The GW Digital Humanities Institute Defends Global Networks

"Yay #GWDH17! Memorable day 
of #Global #Chaucers & #Shakespeares: 
archives, ethics, translation, embodied 
poetics, motion X cultures @GWDHI"

@JonathanHsy

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The Ban

Do we send someone to push through protestors and fight the TSA to get our transnational scholars to the conference? Could we even get anywhere close? Would there still be a conference? These were all serious questions our conference committee (Jonathan Hsy, Alexa Huang, Haylie Swenson, and myself) were forced to consider late one January evening. The Muslim Ban had been announced earlier in the day, halting transport from seven countries but also slowing, stopping, and confusing travel of all varieties of people in the United States. Trump had signed the executive order with immediate effect but few knew exactly what to do or how to handle the number of situations with uncertain standings and outcomes. In response to the Ban and its damaging effects, protestors had gathered at major airports. What made the event stranger to me was that I was caught in the middle of it without knowing exactly what "it" was. In the days immediately prior, I had legally changed my name and gender marker at a series of government agencies across Illinois. During these personal life changes I was busy working on the conference website and following up with hotels for the various guests. Between getting my bags packed, grabbing food on way to the airport, then pushing through security, I had not given much to any attention to what was going on politically. I knew that Trump had signed a new executive order that was making a lot of people upset, but as in the campaign, the horrible news had all began to blend together. It was entirely possible some of this was bleed over from the news from the last few days of executive orders. It was not. 

The first sign that something was going on occurred when I was going through security. While I'm no stranger to strange and unnecessary interrogation from TSA agents on account of being transgender, this time I was being grilled not on who I was but where I was going and why. I was going home I told them. I live in Connecticut. Yes, I'm aware that my flight is going to Boston. Flights to Boston are three to four times cheaper than flights to Hartford, CT. Yes, that is outrageous. Yes, I do think it is a small airport in Hartford. Thank you, I am looking forward to seeing my family. No comment on whether or not I will have a good night. Once I got through to the other side of the TSA, I took a seat and opened my e-mail. Another urgent request for the website. As I paid for internet (the free 30 min was hardly enough to go through my e-mail and make replies) and got to work. After I made the changes, I turned on social media. Suddenly my unusual interrogation by the TSA agent began to make more sense. As I began to understand the gravity and widespread impact the Muslim Ban was successfully having I began contacting the other conference organizers. Over the night and for the next weeks were would monitor the situation closely. As stays were assert and the courts finally halting the ban for the time being, we began to be more cautiously hopeful that at very least the conference would still be occurring. Still, contingent plans had to been written up and a series of terrible scenerios imagined as we tried to prepare for the fallout our government's actions would have on our work and the intellectual community at large.

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The Global Community

Approaching the date, the significance of our Global Chaucer and Shakespeare conference took on a larger and more pressing significance. As the U.S. government warred with the Justice Department and the public over borders, the GW Digital Humanities Conference became living evidence on the importance of transnational networks that resisted, span, and destabilized borders. While most of the conference was carried out in English, once all the organizers and invited speakers were collected in the GW Gelman Library, our community consisted of over a half dozen nationalities and even more language groups, including a few dead languages. Counting those who participated in the conference online via live-tweeting (#GWDH17) the number of countries and language present cannot be readily tallied. What arouse in the subsequent conversations was not only a sharing of distinct cultural locations but a mutual sense of transnationalism. Michael Saenger interwove stories of his travels between the U.S. and England throughout the day's entertainment. Eve Salisbury discussed what it meant to teach students and work with speakers along the border of the United States and Canada. As borders become less permeable, the ability to slip into Canada to take a shortcut to the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, becomes more perilous. Indeed, in the wake of the recent Ban and shift toward white nationalism in the U.S. government, boycotts of U.S. hosted international conferences are being planned. The American academics at the conference applaud the activism and wonder what effects such boycotts will have on these future conferences. For this weekend, however, we were all together to consider and plan how to use transnational technologies and humanities to build up global communities even as institutions assert greater divisions and borders.

Among the language groups in active use in the conference was American Sign Language (ASL) as translators and speakers addressed the audience in a variety of modes. Following the question of access, as well as Carol Robinson's discussion of "Chaucer and Shakespeare in the Deaf World: Transcriptions and Interpretations," Jill Bradbury added insights on how to make literatures like Chaucer and Shakespeare accessible to a wider range of audiences, especially among the Deaf community. Key to this discussion was the dialects and performances of sign language in different versions of Shakespeare. Those who attend to the American Sign Language translations the words being verbally spoken on stage will discover how much they add to and define the performance. When Shakespeare is done in part or entirely in ASL the plays take on new ranges of expression and meaning. ASL Shakespeare continually builds on the combined talents of performer and translator. Robinson affirmed how her students worked at the intersection of translation and adaption when creating American Sign Language versions of Chaucer's The Wife of Bath. Because ASL relies on embodied cues, each translation carries significant bonds with the performance. Certain gestures and facial expressions make the signs clearer or add further meaning. As a result, another person telling the same story in ASL would likely end up creating their own adaptation of the performance even as they stayed faithful to the same text. Indeed, when the conference broke for food, the conversation continued. I got to speak with Katherine Schaap Williams over salad and wraps on how disability and diverse embodiments interpenetrate all our global networks. While languages and codes shift, technologies are replaced by newer models, from medieval to modern society, history continues to play out the dialectical battle of access and boundaries. Out of this arouse a shared sense of the pressing need to be conversant in multiples historical eras, networks, and modes of communication.

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What a Transnational 

Chaucer and Shakespeare

Mean Here & Now

Following the insights from the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (Laura Estill) on "What's In and What's Out," The Global Shakespeare Project (Alexa Huang) shared the roundtable with the Global Chaucer Project (Candance Barrington and Jonathan Hsy)resulting in some good-spirited competition and a sincere collaboration in asserting the transnationalism of these key literary figures. The entries in the Global Chaucer Project attest that the Canterbury Tales did not only travel across London but across Argentina and Brazil. Shakespeare not only spoke English and French but Portuguese and Spanish in Central and South American Dialects. By allowing Chaucer to become provincial in China or Russia, at home in their language and culture, his words become transnational. Of course, the challenge of curating such archives is determining "what is in and what is out." For Global Chaucer, this has more to do with labor and feasibility. In general, explained the directors, they do not say, "no." What they are more likely to say is, "how?" or "can you help get this done?" As a result, contributors take a hand in constructing the archive and not merely adding content to it. On the other side, Global Shakespeare admitted that due to feasibility issues, they are forced to be more limiting in what they will host. So many performances and adaptations of Shakespeare are made every year that archiving all of it with the limited workers and technology available would bring the network to a stand still. As a result, Global Shakespeare requires a performance to be released on television or film and available on an accessible recording. After all, said Global Shakespeare, there are other sites currently at work documenting and archiving other forms of performance. One archive does not need to do it all. In the end, the good is better than the perfect because it effects more change. By providing a growing range of editions for readers of Chaucer and Shakespeare to explore, more global adaptation, reading, and community will be produced by those who follow these authors as they migrate and find refuge around the world.

The roundtable concluded on a thread began in the insights of Fundación Shakespeare Argentina (Mercedes de la Torre and Carlos A. Drocchi), and the featured speaker and translator, José Francisco Botelho, who explored how Chaucer and Shakespeare became Brazilian in the process of making Portuguese editions of their works. For instance, common brown birds like larks do not mean the same thing in Brazil as they do in England, so other birds are named. The meaning of a play or the Canterbury Tales stays the same, says Botelho, only by changing some of the details. A lark becomes unusual and foreign if used in a Brazilian context. A common brown bird from Brazil on the other hand gives a sense of people on pilgrimage not too far from home. As a result, Canterbury begins to feel a bit more like it is located in some out of the way place in South America. Chaucer begins walking out of London and may find himself listening to birds and walking over a stream in Brazil. As a translator, Botelho finds himself having to make more alterations or additions to the text in Shakespeare plays because of their genre as a performance text. Consideration has to be given as to how actors might interpret the lines to make the most out of them for a local Brazilian audience. As much as he could, the translator would stick with a direct translation but often enough the meanings didn't have the same one to one connection as the words. Some direct translations would require a wider understanding of English culture, environment, and history in order to make full sense of them. These demands are less problematic in written texts such as Chaucer's. In Shakespeare's plays this additional historical context can be clunky. These changes were important, explained Botelho, "because jokes aren't funny if you need a footnote to explain them." 

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Thank You GW Digital Humanities

The Global Chaucer and Shakespeare Conference was a bitter sweet event not only because of its resistance to the wider U.S. political position but also because it signaled the last event Haylie Swenson and myself would be organizing for the GW DH Institute and GW in general. Both of us will be finishing our Ph.D's and moving on to other pastures by the end of the year. Speaking on our behalf, we are grateful for the fellowship of directors Jonathan Hsy and Alexa Huang, as well as the wider network of scholars, translators, and digital humanities the Institute has allowed us to engage as members. Moving forward, we will remain a part of the DH Institute's wider network but after this academic year will be less involved on the day to day work. Too often the value of day to day work is underrated and remembered only in recollection. Our heads are down and focused on the work in front of us. A lot happens over computers, skype meetings, and sitting around an Indian restaurant with invited guest. Personally, I'm grateful for the role each of those moments had in us laying the foundations of an excellent Institute, some cutting edge conferences, and in building up movements of resistance, reform, and revolution. Thank GW DH and let's keep this going. The work isn't done yet!

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#Disrupting Digital Humanities at the GWU

"Let's reconceptualize the humanities as a space not of authority but of care." 

Eileen Joy
@EileenAJoy #gwdh15 #DisDH

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GW Digital Humanities Symposium: DISRUPTING DH

Date: Friday, January 30, 2015 9am – 4pm

This symposium explores critical approaches to the digital humanities (DH). What happens when academics, activists, and publishers join forces to rethink how we research, teach, and generate knowledge? How can digital humanists mobilize online media and social networks to radically transform the spaces of the ARCHIVE, the CLASSROOM, and the IVORY TOWER?

Sponsored by the GW Digital Humanities Institute, in collaboration with the Department of English, Creative Writing, Department of History, Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare Program, Disability Support Services, GW Libraries, GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and the DH Graduate Working Group 

Event website: gwdhi.org/gwdh15

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#Disrupting #DH

When Co-director and co-founder of the George Washington University Digital Humanities Institute (GW DHI) Jonathan Hsy sat down with me in early Fall 2014 to build the website for the DHI and to plan the Disrupting DH symposium, we returned to the question: what is the purpose of the DHI? Before we build something, what do we want that thing to do? In the end, we agreed that the mission of the DHI at GWU would be to use its "institutional" nature to be a spotlight for more disruptive projects going on in the digital humanities. We would use our place in the university structure to create spaces, forums, and nodes where the wild world of digital activism, arts, and humanities can speak to one another and to a wider audience.

This became our launching point from which the #DisDH symposium grew. Six speakers were sought out from a variety of professional, educational, social and biopolitical backgrounds to showcase the vital energies that give critical power and resistance to the institutions of the digital humanities: Angela Bennett Segler (creator of Material Piers), Eileen Joy (Director, punctum books), Dorothy Kim (medievalist, feminist, digital humanist), Roopika Risam (Co-founder, Postcolonial Digital Humanities), Jesse Stommel (Director, Hybrid Pedagogy), and Suey Park (Co-founder, Killjoy Prophets). 

With such a power-house of speakers, writers, scholars, educators, publishers, activists, tweeters, and bloggers, we worked hard in the following months to create the foundations and channels for the intellectual energy to flow once it all came together. Not least, this included bringing in Shyama Rajendran to serve as my successor once I left my assistantship to the DHI and returned to teaching in Spring 2015. Once the work got going, more and more groups joined the network to help #DisDH: the GWU Department of English, Creative Writing, Department of History, Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare Program, Disability Support Services, GW Libraries, GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, and the DH Graduate Working Group.

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#Archive

The day of the event, Hsy introduced the symposium's mission to the community of digital humanists in the room and tapped in through social media, as well as thanking the speakers, sponsors, workers, and the ASL interpreters who showed up to support the event. Then Diane H. Cline and Jeffrey J. Cohen took the stage to introduce the first panel of speakers, Angela Bennett Segler and Dorothy Kim, discussing revolutions and institutions of DH archives.

Bennett Segler and Kim set the tone for the rest of the day by grounding the disruption of dh in social justice, the invisible labor and exploitation of women, people of color, and other under-paid, under-publicized radical librarians who have been leaders in the movement to digital archives but have since been erased as institutions, directors and users who recode these projects as typically white male spaces. This is perhaps not surprising, notes Bennett Segler, "today's revolution is tomorrows institution" but this domesticating of women of color's digital labor can be resisted. Kim added that by refusing to see archives as a politically "neutral space" of universal access we can redirect social and financial capital back towards the exploited and forgotten progenitors who continue to revolutionize the field and disrupt the digital humanities.

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#Classroom

After a short coffee break, catered by Whole Foods, the symposium returned, to discuss the disruptive possibilities for digital Pedagogy and how to make the classroom and digital spaces "safe but not comfortable." Holly Dugan and Kavita Daiya came to the podium to introduce the next pair of speakers, Jesse Stommel and Roopika Risam, discussing the many audiences and orientations that come together, create and conflict in the digital classroom.

Stommel and Risam expanded the scope of discussion of social justice from a presumed institutional context to consider the wider audiences that are connecting to the humanities through digital education spaces. Stommel represented what he believed the disruptive potential of Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs) through the opening lines of William Shakespeare's Hamlet tattooed on his arms: "Who's there?" and "Stand and Unfold Yourself." No one authority can police or direct the tens of thousands of participants in MOOCs and Stommel contends that this adds to its radical potential for a non-enclosed and non-authoritarian approach to pedagogy where ideas are shared not only with those at the center of university life but with all those standing in the digital margins, listening, watching, and waiting for their chance to stand up and contribute. Risam continued to press on the ethos of liberation from and by digital classrooms, by addressing the colonial models on which education has long functioned. By expanding and empowering the marginalized, digital educators can help de-colonize the classroom.

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#IvoryTower

In the afternoon, following a lunch break where speakers, organizers, and attendants were able to informally get to know each other, the symposium returned to tackle the institutions that support and set limits on disrupting potentials of the digital humanities. Dolsy Smith and Jennifer Chang took turns introducing the final set of speakers, Eileen Joy and Suey Park, discussing care, cloud feudalism, and danger in and outside the Ivory Tower.

Joy and Park ramped up the issue of social justice to consider the radical threats and potentials to intellectual life for those connected with digital forums for public scholarship. Tackling university (academic) and cloud (digital) feudalism, where institutions set prohibitive limits on who gets to speak and who gets to listen to intellectual discussions, Joy defended "the importance of illegitimacy." English studies, among other fields in the academy, Joy argues, has its roots in the non-institutional settings of living rooms and salons where creative communities burgeoned not because of a culture of authority but of care. Park carried forward Joy's call to create support systems for "bastard thought" through the current activism and poetic politics of twitter and other non-institutional forums. Park warned that while such digital spaces have allowed for alternative communities to form for women and people of color, they too become battle-zones where colonization and marginalization continues. If the Ivory Tower is a supposedly safe space for intellectual community, accessible to a chosen few, than the battles in digital spaces outside its walls witness the need for ethical coalitions to form to defend and protect the lives and creativity of vulnerable communities.

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#DHRoundtable

Bringing the symposium to a close, Jonathan Hsy returned to the stage with the DH Graduate Working Group Co-Founder Lori Brister to lead a roundtable of all the speakers in order to tease out themes from the day that would continue #DisDH into the future. Comments were developed and explored from moderators, speakers, audience members and twitter.

The group began the roundtable by discussing the role that students play in shaping in academia, noting how the digital humanities can serve as a gateway drug to an intellectual community. This challenges university administrators to not view education as a business (although it may adopt certain business practices) and instead as a resource for developing new fields of knowledge. Likewise, it falls to those with power to create spaces and cultures of safety for vulnerable communities (such as graduate students) who cannot afford the luxury of being able to survive failure or abandonment. All of this, affirmed the speakers, requires recognition and support for all the labor that is put in by the marginalized, institutions committed to change, educators, radical librarians, publishers, activists, artists and digital humanists who work to create a more livable, more safe, less comfortable, more just, more caring world.

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The Morpheus Database: Coding Genres of Texts

"I suggest constituting transsexuals 

not as a class or problemic third gender 

but as a genre – a set of embodied texts"

'The Empire Strikes Back'

Sandy Stone

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The Morpheus Database (Mark 2) represents a second stage in the development of an interactive archive of transformation in literature. At this point, I begin Beta Testing the database by allowing online access to the information in order to assess the viability of the program. 

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From Data-Entry to Data-Use

Last month, I discussed problems posed by "thinking like a computer" as I hit the half-way point for data-entry for my summer research. Having input over 100 essays and articles into the Morpheus Database for Critical Theory, I determined that while many of the intra-text coding was working exceedingly well but the inter-text coding was struggling due to a lack of effectively limiting tags. Countering the demand in the Humanities to open up possible meanings and relations for texts, the Digital Humanities often has to impose limits on these connections in order to tell the highly literal-minded computers exactly what sort of datasets we want produced.

Discovering a lack of effective tags at this point was not disappointing but an expected part of the process of building a database. Critical insights can come at any point in the construction, but data-entry and data-use are two periods in which the early architecture of the coding are challenged. Last month, with the data-entry in full swing I began to notice that the intra text elements were developing nicely via the use of text-boxes that allowed me to summarize and quote arguments. The inter-text elements, however, provided for by text boxes and yes/no tags for a range of relevant fields of study (such as Disability Studies and Gender Studies) were too broad to provide useful parameters by which to produce clarifying datasets. A problem was posed that I was still answering.

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Genres of Theory

In the past month I have begun to transition from exclusively doing data-entry to also using the data. As a result, the output that I wanted from the database began to give useful suggestions on how to restructure the input and tagging process. Having read processed and annotated the texts for the first round of data-entry by hand (while still needing to enter their information into the database) I began to surmise that certain questions and connections were developing between the critical theory texts. As the database at present serves (but not exclusively) my research personal project about "Transgender History and Theories of Transformation," I took a suggestion from seminal Trans Theory essay by Sandy Stone "the Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto" and began ordering my lines of though according to "genres" that connect ideas about the body and ideas about texts in a ways that produce interesting patterns of association.

One set of clusters mapped different genres within understandings of the Trans Body (e.g. Transvestites, Transsexuals, Transgender, Intersex) that related to corresponding figures in medieval periods of literature (e.g. Cross-Dressers, Eunuchs, Madness, and Hermaphrodites). Suggestively, the foci on different figures resonated with genres of medieval class-division (e.g. Those Who Fight, Those Who Pray, and Those Who Work) that in turn represented the relevant authors, audience or subjects of medieval literary genres (e.g. Romance, Hagiography, and Tale Compendiums). As the work of the Theory Database is to map how arguments align as well as oppose one another, especially relating to Transgender and Disability, the mode of understanding identity suggests another range of genres (e.g. via the medical model, identity model, critical model and literary model) as well as the mode of controlling/constructing identity (e.g. via surgery, prosthetics, drugs, and diagnosis). These categories prove narrow enough to allow for texts to be distinguished and sorted but broad enough to allow for tense relations between texts to suggest critical differences.

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Trans-Genre Coding

These new tags are not perfect, but words in the Humanities never are even with the drive for flexible understandings and even less so in the Digital Humanities where limitations in the coding can mean precision when speaking to and through computers. It is very likely that these tags will change as I continue through the ongoing processes of design, data-entry and data-use. As is often the case in academia, pragmatism allows for forward motion even as ideals critique the ideologies that are inscribed into the digital construction. This forward motion in the coding translates into useful insights, just as insights from the note-taking translated into forward motion for the coding. 

In particular, in developing and testing out the tagging design I am already finding correspondences between genres. For instance, not surprisingly arguments coded as focusing on Transsexual figures often overlap or relate to texts on Surgery and/or Drugs. What is more surprising is the high volume of relations between Transsexual figures and the medieval genre of Tale Compendiums by/for/involving the medieval "Laboratores," or Those Who Work. While these relations follow certain expectations about the texts selected for initial entry into the database, many do not. Furthermore, as my mapping of arguments has continually reminded me, it is important to first fully establish the position from which you approach a task before you go about exploring alternatives. In this way, the reflective process of coding (design, data-entry, data-use) mirrors the Scholastic methodology for arguments (thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis). This further supports a thought from Steve Jobs that I emphasized last month and continue to believe bears repeating: "learn how to program a computer, learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think."

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Explore the Theory Database!

Sign up to be an authorized Beta-Tester! Add to the conversation about transformation and critical theory!

Please offer comments or suggestions,

Thank you!

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