7th Post, Week 9

Ok, here we go! I decided to join the discussion about Robert Louis Stevenson’s website not because I am extremely, like extremely, a big fan of Stevenson’s characters (John Silver, you’re my man) but because, believe it or I was forced to do it. I usually do not glance at the readings of each week, but start working on them with accordance to the way there were ordered by Dr. Wisnicki. So when I started studying the websites, the first one I looked at, according to the syllabus was of course the Darwin Online. As I kept going down with the listed websites, I decided to write my post on Darwin Online. However, when I reached the Robert Louis Stevenson one, I totally changed my mind and I said, oh boy it gotta be about this one. So when I finished with all the others, I went to the discussion forum and accessed the one about Darwin Online to see what’s going on in there and I found out that it already has three, so I was kind of forced to join the one that is doing RLS (or was I really?!)

The homepage of RLS at the first look seems unattractive, since there is no particular feature that immediately captures the eye, but after a closer look, I think there is much to say about it. The homepage is structured in a very simple way, but I think it has it all. The quote that is highlighted in dark red, which perhaps the first thing the user looks at, is smartly chosen, since I think it says something about DH, but in an indirect way: "The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature." It is hard to believe it was written in 1885, isn’t it? Well, the “web” that Stevenson refers to in this quotation is obviously not the web we usually refer to in our class, but placing it in this context is indeed interesting. Anyway, the few introductory words in homepage are really few, but they immediately explain about the content of the website and to whom it is addressed, and simply why this site matters. I really appreciated the mentioning of to whom the content of RLS is addressed because it identified two important issues right there at the start of the homepage: the audience and the accessibility—“Robert Louis Stevenson, designed for all: academics, school children and everybody interested in learning about RLS.” One more thing about the introductory words, they seemed as if they were coming from a welcoming friend who wants the user/visitor/researcher to feel at home: “Oh, and don’t forget to check out….” That was awesome because it achieved two goals of RLS at the same time: establishing a friendly environment and prompting for its contents and materials.

Both main tags at the top and bottom of the homepage are very interesting features for the clear and quick accessibilities they provide for the visitors. They mostly provide a quick access to serve the purposes of the users, regardless of who they are, whether scholars, researchers, teachers or students. I’ve also noticed that the main tags at the top and bottom of the homepage travel with you all the time through almost every single page in the website. This makes it easy to quickly serve the visitor’s needs and provide a constant reminder of what the website has to offer. Really interesting!

RLS also has many interesting features, which I believe place it at the top of list of the DH’s websites that we looked at so far. To mention few, accessing the actual texts within RLS is done in a very unique way. Upon accessing any text, the website immediately opens a digitized version of it, which resembles the physical reading experience, with of course digital aids such as text-to-speech. When I saw that I remembered seeing such digitization of texts somewhere before, but couldn’t tell where, but when I looked around, I found it belonged to the Internet Archive, which we have examined before. The interesting part is that I was able to go to the Internet Archive from the text itself and browse all its contents without evening leaving the page of RLS. The page of the IA just opens on the top of the RLS page (or just ahead of it) and whenever I’m done with the IA, I just hit close to make the IA page goes away and return to the RLS, which physically I did not leave. Other interesting features include the one touched by our own AJ: “In the Footsteps of RLS,” which basically can only be done digitally, since the real-time map of Google, for instance, is constantly changing, so it is a way of following the travels of RLS in our modern day map. Again, this is very interesting, since it kind of answers the question: why digitizing? There are still a lot more to review, but I’ll stop here for the time being.

Reply:
You seemed to enjoy as well as like RLS as much as I did, AJ. It is a very beautiful site and as you pointed out, it is full of resources on RLS for those who are interested in teaching or studying him. The School is just amazing and it is a great place for both teachers and students to visit. On accessibility, I've just noticed that I quoted the same introductory sentence about the audiences as you did. It is indeed a nice quotation, which fully identify who is the website is targeting--basically everybody, which is great. The site also does not only claim that it targets everybody, but it puts its claims into practice and offers materials that really suit everybody, which is great thing in itself because I remember seeing a site that claims the same thing, but does not put its claim into practice.

6th Post, Week 8

Perry Willett offers interesting history of the electronic text, and to be honest I was kind of surprised that it goes back few decades ago. With the four categories he lists, which defines the interest and the focus of humanities computing, I think they do cover it all, especially with archiving and editing. However, with the last category, Stylistic Analysis, I became a bit confused since I wasn’t sure whether or not to read it as synonym with Data Analysis. Now, obviously, stylistic analysis is concerned with the language of the text itself—its meaning(s) and its social/historical context(s)—and that of course has a huge part in DH. However, DH seems to include a wider scope than the language of the text only, take for instance, the author biography, which is not part of the text. We have seen in the past few weeks that authorship and biographies of the authors are somehow favorable type of study in DH, and it really tells us something different about the past when they become digitized and analyzed—the Pop Chart Tag from the Collective Biographies of Women from last week is an example of this type of study. Yet, all that Willett focuses on in his four category list of the humanities computing has to do only with anything textual, and that is it, which pretty much explains the inclusion of stylistic analysis, but we have seen that DH is not only concerned with stylistics, but more of data analysis. That is why, I had issues with stylistic analysis, which I’d probably alter to data analysis.

Other similar confusing issues had to do with the inclusion of “automated poetry generation” as part of computing humanities. Don’t get me wrong, I totally acknowledge that automatic generation of poetry is indeed a part of the electronic text, but is it part of DH? I mean automatic poetry generation is the kind of literature that is born digital and in this case it is part of digital literature, but again, is it part of DH? From my own experience with DL in the past, and DH so far, I can tell that they are not the same. However, the idea of electronic text is accessible to both DL and DH, and they use it interchangeably, but with quite a distinction of what electronic text really means to both DL and DH. Yet, in his piece, Willett does not seem to make this distinction or acknowledge its existence, and this made me a bit confused.

Willett explores the notion of “skepticism” with regard to electronic texts and builds upon Mark Olsen’s notion of “distrust” to facilitate his argument. I found this quite interesting since we have been debating for some time now on how to approach the text digitally? What’s different about Willett’s discussion from ours is that he gives a glimpse of this kind of debate before the introduction of the World Wide Web, which I found really interesting. According to this rich historical debate, the problem of how to display or transform the text digitally seems to resist a solution. I don’t know but it also seems that the physical bindings of any given book have participated and ENSURED that the text within will remain sacred forever. And so the breaking of those bindings and the digitizing of the text have created a fear, according to Willett, in many traditionalists and un-traditionalists scholars from both the past and the present. The introduction of the WWW, however, did not solve the problem, but according to Willett, it only “simplifies” it with regard to accessibility, and that is it. Therefore, the notion of "faithful representation" of the physical text that Willett points out to kept nagging upon the scholars in the field, and so coming up with different technologies and digital languages to encode the text became a necessity. Still that did not solve the problem. Some of those encoding languages such as XML and TEI need frequent updating and changing (I think we have seen this with the Victorian Women Writers Project) and others may be time consuming or simply costly, such as OCR. That is why some scholars resorts to mainly using metadata (I think we’ve also seen this with ncse). So far, I am little unsure if this problem will ever get resolved.

Reply:

You guys, and girls of course, have been doing excellent discussion with bits and pieces that are related to Perry Willett’s article that I just don’t know where to begin. It is a fascinating article indeed and it touches upon a lot of what we have been reading/discussing so far. I just wanna go way back to the point that Julia made, and which ignited the discussion, because I wanted to tackle it in my response, but didn’t. In addition to what Brandon and Meg said, I think it is crucial to admit that works of DH do target specific audiences, whether we like or not. Those audiences do not have be elite or highly selective in any way, but they’re not the general type of audience anyhow; they’re just specific audiences who are mostly interested scholars, regardless of their qualifications or backgrounds. You referred to this Julia, but we have seen this before in the week of the open-access websites. If I remember correctly, the question that was driving most of our discussion of that week was how far an open-access is actually an open-access? And I think we came to the consensus (whether we believe in it or not) that works of DH favors targeting specific audiences. General audiences of course are welcomed, but in a very limited capacities. Not all the sites that we looked at offer those limited capacities, but I think you touched upon this, Meg, that few websites, such as NINES, do offer this through interactions and social networking. But again, those are still specific audiences, being themselves scholars, teachers and students. Places, such as the Dickens Journals Online, however, do invite general type of audiences, but that is done only, again, through limited capacities, such as, for instance, the Tale of Two Cities Project, which encourages all type of audiences to read the installments, but I bet not all type of audiences will reflect upon their reading experiences with writing back through the blog that DJO provides. Right there we have two types of audiences, the ones who are passive (only read) and the ones who are active (read and write), and I bet again that DJO targets the active ones, even though it is open to all.

5th Post, Week 7.On Brandon's Blog

Collective Biographies of Women is a simple and direct to the point type of website, but there are few things that I did not like about it. When I first accessed the website, I noticed the name Alison Booth (who turned out to be the author of the project) right under the main title of the website. Well, I have issues with that. Of course, the author(s) of any project is entitled to state ownership, but perhaps this is not the way to do it when it comes to website, since it replicates books. For example, when it comes to the printed books, we always have the name of the author(s) right there on the front cover under the main title. However, when it comes to publicly accessed websites, I have noticed, this becomes a different case where the title of the project is the most highlighted name on the front page. Of course, the author can place his/her name on the front page, but only when the visitor’s attention is totally focused upon the project itself, not on the one who made it; as it is the case here. Placing, or perhaps attaching, the author’s name to the title of the project, I think, is a strong emphasis on authorship or ownership that, in my opinion, is irrelevant for browsing or researching a website. Furthermore, I noticed that this project has been conducted mainly by professor Alison Booth, as an individual work, but we also have seen many individual works before that did not place much emphasis on ownership right away, At The Circulating Library, which we studied last week, is one for those websites. Last thought on this issue, it is also important to remember that we are not accessing a personal blog or a personal website per se, but rather a scholarly collection or database that we intent to make a use of its content, not perhaps its author.

Other issues on the homepage includes the nonexistence of a search bar. In one of my previous responses, I remember giving a whole paragraph about the importance and the significance of placing the search bar in the middle of a scholarly database where everything else revolves around it, so it becomes the first tool that attacks the visitor (I think NINES is of one of those examples). I also remember arguing against placing it on the sides or the corners of the homepage, but unlike the websites that places the search bar in the middle of the homepage, or even the corners, this website does not place it anywhere. It is offered as a link alongside the other main tags of the homepage, but I do not consider it part of the homepage since it requires leaving the homepage and accessing a different page.

Moving on to a different issue, I have noticed the “Featured Subjects” tag gives the same entry and provides the same kind of information that can be accessed from the homepage. The little gallery window on the homepage gives the visitor only the name of the person and few descriptive words about her. Well, going to the “Featured Subjects” page, the same thing is provided, and the type of information that I can access from this page I was able also to access a moment ago from the window gallery on the homepage. Perhaps providing a more extended information, or even the entry pages themselves, about those “subjects” on this page would make it worth going to, but providing the same info that one can get from the homepage, I say is both a wasted effort and space.

The final issue that I did not like in this website is when I browsed its content. The way the “Browse the Bibliography” page is set up is based on alphabetical order and that is it. The project itself approached its content chronologically, but; unfortunately, there is not even a chronological browsing option here. The alphabetical entries are listed in a way that I did not appreciate and I really wished if there were more options to browse/view the contents. There is, however, one thing that I liked about the website and that is the “Pop Chart” tag. Right there I was able to find an answer to the recurrent question of why digitizing, and I think the data on this page contributes a lot to the answer.


Reply To AJ's Post:

As I have noted in my post, I disliked how accessibility to the content of Collective Biographies of Women is structured, and now, I actually dislike its content, too—thanks to you, AJ. You really raised a very important issue about bibliographies in general and in this website in particular. In terms of content, there seems to be better websites out there (you mentioned some of them) but here we have this website as well. The issue of up-to-date is equally significant, and it does not seem to be at place here either. The “marketability” of its content that you pointed out to with regard to its female subjects is perhaps the motive behind the project and the reason for its survival. I also would like to add that the time scope of its case-study is perhaps another reason that makes it worth going to, but even with that, there are still some ambivalence. However, comparing the content of this website to another female-centered type of content website, such as the Victorian Women Writers Project that we looked at last week, I think the latter wins, since it provides easier accessibility, a wider scope and it seems better updated. 

Presentation Handout on Open-Access Websites

19th Century British Pamphlets:

Simple and down to the point.

Space of the homepage. (open-access website/no ads)

Why digitizing? Why this website?

From physical to digital.

Collections: out of date/limited access.

Guidelines for teachers.

At the Circulating Library:

Another simple down to the point.

Paper-like homepage.

No commercials.

Started in 2007 (as a grant). Constant updates.

Biographical and bibliographical data.

Modeling, physical/digital.

Dickens Journals Online:

Long homepage. (forces the reader to browse the contents of the main tags)

Emphasis on “free.”

Offers a personal account.

Why digitizing? Why this website? (Promotional video and audio)

Interaction features. (The Tale of Two Cities Project/Facebook and Twitter)

Wider audiences. (text-to-speech)

Access.

Community projects. (Correction/Moderation)

Internet Library of Early Journals:

Space in the homepage. (the latest news box, which shows the website is being updated often, or is it?)

A finished project.

Scanned images. (OCR, Optical Character Recognition)

Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition:

Another simple down to the point homepage.

Facsimiles, searchable and downloadable.

Beta.

Editorial commentary.

Metadata and TEI. (Musslle)

History of the project.

Old Bailey Online:

Open-access website with ads.

Rich collection with frequent updates.

Tutorial videos.

API. (application programming interface)

Guidelines for students and teachers.

Corrections.

Victorian Women Writers Project:

Another simple down to the point homepage.

Turned digital.

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) language.

Up to date.

Access. (Text Mode, Image Mode, Entire Document, PDF, XML)

Discussion Questions: (but not limited to)

1)  In the websites for tonight, we have seen restricted access and limited and/or unlimited access to the contents of those websites, in terms of viewing, searching, downloading etc. Based on your own experience in reading/browsing those websites, how do you define an open-access website?

2)  Numbers of the websites seem to spend a great deal thinking about the type of visitors (audience) who visit them. Do you see that those websites target specific audiences or larger audiences, bearing in mind that some of them address researchers, teachers and students? Do you think the targeted type of audiences determine how and/or why this particular website is an open-access website?

3)  With ncse, Mussell explains, “we proposed leaving the transcripts uncorrected in the index, but providing an elaborate set of metadata that could compensate for the way this transcript represented the article” (136). On the other hand, Fyfe questions “the fate or future of copyediting” and the “tasks of verification and correction,” and justifies, “[m]y argument is not that we are ignoring error but rather that we have not sufficiently considered error correction as a structural feature and theoretical premise within the transition to digital publishing” (206). On both ends of the two arguments, how do you see them manifest in the websites we looked at, especially with data viewing/encoding? 

4)  Tonight, we have seen metadata, beta, statistics, OCR, TEI, API, XML and even a “finished” website. Let’s simply talk about them.

Websites:
19th Century British Pamphlets
http://www.britishpamphlets.org.uk/  
At the Circulating Library
http://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/ 
Dickens Journals Online
http://www.djo.org.uk/ 
Internet Library of Early Journals
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ 
Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition
http://www.ncse.ac.uk/index.html 
Old Bailey Online
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ 
Victorian Women Writers Project
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/welcome.do 

4th Post, Week 6

Hopefully, this is my last thought for this week’s post, so I don’t have to revisit it and modify it like I add with my post for last week.

I had to look Matthew Wilkens up, and it turned out that he is specialized in contemporary American fiction and in digital and computational literary studies, which really made a lot of sense with regard to his essay. I know for a fact that one of my old professors would totally disagree with Wilkens to the point of even rejecting the argument of his essay and perhaps the overall content, but not me. I have always viewed literary analysis and cultural analysis as inseparable type of studies and should always react with one another and answer to each other. In his essay, Wilkens touches on this issue in a very interesting way, which relates to the discourse of digital humanities and at the same time to some of our previous readings.

Wilkens starts off his essay with the everlasting problem of the canon. In my understanding, the canon has always been a problematic issue that resists solution. Wilkens admits to this problematic issue and explains that the canon, in its broadest sense, will always exist. From the canon, Wilkens descends to reading and questions the question, what do we really read and how is reading adding to our knowledge about the past and the present around us? It is obvious that we are in an age of abundance and it seems to be as such for the past decades and most likely will continue to be for the future. Wilkens believes that the problem of abundance has created a problem for us of not being able “to keep up with [the] contemporary literary production” (251). Therefore, the question changes from what to read to what “to ignore”? Wilkens argues that what we read is “nonrepresentative of the full field of literary and cultural production” (251). And so he proposes that we should reconsider our positions of the notion of close reading.

Wilkens argues that “[w]e need to do less close reading and more of anything and everything else that might help us extract information from and about texts as indicators of larger cultural issues” (251). As with everyday that goes by, I see the urge and the need to adapt to Wilkens’s view. To support his argument, Wilkens draws an example from history that is facilitated through the use of digitization. In his discussion of “Text Extraction and Mapping,” I think Wilkens is able to prove his argument of how spending less time in close reading texts and focusing more on the general context of those texts, we will be able to understand history and culture better. With the specific example he uses, I think we ought to reconsider our previous understanding of American regionalism in the 19^th century.

Wilkens’s example relates to our previous readings in a very interesting way. From two weeks ago, Mussell argued that through digitizing humanities, we will be able to understand the past better. Well, here, I think it is evident with Wilkens’s example since through digitization of the 19^th century American texts, the software is able to gather the data of places from texts published in a single year, and produces a statistic figure that has changed our views of the past in understanding American regionalism.

 (I don’t know, but I feel the further we move in our course, the better loose ends become tied up together very neatly)

Since I will be presenting on the websites part of our class tonight, I feel there is no need for me to discuss them here. But I will post the handout that I intend to give out tonight with discussion questions.