Milkbar.com.au (Humanities)

Chapter Two: Humanities

…to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need to investigate its relation to the archive, the site for the accumulation of records. Archive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail, it constantly directs us away from the big generalisations, down to the particularity and singularity of the event. Increasingly the focus has shifted from archiving the lives of the good and the great down to the detail of mundane everyday life. (Mike Featherstone, 2000)

With a particular emphasis on hypertext theory, coupled with a survey of the field of Humanities Computing, I will explicate how Milkbar.com.au positions itself within the eclectic applications of online electronic scholarship in the Humanities.[1] Hypertext theory has (since the early 1960s) made significant inroads into the Humanities because hypertext is the seminal concept energising the global Internet.[2] And Humanities Computing is the most influential field of practice-based computing in the Humanities. Milkbar.com.au borrows practices from both Humanities Computing and hypertext discourse.

If we acknowledge that hypertext is a pioneering form of authorship then we must also take into account the state of the author in contemporary thought. Since Roland Bathes’ confrontational essay The Death of the Author in 1977 few scholars place the same emphasis on ‘brilliance and transcendence’.[3] The author is recognised as a part of a discursive language and cultural system and not the possessive individualism and enclosure of individual genius. Part of this cultural system is the reality of the institutional influence (as well as geographical influence) upon individual authorship.

Hypertext authorship is not only about enclosed media units with reference to internal documents but also refers to external documents that may be situated anywhere. [4] Hypertext authorship (like all authorship) is both internal and external (or even local and global) with pertinent references to others in the field.

In Milkbar.com.au I have simply placed yellow links to the external documents that have influenced the work whilst the white links are to internal references. The yellow links reveal the relationship of the work to a broader world of online scholarship, whilst the white ones form part of a thesis-derivative architectural framework.[5]

The Humanities could be broadly defined as the study of human expression through the works and thoughts of human culture over time. This narrows to within national boundaries, academic traditions, schools of thought, sub-disciplines, and individual scholars. There are duties and concerns within the Humanities of the older schools and innovative approaches that have traditionally been the domain of the newer schools.

Humanities Computing as a field (defined by conferences, journals, research centres and projects) tends to centre on the older more traditional schools such as Oxford, the King’s College London, the University of Virginia, the University of Sydney and Brown. [6] It tends to have a focus on linguistic techniques, be concerned with text manipulation and have a close relationship to the Library and information Sciences.

In fact, many of the Humanities Computing centres are situated within large research libraries such as Alderman at the University of Virginia or Green Library at Stanford.[7] The irony with the field of Humanities Computing is that it is technically innovative but highly traditional in its scholarly substance.

Not surprisingly newer Humanities schools tend to have an approach to electronic scholarship that suits their particular institutional traditions. These include The Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Matrix (The Centre for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online) at Michigan State University, and perhaps my own institution being RMIT University in Melbourne.[8] In a nutshell, the realities of electronic authorship differ between institutions according to their particular economic and cultural circumstances.

The older schools have been particularly active in Humanities Computing and have made enormous contributions to providing text encoding tools, GIS (Graphical Information Systems) and data-set standards for the use of Humanities scholars everywhere. [9] However, there still needs to be a great amount of critical theoretical work done (something that Historians are not famous for) on, for instance, TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and its dictums such as ‘maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent”.[10] Text encoding is part of interpretation, thus in part institutional authorship; how does this authorship combine with say, EH Carr’s What is History or even Keith Jenkins’s Re-Thinking History?[11]

Globally, there is a disproportionate amount of Humanities Computing work being undertaken in the United States. This does not mean that researchers are not producing Humanities Computing works in Australia; rather they are being produced in an array of diverse disciplinary frameworks. [12]

The main centres and individuals within Australia that are encouraging electronic scholarship are the Archaeological Computing Unit at the University of Sydney (Ian Johnson and Andrew Wilson), and Creagh Cole of The Scholarly Text and Electronic Imaging Service (SETIS, also at the University of Sydney).[13] There is the Historian Heather Goodall of the University of Technology in Sydney, John Burrows of the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing at the University of Newcastle and the Historian Professor Paul Turnbull of the Australian National University (ANU). Turnbull has been working on a project for a number of years with the aim of placing Captain Cook’s diaries online (and creating useful interoperable electronic publishing standards for other Historians).[14] And there are also numerous other individual scholars who are pursuing electronic Humanities projects (in all sorts of universities and fields) who may not be engaging with the discipline of Humanities Computing at all.[15]

I tend to agree with Willard McCarty, the founder and long time moderator of Humanist that:

Whether it is a discipline is really a secondary issue, perhaps even a distraction; what matters is whether we can regard it as an essential part of our academic self-definition.[16]

Through Humanities Computing’s relationship with the library, the ‘academic self-definition’ of many in the field has tended towards the creation of tools and scholarly resources that include archives, reference material, text encoding tools and the facilitation of greater access to digital artefacts for researchers and the public.[17] This is what libraries tend to do and what they do well.

However, as an independent researcher, I never deliberately set out to create a technical standard or archival resource for the Humanities. As an independent researcher I am not really equipped to do this; I am an Historian not a trained archivist or a library scientist. Although I did seek to advance the processes and methodologies within electronic scholarship, it is not this project’s only raison d'etre. It also aims to critically advance knowledge about globalisation within a local setting. It does this through the conceptual and technical advances of hypertextual interactive video. [18]

Historians, ethnographers, and archaeologists can make many choices between a number of academic tools depending on the particular problem to be addressed. Scientific process-based research is perhaps better suited to the library sciences or the information sciences where the aim is usually to provide valuable processes for other fields. However, as Espen Aarseth from the University of Bergen argues:

A field based on the premise that it exists primarily to exist and ‘contribute to’ other fields will never reach a healthy, self-respecting identity for scientific or scholarly enterprise. Contributions to other fields should not be offered, they should be obvious.[19]

In my mind, the better Humanities Computing projects will always be about providing a balance between a suitable question and a suitable process. We may not always get this right, and perhaps this is part of our experimental practice, but it must always be a deep-seated goal in our methodologies. All too often, projects may advance the pragmatic processes involved in using the technology, but the researcher’s understanding of broader historical and cultural issues may not be that advanced.

One of the most effective means that I can see in undertaking research in this medium as an independent post-graduate student in the Humanities is through the framework of the Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD). [20] This is for a number of reasons and perhaps this is only a transitory position. I will explain these reasons in the final reflective chapter of this exegetical-thesis. more>>

[1] However I do concur with Featherstone that It is difficult to draw disciplinary boundaries within a medium where moving around electronic texts in a globally linked network environment is part of its central feature

Featherstone 2000 Op.Cit. p166.

[2] The term hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965, Theodore H Nelson, “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Intermediate” Proceedings, Association for Computing Machinery, 1965.

[3] Roland Bathes, “The Death of the Author” Image, Text, Music, (Trans. Stephen Heath), Fontana, London, 1977, pp.142-148.

Likewise Foucault and Derrida vanquish the individuality of the author, the author’s status, the author’s originality, and the conditions that have fostered the authority of ‘the man and his work’.

[4] See: Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum, New Jersey, 1991

Bolter later went on to co-author a much more considered book, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999.

[5] I expect that many of the external links are not that stable and will break over time. However this is also part of the nature of scholarship; relationships rupture and transform and new knowledge augments and replaces older knowledge. Obsolescence is a healthy part of scholarship, however we can only recognise what is obsolete by identifying its contextual relationships. If these relationships are not that apparent, then it is not as valuable to a broader research community.

[6] For an in depth discussion of whether Humanities Computing is an academic field or not see the conference papers from this seminar held at The University of Virginia in December 1999. “Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline?” The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The University of Virginia.

<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/hcs/> (Accessed August 20, 2002)

And accordingly, I have for a number of years been interested in the work of Ed Ayres and Will Thomas of the Virginian Centre of Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia; one of the leading institutions for the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The Valley of the Shadow project (a large on-going collaborative work) has perhaps made a greater contribution to heightening the awareness of digital history than any other project. However, the particular reason that I like this project is not so much for its somewhat tangled application of technology, but because it stands out for its historiographical approach. Although it focuses on perhaps one of the defining events in American history, it does this largely through the traces of everyday people (methodologically like Milkbar.com.au). Most of the records held within this ‘thick description’ database chart the lives of soldiers and people living their lives within two separate communities on two separate sides of the Mason-Dixon line and thus of the Civil War “The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War”, The Virginian Centre for Digital History, the University of Virginia

<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/vshadow2/> (Accessed 28 August, 2002)

[7] “Humanities Digital Information Service”, Green Library, Stanford University

<http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/hdis/about.html>

[8] The Centre for Media and Learning at the City University of New York

<http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/index.html> (Accessed 28 August, 2002)

The Centre for History and New Media, George Mason University

<http://chnm.gmu.edu/index1.html> (Accessed 28 August, 2002)

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland

<http://www.mith.umd.edu/> (Accessed 28 August, 2002)

Matrix - The Centre for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, Michigan State University

<http://matrix.msu.edu/>(Accessed 28 August, 2002)

RMIT University Media Studies

<http://www.rmit.edu.au/adc/mediastudies> (Accessed 28 August, 2002)

[9] See: Digital Resources in the Humanities (DRH) conference series for an idea of some of the recent Humanities Computing Projects

<http://www.drh.org.uk/> (Accessed 17 October, 2002)

[10] Text Encoding Initiative

<http://www.tei-c.org/>(Accessed 15 August, 2002)

[11] EH Carr What is History, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1964.

Keith Jenkins Re-Thinking History, Routledge, London, 1991.

[12] For Instance, there is “the Centre for Linguistic and Literary Computing” at the University of Newcastle

<http://www.newcastle.edu.au/centre/cllc/index.html> (accessed 18 June 2002),

and: “the Archaeological Computing Laboratory” at the University of Sydney

<http://www.archaeology.usyd.edu.au/acl/index.html> (Accessed 18 June 2002) and: “the Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS)” also at the University of Sydney

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/setweb/humres.html (Accessed 18 June 2002)

[13] “The Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service” (SETIS) at the University of Sydney

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/setweb/humres.html (Accessed 18 June 2002)

[14] Paul Turnbull et al “the Endeavour Project”, the Australian National University and partners

<http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~cookproj/> (Accessed 28 August, 2002)

Turnbull, also until quite recently was the president of H-Net; Humanities network online which comes out of Michigan State University and is possibly the world’s largest online academic discussion network (with about two hundred and fifty thousand subscribers spread among six hundred lists) “H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Online”, Matrix, Michigan State University,

<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/> (Accessed October 21, 2002)

[15] This recently created network, The Australian e-Humanities Network, has an aim to “facilitate access to the latest digital resources and research techniques for Australian Humanities researchers”. The web site of this organisation contains a database of Australian Humanities Computing projects:

“The Australian e-Humanities Network” the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the University of Newcastle, the University of Sydney.

<http://www.ehum.edu.au> (Accessed 21 October, 2002)

[16] For an in depth discussion of this see: Willard McCarty “What is Humanities Computing? Towards a Definition of the Field” Kings College London

<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/Humanities/cch/wlm/publications.html> (accessed 17 June 2002)

[17] the Text Encoding Initiative(TEI)

<http://www.tei-c.org/>(Accessed 18 June 2002)

[18] “Historical Voices” is one of the most ambitious online oral history projects from MARIX at Michelin State University

<http://www.historicalvoices.org/> (Accessed 28 August, 2002).

Few Humanities Computing projects have yet to utilise the potential of online streaming media however, there are some emergent developments within the field of online ethnography:

Michael Wesch, “Nekaliminin.net” The University of Virginia

<http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mlw5k/> (Accessed 18 June, 2002)

This project produced by a student in anthropology at the University of Virginia is for a post-graduate qualification.

[19] Espen Aarseth, The University of Bergen "The Field of Humanistic Informatics and its Relationship to the Humanities" <http://www.hf.uib.no/hi/espen/HI.html> (accessed 21 September, 2002)

[20] One of the major concerns in any Humanities Computing project is cost. Some projects are collaborative ventures costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars whilst others, like this one, constitute independent research pursuits. There is only so much that an individual researcher can do in this medium when taking into account economic considerations.

Last Updated :