| Sunday, December 28, 10:15-12:00 noon Confederation 4, 5, and 6 / Royal York | Session 97--Revolution or Evolution?: Electronic Resources in the Humanities (Forum) |
| Sunday, December 28, 7:15-8:30 p.m.
Ontario / Royal York | Session 308--Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Workshop) |
| Monday, December 29, 8:30-9:45 a.m.
British Columbia / Royal York | Session 343--The Refereed Electronic Journal (Workshop) |
The purpose of this forum is to recognize what has already been achieved in humanities computing and give distinguished practitioners and critics the opportunity to evaluate the pros and cons of the electronic tools that are becoming an increasingly important feature of scholarship and teaching in the modern languages. Equally important will be two workshops focused on different aspects of the electronic r/evolution, in which experienced colleagues will make a brief critical presentations of their work, as an introduction to discussion about how these accomplishments can be extended.
As Deborah Holdstein argued in a 1995 issue of College English, some questions related to computers and education have simply become moot. After nearly two decades of computers in classrooms, labs, and learning centers, with computers as fixtures on nearly every workplace desktop and factory floor, it no longer seems pressing to ask in general whether they should be there:
It seems useless to preoccupy ourselves with the question of whether or not we should use the technology available to us. It's here; it's everywhere in the so-called traditional English [and foreign language] department, among Shakespeareans [and Goetheans], medievalists, literary theorists, [language teachers] and composition-rhetoricians alike. We can choose to use it or not, teaching creatively and well with it (and probably without it). When we do encourage its use and trumpet its possibilities in 1995, however, what are the ethical, institutional, and theoretical-pedagogical nuances involved in our doing so as writers, as teacher-mentors, and as readers? (589)
And in 1997 it is still well worth asking how new technologies for research and teaching are affecting our professions and communities. On the one hand, many see these electronic resources as constituting revolutionary cultural change. Proponents of this revolutionary view argue that digital media are reconfiguring our discipline by breaking down the distinctions among media and fundamentally altering the conventions by which we read, write, and think. Opponents of this view recognize such changes but judge them pernicious because they undermine the foundations of literate culture--at least those underlying print literacy. On the other hand, many scholars and teachers believe that digital media simply extend our capacity to do what we have always done: study literacy and culture, written and spoken communication, and verbal art.
Whatever view one takes of digital media, they raise significant problems and offer opportunities for scholarship and teaching in the humanities. The opportunities offered by digital media include computer-supported stylistic analysis of individual texts and large corpora of texts, modeling of intertextual phenomena, creation of new forms of verbal art as well as new modes of creative authorship, and broader dissemination of primary materials and research resources and findings. The problems include the following: determining sound editorial standards for electronic texts; preserving electronic texts; establishing credible, authoritative, and economical electronic publications; and reconsidering the concepts of authorship, intellectual property, reading, and writing in a digital world.
This forum will look at the broad problems and opportunities posed by digital media, while the workshops will focus on two more specific developments: the refereed electronic journal and electronic resources for study in modern languages and literatures.
The speakers in the forum will, collectively, address both the promise and the perils of digital media, noting how they extend the traditional activities and concerns of research and teaching in the humanities yet require that we apply our critical judgment to their development and use. However, we are not assigning fixed roles to speakers so much as defining a broad topic within which they will discuss more focused issues.
Michael Joyce
Vassar College
"Othermindedness: Networked Learning and Post-Hypertextuality"
While we are increasingly used to stories of technological presence and multiplicity, our profession as teachers and artists and thinkers is predicated upon a necessary and creative scrutiny of the things we are used to, especially as they have to do with our understanding of differences: between the virtual and the embodied, between the lasting and the transient, between the beautiful and the ordinary, between the rare delights of human community and presence and the universal promise of access and equality. In that context I want to suggest a new voice for our interactions, one grounded in age old values and a forgotten syntax, a middle voice where we begin to see ourselves in where we are and encourage responsibility for even seemingly passive choices, for virtual worlds, and for alternate selves. As our culture moves, for good or ill, beyond hypertextuality teachers and artists and thinkers must encourage a collaborative responsibility for all that we as makers and shapers consider a desirable thing to maintain and for which, we believe, there exists if not a public then a community willing to sustain it. This is to summon an other-mindedness which is less a focus on the other than the mindedness.
Joel Goldfield
Fairfield University
"Holistic Integration of Technology into Language, Culture,
and Literature Curricula"
This speaker will make a case for holistic integration of technology into language, culture and literature curricula, particularly for foreign language study.
The gradually seductive pull of word-processing as an easier way to revise manuscripts and tests has led to greater comfort with computers among humanities professors and finally, to new collaborations between us and industry. There are now far better tools and products for us and our students than was the case in the early 1980's. After having worked as a consultant to foreign language departments at well over a dozen campuses over as many years, this presenter will provide examples of particular patterns for the adoption of various types of software and the types of resultant changes he has observed in foreign language departments. As many of us have noticed, there have been patterns of mistakes among high-level administrators, chairs of departments and other enthusiastic, enterprising faculty members seeking to quickly integrate various types of technology (not always computer-based) into their colleagues' curricula. Not the least of the problems has been the attempt to wedge apparently well-qualified candidates with technology backgrounds into traditional "molds" for promotion and tenure. The speaker will note several cases (without attribution) of successful cases where the MLA Guidelines played a critical role.
There have also been numerous cases and thus, patterns, of success in separating technological grain from the chaff. Indeed, a certain measure of satisfaction is due those who have applied the successful lessons of their teaching and research to accumulating and evaluating information from competent resources, choosing a measured pace of change, cultivated budgetary support, surveyed the campus terrain, educated colleagues, and motivated students to help support technology in their humanities disciplines while avoiding exploitative situations.
Prof. Carl Cuneo
Project Leader, Network for the Evaluation of Education &
Training Technologies
Dr. Delsworth Harnish
Coordinator, Network for the Evaluation of Education &
Training Technologies
McMaster University
"Social Constraints on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning"
Collaborative learning techniques, especially using computer-mediated communications, have become quite fashionable in the educational research and practitioner literatures. Known as computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), they are often seen as a device for recreating human contact among students and teachers as courses are converted from the traditional classroom to on-line computer networks (both intranets and internet). However, there are three unresolved problems with CSCL. First, the most appropriate technology to use in CSCL has not been properly assessed or evaluated. Second, there is little clear and consistent evidence for the learning effectiveness of CSCL. Third, the role of social factors in CSCL have been almost completely ignored. This paper will explore some social factors by drawing on experiences using First Class Client, a groupware used in education institutions around the world. In particular, the following social constraints will be discussed. (1) The culture of competition and individualism among educational institutions and student subcultures undermines the cooperative teamwork required in CSCL. (2) Most students do not know how to function in collective settings, and are unable to systematically divide tasks organized around agreed upon group goals. (3) Many students in higher education are parents with children. The time required to engage in synchronous and asynchronous communications in tele-education from home are much more restrictive for them than for younger day students in a delicate balancing of household tasks. (4) The move to life-long learning means that both local and distance education students will hold full-time or part-time paid jobs. This also restricts the amount of time they can put into any place, any time CSCL. (5) CSCL from home assumes minimal standards of access to computer networks in terms of hardware, software, and modem or higher speed access (such as ASDL, cable modem, or ISDN). But access to networks from home is deeply affected by gender, household income, and education levels. This creates an inequality of access to curriculum resources in general, and to CSCL in particular.
The production and dissemination of learned critical editions has been substantially improved and facilitated by electronic tools. Furthermore, the capacity to interrogate large databases of literary texts as well as bibliographies of secondary material dealing with literature and language has already transformed how many scholars conduct their teaching and research. These resources have particularly fostered a quantitative approach to literary analysis. The speakers in this forum have hands-on experience in using electronic resources to study literature.
Dr. Patricia Clements, FRSC
University of Alberta
Director,The Orlando Project: An Integrated History of Women's
Writing in the British Isles
Dr. Susan Brown
University of Guelph
Co-investigator, The Orlando Project: An Integrated History of
Women's Writing in the British Isles
"The Orlando Project: Computing and the Collaborative Production of Literary History"
Most humanities scholars have employed computers in their research over the past two decades, some using word processors to produce manuscripts, others pressing the computer into the service of such things as stylistic analysis. Nevertheless, the full impact of computing technology on how we conduct our research has only begun to be felt. This paper discusses the immense shaping effects of fully integrating computers into the research process of the Orlando Project.
The Orlando Project, a major collaborative research initiative funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is producing the first full scholarly history of British women's writing. In both print and electronic form, it will detail the writings and lives of British women writers and their complex social, cultural, and material interrelations. The Orlando Project has, from the outset, aimed to exploit computing technology to mobilize multiple arguments which foreground process and to underline the degree to which the components of a history are always in flux.
Our full integration of computers into the daily life of the project--from communications linking researchers in different geographical locations to our intensive planning, design, and daily use of tools employing Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)--has had immense impact on our research process. Our paper will outline some of the major consequences of this approach, most specifically our use of SGML to encode documents as we produce them. Our intellectual aims require us carefully to consider the constraints and structures of our tools and of our plans for hypertext delivery. Our paper will, for instance, consider the implications of SGML's hierarchical structures and the overall substantial impact that adopting SGML has had on the way we have approached and conducted the research. It will also discuss the intensification of collaboration, and touch on the complicated intellectual property issues, the resource demands, and the institutional implications, that such work produces. From the experience of grappling with computer tools to address the needs of contemporary scholarship, we will argue our vivid sense of the difference this has made to our research process and offer a preliminary evaluation of the impact of computing on how scholarship in the humanities is conducted.
David L. Gants
University of Georgia
"The Digital Future of the Scholarly Edition"
This paper seeks to explore ways in which we might re-invent the scholarly edition to exploit emerging technologies and to serve the needs of scholars and teachers in the 21st century while focusing on the individual edition rather than the larger archive. It takes as its starting point the MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions guidelines, "Standards for the Approved Edition and Approved Text Emblems." Issues addressed in these standards include textual analysis and discussion, textual and historical collations, the critical/textual apparatus, and methods of proofreading and data integrity. The paper then discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Standard Generalized Mark-up Language as an editorial tool, with particular regard to the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines and work done by the Model Editions Partnership. Image reproduction and analysis will play an important part in future editions, and this paper also touches on methods of dealing with the problems surrounding digital illustrations. Finally, it ties together all the editorial elements and proposes a framework upon which an electronic scholarly edition might be built, using as its subject the first collected works of Ben Jonson, published in 1616.
Mark Olsen
University of Chicago
"Text as a Social Object"
I would like to present a paper discussing the implications of computer technology in defining "Text as a Social Object." This would draw on my previous musings on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of large databases in text oriented disciplines and extend that discussion to treat my recent studies of both book circulation from libraries in North America and my recent book (and papers) on performances of plays in Paris during the Revolution. My main contention is that computer technology is well suited to the examination of the social components of textuality, both in terms of literary/linguistic elements and as a commodity which is diffused in a social/economic context. The "consumption" of text -- both reading and theatre attendance -- is a complex activity, subject to economic, legal, cultural, and overtly political pressures, all of which must be taken into account in order to understand the reception of particular texts.
The refereed learned journal, as distinguished from the discussion list pioneered in our profession by HUMANIST, is a primary vehicle both for the transmission of ideas and for professional certification in our disciplines. In recent years, the profession has witnessed the conversion of the journals from print to electronic formats as well as the founding of new electronic journals. Speakers in this workshop will describe the joys and the pitfalls entailed in this transformation.
Michael Jensen
Project Muse, The Johns Hopkins University Press
"Pioneering the Networked Environment: Project Muse and Peer-Reviewed
Humanities Journals On-line"
Electronic access to scholarly materials, electronic communication about those materials, and electronic searchability across a wide range of perspectives/years-are these improvements of the new networked age worth the effort to learn new interfaces, new technologies, and, more importantly, new paradigms of approach to the process of research itself? Expensive prerequisite equipment, haphazard network outages, poor onscreen readability, and the inability to annotate texts are some of the complaints received at Project Muse, the Johns Hopkins University Press's NEH-funded effort to digitize the entire list of JHUP humanities and social science journals. These journals are made available campus-wide over the World Wide Web, via a single library subscription, one that is less expensive than a subscription to the print issues available on the shelves. Thus, all faculty, staff, students, and visiting patrons of the library are able to simultaneously utilize the materials available-with no restrictions other than that the use must be non-commercial and no distribution to other campuses is allowed. Classroom use, electronic syllabi or reserve "shelves", downloading/printing, full text searchability, 24 hour access, and even library archiving are made possible in this new environment. Yet we still receive the above-named complaints? What does that say about the new technology, or the transition scholars are enduring? How can librarians help? Publishers? What standardization is possible? Improved speed of transmission? Improved speed of publication? A discussion of these and other issues involved in providing standard texts of the humanities world (ELH, MLN, Diacritics, and Journal of the History of Ideas are some of our publications) to our audience via this new access paradigm.
Joseph A. Feustle, Jr.
University of Toledo
"An Electronic Journal? Press a Key"
Electronic journals are almost as old as networked computers themselves, however today's technology offers anyone who publishes a journal using desktop publishing technology the choice of printing to paper, or creating an electronic form that can be distributed on disk or CD-ROM, or read over the Internet. The key to the success of electronic journals, however, lies in the typical department or college power structure. Certainly, having the journal refereed is a big step in the right direction, but it is just one of many that must happen before the electronic version will replace the traditional printed journal.
John Unsworth
University of Virginia
"Do Electronic Journals Need Publishers?"
This presentation will examine the fact that many all-electronic journals do not have publishers, and consider the changes (and continuities) in what publishers need to offer journals that take electronic form, if they are to play a useful role in electronic scholarly publishing.
Paul Fortier
H. Lewis Ulman
for the MLA Committee on Computers and Emerging Technologies in
Teaching and Research