I thought
that many of you would like to see this review of our recent publication on
Digital American literature: http://www.diglib.org/pubs/brogan0505/
David
College
and Research Libraries
May 2006, Vol. 67, No. 3
Martha
L. Brogan, with the assistance of Daphnée Rentfrow. A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature.
Of the
making of Web sites, there appears to be no end. Except, cautions Martha
Brogan, in the case of those dealing with American literature. Of this ilk, she
contends, there are too few and fewer still of substantial quality. The
problem, she argues, is pervasive. Disciplinary practitioners tend to be highly
conservative and resistant to change. And those who may be interested in Web-based
learning don’t seem to know what they want in the way of digital tools
and resources. Key professional groups remain curiously oblivious to the call
of the Web. And copyright restrictions close the door tightly on much
twentieth-century literature. The picture Brogan presents is not a happy one.
Cruelest of all, perhaps, is Brogan’s observation that although American
historians have gotten their act together, the AmLit crowd remains in disarray.
And yet, after reading this thoughtful and searching report, it is possible to
draw a different set of conclusions. In fact, the landscape Brogan describes
seems alive, quirky, inventive, and individualistic. In short, it seems
typically humanistic: messy, ill organized, and resistant to easy solutions from
the top or the center. Perhaps the picture is not so bleak after all. A
kaleidoscope, after all, is a thing of beauty, not something to rue.
Prepared
for the Digital Library Federation and the Council on Library and Information
Resources, this report will be of interest to every academic librarian whose
portfolio includes the humanities and, by extension, humanities computing.
Moreover, it will also be of interest to anyone—faculty, student,
librarian—who is thinking of launching a Web site that has anything to do
with American Studies. Despite its title, the scope of the report is much
broader than American literature. Its terrain spans an enormous chunk of
humanities computing, including multidisciplinary content sites, metadata, file
types and formats, preservation issues, encoding schemes, Open Archives
Initiative, digital editing, classroom applications, e-publishing, finding
aids, and the like. It is a marvelously thorough environmental scan that yields
a robust conspectus of information about commercial and noncommercial Web
resources in the humanities. As such, it has a significant reference value
above and beyond its function as a formal report.
Brogan’s
survey is based on both a thorough review of the currently operational sites
and resources and a series of interviews with dozens of leading professionals
from the academy, libraries, and IT communities. She has packaged her
conspectus in six categories, each of which includes a generous harvest of
digital resources: subject gateways; author studies (including digital editing
projects); electronic books (facsimile, encoded, and born digital); reference
sources and primary text collections (chiefly commercial); subject and genre
collections (e.g., poetry); and teaching applications. Within these categories,
Brogan compacts finely honed capsule reviews of sites and resources along with
discussions of technical requirements, best practices, and the like. Though
necessarily brief, Brogan’s reviews are quite useful because they are
critical and evaluative, not just descriptions of what’s on the screen.
They reflect her own judgments and those of the experts she has tapped along
the way.
From
within this forest of reviews, some exemplars emerge. Any number of initiatives
from the
The
thrust of Brogan’s recommendations predictably calls for greater
coordination, collaboration, articulation, and calibration among disciplinary
communities. No one would seriously dispute the need for these and more. The
editorial status of e-texts, to take one chronically serious problem area,
would benefit hugely from common standards and transparent practices so that
users would know exactly what they are consulting. So, too, greater coordination
among sibling humanities disciplines might yield greater leverage with
commercial vendors and software developers to develop better, more affordable
products and a more generous suite of tools. At the same time, the struggle for
interoperable systems and federated manipulation of digital objects must be of
the highest priority for all scholars and librarians.
That said, the ill-coordinated reality of the present state of AmLit on
the Web does seem an appropriate match for the intensely individualistic nature
of the humanities as practiced today. Organized research has not been a
defining characteristic of humanistic scholarship, and probably for good
reason. Attempts to rationalize the Web—the dream of many—would
thus not come without costs and losses. No one involved in humanities computing
on college and university campuses today is unaware of, or unaffected by, the
increasingly centralized nature of academic IT. The needs for standardization,
control, scalability, and cost-effectiveness are real, but so, too, is the
creative freedom they tend to drive out. One of the reasons why humanities
computing may not be so robust as it could be is that campus IT initiatives are
almost always top-down and generic and thus antithetical to traditional
humanistic practices. After all, if the new first commandment on campus is
"Thou shall use Blackboard." What are the incentives for innovation?
Keep your pencils sharp and at the ready. I raise the issues of hierarchy and
creativity not out of any false nostalgia for the "good old
‘90s" but, rather, out of a perceived concern that in building a
more stable, durable, and usable Web future, we keep in view the need to
sustain the vibrancy and creativity of the humanities at the same time. We need
not be careful of what we wish for, if we wish for the right things.—Michael Ryan,