How the Web Can Make Books Vanish

I have recently (in the odd moments allowed to me by that anti-intellectual managerialist nightmare with the Orwellian Newspeak name, the Research Excellence Framework) been preparing for publication my keynote talk at the first Sheffield Digital Humanities Congress last year, Made in Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities. This considers how looking at the history of the Industrial Revolution can help us understand current digital transformations. Among recent scholarly publications on the industrial revolution, I particularly enjoyed Emma Griffin’s Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).  Griffin uses autobiographies by working men and women to reexamine the debate about the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the standard of living and quality of life. Griffin’s introduction discusses the use of quantification in academic discussion of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the life of ordinary people, reminding us of Sir John Clapham’s trenchant dismissal of ‘historians who neglect quantities’ and E. P. Thomson’s riposte that ‘it is quite possible for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions’.

Griffin’s emphasis on the importance of quantification in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution is itself very pertinent to current discussion of the role of quantification in humanities research (and particularly as part of the digital humanities). Griffin reminds us that sophisticated quantitative techniques have been used by historians writing about the Industrial Revolution since the 1920s. The impression is sometimes given by enthusiasts for quantification in the digital humanities that it offers an escape route from the thickets of theory and will create more authoritative conclusions. A moment’s glance at the use of statistics in studying the Industrial Revolution will quickly dispel any such thoughts. The apparently authoritative statistics on British economic growth prepared by Deane and Cole, which provided the basis for Rostow’s theory that there were set conditions for ‘lift off’ into economic growth, were undermined by Crafts, who questioned the methods used by Deane and Cole and produced statistics which suggested that it was very difficult to measure substantial economic growth in Britain in the late eighteenth century, indicating that the early effects of the Industrial Revolution were limited to particular industries and localities. The literature about British economic growth rates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests that quantification isn’t a route to clarity but rather a means of creating greater uncertainty and complexity.

Griffin laments the current stress on quantification among historians working on the Industrial Revolution: ‘Producing graphs and tables is more in vogue than asking how workers felt’ (p. 15). Moreover, Griffin suggests that the picture produced by such measurements is rather monochrome: ‘However living standards are measured, historians report stagnation or decline. Evidence of modest rises is gloomily dismissed as a paltry recompense for the labouring families that had done the most to create the substantial economic growth that occurred over the period …Today’s intellectuals understand the industrial revolution in much the same way as the educate elites who lived through it’ (p. 17).  In Griffin’s view, if one looks at the autobiographies by ordinary men and (sometimes) women which began to appear in increasing quantities from the beginning of the nineteenth century, a different impression emerges. Griffin uses these autobiographies to question some of the accepted criticisms of industrialization. She finds that, for many people, factory work might offer an escape from the misery and uncertainty of a subsistence life in the countryside. She suggests that the growth in child labour had more complex roots than ruthless economic exploitation. Griffin uses these autobiographical recollections to reconstruct working class lives as more than economic abstractions and considers the importance of (for example) sex, religion and education in making up the quality of life.

Griffin expresses amazement that more use has not previously been made of these autobiographies: ‘It is surely surprising that in spite of the ongoing interest in how the industrial revolution was experienced by the poor, no one has opened the pages of the books and notebooks where the poor wrote about just that. Historians have measured wages and working hours with meticulous care, yet none have sought to listen to, or make sense of, the messy tales that the workers left behind … If we listen rather than count, we shall start to see the industrial revolution in a very different light’ (p. 16). There are obvious issues about the autobiographies used by Griffin as a corpus of evidence, and she is very conscious of these (e.g. p. 25).  Griffin uses just over 350 autobiographies – a slender sample with which to investigate such a complex phenomenon as industrialization, although it is remarkable that so many memoirs by ordinary men and women survive. The sample is dominated overwhelmingly by men – Griffin reports cases in which the idea that a woman’s life could ever be worth describing was dismissed as ludicrous. Many of these men had made good as teachers, preachers, poets, engineers or politicians, or wanted to tell us how they had succeeded, perhaps as a result of the virtues of temperance. The authors may have had experience of working class life, but they were rarely simply ordinary people – these memoirs are not the voice of the poor, by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet these autobiographies are fascinating and compelling documents. I cannot possibly do justice to them here – I can only recommend that you read Emma Griffin’s book. Griffin describes how ‘Most of the autobiographies that have survived appeared in print during or soon after the author’s lifetime. A few were even commercial successes. James Dawson Burn’s Autobiography was published in 1855, and by the end of the decade had gone into its fourth edition. Others were published in small numbers by obscure provincial printers, more for the writer’s satisfaction than in response to any public demand. John Robinson’s Short Account of the Life of John Robinson was as short as its title promised – just one page long. Robinson was a printer and probably published his short account himself. It seems likely that the copy held by Torquay Central Library is the only one now in existence’ (p. 5).  

The lack of a digital dimension to Griffin’s research is striking. The process she describes is one of finding forgotten items in dusty archives. Yet the period she discusses – the first half of the nineteenth century – is one where we assume that digital online coverage of published books is quite good. These are books which don't present many copyright problems, and it seems reasonable to assume that many of them will have been covered already by the mass digitisaton programmes of Google, Microsoft et al., and be accessible via Google Books, the Internet Archive and so on. Indeed, perhaps it would be feasible to assemble enough online versions of these working class autobiographies to use some quantification techniques on the text, and see how the results compare with Griffin’s qualitative explorations. What type of language was used in discussing factory work? How were conditions in towns described? Maybe we could even envisage some sentiment analysis of these texts. The potential of these documents for quantatitive analysis has already been demonstrated by Jane Humphries, who has used them in this way in her study of Childhood and Childhood Labour in the Industrial Revolution (2010).  By mining the digital versions of these autobiographies, perhaps we can dissolve the quantification / qualitative polarities in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, and develop a new type of discourse about the effects of industrialization. But the practicability of such an approach would be dependent on the extent to which our autobiographies are available in digital form.

A key tool in Griffin’s research was a monumental annotated critical bibliography of The Autobiography of the Working Class edited by John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, which was published in three volumes from 1984-9 and lists over two thousand autobiographies by people of working class origin produced between 1790 and 1945. Griffin notes that many more items have come to light since these volumes were prepared (p. 248), but they are nevertheless the starting point in attempting to appraise digital coverage of this material. Many of the items described by Burnett et al are in manuscript or typescript form, but a very large proportion are published, and we can hope that many of the earlier items are available online. (On Burnett's Bibliography, see further the archive kept at Brunel University.)

Prior to 1800, the English Short Title Catalogue, representing decades of intensive bibliographic research, provides an authoritative record of the printed output of the English-speaking world, and the ESTC underpins the digital libraries of Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (although even the ESTC is not comprehensive. Between 1788 and 1793, Thomas Johnson, an influential designer, carver and gilder, published an anthology called Summer Productions; or, Progressive Miscellanies, which contains at the end of the sixth volume an account of his life. The ESTC only notes the first volume, which is in the British Library. In 2003, Jacob Simon pointed out that there were copies of the remaining five volumes in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, and published Johnson's Autobiography in Furniture History 39, pp. 1-64) . But most of the printed autobiographies in which we are interested were produced after 1800. Burnett’s bibliography only covers items produced after 1790, and only three items in it were printed before 1800  (Vol. 1, nos. 15, 472, 507).  Griffin, going back to 1700, adds a further six items, giving us nine recorded working-class autobiographies between 1700 and 1800. By contrast, the Bibliography records over 80 working class autobiographies produced between 1800 and 1849, which (as Griffin observes) itself tells us a great deal about changes in working class literacy and access to means of communication.

The nine eighteenth-century autobiographies are all carefully recorded in the ESTC and as a result duly appear in Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Here are the ESTC entries in chronological order, with links to the ECCO facsimile. Where only one edition of the work appears in ECCO, I have given the entry for that edition.  Where copies are available via Google Books or the Internet Archive, I have also given a link.

Tryon, Thomas, 1634-1703.  Some memoirs of the life of Mr. Tho. Tryon, late of London, merchant: Written by himself: together with some rules, and orders, proper to be observed by all such as would train up and govern, either familes, or societies, in cleanness, temperance, and innocency. (London : Printed, by T. Sowle, in White-Hart-Court, in Gracious-Street, 1705.) ECCO copy.

Chubb, Thomas, 1679-1747.  The posthumous works of Mr. Thomas Chubb: containing, I. Remarks on the Scriptures. II. Observations on the Reverend Mr. Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses. III. The author's farewel to his Readers; comprehending a Variety of Tracts, on the most important Subjects of Religion. With an appendix, including a postscript to his four last Dissertations, more particularly relative to that on the History of Melchizedek. To the whole is prefixed, some account of the author : written by himself. In two volumes. ... (London : printed for R. Baldwin, jun. at the Rose in Pater-Noster-Row; and sold by E. Easton, in Silver-Street, Sarum, M.DCC.XLVIII. [1748]). ECCO copy. HATHI Trust copy. Google Books copy.

Bewley, George, 1683 or 4-1749.  A narrative of the Christian experiences of George Bewley, late of the City of Corke, deceased. Written by himself: And Published with the Approbation, and by Order of the National Half-Year's Meeting, held in Dublin in the third Month, 1750. (Dublin : printed by I. Jackson at the Globe in Meath-Street, 1750.)  ECCO copy.

Bangs, Benjamin, 1652-1741.  Memoirs of the life and convincement of that worthy Friend, Benjamin Bangs, late of Stockport in Cheshire, deceased; mostly taken from his own mouth, by Joseph Hobson. (London : printed and sold by Luke Hinde at the Bible in George-Yard, Lombard-Street, [1757]). ECCO copy.

Barker, Robert, b. 1729.  The unfortunate shipwright: Or, Cruel captain. Being a faithful narrative of the unparallel'd sufferings of Robert Barker, late carpenter on board the thetis snow of Bristol, in a voyage to the coast of Guinea and Antigua. (London : Printed for, and sold by the author, and may be had at Mr. Samuel Collins's, the sign of the Card-maker's Arms on Garlick Hill, London, and no where else, 1758.)  ECCO copy. [A copy of the 1759 edition is available via Google Books]. 
Barker, Robert, b. 1729.  Unfortunate shipwright. Part 2  (Published according to act of Parliament.) The second part of the unfortunate shipwright; or, The blind man's travels through many parts of England, in pursuit of his right: ([Dublin] : London, printed: and Dublin reprinted for Robert Barker, for his own benefit, in the year, 1766.) ECCO copy. 
MacDonald, John, b. 1741?.  Travels, in various parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, during a series of thirty years and upwards. By John Macdonald, A Cadet of the Family of Keppoch in Inverness-Shire; who, After the Ruin of his Family in 1745, was thrown when a Child on the wide World; the Ways of which, with many curious, useful, and interesting Particulars he had occasion to observe, and has taken care, by Means of a regular Journal, to record, while he served, in various departments, a great number of Noblemen and Gentlemen, English, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, &c. &c. (London : printed for the author, and sold by J. Forbes, Covent-Garden, MDCCXC. [1790]). ECCO copy. 
Memoirs of a printer's devil; interspersed with pleasing recollections, local descriptions, and anecdotes. (Gainsborough : printed and sold by J. M. Mozley and Co. for the author: and sold by Messrs. Rivington, St. Paul's-Church-Yard, London, M.DCC.XCIII. [1793]) ECCO copy. 
McKaen, James, 1752 or 3-1797.  Genuine copy. The life of James M'Kaen, shoemaker in Glasgow, [w]ho was executed at the Cross of Glasgow, on Wednesday the 25th Jan. 1797. For the murder and robbery of James Buchanan, the Lanark carrier. [ Second edition.] (Glasgow : Printed for and sold by Brash and Reid, [1797]). ECCO copy. 
Anderson, Edward, 18th cent.  The sailor; a poem. Description of his going to sea, and through various scenes of life, ... with observations on the town of Liverpool. By Edward Anderson, ... (Newcastle : printed for and sold by the author. M. Angus and Son, Printers, Side, Newcastle, [1800?]) ECCO copy.  

So for books published before 1800, that remarkable bibliographic achievement, the ESTC, and the resoures derived from it such as ECCO, ensure that we can easily trace obscure voices like that of Robert Barker or Benjamin Bangs. It is worth noting in passing that humbler folk like these are not so well served by other initiatives such as Google Books or the HATHI Trust. While most (but not all) of these works feature as catalogue entries in Google Books, only one is reproduced in facsimile in the Googl;e library so far (which is also the only one to be picked up by the HATHI Trust, showing how the selectivity of these initiatives can become self-reinforcing).

From 1800, paradoxically, as working class autobiographies become more commonplace, they start to disappear from the web. This is partly because the bibliographical infrastructure is less comprehensive from 1800. As noted, to 1800 we have the ESTC which attempts to record every known publication from the English-speaking world. A Nineteenth-Century Short Title catalogue was produced in print and CD-ROM by Avero Publications between 1983 and 2003 and there is an online version which continures to be updated, but, even though this contains more than 1,275,000 items, it is based on the holdings of big league research libraries: the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress, the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the National Library of Scotland and the University Libraries of Cambridge and Newcastle.That means a book that survives in a single copy in Torquay Public Library will not be mentioned. If a book was published in the nineteenth century (and likewise for much of the twentieth century), it needed to have had the social, intellectual or moral prestige to make it worthy of inclusion in one of the super-elite libraries of the English-speaking world. And, if it didn't make its way into these august collections, then it probably won't make it onto the web either, because the blinkered assumption of projects like Google Books and the HATHI Trust is that the sum of human knowledge and understanding is only to be found in elite top notch institutions, and not in Torquay Public Library.

Let us take as an illustration the autobiography found by Griffin in Torquay: A Short Account of the Life of John Robinson, printed by Robinson himself in Torquay in 1882. This does not appear in the Bibliography of Burnett et al., and Griffin speculates that the copy in Torquay Public Library is the only one surviving. Not surprisingly, it is not in the NSTC. A natural next port of call would be COPAC, which declares that 'In a single search you can discover the holdings of the UK’s national libraries (including the British Library), many University libraries, and specialist research libraries'. COPAC stands for 'CURL Online Public Access Catalogue'. CURL was the Consortium of University Libraries, a co-ordinating group for libraries as universities which regarded themselves as elite, now re-branded as Research Libraries UK. Broadly, the membership of RLUK is those elite universities which belong to what is called the Russell Group. There are one or two non-Russell Group universities in RLUK, but generally non-Russell Group universities such as Aberystwyth University, Bangor University, Hull University, Kent University and Sussex University, all of which have important and interesting research collections, are not deemed worthy of inclusion in the COPAC club. COPAC has recently been extending its coverage to other specialist collections, including some which are major resources for working class history such as the Bishopsgate Institute and the Humanist Library at Conway Hall, but no public library collections have so far passed the august portals of COPAC.

A better alternative in searching for this type of material is WorldCat, run by the world's biggest and most important library consortium, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) which has developed from an association of Ohio Libraries and Colleges who wanted to share cataloguing and other resources. Many of the bibliographic products produced by OCLC are indispensable to running a large modern library service and virtually every major library service in the UK is a member and contributes its catalogue records to WorldCat. This includes the university libraries omitted from COPAC, as well as public library services such as Torbay Library Services. WorldCat altogether combines the catalogues of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide. However the size of WorldCat can be a hindrance if you are looking for specific items. In this case, the fact that 'short account life robinson' (and other similar search strategies) wil result in hundreds of hits on WotldCat. The single sheet in Torquay is probably somewhere, but it is searching for a needle in a haystack.

Annoyingly, WorldCat doesn't have an easy means of restricting searches to particular libraries. So the simplest thing to do is to go direct to the online catalogue for Torbay Library Services, where a search for 'robinson' as author and 'short' in the title produces the following very gnomic catalogue entry:

RCN - ISBN/ISSN/BNB          D02006836X

Personal Name          Robinson, J.

Main Title       A short account of the life of john robinson

Publication     As author

# TORQUAY LOCAL HISTORY          D929/ROB PAM        Not for loan    Local History/Studies

         
Part of the difficulty in locating this item in WorldCat was because this original catalogue information is so limited - an indication of place or approximate date of publication would have assisted in locating the information on WorldCat. It is sometimes suggested that catalogue information and formats are becoming irrelevant because of the power of Google as a search tool, but of course the quality of Google searches depend on the underlying information. WorldCat records have been ingested into Google Books, presumably to help direct future digitisation work, but the restricted information in this catalogue entry effectively obscures it. A Google search for 'john robinson torquay' doesn't retrieve the catalogue entry in the first ten hits. A search for "short account of the life of john robinson" does the job, but the lack of information in the original catalogue entry makes the Google Book entry virtually meaningless:

It will probably be a very long time before we see a digitised version of Robinson's account of his life in Google Books. It is ironic that it is through Emma Griffin's own reference to Robinson's little autobiography that this item is beginning to develop a footprint in Google (to which this blog entry will, of course, add). In selecting items for digitisation in Google Books and other mass digitisation projects, priority is given to such 'great libraries' as the Bodleian Library, Harvard University Library and the British Library. The assumption appears to be that the contents of these libraries embraces the whole of human knowledge and understanding. For the British partners, it is assumed that legal deposit under the terms of copyright legislation means that the libraries have a copy of every book ever printed in the UK. But in the British Library (for example) legal deposit was not systematically enforced until the late 1840s and it is unlikely that librarians at the British Museum before that date would have taken much interest in acquiring what would have been seen as such ephemeral material as the autobiographies used by Griffin. Moreover, many items received under legal deposit considered of ephemeral interest were not fully catalogued by the British Library but placed under generic 'dump' headings. The ESTC found that there were something like 50,000-60,000 forgotten items from the eighteenth century in the British Library. These have now been largely identified and catalogued for items up to 1800, but no such similar exercise has occurred for the nineteenth century, and there can be no doubt that many further working class autobiographies languish under such dump catalogue entries.

Although WorldCat and Google Books are wonderful resources, the problem is that they reinforce an assumption that by simply linking up the catalogues of major libraries gives us comprehensive coverage in a quick and painless process. As a result, we found ourselves silently and surreptitiously enmeshed in the world view and cultural assumptions which shaped those elite libraries. The problem is that, in working with resources like Google Books, we soon cease to have any sense of how these resources are silently constraining and altering our research. You can begin to get a sense of the perils of this process by looking more closely at the way which the digital representation of the working class autobiographies used by Emma Griffin is highly filtered, with a significant quantity of material disappearing from sight altogether.

Those writers of working class origins who had a success story to report, who had become distinguished statesmen, successful businessmen, religious leaders and so on, were able to find commercial publishers who were interested in their story. Writers whose life demonstrated the virtues of temperance, prudence and self-help were of course particularly favoured. Books published by major commercial publishers would be picked up by the legal deposit libraries in Britain, and might even excite interest across the Atlantic. As a result, it is these volumes which we tend to find in such resources as Google Books, the Internet Archive and the HATHI Trust. Here are some examples:

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 125]. [CAMPKIN, J.], The Struggles of a Village Lad (William Tweedie: London, 1859). Google Books copy (from The British Library).

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 241]. FLOCKHART, Robert. The Street Preacher, being the Autobiography of Robert Flockhart, late corporal 81st Regiment (Adam and Charles Black: Edinburgh, 1858). Google Books copy (from Harvard); HATHI Trust copy (also from Harvard).

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 331]. HILLOCKS, James Inches. My Life and Labours in London, a step nearer the mark (William Freeman: London, 1865). Cheap edn., Mission Life in London (London, 1865). Google Books copy of cheap edition (from Oxford), also available at Internet Archive.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 632] [SMITH, Charles Manby], The Working Man's Way in the World, being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer (William and Frederick G. Cash: London [1853]). Google Books copy (from Harvard), also in Internet Archive and HATHI Trust (with additional copy in New York Public Library). 

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 675] ANON., Struggles for Life; or, the Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister (W. and F. G. Cash, London; John Menzies, Edinburgh: 1854 [1853]; new edn. The Book Society, Hamilton, Adams and Co., Jarrold and Sons: London, 1864). Google Books copy, from an American edition printed by Lindsay and Blakiston, Philadelphia, 1854, in Harvard Libraries, where a cataloguer has identified the author as William Leask. This copy also in HATHI Trust catalogue.

These autobiographies for one reason or the other caught the attention of librarians and collectors and made their way to the respectable havens of Harvard and the British Museum, where they have been picked up by Google, HATHI and so on. In comparing the contents of the bibliography compiled with Burnett et al. with Google Books, the surprising thing is the large number of the nineteenth century autobiographies, most of which present no copyright issues, are represented only by catalogue entries with no digitisation. This is a reminder of how far Google Books remains a very incomplete (indeed, barely started) enterprise, even for pre-1900 material. In some cases, digitised versions of autobiographies (derived from a microfilm edition of some items in the British Library from Burnett's Bibliography) are available via the Gale subscription resource, Nineteenth Century Collections Online (these electronic versions are picked up by COPAC). However, what is the most surprising and startling aspect of examining the digital presence of these working class autobiographies is the large number which escaped the bibliographical net altogether. As a result, these everyday voices have effectively vanished from the web, except where a modern scholar happens to have discussed them and this discussion has been picked up by Google. Let us examine a few cases to illustrate the process.

Edward Davis was born in Aston started working in a button factory at the age of six. He became a Quaker in 1858 and, having been apprenticed to a pearl button manufacturer and then built up a confectionery trade, eventually became a teacher. In 1898, the firm of White and Pike published a short pamphlet by Davis entitled Some Passages from My Life, Davis presumably paying for the publication. This is No. 204 in Vol. 1 of the Burnett bibliography, which states that there is a copy in Birmingham Reference Library. This is not on the online catalogue of Birmingham Libraries, presumably because it is only recorded on a card catalogue which has not been converted to an online form. Since the book is not recorded in the Birmingham catalogue, it is not in WorldCat. And as a result of this, there is no catalogue entry for Davis's little book in Google Books, the HATHI Trust, or The Open Library. Davis's book hasn't completely vanished from the web, however. A xerox of the copy in Birmingham was made at some point (presumably because of the entry in Burnett's bibliography) and deposited in Oxford University, so there is an entry for this photocopy on COPAC.
Other autobiographies have been more completely obscured by the way in which digitisation has proceeded. John Finney worked in the Potteries from the age of 13 and in 1902 published Sixty Years Recollection of an Etruscan (J. G. Fenn, Stoke-on-Trent, 1902), which is No. 57 in Vol. 3 of the Bibliography. The Bibliography records that there is a copy in the Horace Barks Reference Library in Hanley. In many cases, holdings of local history libraries and reference libraries remain as card catalogues, and the online catalogue for Stoke libraries does not refer to Finney's book. So, once again, it is absent from our major catalogues - no entry for Finney's book in WorldCat or COPAC. As a result, Google Books denies all knowedge of such a book. A general Google web search on 'John Finney Etruscan' will tell us that this is an engaging work, but we can find out nothing else about it or where to get it.

Another example: Benjamin North was born at Thame in Oxford in 1811, the 8th child of a labourer. He was a boy shepherd, bird-keeper, plough-boy, and groom, then trained as a paper-maker, but was made redundant by the introduction of new machinery. He eventually became a traveller for a chair-maker and set up a successful furniture business in High Wycombe. North's autobiography was published after his death by his son, and is No. 129 in Vol. 3 of the Bibliography: Autobiography of Benjamin North, with a preface by W.H., to which is appended a brief notice of his last moments, by his eldest son (Fred K. Samuels, Aylesbury, 1882). A copy is recorded in the Local Collection Reference Library in High Wycombe. The entry in the Buckinghamshire Libraries online catalogue states that the copy in High Wycombe is a photocopy. Buckinghamshire Libraries are members of OCLC, so perhaps it is because the High Wycombe copy is stated to be a photocopy that the entry for North's memoirs does not appear in WorldCat. Whatever the explanation, this is another book that the web has caused to vanish: no entry in WorldCat, nothing in COPAC, no report on Google Books. The only trace of its existence in Google is where it is cited by historians such as Emma Griffin or Jane Humphries in her book on Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution.
We could continue to mount up examples of working class autobiographies listed in the Bibliography of Burnett, Vincent and Mayall which have vanished from our main online bibliographic resources such as WorldCat and Google Books and have in effect been suppressed by the web. Here is a random list made from first preliminary checks against the Bibliography:

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 26] Autobiographies of Industrial School Children (T. Nelson and Sons: London, 1865). Ten short narratives by boys and girls who attended industrial schools in Aberdeen. A copy is reported in Aberdeen Central Library.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 41] BARBER, Mrs M. Five Score and Ten. A True Narrative of the Long Life and Many Hardships of M. Barber, taken down from her own dictation, a short time before her death and who died at the advanced age of nearly one hundred and eleven years (Penny and Makeig, Crewkerne, 1840). Copy reported in Bristol Central Library, the website for which explains clearly why this little book hasn't made its way onto the web: 'Much of the older reference stock from before 1985 will not be found on the online catalogue. These records are still held on card catalogue files in the Reference Library'.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 47] BARNETT, Will. The Life Story of Will Barnett, better known as the ex-jockey. Written by himself (Spurgeon Memorial Press: Congleton, [1911?]). Copy in Horace Barks Reference Library, Hanley.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 71] BLOW, John. The Autobiography of John Blow (J. Parrott: Leeds, 1870). Copy in Leeds Public Library.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 213] DUKE, Robert Rippon. An Autobiography, 1817-1902 (Privately published: Buxton, 1902). Copy in Derbyshire County Library, Matlock. Duke, having been apprenticed to a caprenter at the age of 14, became an architect and was responsible for much of the development of Buxton, so there are published biographies and further information about him on the web, but the existence of this published autobiography is only mentioned in passing.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 263] GIBBS, John. The Life and Experience of, and some traces of the Lord's gracious dealings towards the author, John Gibbs, Minister of the Gospel, at the Chapel of Saint John Street, Lewes (Printed for the author: Lewes, 1827). On this book. see now in addition the Annual Report of the East Sussex County Record Office 2008-9, p. 13.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 299] HANBY, George. Autobiography of a Colliery Weighman (Brewin and Davis: Barnsley, 1874). Copy in Barnsley Public Library.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 300] HANSON, William. The Life of William Hanson, written by himself (in his 80th year) and revised by a friend (Privately published: Halifax, 1883). Another edition was published by J. Walsh in Halifax in 1884. Copies in Halifax Public Library.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 478]  McNAUGHTON, John Donkin. The Life and Happy Experience of John Donkin McNaughton. Written by Himself (H. Masterman: Thirsk, [1810?]). Burnett et al don't give a location for this item - presumably it is recorded only on a card catalogue somewhere in North Yorkshire County Libraries.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 542] [OVERSBY, W. T.] A Life's Romance. By a Successful Insurance Man (Liverpool Daily Post: Liverpool, 1938). Copy in Blackburn Central Library.
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 568] RAGG, Thomas. God's Dealings with an Infidel: or, Grace Triumphant: being the Autobiography of Thomas Ragg, author of Creation's Testimony to its God' (Piper, Stephenson and Spence: London, 1858). Copy reported in Local Studies Department, Central Reference Library, Birmingham.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 598] ROONEY, Ralph. The Story of My Life (Bury Times: Bury, 1947). 3 editions are reported in Burnett, all held by the Local Studies Collection in Preston, but none of them are apparently in WorldCat, Copac, Google Books, etc.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 637] SMITH, George. An Autobiography of One of the People (Privately published, 1923). Copy in Local Studies Library, Redruth.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 641] SMITH, William. The Life of William Smith, late Minister of the Baptist Chapel, Bedworth (E. C. Lewis: Coventry [1857?]). Copy in Nuneaton Library.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 677] SUTTON, William. Multum in Parvo; or the Ups and Downs of a Village Gardener (Robertson and Gray: Kenilworth, 1903). Copy in Local Studies Library, Coventry.

[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 687] TAYLOR, John. Autobiography of John Taylor (J. Francis: Bath, 1893). Copy in Bristol Central Library.

This is only the result of a very preliminary excursus into the Bibliography, and again the very action of publishing this blog entry (just as means of parking my notes for the time being) will give these books a web presence, in some cases for the first time. However, these lacunae of the web do raise important questions about how we are building up our digital libraries and the way in which we conduct research using them. For the period before 1800, the ESTC attempts (and largely succeeds) in documenting all printing in the English-speaking world, no matter where it is kept. After 1800, Google Books and other enterprises have decided to forgo the preliminary creation of such a detailed bibliographical infrastructure. Instead, they have assumed that national libraries and other major research libraries contain all that is needed, and have worked from there. The way in which the use of this ad hoc method distorts the online representation of post-1800 printing requires much further examination. I suspect the result is that the printed output of the provinces (particularly the newly industrialised areas of Northern England and the Midlands) is seriously underrepresented in corpora like Google Books. The extent to which there is an inherent class bias in enterprises like Google Books is also worth investigating (probably there was a bias in the British Museum against all sorts of biographical material which was apparently only of ephemeral value). These issues in themselves have ramifications for the research methods that we adopt in approaching collections like Google Books. 'Distant reading' has a great deal to offer in looking at  measuring shifts in the use of language and metaphor over long periods, but, if the sample on which the distant reading takes place is biased towards particular regions or social groups, this will significantly distort the results.

I hope to develop a more detailed analysis of these issues, but I suppose a preliminary conclusion is a plea to remember public libraries in developing digitisation programmes. Digitising the British Library and Harvard Libraries will never be enough; we also need the Horace Barks Reference Library, the Mitchell Library and the Minet Library. Our digitisation strategies need to take this into account.

Further Reading

J. Burnett (ed.) Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1982)
J. Burnett (ed.) Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1994)
J. Burnett, D. Vincent and D. Mayall (eds.), The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography 3 vols. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984-9)
E. Griffin, Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
Jane Humphries, Childhood and Childhood Labour in the British Industrial Revolution  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
D. Vincent, Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790-1885 (London: Europa, 1977)
D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Europa, 1981)



    
         

                                   

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Making Universities More Open

Sometime I will write a fuller paper on pedagogy in the digital humanities. When I was at Lampeter, I became quite closely involved in a number of e-learning initiatives which seemed to me imaginative and forward-looking, and I was sad that there appeared to be so little contact between the e-learning and digital humanities communities. My colleague Willard McCarty recently made a provocative post to the Humanist online seminar:

Our colleague Jascha Kessler has sent me a letter he wrote to the Editor
of the Financial Times, for Saturday, 18 August 2012, "Brave new world
without teachers, or learning, or thinkers". It concerns dire
predictions of what will happen to higher education as a result of
prominent efforts to teach very large classes by online means. (I send
it along as my first attachment, below.) Perhaps this effort will be as
successful as various tsunamis have been in wiping out costal
settlements. (The metaphor is columnist Christopher Caldwell's, for
which see my second attachment.) But I recall prominent efforts at the
University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s to promote
teaching by television, accompanied at registration by enthusiastic
posters declaring e.g. "See Professor Helson on television!" One can
still find the large, now empty, brackets for the televisions in some
places.

I spit nails, but not here. I think of all my years in classrooms, with
people, face to face. "Now we see through a glass darkly, then face to
face" reversed? I know, Paul's words are more accurately for us
translated "by means of a mirror in an enigma", but the point remains,
does it not?

Comments?

Yours,
WM

Here's my response which attempted to indicate some of the ways in which better links between these areas of activity could be built up:

Dear Willard,

It is interesting how this issue which, as you observe has been around in
different forms for many years, is suddenly causing such anxiety in the
United States - concerns about readiness for on-line activities underpinned a
lot of the recent controversy about the unsuccessful attempt to dismiss
the President at the University of Virginia. I assume that the reason this
is causing such concern is what one might call the i-Tunes effect - the
way in which the success of music downloading has heightened awareness of
senior managers in all types of activities of the potential for new
digitally-based business models to cause radical transformation quite
rapidly. It is by no means certain that disruptions (that favourite
neo-liberal idea) evident in one area of activity will necessarily be
replicated in another - indeed, part of the nature of disruptive
tendencies must be their unpredictability, which must include the
possibility that they do not occur. However, in terms of this American
discussion (and it is very much as framed here about the relative
inflexibility of the structures developed by North American Higher
Education over the past fifty years), the following considerations from
the UK might be relevant:

- The first and most important point is I think that there has been a
lamentable rift between much digital humanities work and new developments
in pedagogy over the past ten-fifteen years. In the early 1990s, we
believed that not only would new digital and networked technologies would
transform research and our access to research materials, we also believed
that equally important was the transformation that would occur in
pedagogy. However, much of our effort since then has gone into creating
and financing digital humanities centres which were supported by soft
funding and therefore necessarily concentrated on a series of short-term
research projects. Teaching activity has tended to be rather an
after-thought for most digital humanities centres. However, in the
meantime, e-learning and technology-enhanced learning have made enormous
strides and for many universities in Britain have been a major focus of
activity and funding. The rift is illustrated by the separate professional
organisations that have been established. I am not aware that bodies like
ADHO or ACH have any significant contact with the parallel bodies for
learning technologists, such as the Association for Learning Technology
(http://www.alt.ac.uk/). The ALT conference is at the University of
Manchester from 11-13 September 2013, and looks very interesting. It might
be a good way of starting to explore these links in a better way. Another
organisation which has of course championed the importance of pedagogy in
the digital humanities is HASTAC, and I think this is one reason why
HASTAC is the most exciting and interesting organisational activity in the
digital humanities work at present. There is a great deal of the HASTAC
website which bears closely on the themes you have raised.

- While you shudder at the thought of American experiments in lectures by
television, we should also remember that we have one enormously successful
institution in the UK which sprang from precisely such activities, namely
the Open University. To my mind, the Open University is, after the NHS,
the most important piece of social innovation in Britain in modern times,
and deserved a place in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The Open
University has of course long ago moved on from the late night television
lectures on BBC2 which we remember from the 1970s, and Open University is
pioneering new types of online approaches, including a major development
in enhancement of Moodle. A hint of some of the Open University's
initiatives in this field can be gleaned from the Open Learn section of
their website: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/. OU have also been
pioneering work on mobile access, particularly mobile libraries. The OU of
course famously links its distance provision to residential courses, but I
suspect its structures are one that provide a good guide to future
developments. I think it is sad that the antiquated insistence of UK
higher education on educational autonomy prevents a more co-ordinated and
strategic development around the Open University. Given that is quite
probably that new online methods will cause changes, it would make great
sense if in the UK we scrapped absurd anachronisms like Oxford and
Cambridge Universities, and created a more integrated and strategic
service based around the OU.

- Finally, it is worth noting that concerns about the mechanisation of
learning are not new. The use of numerical grades for assessment began in
Cambridge in the 1790s in direct response to an increase in the number of
students, and may be considered at a number of levels a response to the
increasingly industrialisation of society. When marked examinations for
school children were introduced in the 1850s, there were many concerns
that it privileged repetitive learning, short term memory and the
retention of conventional knowledge. As a schoolchild myself in the 1960s,
I was always struck and enthused by the willingness at that time of many
educational bodies to try and break down the obsession with exams and
measurement and try new methods of learning. And of course our excitement
about digital technologies is that they open up precisely such
possibilities. Maybe our aim should be to try and bring that kind of
pedagogic liberalism to the new learning environments which are emerging?

Here's the response from Professor Kessler:

I do appreciate the earnestness revealed in Prof. Prescott's comments.  I
do think he rather misses what is the point of the present discussions.  He
concentrates on "learning." Viz., *"** As a schoolchild myself in the 1960s,
I was always struck and enthused by the willingness at that time of many
educational bodies to try and break down the obsession with exams and
measurement and try new methods of learning..."*

*Methods of learning? * What does that mean, exactly?  I was a schoolchild
in the 1930s-40s.  I dont think there was or is a method of learning,
unless it is taught somehow.  By digitized instructors?  Kids learn, Homo
sapiens learns as it learns, sans "method" or methodologies concocted
by...whom?  A robot might learn by implantation of code.  Okay, we stick
silicon chips in newborn heads?  But then the chips learn, and what does
each unique individual brain make of it all internally?   There may be
methods to teach say violin technique, but they are applied and tested one
on one: teacher and pupil. Results vary by talents.  Apart from all that,
what I questioned in my letter to the FT was the costs of teachers vs.
internet teaching. The learning part requires foot soldiers, future
teachers in higher Ed, what schools have been and been about since Sumeria, 
to test what has been learned,  grade and tutor or instruct it.
When the Univ of California at Santa Cruz was inaugurated, Prof C Page
Smith [in my letter] went up to organize it.  It was all Pass/Fail...no
grades.  Assuming perhaps Humanists and Historians and Lit and the rest
reviewed the written work, not multiple choice Xses, of students.  It took
but a few years until the scientists rebelled at the lack of grading for
qualifications in hard subjects, not philosophical or literary chatter. And
grading was back, and how, even for a largely pothead and hippy university
student body in the 70s and 80s and perhaps beyond, up in the Redwoods
paradise.

Even with an Open University scheme, Lenin's question remains: *WHO, WHOM?*
All may enter and study... but what has been learned by each individual?
That costs, and doing away with the absurdity of OxBridge doesn't solve the
question of judgments by individuals, referees.  You cannot get away with
anything in competitive sports.  Some are better than others, as in horse
and dog racing, and judging there is easy: whoever finishes first second
third, etc.  Not including Lance Armstrong, et alia, as it turns out.
Then, too, we are advised:  "It would make great
sense if in the UK we scrapped absurd anachronisms like Oxford and
Cambridge Universities, and created *a more integrated and strategic**
**service based around* the OU."  What, it may be asked, is meant by that
phrase in italics?  More integration of what?  Service meaning...teachers?
Who, Whom? what qualifies?  Integrated whos? Serviced by Whoms? * O,
Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour!*

I take Prescott to be serious, but the questions I raised about Humanities
and the Internet remain.  It is *not* a matter of tv lectures.  When the
few expert lecturers have retired, who takes their place?  Who has learned
what from the medium?  I like documentary films, How it is made, where the
penguins walk? but then all that may be teaching me what is out there.
Still, what goes on, how and why, stanza by stanza in the Divine Comedy?
Who will learn or teach what the Divine is, the Commedia means?  Or even
says?  E=MC2 says what it means, and means what it says, and a digitized
quiz can locate my grasp of those letters.

However,  and for example, I offer an Honors Seminar for Frosh, first year
students, pass/fail, just show up, and select one assignment.  I provide
100 pages of poems; I lay out the fundamental 3 modes of poems written from
history. I require each to pick a poem, read it aloud and deliver orally 1 written 
page that tells the rest what the poem says.  I forbid students
to say what anything, lines, stanzas, whatever *means*.  *Meanings are
idiosyncratic and arbitrary.  If anyone imagines  contemporary student of
19-20 can write one double-spaced page of sentences stating what the poem
says, lines say, that one is mistaken.  These University of California
youth are admitted as of the top 17-19% of high school graduates. We have 2
dozen State Universities for the lower tiers; and many community, 2 year
colleges for all the rest who want something after high school and need a
lot for work and life and career.  A sort of Open system a la UK.
But...there is hardly any system to integrate persons tomorrow who have
not studied and learned and been graded.  Quality is quality.

Finally re my Honors Seminar: I attach Plato's Symposium, and tell them to
read that short work.  As all will recall, each principal vocation speaks
in turn all that night, and each man speaks only of what he knows from his
craft or profession.  Not a one is able to tell the group what it is that
the god Eros does to discipline or inspire or create their work[s].  They
are all good and educated senior Athenians.  But as for understanding the
matter of daily life and work's structures and statements, let alone
meaning...*nada, nada e pues nada.  *In the end, Socrates overturns the
evening, although what he has to say remains a mystery, clearly presented.
And he got it all from some old Sybil in the mountains. The SYMPOSIUM, in
short, remains exemplary regarding this problem.  The scientists and
technologists are crystal clear about what things say, not what they [might
or could] mean; they measure, and measure has always been, or measuring,
the foundation effort of civilization: Tekne, the Greeks called it. But I
am sure it was known to the painters of Paleolithic caves. That is clear
enough, or should be.  As for *meaning?* Alas, that is the burden of
would be Humanists, digital, digitized, or whatever.

Jascha Kessler

And my reaction:

Professor Kessler is right that I did not address the main point in his 
letter, which is that the use of new technologies in learning does not 
automatically mean that the academic profession is doomed. He is right 
on this. What I wanted to point out is that we have over forty years of 
experience in Britain of providing university education through a 
mixture of television, radio, internet, radio cassette and other media, 
and it seems to me very strange that the current fevered discussion in 
the United States does not ever refer to this experience which provides 
very clear pointers for future development.

The idea of a 'university of the air' was proposed in Britain as early 
as 1926 when a historian working for the BBC suggested the development 
of a 'wireless university'. The idea of a 'university of the air' 
gathered momentum in the early 1960s, and the creation of an 
experimental university using television and radio was a prominent part 
of the Labour Party's manifesto when it was elected to government in 
1964. The intention was to offer university education without the 
requirement for any prior educational qualification. That seems to me 
one important difference between the discussions in the 1960s and the 
debates on which Professor Kessler comments - in Britain, we have always 
seen new technologies as providing a key to offering wider access to 
education; the current discussions in America seem to focus almost 
entirely on technology as a cost-saving option.

The Open University was established at Milton Keynes in 1969. The Tory 
minister Iain McLeod called the idea of a 'university of the air' 
'blithering nonsense' and threatened to abolish it if the Conservatives 
formed the next government, but fortunately Margaret Thatcher, the new 
Education Secretary, decided to allow the experiment to go ahead and the 
first 25,000 students were admitted in 1971 to be taught by a mixture of 
television, audio cassette, home science kits, course packs and 
residential courses. Today, the Open University is the largest single 
university in Britain with more than 260,000 current students. Since 
1969, over 1.5 million students, many without previous formal 
educational qualifications, have graduated from the Open University. As 
I mentioned in my previous post, the Open University is pioneering 
on-line methods of teaching. But, above all, I think the most important 
achievement of the Open University was that (in the words of its 
website)'The Open University was the first institution to break the 
insidious link between exclusivity and excellence'.

The Open University has been revolutionary in many of its pedagogical 
methods and many of these have been since adopted by conventional 
British universities. But, to support Professor Kessler's key 
contention, what the Open University demonstrates above all is that such 
innovative educational achievement depends on first-rate academic staff. 
The Open University currently employs more than more than 1,200 
full-time academic staff and more than 3,500 support and administrative 
staff. Above all, it has a network of 7,000 tutors locally based (as 
famously depicted in 'Educating Rita'). The chief lesson of the Open 
University experience supports Professor Kessler's argument - to 
successfully use new media to widen access to higher education then you 
need committed and inspirational academic staff. I think this alone 
shows why current discussions about the use of new technologies in 
teaching should take the experience of the Open University in Britain as 
a starting point. 

Much more information about the Open University can be found on its 
website:
http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/main/the-ou-explained/history-the-ou

I suggested in my previous post that the Open University stands 
comparison within the National Health Service as one of the greatest 
social achievements of Britain in modern times. On reflection, I wonder 
if the Open University isn't the greater of the two achievements. To 
create a collectivised medical system chiefly requires a society with a 
strong sense of a social justice and a political and administrative 
determination to put a fairer and more civilised system in place - it 
wasn't necessary to do much new in terms of the medicine. The creation 
of the Open University required an equally strong social sense of social 
justice but also needed to develop completely new ways of providing a 
university education which didn't compromise on standards. We need a 
similar set of values in approaching the pedagogical possibilities 
provided by new technologies.

For further reflections on some of these themes, I would recommend the 
blog on the history of the Open University maintained by my friend Dan 
Weinbren:

http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/History-of-the-OU/ 

A recent post by Dan is pertinent to these discussions: 

"Open learning is a movement that isn’t going to go away 

The idea that technology can be deployed to support learners isn’t new 
to those who work at the OU. Suddenly, however, it is in the headlines 
because Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have 
formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver 
courses online – with the modest ambition of ‘revolutionising education 
around the world’. 

Paying relatively little attention to the decades-long history of 
sophisticated use of television, radio, video and the internet that has 
occurred at the OU the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial 
Intelligence Laboratory and one of the pioneers of the MITx online 
prototype. Anant Agarwal said ‘This could be the end of the two-hour 
lecture…You can’t hit the pause button on a lecturer, you can’t fast 
forward’. While MIT might be struggling to catch up pedagogically this 
development could be a challenge to the OU, as well as an opportunity 
for it to demonstrate its experience in the field of supported open 
learning. As Dr Anka Mulder, head of Delft University in the Netherlands 
and President of the OpenCourseWare group which advocates free online 
course materials, said ‘Open learning is a movement that isn’t going to 
go away’".

 

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Linear Thinking

I have just been reading with great enthusiasm Tim Ingold's remarkable book, Lines: a Brief History (obtained, while I was laid up with a broken leg, through the remarkable all-Wales library book reservation system at CatCymru). The starting point of Ingold's book was an anthropological investigation into the relationship between speech, song, writing and musical notation, but Ingold found that the wider history of the line - as gesture, activity, metaphor, genealogy, description, connection, ruler - is an enormously rich field of intellectual enquiry. Ingold observes at the opening of the book: 'What do walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines of one kind or another'. As Ingold explores the difference between different types of line - between the threads of the loom and the trace of the written letter - he opens up very rich themes which challenge many of our fundamental assumptions about the shape and nature of knowledge. For example, Ingold questions very effectively the common distinctions between writing, drawing and musical scores, suggesting that the division between them is a comparatively modern distinction, often reflecting social pressures, in just the way that artists emerged about the time of the industrial revolution as elevated and respectable figures, whereas engravers and printers became regarded as craftsmen. Ingold's suggestion that there is a close connection between weaving and writing is a particularly intriguing one.

My only disappointment with Lines is that it does not develop its rich discussion of textual technologies and shapes into the digital sphere. Ingold's book is full of suggestions for further lines of analysis and exploration on the role of the line in our digital thinking. I hope that Ingold's new book, The Life of Lines, announced for publication in 2013, will reflect on digital technologies, but in the meantime, here are just a few random thoughts prompted by his book:

- Computing provides a further illustration of the interaction between weaving and text discussed by Ingold. The idea of the programme, first developed by Ada Lovelace, was derived from the punch card technology used to power industrial looms. Ingold also stresses the assembly line as another industrial manifestation of the line, and I suppose the question this poses is the extent to which lines in computer programming reflect the analogy of the assembly line.

- Ingold's discussion of the difficulties of the concept of genealogy is particularly important, and challenging to the ways in which we think about the descent of text. I like Ingold's concluding comment here: 'The past does not tail off like a succession of dots left ever further behind. Suvh a tail is but the ghost of history, retrospectively reconstructed as a sequence of unique events. In reality, the past is with us as we press into the future' (p. 119).    

- It is a commonplace of discussions of digital environments that they collapse the distinction between information objects - that books become indistinguishable from accounts or drawings or even images of material objects. Ingold argues that the distinctions between drawing and writing or between music and writing are comparatively recent - maybe only three hundred years old. In that case, is the collapse in the distinction between different types of information as radical as some commentators have suggested? Indeed, is there an argument that in fact digital environments still encapsulate and perpetuate false distinctions between sound and image which are new and which we should be trying to break down?

- Following on from this, how far does the digital world reinforce that modern distinction between drawing, writing and notation? Should we look for ways of changing the relationship between these activities in a digital environment?

- Ingold's work also challenges the idea that texts are necessarily linear. Hypertextuality is commonly set up in opposition to the linear text, but on my reading on Ingold's text, hypertextuality is equally linear, since it seeks simply to build a network of connecting traces rather than building threads.     
          

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To Code or Not to Code?

Easter 1982 – thirty years ago! – was spent feeding my latest addiction. Like over a million others, I had acquired the Sinclair ZX 81, which popularised home computing in Britain. It had just one kilobyte of on-board memory; I soon invested in the upgrade to take it up to 16 kilobytes. You used your television as the monitor, and loaded the programmes from audio cassette tapes. My love affair with Sinclair only came to an end when even more awesome Amstrad PCW came along a few years later. Indeed, checking references just now, I came across the Sinclair ZX81 emulators, and began to feel some of the old passion stirring.

In order to get the Sinclair to do anything, you had to programme in the Sinclair flavour of Basic. Even to get a word to display on your television, you had to write and run a short programme. For some, this was a problem. One of the reasons why the BBC decided to use Acorn computers rather than the Sinclair machines to promote computer literacy in schools was that the producer of the BBC series The Computer Programme, Paul Kriwaczek, ‘did not believe that the future of computers lies in everyone learning to program in BASIC’. Yet, for me and I suspect many others, it was precisely the programming that was so fascinating about the Sinclair. As you sought to develop a programme that would, say, enable you to do some primitive word processing, the hours and days would disappear as you played with variables and loops. I became obsessed with trying to produce a programme to calculate the date of Easter. Dates in medieval documents are generally given by reference to religious festivals. Dating medieval documents involves cross-checking tables in a Handbook of Dates. This is obviously a process that can be automated and calculating the date of Easter would be a first step towards this. I honestly believed, in a fit of youthful delusion, that somehow I could produce an automated Handbook of Dates on a Sinclair ZX81. Of course, I was unsuccessful; amazingly, there still doesn’t seem to be an automated version of the Handbook of Dates online. I gave up when I realized how much time my addiction to Basic programming was consuming – I am convinced that I would have completed my PhD thesis two years earlier if I hadn’t purchased a Sinclair ZX81. I realized that I was spending all my time becoming a low-end computing hobbyist whereas I should be concentrating on becoming a reasonably accomplished historian.

My experience with the Sinclair ZX81 perhaps prefigures the debate which is still an active one within the digital humanities – namely the extent to which practitioners of the digital humanities should be hands-on programmers and the level of hands-on computing engagement we should expect from scholars of the digital humanities. Stephen Ramsay’s now celebrated intervention at the 2011 MLA ‘Who’s In and Who’s Out’ , refined by a subsequent post, ‘On Building’, argued that the creation of digital objects of all types should be a fundamental concern of practitioners of the digital humanities. Ramsay points out that humanities scholars are familiar with theorizing (say) maps as cultural artefacts, but that the experience of mapping in GIS gives new perspectives. He argues that ‘Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic – one that is quite a bit more radical than taking the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry and applying them to digital objects. Media studies, game studies, critical code studies, and various other disciplines have brought wonderful new things to humanistic study, but I will say (at my peril) that none of these represent as radical a shift as the move from reading to making’.

The anxieties expressed in the discussion of Ramsay’s blog posts echo through the recent volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities (an extraordinarily Americo-centric volume for a discipline which claims to be highly collaborative and international in its scope and outlook). Indeed, Ramsay can be seen as anticipating recent wider arguments in Britain that coding should receive more attention in schools. Last Saturday, John Naughton launched in the Guardian a manifesto for teaching computer science in schools which emphasized the learning of code in a way that must have gladdened the heart of Sir Clive Sinclair. Indeed, the Raspberry Pi seems to take us back to the days of the ZX81, and has already proved very successful in making children understand how the digital devices which pervade their lives work. In my recent article in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, I argued that it is essential for humanities scholars to become more than mere consumers of digital resources. If this is to be achieved, some understanding of the nuts and bolts of such resources is essential.

But does this mean that humanities scholars, in order to engage with the digital world, must become coders? Isn’t there precisely the danger that I found with my Sinclair machine, that I was becoming a poor coding hobbyist at the expense of good humanities scholarship? I think Ramsay’s use of the term building is important here. In creating Electronic Beowulf, Kevin Kiernan and I were completely dependent on the skilled help of a number of computer scientists and programmers, but we were nevertheless building something which was both a statement about the nature of Beowulf and a vision of what digital technologies can achieve. It is here that the collaboration which is seen as a distinctive feature of the digital humanities comes in. Something like Electronic Beowulf or the projects created by the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London simply cannot be achieved without a wide range of skills embracing not only humanities scholarship but also computer science, project management, programming in a variety of forms, interface design, server management and much else.

Much of my thinking about digital projects is informed by my experiences at the British Library in the 1990s, and in particular the Library’s work in designing the original automated systems which gave catalogue access and allowed automated book ordering in the St Pancras building. A naïve user (aka a humanities academic) would assume that to build those systems you either bought a piece of software or got some programmers in to build the system. But building a robust bespoke automated system is more complex than this. Librarians, as users, define the need. An army of analysts define the logical structures required to meet these needs and asses the array of technical possibilities available. These logical definitions are then broken down into units of work. The system was actually designed in an enormous amount of detail on paper, with a mass of flow diagrams, before a line of code was written, and this was in many ways the intellectual heart of the development. An army of programmers then built the various modules defined in the project specifications. The crucial element in this process was not the coding, but rather the design on paper. The analysts who produced this design were the most important (and highly paid) people in the whole process, yet generally they had very limited programming skills. The coders who actually built the system were at the bottom of the food chain, producing elements of the system to order, frequently with only limited understanding of how the whole system worked.

My experience at the British Library taught me that automation should not be equated to coding. In many ways, it is providing the overall vision and defining – on paper – the steps by which that can be realized which is they key part. This, after all, is what computer scientists spend a lot of their time doing. Such a process requires an understanding of the tools and methods available, but is not wholly focused on the creation and deployment of these tools. Again, an analogy from the library world is I think helpful. It is essential for all librarians to have an understanding of cataloguing standards and methods, but it is not necessary for all librarians to be cataloguers. A scholar in the digital humanities should be sufficiently well informed about the technical environment to develop an independent and critical approach to the use of digital methods and resources, but does not necessarily need to be a hands-on programmer.

I worry that an emphasis on coding, and even on building things, is holding the digital humanities back as an academic discipline. We emphasise collaboration, and collaboration is certainly necessary for practitioners of the digital humanities, to build the innovative digital activities, bit are our patterns of collaboration always the right one? The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London has worked with dozens of academic partners both at KCL and elsewhere to realize an impressive portfolio of projects. The Department quite rightly stresses collaboration as at the heart of its philosophy. Yet I have been struck in the few months that I have been working in the Department by how often our external academic partners assume that they are the driving force in the collaboration. For them, the humanities scholar is always the person who calls the shots; the digital humanities specialist is simply there to do the donkeywork of programming the machine to do what the academic wants. Collaboration turns out to be a mask used to disguise the true nature of much of the Department’s work which is too often the kind of software development or infrastructural maintenance normally provided by a University service department. Now, it could be argued that academics should not see themselves as superior to information service departments, and I would strongly agree with such a proposition, but it is nevertheless sadly true that academics perceive themselves as at the top of the university tree, and most humanities academics evidently regard digital humanities units (even when these are constitutionally defined as academic departments) as representing something lower down the higher education food chain.

Among the controversies to be considered by The Cologne Dialogue in the Digital Humanities later this month is the question ‘Do the Digital Humanities have an intellectual agenda or do they constitute an infrastructure?’. My colleague Willard McCarty will be presenting an impressive defence of the intellectual component of the Digital Humanities, but one wonders whether the question is correctly put here. The issue is not whether, as Anthony Grafton put it, digital media are always means rather than ends. A lot of tne problem is (as Willard will be suggesting) one of confidence – scholars in the digital humanities too often see themselves as serving longer established academic disciplines and lack the chutzpah to develop their own intellectual programme which doesn’t need topay so much attention to others. The question is how Digital Humanities stops presenting itself as an element of infrastructure, as something which helps other scholars realize their visions, and realizes that it doesn’t need to be dependent on classicists or historians or literary scholars to keep going. Part of the reason why Digital Humanities is treated by other scholars as a support activity is because of its interest in programming and coding – it becomes the gateway by which scholars can gain access to this new digital world. One of the many threats confronting the digital humanities is that it will increasingly become part of the service infrastructure. The suggestion that the term digital humanities will soon disappear as all humanities scholarship becomes digital is predicated on the idea that the digital humanities represents a form of specialist support activity which will soon no longer be required. Certainly, the digital humanities should build things – it should be pioneering the creation of new forms of scholarly discourse in a digital environment – but it should not simply be building things for other scholars, and that has too often been the case.

Indeed, it could be argued that the digital humanities as a whole has fallen into exactly the same trap I was concerned about with my Sinclair ZX 81. By insisting on building things ourselves, we simply come up with slightly amateurish packages which fail to make a large-scale impact or simply repeat existing procedures across different subject domains. The pioneering days of digital editions were very exciting and innovative, but having established what we think of as an accepted procedure, we now repeat that again and again and again in different subject domains for different groups of scholars. When practitioners of the digital humanities are going to build things, these objects should be truly innovative and should restate our sense of what is possible in a digital environment. In the recent Institute of Historical Research seminar on ‘The Future of the Past’, I was very taken by Torsten Reimer’s call for the digital humanities to renounce the sort of digital photocopying that is commonly associated with the creation of digital editions and rather seek to develop genuine innovation that moves into new territory both our cultural engagement and sense of the possibilities of computing. The deployment of TEI and its role in the development of XML were truly innovative and helped create the modern web, but that was nearly twenty years ago. Since then, what true innovation has emerged from the digital humanities? Zotero? Citation managers were available before it appeared. Crowdsourcing? Simply borrowed from other domains. The digital humanities has little to show in the way of true innovation, yet all those engaged with the digital humanities know that the complexities of the humanities offer endless possibilities for the creation of innovative technologies in areas ranging from imaging to nanotechnology. Consider the hyperlink. What a crude mechanism it is. Any textual scholar could imagine more complex and interesting possibilities. The digital humanities could readily look to develop the next stages beyond hypertext. Yet it doesn’t – because it is too busy preparing digital editions for historians who don’t otherwise have access to programming resources.

If the digital humanities is indeed to start realizing its own intellectual agenda, it needs to rethink the nature of its collaboration. It must avoid like the plague that service activity which purports to be collaboration – the sort of Antechrist of the digital humanities. It should instead develop collaboration within the digital humanities, genuine collaboration which is all too rarely seen. To achieve this requires some fundamentally rethinking. Digital humanities centres are certainly part of the problem. Frequently dependent on soft funding, they have perforce to pursue research projects in which the role of the digital humanities is often subservient, and fundamentally a service function. It would be better to have smaller digital humanities departments which have more stable income streams from teaching, and aren’t forced by financial necessity to seek out research projects which reduce the digital humanities element to have a service function. The nature of our projects should change as well. We urgently need to start developing more experimental and risky projects, which challenge existing methods and standards and reach out into new areas.

In short, we should code and we should build, but for ourselves and because (like my experiments in trying to create a Handbook of Dates on the Sinclair ZX81) they feed our own intellectual interests and enthusiasms, and not those of others.        

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