The first meeting of our class, Digitizing the Victorians, two Tuesdays ago, left me and some of my colleagues a bit in the dark. I do not mean to say that we were disappointed, but only say this because the topic for discussion was “Defining the Digital Humanities,” and we left with no real consensus as to what the digital humanities was. We realized that the term is in the state of praxis, and that the definition(s) are not necessarily outlined in a specific way, but are brought out in the course of engaging in the field of the digital humanities. This leads me to believe that this emerging field, which is at the forefront of our academic field and which has the potential to generate a great deal of money and “buzz” for the institutions that embrace it—or just note its existence—can be defined much like Associate Justice Potter Stewart’s approach to pornography: I can’t define what it is, “But I know it when I see it (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964).
So, for now, I will operate under the assumption that I will know the digital humanities when I see it.
This outlook was actually quite freeing. When next the class met, I was less concerned with defining the field and more concerned with simply jumping in and interacting with a digital project or five. We read a few articles and looked into a few websites, to see how they worked. As far as the articles were concerned, some were EXTREMELY helpful and others were a mire of technical jargon and presuppositions which made me feel, once again, that I was not equipped to be part of the cutting edge. One of my colleagues is a Medievalist—I’m an 18th Century British scholar—and we both noted, during discussion that the technology of today is akin to the technological advances of Gutenberg’s moveable type. Nothing has changed in the last 500+ years, but everything has. Our resistance, or shall I say MY resistance, comes from the same place as the resistance to previous historical technological “leaps forward”. John Walsh addresses this history briefly at the outset of his article, “Multimedia and Multitasking: A Survey of Digital Resources for Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies” (http://tiny.cc/ivp9iw). I was again comforted by the fact that I was a) not alone in my feelings; and b) part of a historically ongoing practice in the field of literature and humanities—constant upgrades and changes are what makes for a richer, more engaging field. What Walsh did, also, was provide me with a list of digital projects that are in existence now as a guide to what the field can do and is doing for the works of Victorian thinkers and writers. Andrew Stauffer performs a very similar task in his review on NINES, providing an annotated bibliography of projects and resources online that show what the digital humanities is capable of doing (http://www.nines.org/exhibits/VLC_review)
With much of my apprehension gone, I would like to provide a brief anecdote about my recent foray into the digital humanities, which is influenced a bit by Howard Besser’s article on digital libraries (http://tiny.cc/x5r9iw). I am a graduate assistant for a professor here at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and we are starting out on a new digital project to transcribe a nearly two hundred year old field journal. We are using a new program, online based, to read the digital images of the artifact and to aid in the transcription process. I have been tasked with figuring out how the program works. I was given a snapshot of its processes during a meeting at the school’s Digital Humanities Center, and thought, “OK, this should be fun!” Of course, the snap shot was just that—a snap shot; and the hardware being used wasn’t mine, but belonged to the DHC. I went home and thought that I could do this.
I logged onto the site and there was an immediate issue—my web browser did not support the program. I needed to download another browser. I tried and I tried, but my hardware and the new soft ware were not jibing. An hour and a half later I got Google Chrome running installed and running on my laptop and I reentered the site and the program was running beautifully. This experience is similar to the issues that faced early online libraries and digital collections ten or fifteen years ago, where there was a lack of what Besser called interoperability. My tools did not sync-up with the online tools, so an immediate switch to another system was needed, much to my aggravation. But moving on.
I started to work with the program, poking around to see how it worked, and I guess I was missing something. I was trying to define terms, figure out what each application was for and what I did when X was clicked, or Y was moved. I was experiencing a disconnect, however, because there was no real place within the program that would explicate what the different attributes meant or were used for. I continued to play around with the tools, trying to establish image boxes around lines of text on the image, preparing to transcribe them, but every box I rendered caught only a portion of the text as the original text (handwritten) slopped up and the lines were very close to one another. The program was only reading some, maybe a third, of the lines I was creating, and was ordering them in what I could only understand as randomly. I tried and tried to correct this, and finally, after about an hour of drawing and redrawing lines, said, “Forget it!” and was reduced to working within the program’s boundaries. I resigned myself to using the lines it could read and attempted to start transcribing.
Transcribing in XML is something that I am a little more familiar with, using the oXygen Program, so I thought that this process would be similar. How wrong I was. The transcription box in the online program was just that, a box that corresponded to one of the lines I attempted to plot. The first line, according to the program was not the first line of the text image which was the first line that I rendered. Odd, I thought, but let’s just see how this works. Well, it didn’t. I tried to encode, but I needed to encode manually, which is no great issue, though there are tabs in the transcription box that are supposed to be “place savers” for frequently used tags. I attempted to use these tabs to no avail. There was nothing that told me how to manipulate the tabs, nothing to point me in the direction of proper use. Even just playing with them produced nothing that could be accurately called “useful”. The tabs, then, remained adornments to the site as far as I was concerned as opposed to tools for my use.
I transcribed 5 lines, out of order according to the program’s reading of my plotted line boxes, and tried to preview what the encoded text would look like, and it was a disaster. Nothing made sense, but I plodded on and tried to save the work, just to see how saving worked. Again, nothing was at all user friendly. I had no idea as to how I could save, where it was saving to, what it was going to be called, and worse yet, how I was going to find it when next I started to work. The program was, in my opinion, LESS THAN user friendly. Besser speaks of interoperability, but does not really address the end user, that is, someone like me who would use the digital product for work or research. I have found that working in the Digital Humanities requires that the product—the published project put online for “use”—should keep a keen eye to user operability. Our class discussion noted this lack of attention to the user in the texts that we read for class, ostensibly to aid in our understanding of the field and its productions. We thought it odd that the implied user never really came up in the literature. As I found out, in my own encounter with digital tools for scholarly, humanistic work, transparency and clarity are deeply needed.
I have a meeting today with my professor/boss. I will tell him about my experiences, and together I hope that we can either figure out this program, or work together to realize a different strategy to moving forward with the project. We need something that is user-friendly, interoperable, and productively serves the project at hand.
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