Unsworth

Unsworth, John. "Second-Generation Digital Resources in the Humanities"
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/DRH2000.html

In this keynote address, Unsworth briefly defines and characterizes second generation digital resources. They are those resources which "are born digital" (complex collections including commentary, annotations, apparati, etc...) and make use of first generation digital-resouces (digitizations of physical artifacts), thus mirroring to an extent the traditional academic distinction between primary and secondary sources. The flourishing of such projects (like the online archives we've been looking at) highlights several changes in the artstic, scholarly, and editorial communities, but, more importantly, it consequently calls for several others: publishers will "have to start thinking more like libraries", libraries are faced with need of incorporating this new kind of publications into their collections, and authors (who will suddenly become a nuisance not only for publishers, but also for libraries!) need to find ways to receive the just credit for their digital work while engaging in "ten-year projects in a medium that seems to change every ten minutes", at the same time dealing with the necessity of an impersonal, as-objective-as-possible language (and "the death of ambiguity is also the death of nuance, metaphor, and poetry"...). Some of the advice that Unsworth offers to the parties involved is based precisely on these parties making an effort to cooperate with one another: "We need to do some end-to-end projects that involve authors, publishers, and libraries in a coordinated (and documented) joint effort [...] [and] Failing that, we need to do more bilateral projects that involve, say, libraries and scholars or scholars and publishers". Unsworth's ideas surely sound good on paper; translating them into reality in such a $$$-driven society will surely result a much grimmer picture. Bot more importantly, is there not a hint of hypocrisy in Unsworth's "brotherly love"-infused message? As an ignoramus in the field, I must abide by what I've been hearing in this class, but if it is indeed true that there is a competitiveness, which borders on spite and bitterness, between different institutions behind some of the most important digital editing projects (say, the Virginia people and the UNC people), how can we expect a collegial cooperation between authors, libraries, and big-buck publishers when there isn't even such a relationship between authors and authors?

Smith

Smith, Catherine. "Hypertextual Thinking." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning With Technology

Smith's article begins begins with a philosophical evaluation of hypertext as it exists today and moves on to propose a "different vision of hypertext". She summarizes some key concepts from the works of contemporary philosphers Susanne Langer and Walter Kintsch, detecting in both a shared notion of the human mind: "thought is a dynamic system of involvements" (275), and making this postulate into the starting point for her theorization of new models of hypertext, which she hopes to see profilerate in a near future. Smith envisions a "conceptually enriched" type of hypertext that allows for "thick cognition (276). [Clearly, some of the ideas she so convolutely argues for in this piece, published in 1994, are taken for granted today by even the most casual internet users: her hope that "a user could presented with theme links, not only structure or keyword links", and that "users could teach the system what they want to know", has been granted even by the dreaded Wikipedia]. As for the implementation of hypertext in pedagogy and didactics, Smith's main contention is that in order to produce a wave of hypertextually-thinking and hypertext-using scholars, capable of fruitfully stretching the intellectual horizons, a thorough heuristic will be needed. I do think that here she touches on an issue that is still very real today, as I find that my colleagues and my students (as well as myself...), part of a generation with unlimited access to the hypertextual universe of the WWW, are for the most part ignorant about how to make productive use of what the web has to offer. In my experience as a grad student, prof. say "never quote wikipedia!", "beware of google!", or "don't use online translators!", but it's a plain fact that everyone does make a massive use of internet resources (professors included), yet still very rarely (seminars like ours being the rare exception) are students provided with structured advice or a consistent set of guidelines on how to make good use of hypertextual and web resources.

meta-resource page

Your weekend just keeps getting better! After the Tarheels march to the Final Four, this: my meta-resource page on the illustrations of the Divine Comedy, while still a work-in-progress, is now triumphantly online. Visit it at

http://divinecomedyillustrations.weebly.com/

See you on tuesday.

from theory to practice

Just a note to inform y'all that for the first time I have concretely applied the knowledge acquired in this class to my own academic work (yay!). Last week, I wrote a paper about a poem by Aldo Palazzeschi, titled "La Passeggiata". I have liked this work for quite a while, and was glad to be able to finally discuss it thoroughly. When I picked up a copy of the book it was originally published in (the Futurist collection "L'Incendiario", published in 19o9 by Marinetti himself), I noticed some diffrences with the version I was accustomed to accessing online (which, I would later find out, reproduces the one in Palazzeschi's complete poems, published in the early 90s). This led me to a whole research of the poem's textual history in print, and I discovered that there are three different versions, the one from 1909, one from another collection published in 1930 (which introduces the major variations), and another from the early 70s, shortly before the author's death (which is the one reprinted in the complete works). I pondered the differences carefully, weighing them against the author's biography and the historical situations at the time of publishing (the first version was published at the hight of Futurist fervor, and when Palazzeschi himself was an official member of the movement, the second during Fascism, once the author had long renounced Futurism), and I came up (I hope) with some interesting conclusions. I also feel that the extra time and effort I spent doing my own "textual criticism" helped me gain a more thorough understanding of the poem altogether, and led me to some observations, not strictly related to textual scholarship, which I would not have otherwise arrived to. The point is, whereas in the past I would have just pulled up whatever version of the work and went from there, I think that thanks to my exposure to the ideas and concepts we've been exploring, I wrote a much more informed, and ultimately better paper.

McCarty

Willard McCarty's article covers the main aspects of humanities computing's history, its history and the major questions intrinsic to the (non)discipline (see Orlandi), attempting to make sense of "how our insight is sharpened and imaginations empowered to gain genuinely "new liberties of action" from computing, and how these liberties may be used in refurbishing the humanities for an electronic age". he begins by tracingthe historical developments in the field, from Father Busa tomistic project to the internet and the implementation of computing in the classrooms. He then moves on to discussing the different branches in the field. These branches are the algorythmic (geared to "the development of software for the analysis of source materials"), the metalinguistic (focused on devising "computationally rigorous metalanguages by which computationally elusive entities may be tagged and so reliably processed"), and the representational ("arranging, formatting or otherwise transforming the appearance of data"). McCarty then outlines the fundamental epistemological question surrounding humanities computing: how to approach past works/artifacts and "non-computational things of the present"? How should humanities computing relate with other academic cultures? and how we deal with need, to use McGann's words, of "imagining what we don't know"?

In his conclusion, McCarty states that we should not attempt to answer the question of what humanities computing is, but rather explore it and refine our understanding of it. Such a proposition, like many we've come across this semester, reveal the curious dynamics of a field that is still somewhat in an embryonic phase, but nevertheless attempts to develop firm theories about itself. McGann and his constantly coming up with new theories (as the Prof. relates), repeatedly contradicting himself in the process, is perhaps the best exemplification of this phenomenon.

Questions

Jones, Paul. Open(source)ing the Doors for Contributor-run Digital Libraries

Regarding Jones' argument that "we can have contributor-run libraries", I would be interested to hear the library science people's opinion. Is there an elitist sentiment among today's librarians, and a fear of becoming "no longer needed" that triggers an attitude of defensiveness towards approaches such as those proposed by Jones?

Is Jones' idea of a contributor-run library as "noisy, vibrant" incompatible with the (Platonic?) idea itself of library?

Can we really speak, as Jones does, of "intellectual discourse" being fostered by a large mass of contributions by people whose credentials are never truly known? Is there not risk of creating an environment that suffers from "wiki-itis"?

Cricket, anyone?

James Knight. The Truth is Out There--Honestly.

I cherished this brief piece, if only for the actual websites it lists. I have long been a user of wordreference.com, for its Italian-English and English-Italian dictionaries. Until a few years ago, I would have never thought of using the latter, but I've reached a point that every time I write a paper at least one word comes to mind in the other language, and this site (good but not great) has helped considerably. I also think the online English dictionary at dictionary.reference.com is excellent, providing for each word entries from several different major dictionaries as well as quick links to its also excellent thesaurus page with synonyms and antonyms. I have also briefly dabbled with and with 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, very interesting. One of my favorites, however, remains www.etimo.it, the complete (documentary) edition of Ottorino Pianigiani's classic Italian etymological dictionary, still the standard of excellence in my home country, and (for English) www.etymonline.com (highly recommended!).


(As I write this entry, I become aware of another compuer-related "mutation" in the standard process of writing: the present-day habit, be it fruitful or not, of writing while online. I can't speak for others, but I have become accustomed to doing most of my writing (whether for school or otherwise) with the internet running, one click away, teasing me from a minimized window at the bottom left of my screen. I routinely consult it, for specific refrerence (dictionaries, unc libarary page, even the dreaded wikipedia), curiosity (google the name of one the authors I'm reading, for example) loose inspiration (read a 13th century sonnet while I'm writing about 1910s avant-gardes, just to get the music back in my fingers...), or mere escape (espn.com). The great and powerful Time Warner high-speed, however, has just betrayed me (I immediately ran to the phone, called, and was informed of an outage in my area), and to an extent, I feel left in the dark, mutilated, paralized....)