Digital tools help put literature in its place
In one of the most recent public eulogies for literary studies, a Nation essay that ran online in March decried the “trendism” on display in the Modern Language Association’s job listings.
“The major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy,” wrote William Deresiewicz, an associate professor of English at Yale University who has since left the profession. “Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism — whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called ‘digital humanities.’”
That rhetorical flourish might make it sound as though humanities computing is a newly discovered species. But it has been around, in some form, for almost 60 years. In 1949, Roberto Busa, a Jesuit priest, helped pioneer such work when he persuaded IBM to help him create a concordance for the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Particularly since the arrival of the Internet, the field has become the locus of some of the most energetic literary scholarship being done, its vitality putting the lie to claims that literary studies are moribund and that scholars have failed to draw on the analytic and quantitative tools now available to them. Early on, a lot of energy went into digitizing texts and creating online repositories like the Walt Whitman Archive. But second-generation projects are focusing on the interpretive possibilities offered by those digital resources. That has opened up lines of critical inquiry difficult to imagine in the predigital era.
“We now have thousands upon thousands of texts online,” says Stephen Ramsay, an assistant professor of English and a fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. “About five years ago, people started to ask themselves, What can we do with this?”
“We’ve created a literary corpus of immense size, and surely this is going to allow us to ask questions of these documents that have literally never been asked, because there has never been a way to systematically analyze, say, all of 19th-century literature,” Ramsay continues. “To me it suggests a new kind of reading.”
Ramsay points to “a kind of explosion in tool-building in digital humanities,” as scholars experiment with programs that allow them to, say, track the movement of characters through works of literature.
Such work lends itself to interdisciplinarity, combining literary and historical approaches with applications like Google Earth to cast a fresh eye on familiar material and interpretations. It also can have big pedagogical payoffs, as professors use it to engage students and draw them into the scholarly process.
Digital-humanities centers have sprung up on many campuses, and the field has already launched many careers — but not always smoothly. A panel at the Modern Language Association conference in December focused on a particular subset of work that the organizers, including Ramsay, described as “literary geospaces.” Two of the featured projects — Janelle Jenstad’s Map of Early Modern London and Matthew L. Jockers’s work on mapping or “georeferencing” the development of Irish-American literature — suggest the potential and some of the uncertainties that await literary critics who take up digital-humanities work.
MAP OF EARLY MODERN LONDON
Much of the literary activity that took place in early modern London feels readily accessible to modern readers. It’s not hard for anybody with a good anthology or Internet access to figure out where Hamlet falls in Shakespeare’s working chronology, or to situate the playwright in time relative to, say, Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson. But is it possible to recreate how Londoners — authors and readers, actors and theatergoers, booksellers and book buyers, and the citizens who formed the audience for public spectacles — experienced the cultural activity of the era, the theatrical and city-street dramas? How close, for instance, did a playwright live to the tavern that’s mentioned in a certain play? What did you see when you stood at Cheapside Cross to watch the Lord Mayor’s Show, the annual parade that marks the mayor’s swearing allegiance to the crown?
An interactive online project, the Map of Early Modern London “tries to give some of that knowledge back to the reader,” says Jenstad, its general editor. It aims to recreate some of what Jenstad calls “the imaginative landscape of the place,” its “cultural geography.” This is the London not just of streets and landmarks but of births and deaths and Lord Mayor’s Shows — an 800-year-old tradition — and royal progresses and rebellions.
Jenstad is an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria, which has a strong reputation in the digital humanities. Based on the Agas map, a 6-foot-2-inch woodcut of London dating from the 1560s, her Web site lays out the streets and boundaries of the city in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But Jenstad’s goal is to move the user beyond cartography into historiography and what she calls “narrative evidence.”
“It’s been traditional to think of literature unfolding on a historical continuum — the axis of time — and the Web site is imagining literature in space,” she says. “When I think about the influences on authors, I’m thinking about the streets they lived in, where they shopped, where they went for entertainment, the route they must have taken to walk down to the bookseller who published their book, the specific environment in which people bought the book.”
Probably the richest single source of such evidence has been A Survey of London, John Stow’s 1598 excursion through the city’s 26 wards. “Stow is trying to capture a London that has been lost,” Jenstad says. “As Stow walks you through the city, he pauses and tells you everything that happened there.” She thinks of Stow’s text as operating on both a horizontal and vertical axis, because it “stops at a particular place and goes down through time.”
Likewise, the visitor to the Map of Early Modern London can proceed in several directions. An experimental map adds “Google-style layers” to the Agas map, which a user can view in different configurations. An index lists streets, churches, and sites from Aldermanbury Conduit to York House; select a category, click on any name in it, and you get an encyclopedia-style entry (if one has been written yet) about that spot. From there, you can click through to the relevant point on the Agas map. (The index leads the user to other sorts of information as well. For instance, click on “People,” select any of the names that come up, and you can figure out which areas of the city that person is mentioned in connection with.)
Jenstad observes that we know of approximately 26,000 texts published between 1475 and 1650. The plan is to keep expanding the library of texts in the map, adding more and more over time.
By encoding those texts so that they can be cross-referenced, “what you get is a sense of how significant a place was in the early modern imagination,” Jenstad says. Cheapside, for instance, was the main market street in 16th- and 17th-century London. Trace references to it through the map’s database, and, Jenstad says, you can see how much of a “cultural node” it truly was. Authors, too, can be linked not just by date but by location, situating them and their work in a new way.
Jenstad also sees the site as a place to experiment with how to edit in an online environment. “It’s always been a response to the medium, and that has been very liberating,” she says, because it allows scholars to break out of the beginning-middle-end narratives imposed by the traditional print format.
The map has a distance to travel before it can do all the things that Jenstad envisions. It will take decades to code and add all the texts that she would like to include. Many of the sites listed do not yet have completed entries. In those cases, a note invites potential contributors to contact the editors. Jenstad estimates that 600 encyclopedia-style articles remain to be finished and sent through the refereeing process.
That, too, is a work in progress. The Map of Early Modern London relies heavily on student labor. Some of Jenstad’s Renaissance drama students do hypertext research projects instead of writing traditional papers. After Jenstad has vetted their work, it may be incorporated into the site.
“I don’t want to lose that connection to the pedagogical components of the Web site, because I’ve noticed that students tend to take ownership of their work,” she says. “They’re really excited when it’s posted on the Web site.”
When does a project like the map become more than a pedagogical tool or data aggregator? Such digital work tests the traditional definitions of what kind of work “counts” in academe. Jenstad envisions the site as a venue for professional scholarship, with an editorial board to make sure each entry passes muster. She sees room for many different sorts of scholarly contribution: mini-essays akin to a notes-and-queries item in a journal, bibliographic notes, and place concordances. The map site could accommodate grander efforts, too, entire layers of information that could be the equivalent of a major journal article — if those in charge of promotion and tenure were ready to acknowledge such work.
“We need to come up with new categories for scholarly work,” Jenstad says. Particularly in the digital humanities, “the ways we work and the way we work with other people are changing all the time.”
Altogether she and her team have accumulated about a terabyte of data. “I think the interface is lovely,” Jenstad says, “but that’s not where the scholarly value of the Web site is. It needs to be usable, like any other tool, but ultimately it’s going to stand or fall on its content.”
And will Jenstad’s academic career rise on the strength of her work with the map? She has been told that it will count toward promotion, but it’s not clear how it much it will bolster her tenure case. The English department at the University of Victoria still puts journal articles and monographs front and center in its tenure and promotion guidelines. But the university’s faculty of humanities has crafted more-flexible guidelines that take into account other forms of scholarship.
In the meantime, Jenstad has some advice for anyone contemplating a project that doesn’t fit within traditional parameters: “I would certainly recommend that people who want to do this kind of thing talk to their departments and their chairs and get an agreement, probably in writing, that it’s okay to pursue this.”
IRISH-AMERICAN LIT BEYOND BOSTON
Matthew L. Jockers does not worry that his digital-humanities work will hamper his tenure case. Jockers, a consulting assistant professor of English at Stanford University, has a Ph.D. in literature but isn’t on the tenure track at all. Stanford employs him as an academic-technology specialist — which does not mean that he is the guy to call when your e-mail program crashes. He and his colleagues are scholars in their own right, “with a specific expertise we can leverage for research and teaching,” he says. “We’re not going to come in and fix your computer. We really try to emphasize the academic component of the title.”
Jockers’s project, which he presented at the 2007 Modern Language Association conference as “Beyond Boston: Georeferencing Irish-American Literature,” uses Google Earth to plot where and when Irish-American literary activity took place across the United States between 1769 and 2002. He began rethinking the map of Irish-American literature long before Google Earth gave him a new way to visualize it.
“I’ve been playing with this data since 1993,” he says. That’s when he began to assemble a list of works for his dissertation on regionalism in Irish-American literature. That list became a database of more than 600 works of fiction, tagged with geographic identifiers. “I wasn’t interested in publication state but the state where the work was set or that informed the work,” he says — Nebraska for Kate Cleary’s writings, for instance, or Kansas for Charles Driscoll’s. Not all books have straightforward connections to one state, of course, so “some of those decisions were made subjectively,” Jockers says.
Google Earth allowed him to add a timeline to the data and create a visualization, or dynamic image, that shows the viewer how Irish-American fiction writing spread and accumulated over decades. The visualization literally shows books stacking up in various locations on a map of the United States. “As a scholar I can take the visualization and I can stop the timeline at any point and I can say, What was happening in Irish-American literature in 1902?” he says. “That was the power of it.”
Jockers’s biggest breakthrough involved a challenge to “one of the reigning theories about Irish-American literature” — one championed by his adviser, Charles Fanning, a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Jockers explains that in a well-known book, The Irish Voice in America (University Press of Kentucky, 1990), Fanning put forward the idea that between 1900 and 1920, social forces stifled Irish-American literary output.
“What I discovered in my research,” Jockers says, “is that Charlie is absolutely right if you don’t go beyond the Mississippi.”
West of the river, he found, Eastern prejudices lost some of their grip, and Irish-Americans felt more comfortable embracing ethnic themes than their peers in the East did. Consequently they published more, and earlier, than scholars have generally recognized. In California, Jockers observes,"the success of the Irish is taken for granted” among writers of the period. The Google Earth visualization lets him demonstrate those patterns of productivity and distribution in a dramatic way.
“I’d already had a picture in my mind of how Irish-American literature was dispersed around the country,” Jockers says. “That said, there’s no substitute for the visualization. It really brings to the fore the distribution.” Adding the timeline allowed him to combine spatial and temporal data: “I did not have the two together in one place until Google Earth gave me the power to do that.”
To describe what he’s doing, Jockers borrows a term — “distant reading” — from his Stanford colleague Franco Moretti, with whom he teaches a workshop on literary studies and the digital library. Distant reading involves “stepping back from the text that we analyze through close reading and looking at the bird’s-eye view of it,” Jockers says. “My map of Irish-American literature is very much a distant reading of the canon of Irish-American literature.”
Jockers acknowledges that the tenure and promotion system “is still a huge hurdle to overcome” for computing humanists. But that’s changing, he says. Ten years ago, senior scholars such as Benjamin Ray at the University of Virginia — well-established researchers whose tenure allowed them to take risks — were leading the way. “Even five years ago, digital humanities wasn’t on the radar enough that junior scholars were willing to take a chance on doing work in this realm,” Jockers recalls.
Now a born-digital generation has entered graduate school. “I’m beginning to see many more junior faculty and grad students who are willing to go into this sort of work,” Jockers says. “It’s spread like wildfire here in the last year and a half.”
Jennifer Howard is a staff reporter for The Chronicle.
To view a demonstration of Matthew Jockers’s online map of Irish-American literature, visit this link: http://www.stanford.edu/~mjockers/IAL.mov
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 47, Page B10
