How hard is it to imagine "popular scholarship"?

I heard an interesting talk yesterday at Clark University by Robert Anderson, former director of the British Museum, on "The British Museum and Library at the New Millennium:"   wonderful anecdotes from the early history of the museum, and a compelling argument for the essential intellectual unity of what museums and libraries do.

The British Museum Great Court.
Photograph by Eric Pouhier,
licensed under cc-by-sa license.

Two details troubled me.  First, while the rare book library at Clark was filled, I saw only one student, and I probably fell well below the median age of the audience.  The talk was sponsored by the "Friends of the Goddard Library," but if this audience was representative, the library won't have too many friends in a few more years.

Second, both Anderson's talk and some of the discussion afterward made some curious assumptions about scholarship.  As the director at the time of the separation of the British Library from the Museum, and the opening of the fabulous facility at the new Euston Road location, Anderson offered insightful comments on the tensions of an institution committed both to free public access and to serving the needs of specialist scholars.  He brought up a problem familiar to anyone who has worked at the BL recently:  it's such a popular place, that all the desks fill up early in the morning with students looking for a comfortable place to work (with free wifi and good coffee!), but who aren't necessarily taking advantage of any of the unique offerings of the British Library.  This can impose a real hardship on people working on projects that depend on BL material.  Two assumptions emerged in the discussion that struck me as odd:  that the results of scholarly research would only be of interest to a small circle of specialists; and that digital material should be openly viewable, but scholarly research was being well served by a policy that allows free reuse of scholarly material only in print publications with a very limited print run.

Interior of the British Library.
Photograph by Maria Giulia Tolotti
licensed under cc-by-sa license.

Let's parse that logic a little more closely:  scholarly reuse of BL material is OK as long as not too many people care to read it;  and that's fine, because scholars' research is only of interest to a handful of other specialists, and expensive print media are an adequate way to meet this need.  (The host's introduction of Anderson referred light-heartedly, in what was evidently intended to be humor, to the fact that his most recent multi-volume publication costs hundreds of dollars.)

If we think the goal of scholarly research is to produce high-priced monographs of interest only to other specialists, is it really a surprise that the general reading public sees in the British Library a wonderful café?  If we think of "digital access" as a way of entertaining or at best informing a wide public, without inviting scholars to build upon the digital foundations of the BL's collections, is it any wonder that visitors to the BL are not drawn to the library's unique resources, but instead spend their time with the amazing hodge podge of entertainment and information that populates the internet?

(Footnote:  I was able to include the photographs by Eric Pouhier and Maria Giulia Polotti, without regard for how many people might view them, because both are available from wikimedia commons under the terms of a cc-by-sa license.)

CTS is complete under OHCO2

My preceding post promised to compare experiences implementing the Canonical Text Services protocol with three equivalent data structures for text:  trees (formatted in XML), tables, and graphs (expressed in RDF).    Before turning to the first of these data structures, however, I should expand briefly on the comment in that post that, in developing the CTS protocol, "we relied heavily on the OHCO2 model."  More precisely, I mean that we developed CTS so that it fully expresses the semantics of OHCO2:  hence the title of the present post.

The CTS protocol uses CTS URNs to cite passages of texts.  The semantics of CTS URNs by themselves give us two of the four OHCO2 properties, since a CTS URN specifies where in a citation hierarchy a passage of text is situated, and where in a hierarchy of versions a particular version is situated.  A URN like urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.msA:9.119 for example, refers to a passage set in a version of the Iliad (the work tlg0012.tlg001) identified as msA (i.e., the Venetus A manuscript), and refers to a citable line (119) contained within a citable book (9).

The remaining two OHCO2 properties are provided by a pair of CTS requests.  The GetPrevNext request places a passage within an ordered sequence;  the GetPassage request returning the contents of the passage supports a mixed content model.

After some initial experience developing applications built on CTS, Chris Blackwell suggested that it would be convenient for developers to have both GetPrevNext and GetPassage information available via a single request.  We introduced the CTS GetPassagePlus request for just this purpose.  His intuition is now gratifyingly justified by the observation that the GetPassagePlus request tells us everything about a cited passage of text that the OHCO2 model guarantees.

Data structures for texts

My best scholarship that no one has ever read is probably the work I did with Gabe Weaver on the structure of citable texts. (I sense potential for a dinner-party game similar to “Humiliation” in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places…)
We proposed a model of citable text as an ordered hierarchy of citation objects (the “OHCO2” model). In OHCO2, every citable node has four defining properties:

• every node belongs to a citation hierarchy
• every node belongs to a FRBR-like version hierarchy
• nodes belonging to the same version are ordered
• nodes support a mixed content model

Two representations of a text that preserve these properties for every citable node are considered equivalent under OHCO2.
As I worked with Gabe, Chris Blackwell and others on both the Canonical Text Services protocol (CTS) and the CTS URN notation, we relied heavily on the OHCO2 model. I have recently completed a new implementation of the CTS protocol — the third of three implementations I have written using three different technologies for working with three completely different representations of text. Since all of the representations are OHCO2 equivalent, we know that they preserve the semantics of citable text, and we can consider other criteria to compare the advantages and disadvantages of these formats for specific purposes. In a following series of posts, I want to highlight some of the pluses and minuses of the following OHCO2-equivalent formats for representing citable texts:

1. XML
2. tabular structures
3. RDF triples

I’ll tag this series with the label "text data structures".

The maturity of a discipline

If a scholarly commuity cannot identify what material it studies, it has not yet matured to a point where digital technology matters very much:  scholarly discussion requires being able to cite evidence.  I worked on the CITE architecture for scholarly reference in part because I come from a background in Classics where, by and large, we have a reasonable tradition of citing works by logical, canonical reference schemes.  (Of course there are exceptions, like that little corpus of Plato that we continue to cite, bizarrely, by physical pages in the sixteenth century edition of Stephanus...)

The suggestion that scholars need to be able to identify and cite their evidence seems to me a pretty minimal measure of the maturity  of a discipline, but if I hold up classicists' conventions as a positive example of canonical citation conventions, people occasionally misunderstand this as an elitist attack on their field of study.  No:  I want to apply the same standard to subjects I work on.

For example, in the study of ancient science, we have not advanced much beyond the stituation described almost 40 years ago by Neugebauer (never one to sugar coat his judgment of the state of scholarship) as follows:

For classical antiquity and the Middle Ages no systematic collection of mathematical or astronomical treatises exists.  No attempt has ever been made to compile basic collections comparable to the Loeb Classical Library or the Budé Collection, or Migne's Patrologia, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Bonn Corpus of Byzantine historians, etc.  ... This fact alone suffices to show that the so-called 'History of Science' is still operating on an exceedingly primitive level.

A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 1975, p 15 

Can we leap straight to a digital corpus for ancient science, like a third-world country bypassing costly and slow expansion of landlines and immediately delivering phone service through cellular networks?

idiôtês

In classical Greek, an idiôtês (ἰδιώτης) is a private individual, as opposed to someone acting in an official capacity as a member of a community.  From the unskilled or amateur actions of an ἰδιώτης comes the later sense we use in English.

Everything I post on this blog I do as an idiôtês;  sometimes, too, as an idiot.  When I vented my frustration with the way PhD programs are failing our graduate students, I made the mistake of trying to present my critique as satire.  I should have realized that people currently enduring the horrible stress of the academic job market might misread this as criticism of the job candidates.   No one should fault new PhDs for the impossible situation they find themselves in:  a better writer than I should still highlight how PhD programs in the humanities are failing their graduate students.

To any one who found my prior post in poor taste or offensive, I apologize.  Since comments can seem insignificant when buried beneath a post, I wanted to elevate this note to a post of its own.

Advice to new PhDs: how to avoid those unwanted interviews

We all know that a PhD from a highly ranked program guarantees that the world will beat a path to your door for the mere opportunity to speak with you.  How can  you persuade departments that are hiring not to interview you?

Because my department is currently conducting a search, I have recently surveyed essentially the entire pool of job applicants in Classics, and have a good sense for how the best trained candidates manage to avoid getting interviews.  For those PhDs who have not yet mastered such a basic skill, I am summarizing here the strategies I have observed.

Let me stress that these comments are aimed only at a very small fraction of candidates.  When I tried to compile a short list of roughly 5% of our applicants for interviews, I was unable to do so. Rephrasing that in positive terms, more than 95% of the candidates successfully avoided an interview based solely on my first fairly cursory reading of their dossier.   When you consider the kind of dedicated and talented students who go on to graduate study in Classics, that figure is a remarkable testimony to the powerful effects of graduate school.

First let me suggest three fairly general guidelines:

1. Do not read the job description.
2. Find out nothing about your potential home institution and colleagues.
3. Focus relentlessly on your personal career advancement, to the exclusion of any suggestion that your professional work might affect another human being positively.

These may seem obvious, but after reading many applications, I have a better appreciation for how some candidates apply them most effectively.  Remember, even in a field like Classics, you cannot count on letters of recommendation to disparage you adequately:  you need to use the parts of your dossier that you can directly  control — your CV, any specific essays or statements that an advertisement requires, and, especially, your cover letter — to ensure that you do not get an interview.

Almost all candidates will start with the easiest tactic:  send in the same generic cover letter that you use in response to completely different job advertisements.  Many candidates will let a bland, off-topic letter speak for itself, but one rhetorical refinement I came to appreciate is the addition of a single sentence or two mentioning the hiring institution, but clearly appended to an otherwise unmodified cover letter.  If the appended sentence can raise some subject that is central to the job description, but otherwise unmentioned in the cover letter, it will be especially clear that this is an afterthought, and that you have no real interest in the subject.  Even better is the appended sentence that implicitly contradicts the emphasis of the rest of the cover letter.  Of course, if you are not confident that your reviewers will appreciate this subtlety, you can always resort to brute force:  leave the name of a different institution in your appended sentence.  Although I saw this only rarely, it demonstrates to even the most insensitive reader that the cover letter is completely impersonal.

What should you do if your generic cover letter actually responds to some part of the job advertisement?  Unlikely as that may seem, it can happen, and candidates will then have to take extra precautions to stay off the interviewers' short list.  Use your CV and additional statements to obfuscate or directly contradict any apparently relevant sections of your cover letter.  If you allude to a potentially interesting digital project in your cover letter, do not include it on your CV, or else present it on your CV as trivial (e.g., list it under some category like "Other service", beneath a more highly valued contribution such as "ordered pizza for grad student lecture series").  If your cover letter could be misread as referring to collaborative research among students and faculty, expand on that in a separate statement about your research that never mentions students.  As I saw repeatedly this fall, it can be especially effective to dwell at length on your contract for a forthcoming book if you emphasize that it will be published by a press charging more per monograph than your library ever pays, and if your topic leaves potential colleagues paralyzed at the prospect of having to read your book when you come up for review.

While many applicants use the protracted and obsessive  "forthcoming book" discussion to put off potential interviewers, the possibilities it offers for avoiding an interview are almost limitless.  If done properly, you can demonstrate with it that years of advanced study have taught you only a narrow range of technical skills without fostering any kind of development as a thoughtful member of an academic community.  Prose style is highly individual, but you can heighten the effectiveness of this trope if you strive for a tone of entitlement.  Make it clear not only that the proper role for students and colleagues is to advance your career, but that they should be grateful for the chance.

Perhaps the handful of applicants to whom I am offering these suggestions cannot benefit at this point in their careers:  if you have not completely internalized these fundamental habits of thought by the time you receive a PhD, it is highly unikely that you will ever pick them up, and we should recognize that some people may simply be incapable of learning such ideas.  But given the nature of the job market in academia today, I feel ethically compelled to share these suggestions.  If even one applicant thinks differently about applying for a job because of this post, that will be more than enough of a reward for my efforts.

Does it always sounds better in French?

In January, I posted a rant about my dislike of the marginalizing term "digital humanities."  The post has recently been included in a collection of French essays on … you guessed it,  "humanités numériques" (digital humanities).   The French translation by Marion Lamé and Pierre Mounier (available here) is more than accurate:  its polished  style seems to me an eloquent proof that thinking about technology can embody the best qualities of a traditional humanistic education.  I think I prefer it to the English original.

Maybe this kind of subject always sounds better in French.