Managing Projects at the Blake Archive

The Blake Archive has people all over the place. Three editors at three different institutions in three different states, two “teams” of project assistants/graduate students, a Technical Editor (grad student), Project Manager (grad student), and Project Coordinator (grad student—that’s me!).

The domain of Team Rochester (or more informally, BAND: Blake Archive Northern Division) is Blake’s manuscripts and (more recently) typographic editions. Our first publication was Island in the Moon and we’re currently working on electronic editions of Blake’s letters, the Genesis Manuscript, Poetical Sketches, and Four Zoas. Typically, teams of project assistants work together on a single text or group of texts (as in the case of the letters), but sometimes individuals work alone on “easy” manuscripts (which is really a misnomer for anything of Blake’s).

As the job title (Project Coordinator) implies, my job is to coordinate projects. This means several different things, but mainly I keep track of who’s working on what at the UR and I coordinate BAND’s activities with the Project Manager, Ashley, at UNC. The digital heart of the Blake Archive—its servers—is at UNC. Which means that the work we do at the UR involves complicated procedures to log in securely from far away. BAND is also the newest “wing” to the Blake Archive. Combine a bunch of people relatively new to the Blake Archive and the world of electronic textual editing with the labyrinthine world of servers, “tunnels,” and “run this command in the terminal window” ["What's a terminal window??!"] and you can see the need for some coordination.

At the UR, I keep track of who is working on what and how they’re doing. This is primarily accomplished through our weekly staff meetings, for which I set agendas (and during which another project assistant takes minutes). These get posted to BAND’s Google Site, which we use to keep track of things like meeting minutes, technical documentation (for example, the XML tagset for transcribing manuscripts), project documentation (such as proofreading questions), and the links we use frequently. We had been using Blackboard for a while, but we recently migrated to a Google Site, and that seems to work really well for us.

One of the advantages of using a Google Site is that it plays well with Google Docs, which we use extensively. All of our project tracking and proofreading takes place in and through shared Google Docs. As team members begin transcribing and encoding Blake’s text into XML, questions tend to arise. At that point, someone will start a Google Doc for that project, record their questions, and then share it with the rest of BAND. Some of the easier questions (such as “Do we transcribe the handwriting of librarians or archivists?” (Answer: no)) will be answered via the comment feature, or in differently formatted text. Trickier questions (by far the more common species) we address during our weekly meetings, and occasionally escalate to the Blake Archive’s listserv, which gives non-UR folks (typically the other editors, the Project Manager, and/or the Technical Editor) a chance to weigh in.

Once a MS has been transcribed and encoded, it’s ready to be proofed. Once again, we record errors (such as typos) and questions (“Is that a comma or a period?”) in a Google Doc. BAND spends a lot of time scrutinizing small details and discussing at length whether or how to record/transcribe/encode something. In a few seconds and with just a few clicks, project assistants can neatly snip a close-up of whatever mark, letter, word, or line they have a question about and insert that into the proofreading document. Having images right next to specific interpretive questions makes our detailed discussions (which have been known to induce brain-death and existential confusion) about things like dashes much easier to manage. In fact, our reliance on these kinds of images contributed to one of the new features in the Archive, which debuted with Island in the Moon: text-note images in the editorial notes to help explain particularly knotty editorial cruxes. Here’s an example from Object 2 of Island in the Moon:

One last word about managing the work of proofreading. We just started using a Google Survey to make proofing more consistent. Nick Wasmoen, one of the project assistants at the UR, built a proofreading form in Googledocs, which we now use for all of our proofreading. It details everything a proofer needs to check, from typos in the title to errors in copy information or the transcription. Using the document maintains consistency in proofing across texts—this is especially important as we all proofread each other’s work, and this ensures that we all look at and for the same things.

Another aspect of my work at the Blake Archive is being the link between BAND and the folks at UNC—especially the Blake Archive Project Manager, Ashley. When BAND members run into problems I can’t solve (such as log-in issues on the server) or questions I can’t answer, I talk to Ashley. We have regular video chats, during which we share updates about project progress and I get to ask lots and lots of questions about how and why the Archive works the way it does. We’re using Google Video Chat, which seems to work well a majority of the time. We occasionally have issues where one of us can neither be seen nor heard, but it usually works.

Sometimes I’m conflicted about relying so much on Google for tracking and managing our collaborative editing projects. But it’s just so easy! And free! And right there! And easy! And when you spend hours scrutinizing ink splotches or determining whether that “s” is *really* capitalized, “easy” works.

Electronic Enlightenment

A research project of the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford, the Electronic Enlightenment invites you to “explore the original web of correspondence: read letters between the founders of the modern world and their friends and families, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers.” While EE clearly defines itself as a digital project, “a ‘living‘ interlinked collection of letters and correspondents” (FAQ), its foundation is made of paper; that is, the primary source of its content (at this point) have been the print editions of academic presses.

From “Principles of the Edition:”

To date, most of the content of EE has been provided by printed editions of correspondences from academic presses worldwide; nevertheless, it should not be viewed simply as an aggregation of these editions. Rather it is a database of individual letters and correspondents that can be searched or browsed as a complete collection.

From the “Introduction:”

EE has as its foundation major printed editions of correspondence centred on the “long 18th century”. From the correspondence itself, the supporting critical apparatus and additional research carried out by EE, we have developed a set of information categories, from dates and names to textual variants — indeed, any piece of information that contributes to our understanding of the documents. The data captured within these information categories enriches EE as a digital academic resource, by creating an intricate network of connections between the documents.

EE provides access to over 53,000 letters and documents from several centuries (the earliest letter is from 1619), correspondent bi0graphies, and explanatory notes (depending on the source edition, these might be editorial, textual, linguistic, or general notes). The searching capabilities appear extensive; users can search for letters by content (words or phrases), author name, place of origin, date (including day, month, and year), recipient, and the city or country where it was received.

Moving beyond its bookish roots, EE openly invites user collaboration. Users can supply missing information about biographies, dating of documents, locating correspondents, and translations. Readers can submit new letters for electronic publication. Scholars can even develop their own born-digital projects. From “Contributor Services:”

EE will provide a creative space for scholars to develop new born-digital critical editions of correspondences online. It will offer a central area where progress reports can be posted or linked, discussion lists for collaborators and testers maintained, and project results published. When prepared, these editions can be integrated seamlessly into the full collection of EE.

EE offers born-digital editions the possibility of publishing correspondence collections online, integrated into our network of biographical and documentary links.

Despite all of this exciting, collaborative coolness, however, access to the project seems to be by institutional subscription only. (Even the “free trial” available through Oxford University Press seems to be tied to institutional affiliation.)

“Humanities 2.0″

Lisa Spiro at Digital Scholarship in the Humanities started her review of the digital humanities in 2008. She starts with the “Emergence of the Digital Humanities,” and considers NEH’s establishment of the Office of the Digital Humanities as “giving credibility to an emerging field (discipline? methodology?).” The next section is (fittingly) “Defining ‘Digital Humanities,’” where Spiro traces critical key definitions of the “Digital Humanities,” such as discussions of whether it is a method, field, or medium. The last section of this first part of her review is “Community and Collaboration,” which surveys virtual networks of scholars, Humanities Research Centers, and Twitter as “a vehicle for scholarly conversation.”

The New Curators

Via A Repository for Bottled Monsters (“An unofficial blog for the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC.”): The Washington Post has a story up about the Smithsonian’s efforts to join the digital age, starting with “Smithsonian 2.0,” a gathering of Smithsonian curators, staff, and such digital luminaries as Clay Shirky (we wrote about an interview with him here), Bran Ferren (co-chairman and chief creative officer of Applied Minds Inc.), George Oates (one of the founders of Flickr), and Chris Anderson (editor in chief of Wired). [Update: Dan Cohen was also there, and wrote about his responses here.]

Probably the most provocative point raised in the article is the role of the curator, or expert, in the Smithsonian’s digital future. Institutions like museums (or presses) have traditionally occupied the role of gatekeepers (to steal a term from mass communication), choosing “the best” from the masses to display (or sell). For example, less than 1% of the museum’s 137 million items are on display. As many have pointed out, digital technologies change how information is generated and shared, and within the context of 2.0 technologies, crowd-sourcing, and remixing, the role of the expert and conceptions of authority are also transforming – transformations actively “promoted” in the digital humanities imagined in the forward-thinking “Manifesto” from UCLA’s Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities:

Digital humanities promote a flattening of the relationship between masters and disciples. A dedefinition of the roles of professor and student, expert and non-expert. (paragraph #19)

For those involved in historically curatorial institutions like museums, archives, and the ivory towers of higher education, an identity crisis looms. Anderson’s message to the Smithsonian is that gatekeepers “get it wrong,” the influence of curators will never be the same, and that in fact, the “best curators” have not yet emerged from the crowd.

“The Web is messy, and in that messiness comes something new and interesting and really rich,” he said. “The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web. It says, ‘We blew it, but we are leaving that mistake out there. We’re not perfect, but we get better over time.’ “

The problem is, “the best curators of any given artifact do not work here, and you do not know them,” Anderson told the Smithsonian thought leaders. “Not only that, but you can’t find them. They can find you, but you can’t find them. The only way to find them is to put stuff out there and let them reveal themselves as being an expert.”

Compare this optimism, emphasis on shared knowledge, and confidence in the hidden expertise of the public with a new project called brainify.com, a social-bookmarking site only for academics, or more precisely, those with university email addresses (which already excludes a great number of academics in the position of adjuncts, who often don’t get university email accounts). The Chronicle of Higher Education just ran an article about the site’s debut (“‘Social Bookmarking” Site for Higher Education Makes Debut”), and cites creator Murray Goldberg’s rather different take on the value of public contributions:

Mr. Goldberg said that he wanted to focus on solidifying the site’s functions for students and faculty members before exploring the possibility of expanding membership. “As soon as we open up membership for bookmarking to a broader audience, we risk dilution of the quality of the site.”

Hm, so Anderson sees expertise revealing itself from within the public, while Goldberg fears a dilution of “quality.”

In general, I agree with Goldberg’s assertion that “the world needs an academic-bookmarking tool.” Filters are important; they allow users to manage and control the overwhelming amount of information available on the web. Clay Shirky asserts that the charge of “information overload” is actually a problem of inadequate filtering. And as a graduate student and instructor, I can understand that academic needs and interests might vary from that of the general public, necessitating different sets of tools. But ultimately, I question whether the deliberate construction of a “walled garden” (as Melanie McBride calls it) is the best way to meet the varied needs of academics. That is, using exclusivity to order and manage the “messiness” of the web – trying to avoid the strikethrough – is not truly engaging the huge potential for networked knowledge.

I’ll leave Anderson with the final word:

“Is it our job to be smart and be the best? Or is it our job to share knowledge?”

Digital Humanities Manifesto

The Mellon seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA has published “A Digital Humanities Manifesto” which allows users to comment on individual paragraphs or the entire document. Between the initial post and the 70ish comments on the page emerges an interesting discussion about what – exactly – characterizes the digital humanities, the role of print media in the practices and projects of the digital humanities, the shifting relationships between experts and amatuers, and the impact of all of this on the boundaries of institutions and disciplines.

Google Goes to the Prado

Via {feuilleton}: Google has teamed with the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, to bring ultra high resolution photographs of some of the most famous works held by the museum to users of Google Earth. Users will be able to examine the works up close and personal, and at a degree that wouldn’t even have been available to the artist. A press release from the Prado notes that

The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth.  Using the advanced features of Google Earth art historians, students and tourists everywhere can zoom in on and explore the finer details of the artist’s brushwork that can be easily missed at first glance. The paintings have been photographed and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels).

So far, only 14 works have been added to Google Earth, but more are on the way. Among them are some of the most famous and ground-breaking works of art of all time, such as Velasquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s The Third of May, and Bosch’s hallucinatory Garden of Earthly Delights.

To view the works, download Google Earth, “Fly to” the Museo del Prado, and click on the museum. The paintings will pop up. Selecting one and viewing it in ultra high resolution allows you to zoom in to your heart’s content. This becomes an endless source of entertainment with a painting like Bosch’s, which is so full of detail that some things are easy to miss.

I never noticed, for example, that this bird was watching me so intently:

This is an amazing resource. Maybe one day we’ll do something similar with Blake’s art.

Katherine Hayles’ talk in Buffalo

Hayles presenting at the University of Buffalo.

Rachel and I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural session of the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Buffalo. The day started out with a lively discussion between Gregory Crane and Stephen Ramsay (blog post coming soon!). In the afternoon, the keynote speaker, N. Katherine Hayles, gave her presentation. Hayles has always been one of my favorite scholars. Her work on electronic literature, posthumanism, and the intersections of literature and science is a main reason I became so interested in these same issues.

Her talk, entitled “Spatialization of Time in Textual, Technical and Embodied Media,” was an examination of the relationship between space and time, and how that relationship has shifted in the digital age. Her presentation, followed by a roundtable discussion, was provocative and inspirational, and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around much of what she talked about.

Hayles argued that digital technology is not only changing the way humanities (and other) scholars, artists, and students work, but also the way they think. From the inception of computing, our understanding of the computer itself has evolved. We have gone from seeing the computer as a lens through which information is displayed, to an “object of inquiry in its own right” (with the beginnings of computer science), to its current state — a “transformative technology” that has changed and influenced the way scholars and artists conceptualize their work.

Hayles’ main point was built upon previous arguments by people like German scholar Sybille Kramer, who argues that media, and digital media in particular, works as a spatialization of material that, in turn, enables that material to be manipulated in time. Unlike printed text, which is permanently fixed in both space and time on a page, allowing for very limited reader-text interaction, digital media enables the reader or audience to become the participant, to make his or her own unique intervention in or around a text or piece. This interaction depends on the fluidity of time within a fixed space.

Hayles illustrated this admittedly difficult concept with examples from literature and art. One of the most interesting of these was slippingglimpse, a joint art project by Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo. In this project, a user selects one of ten videos which capture moving water in various settings. The water “reads” a poem (the same poem for every video) and uses “motion capture coding that assigns the text to locations of movement in the water.”

The poem also “reads”

image/capture technologies…by sampling and recombining words of visual artists who describe their use of digital techniques – it then explores older capture technologies, such as harvesting plants for food and flax for paper;

the image-capture video reads the water, reading for and enhancing water flow patterns…to which dynamical systems return even as they continuously change.

The work succeeds in locating patterns within constant change and “turbulent motion,” as Hayles put it. This creates a recursive relationship between the piece and its audience, who are continuously exploring the ways in which the text is manipulated through their interactions with it, and its own interactions with the images. Temporality within the piece thus becomes something altogether non-linear. The poem can be read and reread in ways that abandon our perceived notions of linear time, allowing us to explore the movement and recombination of the words in a fixed space that we have selected. Space, then, becomes the independent variable in the space/time equation. The temporality of the text can be altered based on the space the reader chooses for the text.

I had a lot of fun playing with this project after the symposium had ended, and exploring the myriad ways in which the original text is recombined and can be reread in each unique spatial setting. Hayles also gave other examples from the art world — “Listening Post”, created by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, and David Rokeby’s “n-cha(n)t”. These installations work in ways similar to slippingglimpse, but use real-time spoken words and text. Listening Post collects fragments of text from unrestricted chat rooms and other digital public forums. The text is read or sung aloud by a voice synthesizer, and then, by way of a data algorithm, is

cycle[d] through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.

n-cha(n)t uses words spoken by an intercommunicating set of computers and by participating audience members in an attempt to examine and synchronize the verbal flow of language. The computers converge in their communications and begin chanting, and are then broken apart and become divergent when new input is introduced by an audience member/viewer, who then also becomes a creator and artist in his/her own right. Again, this exemplifies how the computer has become a transformative technology that is re-shaping how we work and think, and how art is reweiring us to examine “stable” reality anew. Within the spaces of these installations, time and text become fluid and unfixed, allowing for a new kind of interaction between viewer/reader and piece.

From this discussion of contemporary art, Hayles moved into more scientific realms to pose the question, “How does the body know time?” Drawing on arguments from neuroscience, she argued that the brain only understands time through space. Neural complexity arises because of connections between groups of neurons that produce change in each group, which results in increased intricacy due to the re-engineering of synaptic environments. This complexity allows for the simultaneous experience of diverse temporalities. A good illustration of this might be multi-tasking: often I find myself writing a paper or class-planning in the “present” while remembering something from the “past.” Hayles’s conclusion is that linear time is “an illusion perpetuated by time measurement,” which is in turn perpetuated by what she terms the “colonization or globalization of time,” an idea based in capitalist society’s attempts to harness time to increase profits and efficiency. She noted that a 24-hour basis of operations is now the norm for many companies, who have indexed time to a global standard and have “sutured” it to the local (I’m really enjoying her use of this metaphor here because it gets at a certain violently unnatural quality inherent in Western ideas of time).

The internet, though, is changing all of this, and bringing about a reconceptualization and reenactment of space/time through digital technologies. According to Hayles, “the computer has enabled a collapsing of space, [and there is no longer] a need to navigate space.”

This is best seen with projects like hypercities, in which space becomes what Hayles terms “a container for different temporalities.” This project provides cities a chance to “preserve their time and memory” through interactive mapping technologies that allow a user to explore different layers of time within the boundaries of a given city. Mapping here becomes an exercise in temporalization as it is defined through the user’s choice of a space.

The possibilities this re-imagined space/time relationship opens up for digital projects in the humanities will continue to transform scholarship as those projects continue to evolve and become increasingly interactive, recursive, and revolutionary. Hayles’ talk makes me excited to see, and participate in, the future of humanities computing.

-Ali McGhee

Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies now online

Thanks to Dave Mazella at The Long Eighteenth for posting about the online publication of Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies. This looks like a great compilation of recent digital studies scholarship, though Dave rightly pointed out the problem of limited interactivity. We were pleased to see that the Blake Archive was mentioned several times, particularly in John Walsh’s article on “Multimedia and Multitasking,” in which he cites the Archive as a laudable example of digital scholarship.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI)

In May, I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, a campus famous for its rather large and adorable rabbit population. While I’ve only been to a few national academic conferences, the atmosphere at DHSI seemed especially relaxed and collegial.

As a digital humanities novice, I was in one of the two introductory workshops offered, “Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application” with Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman. My project for the week was to encode the first page of Blake’s MS “An Island in the Moon.” This is our current project for the University of Rochester division of the Blake Archive, and while it has already been encoded, I wanted to practice all of the concepts and skills I was learning from Julia and Syd. My encoding experiment was fairly straightforward, as this particular page didn’t have any of the complex revisions that appear later in the MS.

Immersing myself in the TEI P5 guidelines, however, was a life-altering experience. As I read through the sections devoted to manuscript description (supplemented, of course, by Syd and Julia’s lectures and slides), I started to realize that the work of encoding is really an amazing thing. I started the workshop naively supposing that encoding a text, especially an 18th century manuscript, was this objective, data-entry-like process of preservation. This workshop set me straight: encoding is an editorial act of interpretation.

Encoding a text has nearly limitless possibilities, but the limits of the project must be determined – and it’s this process which can be so grueling. Choosing exactly which features of the physical object to describe, such as the material, dimensions, waterkmarks, ink color. Deciding whether it’s useful to map the text’s content with analytical apparatuses that can track shifts in tone, language usage, or rhyme scheme. Thinking about the audience for the project, and the information they might search for or find totally irrelevant. And finally, how all of this might be ultimately determined by the time and financial constraints which just won’t allow an enthusiastic scholar to describe every possible feature of her beloved text.

I came home from the workshop armed with a much better sense of how text encoding works, and subsequently can ask much better questions about the work we’re doing at the Blake Archive.

–Rachel Lee

The World Premier of the William Blake Archive’s Blog

Welcome.

This is the William Blake Archive’s newest experiment: blogging about upcoming publications, what we do behind the scenes, and digital humanities in general. We are a motley crew of graduate students, professors, and independent scholars working from multiple campuses across several states. In the near future you might expect thrilling tales of manuscript encoding, tag set discussions, publication announcements, and more.