Loss: Our Disappearing Digital Legacy

I'm well into the beginning of the semester and ready to begin documenting early digital humanities projects.

In this post, I want to emphasize how much we are in danger of losing, how much of early digital cultural material is evaporating. I don't want to suggest that the loss is something that is individuated and endemic to digital work, as ample scholarly work has proved that not to be the case. Instead, I want to argue that the small scale, scholarly projects that are crucial to the early days of digital humanities are particularly vulnerable in large part because they are formed outside of institutional structures. These are often one off, activist digital projects that scholars put up on personal servers or purchased webspace. Those who worked on these projects did not necessarily identify as digital humanists and often left the projects without an archiving plan when they were "finished." Yet these projects, in content and design, tell us a great deal about early digital scholarly production and remain valuable artifacts of the period in which they were produced.

When I was writing my book I often looked to Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle website to locate older dh projects. If you use the internet archive to look at older versions of the Voice of the Shuttle you can track digital projects that appear and disappear over time. Since I work in African-American literature, I was very interested in the section originally titled "Afro American" Minority Literatures. The earliest archive of this section is from January 19, 2000 and contains, among various subtopics, a section dedicated to Maya Angelou.

see https://web.archive.org/web/20000119213716/http://vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/eng-min.html

All three original sources are in existence, but have been moved to other servers. The Scott Williams page is of particular interest because it is suggests the interdisciplinary, activist roots of many of the projects I am cataloging.

The project appears to have been originated in 1998 by Williams using a pseudonym, bonVìbré Prosim. 

See https://web.archive.org/web/19981203160317/http://members.aol.com/bonvibre/

According to the internet archive records, it appears that the pages were migrated from their original aol home to Williams' personal web space in the Math Department at the University of Buffalo around the end of 1999. The pages have not been updated since 2000.

When the pages were migrated they were expanded under the auspices of the Circle Brotherhood Association.

 See http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/circle/circle.html#members

Like many early digital sites, the Circle's website is an interesting blend of activism, social outreach and cultural documents. Of particular interest is the focus on local history of African Americans in Western New York and the emphasis on community outreach, with references to the Million Man March and fatherhood activism.

The Circle Brotherhood Association pages are fascinating early digital activist history that deserve preservation and additional exploration, and I hope that someone who works in the nexus of the fields of Black activism, literature and community will provide the work needed to examine this resource.

Given the pages' location, however, it is clear that this early marker of digital history is in danger of disappearance. The pages exist on a university server, but under Scott Williams' personal folders. Professor Williams is no longer listed as a faculty member at the University of Buffalo, suggesting he has since retired and his web pages exist in a sort of limbo. The pages are clearly experiencing deterioration as the current site no longer links to the Malcolm X pages. Unless the university has plans to archive the materials, they will eventually disappear.

It is true that much of the site is preserved on the internet archive. I am unsure, however, what it says about us as a field or area of study that we have effectively off loaded the preservation of much of our field's work to even a fabulous organization such as the ia. As we think about how to preserve, we must continue to press to think about what is preserved, as small activist work like the Circle Brotherhood Association pages provide cultural context for what digital diversity meant in the late 1990s.

Africabib.org

This summer a small group of folks at Texas A&M University, myself, Rebecca Hankins, Maura Ives, and Sarah Potvin, have been working on DiBB: The Digital Black Bibliographic Project. The project will provide an expanded, accurate data set for black cultural research in multiple fields while providing a means to collect and manipulate humanities data, with particular attention to datamining and visualization techniques. During the course of the project, we have been looking at a wide variety of black bibliographies, and Rebecca mentioned Africabib.org's excellent work.

Launched in 1974, Africabib.org was initially a print project titled Africana Periodical Literature Index compiled by the now retired Davis Bullwinkle (About Founder). By the mid 1980s the project was transferred to a database and by 1999 the project was moved to the web. 

Original entry page:

The 1999 web version of the project included the Bibliography of Africana Periodical Literature Database and the African Women's Database (About). The current project has expanded to six database and includes the original databases plus Women Travelers, Explorers and Missionaries to Africa, Islam in Africa, Kenya Coast, and Water and Africa.

Like many of the early digital humanities projects, the web was utilized to allow a larger audience access to the work. Noting that the original research was "still not accessible to researchers," Bullwinkle spent "a great deal of time over many years...to make the data computer accessible" (About).

The current project contains more than 218,000 records and is accessible by a simple set of search fields.

You might also search the materials by collection, country or by region.

We are fortunate to still have this site available. Like many early projects, AfricaBib was clearly a labor of love for its founder. When Bullwinkle retired in 2008, the project could have ended its lifespan as did many early activist projects that were removed from the web or lingered and became increasingly broken as the technology decayed. Instead, the African Studies Centre in Leiden, The Netherlands has taken on the responsibility of hosting the site, insuring its sustainability.

E-Black Studies: Abdul Alkalimat's Brother Malcolm

Today I want to highlight the Brother Malcolm website created by Professor Abdul Alkalimat, Professor Emeritus of African American and Library and Information Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Launched in 1998, this site remains the premier scholarly source for Malcolm X information. I have used the site over many years, and Brother Malcolm was crucial to my work on the Alex Haley Malcolm X papers. In addition, Alkalimat launched and continues to run eBlack Studies, a foundational digital project in black studies.

Brother Malcolm contains a huge amount of information on Malcolm X, from pictures, family information, timelines of writings and speeches, a bibliography, guides to Malcolm X papers in special collections, Alex Haley's estate auction catalog, study guides and much more. Some of this material is not available elsewhere, all of it is extremely valuable. For example, I was able to use the Alex Haley Estate Auction catalog to decode where Alex Haley's "The Malcolm X I Knew" was published. Students also appreciated the site's link to Malcolm X's FBI papers. Without these materials, my work on Malcolm X would remain incomplete.

Alkalimat's site reveals the complexities and importance of Malcolm X's life. I find this letter from Malcolm X to his sister, Ella, while he was in prison in 1949 particularly moving:

Formed from activist politics, the site is staunchly open source and emphasizes a solidarity of democracy. Alkalimat writes,

"Our philosophy is based on three concepts: cyber democracy, collective intelligence, and information freedom.

• Cyber democracy: maximize potential participation (connectivity) 
• Collective intelligence: include all voices (content) 
• Information freedom: free distribution of information (consumption)" (http://brothermalcolm.net/introduction.html)

This philosophy means that teacher training and student materials are included on the site.

The site also includes lists of related dissertations.

While Alkalimat is, to my mind, one of our founding digital humanists, his work has not received appropriate attention from the larger dh community. He was featured at the University of Maryland's 2008 Digital Diasporas conference, but few scholars outside of black studies digital work know of his important role in digital humanities.  I hope that those within the larger dh community come to recognize how important Alkalimat and his work are to dh and that we celebrate his ongoing work.

Payne Theological Seminary and A.M.E. Church Archive

I've been trying to write a blog post over the last two days, but the murders in Charleston have been so horrific that I keep stopping and starting posts.  I have a few other posts forthcoming, but I decided that I needed to feature the Payne Theological Seminary and A.M.E. Church Archive. This digital collection isn't a "historical" (pre-2002) digital humanities project, but the materials on the A.M.E. Church are crucial within the context of Charleston.

The site is huge, with over 80,000 items and growing. It contains two sections: The Payne Theological Seminary materials and the A.M.E. Church Archives. The Payne Theological Seminary was launched in 1894 by the African Methodist Episcopal church to provide training to ministers. The A.M.E. material are divided into five subsections: A.M.E. Church, Church Histories, Clergy, Publishing and Women in Ministry.

The collection is searchable and features high quality images, many housed in the internet archive. The items included are stunning and the Emanuel A.M.E. Church of Charleston, South Carolina is mentioned again and again.





Richard Wright's Centennial encyclopedia of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church (1916)






















"During the first fifty years, the church was confined almost entirely to the Northern States, as it was not allowed to operate among the slaves in the South, though in Charleston, New Orleans, and one or two other places, there were small organizations among free Negroes." (5) Emanuel A.M.E. has long stood as an important symbol within the deep South.




Carter Woodson's The History of the Negro Church, 2nd edition (1921)

Woodson writes: "The African Methodists had with some difficulty under the leadership of Rev. Morris Brown established in Charleston a church reporting 1,000 members in 1817, and increasing by 1822 to 3,00- in spite of the intolerant laws and the police regulations making it difficult for slaves and free persons of color to attend. In 1822, however, because of the spirit of insurrection among Negroes following the fortunes of Denmark Vesey, who devised well laid plans for killing off the masters of the slaves, the African Methodists were required to suspend operation. Their pastor, morris Brown, was threatened and would have been dealt with foully, had it not been for the interference of General James Hamilton, who secreted Brown in his home until he could give him safe passage to the North, where he very soon reached a position of prominence, even that of bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church." (77-8)




African Methodism in the South, or, Twenty-five years of Freedom by W.J. Gaines (1890)















Emanuel A.M.E., according to Gaines, was the Mother church of the South, a title that many parishioners continue to sue. Writing of the return of Bishop Payne to Charleston, "after that long absence he returns, a man of fifty-four years of matured experience and wisdom, to take the step which has opened up a vast amount of territory to the Mother Church and spread wide her dominions." (243)

These are just a few mentions of Emanuel A.M.E. in the church documents. Martin Luther King's visit to the church in 1962 was not the first moment of resistance launched from the church. The church and its people were founded on resistance to white racism and violence and had, by the Civil Rights Era, fought for equality for over 150 years.

Guest Post: Online Tutorials from the History Courseware Consortium

I am pleased to share our first guest post! Melissa Terras graciously provided this overview of TLTP History Courseware Consortium Project. Thank you Melissa, and I welcome anyone who would like to contribute a post on an early digital project.


Guest Post: Online Tutorials from the History Courseware Consortium

The first Humanities Computing project I was employed at was in the 1997/1998 academic year at the University of Glasgow in the TLTP, History Courseware Constorium, project (http://web.archive.org/web/20030424111630/http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/TILT/TILT.html). This was funded by the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (http://www.naec.org.uk/organisations/the-teaching-and-learning-technology-programme) a multimillion pound funding programme that was launched in 1993 in the UK, supported by the main research funding bodies, with the aim of improving quality in the provision of teaching and learning through using digital technologies. It was a period of rapid expansion, and TLTP History Courseware Consortium who were tasked in providing online tutorials and readings in various aspects of history, embedding digitized primary sources into the online texts.

The main players in the TLTP History Courseware Consortium were Rick Trainor (who chaired the Steering Committee), Astrid Wissenburg (the Project Manager) and Don Spaeth (as Director), all from Glasgow, and Frank Colson (from Southampton).  There were eighty institutions in the Consortium.  Southampton was initially responsible for copyright clearance and also for production, using a hypertext environment called Microcosm developed under the direction of Wendy Hall. Glasgow later took over these areas and moved the materials into HTML; Don Spaeth had seen the launch of Mosaic at the NCSA in 1993 and it proved to be a good development platform, although the tutorials' visual design was basic.  The initial idea behind the tutorials grew out of a paper Don Spaeth gave at the UK AHC conference in 1993, called "the enriched lecture". This was literally intended to be the equivalent of an online lecture, with resources for students to view.  However, the concept expanded greatly due to huge amounts of work put in by academic authors during the process of developing TLTP materials, and experimentation with the technologies available.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030625151059/http://www.gla.ac.uk/~histtltp/

The History Coursework Consortium produced a range of online tutorials (which were around 10,000 words long each) on a variety of topics, and these were distributed to History departments around the country on a paid for CD-ROM: not only were many departments not online yet, but copyright issues meant that putting these online was not possible. There was a licensing structure worked out for distribution (http://web.archive.org/web/20031021193225/http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/order.htm), although the process for dealing with these licenses was manual, compared to today’s online registration systems.

One of the aims of the tutorials were to cover emergent areas where primary sources were not well covered in textbooks, and the first ones listed are “Women’s History: Major Themes in Women's History from the Enlightenment to the Second World War” and “Enfranchising Women: The Politics of women's Suffrage in Europe 1789 – 1945”.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030902022335/http://www2.gla.ac.uk/~histtltp/BROCHURE/women2.htm#Title

http://web.archive.org/web/20030902022118/http://www.gla.ac.uk/~histtltp/BROCHURE/themes.htm#Title 

These were written by a range of academic experts, and each overview tutorial provided enough material for an undergraduate course, broken down into a range of subsections which were equivalent to a lecture on the topic, with hundreds of digitised primary historical sources weaved throughout, which was an exciting bringing together of many disparate sources via digital publishing, for the time. In particular, the use of digital video materials was ambitious, and ahead of its time, years before there was any online infrastructure to help host and deliver this type of content. There was also a pioneering data exploration tool (which was an early seed for Old Bailey Online): these tutorials were really pushing what could be done with the available technology.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040114151417/http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/brochure/women/contents.htm 

One of the headaches of the project was copyright clearance for the primary historical texts and images used. Permissions were pursued for each and every one, and you can see from this list of historical sources

http://web.archive.org/web/20040328012020/http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/brochure/women/summerfi/refers/sumack.htm#Title 

just how tricky a job it was: for this one section (of 5) in one tutorial, hundreds of copyright permission statements had to be obtained. One of the project members, Ralph Wheedon, rapidly became an expert in digital copyright - and went on to work in this area at the University of Strathclyde afterwards, then onto direct the JISC Legal Service. The copyright issue contributed to the short self life of the materials: issues with copyright meant they could never be placed online, and the market moved away from CD-ROM hosted materials. Six tutorials were re-cleared in 1998-2000 for sale to schools and outside the UK, but their specialised nature, and the higher level of education that they were pitched to, meant this didn't work well.

My role on the project was slim: I was a MSc student in Computer Science at the time, having completed my MA in Art History and English literature the year before, where, in my final year in 1997, I had learnt to design webpages for an experimental delivery of my MA dissertation on Greek Art (http://www.collective.co.uk/thrones/htm/index.htm). As the TILT project was coming to a close, and given I was known to the team who had taught me web design the year before, and I was helping run tutorials for that course in 1997/98, I was asked to pitch in over the Easter holidays, helping proofreading and checking the tutorials and links once they had already been written, working full time for just three or four weeks.  The bulk of this work had already been done by the project team. It was a great temporary job – I remember thinking this academic lark pays well, compared to part time work in shops, etc – and it really helped support me over the last few months of my mostly self funded MSc.

Sadly, given that only tasters of these were put online in the first place due to copyright issues, and the main mode of delivery was via CD-ROM, means that there are no online versions of the tutorials, which is a shame as they were produced to very high editorial standards and had hundreds of images from different libraries and archives backing up the historical overviews that they provided, as well as the videos and interactive data tools. All that is left online are the tasters which remain in the web archive, which don't cover the breadth, range, and standard of the work produced.

I’m not sure that the work that went into these materials was ever appreciated, nor the bravery in pushing forward the use of digital content, including integrating digital video into the tutorials. The reports that came out of it still make for interesting reading regarding possibilities and limitations of digital pedagogy, especially since delivering online tutorials is all the rage (again!) these days.Various reports exist including:


Wissenburg, Astrid M. "TLTP History Courseware Consortium: A Project Report." History and Computing 8.1 (1996): 45-49  http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hac.1996.8.1.45

Haywood, J., et al. "Use of TLTP Materials in UK Higher Education-a Study Conducted on Behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England." Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Teaching Learning and Assessment Centre (1998).


TLTP is also mentioned in Tim Hitchcock’s overview article about the digitisation of history since 1980 (http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/digitisation_of_history.html), and the activity that went into making these tutorials contributed greatly to both raising awareness of the possibilities that computing could bring to history, and establishing humanities computing as a useful endeavour, in arts and humanities departments across the UK (remember, there were eighty institutions invovled!):

“This publishing programme ensured that a substantial minority of professional historians became familiar with either authoring hypertexts, or else using them with their students. And while the programme largely failed to fulfil the aspiration to make teaching more efficient through the application of technology in a period of rapidly increasing student numbers, it did radically alter the ways in which many historians thought about computing and teaching. … this initiative helped fundamentally to alter both the profession's thinking about teaching and the curriculum and the role of computers in the presentation of historical information.” (Hitchock, http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/digitisation_of_history.html). The fact that they did so by championing topics such as Women’s History and Women’s Suffrage indicates that from the earliest adoption of WWW technologies, Humanities Computing projects were increasing understanding of lesser documented areas, using the possibility of digital technologies to bring together disparate and important primary sources in the digital environment.

Thank you to Don Spaeth for providing additional information.

CSDH/SCHN and ACH Conference wrap up

I just returned from a great conference in Ottawa, Canada. Part of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, the CSDH/SCHN and ACH Digital Humanities Conference brought together dh scholars from around the world.

I was honored, and nervous, to give the closing keynote: DH Futures: Conflict, Power and Public Knowledge. The conference participants and twitter stream provided excellent feedback and have helped me to rethink some of my ideas. Here is the storify of the talk: https://storify.com/beherbert/joint-ach-canadian-dh-conference-2015 (side note--my husband created the storify. Look for the moment where he says--are you finished talking yet? I need to put the sheep in the barn. The life of an academic sheep herder).

Some of the talk material is drawn from my forthcoming book, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies.  I will be reworking the new materials into an article for the organization journal, so for those of you that asked, yes you may read what I have to say shortly!

Thank again to all who provided valuable feedback. Thanks especially to Roopika Risam for a lovely introduction and to the committee for inviting me to speak.

Economics and Cultural Encoding: Milena Dobreva and Medieval Slavic Manuscript Studies in Bulgaria

I have been writing my keynote, "DH Futures: Conflict, Power and Public Knowledge," for the upcoming CSDH/SCHN and ACH Conference in Ottawa and have been thinking about some of the key tensions within our current digital humanities moment. One of the crucial issues that I am discussing is the importance of thinking through dh within national and cultural contexts. While some have criticized digital humanities for a lack of awareness to this issue, there are pioneer digital humanists who have pushed the field to engage with such concerns since the 1990s.

Today I would like to highlight Milena Dobreva's presentation, "Overview of Computer Supported Medieval Slavic Manuscript Studies in Bulgaria," from the 1999 ACH-ALLC Digital Humanities conference. Dobreva is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta.

In her presentation abstract Dobreva points to the robust and rich heritage of medieval Slavic manuscripts, but bemoans the limitations hampering digitization efforts. Dobreva highlights two crucial issues with which we in digital humanities continue to struggle:

1. Encoding standards that are narrow in cultural interpretation
2. The inequitable funding of digitization projects, particularly in developing countries

Dobreva writes:

"The difficulties in creating widely accepted encoding standard are caused by several reasons:

1. The sets of graphemes appearing in different manuscripts are different. In some cases the difference of graphemes represents character differences; in other cases these were variants of the same character. 
2. The encoding of specific textual features (e.g. superscript, subscript, inscript letters and abbreviations) is still debatable. Some of the specialists insist on encoding normalized texts where all these features disappear. For others, the encoding of the text in a form, which represents the original as close as possible, is a must. But even if we have a satisfactory encoding standard, we will need to build tools enabling search within encoded texts. The 'normalization' approach leads to better solution of the problem with text search, paying the price of data loss" (Overview).

The flattening in the treatment of cultural materials leads to what Dobreva rightly calls "data loss," the loss of the robustness of such materials. While we have continually expanded our treatment of encoding Dobreva's 1999 argument remains relevant. How do we represent a complex cultural heritage within the binary of computer code?

Dobreva ends her abstract by noting, "Real digitization work [of Bulgarian manuscripts] is still not undertaken. This can be explained with the economic difficulties of the Bulgarian institutions working in the field of medieval manuscript heritage" (Overview). Unfortunately we have not found a way to resolve or even minimize the discrepancies in funding that drive certain cultural heritages to be underrepresented in digital collections. Dobreva's prescient concerns remain central to the work we must continue to undertake in digital humanities.