Claire Warwick's Blog

Inaugural lecture

2012-01-25T18:15:00.005Z

Below is the text of my inaugural lecture. It's not exactly the same, because I believe in giving lectures not reading them. Enjoy....

The monologue in a crowdsourced world: have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?

The longer I work in DH, and the more I consider what the digital medium makes possible the more the idea of me standing up and telling people what I think and thus by implication what they might think seems frankly bizarre. I increasingly dislike the idea of the single voice speaking with some kind of a spurious authority. One of the great assets of the digital, and what it encourages and enables is multiple voices entering into a dialogue and creating new knowledge out of conversation and discussion. In what follows, therefore, I propose to look carefully at this apparent contradiction.

Even in the physical word, there are, I believe, better ways to generate knowledge, through dialogue and conversation. I think that one of the reasons for my unease with the idea of the single person lecture is that, as a student I knew it as an optional extra rather than the core of the educative process (lectures were not compulsory for Cambridge undergraduates and this remains the case). Cambridge teaching relies on the supervision- a discussion between an academic and one or two students- as the foundation of teaching and learning in the arts and humanities. I was lucky enough to be taught by some of the greatest international authorities yet it was never assumed that their voice in the conversation was necessarily more important than mine. Far more important than who was talking was the quality of thought expressed and the nature of knowledge that emerged from the dialogue, and I think that's quite right.

I don’t propose to talk about users of digital resources in the humanities, and cultural heritage…again. I thought it might be time to take pity on people: if there are any inhabitants of planet Zog who haven’t heard me talking about this, you could always download some of my publications from UCL Discovery. Nevertheless, I propose to apply some of the techniques that we use in user studies, and apply them to the phenomenon of the Inaugural lecture as a case study. Stan Ruecker my colleague on the INKE project uses what he calls the affordance strength model to assess whether digital resources and interfaces are fit for purpose. This allows him to compare the actual use of an artefact or resource, digital or physical, against its potential utility and suggest changes to design and functionality that might improve it. This approach can help explain, for example why despite the production of ever more complex digital reading devices, many of us still prefer to read print because it has affordances that digital cannot yet match.For example we can make notes on a piece of paper, doodle, fold it up, carry it easily, etc in a way that even the most sophisticated digital readers cannot match.

Stan makes clear that the concept of affordance is a very complex one, and there is excellent discussion of affordances in the excellent new book: Visual Interface Design for Cultural Heritage, that Stan has co-written with Milena Radzikowska and Stefan Sinclair. But my very basic explanation of an affordance would be a property that an object possesses that we are aware we can use. It's not a very elegant description, so here is an example from the book of a situation in which various affordances interact.

For example, a cat may afford petting by its owner; the petting affords pleasure for the cat; the petting affords pleasure for the owner; the petting and the cat’s pleasure afford a sense of companionship for the cat owner (and arguably for the cat, too). The pet-ability of the cat is a mechanical affordance. The pleasure of the two creatures involved is an affective affordance. The companionship is a social affordance. It is possible to have any of these affordances without the others. The cat may still afford companionship even if it is not currently in the mood for being petted. The cat may also afford petting but fail to experience pleasure, and so on. The cat is also unlike the book in that its willingness to afford petting in the first place is volitional – the book cannot actively resist reading, by, for instance, jumping up on top of the refrigerator.

Given that affordances can be nested in these various ways, it is not necessary to perceive all the details of an affordance in order to be able to identify and begin using it.....With respect to petting the cat, the person does not have to anticipate that the petting may result in a sense of companionship – it is enough for either the owner or the cat to initiate the negotiation and see where it leads. (Ruecker, Radzikowska and Sinclair, 2011, p94)

I propose to use a version of this method to assess the IL’s current affordances and possible future utility. Another method that we have used extensively is what Ann Blandford calls use in context. This means studying what users actually do with digital resources in the context of their usual work, rather than forcing them to complete set tasks in a lab, and it takes into account the importance of the cultural and professional context within which people work. We have, for example, braved knee deep mud to study archaeologists at Roman Silchester, so I think it’s robust enough for the task in front of me. I am assuming that both the person giving the lecture and the audience are users, and the institutional context we need to take into account is that of UCL in particular, but also the wider academic and historical context, and that of my own professional history.

Affordances are to some extent dependent on the user's perception of them, so the list that follows is mine, but based on what I can gather about inaugural lectures and their purpose from talking to other academics, and from reading university websites. They are as follows:

Communication of research
Interactivity
Ordeal
Paying back
Public Engagement
Inclusiveness/Teams
Celebration
Social occasion/networking

Communicating your research

One of the ideas that is mentioned regularly as the purpose of the inaugural is to tell people about my research, whether that is at UCL, or to engage with the wider public. I had to be reminded that there are in fact people who don’t yet do DH, and part of the reason for me doing this lecture might be to persuade them that they’d enjoy it. Quite honestly I am not convinced that there is any corner of the known universe that hasn’t been reached by the relentless digital wave of publicity that is UCLDH. The fact that our posters are now on display at the ODH in Washington as a result of Melissa’s tweets and blogs is surely evidence of the huge potential for outreach that is innate in digital media. However, it is important to consider this affordance.

One of the stated aims of inaugural lectures is that they should give some idea of the kind of research field in which people work. In this again I feel the affordances of the lecture form are lacking because of its monologic nature. All of my work has been about giving others a voice. If I succeed I should no longer need to speak at all really. When I began work in DH it was assumed that users should not be seen or heard. Their views were unimportant and their only purpose was to adopt all the cool tools and techniques that the clever expert DH people designed for them, and they should be grateful and uncritical. We know what was good for them, in effect. If they failed to do so, it was because they were ignorant, Luddite, old fashioned or just plain stubborn. They did not know what was good for them, in other words. If my work has achieved anything it is to fight against such assumptions and insist that users of digital resources do know what they need, and that if they don't find it they will not use things that are unfit for their needs. In this I was, at one point, something of a lone voice, but I insisted that it was worth me speaking, because I was doing so to give voice to those whose opinions were ignored. I am delighted to find that opinions are now changing, users are being consulted and their views listened to. If my voice is lost in the clamour of ideas, views and demands from the voices of those users, and that such views are taken seriously and design decisions taken on this basis then that is the greatest success that I could wish for.

But how in the end can this happen? The only way to create such resources is for users, designers and those who study user needs, behaviours and requirements to work together. Once again, where is the place for the lone voice in this process? DH is, in almost every way that we can imagine, a collaborative field. We have to learn to work together and understand the different languages that are spoken by different partners in the dialogue: geeks, humanities scholars, information professionals, technical support people and indeed the public. In that sense, therefore, the voice of the DH scholar is of use as an interpreter between different languages and cultures. But interpreters cannot, but the nature of their job, exist in isolation. It is perhaps significant that there are, in relative terms, so many excellent female scholars in DH and in user studies more widely. One might argue that girls are constantly socialised to the idea of communication, creating community and interpreting between people who don’t understand each other. This is not always easy, and if it doesn’t work, can be the downfall of apparently good projects, but when it works properly is one of the great joys of doing DH research, where conversations from different viewpoints result in insights that no one individual could have produced. I would far rather work in research teams that stress community and dialogue than publish single authored monograph, and it may be that this is why so many of us in DH have come to the same conclusion. Of course it is partly due to the speed of technological change in our field. Nobody really wants to read about 5 year old technologies. When we do publish books: they tend to be multiple authored. It's as if we have a sense that DH is about a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and thus that hundreds of pages of a single voice would be to misrepresent the diversity of the field. So I really do not feel that the monologic lecture can give a real idea of how research in DH works.

Lectures are beset by problems of physical constraints. We can only fit a certain number of people into a lecture theatre: there are always limits to the number of questions that may be asked, and of the time possible for answers. There are of course some very interesting and complex questions about the comparison of physical presence and digital surrogacy which we are only beginning to understand, for example in the context of museum studies. Helen Chatergee’s work at UCL Museums suggests that when we handle real objects, different part of our brains respond than when we see a digital surrogate, and similar results have been achieved in studies of visitors to art galleries. It is also clear that despite the early, exaggerated enthusiasm for a pure form of e-learning the reality is that most students prefer a face to face experience of university education because of its social aspects. For example there are many excellent XML tutorial materials on the web, but students still prefer to come to UCLDIS to be taught XML because, despite my great respect for my former boss Lou Burnard, it's easier to work out why your code won't validate with the aid of a friendly demonstrator than a cardboard programmer. I remain to be convinced, however, that this applies to one-off lectures.

Digital media offer a far more flexible and appropriate way to communicate DH research. DH is a global field, and we can enter into conversations with members of our community worldwide using blogs, social media and crowd sourcing techniques. Webcasting or podcasting a lecture means that nobody really needs to be physically present to hear me talk any more. But if I blog or tweet about these subjects it becomes a more equal, multi vocal dialogue. Anyone, anywhere in the world can read a blog at any time, or indeed listen to a podcast. They can leave comments or tweet and be part of the discussion either with me, or other members of the 'audience'. There is no limit on the number of questions or comments that can be made: for people who feel shy of asking a question in public it may be easier to comment on a blog or to tweet especially if they wish to do so anonymously. Such a dialogue may be carried on over an extended time period and does not require an 'audience' to be present at a particular time and place. There is also far less implied or actual hierarchy present: it would seem odd if audience members stuck up a discussion amongst themselves at a lecture, even it if was inspired by the themes discussed, yet we relatively often see multi vocal discussion in the comments sections of blogs or on Twitter or Facebook. It might also seem rude if people got up and left during a lecture yet when reading a blog or series of blog posts we can stop, skip, re-read and come back hours or even days later, as is convenient, and the writer need never know or be offended.

I also had to draw up an invitation list for my inaugural lecture, but one of the reasons I prefer blogs and Twitter to Facebook is that I don’t have to invite people to join me when I discuss DH in those media. Anyone can follow me, or read a blog, and I rather like the sense that I have never met many of the people who do so, in the case of a blog, I may never know. Somehow it’s liberating to talk to such an audience, whereas talking to a distinguished crowd face to face is frankly terrifying.

The ordeal

This brings me to the need to digress, briefly about another possible affordance: the inaugural as ritual ordea. It's been described to me as the entry fee to the professorial club. This makes it sound rather like some awful fraternity hazing ritual, but we might pause to look at this, at least briefly. I can report that if such lectures are meant to be provide a frightening ordeal then in my case at least, that really works! I can’t see how anything digital could match this affordance, unless the new professor were seriously technophobic. But talking of phobias, there are surely quicker, more efficient ways of terrifying people than making them do a lecture. Those who fear heights could be made to walk about on the college roof: arachnophobes could be sent to the UCL Grant Museum to play with the spiders; people like me who are claustrophobic could be locked in a small dark space for a while. I don’t think anyone would feel that was an appropriate thing to do to a new professor, so surely we can dismiss the idea of the ordeal as a serious aim……can’t we?

Putting something back

There is also the more serious idea lurking behind the idea of an entry fee: that new professors should give something back to the community. This is a laudable aim, but I cannot see how someone standing up and giving a lecture achieves this, and indeed it rather reinforces the image of professors as "personal glory seekers", or "backstabbing assholes who take the credit for other people's work" as a recent article in the THE reported. The same study on which the THE reports suggests that Professors should take a greater role in intellectual leadership and mentoring. So, instead of giving a lecture, a more useful way to give back, or pay the entry fee might be to require all new professors to mentor a more junior colleague for a year. This is most likely to be a real world activity, but it might have a digital component, depending on how geeky both people were.

The digital alternative

Digital media are, not surprisingly, the best way to communicate the nature of my own research field- DH. However, I shall also go on to argue that the affordances we have discussed above for dialogue and sharing of information work better than a lecture for sharing any types of research with the wider UCL community. One good example of how colleagues can communicate their research to each other is through blogging, and particularly a simultaneous blogging event such as the Day of DH. Participants sign up to be part of the day and are then encouraged to record what we are doing and reflect on their work and the progress of our subject, and to read each other’s work and comment. This writing has been analysed, using text analysis technique and treated as a crowd sourced publication on the themes and development of DH. The global commitment to the Day of DH seems to me to indicate that dialogue and the equality of many voices is regarded as central to what we do, but it also works well in other fields: UCLDH PhD student Lorna Richardson used this model very successfully for the Day of Archaeology which she organised last year.

It’s possible to imagine a similar event at UCL, where we chose a day and blogged about our work. I think it would be fascinating to read about what my colleagues are doing all day. This would not have to be limited to professors: it could showcase the work of entire research teams or groups and could, indeed should, include early career researchers, postdocs and PhD students. Arguably their research needs more exposure rather than that of professors who are supposed already to have a global reputation after all. Or, if we are thinking of it as an alternative to inaugural lectures, then we might ask newly appointed professors to blog about their work, for example over a week, or longer if they wanted to.

These blogs could, as in the Day of DH, be linked to a common interface, and other new professors might add their comments, as indeed any readers could. Bloggers could provide links to artefacts, images, designs, music, buildings etc depending on what they work on, and there could also be links to UCL Discovery, so that if readers found the blog sufficiently interesting, or relevant to their own research, they could download academic articles. The audience may leave a lecture fired up with enthusiasm to download articles, but I think it's quite doubtful whether they actually do so, especially if they stay for the party afterwards.

The inaugural model also seems to speak to an older model of academia, where everyone had time to find out what everyone else was doing, and might be able to understand it when they did. Now, if we are serious researchers we don't have time to go to all the inaugurals even in our school, let alone UCL, that time is better spent on our own research. Disciplines are also far more specialised, so the idea of the professor as polymath is seldom true. We get promoted because we are experts in our fields and we become so by a pattern of publication in specialist journals that precludes the ability to develop a broader outlook. You don’t have time to read very widely if you have to produce the publications and grant applications that RAE/REF and promotion criteria demand.

In the real world, if I want to find out what colleagues work on I don't want to have to wait until they give a lecture: I'll use digital resources, look up their webpage, follow them on Twitter, find out if they blog, download articles from UCL Discovery. This gives me a far more comprehensive picture of their work, far more quickly than listening to them give a lecture. This could be a new way to foster interdisciplinarity at UCL, whereby people might stumble upon someone who is working in an area of shared interest. It could also be a genuine vehicle for pubic engagement, since the commenting function and potential linkage with Twitter would allow those outside UCL to take part in the conversation.

Public Engagement

Of course these kind of blogs would work very well as a vehicle for Public Engagement. This has also been suggested as a purpose of the inaugural lecture. I can't see how this can be possible, because a lecture is a one to many medium of expression, and without the ability to ask any questions there is no possibility of two way interaction: under the UCL definition, therefore this cannot count as public engagement. Steve Cross, UCL’s head of public engagement, also tells me that very few people from outside UCL come to Lunch hour lectures, that are specifically designed for the public. Yet I know that the podcast of my LHL on Twitter has reached far beyond UCL- people tweet to tell me so and the numbers of downloads of public engagement podcasts such as those from UCL CASA’s Global Lab are very impressive, and clearly growing. So it's arguable that even if we think about such things as communication of research to the public the digital form is at least as good, if not better.

However, digital resources really are very good vectors for Public Engagement: they make it possible for those outside academic to engage with our ideas and even become part of the research process. Because of the stress in DH on collaboration and the need for interpretation and communication it is perhaps not surprising that as a field we have taken to Public Engagement very happily. I’m very proud of the various public physical public engagement activities in which various members of UCLDH, including our students, have taken part, including Bright Club, creative writing workshops and a popup exhibition at the UCL Art Museum. But it is not surprising that the combination of digital resources and the UCL belief in PE and inclusion have produced are two of the most exciting crowd sourcing projects in the world. Transcribe Bentham allows people to engage with original historical sources online in a way that was, until recently, only the preserve of scholars and archivists. It’s wonderful that it has won a Prix Ars Electronica, and caught the imagination of the global media, such as the New York Times, but even more important is that fact that so many members of the public have taken part and contributed transcriptions to the resource. After my lecture the party took place in the UCL Grant Museum, not just because it’s a beautiful space full of fascinating exhibits, but also so that people could use the QRator iPads. Our work on QRator, a collaboration with UCL CASA's Tales of Things, means that users can now express their ideas about museum objects, rather than passively clicking an interactive display or reading a conventional museum label. In doing so they enter into a dialogue with the exhibits, the museum curators and other visitors, whether they are physically present, or commenting on Twitter or via the Tales of Things website. This is a true dialogue, one might even say crowdsourced interpretation, and would have been impossible without the aid of digital technologies. Our work on social media and crowdsourcing once again privileges many voices over one, and is thus, entirely appropriate for DH.

I must admit though that some critics of digital diversity appear to feel that in this scenario there is no place for expertise and the role of the teacher, curator, editor or other form of expert is thereby undermined. There still remains a reactionary academic distrust in the idea that social media can ever be used to a serious purpose, and a fear that allowing normal people to voice their views is fundamentally disruptive and disreputable. I disagree with this view which seems contrary to UCL’s founding principles of openness and inclusivity. Cuncti adsint meritaeque expectent praemia palmae: Let all come who by their merit deserve the greatest rewards. Surely the affordance of the digital medium to allow expert voices to mix and converse with those of the interested public is far more powerful than that of the lone voice speaking. If we are too afraid to discuss our views with others, whether within or outside academia, what kind of experts are we?

Interactivity and inclusiveness

It therefore seems to me that the digital medium allows for a more inclusive approach to academic research, whereby users are not only consulted but become part of the process of discovery and interpretation. There’s also another aspect to inclusivity, and that is in the sense of not discriminating against certain groups. The physical lecture therefore seems to me to offer potential barriers to gender neutrality and family friendliness as compared to at least some uses of digital media. The early evening timing of academic rituals such as lectures and seminars also seems to assume a very dated model where male academics worked and their wives or servants dealt with family and practical things. Having such things in the early evening is only convenient if someone else is shopping for and making dinner and looking after children or older relatives, and you do not have a long commute home afterwards. For most of us this is not the case; early evenings are especially difficult when it comes to maintaining a healthy balance between work and family life. Given that, unfortunately, studies continue to show that women still do the larger share of caring responsibilities and housework, even if they work full time, it may be especially difficult for them to manage this conflict. Yet I know that my DH colleague Melissa Terras found that the use of Twitter and reading blogs helped her keep up with her field while on maternity leave: you can read twitter a 3am while balancing babies and an iPhone. Melissa has missed a lot of inaugurals while she’s been on leave though….

Including the team

I might also argue that the inaugural lecture form is not only unfriendly to women in the audience, but also to female presenters. The most recent Athena ASSET survey of women in STEM subjects demonstrates that most women prefer to attribute their success to working with an excellent team of other researchers and to the support their receive from their partner and family. I am very definitely one of these.

My team know, because I tell them all the time, that they are the most wonderful group of DH researchers on the planet ever, and I could in no way have achieved a fraction of what I have done without them. I don’t say that kind of thing to my husband, but I should, because the same is true- even if he doesn’t do DH. But the serious point is that this tends not to be the case for men, who, the report suggests, tend to see their own ability as the main reason for their success. It follows from this that the inaugural lecture is a particularly masculine form, stressing as it does the achievements of the individual. I would have preferred some kind of event in which my team could have shared not just in the celebration, but in the presentation, and it feels uncomfortable for me to be singled out in this fashion. To use a cycling image, I’m like the person who wins the Tour de France. I may be the one who, literally, gets to stand on the podium this time, but I could never have achieved it without my team working for me, sheltering me from the wind, setting the pace up the climbs, helping me on a bad day, after a puncture or a crash, leading me out in the sprints. I might take the glory, but they do so much of the unseen, unappreciated work, without which it would not be possible. It appears that this may not simply be my own choice, it’s just that I am typically female in terms of who I credit for my success, and who therefore I wish I could include in its celebration.

Celebration

It’s perhaps significant that some of us are wondering whether the single person lecture is appropriate at all as a way to celebrate achievement in DH. During this year’s Zampolli Lecture, at DH11 several of us wondered on Twitter whether this was an incongruous event, given that the honorand, Chad Gaffield was talking a great deal about the work of his team. We felt that almost every DH scholar of note now works with a research team, and that therefore it might be more appropriate to have some kind of an event that celebrates the most excellent DH team, or the most effective DH team worker. But it must be noted that digital social networks can be a vector for celebration themselves. One of the most delightful aspects of my field is that it’s usual to congratulate individuals and team on their success using Twitter, Facebook or comments on blogs. It’s great to know that we don’t feel it diminishes us as scholars to celebrate the success of others online.

Thus the inaugural lecture works well as a celebration if it’s for an individual scholar, but I think it’s less appropriate for team-based research. In my view, though, we already have an excellent way for individuals to celebrate at UCL- The Provost’s Promotion party. This is a delightful occasion at which everyone invited is celebrating their promotion, not just professors, and is able to bring a guest, often a family member, or colleague who has supported them and helped make the promotion possible. It can’t celebrate the whole team, but it gets closer to it than a lecture.

I think therefore, that when we compare the affordances of digital resources and the one-off individual lecture, the digital proves to be at least as good, if not better in almost every category and it is especially ineffective when it comes to expressing the nature of my own field. And yet, the objection might be raised that we still feel that it’s very important that DHers from all over the world should meet at various conferences and workshops, especially the annual DH conference. Why does this physical meeting still matter?

As Ann Blandford has found, the informal, social parts of conferences are the most useful in terms of ideas generated through serendipitous discovery. This is part of the reason for UCLDH digital excursions, where the talk is always short, but the drinking and discussion is as long and enjoyable as possible. People might think we enjoy such occasions: how wrong they are. We only do it for the research networking possibilities, honest. So it turns out that the really important part of this whole process is not the lecture at all, it is the party that follows. My colleagues in other parts of the world, who could not attend my lecture might watch a webcast but nobody has yet invented the digital equivalent of the party, even via social media. Even if they were tweeting away with a glass of wine in one hand and an iPhone in the other, it’s almost impossible to replicate the atmosphere generated by a real, physical party. So this, after all is the affordance that we cannot yet surpass in digital fashion, which is probably why we in DH take partying so seriously.

Conclusion

So let’s have a look at the affordances that I’ve described above and how physical lectures and digital media compare. Physical lectures are clearly massively superior when it comes to giving people a serious fright. Neither medium offers a very effective way to pay back to the scholarly community, but other ways to do this, such as mentoring, would be predominantly face to face activities. Lectures compare badly to digital media when it comes to being interactive, and allowing users and those outside academia to take part in the research process. I also believe that digital media are far more effective as a way to communicate research whether within or outside academia. If we use such things as connected blogs then digital media also offer a way to include and celebrate the activities of a research team. The physical lecture also does little to dispel the image of the professor as stuffy, self-absorbed and disconnected from the wider public or colleagues; the early evening timing harks back to a world where men attended lectures and women looked after the home. We need, therefore, to be aware that in persisting with the physical form we are doing little to challenge these kind of academic stereotypes.

How effective a lecture is as a way to celebrate seems to me to depend on the type of person and the kind of research they carry out. For an extravert single scholar who loves the adrenalin of performance then I am sure they must be wonderful. But for people such as me, who prefer to celebrate with their team and supporters, and fade happily into the background, attracting as little personal attention as possible, then they are, as my engineering colleagues might say, suboptimal.

One of the most powerful things that we gain through the use of digital resources and media is options for ways to communicate and exchange information, express ourselves and conduct our research. We can send email, blog, tweet, Facebook, share pictures, videos, music: we can be an active participant who creates information or prefer to read, lurk and take things in. None of this excludes the possibility of reading a printed book, visiting a museum, listening to a concert or going to a movie with friends. It’s up to us to decide how we want to mix the digital and physical in our own informational and social world. The media we use depend on individual preferences, and what we want to say about ourselves. No one thing is right or wrong: we need to find the most appropriate tool or medium for what we want to achieve. This is as true in our academic as our social lives. Thus I would argue that in academia we should be open to the same kind of complex informational landscape: why not allow for a variety of forms physical and digital that will achieve communicative objectives, why not change the mixture as technologies change? In doing this we might wish to include the traditional lecture in the repertoire of channels, but if we do we need to be clear about our motivations for doing so. If we persist with the traditional form of the inaugural, it is because we want to say something about belonging to a historical academic form and tradition of public academic performance not because it’s genuinely the best way convey information about our work, or our disciplines to colleagues and the interested public. The one affordance of the inaugural process that we cannot begin to match in the digital form however, is the party. It looks as though it might be some time before we can find a digital equivalent for that.

Inaugurals and affordances

2012-01-23T11:49:00.001Z

Tomorrow I’m giving my inaugural lecture entitled "The Monologue in a crowdsourced world: have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?" It's at 6.30 in the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre, if you really want to come.

I can’t say I am really looking forward to it: one of the aspects of inaugurals that I discuss is that they seem deliberately designed to be a frightening ordeal for the person who gives them (and for all I know an ordeal of a different kind for listeners). I was very unenthusiastic about having to do one of these, and could not really work out why. So I did what my old director of studies used to suggest when I was stuck with an essay question: try to examine what it was about this topic at hand that made me uneasy, and write about that.

As a result I decided to examine the phenomenon of the inaugural lecture itself, and consider how well it still works in a digital world. To do this I’ve used the concept of affordances, often employed in the study of interface design and human computer interaction. In essence an affordance is the properly we are aware something possesses and an analysis of affordances can help us decide whether a tool, physical or digital, is fit for the purpose for which we need it. Thus I'm going to consider the affordances of inaugural lectures and of comparable digital resources and see which comes out on top.

I’m going to post the text of the lecture on this blog after tomorrow, and it will be live tweeted and webcast. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what my conclusions are, but here’s a hint- in the end I am a digital humanist.

#tweetyourthesis: elegant simplicity

2012-01-16T18:46:00.001Z

I think it's about time that I talked about #tweetyourthesis in rather more than 140 characters. Susan Greenberg and Anne Welsh have provided excellent accounts of how it all happened: conversation at a dinner for PhD students turned to questions of how concisely to summarise your thesis. Susan picked up the idea and tweeted it first, but then I chimed in with the idea that if you can't summarise your research question or problem in a tweet then it requires more work. Why did I do this? Well because as Ernesto Priego says, it's something I often say IRL, and had been doing so that evening. One of my colleagues used to say that the argument/question/problem of the PhD dissertation ought to be summed up on the back of a postcard- so in conversation several of us decided that the most technologically current version of this must be a tweet.

This is not something I only say to PhD students. I read a lot of research proposals- I'm Vice Dean: Research for UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanties and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, and periodically review proposals for other international councils. I find it surprising how often people cannot summarise their proposed research in a sentence or two. The research question section ought not to be a paragraph long, but it very often is. Furthermore, I almost always find that if there is a long, rambling 'question' the rest of the proposal is often weak, confused and lacking in clarity in other areas, such as methodology or research context. However, the best proposals are able to convey complex concepts in clear, concise, precise terms. I have therefore come to the conclusion that being clear in your own mind about what you are aiming to do has a lot to do with having a properly worked out plan of what your research is going to be about, and why it might matter.

This is why I insist that my PhD students ought to think carefully about their question. I also find that the very best PhD work is such that when you have finished reading a dissertation it is immediately clear to you what the original contribution of the research is. If I am examining a PhD and can't immediately work out either what the main question is or what its contribution may be then I worry about its quality.

The exercise of summing up your research concisely is therefore not about dumbing down. As I often say to people, sometimes the most difficult questions are seemingly simple. Huge amounts of ink have been spilt over 'What are the causes of the first world war' or 'Why can't Hamlet take revenge?' and this seems likely to continue for a while yet. A lot of people in my field get very exercised about 'What is digital humanities?'. I don't think the people at CERN thought it was especially easy to answer 'How can we find the Higgs Boson, and what might happen if we do?' Nor do I think that Crick and Watson thought that their efforts to answer the question 'What is the structure of DNA?' were based on a programme of easy, pointless research. My point is therefore that just because your question is simple it doesn't mean your research must be simplistic.

I also think there has been a bit of a misunderstanding about understanding. Some people have objected that in science they are dealing with very complex concepts and new ideas that the public don't yet understand, if they ever will. That still, to my mind does not rule out being able to communicate your topic concisely to people in your own field. I didn't say that everyone has to understand your research: in the case of my PhD students I just want them to be able to communicate it to me, their examiners, and, ideally people who might give them a job, if it's in academia. If you can also explain it to a member of the public, that’s even better.

But this is also about something very much deeper in the academic psyche. There are some people who feel, as I do, that the greatest and most impressive form of scholarship is to be able to express very complex ideas in a seemingly simple way, so that they may be easily understood. It's the swan argument- you make it all look easy, and only another expert can tell how hard you are working. If, for example, you watch a truly expert rider doing dressage it looks as though they are just sitting still and the horse is doing beautiful, elegant movements because it wants to. Yet if I or most average riders were to get onto the same horse we’d be eating the arena floor in seconds. Only when you know a bit about riding, can you appreciate what incredibly hard work it is to sit apparently still and ask a huge, powerful creature to do what you want it to, with tiny movements of your hands, legs and body. That is what I aspire to in research myself: power and elegance that appears effortless. I do know, however, that some scholars feel that the opposite is true: only if you express yourself in such complex language that only a very few of the brightest of your colleagues and comprehend it are you a true intellectual. I have to say that I cannot agree with that view. That in the end is why it’s elegant, not dumb, to be able to tweet your thesis.

e-books: all deliberate speed

2011-10-23T19:08:00.000+01:00

I am teaching a session on e-books and reading tomorrow. I feel as though I have been talking about this for most of my professional life, but that nobody ever listens to the underlying message I try to convey. This might be because it is one that few people really want to hear: things change slowly, humans are not susceptible to Moore's law; we like books and they work very well as reading devices.

I've also been trying to dig some publications out of the back catalogue to put in UCL Discovery, our online repository. I was hoping to use them to write a blog about reading in physical and digital environments. This in itself is an interesting exercise: it proves to me how careless I have been about my publications, but is also an interesting testament to the changing nature of publishing. (Stay with me, the two themes are going to knit up in a minute)

By the time I have finished writing something I tend to feel completely sick of it; I am thus delighted to send it off to the publisher and forget it. I tried to be organised and keep copies on my own machine, but until the days of offsite backup and large external hard discs that was quite hard. You had to burn CDs (something neither I nor my PC could quite seem to manage) which could then not be overwritten, or you had to be selective about copying things from an old computer to a new one as you migrated. I admit it, gentle reader, I was a bit careless in all this; plus I had a couple of hard disks die on me at very short notice. The upshot of this was that I seem to have lost several publications that I wanted to upload.

Until quite recently this did not bother me overly. After all, publishers were there to get the stuff out, so once it was in a journal or book, why did I need a copy? Enter, stage left, the IR and open access rights for the institution to publish your work. All of a sudden I, as an author, have a responsibility to keep my ill-assorted outputs (as we call them in REF-speak). This is so that years, perhaps decades after writing them, I can send them to the IR, who will make them available to the world, who will, obligingly download them like publication was going out of fashion and cite them all over the place. That, at least, is the theory. Well, sorry people, I am a delinquent author, who has lost most of her old conference papers, quite a few book chapters and several articles. I suspect I may not be as uncommon as the IR might hope.

So what, you may wonder, remains for the delectation of the waiting world (or at least UCL Discovery)?

Warwick, C. L. H. (2004). Print Scholarship and Digital Resources. In Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., Unsworth, J. (Eds.). A Companion to Digital Humanities (pp. 366-382). Oxford: Blackwell.

Warwick, C. (2002). Electronic Publishing: what difference does it make? In Hornby, S., Clark, Z. (Eds.). Challenge and Change in the Information Society. (pp. 200-218). London: Facet Publishing.

Warwick, C. (2001). “Rumours of my Death have been greatly exaggerated”‟: Scholarly editing in a Digital Age. In Fiormonte, D., Usher, J. (Eds.). New Media and the Humanities: Research and Applications. (pp. 49-56). Oxford: HCU.

I can extract some themes from what I have found: it's a bit depressing really. What I really seem to be saying- repeatedly- is that change will happen slowly; reading is a complicated business that we understand too little about; and no, the world will not be transformed overnight just because we have a thing called a Rocket e-book. (Yes, one of them is that old- based on a paper that I gave in the mid 1990s)

I predicted in most of these chapters (now verging on digital antiquities) that less would happen, more slowly than a lot of the techno-enthusiasts and commercially hype-driven vendors were hoping for. This is based on my stubborn, if perhaps rather unexciting, insistence that people do not abandon tools and technologies that suit them well in favour of things than are unproven, unwieldy and perhaps even painful to use (reading on a screen is still not very pleasant for most people) just because some geek who is obsessed with the latest gadget tells them they ought to. You can see that this message is hardly likely to attract a lot of fans in techno-land.

It seems clear that, for some reason that I still understand only imperfectly, some people love the idea of overnight technological marvels. It's a seductive dream, but usually it takes a lot longer to happen, and we now know that far from one technology replacing another we just arrive at a more complex mixture from which people choose the tool or medium that suits them best. Artists still use paint, pastel and charcoal as well as making digital installations after all.

Mind you, for all I know I said something completely different in the chapter I seem to have lost.

Warwick, C. (2008). Premature elegies: e-books, electronic publishing and reading. In Hornby, S., Glass, B. (Eds.). Reader Development in Practice: bringing literature to readers (pp. 159-174). London: Facet.

Luckily I shall be able to check when I get to work tomorrow, because the publishers sent me a copy of the book in which it's printed. This tells us quite a lot about the way that publication technologies are colliding at the moment. My attempt to be Open Access is foiled by human carelessness and digital failure, but saved by old-fashioned print on paper publishing.

As I believe I may have said elsewhere, perhaps more than once, 'Plus ça change'.

An everyday story...

2011-08-15T19:44:00.001+01:00

Once upon a time there was a young female academic, Dr Ann Other (we’ll call her Dr A for short). She heard that an eminent senior male academic, Professor X, at another university might be working on an area relevant to her research, so she emailed him about it. He asked her to lunch, was friendly and encouraging and suggested a new collaborative project. Being a probationer, she was pleased by this suggestion, and reported it to her HoD (also female) Professor B without delay. Professor B’s reaction was a great surprise: she insisted that this collaboration was not a good idea, and that Dr A should on no account carry on with it. Dr A was confused but did as suggested, and was rather surprised never to hear about it again from Professor X. Some years later Dr A was surprised to learn from another senior male academic that Professor X was well known as a womaniser and seducer of younger colleagues. It all made sense now; Professor B had clearly warned him off, but Dr A wished she’d been told the truth at the time.

A few years later Dr A moved universities. She was invited to a reception after a workshop here she met another eminent senior academic, in a sligtly different field. Let’s call him Professor Z. Professor Z struck up a conversation with her, but quite quickly Dr A began to feel uncomfortable. Professor Z stood far too close, smiled in a not altogether professional way, looked at bits of her she was uncomfortable about having stared at and pursued her when she tried to move away. At any minute she felt she might be grabbed, even though this was a public place. Eventually she managed to escape, but she never took Professor Z up on the idea of discussing a teaching collaboration that he’d seemed so keen on. Some years later she was surprised to learn, from another senior male academic, that Professor Z was well known as a womaniser and seducer of colleagues. She was not greatly reassured to know that apparently he was less bad now than had once been the case.

Some years have passed and now she is Professor Ann Other. She wonders what to do when she hears her female PhD student complaining of being cornered at a party by Professor Y, an eminent male academic; when a probationary lecturer talks of being patronised and put down (by Professor V- guess what?) for being pretty, when the clear implication is that she cannot also be clever; when a 30-something Senior Lecturer talks about comments being addressed to her breasts not her face (and I won’t even spell out who did this). This story doesn’t have a happy ending- sorry.

There’s a reason for the name I’ve chosen. It seems to me that the identity of this female academic is not important. The point is that her story is typical of those I hear from other women in academia. In the end Dr A got off relatively lightly, we might feel: she didn’t actually get propositioned, let alone assaulted. But she lives in the knowledge that this kind of low-level sexual menace is always lurking in the background of her job and that she can’t do anything to protext her colleagues from it.

What really concerns me is the reaction of the senior males involed in this story, who were not the offenders. If it’s well known that there are some senior people out there who are sexually predatory or who don’t respect women as colleagues, why is nothing said and nothing done by those people they might listen to- their male colleagues? There seems to be an assumption that nobody is really hurt by all this; it’s just a bit of bad behaviour and does it really matter in such eminent men? The female HoD may have warned off Professor X, but it seems he didn’t do much to change his ways. I’d like to feel that if I knew someone who was treating junior collagues in such an inappropriate fashion, I’d take her aside and tell her in no uncertain terms that this was to stop. (It sounds a bit odd put that way, doesn't it. I wonder why.) Do men do that? If they do, why doesn’t it work? Why doesn’t this behaviour stop? Could it be that such things are excused if the culprit if sufficiently distinguished and the sufferer sufficiently junior?

I wonder if we ought to be more overt about discussing this as women. We don’t complain much, unless it’s really serious, and we don’t generally talk to anyone but other women. It's almost as if we feel guilty. I’m an HoD now, so should I tell my junior colleagues to expect this kind of thing as part of academic life? Should I reassure them it’s not their fault if such things happen? Would then even tell me, fearing that nothing can be done? It makes me furious every time I hear stories like the one I hear above, but I at a loss to know what we, as senior women, can do to stop this. Perhaps the first thing is to make it public, so that other Dr A’s out there won’t feel so isolated, but it seems a pretty inadequate response.

Social media and the London riots

2011-08-12T15:45:00.002+01:00

I've just given an email interview to a journalist from the London Bureau of Xinhua News Agency, China's state media organisation. I ended up writing quite a lot, so I thought I might blog it as well in slighly edited and extended form. I've presented it in the interview format, including the questions that were put to me.

1. How do you describe the role of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger, in the recent riots in London and other English cities?

CW: I think it's quite clear that social media have been used to communicate information concerning the riots in various ways. A colleague in UCL Political Science has written a very good blog post on this, so I won't repeat what she has discussed in detail.

It seems that rioters may have used such things as Blackberry messenger and Twitter to organise and plan activity. However, it's also important to stress that Twitter had a very important role in allowing average citizens, who were not taking part in the riots, to share information. They used it to find out what was happening in different areas and to communicate the kind of good news that the mainstream media are not usually interested in. For example a picture of people making tea for policemen, using a riot shield as a tray has been widely tweeted. The tea in time of crisis theme has inspired Operation Cup of Tea a social media-based site of anti-riot testimonies, which is also using tea sales to raise money for post-riot reconstruction. The Twitter hashtag #riotcleanup was used to organise thousands of volunteers, who met to clean up the damage on the day after the riots. It is vital, therefore, that we understand that social media has had an important effect on community cohesion and communication for the great majority of people using it, and that communication about lawlessness was very much a minority activity.

2. Those social media have also played an important role in the riots in Middle East and north Africa, such as in Egypt. So do you think it is becoming a global issue and a challenge to many governments in this age?

CW: I think the the use of social media during the London is a very different issue from that in other places that you mention. These were legitimate uses of the medium to protest about the activity of repressive, non-democratic governments. It was the only way to organise peaceful protest against oppressive regimes when other more official communication channels were closed or monitored by the state. The UK government is democratically elected and not repressive. Even if some of the rioters might not agree with government policies, these are not in essence political, pro-democracy protests. There does appear to be a correlation between the worst areas of rioting and social deprivation, as this map overlay mashup produced by UCL CASA demonstrates. But the London riots are much more like those sometimes experienced in the USA, such as the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992: a way of expressing anger about the conditions in which people find themselves, and an opportunity for looters to engage in straightforward criminal activity.

3. Then how do you think the new media should be regulated? How should we balance regulation and freedom on internet?

CW: I think it is very hard to regulate new media. The internet was, after all, designed to withstand a nuclear strike, and that decentralised structure tends to resist control by nation states. Even when the internet was effectively turned off in Egypt for a few days, people were still able to tweet from their mobile phones, as research undertaken at UCL CASA has shown. Thus I think repression of social media use is entirely inappropriate.

I think that proven acts of criminality co-ordinated on the internet or social media need to be pursued and prosecuted, just as they would if committed in real life. But it can be much harder to find people on social media and thus can be harder to make the connection between an individual in real life and a social media account holder. If really determined to evade detection, people might tweet psuedonymously from PAYG mobile phones, changing SIM cards and social media accounts or handles regularly, or perhaps use Cyber cafes instead of their own computer. We need to use the same high standards of proof of such activity as we would in the real world. How can we be sure, for example, that people who communicate over Twitter are intending to commit a violent, criminal act as opposed to exercising their democratic right to a peaceful meeting or orderly form of protest? Policing therefore has to be as thorough and sensitive online as it would be off-line.

I think calls to shut down social media in times of crisis are entirely misguided. If a suggestion were made that at such times all roads and rail links were closed, rendering thousands of people homeless and stranded, I imagine that most people would think it a dreadful idea. The vast majority of law abiding citizens use Twitter for lawful purposes in such circumstances, perhaps to make sure that loved ones are safe, and find out what is happening to friends or what the situation is in the area where they live, so shutting it would pose more of an inconvenience, and indeed possible risk to the safety, of most people as a result than leaving it open. Such suggestions indicate to me that politicans need urgently to develop a much more complex understanding of the culture of social media, and its possible positive as well as negative uses.

Tea, Cake and DH research

2011-06-15T19:34:00.000+01:00

I’ve been thinking lately about how we do research in DH as opposed to other humanities disciplines. This came about after I reacted strongly against the notion that we must only ever have PhD supervisions in offices, and be very formal about it. That made me wonder why I disagree with this so profoundly. So here are some thoughts about DH, PhD students and the centrality of tea and cake to our research.

I've always had meetings with anyone and everyone I work with or who works for me wherever seems convenient; that often means over lunch or tea and cake. I think DH people expect this because our research culture is very relaxed, informal and- because it is team based- sociable. One of my most important publications, for example, happened as a result of a conversation in a bar at DH: we wrote the grant application for INKE sitting on the deck in Ray Siemens’ back garden for five days, eating and drinking as we went along, because there was no time to stop. It didn't mean we were not doing serious scholarship, we just didn't need to be in an office, because we had a wireless connection and a laptop each. I’ve had meetings about DH in parks, cafes, restaurants, bars, and even on a Eurostar, and they often involved tea and cake, if not something stronger. I know a leading DH scholar who conducts all of his academic life in the local café, and even provides it with wireless to make his life easier. He only goes into his office to pick up his mail. Humanities scholars are probably more used to being in offices, because they need their books. Almost everything I need now for work is digital- hence the forlorn and empty appearance of my office bookshelves, which, being a booklover makes me deeply embarrassed.

I still feel, therefore, that it ought to be possible, if appropriate, to do this with PhD supervisions. I don't see why I cannot have a supervision with a student when we are at the DH conference just because my office happens to be thousands of miles away. Why should it matter as long as both supervisor and student are happy; it’s clear that this is a supervision not a general chat; and there’s nothing confidential being discussed?

I think my views about PhD students may come back to the nature of DH as team based rather than single scholar research. I'm used to working in teams in DH that contain researchers of various ages and levels of experience and seniority from Professor to PhD and sometimes even MA students. So I regard PhD students as part of our research group, albeit more junior members of it. I am used therefore to discussing research with them in group meetings on as equal a basis as I would with academic colleagues. That's why my immediate reaction to the offices-only suggestion was to say 'Well I have meetings with my colleagues in bars, cafes etc…' because I did not really see a difference. In research teams I am not in a teaching relationship with my PhD students any more than the more senior academic who was PI to my Co-I of my first big grant was teaching me. I learnt a great deal from her of course as a result, and she was mentoring me in an informal way. That really colours the way I see PhD students and postdocs- they may work for our group, but they are independent researchers with perfectly valid opinions and insights of their own and I learn as much from them (perhaps more) than they do from me. I might mentor and advise, but I am no more their teacher than the other academic was mine.

I think increasingly, however, that most traditional humanities scholars see things through the lens of teaching not research; at least this seems to be the case in our faculty. So I wonder whether they see PhD supervision as teaching, because that's what they like to do and they are not used to doing research with other people. If research is what you do alone, then if you are talking to a less experienced researcher you must feel you are teaching them I suppose.

I don't think one mind-set is right or wrong, but I do think we have to allow for variations of practice between disciplines. Thus I need to be able to carry on treating my PhDs as team members and equals, and single scholars to be more formal if they wish or we really are not preparing our students for the worlds they will work in.

It might also help explain why it is often difficult to persuade humanities scholars to think in terms of collaboration: DH PhDs and even MAs are trained for it, so it's easy when they become academics. Most humanities people, from being a PhD student, are trained to the opposite, and so it's harder. I'm not saying that either should necessarily change, but if collaboration and team working are going to be expected more of humanities researchers in future, then we need to think about how to make it seem more normal, if they don't get any help with this as PhD students. Anyone who does DH has had to change disciplines, thus mind-set, from one norm to the other, so perhaps we underestimate how hard it is for most people. It's all very well dangling money in front of humanities scholars in mid-career and saying 'You must collaborate!' and then wondering why people don't. They are happy working alone: they don't know how to work in teams and feel uncomfortable with it.

The answer to everything is, of course, in my ideal world, do more DH at every opportunity. But switching back to reality, this is a problem and I think we need to tackle it at PhD student level, although many supervisors may need to be convinced that this is a good idea. Perhaps they’d like to discuss it over tea and cake.

Making things work if you're female

2011-05-22T13:55:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking a great deal of late about how to make my complicated life work better. I have to find a balance between doing DH (which I love) and doing a lot of what we in the UK call management (and in the US you'd call admin or service) which, oddly enough, I also rather enjoy. It makes me distinctly uncomfortable when I read tweets about all the cool things that other people in DH are doing, or worse when I read them from conferences that I should be at, that are directly related to my research; yet I know I don't have time to take part. Conversely I know that what I am doing in terms of management is necessary to make UCLDH, my department and indeed the university run- and when it goes well it's extremely satisfying.

So when I read this article about how too much service wrecks women's careers I felt a kind of horror. I am an Associate Professor (Reader in UK terms); I do a lot of service and admin; I know I'm at the point when my research is in danger of suffering. I do very much want to be a full professor, but have I blown it already? It makes me feel anxious and trapped-if only someone had told me this years ago. How naïve I was: I have always assumed that all the work I do for the university would be recognised when it comes to promotion. I do still have faith in UCL’s ethical, Benthamite way of doing things, but I'm shaken by this study’s conclusions.

Balancing different demands of research and management is a huge dilemma for anyone, and I know from having talked to senior male mentors in my university that it's been a problem for them. But they are full professors. Why should this afflict women so much more seriously? I can only feel it's because we are acculturated to being kind, helpful, communitarian, thoughtful and to say yes when asked to do things by men in positions of power. This study suggests that most men do not feel the kind of compunction that most women feel when it comes to protecting their time for research and saying no when asked to do something that uses up this time. The logic of this is that I must, forthwith, stop doing all the admin that I do, resign from committees immediately and hide myself away to produce ever greater volumes of research outputs (as we so delightfully call them here). The logic further suggests that, whether or not I immediately ditch my role as acting Head of Department, (Department Chair) I should advise all my female colleagues who are earlier in their careers to refuse to take on any significant admin roles unless and until they have such a heavyweight track record that they are a full professor; otherwise they risk career blight in comparison to male colleagues.

There are obvious problems with this-not least that I don't want to. Running UCLDH is all part of my passion for my field, and as you become a more senior researcher you have to run your own group, surely- unless of course I adopt the pure humanities mode, and simply write heaps of those single author monographs that seem so important, for reasons that continue to escape me. If I did that, I'm sure I'd die of loneliness, since discussing DH with my brilliant colleagues is part of what makes doing research so exciting. Beyond this, my role as Vice Dean Research (Associate Dean) also stems from my interest in the whole area of research, policy and development at UCL and beyond. In my own research I believe in working with users and people outside academia; thus thinking about how we can collaborate with and engage the public in what we do is all part of what I love about being VDR. Now being HoD is different: I've yet to find much to love about it. But I'm doing it because I was asked to by people I respect, who have done a great many things to help me and UCLDH in the past; and because someone has to do it. I don't want to let down people I like and respect and with whom I enjoy working in these various admin roles. I've been given so much support and encouragement that if this is payback time, so be it. Perhaps a male researcher would say no: I'd think him an ungrateful b*stard if he did, but perhaps that's just because I'm female and socialised that way.

There's another problem: some people wonder whether fewer women get promoted because the committees are made up of senior people and (you can see where this is going) such people are usually male because fewer women get promoted. It seems a reductive, circular problem. Thus if women refuse to take up management roles such as being HoD or Dean because they need to concentrate on research, the whole university management becomes overwhelmingly male; how can that be a good thing? Then again if fewer women get promoted because they do service roles instead of research, we have the same problem.

There has to be a way out of this, and in my view it's so simple it's amazing nobody has thought of it before. Why not stop being so obsessed by sheer amounts of research as the sine qua non of promotion? If we recognise that women tend to produce fewer publications because they are doing admin and committee work, when promotion cases are being assessed those doing so need to expect to see somewhat shorter lists of publications and grants from women if (and only if) these are balanced by significant lists of admin jobs well done. Or, (and this is really radical) we could accept that this might affect community-minded men too. Why is that so hard? I mean of course you should only be a full prof if you have made a very significant contribution to your field. But why do we take this 'nevermind the quality feel the width’ attitude? (I could say something about women not being quite as anxious as men about the length of things, preferring instead to value effective function, but that would be a bit obvious perhaps.) Then again when we are discussing function, what is wrong with valuing people for making an organisation work? If mid-career people refuse to do admin until we are senior profs, it's going to leave the senior profs a lot less time to do their research-given the admin load they'll have to carry.

Meanwhile, it appears that women must still do as our foremothers advised: if made an apparently attractive offer, think careful about its sincerity and whether it will lead to a definite, welcome, commitment. Remeber, you could end up over-worked, unhappy and exploited, while making it possible for men to enjoy greater success, happiness and status. For fear of breach of promise of various kinds, if in doubt women must, it appears, still say no.

Here's one I prepared earlier

2011-03-19T11:11:00.000Z

Just in case you don't take part in the Day of DH (what do you mean, what Day of DH?) you might want to see what I've been blogging about there. I like the most recent entry best myself.

Shall we tell them/Who we are? *

2011-03-02T20:05:00.000Z

* The title of this entry may only make sense to fans of LUFC. For this I make no apology, since I am one.

Careful readers of this blog will have detected that I don't seem to update it much. I sometimes feel guilty about this, but seldom guilty enough to upend my hideous todo list to allow me time to remedy the situation. Nevertheless I have been meaning, ever since we got the acceptance for DH2011, to put up the text of out poster about UCLDH I feel rather proud of it, because it's our first corporate publication, as it were. It also comes over a bit bloggy I think.

This is also about my antipathy to the fetish for defining DH that keeps going on and on and on at the moment. So here it is, with no apology for the tone of ridiculous pride expressed for our centre and the work of my colleages, Simon Mahony, Julianne Nyhan, Claire Ross, Melissa Terras, Ulrich Tiedau, Anne Welsh, and Tim Weyrich, who are co-authors of this.

UCLDH: Big Tent Digital Humanities in practice

There has been a great deal of concern recently about questions of how we should define Digital Humanities. John Unsworth in his plenary lecture at DHSI asked how we might define the boundaries of our discipline. UCL’s own Melissa Terras, in her widely reported plenary at DH2010, warned us that we must not only understand our discipline ourselves, but be able to communicate it succinctly to others. Others, including one of the authors of this proposal, tend to the view of ‘more hack less yack’. Yet questions remain, and the theme of DH2011 prompts us toward such considerations. As a result we present a proposal below for a poster about the establishment of the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, (UCLDH) one of whose founding principles is that of inclusivity, interdisciplinary and the broadest sense of definition, in which we demonstrate ways in which the big tent attitude to digital humanities is put into practice. Our tent includes not only other disciplines within academia, but also libraries, museums, archives, cultural heritage practice and commercial information providers. In the following proposal we discuss how this has come about and justify our belief in broadly defined Digital Humanities (DH).

UCLDH does not think of itself as a DH centre in the conventional form, where anyone working on DH must come and work in one central facility. Instead, it is built on a hypertextual metaphor: it is the hub of a network, bringing together work being done in different departments and research centres within UCL and beyond. This is one of the reasons for our inclusive philosophy. We do not believe it is for us to tell people whether they are doing DH, as we conceive of it. If they would like to become part of our network, then we welcome their involvement, since we believe that exciting new research can be created from synergies in such a network, and by unexpected collaborations between disciplines. To this end we run various different networking events such as Digital Excursions. These visits to different parts of UCL and other cultural heritage institutions such as the British Library allow participants to find out about research and digital facilities they might never previously have been aware of, and to meet and talk to others whom they might never have come across. Connections created by these meetings may take DH forward in ways we cannot predict, let alone define.

UCL has unique assets as a basis for Digital Humanities research in the form of Museums and Collections and Library Special Collections, and digital art work being produced at the Slade School of Art. We are also fortunate that our location in central London means that we are close to many of the world’s greatest Libraries, Museums and galleries. As a result one of the main directions in which UCLDH has sought to extend the definition of what DH might be is in working with cultural heritage and memory institutions. For example we are working with the British Museum, the Museum of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum on a project that will help us better to understand the needs and behaviours of users of digital museum objects. We have doctoral students undertaking research at various institutions, including: the British Library, to look at the use of their mass digitisation projects; The London Metropolitan Archive, where image processing will be used to try and decipher the Grand Parchment which is too damaged and deteriorated to read; The Science Museum, where the use of 3D scans of museum objects will be evaluated by the general public; and the British Museum, where work will be done on curatorial documentation of 3D scans to investigate standards and protocols for 3D capture of artefacts.

UCL has world leading research in both humanities, computer science and engineering, and we believe that as a result it is vital to engage all parts of the university’s research base equally in the DH endeavour. We aim to create new knowledge both in computer science and engineering and in the humanities, as part of the same research projects. We think of computer scientists as equal research partners in our work. Computing is not conceived of as existing to provide a service to facilitate humanities research. Thus DH research takes place in the Department of Computer Science as often as in the faculty of Arts and Humanities. One project led by one of UCLDH’s associate directors, aims to develop algorithms to reconstruct the Minoan wall paintings of ancient Thera. This will lead to advances in computational methods, but it also aims to redefine the existing conservation and assembly process, helping archaeologists to create reconstructions of the frescoes, and to study them in ways that would previously have been impossible.

We also believe in engaging with the users of digital resources, whether they are in academia, cultural heritage, or the broader interested public. This is the biggest possible tent that we might pitch for DH. We are highly engaged with social media in our own work, as evidenced by the UCLDH blog, and out Twitter presence (#UCLDH). However, beyond this, several of our research projects involve social networking or crowd sourcing, and aim to engage the public well beyond academia with their heritage. Transcribe Bentham allows users to access digital copies of Jeremy Betham’s original letters, to learn about the intricacies of transcribing primary sources, and then to contribute transcribed text back to the digital collection. The QRator project will use QR codes to allow museum visitors to contribute their interpretation of objects to digital interactive labels using a smart phone app. This means that crowd sourced understanding of museum objects can complement the once monolithic curatorial interpretation of what visitors ought to be seeing.
Stretching the tent even more widely, UCLDH has also caught the imagination of the wider DH and cultural heritage community internationally with its successful discussion group. Decoding Digital Humanities (DDH) This is an informal discussion group about DH established and organised by research students and staff from UCLDH. It meets monthly and is attended by students, researchers and cultural heritage practitioners from London and the south of England as well as those from UCL. It also has five new international chapters: two in Australia, and in the USA, Belgium and Portugal.

Our definition of the big, interdisciplinary tent also includes teaching and learning. Our new Masters will be a highly innovative interdisciplinary programme: the first in the world to have a dual designation of MA and MSc, reflecting once again our sense of the dual balance of our field. Its diverse choice of options from a wide range of disciplines responds to the complex nature of DH, including modules from engineering, computer science, geography, archaeology, anthropology, architectural studies, psychology and information studies as well as pure humanities. It also reflects the needs of the students, the skills required for a new generation of scholars as well as those wishing to pursue a career outside academia. We will also release a substantial amount of the core materials as open access digital learning objects as part of the JISC Open Educational Resources programme: further evidence of a commitment to openness and broad public engagement in teaching as well as research.

The guiding principles of our approach to DH are predicated on welcoming the sense of a field that is growing and in flux. We do not want to put up fences, and create definitions of arcane knowledge which initiates must possess to be part of our exclusive club. We wish to open wide the doors of this amazingly diverse discipline to any and all of those who would like to take part. We believe that DH should create new knowledge in both parts of the equation, of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. We believe that DH should embrace memory institutions and cultural heritage. We believe that DH should involve those who use digital resources, allowing them to contribute their ideas and content to resources, as well as being consulted about their design. But ultimately, to be true to our principles, we believe that is it not our task to define DH at UCLDH. In the spirit of social media, we propose that the definition of the field should be allowed to develop organically, taking into account the views and input of those who participate in it, within and beyond the academy. Our view of DH is crowd sourced, inclusive and ever growing: big tent Digital Humanities in practice.

On Mentors, DH and beyond

2010-12-07T20:17:00.000Z

A few weeks ago Dan Cohen sent a very moving tweet about his mentor's death at the early age of 66. By unpleasant coincidence something very similar happened to me some years ago. That was long before the days of social media so the internet never heard about it, but Dan's tweet set me thinking about the question of mentoring in DH. I've been fortunate enough to have several mentors in my academic DH career, among them Lou Burnard and Susan Hockey, from whom I learned more than I could describe here about our field. But I wondered if there are certain common qualities that we see in our mentors, and why it is, therefore, that we miss them so much.

The weirdest thing about mentorship is that nobody actually signs up for it. We are all assigned mentors at the beginning of our official academic career but that's an administrative convention: those arrangements may just work out by accident but your real mentors are ones who, like cats and horses, arrive unexpectedly. At the moment I am fortunate enough to have three people I think of as mentors at UCL, all senior people, none fully DH, but all DH sympathisers. I know don't know if they even realise that I think of them as such because, let's face it, they have never volunteered and I’ve never exactly asked them. But I admire what they do and I aspire to be as good at doing it as they are and I try and learn by watching them. Does that make them mentors? I think so. Would they be pleased if they knew that's how I think of them? I hope so. But it’s strange that it's the kind of thing that is never formally spoken of until after death.

Maybe that's just being terribly British, but it occurs to me that inherent in the concept of mentorship is the question of loss. By nature most of our mentors tend to be more senior than we are. This means that we know that at some point we're going to lose them either because they'll leave, retire or at worst die. Once it’s happened, you learn greedily, knowing that your mentors won’t always be there to teach you.

So what do we owe to our mentors? I think it's the fact that we benefit from their experience. They are the people we can go to when we don't know what to do; when we feel unsure about the way our careers are going; when we want to work out how they did something right and we just can't figure out how to do it ourselves. Sometimes we just like to watch them being really good at something and to be proud of being associated with them. We hope that they take an interest in us, and share in the pleasure of our successes. But in the end a great mentor is the person who you can guarantee will pick you up when something goes badly wrong, put you back together and tell you how you can go forward, however impossible it might seem. Perhaps even more crucially, however trivial our latest crisis might seem to them, they should understand why we feel that the world is about to end, and act accordingly. No wonder we miss them so much when they are no longer there to do all of those things.

But the question of mentorship is no longer simply about the past at least for those of us in my generation of DH scholars. I recall a conversation that I had with Ray Siemens and Steve Ramsey a few years ago about what would happen when some of the great senior scholars of our field retired. We looked at each other rather uneasily and realised that we would be part of the next generation of senior people in the field, thanks to the damage wrought by the cuts of the 80s. It occurred to us that we would have to become the people who might be needed to mentor the next generation. I don’t know about Steve and Ray, but I didn’t and still don’t feel grown up enough, or nearly eminent enough for that kind of role. Personally this makes me feel rather uncomfortable; although it's a pleasant kind of discomfort. I guess it's because, as I said, you don't sign up to be a mentor, but do your best if people choose you.

It makes me wonder, though, what kind of things a mentor should do now in the socially networked age. Is the concept meaningful any more when we can tweet our hearts out about the latest crisis, and ask Facebook friends for advice? Can one mentor by email, Skype or IM, or must it be an F2F activity? Is there any point weeping into a webcam, or celebrating success via a headset? Can we mentor someone thousands of miles away as well as someone we see regularly? I think it’s an ongoing experiment, but given what I gained from my mentors it’s one I feel bound to take part in.

For JWS, 1936-2002: teacher, inspiration, friend.

“Then others for the breath of words respect,
Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.”

Oxford past and DH future

2010-09-20T18:31:00.000+01:00

Today I have been in Oxford, almost 14 years after I started work at the HCU (Humanities Computing Unit). It's not like I've never been there since. But I’ve just been external examiner for a PhD and I think that's made me reflect on my status, since being external in the UK system implies that you are An if not The Expert in the discipline. Inevitably that tends to make me a bit reflective about where I am, and how I got here.

I couldn't help thinking about what I'd have made of this had I known 14 years ago that I'd be a relatively senior academic at a world top 10 ranked university in a discipline with a name that was yet to be invented (Digital Humanities). I reckon I'd have been pleased, not least because at that point I had pretty much given up all hope of an academic career. But I certainly couldn't have predicted it. Nor would I have been able to guess that in my backpack would be a laptop weighing less than 1kg and an iPad. I could not have known that I'd plan my walk from the station to where I was staying using a mapping application on a device that's a phone in name, but that it would also play MP3s to accompany the journey as well as doing almost anything else I need of it aside from making tea. Nor would I have predicted that my favourite skinny-ish jeans plus my luggage and aforementioned phone would have been bought online. I mean while I was here I built the first website for my faculty. We hardly dreamt of online shopping.

So much for progress, but what of reflection? I owe a lot to this place. It was at the HCU that I really learned my trade as a digital humanist (even if we didn't call it that at the time). I will always owe a huge debt of gratitude to my colleagues but especially my then boss Lou Burnard and Stuart Lee: colleague, friend, fellow sufferer as a Leeds fan and pub quiz teammate sans pareil. It's just so sad that the HCU did not survive. But I certainly found my home in this brilliant discipline that never stops changing and growing with the technology.

I could hardly believe how lucky I was to find myself in a field in which people really wanted to hear about your work however junior and unimportant you were and who were happy to share theirs. I was indeed fortunate to be one of the few people at the time who understood both SGML and English Literature. Today’s early career scholars probably have a far more profound knowledge of the field, as well as far greater technical skills. They must regard us old fogeys with senior posts we seem to have wandered into much as we thought of the beneficiaries of the post war university expansion: lucky, but taking up jobs we could have done better. Still I thank the good fortune that led to me stumbling into the light of DH. It was so brilliant, for example, giving a talk about DH at Bangor last week. I hope some of the grad students I talked to either have or will come to share my passion for my field.

In the end I guess all this underlines the profound scepticism I have always felt about technological futurology. I could not possibly have predicted the kit I carry as normal and the uses to which I put it. But I loved the DH world in which I found myself then. It was so new and exciting. I still do: it still is. If I come back 14 years hence who knows what sort of technologies I’ll be using. But I am sure that DH still will be as exciting and that I will still feel the same.

Reading the paradigm shift?

2010-08-13T10:34:00.000+01:00

Morning all! (Or whatever time it is for you people in North America) It's wonderful that people are so interested in this topic and have made time to write such detailed and insightful comments. So rather than write another long comment myself I thought it might be easiest just to handle them in a post, not least because some of the same issues recur in more than one comment. I don't know if you're meant to do that in the blogosphere, so forgive me if I inadvertently transgressed the unwritten law (Thinks, 'Dinsdale....' in the voice of Spiny Norman)

Anyway evidently I missed the point a bit and underestimated the possibilities of Anthologize (and yes, thanks for pointing it out, I was using UK spelling!) So I concentrated on how it fitted into my conception of the world and my interests, prominent among which are reading in physical and digital spaces. Then I went on about it, based on a partial understanding of the topic, to my friends and colleagues. Unfortunately that means that in my interactions with Althologize and its web presence I ended up behaving like a typical humanities user as we have observed them.

In other words I made assumptions based on its name (sounds rather booky) then I looked at the web page, saw things about putting posts together and making an electronic book and then publishing it. All these words said book and print to me. (Remember I am a former literary scholar) Then I said to myself. 'I don't think I need that, it makes no sense to me.' Thus I proceeded not to download it. This is exactly what users do. They get easily confused by names and descriptions and if they don't see the point of something they don't go any further especially if, ironically enough, they would have to download and install anything. In fact I actually went a bit further and did explore your web page to find out more about the project, and most people would have been long gone by then. Amanda, if you'd like a reference for this, pick just about anything we've ever written about LAIRAH from my publications page eg 'If you Build it'... in LLC

We all want to be able to say 'No but wait, you got it wrong, you misinterpreted our work, it's so much more than you thought' And now I am convinced. But you only knew what I thought because I blogged it. Most users don't do that. They just give up. We can't be there to guide them through the resource, or answer their comments and put them right (even if you have a comment function or forum most people don't use it) Thus user testing is vital because it helps us anticipate to some extent how users might react, and to fix possible problems before they happen, and in doing so undermine their trust in the resource.

Amanda makes the very good point that there are different versions of digital reading. We have not yet studied them, but this is built into the research plan for INKE At the moment we are still gathering and analysing data for our early studies, and at this point we have not found that users are switching between many different types of device. They tend to read either at a computer screen on in print. A very few of them use phones and even fewer an e-reading device, so we haven't yet had chance to compare across devices. But this might change given that iPads and Kindles are much later into the UK market. We base our findings on what people are doing because we choose to study what people are already doing in their usual context rather than bringing them into labs and giving them things to do on different platforms. That's a perfectly valid method; it's just not the one I tend to use with humanities scholar or general readers. When we do have results ready for publication I'll be sure to blog about it, since it seems like people are really interested. Needless to say that if anyone reading this would like to take part in an INKE study, please do let me know. We'd love to hear about what you do.

And yes, I guess I do come over as a nay-sayer. As someone once said to me, 'As a user studies person you'll never be popular. You come in and tell enthusiastic people what's wrong with the lovely new thing they are so proud of, and that they have to change it.' But I don't care if I'm loved for this. I do care if as a result digital resources can be improved. It can be so much better than take it or leave it. By taking a few, quite simple things into account you can make it so much more likely that your tool or resource is more likely to be used. (cf our LAIRAH checklist) So in the end I see this as necessary pain for future gain.

Finally and by no means least thank you very much indeed to Kathie for her detailed and very informative comments about the UX team on Anthologize and what you did. I'm so pleased that this kind of serious user research was being done. The other day I was talking to someone whose opinion I respect who insisted that what I was describing in the adoption of user studies in DH was a paradigm shift. I was a bit unconvinced as it sounded too large and daunting a thing to be part of but I am beginning to wonder, and that pleases me more than anyone can imagine.

I wish you'd say more about your user studies on the web page, as it's really important stuff. I also very much hope you will write this up for academic publication. I might have an idea about how to do that.... watch this space. But seriously I think we ought to talk more about this off-blog as it were. Perhaps there could be a way to collaborate on testing as part of INKE since we already have Julie Meloni as link person.

I could go on about users and readers, and believe me I often do. I'd also like to reiterate that what I was saying was in the context of the Anthologize work, but it was meant to highlight the broader issues of the importance of users studies and testing. There is so much fascinating work to be done here. Also I am truly delighted to know that people out there are so interested in these issues. I've always thought, 'Oh well this is just me and my stuff, I'll talk about it occasionally at conferences and write articles, but nobody will really be bothered.' It's so good to know that people out there are bothered, and would like to join in the debates. Maybe there is something to this blogging lark after all...

Raining on the Parade

2010-08-12T19:06:00.000+01:00

OK people, fasten your seatbelts, here comes my first bloggy rant. I realise these is a risk that I may upset or even offend some people I regard as good friends and colleagues. So let me first say, please remember I admire what you do, and in no way can I claim to be able to build tools, write code not related to the XML standard or anything of the kind. Also I like you. But, I also love my work and what I do and so I can't just sit here and say nothing.

There is a lot of buzz about at the moment about Anthologise. Most of it is good. I can see why. It's a great achievement to get a group of people together and build a working tool in a week. But here is my objection, was there anyone there at all that has any knowledge of how to conduct user studies of digital reading? Because I can't see any evidence of this.

The reason why this matters is that those of us who study online reading and general user behaviour can show that is that there is a very great difference between reading online and offline. So it's just not that simple to say, take blog posts, put them together, make a book, hey presto. Because if a blogger is any good s/he should know, or perhaps just intuit by accident, that people read differently online (They take in about 40% less information) Thus if you write for the online medium, you ought to do it differently than for print, and that can be a great opportunity. Thus just putting blogs together and printing them does not a literary or journalistic success make. In fact a printed blog collection seems to me to be a wounded digital object with its wings clipped. It can't make use of all its original hypertextual muscles to take off as it ought to, and so it's grounded and trapped on paper.

I love reading in print, but when I do I want to read a subtle piece of argument or something with all kinds of fascinating literary language and complexity, because print is the best place for them. They don't go over well on a blog: we just don't have the processing power to want to comprehend them online. Conversely, at least to me, blog posts seem too flat and utilitarian when printed.

So if I had been there, would I have poured cold water on the idea? Well yes I might, or at least I might have brought my knowledge to the table to take part in the discussion. But what I'd have actually said was, 'OK I have doubts, but let’s test it on the users and see what we get'.

I am really pleased that Anthologise had a UX team. But I can’t quite see what serious UX work you can actually do in a week. And this is a problem because if you are going to design something that users really want you need to study them first. You need to talk to them, interview them, observe them, feed back the results of this into the design process, try it again, retest, get more feedback etc. Otherwise there is a huge risk that what you get is a tool that people in DH love and get but other people, actual, real users don't get. But please prove me wrong if you can. I'd love to know if you can do mega rapid user testing as it might be a technique that we could use in our group. I mean that seriously.

Now it might be that Anthologise will be a huge success, and I really do wish it well. But I cannot get enthusiastic about this kind of development method for DH tools in general, because we know from our work that this kind of attitude, what we've called 'designer as user', is fraught with problems. Often we techies or DH people understand complex digital functionality, and imagine that if we can do it, anyone can. But it turns out that as a reuslt it's much too complicated for users, or they just don't see the point of it. And if that happens we know they just will not use things. If you happen to get lucky and design a tool that everyone loves and gets, good. But we find that, oddly enough, resources that work are more likely to do so if users are taken into account, and if they are not at least a third of them are likely to fail. Why take that risk? If this is just an experiment and nobody cares if it works, fine. If it's supposed to work, please involve users. In the case of Anthologise I cannot see any mention of this in future plans.

You may say that we have written possible use cases, showing people what they could do. But I have as many doubts about these as the I do with use of personae. They are a more complicated version of designer as user, because they simply replicate the assumptions we make when writing them. It's very hard honestly to imagine how someone utterly different from yourself will use something. Unless of course you've got data from a great deal of user testing. Again, prove me wrong here, tell me how you got that.

DH history is littered with tools that have been written about with a kind of missionary zeal. If you study the DH literature there are far more articles exhorting people to use tools and techniques in the mainstream than there are about people who actually do use them. This is really, really not about lack of knowledge, it's about lack of fit with what people want. We keep saying, 'If we shout loud enough people will come.' They just won't, won't, won't if what we are offering is not right. I know we love cool digital things, and want others to love them, but just going on about how great they are is not working. How long do we have to keep shouting before we realise this? It's been decades now.

Sorry I am in full rant mode now, but it frustrates me so much. This is at the core of my work, we have evidence about it, people even quote our research now. Then they just plain ignore the message of it.

I love digital things too. I want more people to use them. But I am convinced that we can only do this if we find out what users want and design for that. What's so hard about that? It might mean we have to change our plans a bit, and produce things that are simpler, but perhaps more elegant and pleasant to use as a result. It's an exercise in listening, not in imposing our own ideas. Why is that so wrong?

Oh Canada, or UCLDH @ DHSI

2010-06-05T04:48:00.000+01:00

Zen and the art of long haul travel.

Unfortunately the world seems to know that I have started a blog, which leads to a certain level of expectation of content being produced, which I am not certain I can live up to. But then again I fear that if I take to blogging like I have taken to tweeting this is going to take over a lot of my life, but anyway, I’ll see what happens. I often tweet on train journeys, but it’s a bit pointless when there is no internet access up here somewhere between and above Coventry and Peterborough! (I love this neat map app they have on Air Canada, it tells you where you are to the mile and what direction you are going in. I anticipate that this might get less fun soon, as in over the Atlantic, still over the Atlantic, yup it’s the Atlantic again etc) So I am going to try something new for me, blogging my journey to DHSI.

I realise that in some quarters I am regarded as the kind indomitable feisty geek girl who is afraid of nothing other than the sky falling on her head. (And that’s the kind version) But regret to inform that in fact I am quite nervous of travel, especially long trips on my own. Or at least I was. What follows is yet more evidence of the power of UCLDH to change lives, or at least mine. My travel anxiety is not of the usual kind. Unlike a very high- powered academic friend of mine, who used to be scared she would fall out of the aeroplane at high altitude, I am not actually frightened of flying. I love planes, and the smell of avgas has the equivalent allure for me that new mown grass or their mother’s perfume has for other people. In fact at an early age, before I realised that I could neither see properly nor do physics, I was determined to be a fighter pilot. So it's definitely not flying that is a problem.

For me it’s the anxiety of forgetting things. I am always convinced that something terrible will happen and I’ll leave something vital at home. I always, as a consequence, pack far too many things, especially clothes, as I hate the idea of not having quite the right thing to wear in all eventualities. Not surprisingly perhaps that one of my recurring anxiety dreams is trying to pack a case in which things simply refuse to stay, or have to be chased about the house because they won’t allow themselves to be packed. Odd I know. Most people dream of exams not prepared for, being naked giving lectures etc. Not me. Freudians out there may leave a comment. I’d be interested to know your interpretation.

Also I worry about whether I’ll get jetlagged and not be able to cope with it, whether I’ll be able to sleep when I get there, whether I will miss my connecting flight and whether my suitcase will go missing (with all those important clothes in it) In general I tend to be a positive compendium of travel-related tension. (Ooh look, right now we are between Ripon and Manchester, a good place to be, if we were not heading west) Sorry I digress

This trip none of the above has happened. I am unbelievably calm. I packed in the minimum time last night. When I thought I could not find my passport I did not yell at husband and dash about randomly, whimpering all the while. I just calmly informed him and he calmly found it for me in the place I thought I’d looked. And then I didn’t even get cross with him for being smug about it. I did not fret and wake up hours before it was time to get up. I did not dash about the house collecting things I’d become convinced I might need at the last moment. I did get a bit wobbly when dropped of at the station, but not to do that would be a complete miracle for me. I should add that another irrational enxiety on leaving home for a long journey on my own, is that something awful will happen while I’m away. It’s daft, I know but it never, never gets easier. But nevertheless on this trip, for the first time, I did not get to Heathrow feeling like a completely stressed out wreck.

How has such a transformation happened I wonder? I think it’s to do with the launch. It seems like the last few weeks were just burned out a few of my panic circuits. It’s as if I went so far into worry that I came right out the other side. For example, if you lost your beloved laptop, and indeed only computer, to a hard disk fail, what would you do? Scream, cry, throw things, panic, vituperate? All of the above would be a normal reaction. But when that happened to me a week before launch none of that occurred, just a kind of scarily controlled rationality. I phoned the support people, booked it in for a repair, wondered to myself where I’d get another one, and found a temporary replacement, all without the slightest whisper of a hissy fit.

“Now, this is not normal” I thought to myself. But apparently it is. It seems that there is at least anecdotal evidence that this kind of reaction to anxiety can actually happen. People can stand chronic fear for a few weeks, and then somehow it’s as if they can just adapt, and resume their normal lives. Usually, mind, this is in war zones or such things, but it seems like something of the kind has happened to me. I’ve just got over being stressed, and all because the continual terror of preparing for the launch with one person fewer than we should have had seems to have shot me straight through anxiety into an eerie calm. I thought this might lapse when we’d got the immediate crisis over. But it seems not. It’s as if I just can’t be bothered to get stressed about minor things such as will I have enough pairs of shoes and would I be able to carry my suitcase if I did? And all of this is the unexpected consequence of UCLDH. I think I’m pleased. I’m not completely sure that the benefit was quite worth the pain. But it certainly makes travelling much more pleasant.

Dogma

Later....

So here I am in Calgary airport, waiting for my connection to Victoria. Come to think of it, my cousin probably managed the building of at least part of it, given that the company she used to work for seems to have built most of this city. I really should have made time to call in to see her, but only thought about that last night. I was booking all this a few weeks before the launch when I didn’t have the headspace to work all that out. Oh well, next time maybe.

When in airports I always find myself thinking of one of my favourite scenes in the very fine Kevin Smith movie Dogma, in which the two angels stuck on earth for eternity find themselves musing on how airports bring out the best in humanitity. It really doesn’t come over well when described, but I fully recommend watching it. It’s extremely funny: think Milton with extra expletives... lots of extra expletives. But definitely one of my favourite movies. I am however a Smith purist. If it doesn't include Jay and Silent Bob, it's definitely not worth watching in my view.

Flight was horrible and tested the newfound Zen to the limit. Full of sceaming kids, so I didn’t manage to sleep. But still the bag came off the belt in one piece and in plenty of time to make the transfer. But yes I did worry about it a bit, I cannot lie, and did offer my usual prayer to the gods of air travel to make sure it didn’t get lost. But then, however calm you are there is no denying that long haul flying makes you feel like death. At least it does me. I am just refusing to think about what time it is at home at the moment. I have hidden the clock on this computer, as I don’t have admin rights so can’t change it. Sigh! Oh how I miss my lovely (light!) laptop. Flight has just been called so better go. More soon...When I wake up that is.

The Digital Elephant

2010-05-28T19:12:00.000+01:00

I don’t blog much, and indeed for the first time I thought it might be a good idea to have my own pages and stop piggy backing on UCLDH. But I started thinking about how I might contribute to Hacking the Academy and into my head popped a thought that has been disturbing me for a while and has been brought into sharper focus by recent goings on at UCLDH. That is the digital elephant in the room, in other words the real cost not just of creating but of preserving and curating digital data. There have been plenty of blogs and tweets decrying or praising what James Murdoch said at the launch of our centre last week. But whatever side of the debate you are on, I am glad of the exposure, because it brings to the fore an uncomfortable truth. Whether or not you put a pay wall in front of it, digital data is not free. It is not free to create, and it especially is not free to maintain or preserve.

I say it isn’t free to create, and doubtless readers will want to know what it costs me to write this blog. Well time for one thing, that I am not spending answering email, writing research proposals, having meetings, generally running UCLDH when I have too many things to do. And in the end time is a cost, especially as UCL pay for me to work with digital material. I recall John Unsworth talking about this opportunity cost in relation to editing Post Modern Culture. That was many years ago, but still it seems not to be taken seriously.

But mainly I am disturbed by the cost of maintaining and preserving things digital in the academic and cultural sector. At the moment there is an uncomfortable conspiracy of silence about this. When the creation of such material is publicly funded there is, in truth, no money properly to maintain digital resources, and thus a serious risk that public investment and the time taken by academics and information professionals in their creation is wasted. And yet we all lie about this. Sorry, that’s a harsh word, but we do. As applicants we all cross our fingers and insist that our universities will maintain digital resources for at least ten years, knowing that there is absolutely no hope of this happening, unless the PI herself happens to have time to do this. As reviewers we know that’s the case, but we want to see good things funded, so we pretend to believe it, and funders must do the same too. No funding council I ever heard of checks to see if resources really are still there, and still usable after even five, let along ten or more years, so they also become complicit in the ignorance of the elephant.

But what about institutional repositories, you may protest. Sure resources can be put into the institutional repository or dark archived, but that’s not enough, as we all know really. The work we did for our LAIRAH project showed that users are very quick to recognise when a digital resource is no longer updated, and that as a result they distrust its content and prefer not to use it. Instead they prefer commercial resources that look as though they might work well. That’s even the case if a website looks a bit out of date, let alone having problems with the content not working properly. So it’s vital that resources are updated and maintained regularly if we are to have any hope that they will be used after their completion. But who pays? The research councils don’t and neither do universities, whatever we might promise in our grant applications. At least there may be fortunate people out there in universities with dedicated support of this kind, but I’ve never heard of it in the UK at least. I’d love to establish this kind of service at UCL, but how would we fund it in the terrifyingly cash strapped times that are ahead?

So the unpleasant truth of this is that perhaps freely available digital resources don’t work, because if you don’t have an income stream coming in, then you can’t afford to maintain them, and thus they die if they can’t be used. I know, though, that the commercial publisher I used to work for regularly does update its resources, both back and front ends and so the resources that I worked on 15 years ago still work very well. I know that not to be the case for many, if not most resources produced in the academic sector. The reason why people charge for digital resources is not only to make profits, but also to keep their products doing what they ought to.

And all this is without going into the complex problems facing us concerning digital resources in the cultural heritage sectors and in academia, all of which were created with small scale project funding, all of which work in a different way, and many of which now will not work together in any kind of coordinated system or with a common interface. The unpalatable reality is that a lot of these freely available resources might stay free in future, but will be anything but available, because they won’t work and there will be no money to maintain them, or resurrect them. And that’s a huge scandal really. The cost of creating them must run into tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of public money, which is, in effect, wasted as a result. And worse the intellectual effort of all the creators is also lost. Few people seem to care about this, but imagine what would happen if I told the humanities scholars in my faculty that every copy of their book would be pulped in ten years time and that although a library might have an archive copy, no readers would be able to use it and that unless they regularly re-edited the old word file on their computer, it too would be unusable, by anyone but a technical expert. They would be horrified, and rightly so. But this is the analogue version of what we are facing in terms of digital resources if nobody can afford to maintain them.

So what do I propose to do? Well it’s not easy to find a solution to all this, especially not in these economic times. In an ideal world we would have digital curators whose task it would be to manage the maintenance and updating of digital resources in the academic and cultural heritage sectors. And they would be funded either by universities or public funds. But is that a realistic prospect? Not now I fear.

In a sense I am doing the very thing I tend to deprecate in humanities scholarship, in pointing out that a problem exists but being unable to offer a solution. But I do feel that it’s very important at least to point out the presence of the pachyderm. It’s not a very right-on thought, but even Richard Stallman has pointed out that free speech and free beer are not the same thing. If we want free in digital terms it may be that gratis is not the sense in which we must interpret the word. We might have to resign ourselves to the fact that free equals temporary, while only commercial resources might be expected to last. Or we may have to find creative ways to make content free to access, but fund it in some other way to ensure its life beyond initial public funding. For the life of me I can’t see what that might be, but for the continued life of digital resources, I do hope someone else can, or there will be a lot of digital white elephants in years to come.