Welcome to Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities.

Digital Humanities is any attempt to incorporate digital understandings or culture into scholarship, pedagogy and service. For my particular reasons, I define Digital Humanities as an attempt to use computing methods to understand 19th Century British literature from a book historians point of view. As a teacher, I use Digital Humanities to create a bridge among myself, my students and our contemporary culture. We use all kinds of tools to get into 19th Century print culture, and not just tools to assess the 19th Century moment but to also create content that can serve as a critique of our own use of tools, such as Twitter, Moodle, TeamSpot, tech-enhanced teaching facilities. For instance, we explore gaming as a way to discuss the technological upheaval of the printing press in the early 1900s. That’s just a tidbit of my world as a Digital Humanist

This was my response to the request to define Digital Humanities.  It sounds somewhat lame in re-reading it because I couldn’t possibly begin to describe everything that happens in my typical semester.  I have found more and more that my research needs to connect to my pedagogy or it won’t get done — neither one.  Also, I want to create projects that will be useful to more than my party of one.

I began my work in Digital Humanities by accident — I wanted to save these little books from vituperous 19th century reviewers.  And no one was really working on them about 10 years ago.  Voila! Instant dissertation, but only after I learned some textual theory, a little digital theory (but very little in those days) and some rudimentary Frontpage with frames.  I even had to amass my own collection of these little books because no one had an extensive enough collection for me to make large, sweeping historical gestures about their worth and their contents’ contribution to British literary studies.  So, I started scanning to avoid opening and closing these books, to arrange the data (in hand-coded HTML pages) so I could look at a glance and make connections.  David Greetham, let me do it, even encouraged me, for one of his seminars.  What happened afterwards, as with many of these projects, was that it went public, became a chapter in my dissertation and grew into a project that required server space, database, metadata, continuity, and more. The project also continuously still asks the question (but does not answer): what is a scholarly edition or even an archive?

The metadata and transcripts of the Forget Me Not Archive have become part of the Poetess Archive, which is primarily a database in TEI.  It’s not an edition.  And, it’s much wider in literary scope.  And it has momentum, funding, server space, database designer, a NINES exec, web designer and a handfull of editors and graduate students working on it, including myself.  We haven’t yet figured out how to successfully combine the aesthetics of the Forget Me Not Archive with the rich data in the Poetess Archive.  Do we preserve the connections that I’ve made or do we present raw data?  Recently, Laura Mandell, added visualizations and will now start accepting Collex exhibits as articles for the accompanying Poetess Archive Journal. One day, when I have enough time, I’d like my students to get dirty in Collex and the Poetess Archive.  Soon, they’ll have to do it soon.

I continue my work on creating a literary history of the literary annuals — in traditional book format — though my university doesn’t require this for tenure (1.5 years away from this).  Because the Forget Me Not Archive is old digital, it’s not really eligible for funding with grants such as the NEH Digital Humanities Start Up.  In fact, it’s so old that it doesn’t even represent innovation any more.  That doesn’t stop the fact that it needs to be “completed” and updated to conform to TEI and such.  But, because of my teaching load, that opportunity has passed.

Recently, because of tenure requirements and those yearly reviews, I’ve turned my attention to defining Digital Humanities — this means participating in discussions about how best to educate my senior colleagues about the value of my work.  This, in turn, has lead me to consider further digital tools to innovate in my classroom, bring social networking to my students in a critical fashion.  And, this is where some of my best work resides these days:

1) My “TechnoRomanticism” class last Spring practiced radial reading and what I call slow reading.  We read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in as much context as possible.  This required us to read only a chapter or two per week and read the surrounding or referential materials along with it.  In addition, students collaborated on several assignments in Google Docs, including a timeline of the 19th Century, a Frankenstein reference page and finally a digital edition of Frankenstein (in Page Creator). A better description can be read here where student projects are also housed: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/TechnoRom/News.htm This class was capped at 30 but only 15 students showed up for the experiment.  By far, this was the most invigorating course that I’ve ever taught/participated in. (Really, the students took it over by week 7 and made it their own.)

2) I have the opportunity to teach in our very techno-savvy classroom complete with data projector, 2 smart boards, portable desks & chairs, video conferencing — the works.  The best part is that students are given a laptop in the classroom and taught how to share info from their laptops onto the smart boards (using TeamSpot).  We do the typical blogging, discussion board, courseware (I prefer Moodle).  The room is new, the furniture is modular and the trust with laptops empowering (donated by HP and Apple).  Currently, I’m teaching the 19th C. British Novel in Moodle; please visit and log-in as a guest: http://ic.sjsu.edu/moodle/

3) Most of my courses are taught in the Smart Rooms — data projector, vcr, video, campus tv, wifi connections.  Some courses don’t really require all of this technology but I find that when I model using PowerPoint, DVDs and such, students will automatically incorporate some of this technology into their presentations.  And, then they try to upstage each other.  In fact, one of the Introduction to Literary Criticism students presented a PowerPoint in the way that PPT is supposed to be used: each slide offered text but it was grouped and colored like a tag cloud rather than a set of bulleted points.  The aesthetic decisions were really incredible.  This student’s native language is Polish, and she has expressed the difference between the two in very lively descriptions.  Polish, for her, is much more emotional and spatially arranged (in her mind).

Though I would really enjoy documenting a day of working on my Digital projects or an article about digital pedagogy, I will be teaching & traveling on March 18th.  Perhaps I’ll take a picture of the 3 computers in my office and their varied use.  Or perhaps the students will let me photograph them using our techno-savvy classroom.  We’ll see.  I teach from 10am-5pm.  The day and many of the decisions happen in a blur.  My first year writing students will start work on a research project on technology and privacy (inspired by the Facebook terms of service debacle).  Perhaps I will be able to capture their explorations on that day.