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.  

Challenging Crisis Discourses

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the genre of "crisis discourse" in relation to scribal, print, and digital media in both past and contemporary cultures. Many readers familiar with the early modern emergence of print will doubtless be familiar with similar laments and discourses in that period. (Of course, there is also the problem of teleological accounts that praise printing, another related issue.) Since contemporary rhetoric about the crisis of books in the face of digital media is so prevalent, there is no need to enumerate the instances--but lamentations abound. In terms of contemporary relationships between various media, this is obviously a hot topic, not only among academics (especially in digital humanities) but also in wider popular culture.

Much of my thinking on this issue was sparked a few weeks ago, when I read Ted Striphas's book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia UP, 2009) [read my review here]. Just a few days ago, I encountered further thoughts in Elaine Treharne's excellent blog post on "Restrictive 'Humanities'." The former goes a long way to challenge the rhetoric of catastrophe by thinking instead about the various modes of intermediation in our culture. The latter ranges across several important questions pertaining to digital humanities, at one point arguing that "the [early modern] dawn of print did not displace, and still has not displaced, the manuscript; indeed, the digital age itself has not done so, and, I venture, will never do so." Both scholars raise important points for considering the ongoing developments of text technologies, and both convincingly challenge assumptions that underly the misunderstanding that newer technologies eclipse previous technologies.

My own interest in these issues is especially connected to some recent work I've undertaken in terms of a handwritten prayer in an early modern book. While browsing through Early English Books Online a few months ago, I discovered that the Folger Shakespeare Library holds a copy of the first printed edition of A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instruction of a Christen Woman (STC 24856.5), translated by Richard Hyrde from Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae Christianae, which contains a handwritten note including a prayer by a reader with the date 1637 (on page B4v; click to view, though only with institutional access). After some digging, I discovered that it has gone fairly unnoticed in scholarship. So I've undertaken a study of the prayer, which turns out to be an appropriation of biblical texts, mainly from Psalm 89 (90) [here we enter problems of medieval & early modern numbering of the Psalms].

Along with thinking about the handwritten note as a cultural artifact on its own, I also want to use it to consider relationships between scribal, print, and digital media--and how this intermediation matters to scholarship. As a model of intermediation, the associations of scribal and print practices in the handwritten note should be understood as dynamic rather than linear, since scribal and print practices intermingled in the early modern period, just as they continue to intermingle in our present culture. In a parallel fashion, the emergence of digital media does not suppress scribal and print forms but intensifies possibilities for intermedial relationships. Thus, the prayer survives through continued intermediation: for twenty-first-century readers, the most accessible means of reading this prayer, through EEBO, further augments the relationships of early modern media with a digital media interface. It is also important to note that even EEBO is a complicated instance of intermediation: this archive does not provide digital photographic reproductions of printed books but representations of the earlier technology of microfilm. Furthermore, these interconnected representations are, in turn, mediated through a web interface controlled by a gateway with a pay wall.

There's a lot here to think about, and I'm in the early stages of working out my thoughts on the issue. While doing so, I've also been wondering where other scholarship exists that similarly challenges crisis discourses and proposes new ways of thinking about shifts in text technologies. Certainly various pursuits in digital humanities contribute here, whether inherently or more explicitly (I've encountered some, but welcome suggestions). It is my hope that this little-known piece of early modern biblical appropriation will lead me to further considerations about the intermediation at work in everyday culture and intersections with how scholarship deals with it.

Remixing in Teaching

As many of us settle back into another semester, I thought I would share some of my thoughts about one aspect of my own work this semester. I am especially excited to be back to teaching this semester--I've been working as an administrative assistant for the past three semesters--and am having a great time planning and teaching my class so far. Particularly interesting for me is that I'm teaching a class--a combination of emphases on literature and composition for first-year honors students--that is part of a collaborative effort between myself, another graduate student, and my advisor: we have crafted a collective, shared syllabus (content and scheduling), and each of us will teach our own independent class based on it, collaborating as we go.

The topic we chose is "The Bible and Some Medieval and Renaissance Adaptations." Here is the general course description that we wrote:

We will examine major biblical traditions set alongside adaptations in medieval and renaissance English literature. Adaptation will be a major lens with which to understand the Bible and its importance in Western culture. Pairings will include Judith with the Old English Judith, Genesis with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Beowulf, apocalypses with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and the Psalms with Cædmon’s Hymn and early modern religious poetry.

So we've decided to focus on the overall influence of the Bible, using the lens of adaptation to understand how this happens across a spectrum of early English literature, and even more generally across culture even up to the present.

For the first few classes, we want to establish the lens of adaptation, so we are reading the introduction and first two chapters of Julie Sanders's Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006; repr. 2010), a great introduction to the subject. This is, of course, a topic that I'm very excited about and interested in, and I'm having a great time working with it so far.

In preparing for the next class, I am also planning to bring in some other ways of thinking about cultural adaptation. One of the greatest resources that I've been wanting to incorporate into my teaching for a while is Kirby Ferguson's Everything Is a Remix, a four-part online video documentary about the many ways that our own culture is filled with adaptations. Starting off next class, I plan to show the first two parts (about 20 minutes total run-time) to jump-start our conversation. From there, we will talk about the Bible as an adaptation in itself, the long history of adaptation in Western literature, and onward to the rest of the semester.

Needless to say, I am very much enjoying being back to teaching.

Letters to Past Selves

Yesterday, a former student of mine shared with me a short piece she wrote about her grandparents. Her grandfather has recently passed, and in the piece she reflects on loss and memory, all prompted by a photo. It got me thinking about how objects, physical and digital, hold memories. So, I wanted to share something I wrote about books and my grandfather.

I wrote this while a graduate student, and a few of the sentences and some of the academicese make me cringe, but I offer it below with minimal editing.

_______________

Letters to Past Selves

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.”
–Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

“the better part of our memories exists outside us”   

–Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

           

In my office, I am surrounded by books. Shelves and shelves of books. Each book sitting on my shelf carries the memory of former selves and of earlier times.  A set of books in my collection that is particularly loaded with memories for me includes those signed by another person, either the author or a previous owner.

The most recent book that has been signed is Snow by Orhan Pamuk.  I bought it right before departing on a cruise to the Caribbean with my wife’s family.  I must admit that my decision making process for selecting this did rest greatly on the juxtaposition of Pamuk’s snowy Kars with the sunny Caribbean.  And so now, whenever I consider this book, I experience a Wordsworth-like “spot of time”—a memory of long days unfolding upon the deck of a ship, in the open air, as I would occasionally glance away from my book to contemplate the blue-green clarity of the water.  But when this book found its way into the hands of its author, it gained a new temporality.  I had the great fortune of meeting Pamuk, and as one often does in such a situation, I asked him to sign his book.  Beneath his signature he placed the date, inscribing both himself and that moment upon my book.  His signature functions as a trace, and as such, gives voice to heterogeneous temporalities.  It is a mark of the past, recalling a particular moment in time.  And yet, it is present to me.  I can run my fingers over the ink.  Paul Ricoeur would call this the inscription of lived time upon calendar time. 

The twin to this book is my signed copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.  Both books are by international authors, and both writers are concerned with the meeting of East and West.  But an important difference between them is that Rushdie signed my copy of his book in my absence.  While I sat in Graham Chapel at Washington University, listening to Rushdie talk about his work and his life, my grandfather was in the hospital gravely ill.  The time of the intellectual, marked by books and lectures, was interrupted by the time of loss, and ultimately, of mourning.  When Rushdie was signing my book at the behest of a friend the next day, I was on the road, traveling home to attend the funeral of my grandfather.  Having recently read Jacques Derrida’s writings on the deaths of friends, collected in a volume called The Work of Mourning, I wish that I had made a copy of my eulogy rather than delivering it from memory.  I cannot now recall much about it.

The memory of my grandfather, linked forever with the signing of Rushdie’s book, leads me to make a connection between one signed book and another, between The Satanic Verses and a book that my grandfather owned.  On the fourth of July in 1997—it was the summer before my Junior year of college—my grandfather loaned me a book by John B. Noss titled Man’s Religions.  I can only dimly remember the conversation that led to his loaning me the book.  In a moment of humor appropriate to my grandfather, he signed his name, date, and address (apparently to remind me where he lived), along with a note that it was being lent to me, on the inside cover.  His inscription was a teasing reminder that I had occasionally “forgotten” to return books to him.  I never did return it to him, and now, I consider it part of my collection.  Although it is a good book on comparative religions, I keep it mostly for the inscription left by my grandfather.  But the book may conceal further temporalities and stories.  Why did my grandfather buy the book?  Originally published in 1949, this particular copy is the third edition of 1957, when he would have been in his late twenties.  Years later, in the 1980’s, he privately had his bar mitzvah, which he should have had decades before.  There is a story there that is not available to me, and perhaps this book plays a part, but I cannot ask him now.

Memories of my grandfather conjure a third book, bringing me further back in time.  When I was very young, I went to visit him in the hospital—an option not open to me when he passed way.  He was recuperating from bypass surgery, and during that time my ever-garrulous grandfather had gotten to know a fellow patient.  As grandparents often do, he told her about me at great length.  And for some reason, she felt compelled to give me a gift during one of my visits, and this gift was the first novel that I remember owning.  It was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.  Here I experience a double loss.  Not only is this book missing, but also my memory of receiving it lies at the vanishing point of recollection.  Only with great effort can I recall anything more than the fact that this event happened.  With some sadness, I do remember that I did not read The Hobbit until many years later.  At that time, I was not much of a reader.  My career as a reader did, however, begin with the genre which Tolkien inspired—fantasy.  And though I rarely read fantasy fiction now, the memory of this book still looms as a curious happenstance because I am currently training to be a medievalist, Tolkien’s own academic field.   

My memories link back along the chain of the signature, and I think about another pair of signed books that I own, by two fantasy authors: Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan.  These books recall the larger series of books that the authors wrote many years ago.  Looking at them now, I am arrested by a certain set of memories. They are almost like Proust’s madeleine, overwhelming me with memories, sensations, smells.  They bring me to a period of my life when reading acted as a life preserver in the face of one of time’s truths: illness.  As an adolescent, I spent a significant amount of time in the hospital.  During my stays, I spent all of my free time reading, particularly the fantasy novels of Terry Brooks.  (I cannot think of one of his books now with out smelling the singular odor of the hospital—disinfectant.)  I am also reminded of Ricoeur’s reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in volume 2 of Time and Narrative, where monumental time (manifested as official time, or clock time) intersected with the private times of the characters Clarissa and Septimus.  My stay in the hospital was marked by a similar dual apprehension of time.  Hospital time is regular, and largely impersonal.  Have your vitals checked at this time; receive your breathing treatment at this time; and take your medication at another.  The days would roll on, marked by the periodic and regular reminder of mortality and sickness.  The rest of the time, however, was one long unfolding of solitude.  During that private time, reading these fantasy books gave me a sense of “transport” in the way that Longinus defined it.  My love of books, which has ultimately led me to seek a doctorate, is anchored in that experience.      

While these books harbor memories of many people and places, my collection also testifies to a Proustian succession of different selves.  The person that bought and experienced them is, to varying degrees, a stranger to me now.  And even though I have only recently developed a vocabulary for discussing time, all of those previous selves have always been keenly aware of both its passing and the problems created in its wake.  But in trying to apprehend my books under the aegis of time I must echo a sentiment of Walter Benjamin’s in “Unpacking My Library,” and acknowledge that “[t]his or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions.”   

Review of Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print

Over the break between semesters, I've been tackling some reading that doesn't concern my dissertation or research directly--and it's been a great break while still feeding my mind. I was especially happy to stumble across a free digital version of a book by Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia UP, 2009). The digital version may be found on Striphas's website, since he's offering it through a Creative Commons-licensed pdf through a "pay with a tweet" system (props to him for doing this).

So I want to offer my review of the book here (disclosure: I've also posted this review on Goodreads, and plan to post it on Amazon.com, too). Though it's not directly related to the medieval period, I do see a lot of implications here for how we think of book history; and I think that there is a lot here that intersects with how we think about scholarship.


In The Late Age of Print, Ted Striphas sets his main approach as a nuanced examination of American book culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, he challenges crisis discourses and laments for the loss of books. Striphas presents a well written, accessible, anecdotal, and effective critique of ideologies behind consumption, control, and transformations in American book culture.

Much of this study relies on the cultural history that Striphas establishes from the outset, emphasizing "the history and conditions by which books have become ubiquitous and mundane social artifacts in and of our own time" (4). By charting book culture from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first,  Striphas lays out "a changed and changing mode of production; new technological products and processes; shifts in law and jurisprudence; the proliferation of culture and the rise of cultural politics; and a host of sociological transformations, among many other factors" (5). He does so by focusing on various aspects of American consumerism, the book industry, legal history, media relationships, all circulating around attitudes about the value of books in the everyday. With these topics as the mainstay themes of the book, Striphas takes up the topics of American bibliophilia, digital media, big-box bookstores (especially Barnes and Noble), online marketing (especially Amazon.com), Oprah's Book Club, and Harry Potter--all centerpieces of his cultural examinations.

Ultimately, he demonstrates, through several case studies, "how printed books and electronic media can complement one another" through a type of "synergy" in culture (188). Yet he does not insist on ignoring the transformations that have taken place and will continue to occur. He equally insists that consumers must be aware of the ways in which control--by the industry, marketers, publishers, as well as consumers and various aspects of popular culture--underpin the most important facets of book culture. Indeed, the polemical features of Striphas's book emphasize the need for continual reconsideration of these issues to best understand the various complexities of intermedial relationships. This is particularly the case for his approach to intellectual rights laws in a global economy and with emergent digital concerns. All of this is offered with well-balanced and salient critiques of the past, the present, and the future.

As an extension of my review, I also find my own access and approach to this book intriguing for its implications about the type of "synergy" that can arise from print and electronic media. The fact that I accessed the book through a Creative Commons-licensed pdf, which Striphas offers essentially free (no need to go through the Columbia UP publisher; nor any need to mediate my reading through some sort of book-seller, in a store or online), raises a whole host of questions related to his discussions of control and consumption--I'm sure much could be said about this. I downloaded the digital version that Striphas offered on his site three years after the book's initial print release (2009); I synced it in my DropBox folder; I read the whole of it on my iPad, digitally annotating as I read. I may even buy a print copy now--but I will certainly keep the digital copy with all of my first-reading notes.