possible hashtags, then, also presents variety for "charting the growth of the discipline, the geolocation of tweets, the networks that exist, the sentiments surrounding it" (Terra's words). In short, the #digitalhumanities hashtag does not so readily encapsulate the field; nor does that single hashtag encapsulate all of the narratives to trace in the developments of the field. So I pose my main question, which I mean not as a rhetorical challenge but as a genuine question to foster discussion: Is #digitalhumanities the only, or even the most appropriate, hashtag to consider? What about other common hashtags like #dh, #WhatisDH, #transformdh, etc.? These questions bring a host of attendant issues, but I believe they are worth considering in order to avoid charting narratives that do not encompass the whole field.

Nerds, Love, Amateurs: Reflections on How Soon Is Now

First, before you read this post, go look at Karl Steel's writeup of an event celebrating the publication of Carolyn Dinshaw's How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Second, let me say I loved this book. I need, in fact, to re-read it because I felt myself swept away by just how thoughtful and enchanting it is, and consequently I did not take as many research notes as I would have liked. It's a manifesto for the desire to touch the past, one that I will be happy to return to. 

I hope to put up a more positive response to the piece soon, but for now, I wanted to respond to Karl's post, which touches on a concern that has been nagging at me. Karl notes that "[t]he q&a bogged down for a while in the distinction between professionals and amateurs, with Dinshaw, if I remember correctly (and I probably don't), emphasizing that she's describing differing modes of engagement rather than, say, job titles." In place of amateur, he suggests "nerd" -- I find this preferable, for reasons I'll get into.

My frustration with the distinction Dinshaw makes between professional and amateur is, perhaps, unfair. But it proceeds directly from my own relationship to professionalism. To get at this, let me quote a few sizable chunks from her introduction (I am using the Kindle edition, so forgive the lack of page numbers).

Here is her account of the relationship between professionals and temporality:

Professionals are paid for their work, and their expert time can be seen to share characteristics with money: it is abstract, objective, and countable. Professional work time is clock-bound and calendrical, regulated abstractly and independently of individuals, and the lives of professionals conform to this temporality. Measurement-that one side of the Aristotelian temporal problematic-is the essence here. Consider the sequence of school nights and workdays, weeks, weekends and vacations, fiscal quarter following fiscal quarter, semester following semester, year following year. Such time is homogeneous and empty. It is secular: Weber's analysis, for example, contended that the "rational" scheme of monastic hours was the precursor of secularized Protestant time-consciousness. And, like money, it is to be saved, budgeted, and spent. A life regulated in this way is marked by significant milestones: on the quotidian scale, there are deadlines to be made; on the scale of the life course, there are schools, higher education, early apprenticeship, employment with benefits including life insurance, then promotions and eventual retirement, with the shining gold timepiece at the end.

Now, I have to admit, this rendition of the temporal progression of professionals strikes me as inadequate and, perhaps, anachronistic. (I doubt it jives with the tenure-track or tenured academic either, given the schedule-busting activities of teaching, grading, mentoring, research, committee work, etc.) Right now, I am probably stuck in some hybrid of "apprenticeship" and "employment with benefits," and for those like myself (having a PhD, but not yet landed in a tenure-track job) the optimism of forward movement here seems like a distant dream, or an oasis that I keep trying in vain to drink from. (Does that make sense? Need coffee.) In contrast to this orderly and regulated set of temporal rhythms, here is what she says about the amateur:

If amateurs are not paid -and defined as such they are not remunerated for work -what do they get at the end of their efforts? What, indeed, defines the end of amateurs' labors? Operating on a different time scheme from professional activities, amateurs' activities do not require punching a time clock and do not follow a predestined career path, since they are not wage labor. Amateur temporality starts and stops at will; tinkerers and dabblers can linger at moments of pleasure when the professionals must soldier duly onward. Professionals must bring all elements of an operation into place in order to complete a replicable task-say, the making of a perfect omelet-but amateurs can enjoy the chance irruptions that occur when all is not synched up. Amateur time is not dictated by a mystified scientific method that requires not only a closed system and the elimination of chance but also, and most fundamentally, the separation of subject from object. In fact, not "scientific" detachment but constant attachment to the object.

Part of the problem that has been nagging me is that I see myself as neither the professional she describes in such sterile tones, nor do I identify fully with the amateur she lauds. But, I identity more with the amateur. My career path seems far less "predestined" than it ever has, and I am certainly not paid for all of my work. My teaching work is paid for, according to the levels of remuneration for a postdoc, but all the other work I do is not. Writing conference papers, revising an article, providing a reader's report for peer review, developing a book project--all of this is on my time. I do not punch a time clock, and there is no clear milestone this leads to. Yes, the general idea is that I do these things to land a more permanent position. And, that is one of the major reasons I do it. Yet I don't need to. There is no guarantee that there will be another job after this, and there are no significant penalties for not doing this work. Well, there are (of course there are), but for now it seems like these penalties exist in the abstract. I mostly continue this work because I choose to, because, even when I am at my most frustrated, I still love the work. My continued scholarly activity comes from a place of desire, albeit one not yet able to attach itself to the comforting temporalities and remunerations of the professional.

Strictly speaking, according to her definition, I am not an amateur simply because I am paid. But the main point I'm making is that I occupy a hybrid time, both professional (I still have a place in the University as a teacher) yet amateur because I pursue my activities for myself, without definable milestone or pay. (Side note: I discuss academic time in an essay I wrote for postmedieval. /endselfpromotion) 

To be fair, though, Dinshaw is aware that there are limits to a celebration of amateurism:

Lest this description of amateurism seem purely idealizing, let me acknowledge that amateurism is not miraculously free of the shaping institutions of modernity; it may indeed be a kind of ruse of late capitalism. Amateurs might have wealth enough so that they don't need to work; that hardly puts them outside capitalism. Or they may be out of work and so have plenty of time for their hobbies. Amateurs might embody traits that are a neoliberal fantasy: they may be not only creative, but flexible and adaptable, too. They might be especially celebrated in a recessionary economy for being able to convert their passions into pounds sterling- all the while still staying passionate. They might be complicit in a culture and economy of deskilling.

If anything, I'd like to see more attention to the economic horizon for such amateur activities. Karl suggests the term "nerd" over "amateur," and I think it's a better term. For one, it somewhat sidesteps the messy conversations prompted by amateur and professional. As Dinshaw noted at the roundtable, she is more concerned with types of engagement as opposed to job titles.  The sorts of engagement that she lets the past penetrate the now, rather than be kept at a cool, neutral or professional distance. This can cause discomfort and affection in equal measures, as any passion often does. As Karl suggests, "Nerdery, then, is a bit queer, a bit off, a bit unpleasant, and also, of course, unfortunately agonistic. It works well, then, to describe the overripeness of passionate attachment to what we do for love, where love, remember, is always a bit awry or repulsive." To make an overly broad claim, though, many people that I know who display such "nerdery" are often those who derive little satisfaction of the "closed system" of professional time. They are in jobs that are not challenging, or that are going no where. Or, they're fine enough but not stimulating in the ways our passions can be. I suspect, but can only provide anecdotal evidence, that there is a higher probability for such nerdic (yeah, I did that) engagement or creation among those not working, or holding jobs that aren't satisfying or consuming in the ways I just mentioned.

Reading How Soon Is Now, it was a little difficult not to feel alienated at times by the celebrations of the amateur. On one hand I feel that my amatory intellectual work must be "amateur" because of complicated and changing economic conditions. On the other, I feel unable to identify (not that I need to) with the figure of an individual who has enough economic freedom to pursue their projects as they wish. 

I do have to admit, again, that this response is unfair, since the current economic conditions of PhDs in the humanities is not Dinshaw's subject. I just could not help but reflect on these issues by her choice of terms. And, I know that much of this post can seem bitter or frustrated, and yes at times that is what I feel, but my motivation to do this work still comes from an amatory impulse. 

There is much to take delight in in Dinshaw's book. But the amateur sort of engagement she holds up already feels anachronistic, while the amateurism I feel participant to is painfully modern. 

I am still working out my response here, and I'd love to hear others' take on the issue. I think I am coming across as far more critical than I necessarily feel. Having said that, I would have liked more attention to the concerns she raises in the third chunk I quoted.

 

Humanities and the "Internet of Everything"

I begin with a video: a recent (released in December, 2012) advertisement by Cisco for their campaign titled "Tomorrow starts here" (60 seconds long).*

Here is my transcription of the video:

What if the next big thing isn't a thing at all? It's lots of things waking up, becoming part of the global phenomenon we call the "Internet of Everything." Trees will talk to networks, will talk to scientists about climate change. Cars will talk to road sensors, will talk to stoplights about traffic efficiency. The ambulance will talk to patient records, will talk to doctors about saving lives. It's going to be amazing, and exciting, and maybe, most remarkably, not that far away. The next big thing? We're going to wake the world up and watch with eyes wide as it gets to work. Cisco. Tomorrow starts here.

In addition to the video, Cisco has also established a website that emphasizes various aspects of their campaign. In one particular part of this website is a video in which Dave Evans, Cisco Chief Futurist, talks about how these major shifts are essentially beneficial at their roots. The video ends with Evans discussing how historians will look back and ask "How did Internet of Everything benefit humanity?"--and his response, as conclusion, is that "Nothing else matters."

On one level, it is intriguing that this type of hype for change as a benefit to humanity comes from a multinational corporation in the S&P 500 Index (though it is good advertising for this). On another level, the rhetoric here is much the same rhetoric that comes with looking to the Internet as a democratizing force, a globalized connector, a type of messiah for the secular world.

What is interesting about this rhetoric are the components that are pulled together in just one short minute. The most important factors for the development of this "Internet of Everything" are emphasized in the moments when the advertisement is at its most specific, in the center--in contrast to the abstraction that frames the comercial. We are prompted to see the issues of environmentalism, transportation efficiency (another network of human life), and human sustainability. These are the key stakes. This is the future according to Cisco.

Of course, I do wonder where the humanities are in all of this. Science is clearly king in this video; and it is also the focus in the various aspects of Cisco's website. I have few arguments to make here, but I do want to question the sort of secular messianic view of science inherent in all of this.

The ad does clearly play with a sense of aesthetic beauty, a sense of wonder, a sense of humanity beyond just scientific achievements. The images are telling for this: the video begins with a scene looking up at the stars, evocative of the ever-expanding universe, a network so often connotative of infinite possibilities. In a series of images that last for no more than a second each, we (as we are told of "lots of things waking up") are shown flashes of a sea-shell, blood cells, flowers, a highway network, various sites of human residence with lights turning on one at a time ("waking up"). The networks here are fascinating. Interspersed throughout the ad are humans at work, at school, standing in cities, several faces at the end to show the humanity inherent in this vision.

Glimpses of the arts are also found throughout the video more explicitly. At 0:13, we are shown part of a page of a printed book titled Schubert, by Walter Gualtério Armando (GoogleBooks snippet view here--found by a Google search). Another connection, albeit more of a stretch, is the language of binary shown at 0:18--a code that some digital humanists have pointed toward as a language in its own right deserving more study through linguistics. At 0:39, we have a glimpse of a rock band playing in what appears to be a garage. At various points in the ad, photographs are also incorporated, a natural connection to Walter Benjamin's reflections on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and what the digital media age offers as extensions of his ideas.

Are sciences the only areas pushing us forward in the digital age? Clearly not. I think there is ample room for reminding ourselves of this. On Cisco's website, they talk about education, and we are told "With the world's knowledge one Internet connection away, students will be active designers of their learning experiences.... The deep, rapid and constant change in technology will transform the way we teach and learn." We all take part in this, but the infographic offered emphasizes medical education, not mentioning the ways in which liberal arts and humanities develop significant ways into understanding human rights for these globalized networks. Or what historical endeavors (not just history as a discipline, but all historicizing endeavors) offer for understanding and avoiding past problems in moments of globalizing change. But beyond cautionary tales and warning signs, humanities also provide us with other avenues, such as appreciation of those glimpses into books, languages, music, and photographs--all still important in the digital age. In this, we hold onto the ways that the Internet of Everything embraces those aspects, too.


* In no way do I endorse Cisco, but use this video only for a starting point for my discussion.

A little self advertising...

Please pass along to any and all interested parties and forgive duplications:

Hello all, I am pleased to off the two courses listed below this summer online. There are both undergraduate and graduate options. If you are not a Bemidji State University student, directions on admission can be found here: http://www.bemidjistate.edu/academics/distance/admissions/ The ability to use basic software is required, and much will be delivered through D2L, a Blackboard like software that the student will be able to access once enrolled for the class. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there!

 ENGL 3930/5930 Intensive Latin Online 2013

Dr. Larry Swain 

Bemidji State University 

 Course Description: This course is an intensive introduction to Latin, covering in nine weeks a full academic year’s worth of the language. This will require a lot of work and dedication on the part of both instructor and student. By the end, however, the student should be able to read Latin prose with the aid of a grammar and a good dictionary or lexicon. There will be a great deal of memorization. Via our online tools, discussion board, online office hours, recorded lectures, live lectures, exercise sharing and corrections, and Q&A sessions delivered via D2L, power point presentations, and other tools, we will go through the entire text and master basic Latin. The course will require a commitment from the student. A MINIMUM of 2 hours and preferably 4-6 hours a day will need to be spent working on the exercises, in class, interacting with the professor etc. Because delivery is online rather than in a traditional classroom, the need for each individual student to apply him- or herself diligently daily is even more important than in a face-to-face class.  We will meet virtually in an online classroom for each lesson to explain the grammar lesson, to do some in class exercises, to correct exercises, and so on, for approximately an hour, more if necessary or if student interest. The rest of your time will be spent working on exercises, translating sample passages of actual Latin, memorizing the forms. 

Texts: Intensive Latin by Floyd Moreland and Rita Fleischer 

Other materials as assigned

(I will have advice about students’ dictionaries, additional grammar aids in print and online and so on as well throughout the course). 

Highly Recommended: English Grammar for Students of Latin: The Study Guide for Those Learning Latin by Norma Goldman and Ladislas Szymanski 

This course is six credits; I think a full year of Latin deserves a full year of credit.  The above URL at the top is the Center for Extended Learning Admissions website.  This URL is for the tuition calculator: http://www.bemidjistate.edu/offices/business/tuition_fees/tuition_calculator/.  

English 3390/5390: 

Intensive Old English Summer 2013

Dr. Larry J. Swain

 Bemidji State University 

This seminar is intended to accomplish three related objectives: 1) to learn to read Old English and translate texts in Old English with relative ease 2) to have an overview of Anglo-Saxon Literature and 3) to place the language and literature into the historical, cultural, theological, intellectual, and material contexts. That's a tall order. But like those we read who endure heroically, so shall we: we will be able to by semester's end read Old English literature in Old English, both prose and poetry. The approach is simple. This is an intensive course, a full 15 week course offered over 9 weeks in Summer via the Internet. We will cover approximately two chapters of the textbook each week, and during the last couple of weeks we will be working exclusively in translating Old English texts.

Textbooks: Reading Old English: An Introduction by Robert Hasenfratz and Thomas Jambeck

A History of Old English Literature by Michael Alexander 

Recommended: The Anglo-Saxons James Campbell 

Larry Swain lswain@bemidjistate.edu

Opening Access to Academia

Unofficial open access logo
Originally created by
Public Library of Science

A few months ago, I needed to supply a writing sample for a fellowship application. I thought that I had just the thing: an article published earlier that year that showed my interest and abilities in subjects directly related to the fellowship. The problem was, as I soon found, that I had no presentable digital copy of the article. Yes, I did have a pre-publication word processor document with all the relevant text, and yes, I did have hard copies from the publisher--but I had no digital version of the article in its final, formatted, published form. I also did not have access to the journal through my institution. The only way to obtain a digital version of my own work in its final, published form was to email the publisher asking for special access to it.

I write all of this not only to complain but also to point out how odd academic writing, intellectual rights, and access can be. This issue is nothing new, and it is certainly part of a much larger conversation about the shifting tectonic plates of the academic publishing landscape. In my predicament, I faced two questions: 1) Why didn't I have more direct access to my own work in its final (digital) form? 2) How could I have more power to digitally disseminate my own work? In response to my first question, fortunately, the publisher helped me in my plight; of course, rather than granting me access to the journal, the publisher liaison emailed me a pdf document of the article because, the correspondent claimed, it was simpler than other options. This still does not answer my bigger question. In response to my second question, I am glad for Academia.edu, where I can post my published work for those without access otherwise (my profile here).

As my example shows, the answers to questions about intellectual rights and public access in academic publishing do not come easily. In addressing such questions, I am also glad for groups such as Open Access Now and Creative Commons (just a few among many).

Last Friday, the tectonic plates of the academic publishing landscape shifted, as the USA's Office of Science and Technology Policy released the following news:

OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.

The full policy memorandum may be read here.

This was, for a number of reasons, good news, not least of which is the fact that these issues are gaining public attention and support. Perhaps my own (albeit minor) predicament would not have been particularly helped by these first steps for the government's push toward open access. But this is, at least, a good start.

Our own Orientalism: Why Medievalists are Complicit when Manuscripts Burn and Ruins Crumble

(Modern Medieval is pleased to host this guest post by Prof. Rabia Gregory, University of Missouri-Columbia)

Last month, as French ground forces moved into Mali at the request of Mali’s interim President, horrified whispers spread across the internet: Timbuktu’s manuscripts were in peril. On January 28, the French army moved to recapture Timbuktu amidst rumors that a retreating militia, perhaps the Salafist group Ansar Deine, had torched the Ahmad Baba Library. Later reports revealed that Ansar Deine had protected the Ahmad Baba Library, that the majority of manuscripts had been kept safe by African curators and local citizens, and that rumors of fire were stoked by a Sky News reporter embedded with the French army and confirmed by Hallè Ousmane, Timbuktu’s mayor, exiled 800 km away in Bamako. As images of scorched manuscripts on the tiled floors of the Ahmad Baba library began circulating, medievalists voiced a visceral outrage: to us, more than anyone, the destruction of books is an unfathomable act of barbarism. When fighting in Aleppo set the medieval souks aflame, threatened the Crac des Chevaliers, and endangered Palmyra and Old Damascus, and imperiled the manuscripts of Timbuktu, my friends and colleagues turned to Facebook and blogs to lament that they could never understand how anyone could so callously destroy their own cultural heritage. As if destroying manuscripts marked humans as dangerously different, or subhuman. As if our own armies had not destroyed vast collections of unique manuscript in Hamburg, Dresden, Baghdad, Mosul, Sarajevo, and elsewhere. As if we had forgotten how poor planning, corruption, war, and disaffected citizens had doomed  many of “our” libraries—the 2009 collapse in Cologne, the 1870 bombardment and fire which destroyed Strasbourg’s library and museum, the wholesale destruction and appropriation of books across Europe between 1914 and 1945, the floods which have permanently closed 12 libraries in Louisiana, damaged collections in Iowa, and endangered archives across the Eastern Seaboard. Arson has destroyed more books in the US and UK than in Africa: in 1986, an arsonist destroyed over 400,000 books and manuscripts in the Los Angeles County Library, and the sole surviving copy of the Beowulf manuscript, (BL Cotton Vitellius A. xv.) was damaged by fire in 1731; other unique manuscript copies,including the Life of Alfred, did not survive. Last year, a disgruntled alumnus vandalized and attempted to burn down our main research library last year sprinklers saved the building but water and smoke damaged many books and some of the Missouri State Historical Society’s collection.  Though we now find it quaint and amusing, the Bodleian’s famous oath recognizes the threat fire poses to libraries.

Western-educated medievalists are complicit in the ongoing destruction to medieval culture in Africa and the Near East, just as we passively allow the defunding and desecration of medieval archives and medieval studies programs in Europe and the Americas. There can be no apology for criminal actions under the guise of war, no excuses for the weak corrupt governments which cling to power exploiting the citizens of Africa and the Near East. But, as a medievalist who works with German manuscripts, and an Arab-American who follows the news from the Middle East closely, I must point out that many of the worst losses of medieval books and buildings have occurred in Western Europe. As we sit in our offices accusing them of barbarism, many Arabs and Muslims are mobilizing to protect medieval artifacts and memorializing ongoing tragedies through medieval poetry. The destruction of books, by fire or war, should not be an incomprehensible “act of barbarism” to medievalists, who habitually nuance the “barbaric” and often find our own western manuscripts have been lost to war or fire. My own research is hampered by the losses at libraries in Lübeck, Wroclaw, Dresden, and Strasbourg. Only a small portion of the 100 boxes of medieval manuscripts relocated by the Wroclaw City Library in 1943 under threat of bombardment have been recovered; those lost to fire will never resurface. I expect simplistic narrative of savage Muslim destroying priceless antiquities in incomprehensible acts of barbarism from reporters compiling stories from wire reports. Medievalists, many of whom are widely read in postcolonial theory, and invested in recovering evidence of marginal peoples, should know better.