An Account of David Hoover's DHSI 2015 Keynote: Performance, Deformance, Apology

David L. Hoover of NYU gave the opening keynote during week 2 at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (#dhsi2015) this year. It was an intense event, partly because Hoover used certain euphemisms about the poet Joyce Kilmer that some members of the audience perceived as homophobic or transphobic. Another issue was perhaps a bit less urgent, but certainly at least one audience member noted it publicly and it struck home for me as well: Professor Hoover, throughout his lecture, adopted a somewhat comic and facetious tone when describing the ideas and methods of scholars whose work he was criticizing: Jerome McGann, Stephen Ramsay, and Stanley Fish.

As a service to those who weren't in the room, I'll try and summarize the controversy a bit briefly here. I did take notes at the event, but there were limits as to what I was able to record on the spot and my memory of some of what happened may be imperfect. (If anyone reading this wishes to correct my account or offer an alternative version of events, please do so in the comments below -- or send me an email at amardeep at gmail dot com.)

I should also say upfront that despite its flaws, I actually learned a lot from Hoover's lecture; it was, in fact, the first time I had ever seen a lecture strongly oriented towards this type of stylistic analysis. I have been thinking quite a bit about the contentious parts of the lecture, but the more 'bread and butter' arguments and analyses have been thought-provoking for me as well, as I'll describe below.

Hoover has a really impressive CV and extensive credentials in the stylistics (stylometry) subfield in the digital humanities. Here is his page at NYU: among other things, he recently edited a volume for Routledge called Digital Literary Studies: Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose and Drama, with two of his own essays in that collection. He also published an essay using cluster analysis to analyze the evolution of Henry James' style in an issue of Henry James Review (accessible via Project Muse presently). Most directly salient for our purposes, however, I would recommend readers look at his essay "Hot Air Textuality: Literature After Jerome McGann." Many of the rhetorical moves Hoover made in the talk he gave are worked out at greater length and with greater care in that published paper (indeed, one of my biggest problems with Hoover's talk is that he seemed to be skipping important steps in his critique of McGann in particular -- he at times came across as contemptuous of McGann; the published critique is actually more respectful of McGann's main arguments).

DHSI Notes Part 3: Electronic Literature and the Problem of Platform Obsolescence

Let me begin by thanking the excellent teachers of the course on Electronic Literature I took at the DHSI last week, Dene Grigar and Davin Hickman. Dene and Davin, I learned a lot from you -- thank you so much for volunteering so much of your time and intellectual energy to help a "noobie" like me get grounded in your field.

I'll organize my thoughts into three sections below, roughly corresponding to the three parallel things that were happening in my head last week as I took this course: 1) the problem of Platform Obsolescence and closed platforms in general, 2) Whoa, some of this stuff is really cool!, and 3) many of the participants in this community are pretty invested in an experimental, postmodernist aesthetic -- not so much the social issues that I tend to gravitate towards in my own research and teaching.

Issue #1: Platform Obsolescence

One of the most thought-provoking elements of my experience in the Electronic Literature seminar at DHSI last week was the revelation that large amounts of material considered important to the genre is actually no longer playable on many devices. Projects completed as Java applets (popular a decade ago) are banned by modern browsers like Chrome, making them extremely difficult to access. Other projects are in Flash, which is still technially 'alive' -- but not accessible on mobile devices. It's highly possible -- likely even -- that since Flash is no longer being updated by Adobe, it will eventually also eventually fall into the category of a disallowed plugin.

Moreover, many of the influential works of "hypertext" literature from the late 1980s and 1990s are no longer readily accessible. Works such as Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995 -- a queer, feminist Frankenstein adaptation) were published as Storyspace texts. Storyspace is, of course, out of business, and Eastgate systems, which owns the rights to the text, have refused to modernize its mode of distribution. The text cannot be purchased for digital-to-digital reading; rather, the only way we can access it is through purchasing a USB drive that is delivered via conventional mail -- for the rather absurd price of $24.95.

Let's spend a moment longer talking about platform obsolescence. In the past decade, the Electronic Literature organization has made two major collections, first in 2006, and then in 2011. A third collection is currently being compiled and is scheduled for release in 2016. The first collection can be found here:

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/

The second here:

http://collection.eliterature.org/2/

From these collections, quite a number of works are either difficult to access or already non-functional. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Facade is, for instance, currently non-playable. Other texts, like Emily Short's Galatea, require the user to download and install proprietary software that many contemporary users might find discouraging.

These texts seem to be a minority; most texts are still accessible with a little patience. Still, the vast majority of the works in the two ELO collections should probably be seen as "endangered" since they were programmed in Flash -- a platform that has been slowly dying since about 2007.  So we may one day soon lose the ability to "play" Jason Nelson's intriguing anti-game, Game, Game, Game, and Again Game. The same for Juliet Davis' feminist work Pieces of Herself. And for Kerry Lawrynovicz's Girls' Day Out. And Sasha West's gorgeous kinetic poem, Zoology.

So one lesson from this is that platform matters. A large number of participants in the electronic literature movement have found the potential reach of their works stymied by technological changes and by their reliance on closed platform systems. With Google's new Swiffy tool, there is some scope to make Flash projects accessible on mobile devices and the next generation of web browsers, but it's not clear how effective that will be at preserving these works.

For the long run, it seems imperative that Elit practitioners going forward make an effort to find open platforms that are at least non-proprietary. So we aren't subject to the vagaries of negotiations between large corporations like Apple and Adobe -- neither of whom really care much about fringe artists using their technology.

Issue #2: Here are some things I really liked.

Just in terms of technical accomplishment, it's hard to beat Sasha West's Zoology, though I don't feel that the text of this kinetic poem is as compelling as the stunning visuals and sound (assembled by Ernesto Lavendera).

Another work of Elit that I thought was pretty magnificent is Christine Wilks' Underbelly (this one really requires sound: you can't find the text any other way). Wilks' project explores the early 19th century history of women working in British coal mines, using a mix of poetic speculative imagination and actors reading aloud scripts derived from testimony of actual women who worked in the mines in the 19th century.

A third project I think is wonderful is Jason Nelson's "Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise." While Nelson's other anti-game project (mentioned above) has an abrasive, confrontational feel, this game is a commentary on the user's emotional investment in the simple sprite that moves across the screen. What makes the user of simple arcade games feel satisfied and happy? Often it's performing something tricky or difficult (a jump that has to be timed just so...).

Finally, I was really impressed by the work of J.R. Carpenter, particularly her two major Montreal-oriented works, Entre Ville and In Absentia. "In Absentia" uses parallel narratives and a Google Maps API interface to tell a story about gentrification in Montreal. As part of a class assignment, I wrote a blog post about the lovely urban poetry of Entre Ville here.

We did explore a couple of Ipad Elit projects that look really interesting. One is Jason Edward Lewis' P.O.E.M.M. Another is Erik Loyer's Upgrade Soul, which is a kind of mobile-oriented graphic novel. I haven't downloaded Upgrade Soul myself yet, but hope to spend some time with it soon. (As a side note: these apps., which are only playable via Apple's Itunes store, are exactly the kind of approach to Elit I cautioned against above: will they still work in five years on the version of IOS Apple will then be using?)

We also read some pretty interesting theoretical essays over the course of the week. One was Sandy Baldwin's "Ping Poetics." This essay begins with a look at the metaphorics of the Ping -- a basic command that can connect any two points in the internet -- and the Traceroute command that can be used to track the path of a Ping.  Later, Baldwin discusses the workings of other fundamental elements of internet architecture, including TCP. About TCP, he writes:

TCP is writing that implies a textual model of reading order and hierarchy, of packet segmentation as annotation, and packet length and format as closure of the book. The writing of TCP is a contractual relation. The segments and packets, addresses and check digits, are dedicated and written towards the other. TCP creates virtual circuits between nodes that are listening and ready for association. It is a philosophy of alterity, where “I write” means “I listen for the other, I wait for your reply.” 

"Ping Poetics" inspired me to develop my own project, using Jim Andrews' "Stir Fry" poetry concept in Javascript.  Jim Andrews was kind enough to come to the Thursday session of our class and talk about his project. He also stuck around for the afternoon part of the session while several of the students in the class made modified versions of his Stir Fry poem; this required us to go into his Javascript code and make some modifications in the file to reflect our own particular interests and ideas.

My project was called "Seven Layers"; it imagines a troubled internet romance and uses the architecture of the internet (there are seven layers) as a metaphor for the different levels of connectedness in the digital media / social networking era. You can see the Stir Fry version of the poem here: http://dtc-wsuv.org/dhsi2015-elit/b/index.html. I also posted a linear version of the poem here. That said, I am still trying to decide how I feel about the stir fry version of the poem -- and Andrews' general embrace of cut-up aesthetics, non-linear narrative, and postmodern play. (More about that below.)

Issue #3: The Elit Aesthetic vs. Social Realism (Thematics of Race/Class/Gender/etc.)

As I mentioned immediately above, I am not sure how I feel about some of the more esoteric works in the Elit genre. Works like Jim Andrews' Enigma N do not, I must admit, do very much for me. I have a similar reaction to many of the "sound poems" of Joerg Piringer. These are often clever little text/sound/graphics experiments, but their lack of investment in narrative is something I find limiting.

Taking this class reminded me just how much I am -- despite my occasional noises about being a postmodernist - invested in works of literature that have some investment in social realism. That isn't to say that I will only engage works that are strictly linear and conventionally framed and plotted. But I do feel the strongest connection to literature that explicitly engages with social issues, whether they are instantly recognizable themes (race, class, gender), or complex social and multi-tiered phenomena like gentrification.

(That said, I did find Andrews' work "The Club", which uses his DBCinema visual synthesizer tool, quite haunting and beautiful. Of course, this is one of the few works by Andrews that is clearly representational -- and that seems to have a clear politics behind it. And I admire his willingness to develop advanced tools and then open them to other artists and writers to play with -- whether with the StirFry idea, or with DBCinema.)

In our in-class discussions we went back and forth about some of these issues a couple of times. A couple of students in the class noted their disappointment that the big Elit repositories and the developing search engines (The Cell, ELMCIP) do not have thematic organization. Thus, it is currently impossible to use these state of the art databases to find works authored by, say, black women, just as it is impossible to search by geographical information (i.e., works just by Elit authors in the Philadelphia area, or which thematize the city of Philadelphia in some way).

That isn't to say that no Elit writers are concerned about these issues. There has certainly been a long and sustained group of Elit writers who have been interested in issues of gender and sexuality (starting with Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and continuing through a very recent project like the Twine project Even Cowgirls Bleed). Another social justice oriented work of Elit might by Sharon Daniel and Erik Loyer's Public Secrets.

But what does strike one about the dominant aesthetic of Elit as it has developed is that it is 1) clearly deeply committed to avant-garde, postmodernist aesthetics, including non-linear narrative frameworks, linguistic cut-ups, and pastiche, 2) the practitioners and theorists of Elit have been most interested in formal and technological aspects of Elit work up to this point. The social "message" of particular works is seen as somewhat secondary in determining value to the question of a work's formal innovations and investment in experimentation.

Along those lines, the manifesto by Eugenio Tisselli, "Why I Have Stopped Creating E-Lit," is required reading. Another important work that strikes a critical chord is Florian Cramer's "Post-Digital Writing."

If it is possible for me in the coming months and years to write more about Elit and perhaps aim to publish something in one of the journals devoted to criticism and  theory related to Eliterature and Net Art, I will probably be interested in trying to talk about what I have been calling the "message" of particular works of Elit that I find powerful. (A starting point might for me well be a full-length essay on the works of J.R. Carpenter...)

Notes on DHSI 2015 (part 2): Focus on Tools and Gadgets, #DHPOCO, TEI

I picked up a lot during my week at the DHSI, and it will probably take some time to process all of it. This week, I attended two keynotes, three colloquia (often with younger scholars talking about their work and teaching), three 'unconference' lunch sessions on different topics, two poster sessions, and of course my week-long class on Electronic Literature.

Working through my thoughts on electronic literature, as well as the controversial first keynote address by David Hoover, will take some time -- and I'll save those topics for subsequent blog posts. For this post today, I'll summarize some of the tools I encountered people talking about and using, either as pedagogy tools or in their research.

Tools: Mapping, Social Annotation, GIS, Scalar...

John Maxwell (whose keynote I described earlier) talked about using Wiki writing projects in the classroom. (I've actually done this a little -- last fall I asked my students in "Writing for the Internet" to work together on a collaborative Wiki project on Gender and the Media, with mixed results.) Maxwell's idea is that the openness of the Wiki writing format could be empowering to students and useful in teaching them to think about their writing.

At a colloquium talk, Juliette Levy talked about a teaching tool she had come up with, Zombies.Digital. This is a little like a digitally enhanced treasure hunt to get students to actually go into the library, explore resources, and talk to living librarians (one of the exercises actually asks students to take selfies with librarians; another involves using geotaggging...).

I saw a couple of different talks from people who are working on social annotation tools using Commons in a Box. One is of course the MLA, whose Nicky Agate talked about the new components of MLA Commons that are being built. (The MLA is hoping scholars will upload draft papers to MLA Commons for comment and peer-perusal along the lines of what has already been happening at Academia.edu. The difference being that Academia.edu is a for-profit company, while MLA is of course non-profit and specifically focused on literary scholarship. MLA can also help with intellectual property issues by assigning people who post their works to MLA Commons a DOI.

A second social annotation project is afoot with the Digital Thoreau project. In one of the colloquia, Paul Schacht talked about how his project has moved from simply providing digital editions of Thoreau's works, to enabling complex annotation frameworks that would work better for students looking at Thoreau's works on their site. They earlier used Digress.it, an offshoot of CommentPress, but received a grant to develop a more sophisticated tool called BuddyPress Groups, that which allows "many to many" annotations and structured admin control appropriate to college courses. (Schacht mentioned that he has a forthcoming article in Pedagogy where he talks about his work on Digital Thoreau).

I saw a short colloquium talk by a librarian from U-Vic. named Corey Davis. Davis talked about the troubles libraries are having figuring out how to archive digital artifacts. An earlier generation of web artifacts could be archived by simply scraping and making copies of files, but the current generation of database projects that generate content dynamically are much harder to grab and hold. U-Vic. uses software called Archive-It (developed by Archive.org) to do this kind of archiving currently, but in the future web archivists will need to change their focus to archiving data objects rather than the 'front end' of web projects.

In another interesting colloquium talk, Josefa Lago-­Grana and Renee Houston (both grad students at the University of Puget Sound) talked about some of the digital tools  they use while teaching. These looked excellent:

1. Timeglider. This allows you to make visualized timelines. Perfect for class projects where you might assign students to add entries around a particular literary historical period (say modernism). It could help students see relationships between different kinds of publication events and news events, as well as get a sense of the density of literary periods.

(Another Timeline app. that someone mentioned in another colloquium: TimelineJS. I have not played with these yet to find out which might be the better one to use.)

2. Voyant-Tools is a text analysis tool that does simple word cloud and most frequent word scans on text files that you can upload. This might allow a stripped-down version of a discussion about issues in stylometry. (For more advanced stylometry, involving cluster analysis, you would need other tools.) But it's super-fast and easy, and definitely a step up from something like Wordle.

3. Among other things, Thinglink allows you to easily create clickable objects on maps. Again, the pedagogical value is pretty obvious (see for instance this probably student generated map of Pennsylvania).

The tool CartoDB, also mentioned in a different colloquium talk I saw, looks like much more powerful and sophisticated mapping software. The array of examples of enriched maps created using this tool is pretty vast (some very cool projects). Here's just one example of a site that used CartoDB to give users a sense of the sights and sounds of 1940s New York.

The list of tools I heard people talking about just goes on and on. In my notes I simply have the words "Piktochart" and "JuxtaCommons" -- more tools. (So many tools... *sigh*)

Shawna Ross, at Arizona State, is another modernist (see my earlier post) doing DH stuff. In a colloquium talk, she talked about some of the digital projects she has afoot with Henry James in particular. James made nineteen transatlantic ocean voyages, and Ross has done archival research on each of the voyages, looking at things like the size of the ship, the length of the voyage. She's also been looking closely at the stories James wrote where the ship setting is relevant, as well as James' letters mentioning the transatlantic experiences. This line of research follows a track similar to the line of thinking behind my courses on Transatlantic modernism. Ross has several other DH projects underway, which are documented at her blog and in her research statement here .

The final keynote at the DHSI was given by Claire Warwick, of the University of Durham in the UK. Warwick talked about the rapid institutional growth of DH as a field in the past fifteen years, showing a map of DH centers around the world (as a side note: there are two centers in the middle east, but none that I know of in South Asia... hm!!). Warwick also spent some time revisiting women pioneers in humanities computing, and talked about some of the reasons their names aren't better known to us (some of them were librarians -- and library science in general has suffered from being seen as a 'feminized' discipline). Warwick particularly mentioned Muriel Bradborough of Cambridge University, and Susan Hockey. Hockey is probably best known as the author of a pioneering book called the History of Humanities Computing. (Her essay on the History of HC is also chapter 1 of the 'essential' Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities from 2001.) But as I was Googling, I was surprised to discover that Hockey also did pioneering work developing software for displaying non-western characters, back in the early 1970s.

Then there's Scalar, which I had already been exploring a bit on my own as a possible alternative to using WordPress as a teaching tool. I attended an "Unconference" session led by Paige Morgan and Cathy Kroll introducing Scalar. Paige Morgan showed us some of the advanced visualization capabilities of Scalar using her "Visible Prices" project -- a pretty awesome idea, where the visualization plays an obvious and incredibly valuable role. For her part, Kroll has used Scalar to create a media-rich, teaching resource on Things Fall Apart (though I can't presently find the actual Scalar project online).

#DHPOCO

Finally, I came to DHSI having already heard quite a bit about the debates in Digital Humanities regarding issues related to gender, race, and colonialism. My friend Roopika Risam was one of the originators of the the DhPoco.org project, and I knew coming into the event that this was something I myself wanted to think about while here, even if the class I had signed up for wasn't explicitly focused on this topic (though we did talk a bit about Jason Edward Lewis; more about that later). My department also has a specific focus on "Literature and Social Justice," and I'm hoping to bring LSJ concerns to the forefront when I co-teach Digital Humanities (for the first time!) this coming fall with my colleague Ed Whitley. Along those lines I was happy to get to know Alex Gil and Padmini Ray Murray a little bit and hear about some of their projects. (While on the subject of LSJ, I was also happy to meet George H. Williams in person for the first time, and talk to him a little about his Accessible Future project.)

At DHSI this year, Alex was teaching a course oriented towards Minimal Computing. Minimal computing is a philosophy and a methodology that might be summarized as follows:

This dichotomy of choice vs. necessity focuses the group on computing that is decidedly not high-performance and importantly not first-world desktop computing.  By operating at this intersection between choice and necessity minimal computing forces important concepts and practices within the DH community to the fore.  In this way minimal computing is also an intellectual concept, akin to environmentalism, asking for balance between gains and costs in related areas that include social justice issues and de-manufacturing and reuse, not to mention re-thinking high-income assumptions about “e-waste” and what people do with it.

Concretely, Alex's class worked on designing web publications systems that have the equivalent functionality of today's content management systems (i.e., Wordpress), but which generate static web pages that demand considerably less internet bandwidth as well as less computing power. This is a social justice / critical globality issue: many people in the developing world access the internet over 2G//Edge connections on mobile devices as well as cheap Android / Linux laptops. Platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr run quite slowly in places like India, making them much less useful than formats that might use static HTML (in previous trips to India I have noticed that my own blog takes forever to load, even over relatively decent broadband connections at the houses of relatives... Factor in all of the other DH projects using dynamic HTML and you'll see the problem...).

The Minimal Computing idea involves programming skills and context that I don't really have at present; I might come back and take a course with Alex if I come back to DHSI again. That said, I do have some new ideas about #dhpoco type projects I might want to do -- the next step is to get home and get to work!

TEI

I didn't see any talks about the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a kind of framework widely used by people creating digital editions of literary texts. I did however talk informally with a student in the TEI class offered this session by DHSI; I was able to learn a little about what she was doing and how she was doing it.

There's a very helpful summary of what TEI is and its relationship to XML in this essay by Sarah Ficke here:

The final stage of the digital humanities unit, tagging texts using Extensible Markup Language (XML), continued our focus on the intersection between the work of digitization and interpretation. XML tags are used to describe the data (text) that they surround. For example, I could use the tag [title] to identify the words Moby Dick as a book title in this way: [title]Moby Dick[/title]. XML is called Extensible because, as Julie Meloni writes, “the structure of the document and the language you use to describe the data being stored is completely up to you” (“A Pleasant,” par. 6). This means that instead of using [title] to describe Moby Dick I could use [very_long_book] and it could be equally valid under the rules of XML. Tagging plays an important role in the digitization of texts for analysis because, as Thomas Rommel points out, “[w]ithout highly elaborate thematic – and therefore by definition interpretative – markup, only surface features of texts can be analyzed” (91). Tagging allows for thematic indexing, the conceptual linking of different groups of words, and many other operations, and often (as in my [very_long_book] example above) involves an act of interpretation. Although XML tags can be entirely self-created, many humanities scholars and organizations use the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines to design their projects. The TEI is an evolving set of standard tags and practices that enable scholars to create their digital works in a format that is readable and accessible to others—a kind of common language, as it were. Though TEI provides structured guidelines, there is still opportunity for invention and dissention within those guidelines. 

Source: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cea_critic/v076/76.2.ficke.html 

The grad student I talked to (she was kind enough to show me her work) was working on a TEI-encoded version of a novel by Anne Radcliffe. First she had gone through the novel with color-coded sticky notes indicating different topics and themes. This past week, the student had been working through a digital version of the text page by page and line by line, putting in the appropriate tags. The end product would be a fully-indexed database version of the digital text that could be searched thematically as well as for actual snippets of text.

Stylometry? 

I also had some conversations with people about new ways to use stylometry (traditionally stylometry focused more on authorship attribution questions, but new kinds of analysis are opening up the possibility of using statistical methods to answer different kinds of questions). More on that if and when I get around to putting down some notes on David Hoover's keynote address. 

DHSI 2015 Notes 1: Pre-conference on "Social Knowledge Creation"

I'm here in Victoria for week 2 of the DHSI; I might try and post a few brief notes along the way for myself and any others who might be interested.

There were two pre-conferences meeting at the same time on Sunday. One was on maximizing accessibility in DH projects -- especially for users who are sight-impaired -- and the other was on "Social Knowledge Creation."  It was a tough decision, but I decided to go to the Social Knowledge Creation session.

The keynote, on the history of the Wiki idea, was given by John Maxwell. He started with a quote from Ivan Illich from 1973, on "Tools for Conviviality." I'll just post the whole quote, since it's interesting:

“Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision” Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in convivial fashion.

In effect, a highly open-ended tool like a Wiki is a 'convivial' tool, while other, more strictly hierarchical, means of structuring knowledge are more "industrial."

Maxwell talked about the creator of the first Wiki, Ward Cunningham. Wikis were named after the Hawaiian "Wiki-Wiki Bus," and initially written using the early Mac HyperCard software. Cunningham went on to create the first Wiki website, called WikiWikiWeb, focusing mainly on creating a base of knowledge about software development.

Cunningham defines a Wiki as "a body of writing that a community is willing to maintain." Maxwell, in his comments, expanded on this, describing Wiki writing as "the textual embodiment of a community of inquiry" and as "collective autoethnography." What he finds remarkable about the Wiki framework is that it's a software system "that has no features"; it's effectively just a system of writing. Maxwell also talked about some of his own experiences using Wikis in his research ("Coach House Technological History").

At the end of his talk Maxwell talked about Ward Cunningham's fascinating recent shift away from his own creation -- the idea of a community-edited, but still centralized, body of knowledge. Ward has now invented a new model of a distributed Wiki system that he calls a "federated" Wiki.

Cunningham talks about the reasons for the shift in this article in Wired: 

But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. “I always felt bad that I owned all those pages,” he says. The central idea of a wiki — whether it’s driving Wikipedia or C2 — is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.

This new creation taps into the communal ethos fostered by GitHub, a place where software developers can not only collaborate on software projects but also instantly “fork” these projects, spawning entirely new collaborations.

To me, it seems like there’s an unresolved contradiction here: Cunningham started out wanting a centralized index with multiple authors. When that worked -- almost too well -- he changed his mind, and wanted to decentralize his own index, achieving multiplicity not just of authorship but of web domains.

I think many people share Cunningham's ambivalence about centralized knowledge. On the one hand, don’t we want there to be authoritative references out there? The feminist DH critique of the male-centered tendencies in Wikipedia (who edits it, who contributes “knowledge? see this) is in a way accepting the premise that Wikipedia is a powerfully central site for knowledge production and distribution. Insofar as centralized knowledge production is still a widely felt social need, perhaps we need a better, more diverse Wikipedia, not a decentralized, confederated Wiki system where everyone creates and curates their own bases of knowledge.

Moreover, if a decentralized mode of knowledge production really does take off, it likely won’t be led and scripted by Ward Cunningham. The decentralization might also have a price that maybe we haven’t anticipated: the decentralization of knowledge and history can be as empowering to conservative revisionists as much as to progressive thinkers.

During the break, I said as much to a faculty member from a University of Wisconsin campus (I didn't catch her name); she mentioned to me that this debate over the centralization of knowledge was in fact happening in the 18th century as the first Encyclopedias were being compiled. She mentioned a book that sounds relevant, Seth Rudy's Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain. 

The lightning sessions had many interesting papers. Because these are works in progress, I won't say too much here. I will say that the papers I was personally most interested in were both by graduate students from the University of Victoria itself, and both involved applying various mapping visualization techniques to works of literature. Alex Christie's Z-Axis 3D maps are far enough along that he's collaborating with Modernist Studies Asociation members and planning a session at the MSA that will showcase the methodology at MSA 2015 later this year. Randa Khatib has, in conjunction with colleagues in computer science at the American University of Beirut (which has its own Digital Humanities Center!), developed an installable tool called Topotext, that automatically annotates text files, using natural language processing to extract geographic data. 

On my own, I installed Topotext from the version I found on Github at the link above, and played around with a .Txt version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

The concentration of location on the east of Ireland should be obvious for those who know the novel. But what's interesting are all the references in the southwest of Ireland. It's easy to forget the trip Stephen takes with his father early in the novel to Cork, and think, instead, of Portrait as first and foremost a Dublin novel. But that trip to Cork is of course important, both to Stephen's development of his sense of space, and to the concept of Irish space in the novel more broadly. There's more we could say here, but suffice it to say for now that it seems like the Topotext tool has justified its existence here by getting me to think about Portrait's relationship to space in Ireland a little differently than I had before.