Jonathan Deering's Presentation at CERN's OAI7 Workshop

From June 22-24, 2011, the University of Geneva, Switzerland, hosted the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI7).  Jonathan Deering, T-PEN's Lead Developer, gave a presentation on how T-PEN will use the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) Framework to record transcriptions as annotations of digitized manuscripts.  OAC is a form of RDF serialization that will permit data interchange between T-PEN and other RDF-aware applications. Jon presented the rationale for why T-PEN should adopt OAC conventions.  Not only will it permit data interchange OAC will be one way in which transcriptions can be preserved even if (God forbid!) T-PEN withers away. You can catch the audio and the slide presentation of Jon's talk, along with the equally interesting Q&A that followed on the CERN site.

Well done, Jon.  You represented the project very well, and you garnered good attention for T-PEN through this presentation.

Fear and XML

I still have strong memories about my first academic position. For the first time, I would have my own office and desktop computer. It was still the days of Win3 and for the first time I was going to use the cutting edge word processor, MS Word 2.0! Having been a previous WordPerfect user, this was a strange moment for me and it was even more jarring because the prior user of the desktop had turned on the "reveal codes" option in Word: there are no white spaces in the document, spaces are represented by black bullet points and carriage returns with the ¶ symbol. It was incredibly annoying and it made it difficult to read my texts. So why did Microsoft even have this option?  It was their imperfect attempt to help authors with typesetting, especially if they followed the rule that there has to be two spaces after a period (which I recently discovered is a typographical sin!). As useful as it was, this type of "markup" was intrusive and I was very relieved when I finally figured it out how to turn it off. I did from time to time turn it back on, but for the most part I was happy enough to have this type of markup sitting under the hood. 

I was reminded of this experience as I was reading some recent exchanges on Twitter about how some users want XML elements to be in the background in an editor. Hugh Cayless, on his blog, recently mused that this demand was grounded in fear. I think he is right: some scholars look at the predominant way in which digital humanists manage and process texts and become fearful that they would have to do the same. This is not fear about XML per se as it is fear about change. For all our boasting of being trend-setting and critical thinkers, we academics are conservative at heart. Cayless has gone even farther to argue that any XML editor that permits hidden tags will ultimately be a losing proposition. This is because any schema (but Cayless has TEI and its minions in mind here) is ultimately a text model and to hide it from the author/reader is to misunderstand its functionality. 


So far I completely agree, but I would want to make a distinction here. As a text editor, sometimes I want to simply read the text, especially when I am transcribing an unpublished manuscript in Latin. I want to examine the flow of the words, the sentences and even paragraphs, without tripping over an XML element that is describing part of the text's content or structure. Now I am the first to admit that the semantic units of words, sentences and paragraphs are already marked up, or encoded, by using white spaces and/or punctuation. And yet, that kind of markup is so ingrained in my reading skill that they do not diminish the usability of the text displayed on screen. Add a few angle brackets, however, and my reading strategy has to change. 


For the T-PEN project, exposing and hiding XML tags is an important part of its development. We have two central goals in our mission: (1) to create a digital tool that paleographers and text editors will use when working with digital images of manuscripts; and (2) to integrate transcription and XML encoding; in other words, to bring to together the acts of composition and encoding. The second goal is particularly important since it means that decisions about representing structure are made as you create the text with the manuscript page before you. But this integration can present a challenge to those scholars who may not yet feel fully comfortable with XML encoding. And, for those scholars who are non-plussed about XML, they may still want to read the text qua text. We thus want to permit the user to have the choice about how their transcriptions are displayed. Users can certainly draw upon a palette of tags (which can be drawn from any schema including TEI) to insert as they transcribe, but they can also banish those tags to leave a naked text. We are even considering allowing users to select a color code for each element, so that they could have a third option; but that would depend greatly upon how many tags are in operation, and whether that might lead to rather unsightly text decoration. 


This strategy also reflects our concern for usability. Usability is not just about ease of use, since ease is directly related to comfort. Cayless is quite correct: there is a good deal of irrational fear about XML amongst humanist scholars. However, if we want to see the number of practitioners of digital humanities grow, then there has to be ways to overcome that fear. Allowing T-PEN users to hide and expose XML tags may increase the comfort level, and this can lead to better use. Ultimately, it will provide for a good experience for the fearful who may finally see that XML tags are the essential components of a usable text model. 

Defining Digital Humanities

For the last month or so I've been on an evangelistic kick at my home institution promoting digital humanities.   It has been a lot of fun learning what my colleagues in the Humanities departments think when they hear the phrase "digital humanities."  Inevitably, the tables get turned on me and I am asked: what do you think Digital Humanities is?  This has heated up a bit in the last few days since the New York Times published an article on how Digital Humanities could unlock Humanities' riches.  Reading that article, along with the almost 100 comments and the response to that response by Martin Foys and Asa Mittman has prodded me further to reflect on defining on what I do. 


It is typical in both the humanities and the sciences to engage in research without first identifying its context in absolute terms.  Indeed, one should always be wary of any a priori definition of research fields, since the more accurate accounts of academic work come  out of praxis.  So I haven't been necessarily embarrassed that I had never properly defined what I do as a digital humanist.  But with the question dangling, I had to articulate my vision.  Here's what I have come up with:


"As a form of scholarly work digital humanities  offers methods and resources that can strengthen the established methods of humanities research.  It can also help make the boundaries between the constituent disciplines more porous and thus bring together different groups of scholars and students.  Digital humanities comes closest to how our students engage the world on a daily basis as consumers of digital information. 

"Such possibilities may seem incommensurate with the common (mis)perception of digital humanities namely that is defined solely by the task of digitization.   This is certainly a principal task of digital humanities, but it hardly accounts for all that it is.  In sum, digital humanities comprises three general tasks: preservation, aggregation and integration. To begin with, digital humanists engage in the digitization of existing artifacts as an act of preservation, from text to images to 3D objects.  Digitization projects, however,  preserve artifacts for the sake of access. There is no point in digitizing if does not change the scope of access.  Digitization ought to be about broadening access.   As for aggregation,  the methods of digital humanities allow for a wider consultation and analysis of large data sets through automation.  Even if computer algorithms assist in this analysis, it is based on the core methods of “pattern matching” that most humanists use: finding common ideas or words/phrases in a set of texts, matching textual accounts to other cultural artifacts or practices, etc.  Digital humanities permits this type of work to occur on a larger scale, and often supports complex forms of pattern matching.   This data, when brought together, can give the humanist scholar ample evidence to draw significant conclusions.  I would include here the role that "crowdsourcing" has come to play recently.  Many projects can achieve so many more goals with a large number of scholars and interested parties working collaboratively.    Finally, the ample evidence from the aggregrate sources is analyzed within an interdisciplinary context. On a very basic level, it encourages the integration of text and image, but it can also provide ideal opportunities to integrate different textual types (or different sets of images) in a way that assist the reader or user to engage the complexity without becoming confused.  Digital humanities can provide the virtual means to bring together disparate sources, ones that have never been connected before (and perhaps can never be physically present together), and provide for the humanist scholar the tools to develop a more complex picture of the topic under study.  It can also bring together disparate scholars which can open new ways to study and interpret cultural artifacts.  One example is how historians are using GIS technology to contextualize historical narratives within a specific geographical space (paying attention to meteorology and other environmental conditions)  or to map the path of documents as they traveled from reader to reader.


"Digital humanities can therefore breathe new life into the world of scholarship and teaching, without snuffing out how humanities scholars currently function.  Additionally, it can provide a mechanism for the critical evaluation of technology as both a pedagogical tool and a form of research.  As our culture demands immediate access to larger and larger sets of data, and also seeks ways to integrate that data in multivalent ways, digital humanities can assist students and professors in this complex, wired world."


I'm not suggesting that I have developed the definitive account of digital humanities.  Some of my fellow DHers might object to the way I privilege text -- although I employ a rather elastic notion of text as simply a container of information.   And, I'm sure I've not accounted for everything, but this is my modest contribution to trying to understand what we do as digital humanists and why we do it.