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.

Wait, wait, don't tell me

Two colleagues recently forwarded me a pair of links they thought I would find interesting.  One was an MLA job listing for an assistant professor "in American or British literature, 16th-20th century, with interest in the problematic of digital humanities".  It included the specification, "Some familiarity with MSWord expected."  The other was for a new journal called Digital Philology.   The author's guidelines include the invitation, "Digital Philology is welcoming submissions for its 2013 open issue. Inquiries and submissions (as a Word document attachment) should be sent to" ...

I actually had to read each of these twice to realize that one was intended as a parody, and the other is apparently intended seriously.  In the spirit of the news quiz on NPR's "Wait, wait, don't tell me," you decide: which one is the parody?

- a job for assistant professor asking for familiarity with MS Word
- a new journal Digital Philology soliciting submissions as emails with attached Word document

If you are unable to tell, the links lead to the full listings on the original web pages, where you'll find further clues.

Welcome to the world of digital humanities and digital philology in 2012.

wikicite?

I recently heard a radio interview with Timothy Messer-Kruse, describing his experience editing the wikipedia article on the Haymarket trial.    (He had earlier described the same experience in the Chronicle of Higher Education, online here.)

The striking point is that his edits on wikipedia were repeatedly reverted because they were based on and supported by primary evidence.  Wikipedia is, by design, intended to reflect consensus opinions as reflected in secondary publications.  This is a horrible inversion of the way history should be studied and presented — one that wikipedia shares with encyclopedias in general, including distinguished specialized encyclopedias like the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

While I don't like encyclopedias, I love the crowd-sourced part of wikipedia.   So what if we created a "wikicite" for classical studies?  Imagine a wiki where only primary sources were allowed:  no reference to any kind of secondary publications permitted.  You are  of course welcome to read them on your own time, and maybe even learn something from them, but to post to wikicite, you would actually have to work back to the primary sources, and confront evidence you could cite.

That would be revolutionary.

Mark[up|down]

People sure hate the pointy brackets.  I've been writing markup since version 2 of  the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines in SGML in the 1980s, and as easy as modern tools like oXygen make it today, even I'm not crazy about it.  Over the past year or so, I've looked at every "markdown" alternative to markup that I could find:  to name a few, textile, markdown, multimarkdown, reStructuredText, and more wiki languages than I can list.

All of them seem to have a similar history:  somebody wanted to have a quicker and easier way to express HTML, cooked up a tool to convert some simple "markdown" conventions to HTML, and realized, "Hey, this is useful!"  As a result, all of the markdown languages share two main drawbacks.  The first is that they generally express only the semantics of HTML, or a subset of HTML.  That eliminates their application to any writing or editing that requires richer semantics such as an XML language could supply, but more fundamentally, the markdown languages suffer from a long-recognized limitation:  they're not specified.   It should be obvious that "Whatever my converter tool handles" is NOT a specification, but that's the state of most of the markdown schemes.  (See these comments from more than a decade ago about reStructuredText!)

For those cases where I really just want a quick and easy way to bang out HTML-like content, John Grueber's markdown seems to offer the best compromise.  First, if you really need some particular piece of HTML beyond what markdown offers, you can just embed it in your text (although at the price of reintroducing some pointy brackets).  But what really persuades me is the pegdown processor.
Pegdown uses parboiled's "parsing expression grammars" (PEGs) so it comes closer to a separately specified definition of the language than a code library full of regular expressions emitting some kind of converted text.  pegdown will give you an abstract parse tree for your markdown content, which makes me feel much more confident using markdown down from code I write.

Add to that the ever growing number of editors and other tools that support markdown in all kinds of contents, and I'm converted.  So was the text of this post — from markdown to html.