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.
DH 2010, day three
Not such an early start, so I missed Joshua Sternfeld’s talk on Digital Historiography. Annoying, but a sign of a good conference is that there’s too much of interest rather than too little.
For me, the important presentation in the Teaching/Managing strand was Nowviskie and Porter’s “The Graceful Degradation Survey: Managing Digital Humanities Projects Through Times of Transition and Decline.” The afterlife of digital projects – and websites in general – is not only very important, but quite neglected, seemingly being done on an ad-hoc, voluntary basis. It was more to do with project management, organization and funding; I had hoped to hear something about technical solutions. It did suggest that there is a move to creating smaller, more preservable packets of information: a granular approach insuring against complete meltdown.
Another suggestion was that Digihum projects are increasingly being operated outside the academy. There’s a subterranean current here at DH2010 of extra-academic projects, ‘fragile vessels’ (as mentioned yesterday), small unfunded projects. One of those – a graduate project now continuing independently – is contextus, which featured in the Scanning Between the Lines: The Search for the Semantic Story panel in the afternoon. Aside from being a very clear and useful introduction to RDFa (foaf etc), and being sprinkled with Doctor Who references, the speakers showed the great potential of the ‘semantic web’, about which I’d previously been a bit doubtful.
Many of the posters displayed, as on day two, were also for small, semi-independent or semi-official projects, using whatever tools are available free (in the financial sense). Somehow, this aspect of the Digital Humanities isn’t getting the full recognition it deserves. The lack of money shouldn’t mean abandoning a good or interesting idea, nor should it be considered a denial of permission to do what we want to do. It’s an obstacle, yes, but not insurmountable. Ways of operating on a shoestring need to be shared. And there is the advantage that without funds, one isn’t beholden to funders.
DH 2010, day one
For the next few days I’m a student assistant at Digital Humanities 2010, doing a bit of everything, from giving directions to waving microphones under people’s noses
The first day of the conference proper (there’s been many associated events in the last few days) was mainly dealing with organization, with only a few events. I missed the second day of THATCamp London, twitter proving more frustrating than informative as it just made me want to be there more than ever, but managed to catch Dan Cohen afterwards for my first interview.
The only event I attended, was the launch of the CHARM (Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music) sound files. These are digitisations of out-of-copyright, lesser known, 20s and 30s 78 rpm records, and are freely downloadable. Hallelujah for free, because there’s some gems to be discovered. Check out Mischa Spoliansky’s excellent, jaunty version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (seemingly no static URLs, but the search interface is easy to use). And thank you to CHARM for not locking the music up: both the speakers spoke with an enthusiasm they wanted to share. Got interviews with them too.
Duties meant I missed the opening ceremony – which also featured CHARM – but had a snigger at the tweets about paleography provoked by the words of Kings’ lamentable principal.
Serious seminars start tomorrow. Perhaps serious blog posts too.
The Enclosure of the Historical Commons (2): Murdoch Junior
Last week James Murdoch spoke at the launch of UCL’s new Centre for Digital Humanities. Quite why they invited him I don’t know, for he appears to have no idea of what the Digital Humanities are. That said, his speech got plenty of media coverage, so it may have been a clever piece of publicity-mongering.
Notwithstanding his protestations to be speaking “as dispassionately and factually as I can”, it was a partisan and aggressive statement for the so-called “creative industries.” The usual suspects were lined up: the BBC, file sharers, the public sector, search engines, digital utopians et al. The notorious Tera report was cited, apocalyptic visions of redundancies painted (how ironic coming from Wapping), government enforcement of “basic property rights” demanded, Sky iPhone apps and Fox films promoted.
(It was also semi-literate: “almost exactly”; “the era of Pope, and Johnson, and writers after them.” As for the trite Tolkein quotation, was he trying to show he was down with the geeks?)
But it was the attack on the British Library’s newspaper digitisation program that garnered most of the headlines; see, for example, The Indy and The Guardian. The library’s project aims to turn some 40 million pages of their newspaper holdings into searchable, preservable, accessible, distributable text; a great resource for historians. The majority of this material is clearly out of copyright and in the public domain. Where it is not, there will be agreement with, and remuneration for, the copyright holders. The press release states:
…. the partnership will also seek to digitise a range of in-copyright material, with the agreement of the relevant rightsholders. This copyright material will, with the express permission of the publishers, be made available via the online resource – providing fuller coverage for users and a much-needed revenue stream for the rightsholders.
So what’s Murdoch getting so angry about? Immediately, competition with archive.timesonline.co.uk. It’s curious he didn’t take the opportunity to plug that product along with all the others. But there’s something else: free content.
Just yesterday, the Library announced the digitisation of their newspaper archive – originally given to them by publishers as a matter of legal obligation. This is not simply being done for posterity, nor to make free access for library users easier, but also for commercial gain via a paid‐for website. The move is strongly opposed by major publishers. If it goes ahead, free content would not only be a justification for more funding, but actually become a source of funds for a public body.
As the old saw goes, there’s free as in freedom, and free as in beer. One means the freedom to use a resource in any fashion, the other simply not to pay for something. The British Library project is not free in either sense, as I’ve previously shown. Likewise the Times archive.
Clearly, the “free content” referred to is material on which copyright has expired and which is now in the public domain. It can be used in any way anyone desires. The problem is obtaining it. That means only certain institutions, the British Library and News International alike, can take advantage of this common wealth, and enclose it with an array of technological (DRM), financial (paywalls) or contractual (the terms of use and copyright claims over remastering into digital formats) fences.
For Murdoch, this isn’t enough. He believes the Times archive is his inviolable property. Although in practice only the British Library can compete with him, the root problem is that this material is in the public domain. Consequently, not only does he berate public sector competition for “profiting from work they do not create”, but demands that only the creative industries should be allowed to “develop and protect the value of what they create”, even where copyright has lapsed. This privatisation envisages the digital humanities as an adjunct to commercial exploitation, in line with current ideologies of the “impact agenda” and business-driven education; and it dramatically diminishes our historical commons.
Standard caveats: I am not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on TV. Nor am I a mind-reader with privileged access to the inner workings of the mindset of the wealthy.
See also Richard Lewis and The Guardian.
You can read the transcript here and here. Curiously, neither page has an explicit copyright statement, so presumably both sites are claiming the rights to the lecture!
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.
