Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

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Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

Collection Editor:

Jerome McGann

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Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

Collection Editor:

Jerome McGann Authors:

Roger S. Bagnall Alan Burdette

Dan Cohen Paul Courant Gregory Crane

Paolo D’Iorio Robert Darnton Jennifer Edmond Hans Walter Gabler

Charles Henry Penelope Kaiserlian

Michael A. Keller Matthew Kirschenbaum

Laura Mandell Jerome McGann

Frederick Moody Michael Moss

Allison Muri Gregory Nagy

Steve Plog Timothy Powell

Todd Presner Kenneth Price

John Rink Peter Robinson Geoffrey Rockwell

Ray Siemens John Unsworth susan schreibman

Online:

< http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1/ >

C O N N E X I O N S

Rice University, Houston, Texas

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Collection structure revised: May 8, 2010 PDF generated: October 29, 2012

For copyright and attribution information for the modules contained in this collection, see p. 657.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

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This book collects the twenty-seven papers that organized a three-day conference at University of Virginia, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come (26-28 March 2010). As the title suggests, the conference was not about Digital Humanities but Online Scholarshipa very dierent thing. Questions about applications, metadata, tools, platforms, and information architecture dominate the distinguished and long-running Digital Humanities conferences sponsored by AHC/ALLC (the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing). But the question that set the agenda for this conference was framed more broadly: how do we develop and sustain online humanities research and publication?²

Because that is a political and institutional question, the conference spent little time on technical issues facing scholars who use digital media. Indeed, there is a growing sense among these scholars that the advancement of our learning is much less troubled by technological problems than by misfunctions within the broad humanities socius. Certain questions are especially insistent: How do we sustain the life of these digitally-organized projects; how do we eectively address their institutional obstacles and nancial demands;

how do we involve the greater community of students and scholars in online research and publication; how do we integrate these resources with our inherited material and paper-based depositories; how do we promote institutional collaborations to support innovative scholarship; how do we integrate online resources, which are now largely dispersed and isolated, into a connected network. Sustainability and institutional problems have emerged for many as the two overriding issues for scholars working with this new technology.

Those questions dene a complex, multi-institutional, and multi-disciplinary problem. It is also a problem that goes to the heart of the legitimation crisis in the humanities, which has grown more pressing over the past twenty years.

Human memorythe Mother of the Musesis the business of the humanist. The scholar works to preserve for the future an intimate connection between what Wordsworth called the noble living and the noble dead. As with the renaissance sped forward by the printing revolution of the fteenth century, digital technology is driving a radical shift in humanities scholarship and education. The depth and character of the change can be measured by one simple but profound fact: the entirety of our cultural inheritance will have to be reorganized and re-edited within a digital horizon.³

1This content is available online at <http://cnx.org/content/m34305/1.2/>.

2The papers were distributed before the conference opened and so were not read at the meetings. Each presenter was assigned ten minutes to lay out some issues he or she felt to be important. The session was then opened to a free discussion from the eighty or so invited participantsother scholars and professional stakeholderswho made up the full complement of on-site discussants.

3Such an undertaking lays down institutional demands that our professional communities are less prepared to meet than they Available for free at Connexions <http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1>

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Because of their vocational mission, humanist scholars register this crisis with special acuity: hence the content-focus of the conference on literary and cultural studies, history, classics, anthropology, archaeology, and music.⁴

But these disciplines carry out their work in a complex institutional network that impinges upon and shapes all of it. Consequently, a searching inquiry into the future of humanities scholarship and education requires another set of multiple perspectivesspecically, the views of persons and initiatives that come from funding agencies, publishers, museums, libraries, and professional organizations: hence the need to hear from these other, crucial areas of our implicate order.

The conference title is lifted from H. G. Wells's once-celebrated futurist chronicle The Shape of Things to Come (1933). The book made some remarkably accurate forecasts, the most arresting of which was its prediction that World War II would break out in Poland in 1940. Its longer-range views have proven less reliablewhich is exactly why we should remember it today as we try to see beyond our immediate scholarly purview. If prophetic forecasting is hazardous, judicious planning is notindeed, it's imperative.

The Shape of Things to Come in humanities scholarship is in certain respects pretty clear. One's lips don't need the touch of a burning coal to see that our peer-reviewed scholarly exchanges will soon be largely digital and online, with print output options. Or that editorial theory and method will be a dominant scholarly pursuit for years to come: a subject of interest, a set of methodological procedures, a theoretical horizon. Or that integrating our cultural resources for scholarly study and public educationtraditional as well as digital resourceswill be the framework that guides much of our work.

But then what?

Conferences like this often seek to answer that question by laying down a set of conference Outcomes.

But Wells's book, as well as the current state of humanities scholarship, should make us wary of giving directions or oering prescriptions. And a conference remark by Susan Schreibman explains why : I can't tell you what I'm doing because I haven't gured it out yet.

All of us surely understand the force of that assessment of our work. But let's not misunderstand its honesty. We may all be out far and in deep, but we're notcertainly Susan Schreibman is notentirely lost. As the poet said, we learn by going where we have to go. Or as Beth Nowviskie observed during the conference: Love will nd a way. These papers and the conference discussions, all of which are now freely available online, lie along that way, which is a lot more energetic and thoughtful because it runs through digital spaces. As the real-time discussions were proceeding at the conference, a lively meta-twitter- conference was unfolding in the viral world, commenting on the proceedings from yet another real-time (real-time turning out to be virtual time at several dimensions?). Well, I thought: Now there's an Outcome of some consequence.

That parallel universe of scholarly desire underscores a point made repeatedly during the conference: that our work needs to move outside the tight little island populated by digital humaniststight little disciplinary islands; tight little techie islands; tight little islands of higher education. Out to what John Unsworth calls constituencies. If sustainability is a problem for online humanities projects, constituencies are a key to its solution: crowd sourcing at the back end, user-communities at the front end.

So a chief Outcome of this conference was shaped as its initial Income, the multi-textual intercourse of the various participants, those dierent constituencies, who came together to talk. Over the years many of us have grown anxious at the scholar's isolation from our larger world. Who is my neighbor? a lawyer once asked Jesus. The inherited scholarly system, paper-based and ve-hundredyears mature, has made us lose touch with some of our most important neighbors. There will be no successful business plans, no eective nancial sustainability, unless the problem is approached as a systemic one, with all of the stakeholders and educational agents acting together in conscious cooperation.

There are crowds of us who have yet to be sourced. We want to remember that the state of humanities scholarship in 2010 is not the same as it was in 1993. Then and for many years the approach we took

ought to be. See my Culture and Technology. The Way We Live Now, What is to be Done, NLH 36 (Winter, 2005): 71-82 (http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/nlh04web.htm (<http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/nlh04web.htm>)) and Texton- ics. Literary and Cultural Studies in a Quantum World (http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsrel2002/mcgannlecture.pdf ) 4We intended to include a unit on art and art history but circumstances intervened to prevent this from happening.

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3 at IATH⁵we were typicalmade sense: to promote specic projects in digital scholarship outside the traditional departmental and institutional structures of the research university. It seems obvious now, as we move from here, that we need to integrate our scholarship into the programmatic heart of the university, and specically into our courses and with our students, undergrads as well as grads. Humanities scholarship needs those people, and most of all it needs to work with them in the world of their degree programs, and not along the marches of that world. And we need them not simply because we want collaboration. We need them because the future of humanities scholarship, exposing what Michael Keller calls the big ideas, often comes from that population of young people. Everything I've seen over the past seventeen years has proven that to me.

This conference also demonstrates that big ideas often come from established scholars. But as we all know, online scholarship is still practiced by only a tiny fraction of our humanities faculties. The absence of a broad professional involvement has been long-lamented and variously explained: steep learning curve, entrenched habits, lack of available time and resources, wariness at the volatile character of the new technologies. And all of those explanations are pertinent. But equally pertinent is the general failure of scholars who use digital media to give clear explanations of its critical research value. A website, however elaborate it may look, is rarely an act of critical inquiry or scholarly research. What would make it so? Hyperlinks?

GIS technology? Hardly. A signal failure of online scholarship has been its reluctance, perhaps its inability, to explain why and how a specic online project constitutes an important research undertaking.

Of special relevance here is the question of interface design. Digital scholars too regularly and too easily draw a distinction between their data and their delivery interfaces. That distinction too easily and too often leads to arguments about the primary value of the data, as if it could be separated from the more ephemeral interfaces. But the distinction is seriously misleading. There can be no data without structure, and all structure is interface, whether we view it as a screen appearance or not. Indeed, most interfaces are logical and algorithmic, perceptually invisible. Even more importantly, all interfacesvisible as well as invisibleare interpretational forms. Until online scholars are prepared to elucidate the critical and interpretive functions of that workuntil we explain why we are doing innovative kinds of scholarship and not simply constructing websitesthe general community of humanists will continue to stand aside.

Allison Muri has rightly said that a project is never done. But since each of us one of these days will certainly be done for, as Peter Robinson observed with his familiar Aussie wit, our work must be sustained by others. That elementary fact explains why the future of scholarship and public education cannot tolerate disengaged humanist communities. We can't do this work ourselves.

Do the arithmetic. Librarians, funders, publishers use that phrase all the time. Scholars tend not to.

But we all need to do the arithmetic. And the metrics in the phrase aren't just nancial, no matter what some business managers may believe and argue. If you do the arithmetic you'll soon gure out that you're trying to solve a problem of large (human) numbers and complex (social) variables.

A recent issue of Critical Inquiry edited by James Chandler and Arnold Davidson has two essays of special relevance to this conference.⁶ Sheldon Pollock tells us that the core problem of philology today. . .is whether it will survive (931) and he goes on to explain why this is something we should all be worried about: whether coming generations will even be able to read the texts of their traditions is now all too real a question (935).⁷ Pollock gives special attention to our great Sanskrit inheritance, but his concern (for example) with the shallow presentism of scholarship in general (935) underscores the breadth of the problem as he sees it. It also indicates the peril to knowledge and education that has come with the turn to bottom-line calculation (935) in university policy everywhere.

Doing the arithmetic of knowledge in bottom-line terms is the subject of Marshall Sahlins' essayan extensive, alternately dismal and witty exposure of how this kind of thinking infects the university tout court.

The narrative is all the more trenchant for those moments when Sahlins lets us glimpse his own moments of

5The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at U. of Virginia (www.iath.virginia.edu (<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/>)).

6The Fate of Disciplines, Critical Inquiry 35.4 (Summer 2009).

7For a parallel if alternative view of the discipline of philology, see my McKenzie Lecture, Philology in a New Key (Oxford, February 2009; reprinted in somewhat abbreviated form as Our Textual History in Times Literary Supplement 5564 (20 November 2009): 13-15).

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complicity.

God, or Somebody, knows that capitalist enterprise has much to answer for. But so far as sustaining our cultural inheritance is concerned, its demons need not be enemies of promise. Successful business plans make both short- and long-term calculations. The business of the university is knowledge and education, both of which have always been long-term capital investments. As Roger Bagnall remarks, if Papyrology is unlikely to generate the revenue needed to sustain its work, then universities have to think outside that box called the bottom line. How else can we expect to understand the ancient world without it? And how can we understand who and where we are now without those histories?

We are part of a vast implicate order. And because that is the case, we need an arithmetic adequate to that order. Sustaining humanities scholarship into the future, which is also keeping faith with the past, means one simple and obvious, if also dicult, thing: it means cooperation among the stakeholders. In this case, the central position of the universities lays a special obligation on them: not only to generate the funds needed to maintain what the past has entrusted to them, but to set policies that drive inter-institutional scholarly collaborations. There are economies of scale, as we alltheoreticallyunderstand. But the truth is that most humanists, abetted by their universities, continue to operate not in an implicate but in an isolate order, as the author lines of our publications indicate, all the while pledging allegiance to globalization and the noble living and the noble dead.

Online networksboth their character and their costsare calling us to rethink what we're doing to reshape our common and communal procedures. The question, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick asks in her polemical inquiry into online scholarship, do we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the [digital]

systems that will replace the entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs.⁸ The question asks for practical responses.

Jerome McGann

8See the text of Planned Obsolescence online at mediacommonspress: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/

(<http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/>)

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Chapter 2

Sustainability: The Elephant in the Room

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Sustainability is a dark but potent word in the eld of digital humanities. It signals a broad set of concernsthey are both technical and institutionalabout how to maintain and augment the increasingly large body of information that humanists are both creating and using.

But sustaining what precisely? How and for how long? Indeed, why do we have a problem at all?

These may seem absurdly obvious questions, and in a certain obvious sense they are. But like most obvious questions, their transparency is deceptive. This becomes clear, I think, if we pose a few questions rhetorical and hypothetical: Would the problems go away if we had access to a lot more money? Or technical support? Or perhaps if all our scholarly projects had well-crafted business plans?

To think that they would is a fantasy we all, in our dierent ways and perspectives, have to reckon with.

Of course funding and technical support are necessary, but to xate there is to lose sight of the more dicult problems we're facing. These are primarily political and institutional. And those political and institutional pressures distort the view of those who are trying to frame strategies and general policy. As you will see, I will be taking some of my own experiences and myopias as instructive cases.

Our situation reminds me of the problem that organizes Kathy Acker's notorious ction Empire of the Senseless. At a pivotal moment in the action, Acker's heroine Abhor nds herself in a maze of diculties.

Trying to discover what has caused the mess of her life and how to escape, Abhor realizes she has herself been multiplying her problems. Her life takes a decisive turn for the better when she sees she has been asking the wrong question. Abhor changes the question from what is the problem to who are the agents social and individualshaping the eld in which she has been such a dismal wanderer. ² The shift has two important eects: it dissipates the fog of abstractions that has made such a comedy of her life; and it begins to free her from her circumstantial, and thus largely reactive, view of her experience.

So let's begin to think about the current state of humanities scholarship under that Abhorrent sign: Not what but who.

2Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 112.

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Humanities scholarship wasand still precariously iscreated and sustained through the interoperation of four institutional agents. Three of them are structurally foundational, like three persons in one secular deity: the scholars themselves (working within a network of educational and professional organizations);

publishing entities, especially university presses and professionally-authorized journals; and libraries and depositories, where this work is collected and made accessible for reection and repurposing. There is also an important fourth agent, scholarship's Church Militant. This would be the various public and private funding entities that provide crucial nancial support to the ongoing life of culture.

Let's do a little recollecting. Until about twenty-ve years ago, that scholastic network functioned reasonably well. But a number of causes began to undermine its operations. The emergence of digital technology was not the only one, but it proved to be decisive.

For obvious reasons, research libraries were the rst of these agents to engage practically with the new information technologies. While the adaptation has created serious problems for these libraries, the event has also restored an awareness of their indispensable educational position. I well remember years agoit was the late 1970shaving a conversation with Stanley Fish about our academic work. We were both on the faculty of John Hopkins at the time. I was complaining to Stanley about certain weaknesses I was nding in the holdings of the Hopkins library. It's not a problem for me, he said. What I do, I can do without any library at all. Of course I knew exactly why he said that and why it was true. But I had to reply: What I do, I can't do without a library.

For the research library, digital technology has been both a problem and a boon. When digital scholarship in the humanities thrives at a university these days, the library is almost always a key player, and often the center and driving force. The digital transformation of the library has caught everyone's attention.

The faculties take notice now when the library announces it is buying or subscribing to (or not buying or subscribing to) a certain database, or when it drops journals or doesn't buy certain books.

For academic publishing, on the other hand, digitization and the accompanying market changes have brought a largely unmitigated crisis that has yet to run its course.

As we all by this time know, the very existence of many university presses and specialized journals has become uncertain. As academic presses cut back their lists, scholarsespecially young scholarshave diculty publishing their work. This serious problem has engaged the attention of our communities for some years, though our practical responses so far have not been impressive. At least as distressing is the almost total neglect of the problem of in-copyright scholarly publicationsthe backlists of university press monographs and the many journals with specialized subjects and audiences.³ The digital migration of this very special library of scholarship is a clear and pressing need, but virtually no programmatic eorts have been made to address it.

In the meantime, commercial vendors have been quick o the mark to oer various kinds of digital packages to academic libraries. Until the coming of the Google Book initiative, these were specialized collections and invariably expensive, and only recently have vendors of these materials given serious thought to how users might access them for integrated online search and analysis. They were also created without eective scholarly input at the design stage, or later at the use end where these materials might befrom a scholar's point of view should beaugmented and repurposed.

In these ventures to digitize our cultural heritage, Google Books brought a whole newa totalizing approach. Because this initiative aspires to a vast and integrated depository of our print materials, that approach is inspiring. But it is also disturbing and fraught with danger, perhaps especially in the United States, where the Library of Congress represents a national commitment to free culture and access to knowledge. The Google Books Settlement controversy exposes the disconnect between commercially driven digital initiatives and the scholarly communities whose educational mission is to preserve, access, and augment our cultural heritage. About this matter I shall have more to say in a moment.

For a scholar and educator, a most dismaying aspect of this general situation is the blow-back eect one sees in graduate programs. Dissertation work in literary and cultural studies, for example, is now

3The ACLS-sponsored Humanities E-Book project is one response but its approach is decidedly random. Google Books has already digitized a vast number of these works but few are accessible to the scholarly community, and when the Google Book Settlement is nally achieved, no one knows how these works will be accessible.

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7 regularly shaped to short-term market demands, which respond to a calendar that has little relation to the fundamental needs of humanities research and scholarship. Important work is not being done, is positively shunned, in graduate programs because academic presses will almost certainly not publish it any more. At the same time, as opportunities emerge for using digital resources to improve scholarly work in the humanities, programmatic responses in traditional departments have been minimal to nonexistent. Humanities students who want to pursue digital work almost always do so outside their regular institutional programs, which remain rmly oriented to print publication.

For two decades various persons and concerned institutions have been trying to address those problems.

Electronic journals and journal providers; various types of digital repositories maintained by universities and their libraries; Google Books and Google Scholar; large commercial databases like ECCO; scholar-driven and peer-reviewed research ventures like NINES; and most recently print-on demand publishing: all are responses to a crisis in scholarly communication. Taken individually, each of these ventureseven Google Books, if we except the current Settlement proposalsis important, useful, sometimes inspiriting. Moreover, taken together they appear to signal a great improvement in the scholar's and educator's condition.

But two problems pervade these responses. First, their hodgepodge character is darkly eloquent, signaling a grave and now widely registered instability in humanities research education. Second, and far more troubling, the community of scholars has played only a minor role in shaping these events. We have been like marginal, third-world presences in these momentous changesagents who have actually chosen an adjunct and subaltern position.

Let's pause to reect on the inaction of the scholarly community. What's going on here? Rather ask:

who? The emergence of digital technology has brought a new and crucial populace into the university. So far as the university's political and social structure is concerned, they are employees hired to serve the faculties.

I leave aside the fact that these people are often scholars of distinction in their own right. What is chiey pertinent here is (1) their skills are essential to digital humanities work; (2) the structure of the institution separates them from the regular faculties; and (3) they are an expensive population to support, commanding high salaries, often higher than the faculty persons they might be working with, as well as expensive resources that regular faculty don't need and wouldn't know how to use anyhow.

What to do with these immigrants? One optionit is widespreadis to set quotas on their admission.

The institution hires the technicians it needs to run its basic administrative operations. Scholars who want to pursue digital work complain bitterly that the university does not give them the technical and resource support they require. But since the vast majority of the faculties do not want those persons and resources, and since they are expensive . . . etc. etc, Q.E.D.

Or if the quotas are lifted and these persons come into the university, where do they live? The answer is: outside the departments and faculties. That situation makes it extremely dicult to pursue any kind of digital work that isn't tied directly to classroom pedagogy. It makes it virtually impossible to direct a coherent institutional policy toward the support of digital scholarship. Since the university and its faculties dene themselves in relation to their scholarship and research work, the situation gets lost on both sides: it discourages the emergence of digital scholarship, and it sustains, though minimally, the traditional paper- based network. So far as digital scholarship is concerned, the result is a haphazard, inecient, and often jerry-built arrangement of intramural instrumentsfree-standing centers, labs, enterprises, and institutes, or special digital groups set up outside the traditional departmental structure of the university. They are expensive to run and the vast majority of the faculty have no use for them. The result is social dislocation both within and without the faculties. Because the dislocation registers most clearly as a struggle for scarce resources, we think we're dealing with a problem of money. But we're not. Money isn't the problem, it's the symptom of the problem of setting university policy at a time when humanities faculties are uncertain of both their public and their intramural position.

2.2 II

So in a time like this we are sorely pressed by the question: What do scholars want? Whether we work with digital or paper-based resources, or both, our basic needs are the same. We all want our cultural record

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to be comprehensive, stable, and accessible. And we all want to be able to augment that record with our own contributions.

Those desires lead many of usperhaps even most of usto cherish the reliabilities of print-based research and traditional publication, especially monograph publication, and to resist moves toward digital venues. Alas, one might as well hope for the return of the unity of Christendom, a global economy of sailing ships, or the Holy Roman Empire. Of course book culture will not go extinct: human memory is too closely bound to it. But no one any longer thinks that scholarshipour ongoing research and professional communicationcan be organized and sustained through print resources.

From that realization many of us imagine that if we digitize all of our cultural heritage, if we do that with care and accuracy, we will have solved the problem. But the simplest reection exposes how mistaken we would be. After we digitize the books, the books themselves remain. Or, as many thoughtful humanists keep insisting, should remain. Perhaps the greatest of the false promises of digitization is that its simulations will save our books. They will not, though they are provoking us to get seriously involved with the problems that grow, like tares among the wheat, with digitization. If our book heritage is to be saved, we will have to choose to save it intact, not simulate it electronically.

Because scholars now liveand will henceforth livein a kind of half-world between print and digital technologies, this early period of transition has brought the confusion and uncertainty we see everywhere. We want to minimize these transitional problems. Even more, we want mechanisms that stabilize the cultural record, both print and digital, and that sustain and perhaps improve how we investigate that record and communicate what we learn. In short, we have two closely related problems on our hands: how to carry on our research in mixed depositories; and how to communicate and exchange our work.

Here's a small examplea personal experiencethat may help to expose the issues.

For several years I've been spending four weeks in Berkeley in December and January, between my fall and spring terms at the University of Virginia. I have a research appointment at UC Berkeley and thus get access to the U.C. libraries. I haunt the Bancroft and the Doe. But California's recent economic catastrophe forced drastic cutbacks in the Berkeley library hours. I arrived in Berkeley this past December and found the libraries were all closed.

The situation threw into relief what this particular scholar sorely wanted: direct access to the printed books and journals in Berkeley's regular and special collections. Although I had privileged access to all the digital resources of two major research librariesU.C. Berkeley and U. of Virginiamy research projects couldn't proceed. I had to consult certain materials in Special Collections. That was one problem, though it wasn't the most imperative. I also needed access to a large corpus of scholarly work that is only available in print. Indeed, it was this workscholarship developed and published for the most part during the past forty yearswhich established my own research frame of reference. But the fact is that very little of the scholarship still in copyright is digitally accessible, so unless you can get the books and journals themselves, you're out of luck.

This little episodetrivial enough in its wayexposes two dicult issues for scholars. The rst is well known but may be usefully rehearsed and explored a bit further. The second, less well recognized, has grown within the digital humanities community itself.

University presses control the vast majority of the copyrights of scholarly books. After a few years, nearly all of these books have exhausted their salability, and in recent years that timeframealong with the sales numbershas continued to shrink. Still older booksworks, for instance, published before the drastic pricing changes that university presses began to introduce in the late eightiesare virtually entombed. Scholars' need for these works remains as fundamental as ever. But presses resist eorts to release these works to a free culture network. In fact, few are even minimally revenue producingindeed, they can be serious drains on a press's nances.

The issues are highlighted in Google's negotiations with the Authors Guild and the American Associa- tion of Publishers to establish guidelines and rights for Google's book digitization plans. These negotiations are taking place without any eective input from the scholarly community. Neither the Modern Language Association nor any of the large professional organizations with a fundamental interest in humanities education and cultural heritage have been participants in the settlement negotiations. But whereas the chief

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9 interest of the Guild and the AAP (and Google) is in secure prots, scholars want to sustain a vigorous intramural communication, on one hand, and to maximize the public access to knowledge on the other. The interests of the educational and scholarly communities might have been defended by university presses and their association (AAUP). But this has not happenedon the contrary in factbecause academic presses have been running for years on a for-prot model that is little dierent from commercial publishers.⁴

Robert Darnton's series of essays in The New York Review of Books has called attention to some of the key issues.⁵ But even so, the community of scholars is scarcely aware of what is happening and is little engaged in any practical way. Not until the fall of 2009 was an eort launched to le an appeal to the court arguing that no settlement should be completed until the interests of the scholarly community have been assessed and addressed.⁶ The appeal letter is now ocially led on behalf of a group of sixty-ve academic authorsa number that supplies a dismal gloss on the institutional awareness of the scholarly community.

The problem here has two programmatic faces: how to pursue scholarship into a future that will be organized in a digital horizon; and how to secure access to our inheritance of printed scholarship within that new framework. A sharp institutional contradiction has ensued, for whereas scholars want to preserve and integrate our print work for digital emergence, we also see the need to give up print-based forms of scholarly inquiry for born-digital forms. This means migrating the scholarly print archivejournals and publishers' backlistsand also beginning to shut down the system of print-organized scholarly research and communication and migrate to a digitally-organized social machinery.

I say begin to shut down the system because this is not a machinery we can easily turn o. The system comes with a long history and is rmly integrated in every aspect of our scholarly institutions. Jobs, promotion, tenure, and the institutional organization of the university remain keyed to it. Understanding those relations, we talk about prying ourselves free of the system by shifting criteria for scholarly advancement from monograph to periodical work, or we plead that digital worksome of it anyhowbe put on an equal footing with print work in considering scholarly merit. But as Our Lady of the Flowers said to her judge, we're already beyond thatway beyond it, in my opinion, though notas we all knowat the level of institutional politics.

Certainly Kathleen Fitzpatrick is already beyond it, as I think many if not most younger scholars tend to be. Fitzpatrick's book Planned Obsolescence grounds its various proposals around a pair of key premises: (a) that scholarship is about participating in an exchange of ideas with one's peers; and (b) that the traditional system surrounding [the] production and dissemination of this exchange has ceased to function in reliable ways. She is condent that we have the technical means to reconstruct this system in digital forms. But the charged polemic of her book reects her worry whether we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the [digital] systems that will replace the entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs.⁷ In other words, Not what, but who.

Fitzpatrick is an energetic voice, and the practical cast of her mind is particularly refreshing. But plans for institutional changes that can actually be implemented need to rest in a comprehensive view of the scholarly scene. To the degree that scholarship is about participating in an exchange of ideas with one's peers, new networked publishing structures can facilitate that interaction, as Fitzpatrick says, and the interaction will work best . . . if the discussion is ongoing, always in process.

But implicit in that argument is a presentist view of scholarship that needs expanding. Our peers are both the noble living and the noble dead. All of our ongoing discussions are rooted in the past even as they are executed in the present. That's why the crisis in the humanities is only partlyand I suspect

4Attempts to address this problem have only just begun as libraries and universities explore new procedures for making educational materials accessible online, either freely or at reasonable costs.

5Darnton's series of review essays and response notes began in The New York Review of Books, 12 February 2009 issue.

6This letter to the court was the initiative of Pamela Samuelson, wholike Darnton has been a steady critic of the narrow framework in which the settlement is being pursued. See e.g. Samuelson's Google Book Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace

(http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:hL83m3sqzdgJ:people.ischool.berkeley.edu/∼pam/GBSandBooksInCyberspace.pdf+pamela+samuelson+google+books&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us (<http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:hL83m3sqzdgJ:people.ischool.berkeley.edu/∼pam/GBSandBooksInCyberspace.pdf+pamela+samuelson+google+books&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us>))

7I quote from the online mediacommonspress publication of Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/

(<http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/>))

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not primarilyabout tenure, promotion, and the obstacles to a current exchange of ideas. It is about sustaining what Raymond Williams, a great scholar as well as a great critic, might have called The Long Evolutionif he had thought about the problem of culture as a socio-scholarly instead of a socio-literary problem, and if he had addressed it from an Electronic vantage point.

A Long View: this is what scholars have traditionally taken and it is still What Scholars Want, or what they ought to want, now. A Long View stretches back to the period before copyrighta territory being overrun by Google and other vendors. But it also stretches back to that middle distance where so much of our scholarship was print-published, and where copyright restrictions are such a hindrance to digital initiatives. Consider that proposals are now being drawn up to generate searchable PDF les of the in-copyright backlists of academic presses. Consider that this is precisely not to take a long view but a short viewone that responds to the nancial diculty of digitizing such works by avoiding the more basic needs of scholarship and education. You can look at and think about PDF les, you can even data-mine themor at any rate some of them. But you can't work with or repurpose them to any depth. For that you need structured data: TEI or XML les, databases, and ontological schemas that organize information's metadata. Traditional scholars can easily imagine that these are the requirements of digital pedants. But it isn't so. Scholars need these things because structure introduces explicitly historical dimensions into the material. Even Google takes a longer view of its digital migration of books than do vendors, proprietary or open source, who resort to PDF.

Or reect on the short view that pervades much of the thinking about (and practice with) Web 2.0 and the enthusiasm for various kinds of networked collaboration. Is Web 2.0 simply a piece of jargon, as Tim Berners-Lee has mordantly remarked?⁸ I think the answer to that question hangs upon how the scholarly community actually works, as a community, with web resources. So far the signs are only minimally encouraging. Because the roots of social networking are in online practices like Flickr and other folksonomies, the considerable scholarly potential of collaborative technology remains a pursuit.

Social software technologies have a wide-spreading but shallow root system. Their most impressive result to date, Wikipedia, illustrates both its capacities and its limits. The wiki initiative delivers an encyclopedia of information that can rapidly update the range of its entries and their content. How to enlist this technology for more substantial scholarship is often speculated about but not yet realized. That is to say, while we certainly have projects that implement collaborative scholarshipNINES is as good an example as anynone of these projects is adequately integrated into the scholarly community at large. NINES, Integrating Digital Papyrology, The Homer Multitext project: these and initiatives like them, while open and collaborative in various ways, are still fundamentally standalone works. In technical terms they are only weakly integrated into the World Library that digitization promises. In relation to scholarship's institutional ethos, their relations are even less functional. Wikipedia and professional Listservs (our digital Notes and Queries) are driven by a form of that institutional will Fitzpatrick hopes nally to see. Higher-level online research workthere is now a good deal of itis not.

But institutional will is a gure of speech that should be used with caution. It's unhelpful and untrue to imagine traditional scholars as a slacker community. The Long View of the scholar's life was well established before the emergence of the Internet. Indeed, we all know that the volatile state of digital resources has made scholars hesitate to take them up. Their hesitance, like Ahab's precipitance, has its humanities.

In that respect, here's another personal anecdote that seems to me pertinent. I spent eighteen years designing The Rossetti Archive and lling out its content. This was a collaborative project involving some forty graduate students plus a dozen or more skilled technical experts, not to speak of the cooperation of funding agencies and scores of persons around the world in many libraries, museums, and other depositories.

It comprises some 70,000 digital les and 42,000 hyperlinks organizing a critical space for the study of Rossetti's complete poetry, prose, pictures, and designs in their immediate historical context. The Archive has high-resolution digital images of every known manuscript, proof, and print publication of his textual works, and every known or accessible painting, drawing, or art object he designed. It also has a substantial body of contextual materials that are related in important ways to Rossetti's work. All of this is imbedded

8See the 2006 developerWorks interview with Berners-Lee: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm- int082206txt.html (<http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html>)

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11 in a robust environment of editorial and critical commentary.⁹

I undertook the project partly as a laboratory experiment to explore the critical and interpretive capa- bilities of digital technology, and partly to create a scholarly edition of Rossetti's work. As a laboratory experiment the project was a remarkable educational experiencea clear success, I should say. I used to measure that success in theoretical and intellectual termsas indexed in the series of books, lectures, and essays that spun o those years of the Archive's development. I now measure it by its institutional position and relations: where it came from (IATH and the digital initiatives at U. of Virginia); and what it led to (Speclab, Arp, and nally NINES). I measure it even more particularly by the names of the people who worked with me in various ways and at various stages. Most important here are those young men and women, then graduate students, who are now the generation of scholars shaping the future of humanities research and education.

On the other hand, if the Archive is judged strictly as a scholarly edition, the jury is still out. One simple and deplorable reason explains why: no one knows how it or projects like it will be or could be sustained.

And here is the supreme irony of this adventure: I am now thinking that, to preserve what I have come to see as the permanent core of its scholarly materials, I shall have to print it out. It will probably ll two dozen or more large volumes. I have also come to think that the Archive's most important scholarly content is nothing digital at all.

2.3 III

The Rossetti Archive and projects like it are most important, I now think, partly because they are already obsolete. More precisely, they are important because their process of development exposed their conceptual and institutional limits within the digital environment that spawned them. These limits, which lie concealed by the (often) impressive appearance of such works, are institutional and not algorithmic. Currently these projects are research environments, but as the online World Library emerges, their scholarly functions will become standardized and distributed. The process is even now transforming these works into historical artifacts, less engines of scholarship than objects of scholastic interest. They will not be sustained. They will bewe hope their most signicant parts will bepreserved.

The very amplitude of The Rossetti Archive is instructive. Scholarship assumes that an investigator will have access to everything that might be relevanteverything of Rossetti's, of course, but also everything that makes up the context of his work. The Archive was designed to meet those requirements: on one hand it comprises those scores of thousands of les; on the other it is designed for integration into a comprehensive online scholarly environment. I thought I might build a small model of how objects in an online World Libraryassuming the existence of such a librarywould have to be designed.

The investigation was, I think, successful, though not at all in the way I was expecting. I was less exhilarated than sobered by the outcome. The completed Archive implicitly argued that, so far as scholarship is concerned, something as thickly empirical as The Rossetti Archive would have to be created for our entire mediated inheritance, which is by no means only semasiographic. Not just all the documentary (or non- documentary) remains of Rossetti or Blake or Whitman, or Washington or Jeerson, but the same for everyone they touched as well as everyone they did not touch; and not just those individuals but all the social agents, individual and otherwise, who left their mark on the record. More, it argued that the socio- historical structures that deliver our inheritance to us must also be preserved and passed onthat would be all the metadata that organizes the complex socio-history of our human records as well as all the imbedded formsthink XML and TEIthat dene its general and local shapes.

NINES was born out of a reection on those daunting realities. Unless integrated into what I will call the online World Library, projects like The Rossetti Archive are only minimally useful to scholarship. Hence the

9See http://www.rossettiarchive.org (<http://www.rossettiarchive.org>). The Archive is a complete collection of all Ros- setti's textual, pictorial, and design works in all their known material forms and states. There are 845 textual works that exist in some 14,000 distinct documentary states and more than 2,000 pictorial and design works. Each document has an xml transcription as well as a high resolution image, and with a few exceptions each artistic work is represented by a high resolution image of both the original work and, in many cases, various later important reproductions of the original. In addition, the Archive has some 5,000 les of extensive scholarly commentaries and notes on its materials.

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emergence of NINES, which was conceived as a small model for exploring a problem of informational design for scholarly work at a global scale. It was a response to the following question: assuming a distributed world network of objects like The Rossetti Archive, how should it be organized and its materials integrated? A key initial decision was to move against the promiscuous state of information available on the web. NINES established itself as a peer-reviewing agent that would identify and assemble a corpus of trusted online resources.

It took only a few years of NINES development work to realize that the problems NINES was attempting to address were not fundamentally logical or ontological, least of all technical. They were political and institutional, and they came largely in three forms.

First are online resources that in a traditional scholarly sense are excellent. But the projects I refer to are designed and developed in digital formatstypically HTMLthat are not only a priori unsustainable; they cannot exploit the integrating functions that make web technology such a powerful social network. Quite a few online sites of this kind exist and more appear every day. Unless this work is remediated it will be lost.

Second are resources that are internally well-designed but that remain, by choice or by circumstance, sui generis online agents. They do not participate in the kind of second-order integration pursued by a project like NINES, where independent and globally distributed works expose themselves to the special interests of educators and research scholars. Moreover, NINES is itself only a modela small, operating imagination of how the World Library might be organized. Beyond our special projects, beyond the conceptual model of NINES, lies the unplumbed salt estranging sea of various independent institutions.

Third are two highly problematic kinds of traditional scholarly resources. On one hand are those that lack any online presence at all: university press backlists, for instance, or the current and/or back issues of many scholarly journals. On the other are materials being hurled on the Internet in corrupt forms by Google and other commercial agents: materials that are badly scanned, carelessly or merely randomly chosen, poorly if at all structured. And the proprietary interests of the agents who control these materials have so far obstructed an eective involvement of the scholarly community.

2.4 IV

Not what but who. It's a fact that most colleges and universities have not formulated comprehensive or policy-based approaches to online humanities scholarship. Resources for the use of media in the classroom, including electronic and web media, are fairly common. But a commitment of institutional resources to encourage digital scholarship is very rare. Scholars who have serious digital interests regularly complain about the lack of institutional support. But it's clear that the universities are responding to facts on the ground: i.e., to the scholars themselves and their professional agents. Most scholars and virtually all scholarly organizations have stood aside to let others develop an online presence for our cultural heritage:

libraries, museums, prot and non-prot commercial vendors. Funding agents like NEH , SSHRC, and Mellon have thrown support to individual scholars and small groups of scholars, and they have encouraged new institutional agents like Ithaka, Hastac, SCI, and Bamboo. But while these developments have increased during the past seventeen yearsi.e., since the public emergence of the Internetthe scholarly community at large remains shockingly passive.

One more anecdote and I have done. This one goes back to 1981, when I was rst introduced to computer processes at the California Institute of Technology. I took a position at Caltech to help design a program of general studies in humanities and social sciences for their undergraduatesbut that's another story.

Our division used Vax computers that ran Unix. I was mesmerized by the command-line world and its powerful abstract operations. I decided I had to learn how to use these machines and the chance nally came a year later. I had just nished writingon my typewritertwo short books, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism and The Romantic Ideology. A young colleague in the division, an economist, was also completing a book and he had a programmer friend who was writing a computer typesetting program. His friend needed people to test out the program so we both agreed.

It was a painful experiencebut that too is another story.

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13 In the end I actually got a handle on the program, designed the two booksone decently, the other badlyset the type, and produced camera-ready copy for U. of Chicago Press, who published the books in 1983.

I tell this story for two reasons. First there's this. Since I`d done so much of the publisher's work myself, I was pleased to think we could reduce the cost of the books dramatically. You'll recall that academic book prices at that time were beginning what would soon become their dramatic, and ultimately catastrophic, price escalation. When I asked what kind of price reduction I could expect, I was told by the press: Very little. What? How could that be? Because, I learned, the market expects a certain price for books of this kind. If we drop the cost on your books it will skew the whole price structure of our book list.

Had I been a more imaginative person I might have seen the dark future hidden in those words. But what did I know then, what did any of us know, or foresee? The academic book market was still years away from the crisis that now engulfs it. The three persons of our one institutional godthe library, the academic press, and the institutional community of scholarswere still, to all appearances, unam, sanctam, cotholicam. But then came the (digital) Reformation. Now everybody wants to know how we're going to put our Humpty Dumpty together again.

But there's also something else. While I was wrestling with the bugs and deciencies in the code and talking with the programmer, he entertained me with a little piece of black comedy. His main job was at Caltech's famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He said the problems we were having with his typesetting program were endemic to his work. He needed us to beta test the program so he could correct and improve it. I still remember his wicked smile when I told him I was glad to help. It amused him no end, he said, to think about the complex programming he and others were doing for JPL You realize, don't you, he said, that there are always fault lines and errors in the coding. Therein lies the joy of the hacker's life. And the more code we write, the more we correct and extend its functionalities, the more deeply we imbed the errors. As we improve the code, we also make it more dicult to see its weaknesses. Being a literary person I thought of Thomas Hardy's reections on the voyage of the Titanic:

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance, grew the iceberg, too.

When we pursue sustainability and try to forge policy, we want to remember: that is the horizon we're working in.

How depressing, some might say. Not at all, I answer. The poet was quite right. And so was another poet who said this: In play, there are two pleasures for your choosing,/ The one is winning, and the other losing. They were right because both knew that if a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst. And we're all here looking for a Better Way.

JPL is still going strong, despite its disasters, and after the Titanic global travel is commonplace. Another of my favorite and darkly comic poets was also right when he urged us to Say not the struggle nought availeth. We're on The Long Evolution. And because we are, we want to travel in the company of those a more recent poet called The Less Deceived. Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again on a sustained basis, on the library shelves and also online, isas they say about old agenot for sissies. It will be done even though none of us here knows exactly how. I also thinkI hopethat all of us, even the youngest, will not live to say, as a careless and ignorant man once foolishly said, Mission Accomplished. Much better would be to ask ourselves what Sean Connery asked Kevin Costner in The Untouchables: What are you prepared to do?

Which brings me back to my initial subject, Sustainability. We have to sustain our traditional cultural records. We also have to sustain our growing body of born-digital scholarship. And we have to develop and sustain digital mechanisms that give scholars functional access to both.

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But there we have only the what of the problem. Dening it as a practical problem shifts us to ask how. And when we make the shift we realize, like Kathy Acker's heroine, that the question ultimately comes down to who. We know that a number of institutional agents have a serious interest in these issues.

Thinking today in relation to that nexus, I've deliberately assumed the position of the scholar in order to examine sustainability (1) from the point of view of scholars as they function in their traditional institutional settings, digital and non-digital; and (2) from the point of view of scholars as they work and collaborate with non-academic persons and institutions.

I've done this partly out of necessity, because those are the perspectives in which I experience the issues. But I've also done it to argue that the scholar's interests ought to be determining onesperhaps, if there is such a thing, the determining ones. Why is that? Because it is the scholar's vocation to monitor the cultural record as the indispensable resource for public education. As librarians, publishers, funding agencies, and academic administrators engage these issues from their special vantage points, they should keep that perspectivemy perspective, our perspectiveclearly before their minds.

The most disturbing aspect of the ongoing Google Book Settlement dispute is that the interests of the higher educational community have not been represented in the negotiations.¹⁰ But the dismal truth is that we have been absent for years from many decisive, if less dramatic, events. We are largely invisible.

Because only a small minority of scholars has been active with digital work and the institutional changes it is bringing, they function on their ownas individuals or relatively small groups, isolated within their own traditional communities. This is the social fracture in the world of higher education exposing the very heart of the matter.

Or the heart failure. We will advance funeral by funeral, a learned digital scholar once mordantly remarked when I was kvetching with him on these subjects. And while I'm sure he touched an important truth, it isn't a truth to help us shape reliable policy, which is what we need. Sustaining digital scholarship means sustaining our cultural resources tout court, digital and non-digital, and it also means taking a long view. It is a social problem pressing on the entire community entrusted with the care of public education.

Advertising, ideology, propaganda, and entertainment are part of our public education, but scholarship is its source and end and test. And sustainability is what scholarship has always been about.

What are you prepared to do?

10

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Chapter 3

The Grub Street Project: Imagining Futures in Scholarly Editing

¹

External Image

Please see:

3.1 The Grub Street Project: Aims and Objectives

Imagine an edition of eighteenth-century London, where a single page as zoomable map provides the interface for reading the city, its communications, its economies and texts, its literature, history, architecture, art, and its music. Imagine a new way of sharing a scholarly edition in the digital environment, not as a single annotated e-edition, but as an expanding library of selected and topographically encoded, searchable books, maps, and prints. Still very much in an early stage of development, the Grub Street Project aims to create a system to assemble and map the topography, publishing history, texts, and people of eighteenth-century London. The project is intended to create an open-access collaborative space where students, scholars, and members of the public (e.g., genealogical societies, high school classes, or gamers inventing a new space to imagine D&D style narratives) can add their own annotations, literary mappings, e-editions, or digitized documents to the infrastructure. The digital infrastructure will include a number of maps of London from 1720 to 1799, including John Strype's Survey of London (1720), widely understood to be the rst authority on the history of London and its topography, and Richard Horwood's Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1799). Horwood's map, intended to present a complete view of the city with every individual property, street, and alley, will serve as the main interface, while the others will provide comparative views of the city over time. Horwood's thirty-twopage document is reconstructed as a single zoomable map that will be associated with data, including 11,000 place names and alternates, plus 5,300 place descriptions from the complete text of the public domain Dictionary of London (Harben 1918); addresses, trades, and tradespeople from Kent's London business directories published annually from 1732 to 1828; bookseller and printer locations derived from bibliographical data; and links to full-text e-editions of books, pamphlets, broadsheets, images, and maps printed and sold in the city.²

In terms of scholarly goals, by applying topographical markup to a set of digitized maps, texts, and images, the project aims to provide a means to search, navigate and visualize trends and relationships between material contexts (such as networks of print distribution, literary commerce and other trades, or particular historical events). This will allow us to read and visualize the history of print culture in this particular space.³ But as a literary scholar I am also interested in the immaterial London: the London that

Available for free at Connexions <http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1>

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is in the imagination of its citizens and visitors, the London that is both real and metaphorical topography depicted by contemporary writers such as Alexander Pope in The Dunciad. Maps can also help us to investigate how that space is represented by imaginary topos, for example a Dulness that is impersonated in localizable points such as Bedlam, Fleet Ditch, or St. Mary le Strand in Fleet Street and also lies like a cloud over the entire city. The utility of this concept for the study of literature and its spaces or topographies is that, as with Google Maps, annotated maps are not merely geography: they articulate the culture of places. By re-presenting the history of London as a network of literary communications, ideas, and physical- spatial relationships, by visualizing it as a heterotopia,⁴ localized in maps of the real but simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted by literary metaphor and ambiguity, we can gain new understanding of the city and its literature.

In terms of the project's goals that are less scholarly but more crucial overall, this project aims to promote public access to scholarship and public domain documents. The site and the editions contained in it will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license that will enable the digitized documents and editions to be accessed and used freely. Making digital editions usable, accessible, readily annotated, and free of restrictions will help to ensure sustainability for non-commercialized projects. Perhaps the most important issue facing scholarly use of digital textspossibly more important than TEI-compliant markup, machine-readable texts, digital tools for collocation and concordance, etc., as valuable as they areis copyright, and the public access to high-quality, carefully edited, digital editions (whatever the future structure of digital editions might be).⁵

3.2 Copyright and Sustainability

Copyright issues are not new to digital projects, but the atmosphere of restrictions and controls over these materials is much more vigorous today. When scholarship is owned by commercial interests, we risk losing our ability to participate in our own discourses. Copyright has been, mostly, a fair means of protecting authors', publishers', and scholars' interests in the world of print. However, everything changes when digital technologies render all communications as copies. This situation has resulted in sometimes excessively restrictive user agreements written for companies that have built their business models on distributing books and journals in the age of print, when it was harder to copy and re-use words or images.

As an example, consider the legal notice for the OED Online, which reads as follows:

you may not . . . systematically make printed or electronic copies of multiple extracts of OED Online for any purpose; . . . display or distribute any part of OED Online on any electronic network, including without limitation the Internet and the World Wide Web (other than the institution's secure network, where the Subscriber is an institution); . . . use all or any part of OED Online for any commercial use.⁶

Merriam-Webster Online similarly limits the use of its text:

No part of the work embodied in Merriam-Webster's pages on the World Wide Web and covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systemswithout the written permission of the publisher.⁷

The commercial and legal motivations for such notices are understandable when the tools for copying and publishing are ubiquitous and easily employed; however, a dismaying trend here, by no means unique to these publications, is the explicit overriding of any principles of fair use or fair dealing. Aside from the obvious vagaries of terms such as systematic or multiple, readers and writers are apparently forbidden to use any portion in an online work, in a commercial work, or in the case of Merriam-Webster, in any work whatsoever. An added irony is that a signicant proportion of these dictionaries has been compiled from a long and protable tradition of stealing, pilfering, and fair use. If one compares, for example, the denitions

Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

Collection Editor:

Jerome McGann

Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

Collection Editor:

Jerome McGann Authors:

Roger S. Bagnall Alan Burdette

Dan Cohen Paul Courant Gregory Crane

Paolo D’Iorio Robert Darnton Jennifer Edmond Hans Walter Gabler

Charles Henry Penelope Kaiserlian

Michael A. Keller Matthew Kirschenbaum

Laura Mandell Jerome McGann

Frederick Moody Michael Moss

Allison Muri Gregory Nagy

Steve Plog Timothy Powell

Todd Presner Kenneth Price

John Rink Peter Robinson Geoffrey Rockwell

Ray Siemens John Unsworth susan schreibman

Online:

< http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1/ >

C O N N E X I O N S

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

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Chapter 2

Sustainability: The Elephant in the Room

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2.1 I

2.2 II

2.3 III

2.4 IV

Chapter 3

The Grub Street Project: Imagining Futures in Scholarly Editing

External Image

3.1 The Grub Street Project: Aims and Objectives

3.2 Copyright and Sustainability