2. University of Iowa: Weeg Center for Computing
Both of these Institututes are doing terrific hypermedia work in the
humanities with some affinity with what Janet Murray and I and Gilberte
Furstenberg, Doug Morgenstern and Shigeru Miyagawa are doing here --
Virginia offers two year faculty fellowships so professors can work up
their ideas for hypermedia archives, publications and educational
applications in conjunction with a professional staff and programmers.
Projects include a multimedia database on the Civil War, A Complete
Archive of Dante Gabriel Rosetti art work, poetry, manuscripts and
critical opinion. And a Medieval Literature project using digitzed
manuscript facsimiles. Virginia's projects are now represented on the
WWW -- though copyright issues force some dumbing down of the content.
Iowa also does first rate work -- perhaps their most interesting project
is a hypermedia study of Alfred Hitchcok's Rebecca, using which students
can compare novel and film, view outtakes and screen tests, and study
the differing reception history of the film in six key cities or
"markets".
You will notice that these projects are part research and part
educational -- the distinction is fast dissolving in humanities
computing.
Both of these centers share some of the goals of MIT's LATH.
They use multimedia computer access to
1. Shift humanities study toward DIGITIZED PRIMARY MATERIALS IN SEVERAL
RELATED MEDIA. I call this the DOCUMENTARY side of the new teaching --
we want to be dealing with primary materials as much as possible -- not
twentieth century editions of Shakespeare for example, but digitizations
of 16th century texts. This is good for two reasons -- one is what Hoyt
Duggan at Virginia calls the proximity of evidence and hypothesis.
Humanities work involves our own responses and assessments of the "data"
and our work gets better if we can access that "data" -- specific
moments in films, specific historical documents -- intheir original
contexts and in the specificity of the original material form. We do
not get originals, of course, but digital multimedia is better than
print. The second reason for valuing the shift to digitized primary
materials is that these materials then become components of a simulated
"world" through which one can "travel" PExcuse quotation marks --
metaphor alertP.
2. They deal beautifully with longstanding problems about how to handle
complex variation in relation to a relatively stable cultural artifact.
There is variation in SOURCES -- fifty manuscripts of The Canterbury
Tales, three versions of Hamlet -- and variation in INTERPRETATION and
RECEPTION. -- No two performers or cultural - artistic contexts will
produce the same reading of Medea. Much pre-electronic scholarship has
been devoted to deciding which source is most authentic, which
interpretation "best." Part of the need to do this is that some one
version must be printed, some one interpretation must be taught. Now we
can have a more generous -- and far more accurate -- view of the
fascinating shifts in the history of a work of literary, dramatic or
film art, because we can experience alternatives without incoherence or
fragmentation.
In addition, advanced technology, as uded in all these projects, can
restore a sense of PROCESS to the study of supposedly fixed or finished
works.
Actually the best example of this of all is the CDROM that was made of
MAUS, the Art Spigelman comic book about the holocaust. //The fact that
we live in a time when such a popular form can be used for such a
serious work is also interesting//. Spigelman had done a Museum of
Modern Art about his artistic process -- sketches, drafts of pages,
archival research in Poland, his own films of the town his parents lived
in etc. On the CD, there is audio of his interviews with his father who
survived the camps, his own comments on that and on his artistic
decisions and problems, archival material on Auschwitz -- even the
internment papers in facsimile of his parents.
What does all this have to do with networks ? Perhaps not much, but
these examples may amplify my point that we need to think about networks
in relation to the larger question of how computer access, hypertexting
and nagigation/reconfiguration can transform how we look atquestions of
meaning and significance in arts and humanities. And at the same time,
this transformation CAN help to break down distinctions between
humanities on the one side and science/engineering on the other, perhaps
emphasizing the design of navigable simulated environments as a common
interest.
The best humanities advanced technology applications have very dense
links, fine-grained correspondences. They emphasize reconfiguration or
interactivity in ways the web will need to catch up with and can learn
from. They use lots of images and moving images. We need more
alliances with engineering to amplify what we can do -- for example we
need pattern recognition searches of image material as well as word
searches, and more powerful ways of linking multiple documents in
several media at all points of correspondence. The web is wonderful,
but it can be better, and part of its improvement will come from doing
what we are already trying to do better even if it is not immediately
webbable.
I think of advanced humanities computing as one source of inspiration
and basic research into what the web could and might do in the future.
Pete Donaldson