This is what digital humanities can be

Ok, so this isn’t part of my NaTheWriMo, just something I’d forgotten to post earlier:

One of the coolest – if not the coolest presentation I saw in England last spring was given by an art historian and medievalist named Kathryn M. Rudy, and entitled “Dirty Books”. Not dirty as in naughty, but dirty as in soiled – it was about the grime left by readers’ hands in the margins of 16th-century prayer books, and what that can tell us. Basically, she used a densitometer to measure how thick the grime was, and the measurements revealed the reading habits of the owner of the prayer book. I thought it was great stuff!

Well, now it’s been published and is available freely on the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art website. Well worth a perusal.

There’s something in the hands-on approach in her study that I really like, and the way it brings the past closer – not only through said hand grime, but in revealing that person x only read the optimistic bits, whereas person y was a true zealot and fundamentalist (to use modern parlance). I’m sure her method can be used to good effect on other sources too – alas, however, not on mine. But that’s not really the point either. Rather I’m enthusing about the way her study combines tools from one discipline with the sources of another – modern technology and medieval manuscripts – in order to bring out something which neither discipline could reveal on its own. That’s really something I’m trying to do with my work, too.

NaTheWriMo November 2010
WriMo
  Day:      2
  Word count:   0
  Transcription word count:   2,400
  Blog entries:   2

National Thesis Writing Month

This month, I accept and attempt the challenge of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) – or rather, since it ain’t fiction I’m writing (sic), this is NaTheWriMo. Bit of a mad venture, really, but, dammit, words ain’t forthcoming unless ya writes ’em. So, in a nutshell:

50,000 words
            in
       30 days

Wish me luck…

           Day:      1
  Word count:   0
  Blog entries:   1

On tangentials (& pro-crastination)

One of my worse – or better, depending on your viewpoint – features is my tendency to run off on tangents. I’m not sure why this happens, unless it’s just that I find following paths to see where they end more interesting than continuing along a set course to a defined destination. This is, in any case, a highly indulgent habit, and one which I will indubitably have to shed once I get my degree and need to find a real (academic) job.

Case in point: a colleague asked me what I thought about diplomatic letterbooks (ie. copybooks of diplomatic correspondence): why are these made?

Asking me anything can result in Pratchettian philosopher-length response times, and my answer duly expanded into a small-scale investigation into letterbooks, including a comparison of the correspondence of Sir Charles Cornwallis (English ambassador in Madrid, 1605-1610) and Sir Robert Cecil as seen in original letters and letterbooks found in no less than five archives, and several collections within most of them..

I think the results are fairly interesting, and point to much work that could be done on this front. (For one thing, perhaps Henry Woudhuysen’s claim that we still know next to nothing about Early Modern English letter-writing practices isn’t that far off the truth, after all.) But this took at least a day of my time, and frankly I can’t afford to do this kind of thing any more. Yet ultimately I can’t be overly upset with my behaviour, for I tend to think of procrastination as definitely containing the pro-element, meaning that it is WORK just as whatever-you-should-be-doing-instead is work. And thus the results of procrastinatory activities are bits of research in their own right.

This is all fine & dandy, but yeah. Prioritization. Not one of my strengths.

type, type, type

Really just links this time: this one relates to my earlier post on the value of the arts. Crisis of the humanities indeed – I suppose one should really come up with arguments for why the arts are important, if nothing else then for funding applications..

And on the topic of why are we here &c, Josh Ritter is blogging about making a life in music. Everything always does come down to: work hard at what you do.

Or, and particularly aptly for my current situation, as Mr. Neil so well puts it when asked advice on writing: “Write. Finish what you write.” (He continues with “Send it to publishers”, but it works a bit differently in academia.)

Now, if I only could follow my own advice.. I suppose it’s a Write or Die sorta moment. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to try to stay alive…

Useless post

An archival scholar has to thumb through numerous copies of catalogues of manuscripts held by libraries and archives. Many of these were compiled in the 19th or early 20th centuries, and it has to be said this shows. Some time ago I was going through The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. A Descriptive Catalogue (Montague Rhodes James, 1900-1904, 4 vols, Cambridge University Press), and came across these two cute examples (bold emphasis mine):

438.     R. 1. 21
Paper, 7 1/8 x 5 1/2. Cent. xviii.
A note-book containing Latin commonplaces digested under
headings, and in a later hand, miscellaneous memoranda, e.g. of
MSS. at Corpus Christi College which the writer intended to
consult.
It seems completely valueless.

…

633.     R. 3. 61 vac.
Paper, 7 5/8 x 4 3/4, ff. 27. Cent. xviii.
A note-book of historical events from 1649 to the death of
William III.
Apparently quite useless.

These value judgments now strike one as par with comments in editions of the correspondence of insert-Early/Late-Modern-English-Letter-writer-here from the same period, where the editor more often than not says he (and the editor is inevitably and always a ‘he’) has omitted the family letters as of “little interest”. But rather than make fun of Victorian scholars, I find it more interesting to wonder what choices in modern scholarly endeavours will strike our colleagues a century from now as peculiar or barbaric…

The value of the Arts

I’ve recently begun to think that the Humanities are not called the Arts for no reason. In fact, I’m currently inclined to argue that that is a most apt descriptor, and much better than “science”. Science allows us to investigate and understand the universe in terms of its details; Art allows us to study and understand the universe holistically and indirectly. ..or something like that: I’m sure this idea is not new by any measure, and that many people have put it much, much better than I have. But for example, literary criticism fares poorly when compared to cardiology in terms of how many lives has it helped to save. Yet lit. crit. gives one an immeasurably superior training in being human and understanding the universe than cardiology does.

What does this matter? Well, currently the Humanities are getting shafted in terms of funding and whatnot, wich constantly being compared to the ‘hard sciences’ and being required to “prove their worth and usefulness to society”. And I think the measuring stick is wrong – not that the Humanities (or some branches thereof) are incapable of delivering such proofs, but rather that it is much the same as requiring Medicine to contain social commentary and be provoking and beautiful. In other words, the system is biased.

..hmm, I’m not entirely happy with my argument here, but what the hey, this is a blog.

It’s alive!

I’ve been thinking about resurrecting this blog for some time now. I think I was rather too ambitious originally, and then the lack of highbrow inertia got to me. Maybe I should stick to vignettes? In any case, when Neil recently wrote that blogging is “a nice warm up exercise for the mind and the fingers” when working on a book, I thought the time had come for me to ape him. So, here goes. Now, I failed this once, so no promises to write more than three entries between now and finishing my thesis. But we’ll see..

The blog is dead, long live .. er, something else..?

That really sums it up. Three “blog” entries in a year is hardly satisfactory (not that I’m trying to satisfy anyone per se), so I concede defeat: clearly writing this blog wasn’t as pressing a concern as other things I do with my endlessly bound days.But I might as well leave this here as a reminder to myself. And who knows, resurrection is always possible (or reincarnation)…

Finding answers

I’ve usually not welcomed the question “what do you do?”, for it inevitably leads to “..so, what are you?”. That is, to having to define the discipline I am in. However, I think from now on I will give the answer suggested by a friend recently:

I am an Early Modernist.

What has made answering difficult – what still makes it difficult, really – is the fact that there is no one simple answer for me; I can’t say I’m a linguist, for instance, or a historian. Despite being a member of a research unit of historical corpus linguists, I am not a linguist myself – although I do do a bit of linguistic research. I can’t call myself a historian either, not having the training, although definitely I seem to use and read more historical research than anything else. And then there’s the digital humanities aspect to my work. What does that make me?

Recently, I attended a lecture on interdisciplinarity as seen from the viewpoint of an eminent medievalist, who pointed out that medievalists have been inter- and multidisciplinary from day one. In their research, they regularly combine (historical) linguistics, history, archaeology, and a whole slew of other disciplines. I think it’s time to copy this usage. Yesterday was the first time that in conversation with someone I’d not met before, I called myself an Early Modernist. I found that it was a much easier explanation than ones I’ve given previously.

There is, however, another answer I could give – one also multidisciplinary in scope:

I am a manuscript scholar.

..but somehow I feel that “Early Modernist” sounds better than “manuscript scholar”, despite the fact that yes, the latter is also very much true. On which note, let’s have an image:

Richard Cocks to Thomas Wilson, 1607