C21 Institutional Climates for C19 Data

Lauren Coats

Louisiana State University

Lauren Coats is associate professor of English and Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at LSU. She researches and teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature, with emphases on digital humanities, archives, and travel and exploration. For the DSL, Coats collaborates with faculty, staff, and students to advance digitally enabled scholarship. She leads a digital project on The Broadway Journal, and nineteenth-century literary magazine. Founding editor of Archive Journal, Coats’s work has been published in J19, PMLA, Lehigh University Press Digital Scholarly Editions, and more. She is currently completing a book, “Archives of Discovery: Mapping North America 1728-1850.”

Nicole Gray

University of Nebraska Lincoln

Nicole Gray is a research assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an associate editor of The Walt Whitman Archive. She has co-edited a range of documents for the Whitman Archive, including Franklin Evans, Whitman’s short fiction, and Spanish translations of “Poets to Come.” Her articles on American literature and book history have appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and PMLA.

Sarah Patterson

University of Massachusetts, Amhert

Sarah Patterson teaches African American Literature in the English department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She specializes in 19th c. African American (women's) literature, print culture and the digital humanities. Sarah’s dissertation examines Black intellectual cultures and ideals, particularly through the lens of Black women's educational philosophies in literature, 1856-1910. Sarah is a co-founder and a national faculty director for the Colored Conventions Project. She is co-editing the forthcoming volume, Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age. @sarah_patterson

Jacqueline Wernimont

Arizona State University

Jacqueline Wernimont is an anti-racist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures. Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, she writes about long histories of media and technology—particularly those that count and commemorate—and entanglements with archives and historiographic ways of knowing. She is a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences. This work includes co-Directing HASTAC and ASU’s Human Security Collaboratory. She also runs Nexus: A digital research co-op and is a fellow of the Global Security Institute.

Ed Whitley

Lehigh University

Edward Whitley is associate professor of English and director of the Mellon Digital Humanities Initiative at Lehigh University. He is the author of American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (2010) and essays in journals such as American Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and ELH. He is a contributing editor to The Walt Whitman Archive, and with Robert Weidman he is the co-director of The Vault at Pfaff’s: An Archive of Art and Literature by the Bohemians of Antebellum New York.

Abstract

“C21 Institutional Climates for C19 Data” Chair: Lindsay Van Tine, University of PennsylvaniaPanelists: Lauren Coats, LSU Nicole Gray, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Sarah... [ view full abstract ]

“C21 Institutional Climates for C19 Data”

Chair: Lindsay Van Tine, University of Pennsylvania
Panelists: Lauren Coats, LSU
Nicole Gray, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Sarah Patterson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Jacqueline Wernimont, Arizona State University
Edward Whitley, Lehigh University

This roundtable brings together scholars working on C19 digital humanities projects to discuss institutional climates for using twenty-first-century technologies to work with nineteenth-century data. The growing number of such projects suggests an increased institutional investment in the structures (technological, professional, and human) needed to sustain digitally driven scholarship. Attention to 21C conditions of scholarly production refracts those of the 19C, allowing panelists to speak to a broad range of institutional factors—technological environs, epistemological forms, labor practices, narratives on the emergence of new media, the function of data in the public sphere, and more—that affect the creation, circulation, and understanding of the data in question. What can we learn about nineteenth-century cultural formations and literary practices through digital humanities practices? And how, in turn, do such practices take shape in the institutions and networks of the academy today? The five panelists— representing a range of institutions, professional roles, and digital initiatives—take up these issues through their various and varied digital projects.

Lauren Coats will focus on a collaborative project on nineteenth-century periodicals, and the epistemological possibilities and limitations of creating a structured data set that identifies authorship. Producing a digital edition of The Broadway Journal (1845-1846), a literary magazine edited mainly by Edgar Allan Poe, using a widely adopted textual encoding standard (TEI) has enabled a collaboration that crosses professional, disciplinary, and institutional lines. It has enabled the team to produce robust data by identifying authors—often anonymous, pseudonymous, or scantily attributed—who were published, reviewed, and discussed in antebellum periodicals. Coats will discuss the ways in which C21 data structures interact with C19 authorship, making visible authors and literary networks while also narrowing the capacious range of forms of authorship available in C19 to that of an identified authorial agent.

Nicole Gray will talk briefly about current work on a grant-funded project to create a digital edition of Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass that includes both manuscript antecedents and printed variants. Whitman Archive staff are grappling with how best to describe and display revision, variation, and the complex relationships among documents using text encoding and other tools. The textual contingencies of the 1855 Leaves that its associated documents reveal have a political parallel in the goals and institutional imperatives of the grant itself. Why devote so much attention to a single nineteenth-century edition of poetry? The case for the relevance of this project points in many directions, from implications for scholarly research on Whitman and American literature more broadly, to changes in editorial methods and priorities, to technological transformations and the intelligible, machine-readable representation of revision, to the reverberations of intensive study of the volume within the collector’s book market.

Sarah Patterson will discuss the award-winning Colored Conventions Project and the ways in which collaboration and interdisciplinarity in project management advances research on historical and present-day African American collectives. Focusing on the politics of representation in digital studies, Sarah will review collaborative models of digital archiving, exhibition and geo-spatial visualization that challenge popular assumptions about Black women’s role in the Colored Conventions movement, a seven-decade series of Black-led social justice meetings that extended from 1830 to 1900. She will ask: how do we tackle the role of power and authority in data that explores the lived experiences of marginalized groups such as Black women activists? In what ways do project cohorts across rank, discipline and interest propel public-facing digital collections? These comments will highlight Black DH praxis and pedagogies that enhance what scholarly and public audiences know about the debates, women and literature connected to Black political organizing in the nineteenth century.

Jacqueline Wernimont will discuss the "The Climate of Southwestern DH.” New centers at the University of Houston, University of Utah, and existing efforts in Arizona, elsewhere in Texas and Colorado have created a new opportunity to think about the regional specificities of DH work in the American Southwest and to think about the rich work in 19th century periodicals, cartography, and personal archives in particular. This presentation will highlight the network and discuss the unique concerns with borderlands, cartography, and race represented in southwestern DH. Additionally, drawing on the work of Stacie Williams on the ecological impacts of DH work at "frontiers," these comments will address how these projects are engaging not only institutional and cultural climates, but also the ecological considerations for our work in desert and semi-arid spaces.

Edward Whitley will discuss the institutional climate for recognizing and rewarding digital scholarship by untenured faculty, graduate students, and scholars in alternative-academic positions. He will review the guidelines established by the MLA as well as by individual advocates (such as Laura Mandell’s 2012 article in the Journal of Digital Humanities) and forward-thinking institutions like the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He will plan to share the results of a survey on best practices in reviewing digital scholarship that he will distribute to the C19 listserv before the conference. His goal will be twofold: (1) to empower attendees at the roundtable as to how they can best present their digital work for institutional review; and (2) to educate senior faculty, tenure reviewers, search committees, and institutional decision makers on their role in supporting digital scholarship. He will make special mention of the efforts to #transformDH and the additional challenges faced by women and scholars of color to have their work valued within their home institutions and the larger culture of digital scholarship.

Authors

Lauren Coats (Louisiana State University)
Nicole Gray (University of Nebraska Lincoln)
Sarah Patterson (University of Massachusetts, Amhert)
Jacqueline Wernimont (Arizona State University)
Ed Whitley (Lehigh University)

Topic Area

Panel

Session

P72 » C21 Institutional Climates for C19 Data: A Roundtable (10:15 - Saturday, 24th March, Fiesta III-IV)

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