Digital Riffs

Thinking about Infrastructure

2012-02-25T07:11:00.001-08:00

A colleague drew my attention to NicolaOsborne’s liveblog of the very interesting event at the University of Edinburghon 24 February 2012, Digital Scholarship:A Day of Ideas. It is wonderful to see that Edinburgh University, which,through EDINA and other activities, has made such important contributions tothe growth of digital scholarship over the years, is continuing to develop newinitiatives – the appointment by Edinburgh of a Dean for Digital Scholarship isparticularly noteworthy. Mind you, it must be admitted that the idea ofdigital scholarship creates some problems. One worry that constantlynags away at me is whether we should privilege the digital in the way that wedo. Other technologies have the capacity radically to transform humanitiesscholarship – it is possible, for example, that nanotechnologies, by offeringnew approaches to the conservation of cultural heritage, have just as much tooffer the humanities scholar and curator as the digital. Perhaps we should bethinking as much about nano-scholarship as digital scholarship. Certainly, itwould be worrying if humanities scholars restrict their engagement withtechnology to the digital.

My reflections on the day derive fromNicola Osborne’s liveblogging, so apologies in advance if I consequently gethold of the wrong end of the stick here and there. Melissa Terras in herpresentation evidently demonstrated very vividly the way in which digitalresources and tools have transformed the practice of humanities scholars overthe past twenty years. Yet, as Melpointed out, there is a fundamental dilemma here. The most importantdevelopments have not been driven by scholars, but by libraries and commercialpublishers. The resources which have become indispensable to humanitiesscholars are commercial packages such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online,Early English Books Online or the British Library’s Newspapers Archive. AsLaura Mandell has emphasized, these resources are designed on the model of thelibrary microfilm surrogate, intended to enhance public access to librarycollections. Their searchability is very limited, and they are often positivelymisleading. The digital humanities, as formally constituted through centressuch as UCLDH and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s CollegeLondon, have been largely irrelevant to this process, and have general notproduced any resources which have had the same impact on scholarship as thesecommercial packages. If a scholar working on the early nineteenth century wasasked to choose whether funding should be used to secure access to The TimesDigital Archive or to continue a project like Transcribe Bentham, most wouldunhesitatingly choose The Times.

One of the most urgent issues for digitalscholarship (as Laura Mandell has emphasized) is to develop closer links withlibrarians and publishers to influence the creation of these commercialpackages. But it seems that, floating around the Edinburgh day, was the suggestionthat a far more critical issue is one of infrastructure. In particular, in bothJane Ohlmeyer’s presentation and in some questions after Mel’s presentation,seemed to be flickering the idea that in some the United Kingdom had taken astep backwards by ending funding for the Arts and Humanities Data Service andby not taking a sufficiently active role in the European Dariah initiative. Theway forward, it appears to be suggested, is to invest in infrastructure, andthe UK, it is also suggested, has characteristically thrown away an early leadin this area.

I must admit instinctive nervousness aboutinfrastructure, which can only be explained in terms of my own engagement withdigital developments. The British Library, through its Initiatives for Access programme between 1994 and 1997, established a remarkable portfolio of pioneeringdigital projects, including Portico, the first British Library website, theBurney Newspapers digitisation, Turning the Pages and Electronic Beowulf.Indeed, in many ways this programme explored almost all of the aspects of thetechnology which have subsequently preoccupied us. There was clearly a need forthese activities to build closer links with work in other sectors, particularlythat of the JISC, but in many ways the British Library mapped out through Initiativesfor Access a remarkable template for future. But, at the conclusion of theprogramme, the Library’s view was that the most pressing need was investment intechnical infrastructure, particularly given the Library’s ambition to embarkon legal deposit of electronic resources. So, a large and ultimatelyunsuccessful programme to procure a major piece of new technical infrastructurewas put in place, and the British Library threw away the advances that it hadmade in the 1990s. It is striking that the British Library has since failed to exerciseany decisive leadership on the development of wider digital scholarship in thehumanities. There have been some interesting developments, such as the UK Sound Map or the Codex Sinaiticus project, but the major British Librarydevelopments have been through commercial partnerships, as with the newspapers.Digital scholarship has been sacrificed for infrastructure.

For scholars working within British universities,the three most important pieces of infrastructure provided by the universitiesthemselves are barely mentioned or discussed. These are: the network provisionthrough JANET; the collective licensing of commercial digital packages through JISC Collections; and the NESLI2 licensing of access to online journals which(although extraordinarily complex and often fraught) provides access to theenormously expensive journal packages of publishers such as Elsevier orWiley-Blackwell. Take any of these components away, and the digital revolutiondescribed by Melissa would disappear overnight. These provisions are not cheap– online journal provision for a publisher such as Wiley-Blackwell can stilleasily cost a university library over a million pounds a year, even with thediscounts negotiated through the NESLI2 agreements. All British universitieslibraries spend the bulk of their acquisition budgets on the provision ofonline resources – a fact of which most academic users seem blissfully andhappily unaware. However, these pieces of infrastructure bring enormousbenefit, one of the most important of which is an equality of provision acrossUK universities. I feel strongly about this, because while I was Librarian at thesmall university in Lampeter, the excellent work of JISC Collections meantthat I could easily build up a portfolio of electronic resources which, inthose areas taught at Lampeter, bore comparison with much larger universities.Contrast this with the appalling situation in the United States, where verylarge and wealthy universities can afford a huge range of subscriptions toelectronic resources but smaller colleges have nothing at all. For example,look at the library catalogue of St Vincent’s College in Pennsylvania, anexcellent Catholic liberal arts college very similar to Lampeter, which listsjust four very limited electronic resources. This is an immense digital divide,which the work of the JISC has ensured does not occur to the same degree inBritain (although there are exceptions, such as Parker on the Web, where the scandalous refusal of Stanford University Library to agree terms with JISC Collections mean that this important resopurce is unavailable in most British universities) .

At this level, Britain possesses aninfrastructure which has successfully fostered digital scholarship in the artsand humanities. In this context, clearly the most important priority is toprotect this infrastructure, and it is an infrastructure which is under threat.It is a constant struggle to negotiate affordable rates for journalsubscriptions. In this sense, the recent Elsevier boycott is beside the point –many other publishers, such as most notably Wiley-Blackwell, are equallyculpable of what is really nothing more than exploiting monopoly advantages. Inthe current financial situation, sooner or later, some British universitieswill not be able to afford to continue subscriptions to journals or databaseswhich scholars have become dependent on. What happens to the digital revolutionthen?

These seem to me more pressing structuresof infrastructure than refighting old battles about the Arts and HumanitiesData Service. The withdrawal of funding was very sad, and at King’s CollegeLondon we are enormously proud of the way in which Sheila Anderson and hercolleagues have created from the Arts and Humanities Data Service a tremendouslysuccessful Centre for eResearch which in many ways is pushing forward newmethods of researching in even more remarkable ways than under the AHDS. TheArts and Humanities Data Service was established in the mid 1990s at a timewhen it was assumed that much of the creation of digital content would occurwithin universities and that some kind of infrastructure was necessary tofacilitate this. AHDS was also intended to promote awareness of the need forsustainable standards. AHDS was certainly successful in ensuring this attentionto appropriate standards, and some former components of the AHDS, such as theHistory Data Service, Archaeology Data Service and the Oxford Text Archive,have flourished notwithstanding the loss of central AHDS funding, and stillperform this function very successfully. But the question must be asked – isthe vision of large quantities of university-created digital content requiringcentral curation still the most pressing issue? Isn't this a vision more appropriate to 1995? David Robey has consistentlystressed how the AHRC is still funding many research projects which have adigital content. A list of some of these is available here.

So the loss of funding for the AHDS has notinhibited the engagement of humanities scholars with digital methods – do we infact need that sort of function at all? Most of the projects funded by the AHRCof this kind represent small-scale activities of the type which Andrew Green ofthe National Library of Wales has called ‘boutique digitisation’. Andrew arguesthat the major issues for both humanities scholars arise from the impact ofcommercial initiatives such as Google Books, and I feel sure that, in thinkingabout infrastructure, it is these wider more strategic concerns which are morepressing than whether we have data repositories to support small-scale lowimpacts projects such as Transcribe Bentham or the 1641 Depositions in Ireland(and, yes, I would include projects like Electronic Beowulf in this category aswell). We need infrastructures which will instead address our dangerous dependence oncommercial initiatives by a range of companies from Gale to Google.

In this context, I think it could be arguedthat the United Kingdom is in fact now pointing the way forward in terms of thenecessary infrastructure in a rapidly changing digital environment more effectively than throughmodels like the AHDS, which reflected the situation in the mid 1990s. Indeed(and I’ve hesitated in case I am being unduly chauvinistic here, but I don’tthink I am) I think there is a danger in the UK being asked to turn the clockback by those who are only just reaching the stage that Britain reached fifteenor more years ago.

One important point to bear in mind is thatBritain today is very different to Britain fifteen years ago. Having worked inWales, Scotland and different parts of England, the impact of the creation ofan increasingly devolved country (or countries) is one of the most importantissues. It is indeed striking that an Irish scholar speaking in Scotland refersto what Raymond Williams called ‘the Yookay’ as if it was a single entity,which it is no longer. The AHDS reflected an assumption about the type ofinfrastructure for Great Britain which was appropriate in London in 1995 but nolonger fits Great Britain today. Many of the most important recent initiativeshave stemmed from the devolved nations where national governments have beenundertaking interesting investment in digital infrastructure. For Wales, I havedescribed some of these in my recent article for Lorna Hughes’s book on Evaluating and Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections. An activitylike the Welsh Journals Online project, partly funded by the Welsh AssemblyGovernment and co-ordinated by the National Library of Wales, is, as AndrewGreen has described, consciously designed to seek to counter the balefulcultural effects of a project like Google Books. Likewise, the People’s Collection, which was a manifesto commitment of the last Welsh government,anticipates on a smaller scale many of the features on the major Digital Public Library of America which looks likely to be the single most transformative piece of infrastructural work for digital scholarship over the next few years. Catcymru, providing integrated access to all Welsh libraries, isagain a remarkable illustration of the way in which the evolved nations areusing digital infrastructures to create a new sense of national identity.

A similar story could be told in Scotland,where for example Scottish universities have been pioneering new methods of securing joint access to on-line journals and databases, and the National Library of Scotland has been working with Scottish universities to developprojects to provide (for example) on-line access to collections of maps. But whereit seems to me that in Britain we are engaging with more current issues ofconcern than is evident from Jane Ohlmeyer’s description of the situation inIreland is our awareness of the issues posed by the commercialization ofdigital scholarship, of which Ireland seems blissfully unaware. It is in the initiatives that are responding to this threat that Britain is still taking a lead. Open access is an obvious area, and the work ofthe JISC is promoting awareness of the issues around open access has beencritical here. There are rumours (no more than that, sadly) that a ruling willbe made that only work available on open access may be submitted to the REF,and no more important measure could be taken to support digital scholarship atthe moment than the implementation of such a ruling. Repositories remain a keytool for tackling such issues, and again I think Britain has been leading theway here – one of the most interesting projects with which I have ever beeninvolved was the Welsh Repositories Network, which ensured that everyuniversity in Wales has an open access institutional repository – that’s anamazing achievement, and needs to be trumpeted more. Other projects which Ithink point the way forward more firmly than hankering after the AHDS includethe British Library’s Ethos project to make doctoral dissertations more easilyavailable. We might also point to recent work on research integrity which seeksto link data curation more closely to the research process, and support forthese initiatives is perhaps more pressing than worrying about storageservices.

In short, the issues confronting digitalscholarship in the humanities are less to do with the storage and curation ofdata and much more to with creating models which resist the commercialisationand commodification of knowledge, and save us from the maw of companies likeMicrosoft and IBM. Here, I believe Britain still continues to point the way. Itis very tempting to feel that digital issues an be resolved by the purchase ofa splendid piece of kit, and I worry that such an instinct too often pervadesour thinking about infrastructure. In the sciences, such large initiatives areoften tied to research questions which cannot be addressed without majorinvestment in equipment: think Hadron Collider, Square Kilometre Array, DiamondLight Source. But in the humanities our thinking about infrastructure is toooften disconnected from research issues. We worry about creating services.Maybe we shouldn’t.

#transformDH

2012-02-20T02:18:00.001-08:00

I was very pleased that my contribution tothe special double issue of the journal Artsand Humanities Research on ‘Digital Humanities, Digital Futures’ appearedthis week. It is an honour to be published alongside such distinguishedscholars as Alan Liu and Patrik Svensson. My contribution deals with some ofthe themes I discussed in my inaugural lecture, so it is good to have itavailable so quickly after the lecture.

My article is entitled 'Consumers, Creatorsor Commentators? Problems of Audience and Mission in the Digital Humanities',and is a criticism of a digital humanities community that seems to meexcessively inward-looking, over-pleased with itself, and lacking in links towider humanities scholarship. These limitations of the digital humanities ascurrently practiced are apparent from the way in which discussion of such majorthemes in current humanities scholarship as gender, sexuality, ethnicity andidentity is absent from such leading digital humanities journals as Digital Humanities Quarterly and Literary and Linguistic Computing. It isastonishing how the names of many of the key thinkers whose work underpins currenthumanities scholarship are absent from much digital humanities literature: 'Inrebuilding links with the constituency of humanities scholars, the digitalhumanities community first needs urgently to reengage with the humanities byexploring the debates around the thought of key thinkers such as RaymondWilliams and Merleau-Ponty whose names are at the moment absent from thedigital humanities literature. Re-engaging with these more current intellectualdebates will immediately open up new audiences for the digital humanities andengage new constituencies'.

These issues of the failure of the digitalhumanities (as represented by the international associations which comprise theAlliance of Digital Humanities Organisations or by the digital humanitiescentres in North America and Europe) to engage with the wider concerns ofcultural theory have also been discussed by commentators such as Alan Liu,whose masterly discussion at the 2011 MLA of the question 'Where is CulturalCriticism in the Digital Humanities?' is available here, and I regret that Ididn't pay more attention to Alan's paper in my article. In his piece for theArts and Humanities Research special issue, Alan again emphasises what seems tome the astonishing fact, that 'The side of the digital humanities that descendsfrom humanities computing lacks almost all cultural–critical awareness'.Indeed, there appears to be among many practitioners of the digital humanitiesa conviction that computing offers a means of escape from the hard work oftheoretical discussion and a return to the comforting certainties of data andempirical observation. I quote in my article the declaration in a New York Times piece on the digital humanities that 'Members of a new generation ofdigitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration inthe next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology ischanging our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is aboutmethod, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitizedmaterials that previous humanities scholars did not have'. This is a point ofview that verges on the anti-intellectual. One of the great achievements of thehumanities over the past forty years is the creation of a sophisticated set ofcultural and theoretical tools which enable us to explore cultural artefactswith real richness and depth. Yet too often humanities scholars cast aside thiscritical training and mentality when they sit in front of a computer screen.

Part of that great achievement of whatTerry Eagleton has called the 'Golden Age of Cultural Theory' has been tocreate a more liberal and inclusive view of the subject matter of thehumanities. We now accept that (for example) comic books, television, magazinesand texts associated with non-elite groups are suitable subjects of scholarlydiscourse. We recognise that women, children, marginal ethnic groups, poorpeople should figure just as prominently in our scholarly discussion as thoseelite groups who dominated the vision of humanities scholars of earliergenerations. Bringing these people and subjects into the consideration of scholarlydiscourse has been one of the great achievements of modern cultural theory.

If the digital humanities spurn anengagement with theory, they also run the risk of returning us to the world ofMatthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot or F. R. Leavis, in which humanities is identifiedwith the civilizing effect of ‘high culture’. And, indeed this is preciselywhat the highly formalistic view of the digital humanities which has dominatedthe field thus far is apparently doing. Of the dozens of digital humanitiesprojects from the University of Oxford featured on the University'sdigital.humanities@oxford portal, only a handful deal with the period after1850, and the majority are concerned with the period before 1700. Themes suchas ethnicity, gender, sexuality - key themes of modern humanities scholarship -are noticeably absent. The selection of projects offered by the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London isn’t much better in this respect.

It is in this context that, I think, weneed to pay very serious attention to, and engage with, the recent movement to#transformDH. I really didn’t know enough about this movement when I wrote myarticle for Arts and Humanities Research.I first really became aware of it when I attended the HASTAC conference inMichigan in November, and met the excellent Alexis Lothian, who has been aleading protaganist of the need to #transformDH. The origins of this movementlay in a panel on the American Studies Association in 2011 on ‘Transformative Mediations? Queer and Ethnic Studies and thePolitics of the Digital’. This led to a call for actionby Amanda Phillips, available here, which urged "DigitalHumanities" (used here in the most expansive sense possible) … todiversify itself in terms of inclusion, approaches, theorization, andapplication to social justice issues’. Alexis Lothian herself provides one ofthe best short discussions of #transformDH in a blog post here: ‘most of usalso felt that the majority of DH projects did not speak to our areas of queer,feminist, critical race studies, cultural studies (within which we study a widerange of literature, theory, media and culture between us). We started#transformDH to think about how those interests might intersect with DH – how,most importantly, they might already be intersecting. We were not, I think,trying to take away from the good experiences others have had in the DHcommunity: just to add to them, in the specific ways that mattered to us,transformatively’.

Some digital humanities scholars havepointed out in response to these criticisms that digital humanities is alwaysopen, collaborative and welcoming, although this is difficult to perceive fromthe mix of projects generally offered in the digital humanities, which rarelystray beyond old-fashioned ideas of high culture. Technology is too oftenpresented in digital humanities as something that is raceless, sexless,genderless. One fundamental role of digital humanities scholars must surely beto point out that our new technologies are in themselves complex culturalartefacts, whose origins after all lie in the military-industrial complex of the1940s and 1950s. To quote Amanada Phillips's summary of Tara McPherson's comments on the 2011 ASA session, ‘We need more critical race coders.We need more feminist media scholars who can't write code to run software labs.We need more people fighting to make these paradigms play nice with eachother’. This should not necessarily be as surprising as it perhaps seems atfirst sight. It is a commonplace of library studies that catalogues are highlygendered constructions: one need only look at the way in which the BritishLibrary’s manuscript catalogues treat women’s names to see that. Likewise, codeand software are cultural constructs which require analysis and criticism.

Another objection is that digitalhumanities by definition involves some hands-on work – it is about buildingthings. #transformDH perhaps looks too much like an attempt to turn digitalhumanities into another form of cultural or media studies. But that doesn’texplain why we focus on papyri, medieval charters or great authors indeveloping digital humanities projects. Part of the excitement of the digitalhumanities (as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey project has emphasized) is theway it opens up new methods of exploring the lives and achievements ofnon-elite groups.

The oppositional rhetoric of#transformDH is necessary and important, because there is a danger that DigitalHumanities, having been proclaiming itself as the next big thing for twentyyears or more, will otherwise continue to be deluded by its own rhetoric. Butin the end #transformDH is fundamentally about reconnecting digital humanitieswith fundamental themes of current scholarship in the humanities, and avoidingit becoming a refuge for the high-minded and elitist. Alexis Lothian in herblog on the HASTAC conference commented on the keynote by the Chair of NationalEndowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach: ‘I was fairly taken aback by hisdiscussion of the humanities as a “civilizing project” that would spread from a"new digital class" based in the US out to the rest of the world.Comments on twitter and to Micha’s post suggest that this unabashedly imperialnotion of civilization is what we must accept if we want to be funded for ourdigital projects, and discussions I had informally at the conference remindedme that anything that seems overtly ‘political’ will (after so many years ofthe culture wars) be unlikely to appeal to US government bodies’.

I think it is at this point – the wayin which we fund and structure the digital humanities – that #transformDH hassomething very powerful to say. We are urged by governments to develop thedigital humanities as a means of taking forward the ‘digital economy’, todevelop ‘connected communities’ achieving ‘digital transformations’. Since thecontinued existence of many digital humanities centres depends on the abilityto pull in research funding of this kind, digital humanities will dance to governmentaltunes in this way. But should we? Should not the role of digital humanities beprecisely to challenge these kind of assumptions? That means rethinking the waywe do digital humanities, maybe moving away from the big funded researchproject, or at least making it less centre of stage than hitherto. We need tomove away from our assumption that dh=projects, into broader intellectualactivities. Certainly, we should urgently being developing more community-basedactivities of the types showcased in HASTAC and elsewhere. Here for example isa session at HASTAC on a Chicana feminist archive described in tweets by AlexisLothian. This is the type of activity which will #transformDH.

An Electric Current of the Imagination

2012-01-26T03:17:00.000-08:00

An Electric Current of the Imagination: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They Might Become

Lecture by Andrew Prescott at King's College London, 25 January 2012

Illustration from Michael Takeo Magruder, Data Sea (2009)

It is a great honour for me to become head of this academic department devoted to the study of the digital humanities. When I first saw experiments in the digital imaging of books and manuscripts in the British Library twenty years ago, it was impossible to imagine that they would develop into an intellectual activity on a scale warranting an academic department. The fact that King’s College London has led the way in this process is due to the work of many pioneers, and I cannot start this lecture without acknowledging their achievements and saying what a pleasure it is to join them now as a colleague. Above all, it is essential to honour the contribution of Professor Harold Short who is without doubt the father of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Harold has been an outstanding international pioneer of the digital humanities, and I feel honoured and humbled to follow in his footsteps.

Slide: Birdsong Compliance: http://itchaway.net/poetry_content/birdsong-compliance/Scene_1.html]

The work you see displayed here is a digital poem called Birdsong Compliance by the British poet John Sparrow. The words are taken from interviews with the composer John Cage and the critic Joan Retallack. This poem illustrates how some artists have become fascinated by the way digital processes can be used to transform texts into new pieces of art. In Birdsong Compliance, two overlapping texts interact with each other. One text is static while the other moves around this background to create random juxtapositions suggesting new and unexpected meanings.

Another poet very interested in processes by which texts can be transformed or, as he prefers it, deformed in order to discover new meanings is my former colleague at the University of Glasgow, Jeffrey Robinson. Jeffrey is not only an interesting poet but also a distinguished scholar of the Romantic period.

In his recent volume of poems called Untam’d Wing, Jeffrey takes the great monuments of Romantic poetry on which he has worked for many years, and subjects them to processes of poetic transformation. He reduces Wordsworth's sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge to five key words conveying the ecstasy of a scene witnessed by early morning light. Jeffrey splices lines and phrases from the poetry of Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge with lines from Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and Gertrude Stein. Jeffrey finds new poems in marginal notes by Keats. He takes lines from famous sonnets of the Romantic period and mixes them up to create new sonnets which reveal surprising interrelationships between the words, rhythm and imagery of the originals. Jeffrey riffs on phrases and words in individual poems, setting out like a jazz musician to renew a body of standard work (in the way that, say, Miles Davies might revisit George Gershwin).

The effect of Jeffrey’s deformations and transformations of romantic poetry is at first disconcerting, then magical. Jeffrey’s reworkings compel us to look afresh at individual words and lines. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Eolian Harp, originally published in 1795, has often been taken as the beginning of the Romantic movement in poetry. I have given the text of the first section of The Eolian Harp on your handout. Over the page, you can read one of Jeffrey’s deformations of The Eolian Harp, which picks out words from Coleridge’s poem. I have known The Eolian Harp since I was a teenager, but it wasn’t until I read Jeffrey’s version of it that I really noticed Coleridge’s use in this poem of the startling word ‘sequacious’. This word, rarely used in English poetry, meant in the seventeenth century ‘following a leader slavishly’. By the eighteenth century, ‘sequacious’ came to be used with reference to objects, and mean pliability or flexibility. Applying the word to the ethereal sound of the Aeolian harp, Coleridge here gives ‘sequacious’ a further musical inflection.

Jeffrey Robinson’s poems encourage us to focus on the evanescence of individual words like ‘sequacious’, which we might otherwise skip over. Jeffrey reminds us that new insights can be found in single words just as much as in huge quantities of data. Robinson’s juxtapositions of the old and the new seek, in his words, to generate ‘an electric current of the imagination (as the Romantics might put it) [which] causes transformations that constitute a real thing in the world’.

[Slide: OPTE project: http://www.opte.org]

This is an image from the OPTE project which was started by Barrett Lyon in 2003 and seeks to create a visual representation of the internet. This image represents the internet connections of a single computer in November 2003. The purpose of the OPTE project is to map the growth of the internet, to identify gaps in the internet’s structure, and to analyse the effect on the internet of major events such as wars and natural disasters. But the images are also aesthetically pleasing, and they have been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This image conveys something of the scale of the internet, but gives little sense of its growth over the past fifteen years. In 2000, there were about 361 million internet users. Since then, the number of users has grown four fold, so that there are currently just over two billion internet users, about one third of the world’s population. There are currently estimated to be about 12 billion indexed pages on the indexed World Wide Web (and how odd that our unit of measurement for the web continues to be the page).

In 1997, Michael Lesk calculated that the entire holdings of the Library of Congress amounted to about 20 petabytes of data, and guessed that the total information in the world amounted to a few thousand petabytes. By 2003, Lesk reported that the total of new information created every year amounted to 1.5 exabytes, which is over 1500 petabytes or 1.5 billion gigabytes. As of May 2009, the size of the world’s total digital content was estimated at 500 exabytes or over a trillion gigabytes – about 160 gigabytes for every man, woman or child on earth, or about 480 gigabytes for each internet user. Most of this information has been created since 1997. It is also estimated that during the single year 2013 internet traffic will be equivalent to all the information currently in existence.

These figures are dizzying and perhaps rather terrifying. Michael Lesk also calculates that the works of a single author such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Wordsworth occupy about one hundred megabytes of data, not so much a drop in the ocean of information, as an atom in a universe of data. How in this context are we to hang on to the resonances and evanescence of a single word in a single poem like ‘sequacious’? In this huge and inhuman world of information, poems start to look as fragile as butterfly wings.

[Slide: Square Kilometre Array: http://bit.ly/rOsHEU]

Scientists frequently deal with vast and intimidating problems of information. When the Square Kilometre Array, a sophisticated radio telescope, is built, it will produce four petabytes of data an hour. Each day, the Square Kilometre Array will process more information than is found in all the printed books in the world’s national libraries. Although film and video can for example generate large quantities of data, humanities scholars in general do not at present confront the same problems of scale of information that astronomers have to deal with. Humanities scholars are often much more preoccupied with the complexities of the smaller scale – with the problem of a word like ‘sequacious’. Nevertheless, in their approach to information, humanities scholars have tended to use approaches more appropriate to the large quantities of data dealt with by scientists. The main concerns of humanities computing have been with such issues as the modelling of data, its interoperability and sustainability, and the control and management of its growth. Yet many of the books, manuscripts, pictures, films sound recordings and artefacts with which humanities scholars are concerned resist such managerial approaches – they are messy, damaged, ambiguous in their meaning and complex in their structure. They refuse to be sequacious.

[Slide: Literature Online: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/]

Among the many commercial online packages on which humanities scholars and students have become increasingly reliant is Literature Online, which is produced by Proquest and contains a fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. Here is how The Eolian Harp appears in Literature Online, and this is nowadays likely to be the way in which many students first encounter the poem. We are presented with the text from the 1912 edition of Coleridge’s Poems, and everything looks reassuringly simple and straightforward. Admittedly this isn’t the most recent and authoritative edition of the poem, which was published by J. C . C. Mays in 2001, but there are problems running deeper than this. A study by Jack Stillinger has emphasized how Coleridge constantly revised and altered his poems, so that there are something like sixteen different versions of The Eolian Harp in manuscript and printed form, all dating from Coleridge’s lifetime. These range from 51 to 64 lines in length. Sometimes Coleridge presented the poem as a single section, and at other times he divided it into three, four or five paragraphs, so that the poem’s development could be more clearly followed. The various versions of the poem have different titles, reflecting Coleridge’s uncertainty as to the best way to convey the poem’s abstract and reflective character. Among the titles with which Coleridge experimented were ‘Effusion XXXV’ and ‘Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire’, and he only settled on the title ‘Eolian Harp’ in 1817. Stillinger comments: ‘There are too many differences [between these versions] to enumerate… they change the tone, the philosophical and religious ideas, and the basic structure rather drastically. The first recoverable version, ‘Effusion XXXV’, recounts an amusing incident of early married life, while the latest version is a much more serious affair’. Many of Coleridge’s poems are characterized by this textual instability – Stillinger calculates that there were at least eighteen different versions of The Ancient Mariner. In this context, we might wonder how far there was ever a single settled version of a poem like The Eolian Harp or The Ancient Mariner. Jeffrey Robinson’s process of ‘deforming’ The Eolian Harp can be seen as the continuation of a process in which Coleridge himself engaged for more than twenty years.

Users of Mays’s monumental edition of Coleridge’s poetry immediately realize how important this textual instability is in understanding both Coleridge and his poetry. The wealth of evidence for the changes in particular texts led Mays to divide his edition between, on the one hand, reading texts and, on the other, a bewildering variorum edition. In the case of The Eolian Harp it was even necessary for Mays to include in the Variorum edition photographs of annotated copies of Coleridge’s 1817 collection, Sibylline Leaves, illustrating Coleridge’s continued reshaping and development of his poem, and I have included one of these in your handout. None of this is even hinted at in Literature Online or other online presentations of the poem. Literature Online irons out the complexities and uncertainties of The Eolian Harp and reduces it to a piece of information which could be transmitted by telegraph. There is an irony here in that cultural commentators frequently emphasise the (often false) perception of online information as inherently ephemeral, volatile and unstable. Yet here the online version presents a very fixed image of a text that is, in its manuscript and printed version, very volatile and unstable. This instability reflects Coleridge’s attempts to replicate the fluidity and interconnectedness of conversation, and so is important in understanding the poem. These are precisely the issues we need to confront in considering the humanities in an information world: how to represent flux and fluidity, how to explore instability and uncertainty, how to represent the complexity of the minute. Scientists want to map the universe; humanities scholars want to investigate the universe contained in a single poem. And, as Coleridge’s work demonstrates, that poem may turn out to be more complex in its structure and interconnections than an entire galaxy.

[Slide: Coalbrookdale at Night: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._002.jpg]

We have been here before. This is a celebrated scene of the early industrial revolution at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. A sense of being overwhelmed by technology, of anxiety about the way in which new technologies are transforming society, while at the same time feeling excited at the material improvements which these changes might bring is a familiar – perhaps even a necessary – condition of modernity. A standard point of historical reference in thinking about the modern information revolution is the arrival of print in the fifteenth century, but perhaps a closer parallel is the way in which the growth of empire and the resulting changes in industry and agriculture transformed Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. David Simpson has pointed out how Wordsworth’s reference to ‘bright volumes of vapour’ in his poem ‘Poor Susan’ in the Lyrical Ballads may refer to the over-production of cheap and worthless literature – a data deluge whose effects preoccupied Wordsworth. The prostitute Susan in Simpson’s interpretation is one of an army of alienated and rootless people who pervade Wordsworth’s verse: beggars whose anxious movements reflect the pointless and repetitive movements associated with the introduction of machines; vagrant farmworkers who have been disconnected from the land by enclosure; discharged soldiers who move through the landscape like ghosts. Concerns about the nature of the society emerging at that time united such disparate figures as Burke and Cobbett. Burke fretted that the state was becoming ‘nothing better than a partnership agreement in trade of pepper or coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved at the fancy of the parties’. From a completely different stance, Cobbett expressed his horror at the way in which the cash nexus was becoming all pervasive: ‘We are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents’.

Part of our role as scholars of the digital humanities should undoubtedly be to challenge those glib historical claims frequently made about modern developments in information technology. A longer historical perspective suggests that today’s developments are but another step in a long revolution in in the structuring of knowledge and its representation. The invention of the codex at the beginning of the Christian era was just as remarkable as the appearance of the iPad. The creation of the biblical concordance in the twelfth century was equally revolutionary – the idea that sacred text could be broken up according to an external and abstract pattern of alphabetization verged on the sacrilegious. Without the Western adoption of Arabic conceptions of zero at about the same time, digitization would have been still born. And of all the mechanical inventions which transformed human life, few have had greater impact than the appearance of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century, factories and railways transformed the very structure of time. Each age has had its information revolution, but nevertheless it seems that what happened at the end of the eighteenth century dwarfed them all. We can see this by the way in which reactions to those changes which so alarmed Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke and Cobbett are still evident in our everyday language.

In his seminal work Culture and Society, Raymond Williams described how the great social and economic changes in Britain between 1760 and 1830 resulted in the development of new meanings for such key words as class, industry and artist. For example, the idea that the terms art and artist refer to the imaginative or creative arts first appears in this period, and was an attempt to affirm essential spiritual values in the face of the dehumanizing effects of the industrial and agricultural revolutions. Of these major ideological and conceptual shifts at the time of the Industrial Revolution, Williams singled out as particularly significant that term which has become a modern intellectual catch-all: culture. The modern concept of culture as meaning a general body of artistic achievement and activity and, eventually, a whole way of life was, again, a reaction to the appearance of modernity. Williams traces a tradition running from Burke and Cobbett through Romantic artists such as Coleridge and Wordsworth through to John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, and still evident in twentieth century commentators such as Eliot and Leavis, which articulates the idea of culture as a mechanism for preserving essential human values in the face of a society increasingly dominated by trade, manufacture and the earning of a living. Coleridge is a pivotal figure in this development, declaring to Wordsworth that there was a need for ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’. In his Essay on the Constitution of the Church and State Coleridge called for the creation of an endowed class known as the Clerisy or National Church whose business would be ‘general cultivation’. The Clerisy would consist of ‘the learned of all denominations: the sages and professors of all the so-called liberal arts and sciences’. Coleridge had a profound influence on the early development of King’s College London and may in many ways be seen as its presiding genius.

The idea of the humanities was at the heart of this early nineteenth century debate about resisting that mechanistic Utilitarian society which so entranced figures like Jeremy Bentham. Coleridge declared that his Clerisy would counter this mechanistic death of the spirit. The Clerisy would ‘remain at the fountainhead of the humanities, in cultivating the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science’. The humanities are thus another of those keywords which reflect the ideological shifts associated with the rise of modern society. Just as the definition of art shifted, so the older form of the word humanities, associated with the study of the litterae humaniores was discarded and replaced by a focus on that knowledge which would encourage, in Coleridge’s words, ‘ the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity’. Coleridge declared that his intention was to undo the entire philosophical and scientific superstructure associated with the measurement and geometry of the Newtonian world. In his view, this mechanistic concern with numbers and measurement threatened to destroy the life of the mind and crush the human spirit. The humanities were a reaction against modernity, and an affirmation of the human spirit against the cash nexus.

In this context, the idea of the digital humanities is problematic. At one level, the computer is simply a sophisticated spinning jenny. Indeed, the great-grandfather of the computer, Babbage’s difference engine, with its programmes developed by Ada Lovelace from the mechanisms used to control looms, was the most sophisticated and forward-looking product of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. The present information revolution could be seen as an attack by the heirs of Babbage on the very cultural arena established as a refuge against the mechanistic impulse. If we see the digital humanities as merely extending mechanistic arithmetical procedures into the realm of cultural endeavour then they indeed mark that death of the spirit which Coleridge so much feared. Alan Liu has brilliantly described in his Laws of Cool how modern computing is an instrument of that managerial impulse which seeks to make knowledge work as mechanical and controlled as work on a production line. Liu reminds us how the aesthetics and language of computing, with its excitement about the latest ‘cool’ medium, are a refuge from the grim reality of a cubicle in an open plan office on an industrial estate. In the end, Liu sees the digital humanities as an escape from the tyranny of the cool, but there is a sense of despair in his conclusion that the only reaction to art in such a situation is to deform and deface it, in a way which anticipates some of Jeffrey Robinson’s procedures in Untam’d Wing. The work of Liu and other commentators reminds us that the modern information revolution is not simply about machines and the capabilities of new technology. It is about how knowledge is being turned into a commodity, a data steam disconnected from those who produce it and turned to commercial advantage by monopolistic corporations. This is surely something which must be resisted, but it will not be achieved by using open source software or even by engaging in a strategy of resistance. We need precisely what Coleridge called for in his letter to Wordsworth: ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’. This cannot be achieved by escaping the digital; there is no escape from the digital, any more than there was from the industrial revolution. What is necessary is to reshape the digital world in Coleridge’s model. The creation of such a world is the mission of the digital humanities.

It would be easy to see Samuel Taylor Coleridge as opposed to science. However, as Nicholas Roe and others have recently emphasized, Coleridge was deeply preoccupied with science. He sought to ‘warm his mind with universal science’ and declared ‘I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine’. The Eolian Harp was partly prompted by Coleridge’s reading of materialist scientists such as Thomas Beddoes and Erasmus Darwin, and for Nicholas Roe the poem demonstrates that ‘for Coleridge at this moment there was no separation between imaginative writing and advanced science or ‘natural philosophy’. Coleridge’s preoccupation with science reflected his concern that physicians such as John Hunter only offered ‘mechanical solutions’ to the understanding of life. In 1824, Coleridge supplied notes on the ‘Idea of LIFE’ for Joseph Henry Green, who afterwards became the first Professor of Surgery here in King’s College London. For Coleridge, then, the first step in resisting the mechanistic spirit of the industrial revolution was a profound engagement with science. Likewise, if humanities scholars wish to ensure that their understanding and engagement with human knowledge does not become another Californian commodity, it is essential to engage with the digital world, and not as consumers but as creators.

This then is the challenge for the digital humanities: to create a new type of humanities which will transform science and technology and achieve a revolution comparable to that revolution of understanding sought by Coleridge. How have the digital humanities risen to this challenge? There can be no doubt that the practice of humanities scholarship has been transformed by the increasing availability of digital tools and resources over the past ten to fifteen years. A recent study by Mark Greengrass and Stephen Brown found that 89% of a sample of 149 humanities researchers used the Web on a daily basis and 77% had been using the Web for five years or more. Likewise, in the LAIRAH study, 81% of a sample of humanities researchers identified themselves as extensive users of digital resources, and 83% agreed that digital resources had changed the way in which they did their research. However, these studies also indicate a problem for the digital humanities. Overwhelmingly, the digital resources used by humanities scholars are commercial packages produced by libraries and digital publishers such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Early English Books Online, Literature Online or JSTOR. Usage of the specialist packages produced by digital humanities centres based in universities is, by contrast, very low. For many humanities scholars, the most pressing need in developing digital infrastructures is not to increase engagement with the digital humanities but rather to secure access to commercial packages which their institutions cannot afford, such as the monstrously expensive Parker Library on the Web.

The digital revolution has occurred, but its course was dictated by libraries and commercial publishers, and the digital humanities as formally constituted has largely stood on the sidelines. The well-known digital humanities centres in British universities such as King’s, Glasgow, Sheffield and Belfast have of course produced dozens of digital projects over the years, but the impact of these has generally been very limited compared with the major commercial packages. A great deal of effort has gone into developing subject associations for the digital humanities such as the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, but these look increasingly irrelevant and marginal to wider digital scholarship. The international Digital Humanities conferences are, as Jerome McGann has recently emphasized, preoccupied with inward-looking discussion on metadata and standards, and seek to establish what McGann calls ‘tight little disciplinary islands; tight little techie islands’ . Patrick Joula has recently produced a devastating analysis of academic journals for the digital humanities, showing that they are rarely cited by other scholars and fail to attract contributions from scholars in leading universities. The digital humanities consistently punch beneath their weight.

[Slide: Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0: http://www.toddpresner.com/?p=7]

There are signs of change on the horizon. The enthusiasm for the digital recently evident at major subject conferences such as MLA and the American Historical Association has received a great deal of publicity, but perhaps this is just another example of the digital humanities being proclaimed yet again as the next big thing, as has happened many times in the past. More exciting is the work of new groups such as HASTAC, which has been very successful in attracting to the digital humanities large new communities of young scholars who are not only culturally and critically engaged but also emphatically wired. It is striking how many of these younger scholars reject the older institutional structures of the digital humanities and seek, as a recent twitter and blog discussion urges, to transform DH. The case for a new digital humanities is also proclaimed in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 drafted by Todd Presner, Jeff Schnapp and others, which declares that ‘The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative … the second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character’.

Despite these recent bursts of optimism, however, the record of the digital humanities remains unimpressive compared to the great success of media and culture studies. Part of the reason for this failure of the digital humanities is structural. The digital humanities has struggled to escape from what McGann describes as ‘a haphazard, inefficient, and often jerry-built arrangement of intramural instruments, free-standing centers, labs, enterprises, and institutes, or special digital groups set up outside the traditional departmental structure of the university’. Such structures, McGann observes, ‘are expensive to run and the vast majority of the faculty have no use for them’. The only answer is to move these various labs and centres into the main academic structure, and this is why the decision by King’s to establish its long-standing Centre for Computing in the Humanities as an academic department and to merge its Centre for e-Research into the Department is very important. A second problem is that the digital humanities has not generated an intellectual programme and, more particularly, a teaching agenda comparable to the work of (say) Thomas Tout in pioneering history programmes at the University of Manchester at the beginning of the twentieth century or Leavis and Richards in creating the study of English literature in Cambridge in the 1930s or more recently Richard Hoggart at Birmingham in developing cultural studies. Pioneers like Leavis or Hoggart did not lack ambition for their new subjects. Both Leavis and Hoggart felt that their new academic disciplines would generate major social and cultural reforms. In the digital humanities, we need to emulate the ambition of a Leavis or a Hoggart and create new teaching programmes articulating new intellectual and social aspirations. I hope that a priority for King’s over the next few years will be to develop a single honours undergraduate programme in the digital humanities which will enable us clearly to set out our overall intellectual agenda.

In America, the growth of digital humanities has often been linked to English Departments, and Matthew Kirschenbaum has given a fascinating account of ‘What Is Digital humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?’ In Britain, digital humanities has struggled to find a similar relationship with an academic discipline. It has often developed from libraries and information services and it is frequently seen as a support service. One of the things that I am proudest of in my career is the way in which I have moved between being a curator, an academic and a librarian. Museums, galleries, libraries and archives are just as important to cultural health as universities. Indeed, I have found my time as a curator and librarian consistently far more intellectually exciting and challenging than being an academic. Institutions such as the British Library, the British Museum, the National Archives, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the House of Lords Library contain communities of scholars who possess the skills and understanding that will be essential to our society in negotiating a new digital order. I am particularly delighted tonight that my audience includes scholars from all these institutions. Digital innovation is more likely to come from libraries and information services than university departments. One of the great tragedies of university life in recent years has been the way that a distinction has grown up between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ staff, so that for example research active staff in university libraries are no longer eligible for return to the REF, effectively excluding from the academy precisely those people who are most needed by it at the moment. With the collapse of American academic job structures in recent years, there has been a great deal of talk about ‘alternate academic careers for scholars’ or alt-ac as the twitter tag puts it. But I worry that this suggests that libraries or museums are a kind of second best to universities. Far from it - libraries, museums, galleries should be at the heart of the academy. An important current experiment in this area is at the National Library of Wales, where the Chair of Digital Collections of the University of Wales is based within the Library. I am delighted that the holder of this first digital humanities chair based in a cultural institution is Lorna Hughes, previously from King’s, and we look forward to working closely with Lorna.

The Digital Humanities Manifesto declares that ‘Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar’. I think that hits the nail on the head as to what the digital humanities could become. The process whereby the curator became disconnected from the academy is a mysterious one, and deserves more study. When Frederic Madden, the great Victorian manuscript scholar, was prevented by family circumstances from pursuing his academic studies at Oxford, an appointment as an Assistant Librarian at the British Museum placed him at the heart of Victorian literary and historical scholarship. Likewise, Antonio Panizzi’s appointment to the British Museum in 1831 was a definite step up from his uncertain position as a Professor of Italian at University College London. It is a paradox that, in the late nineteenth century when modern scholarship was stressing the importance of rigorous documentary and textual analysis, the relationship between academic scholars and curators became fatally weakened. By the 1920s Sir Walter Greg and others were lamenting the failure of universities to undertake systematic work in descriptive bibliography. A similar story can be told of palaeography. Although Maitland declared at the beginning of the twentieth century how all history has been rewritten because of the study of manuscripts in libraries, and notwithstanding the initiative of King’s College in appointing Hubert Hall of the Public Record Office to a Chair of Palaeography in 1919, provision for teaching in palaeography has always been patchy. Palaeography has found it difficult to escape the stigma of being an ancillary discipline – something to be got out of the way before one got on with the real research. I look forward to working with our newly appointed Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies, Professor Julia Crick, in trying to address these issues.

Yet, despite the semi-detached relationship of disciplines like bibliography and palaeography with the academy, they should be recognized, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has reminded us, ‘ as among the most sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved’. Digital humanities offers a means by which disciplines such as bibliography, palaeography, diplomatic and museum studies can be brought back to the heart of the academy. Moreover, at the heart of these disciplines is the perception that our understanding of knowledge is inextricably bound up with the nature of the medium by which it is transmitted to us. The cultural threat of the digital lies in its commodification of knowledge – the way in which (as Robert Darnton has eloquently described in the case of the Google Book Settlement) knowledge is being turned into a monopoly generated and owned by private corporations. Yet this is only a risk if we see knowledge as data and forget its complex material base. The digital humanities should constantly engage with the materiality of knowledge. Kirschenbaum has forcefully reminded us how data is material, and in his grammatology of the hard drive reminds us how data is recorded on a funny whirring object which functions in a way very similar to a gramophone record. The study of such materialities of knowledge requires a much larger and more expansive engagement with science than if we simply see science as data crunching. By forming closer links with such curatorial disciplines as bibliography and palaeography, and connecting these with the theoretical insights of media and cultural studies, the digital humanities can reshape the academy and address those cultural imperatives which confront it.

[caption id="attachment_442" align="alignnone" width="621" caption="British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B.X, f. 54v"]

This digital image is now more than twenty years old, but for me it is an emblem of what the digital humanities can be. In 1731, the great manuscript library of Sir Robert Cotton was severely damaged in a fire. The library was afterwards one of the foundation collections of the British Museum and the unconserved fragments rescued from the fire were preserved in an attic room in the Museum. Sir Humphrey Davy was consulted as to means by which the fragments could be opened up for public use, and a large number of manuscripts were restored, but Frederic Madden was nevertheless horrified to discover in 1837 that thousands of burnt fragments like this one were still preserved in the attic. Madden began a conservation programme for this material which took over twenty years. Yet badly burnt fragments like this one, from an eleventh-century collection of Old English saints’ lives, remained illegible. By 1913, the American forensic scientist Elbridge Stein had demonstrated that ultra-violet light could be used to read damaged writing. In 1934, an ultra-violet cabinet, manufactured by a firm in which the Glasgow scientist Lord Kelvin was a partner, was installed in the British Museum and allowed documents such as this to be read. It was difficult however to get a stable image of the ultra-violet readings.

In the 1980s, my friend Professor Kevin Kiernan was working on these damaged Cotton manuscripts and wondered if there were other scientific methods available which could assist in this study. He was given advice on specialist imaging technologies by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and found the medical imaging equipment could be used to create digital images. He longed to try this new equipment on the burnt Cotton manuscripts. Finally, in 1993, I was able to assist him in getting the necessary access and the medical imaging firm Roche Kontron provided a camera and operator. The result was this image of a phrase in the burnt fragment. Nervous about transporting this image back to the United States only on a hard disc, a second copy was sent by phone modem and as far as I am aware this was the first digital image of a medieval manuscript transmitted across the Atlantic. The initial image was flooded with the blue of the ultra-violet light and required extensive image processing by Kevin to reveal the remnants of Old English script.

This was an experiment which was dependent on collaboration between the scholar, curator, conservator, scientist and imaging technician. We didn’t know whether the imaging equipment would work. The methods we adopted were dependent on scientific advice and guidance. We didn’t know whether the resulting image would ever reach the United States. But we definitely produced important research results.

[Slide: Hyperspectral imaging of the Declaration of Independence: http://engt.co/cVQmFL]

The history of the Cotton collection has been one of engagement with cutting edge science, ever since Humphrey Davy was consulted about the conservation of the fragments. Since our 1993 experiment, digital imaging of manuscripts has become routine and images under special lighting conditions have been produced of manuscripts ranging from early papyri to the early biblical manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, and the eighth-century Chad Gospels. It might be objected that such very specialist imaging techniques are only relevant to very early materials. This slide, however, shows hyperspectral imaging of a detail in one of the most celebrated modern documents, Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. This imaging under a variety of light wavelengths by the Library of Congress has recently revealed how, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson first used the words ‘fellow subjects’ and gradually altered them to ‘fellow citizens’. A similar project at the National Library of Scotland has recovered the illegible text of David Livingstone’s diaries. There are countless further research projects in this field which require close collaboration between scientist, humanities scholar, curator and conservator. Thousands of manuscripts were damaged in the nineteenth century by the application of chemical solutions in an attempt to read faint text. The residue of these solutions means that we cannot use the fluorescent effects of ink at different light wavelengths to recover the text. To address this problem requires further research into the chemistry of the ink and manuscripts, which in turn requires closer collaboration with scientists. This is the kind of project which should be at the heart of the digital humanities. The Diamond Light Source, Britain’s national synchrotron science facility, has recently been used successfully to investigate objects ranging from 18^th century Spanish manuscripts to Catalan altarpieces. This engagement with ‘big science’ will eventually give birth to a ‘big humanities’ but in order to achieve this we need new forms of dialogue with our scientific colleagues. Such methods are of course familiar in archaeology and art history. The digital humanities must strive to make this creative engagement with cutting-edge science more widespread.

Again, it might be felt that this stress on the materiality of our cultural heritage ignores sound or vision, both of which have become much more readily accessible as a result of digital resources. However, a digital version of the music on a cylinder or record only tells part of the story. We cannot understand the cultural significance of an album like Sergeant Pepper by accessing it on iTunes. The cover of Sergeant Pepper was a celebrated artwork in its own right and even the inner sleeve containing the record added to the overall impact of the album. It is impossible to understand the order and structuring of the music of an album like Sergeant Pepper without knowing that an LP record had two sides, or that there was a lock groove at the end of each side

[Slide: Mitchell and Kenyon: http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/mk]

Likewise, our understanding of film is inextricably bound up with its material basis. I was very lucky while I was at the University of Sheffield to be a member of a group of scholars who worked on the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, a remarkable archive of films of Edwardian life found in the basement of a shop in Blackburn. The restoration of these fragile nitrate films by the British Film Institute was itself a remarkable feat of scientific conservation. The sense we gain from the Mitchell and Kenyon films of proximity to everyday life was in part due to the fact that only the master negatives of the films survived. Most Edwardian films usually survive only in scratched and damaged copies which increase our sense of distance from the scenes depicted. The clarity of the Mitchell and Kenyon films change our relationship as viewers to these depictions of the past, in a fashion that raises questions about the relationship between viewer, cameraman, participant and medium.

[Slide: Data Sea: http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns030/]

Coleridge’s The Eolian Harp demonstrates how an engagement with the latest scientist discussion can directly contribute to great art. Jeffrey Robinson has also shown us how scholarship can inspire poetry. Both Coleridge and Robinson remind us that, in this dialogue between humanities scholar, scientist and curator, the creative artist also has a vital role. Digital art is increasingly breaking down many familiar disciplinary barriers and it has a key role to play in developing the next wave of the digital humanities. I was fascinated on my arrival at King’s to learn about the collaborations between the artist Michael Takeo Magruder and members of the Department of Digital Humanities. Michael’s artwork, Data Sea, created by him for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009 and installed in Thinktank at the Birmingham Science Museum, uses astronomical databases to create a three-dimensional artwork. Michael’s associates in creating this artwork were Drew Baker, for the 3D visualisations, and an astrophysicist, Johanna Jarvis. This is the kind of collaboration which would have delighted Coleridge, and it makes one think of how those vast data flows produced by the Square Kilometre Array may also provide material for artists.

[Slide: Abbey Theatre project: http://blog.oldabbeytheatre.net/posts/visualisation]

Visualisation techniques may seem like an escape from the material, but they are a powerful way of reengaging with a lost materiality. The Abbey Theatre in Dublin was destroyed by fire in 1951, but a virtual reconstruction by DDH’s Hugh Denard with colleagues from Trinity College Dublin enable the nature of the Abbey as a performance space to be explored and events such as the riot at the first performance of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World to be investigated in their material context.

[Slide: Oplontis: http://www.skenographia.cch.kcl.ac.uk/oplontis/index.html]

Visualisation is thus intimately bound up with the exploration of lost materialities and the recreation of old cultural spaces. An engagement between the virtual and the material is at the heart of this reconstruction by DDH’s Martin Blazeby. It shows a fresco from a Roman villa at Oplontis near Pompeii, and is one of a hundred rooms reconstructed in this way. On the left, you can see the surviving fragments of the fresco, and on the right its reconstruction by Martin.

[Slide: Vanishing Points: http://www.takeo.org/nspace/sl005/]

The work in reconstructing the lost villa at Oplontis has itself become the basis for an artwork by Michael Magruder and Hugh Denard called Vanishing Points which was commissioned for the 2010 Digital Humanities conference and was displayed in the Great Hall here in King’s.

In this and other examples I have shown you, science is used to explore the materiality of our engagement with the past and the nature of our achievements as human beings, thereby producing new art. This is surely the stuff of the ‘universal science’ which Coleridge sought to recreate. Such a new conjunction of scientist, curator, humanist and artist is what the digital humanities must strive to achieve. It is the only way of ensuring that we do not lose our souls in a world of data.

The Battle of the Books

2012-01-25T01:18:00.000-08:00

Many apologies for my neglect of this blog. I've been very preoccupied with researching and writing my inaugural lecture at King's College which I am giving tonight. The text of the lecture will be available here sometime tomorrow.

The timing of my lecture is due to our wish to link the King's College event to another inaugural lecture in the digital humanities, by my friend and colleague Professor Claire Warwick, the Head of the Department of Information Studies at University College London. Claire's very successful lecture last night (which crashed the server for the live stream, such was the interest) playfully explored the effectiveness of the inaugural lecture as a means of communicating knowledge. She pointed out how much work in the digital humanities is conducted through networking and collaboration, and suggested that the ex cathedra declarations of an inaugural lecture were not particularly useful in the context of such research. In particular, she stressed the need to acknowledge the contribution of the team and argued that there was a need to look at formats (particularly online formats) which gave the team much more visibility and recognition.

Sitting in the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre last night, my mind ran back nearly twenty years to a previous inaugural lecture by a new Head of what was then called the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at UCL, Robin Alston, who I remembered in a previous post on this blog. Robin had recently arrived from his work as consultant at The British Library, so the audience was swelled by many curators from the British Library. As previously noted, Robin was a great pioneer in the development of many of the digital resources we nowadays take for granted as a result of his work with the English Short Title Catalogue. Robin had a reputation as a visionary and the audience were full of anticipation. We were not disappointed - Robin gave a characteristically inspiring, enthralling and thought-provoking performance. I remember it was the first time I had ever heard of this term 'surfing' applied to the Internet. Robin's argument was a challenging one: that there were great risks attached to commercially driven programmes of mass digitisation that did not respect traditional bibliographic skills and arguments.

I recently revisited Robin's lecture, entitled The Battle of the Books, for a piece I wrote on transformations in the library for a new collection just published by Facet and edited by Lorna Hughes, called Evaluating and Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections. Rereading it after all this time I was astonished by how prescient Robin's comments were, particularly in the light of the Google Book Settlement controversies. I liked this quote:

"Of course it is possible to digitize and index the contents of all the world's important libraries and archives. In the 1930s Eugene Power demonstrated that it was possible to persuade libraries that we they needed was microfilm and created that juggernaut of unselective micropublishing University Microfilms. The question we must answer is, who could benefit from such a colossal enterprise? Commerce or knowledge? Are libraries in the control of visionaries or are they in the control of irresistible economic forces which we ignore at our peril?"

These are still very pertinent questions, and I will be considering them from a different angle in my own lecture tonight. Robin's Battle of the Books is still worth reading, and it is available here. If my own lecture proves a thought-provoking and as pertinent to our current digital dilemmas as Robin's, I will be a very happy man.

A Sequacious Riff

2011-10-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

The choice of name for this blog was inspired by a collection of poems called Untam'd Wing: Riffs on Romantic Poetry by my friend and former colleague at the University of Glasgow, Jeffrey C. Robinson, published by Station Hill Press. Jeffrey is a distinguished scholar of the English Romantic movement and an expert on William Wordsworth. He is also an accomplished poet and anthologist, winning the American Book Prize for the anthology Poems for the Millennium, which he edited with Jerome Rothenberg. Untam'd Wing is a remarkable experiment. Jeffrey takes the great monuments of Romantic poetry on which he has worked for many years, and subjects them to processes of poetic transformation. He reduces Wordsworth's celebrated sonnet 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge' to five key words which convey the ecstasy of a scene witnessed by early morning light. He splices lines and phrases from the poetry of Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge with lines from Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gertrude Stein and Paul Celan. Jeffrey finds new poems in marginal notes by Keats. He takes lines from famous sonnets of the Romantic period and mixes them up to create new sonnets which reveal unexpected and new interrelationships between the words, rhythm and imagery of the originals. He riffs on phrases and words in individual poems, setting out like a jazz musician to renew a body of standard work (in the way that, say, Miles Davies might revisit George Gershwin).

Some samples of Jeffrey's re-workings of Romantic poetry can be found on his website here. Much of the fascination of Jeffrey's work derives from the way in which it refocuses our attention on individual words and images in very familiar poems. Jeffrey suggests that the poetic quality of Romantic poetry comes from a mysterious 'unrepeatable place' in the poem. By his poetic deformations, splicings and re-orderings, Jeffrey's riffs create a situation in which 'language seeks to float on untamed wing free of its habitual moorings in syntax, form, measure, and narrative'. In Jeffrey's collection, we are constantly confronted with the evanescent quality of individual words and phrases in familiar poetry. A very good example is Jeffrey's treatment of Coleridge's poem 'The Eolian Harp', whose publication in 1795 is seen as a key moment in the development of Romantic poetry. Jeffrey draws our attention to Coleridge's use of the startling word 'sequacious', which rarely appears in English poetry. Jeffrey points out how the meaning of this word has developed over time: 'in the 17th century it meant 'following a leader slavishly'. In the 18th it was applied to objects, indicating the pliable or the flexible. And then Coleridge in 1795, just after the French Revolution, gives it a musical inflection - regularly following melody or rhythm'.

I have read 'The Eolian Harp' many times since I first developed an enthusiasm for Coleridge in my teens, but Jeffrey's poem made me think afresh about this word 'sequacious', which I had barely registered before. And this experience of being presented with new perspectives on Coleridge's poem made me wonder about how far the digital humanities can support this kind of experience, of rediscovering the transcendent and evanescent qualities of individual words and phrases in text. Increasingly, in using digital tools, our concern is to track a path through very large quantities of data. We want quickly to search our way through huge quantities of text, without really stopping to reflect a great deal on the language or poetics of that text. The digital seems to encourage whatever might be the opposite of close reading: rushed reading? superficial reading? digital reading?

If we try to use digital tools to reflect further on a word like 'sequacious', how do they help us? Well, at the simplest level we can use a dictionary to find the meaning of such an unfamiliar word. Indeed, most of the first ten pages from the 72,000 results in a Google search on 'sequacious' are from dictionary definitions. The limitations of Google are revealed in a disturbing way by a search on 'sequacious'. Google fails readily to produce much useful information about sequacious, such as that the word is used by Coleridge - you're about 12 pages in before there is a reference to a JSTOR article on 'The Eolian Harp'. If you already know that the word 'sequacious' appears in a poem, you might search on 'sequacious poem', but this causes Google to throw a hissy fit, and suggests that you must be mistaken and gives the results for 'loquacious poem' instead. If you insist on searching for 'sequacious poem', Coleridge will not be the first poet returned by Google. Instead it offers us a poem called More Sexually Sequacious Stuff by a retired clinical technologist from Minnesota called Walt Martin. It is only thanks to the Poetry Foundation that we come across 'The Eolian Harp', at the bottom of the first page of results. You really need to know that sequacious appears in a poem by Coleridge to get any useful returns from Google - which will then lead you to discussions by Douglas Kneale and Harold Bloom of Coleridge's use of the word.

Disappointed by the results of a Google search, we might turn to a specialist database such as ProQuest's Literature Online. But although 'The Eolian Harp' appears in Literature Online, oddly the quick search facility in Literature Online does not find Coleridge's poem when searched for 'sequacious', producing just one hit, a poem by Thomas Brown published in 1721 and beginning: 'As the sequacious wax with ease receives'. The quick search facility in Literature Online only searches the indexed database; a full text search of Literature Online is more satisfactory, returning not only Coleridge's poem but a reference by Dryden in his 1687 Song of St Cecilia's Day to 'sequacious of the lyre' which was perhaps an inspiration for Coleridge.

So, you can find something more about the word 'sequacious' with digital resources, but it takes some hunting and it helps if you know in advance that Coleridge used the word in 'The Eolian Harp'. Nevertheless, I can't help thinking that, in the midst of the vast quantities of data on the web, we lose sight of individual words like sequacious. It seems as if the web is determined to keep a word like sequacious anchored and tethered - to prevent it taking the 'untam'd wing'. Is this a result of the industrialisation and commodification of language which appears to be an inevitable concomitant of making use of digital machines to process language? Perhaps not. Digital poets and artists such as John Sparrow or John Cayley use different forms of digital presentation to focus our attention back on individual words. Likewise, a current exhibition at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork, In Other Words: the Place of Text in Recent Art, shows how contemporary artists have presented the resonances of individual words and letters. Perhaps digital humanities specialists need to engage more with this kind of work.

How do we recapture on the web that engagement with the poetics - with the wonder - of an individual word? An investigation on the web of a word like 'sequacious' will lead us in unexpected directions, which may not take us to Coleridge and Dryden but nevertheless raises some fascinating questions. Sequacious seems to have a curious and unexpected contemporary career. There is a Flickr user called Sequacious, a single woman called Rhett who lives in Santa Cruz. What attracted her to this word? Why did 'trainwreckmollie' (who describes herself as '19. Tattooed. Pierced. Bisexual. OCD. Medicated to the point where i'm finally normal. Has 2 people in my head. Draws, paints and tries to make things. Sings for the occasional band and such. Models. Is completely feral and childish. Is paranoid people can read my mind, especially when touching me. Has a fear of weighing over 46kg') give her Tumblr page the title 'Sequacious'? What attracted Roberta, a twenty-year-old Portuguese girl living in Herne Bay who also wants to be a model, to the word 'sequacious', so that she uses it to advertise her modelling portfolio and for her Tumblr blog? (The image at the top of this post is from Roberta's Tumblr account). Was the Melbourne DJ Evan Necker influenced by Coleridge in choosing the name 'Sequacious' for his alias - a very appropriate musical link for the word? The way in which pursuing this rare word taken from Coleridge (and, as Thomas de Quincey declared, a very distinctly Coleridgean word) leads us so quickly to find out so much about this distinctive mixture of people is in many ways more striking than the limited value of the web to investigate the use of 'sequacious' in literature.

The poetry of Jeffrey Robinson focuses our attention on the qualities of a single word like 'sequacious'. One of the challenges confronting those working in the digital humanities is to ensure that, in the concern to create large searchable databases, we do not lose sight of the resonances and fascination of a word such as 'sequacious' . Digital resources often teach us to look for large connections and patterns, but one of the functions of the digital humanities must also be to stress the importance of the small-scale and easily overlooked: the individual word, line or poem. When we refocus on those words, the web can reveal strange and sometimes surprising cross-connections.

Robin Alston's Library History Database

2011-10-08T04:45:00.000-07:00

I was sad to learn in July this year of the death of my old friend and mentor from British Library days, Robin Alston. Robin's achievements as a bibliographer were innumerable and fundamental to our present digital environment. In particular, I would single out his role as a driving force behind the creation of the English Short Title Catalogue. The availability of the ESTC has underpinned the development of such key digital resources as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Robin was a constant source of inspiration in developing new projects and ideas; it was his early experiments with a Mekel Microfilm scanner which led ultimately to the British Library's recent on-line presentation of the Burney collection of newspapers of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries. There's a wonderfully written obituary of Robin by Stephen Green available here.

Among Robin's projects from 1991 was the creation of a huge database of references to libraries in Great Britain to 1850. In compiling the Library History Database, Robin consulted over 1,500 published works and found references to over 30,000 libraries. Robin commented that 'Cultural historians have under-estimated the number of libraries available for reading, whether for entertainment or for self-improvement. As the data presented here demonstrates there was provision of print in almost every market town in the British Isles by the year 1820, and by 1850 in hundreds of villages with a population of less than 500 souls. The sheer variety of libraries so far discovered is quite extraordinary: libraries devoted to the arts and sciences; libraries in the workplace; libraries on omnibuses; libraries in inns; libraries on the estates of wealthy landowners provided for the workers; libraries associated with every type of society; village libraries provided by benevolent pastors'.

Robin generously made his database available on his personal website and it has been an indispensable resource for me ever since it appeared. It is planned to transfer the database to the web servers of the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, but this process appears to have taken some time, and earlier this year Robin's own site became unavailable, so that for some time it has not been possible to access the database directly.

However, fortunately the information on Robin's own website can be recovered from the Wayback Machine. Care has to be taken in using these archived copies, since the Wayback Machine snapshots do not always give the complete listing. These pdfs give the fullest version of the indexes to the Library History database posted by Robin on his website. The date of the Wayback Machine archived version used is given in brackets.

Robin's introduction to the project is available here. There are lists of libraries as follows: England (8 July 2006); Scotland (19 July 2006); Wales (8 July 2006); Ireland (excluding Dublin) (8 July 2009); Dublin (4 May 2009); Islands (4 May 2009). There is a consolidated index of places (20 July 2005). A breakdown of societies listed in the database (4 Jan. 2006) and some summary statistics (12 Oct. 2007) are also available. Finally, there is a consolidated list of sources used in compiling the database.

Robin was also in the process of producing a pioneering database of country house libraries. He wrote that 'The Country House Database represents a first attempt at listing country houses in the British Isles from the late medieval period to ca. 1850, together with an index to all the families so far traced as having occupied them. Certain types of house have been omitted (for fairly obvious reasons): Episcopal and Royal Palaces (some notable exceptions);Large vicarages (known to have contained libraries throughout their history); Castles with little history beyond the Civil War; Houses abandoned by the middle of the seventeenth century; Ecclesiastical buildings destroyed in the Dissolution; Houses for which no adequate evidence could be established regarding historical ownership; Houses which for most of their history were let rather than sold; Large farm houses. Some idea of the extent of these exclusions may be gathered by the fact that I have had to relegate to a subsidiary file over 1,000 houses. In the period between the first county directories (ca. 1820) and 1850 over 10,000 residences belonging to the gentry and minor aristocracy have been identified, but with negligible evidence for their history. While a fair proportion of these have survived, and are noted in Pevsner's monumental series of volumes covering buildings in the British Isles, almost nothing is known about the families that occupied them. Where possible I have included the names of well-known owners; details regarding the libraries (where any are known); dates when libraries were sold; demolition or destruction by fire; references to the considerable number of studies of country houses (national, county, local), particularly sources, like Campbell, Neale, or Morris, which have illustrations; rebuilding, remodelling, and enlarging'.

The following are the listings, as preserved in the Wayback Machine, of the Country House Database in England (1 Feb. 2009), Scotland (1 Jan. 2009), Wales (1 Jan. 2009), Ireland (1 Jan. 2009) and the Islands (1 Jan. 2009).

On sources for the Country House Database, Robin wrote that: 'In order to keep entries as brief as possible most sources are given abbreviated reference, but there is a full list of the large number of sources on which the database has been built. These include older (but indispensable) national sources such as J.B. Burke's Visitation (1852-55); early guide books and directories; county and town histories; modern national and county surveys; all the volumes of the Victoria County History which have published volumes dealing with manorial history; accounts by contemporary travelers (from Leland to Cromwell); articles in Country Life; brief histories of houses, frequently published privately and difficult to locate; estate sale catalogues (the best collection is in the Cambridge University Library); auction sale records. The best collection of works, including rare pamphlets, is in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I had originally intended to list family histories, but keeping up with genealogical literature is quite impossible for a single labourer in the vineyard! Recent publications on historic buildings can be found at the English Heritage site. A number of the larger country houses now have promotional websites, but these generally do not provide any useful information about their libraries or owners'.

On the family index to the Country House database, Robin commented that 'This index contains over 7,000 records for families identified with the 4,000+ houses listed. In cases where a house had numerous owners, some for only a brief period, I have compromised historical completeness by listing only the most important owners. One important discovery of my researches concerns the number of houses owned by a single family during the period covered: a staggering 2,194. The number of houses with just two owners is 1007. For published family histories T.R. Thomson's A Catalogue of British Family Histories (London, Society of Genealogists, 1980) is invaluable. For the aristocracy the standard works by Burke, O'Hart, Doyle, Douglas, and the 12 volume Complete Peerage (London, 1910-53) contain vast amounts of accurate information'.

As part of the work on the Country House Database, Robin was also compiling a list of private owners of books, and his preliminary findings as preserved in the Wayback Machine can be seen here (1 Jan. 2009). In connection with this work, Robin also compiled a preliminary list of members of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries.