DH 2010, day four
For me, the final day was the important one, with both the geography and history sessions taking place. The former saw three excellent presentations, from the University of North Carolina, Ian Gregory and the Hestia project. But the big news is that the UNC have built a locally-deployable, open source map server, called Main Street Carolina and available sometime this summer. There’s not much information available, but it is used for many of their projects including Going To The Show, and there’s a blurb and blogpost online. I have seriously high hopes for this, as a way of easily putting maps on the web without having to go down the Google route.
The highlight of the Professional Reflection strand was Claire Ross‘ Pointless Babble or Enabled Backchannel, a witty and zippy analysis of twitter usage during three Digital Humanities conferences in 2009. Far more than 140 characters, without any excess and plenty of time for questions.
The History strand saw two very good presentations. And one that had me gawping in disbelief. Roorda’s Letters, Ideas and Information Technology, on visualizing seventeenth century correspondence, and Sainte’s Reading Darwin Between The Lines, analysing Darwin’s rare use of the term ‘evolution’, were very fine. But Blaney’s Developing a Collaborative Online Environment for History – The Experience of British History Online was a trip into the digital netherworld.
What British History Online wanted to do was crowdsource the Calendars of State Papers, those abstracts of government paperwork compiled in Victorian Times and now showing their age. So what do they do? Raise obstacles to participation. First, the CSP are behind a paywall, and as far as I can tell, there are no institutional subscriptions available. So the academics they hoped would annotate the documents had to pay for the honour. Then, to minimise contributions either malicious or erroneous, they deliberately put in obstacles and constraints to make annotation difficult. *rollseyes* Do they have any idea what crowdsourcing is?
Contributions were, unsurprisingly, sparse.
One of the audience asked about re-use. We were informed that the XML was locked up, the documents copyrighted (even though much of the material on BHO has long since passed into the public domain), but generously, we can print off as many copies as we wish. This was the only time I heard such sentiments expressed at DH2010; everyone else understood the importance of openness, of re-use, of contributing corrections and improvements, of sharing. It’s called community. And if you look at the graphic below, you’ll see it’s one of the prominent words (used 25 times) in the closing address from Melissa Terras, Present, Not Voting.
- Wordle of Melissa Terras’ speech at DH2010
(Click to view full size)
‘Transcribe’ and ‘Bentham’ also feature as this is a crowdsourcing project Terras is involved in. As she says:
one of the things we want to do with Transcribe Bentham is to provide access to the resulting XML files so that others can reuse the information (via web-services, etc). The hosting and transcription environment we are developing will be open source, so that others can use it. And this sea change, from working in small groups, to really reaching out to users is something we have to embrace, and learn to work with.
The prospect of easily setting up such collaborations is mouthwatering. Access, re-use, reaching out, yes yes yes. Sharing is fundamental to what we do, and we are stronger when we share. And right now the Digital Humanities community – like everyone else – faces terrible pressure, from government and university management, and needs to get stuck in:
We need people who are not just prepared to whine but prepared to roll up their sleeves and do things to improve our associations, our community, and our presence in academia.
Her whole speech was barnstorming, critical but not despondent, electrifying the audience, and the highlight of a conference that, for all the heat and rushing around and getting up way too early, truly inspired me.
London Lives, Plebian Lives
A few weeks ago I went to a presentation of the London Lives project, held by the Long 18th Century seminar at the IHR. This ambitious undertaking aims to integrate the records of some of London’s major organizations – among them, the Old Bailey, Bridewell, St Thomas’ hospital – into a website that allows researchers to follow the lives of the ‘lower orders’ in their interactions with the legal, charitable and medical institutions of early modern London.
This is a phenomenal amount of data: over 3 million names, 1,300 to 1,600 separate manuscripts, around a quarter of a million pages, some 40 million words in all. Which means it needs a decent interface and facilities, or else one will just be swamped by raw, muddy data. Judging by the demonstration given by Sharon Howard, it looks like it has been designed with researchers in mind, with the ability to cross reference records and link entries together in sets.
Two examples of using the site were given. Tim Hitchcock deftly restored the reputation of the much-maligned nurse Hannah Poole, falsely accused of being uncaring and negligent; Bob Shoemaker showed a perhaps surprising distance between the criminal world and the poor, members of one rarely showing up in the records of the other.
Digital projects have to have a research question, and the one behind London Lives is: how did the poor and the plebian relate to the welfare authorities in early modern London? There were a number of questions raised as to which term to use – the project was originally entitled ‘Plebian Lives and the Making of Modern London’, which was dropped because of the difficulties of defining class in this era (not to mention the presence in the records of numerous higher class individuals, such as administrators). Hence the new title ‘London Lives’, both more specific in location and more general in scope.
There is one aspect to this question that concerns me: it frames the poor in terms of their institutional existence. Of course, there are few records of the poor that come ‘from below’, from their own mouths, especially when illiteracy is the norm. And of course, these institutional sources offer much rich material for understanding the lives of the lower classes, not necessarily as passive as one might presume. But there was much more to their lives than interactions with the authorities, and quite possibly a considerable degree of social autonomy as well.
Uncovering this independent existence is central to my Alsatia project, and devilishly difficult to do.
The London Lives Project isn’t live yet; it should be opening this May, but in the meantime there’s a blog for news and information about the forthcoming unconference in July.
