Cordell compellingly describes a specific DH project, one that utilizes digitized 19th century periodicals and various DH software tools to track the reprintings, the "possessions" of Hawthorne's "The Celestial Railroad," a story little read these days, and various paratexts, materially documenting the lively and contentious denominational atmosphere of the 19th century. Cordell's research suggests the possibility that Hawthorne would later subtly edit his story to make it less available for these religious "possessions." His project draws attention to the fluidity of the notion of "authorship" in the 19th century, the interaction between literary text and social context, the relationship between technology (incl. the railroad), dissemination, reception, religion, and politics. Interestingly, Cordell's piece also makes an argument for the uses of DH, underscoring its continued "outsider status," or at least marking the author's anxiety about the reception for his methodology and project!
Cordell illustrates how both traditional and DH research methodologies and tools, including Google's Ngram viewer, in combination, make for "zoomable reading." Importantly Cordell calls attention to the fact that a gap in available materials persists and thus he does not argue that he is able to uncover a complete social context for the "The Celestial Road."
Cordell's project suggests both the possibilities and complexities of a DH project. To large extent, the success of any such project is dependent on the digitization of materials and the quality of that digitization and accessibility. The librarian in me concurs with Geoffrey Nunberg's lament about the poor quality of metadata. Aside: Back in the 90s as the Internet was beginning to really take off for a brief moment a whole new job category for librarians emerged: information architects. There were numerous jobs advertised and books and even training programs developed for info architects. For various and complex reasons, while there are some librarians who have been employed by Google, Yahoo, etc, the problem of descriptive tools for documents on the web has not been adequately addressed. So, in the absence of controlled vocabularies or richly descriptive metadata, we are left with a free for all.
While some of the materials I work with in experimental late 20th century writing have been digitized, many of them--particularly small press projects--have not, and even when they have, they are not centrally located but dispersed across the web. I suspect that for many of us, digitized repositories of materials for our scholarship are incomplete, non-existent, etc.
Some questions I have:
What DH software tools has the English dept. purchased? Are there SCU faculty currently engaged in specific DH projects? How might we share this info? How might we collaborate with SCU librarians and other faculty in other departments on DH projects?
This link was down earlier, but is now reestablished. The article can now be read online or printed out.
ReplyDeleteAwesome article!
ReplyDeleteCordell compellingly describes a specific DH project, one that utilizes digitized 19th century periodicals and various DH software tools to track the reprintings, the "possessions" of Hawthorne's "The Celestial Railroad," a story little read these days, and various paratexts, materially documenting the lively and contentious denominational atmosphere of the 19th century. Cordell's research suggests the possibility that Hawthorne would later subtly edit his story to make it less available for these religious "possessions." His project draws attention to the fluidity of the notion of "authorship" in the 19th century, the interaction between literary text and social context, the relationship between technology (incl. the railroad), dissemination, reception, religion, and politics. Interestingly, Cordell's piece also makes an argument for the uses of DH, underscoring its continued "outsider status," or at least marking the author's anxiety about the reception for his methodology and project!
Cordell illustrates how both traditional and DH research methodologies and tools, including Google's Ngram viewer, in combination, make for "zoomable reading." Importantly Cordell calls attention to the fact that a gap in available materials persists and thus he does not argue that he is able to uncover a complete social context for the "The Celestial Road."
Cordell's project suggests both the possibilities and complexities of a DH project. To large extent, the success of any such project is dependent on the digitization of materials and the quality of that digitization and accessibility. The librarian in me concurs with Geoffrey Nunberg's lament about the poor quality of metadata. Aside: Back in the 90s as the Internet was beginning to really take off for a brief moment a whole new job category for librarians emerged: information architects. There were numerous jobs advertised and books and even training programs developed for info architects. For various and complex reasons, while there are some librarians who have been employed by Google, Yahoo, etc, the problem of descriptive tools for documents on the web has not been adequately addressed. So, in the absence of controlled vocabularies or richly descriptive metadata, we are left with a free for all.
While some of the materials I work with in experimental late 20th century writing have been digitized, many of them--particularly small press projects--have not, and even when they have, they are not centrally located but dispersed across the web. I suspect that for many of us, digitized repositories of materials for our scholarship are incomplete, non-existent, etc.
Some questions I have:
What DH software tools has the English dept. purchased? Are there SCU faculty currently engaged in specific DH projects? How might we share this info? How might we collaborate with SCU librarians and other faculty in other departments on DH projects?