The Ministry of Silly Walks

Last up was Jason C. Rhody of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, who discussed the challenges of overcoming the fiction of the solitary scholar and using both carrots and sticks to encourage people to collaborate on important initiatives like the Shakespeare folio project being undertaken by the Folger Library and a number of other institutional stakeholders. Rhody also discussed the importance of understanding that "infrastructure can be people" and not taking the contributions of librarians and computer scientists for granted. He cautioned that when it came to collaboration "2+2+2' might only add up to "3."
In the question and answer session Jason B. Jones discussed how his own campus had experimented with giving all students an iPod touch as a vehicle for course content, but the problems that arose when students were separated from institutional infrastructures in their non-wireless homes.
This was not the only session talking about the limitations and challenges of the digital humanities at the MLA. Earlier in the day in a session on "Making Research: Limits and Barriers in the Age of Digital Reproduction," other obstacles to utopian outcomes were also detailed. William Baker discussed "The History and Limitations of Digitalization" and grad student Elizabeth Vincelette pointed out how the hypertext party has been declared over by Alan Liu in a talk called "Moving Past the Hype of Hypertext: Limits of Scholarly Digital Ventures." Vincelette discussed how such projects might exploit the labor of graduate students, adjuncts, and OCR monitors and document scanners in developing nations. She singled out Google Book Search as a flawed privatized program that has been justifiably criticized by Geoffrey Nunberg and the issue of the theology surrounding Google that were first made explicit by Thomas Friedman. Graduate student and Tennyson scholar Jan Pridmore did not completely clarify the procedures in "A Proposed Model for Peer Review of Online Publications," but she did explain how her low budget, high quality site literaryhistory.com managed to produce so many pages and still avoid copyright battles with her large bibliographies of linked literary criticism. Pridmore singled out scholars like Marjorie Perloff for praise by putting so many of her scholarly essays online. On this morning panel only Kerry Kilner of AustLit played cheerleader.
As the Twitter archive of tweets from the MLA indicates, there was a lively backchannel. One of the "rockstars" of the twitterati was the man who was called "missing in action" by the Chronicle of Higher Education: Brian Croxall. Croxall's name appears prominently in the Twitter wordcloud above and his blog entry explaining his absence for reasons of poverty became a must-read.
Meanwhile, Twitter has also been a vehicle for the Twitter feed that complements the yearly MLAde send-up of Aaron Winter.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick's round-up of all the digital humanities playfulness and caution at the MLA is here.
Thanks to Mark Sample for the word cloud!
Update: More great data visualizations about the MLA for Mark Sample here. I'm only a small piece of the pie!
Labels: conferences, digital humanities, hoaxes, interdisciplinarity
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