About six weeks ago, I left a swanky DC hotel feeling pretty good. The Scholarly Communication Institute, an 8-year old Mellon-funded project for which I serve as associate director, had just concluded a two-day summit with a some of the most interesting institutional thinkers and do-ers in the humanities: leaders from CHCI, the international consortium for humanities centers and institutes, and from centerNet, its energetic digital counterpart. For SCI, this gathering culminated a process that had begun in the summer of 2008, when we hosted an event on humanities centers as sites for innovation in digital scholarship. After a January meeting in Tucson (where grapefruit were ripe in the hotel courtyard) and a series of less paradisiacal conference calls and proposal drafts, the two groups were now poised for meaningful collaborative action. There was a palpable sense in the room that the plans we were hatching could change the way business is done in the humanities, digital and otherwise. In fact, something like a five-year program was emerging, and the two groups had outlined a series of co-sponsored ventures, joint meetings, and big-picture goals.

Happiness makes me obnoxious on Twitter. Before I packed up my laptop, I tapped out two messages:

“SCI-sponsored CHCI/centerNet meeting is winding down. Stay tuned for announcements from the two groups working jointly in the new year.” [X]

“& struck again by dues-paying crap I skipped in deciding against tenure-track jobs. How many junior faculty sit in on discussions like this?” [X]

I held no illusions about my role in the process SCI had facilitated. SCI (from the insider’s point of view) is about listening, helping, and nudging. In the conference room at the Hotel Palomar, I was Note-taker-in-Chief, pausing only a few times to add my own perspective — as a recent humanities PhD, a person who had held one of those rare digital post-docs we were discussing, as a member of the research faculty at an R-1 institution, and (now) as someone who had exercised the “expanded employment options” that are often brought up in conversations about improving methodological training in graduate education. My day job is as Director of Digital Research & Scholarship for the University of Virginia Library. This is a department that includes the Scholars’ Lab, a growing digital center which offers fellowships to grad students, runs a vibrant speaker series, undertakes its own research-and-development work, and partners with humanities and social-science faculty on projects in text-based digital humanities and geospatial and statistical computing.

I have a pretty sweet gig.

But, as will have been obvious to anybody who heard my recent MLA convention talk on matters of intellectual property and institutional status in collaborative scholarship (or who found it through the Chronicle), that whole grad-school detox/deprogramming phase that the #alt-ac crowd must work through takes a while to leave one’s system. I can personally attest that this is true even if you’re one of the people who opted out of the tenure-track teleology very early on. (I never undertook an academic job search, and I politely declined the campus visits I was offered as an ABD grad student. Friends, the market was better then.)

#Alt-ac is our Twitter-hashtag neologism for “alternate academic careers” — particularly for positions within or around the academy but outside of the ranks of the tenure-track teaching faculty. These positions are nonetheless taken up by capable humanities scholars who maintain a research and publication profile, or who bring their (often doctoral-level) methodological and theoretical training to bear on problem sets in the orbit of the academy. Keeping our talents within (or around) the academy is often more psychologically difficult than examining the color of our parachutes and gliding off to fabulous private-sector careers. Class divisions among faculty and staff in the academy are profound, and the suspicion and (worse) condescension with which “failed academics” are sometimes met can be disheartening. As “Natalie Henderson,” an administrator who writes pseudonymously for the Chronicle of Higher Education, asks:

“In an arena where people spend so much time trying to think in nuanced ways and where we ostensibly celebrate the wide dispersal of sophisticated ideas, why is so much energy expended in maintaining fixed categories and squelching the intellectual contributions of those on the wrong side of the fence?

In an environment dominated by research agendas that often seek to right historic wrongs, question power, undermine hierarchy, and give voice to the voiceless, why are intellectual status and respect given so grudgingly to smart and engaged people who have jumped off the tenure track?”
(“A ‘Non-Academic’ Career in Academe,” 20 June 2005)

For all that, we love our work. Many of us on the #alt-ac track will tell you about the satisfaction of making teams (and systems, and programs) work, of solving problems and personally making or enabling breakthroughs in research and scholarship in our disciplines, and of contributing to and experiencing the life of the mind in ways we did not imagine when we entered grad school. Among us are: administrators with varied levels of responsibility for supporting the academic enterprise; instructional technologists and software developers who collaborate on scholarly projects; journalists, editors, and publishers; cultural heritage workers in a variety of roles and institutions; librarians, archivists, and other information professionals; entrepreneurs who partner on projects of value to scholars, program officers for funding agencies and humanities centers, and many more.

My flippant, self-satisfied tweet (“how many junior faculty sit in on discussions like this?”) brought representatives from all of these groups flocking. Clearly, I hit a nerve, and before I knew it I was editing a book. This is largely thanks to the encouragement of the first respondents, including CHNM’s Tom Scheinfeldt (of the “third way”), and other valued colleagues — as well as Brian Croxall, who, frustrated with the adjunct lifestyle in which so many humanities scholars feel trapped, demanded “signposts” for following the kind of path we’ve taken. I offered to oblige. Within two hours, ten amazing contributors had volunteered to share their perspectives. The number (without my making any kind of formal call) is now at 18 — and this does not include a set of CLIR post-doctoral fellows who will be contributing a dialogue about their shared and divergent experiences in academic research libraries. I do plan to issue special invitations to a few more people who could help round out the discussion, and am open to further ideas and expressions of interest.

We are adopting #alt-ac as the rubric for our open-access collection of essays, which will be written from the points of view of well-educated, non-tenure-track humanities professionals, here to tell you that their work in the academy is satisfying, delightful, reasonably stable, deeply intellectually engaging, and — occasionally — a damned hard row to hoe.

Contributions to this Web-accessible publication are due July 1st, 2010. I am currently in conversation with interested University presses about print and print-on-demand options for the book, and will continue to accept proposals from potential contributors by email (accompanied by a one-page abstract, please!) through April 1st. All essays will be licensed, with attribution, under Creative Commons by their authors, and will be made freely available online.

Update:
We’ve been encouraged by conference organizers to undertake a special session on this project and the issues behind it at the January 2011 convention of the MLA. Several #alt-ac book contributors have expressed interest, and I’m opening up the call to a wider community. If you’d like to be considered for the roundtable in Los Angeles, please submit 1-page abstracts and brief CVs to me by March 1st.

The ultra-brief MLA blurb for this roundtable is “pleasures and pains-in-the-neck to be had following nontraditional paths that nonetheless keep within or around the academy.”

I’ve decided to spend my 10 minutes of introduction on the MLA convention’s “Links and Kinks” panel indecorously – in opening conversation about one of the least genteel, least talked-about aspects of collaborative work in the digital humanities. I’ve been active in this community of practice for 14 years – and can count on one hand the number of interchanges I’ve had about these issues that were both unguarded and productive.

The policy issues related to institutional and academic status that I want to put before the panel are so uncomfortable that they tend to make good-hearted, collaborative folks like all of you behave as if they can be wished away – as if they’ll shrivel up and die if they are studiously ignored. But here, as in other areas of the academy, benign neglect is bad behavior. Consciously ignoring disparities in the institutional status of your collaborators is just as bad as being unthinkingly complicit in the problems these disparities create. This is because of the careless way your disregard reads to the people it damages. These people are: your junior colleagues; your graduate students; academics on the “general,” “administrative,” or “research faculty;” the lost souls euphemistically referred to as “contingent labor;” and the lowest of the low, members of your institution’s staff: those of your collaborators who are classified as service personnel. This latter group includes programmers, sysadmins, instructional technologists, and credentialed librarians and cultural heritage workers.

There is another reason, beyond discomfort, that we don’t really talk about how status factors in collaborative work. The people best positioned to articulate the personal and professional impact of HR and academic research policies either can’t afford to make trouble, or quite rightly fear they’ll lose the little bit of collegiality they’ve earned from you, the faculty, if they publicly align themselves with the wrong side of the equation. You’ll rarely hear them yelling about the violence inherent in the system.

Because they highlight the degree to which new works of scholarship are the work of many hands, the digital humanities bring into focus any failure to acknowledge our collaborators appropriately (by which I do not mean merely “to acknowledge them at all”). And it is in the digital humanities that I believe we will have our first and best opportunity to address inappropriate and counter-productive academic policies relating to intellectual property. These policies are – in my varied experience as a graduate student, a post-doc, a senior member of the research faculty at an R-1 institution, and (now) a higher ed administrator – where the rubber hits the road.

I hail from the University of Virginia. “Monopolies of Invention,” the title of my talk, is from a highly relevant passage of writing by UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Its explication will be left as an exercise to the reader.

Several of my own past projects, including projects in the literary field, have done a delicate dance with our IP policy in Jefferson’s “academical village.” These policies require that we disclose inventions or innovations (including the development of new software or digital humanities methods) to a governing body that will determine whether they should be patented and monetized. As a disclosure incentive, the person designated “inventor” is offered some portion of potential profit, which is owned by the University if the work was done using “significant University resources.” Significant resources are anything that goes much beyond a low-end laptop, electricity in your office, and the brainpower of a teaching faculty member. As a determining factor in the patent process, the “significant resource” designation certainly kicks in when general faculty and staff reporting to me, in my role as director of a digital humanities lab and department within our library system, collaborate with teaching faculty on scholarly projects.

By some interpretations of the policy, I may well owe this governing body conversations about four different collaborations we’ve undertaken with English Department faculty in the past year alone: projects that use technology to teach poetic scansion, analyze 19th-century biographies of women, data mine 18th-century texts for metaphor, and present searchable audio files of William Faulkner lectures. I frankly don’t often talk with faculty about patent policy before we start working with them, because it would scare them all away. Instead, I rely on my sad ability – if called upon — to convince local arbiters that innovations in the digital humanities are fundamentally worthless, and that we should get a pass. I don’t think this is good institutional practice.

The intellectual property system in universities is geared toward big profits from big pharma, not little websites on prosody. My happiest conversations with our Library’s brilliant IP lawyer happen when a project’s grant money comes with strings that absolutely require open source code and open access content, no matter who contributed to its construction. All of the Mellon Foundation’s grants do, now, for instance, and that’s what saved the NINES project some huge headaches. The open-access mandate of the NIH is bringing this approach to federally-funded medical research. What would it take to expand the mandate to the NEH? If you value open access and the liberties it grants to your collaborators, you should explore this issue with the funders of your research.

I’ll shift now, not without significant discomfort, to a more specific example from the intellectual property dirty-laundromat: a project from my past. This project was of keen interest to a large community of users, was hugely provocative in the challenges it posed to theory and method in its field, and was ready for implementation, — but it has lain fallow for many years even though most of its team wanted to take it forward. I was one of those people. Why did it die? It died because the professor who served as PI on the project’s grant experienced a waning of interest after we exhausted our first round of funding and hit proof-of-concept.

This kind of thing happens a lot and is, frankly, not a big deal. Waxing and waning of interest among collaborators is just a part of the scene, and the digital humanities community has largely found ways to work around this natural consequence of life beyond the lone-scholar model. (The broad survey Dot Porter and I have conducted of times of transition and decline in digital projects confirms this, and we will share our results this summer.)

So, if losing a key collaborator doesn’t automatically spell doom for a digital humanities project, what was the problem? The problem was this professor’s assertion of a right — granted to lead faculty members on collaborative research projects by our institutional policies — to intellectual property over the whole concept of our shared work.

I do not wish to sound ungrateful for the experience I gained on this project; it was a transformative period in my intellectual and technical growth, and in my growth as a pragmatist, which is to say a higher-ed administrator. Friendships are intact, and in fact – years later – we are amicably poised for a revival of the project with new partners. But my institution failed me in allowing a collaborative digital humanities effort central to my scholarship to be treated like a patent-able widget created by a sole inventor. The contributions of all team members besides the sponsoring faculty member fell under the category of “work for hire,” no matter how intellectually rich and critical to the project these contributions were. Our programmer and designer felt like they had no leverage at all to argue against this system. And what about me, the person who had conceived and designed a software approach to our research problem and had shepherded all aspects of the software’s development? I chickened out and did not press the matter. What grad student facing her dissertation defense would do more?

Now, years later, the patent, copyright, and intellectual property policies that governed this incident are somewhat more refined. Although “work for hire” is still a major factor for determining the right to ownership of software and ideas, our institution also now offers delicate and charming guidelines for when you, as a faculty member, may classify your collaborators as “a pair of hands” or as merely “an information provider.”

We should stop now to remind ourselves that digital projects require serious investments of energy and critical thought by expert collaborators who did not train in the same way we did and emerge (or diverge) from our conventional paths. Faculty collaborators and graduate students are part of our teams, but even they come increasingly from other departments and schools with different norms. Or they’re English Department grads who set out on unforeseen trajectories. And, often, our research and development groups are not only interdepartmental and ad-hoc, but also include undergraduate and professional-school students, designers and programmers both within and beyond higher ed, computer systems administrators, administrators of less holy sorts, and professional librarians or other instructional technology and information specialists.

The scholars I’ve known who are most obviously at school when working with programmers and other digital humanities collaborators invariably break new ground. That is to say, in my experience, the most productive and interesting collaborations are grounded in a kind of intellectual egalitarianism, or openness to the contributions of all team members.

However, this does not mean that the social boundaries inherent in digital project-work can or should be ignored. Policies about intellectual property and open source impinge differently on the rights and responsibilities of teaching faculty, research faculty, students-as-students, students-as-employees, and staff members of all kinds. These groups may have differing career arcs and intellectual agendas, and their participation in projects is often understood and evaluated differently within their professions and disciplines. If you do nothing else after this conversation, I hope you’ll go home and read your local policies with an eye toward how they work for the people with whom you collaborate.

We may worry that acknowledging cultural and administrative distinctions in the academy will reify them – but, in fact, ignoring differences can result in much poorer outcomes for our projects and personnel – particularly for the increasing number of collaborators who fall into hybrid professional categories. What do we do with those people whose training, research, and publication profiles do look exactly like ours, but whose right to claim intellectual property in the work they undertake as an equal partner is curtailed because of their status in the university’s HR system? The “ignore it and it’ll go away” strategy has not been helpful.

The biggest question for you may be how you’ll open potentially awkward conversations about status in a way that strengthens your team, creates – rather than limits – opportunity, and permits the kind of fluidity and professional growth we all want to foster over the course of long-term, collaborative initiatives.

[Note: this presentation and the larger conversation in which it participated at MLA was later described by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education.]

Check out the site to see what’s going on with Omeka plugins (including Fedora and Solr), EAD, poetic prosody, web services for maps and GIS, text mining for metaphor, TEI on Rails, Xforms, Colonial-era social networks, and more. There’s also a section for “alumni projects,” that have graduated from incubation at the Scholar’s Lab, including one recently featured in the Chronicle.

New modes of interdisciplinary, tech-enabled research and production drive us to collaborate across an array of boundaries in the digital humanities.  It is no longer unusual for a scholar to lead a tight-knit, interdepartmental research group or function as part of an ad-hoc team that may include faculty colleagues, graduate students, designers, programmers, systems administrators, and librarians or other instructional technology and information specialists.  This is a good thing, and (in my experience) the most productive and interesting collaborations are grounded in a kind of professional and intellectual egalitarianism, or openness to the contributions of all team members.  But not all of the social boundaries inherent in digital humanities project-work can or should be ignored. 

University policies about intellectual property and open source impinge differently on the rights and responsibilities of faculty, students, and staff members.  These groups may have differing career trajectories and intellectual agendas, and their participation in projects is often understood and evaluated differently within their professions and disciplines. We may worry that acknowledging cultural and administrative distinctions in the academy will reify them — but, in fact, ignoring them can result in poor outcomes for digital humanities projects and personnel.  And woe to the increasing number of collaborators who fall into hybrid professional categories!  What do we need to establish at the outset of digital humanities projects in order to foster healthy collaborative work? How can we create collaborative teams in which all members’ contributions are acknowledged, respected, and appropriately rewarded?  And how can we open these potentially awkward conversations in a way that strengthens teams and permits the kind of fluidity and professional growth that should happen over the course of long-term digital humanities initiatives?

This is the big stuff!  I’ll have about six minutes.

Some of these issues emerge from my experience as a DH grad student, post-doc, member of UVA’s research faculty, and (most recently) administrator of a library department devoted to digital scholarship. I’ll also draw on some of the anonymous data (now being analyzed) from the “Graceful Degradation” survey I conducted this summer with Dot Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory in Ireland. I’m posting this here on the chance it will garner some comments I can bring to MLA in December.  (And don’t be afraid to tell me I’m cracked.)

Finally, the panel will explore the question of how Bethany will manage to talk about this without getting herself into trouble.  Stay tuned for the next episode of “MLA Confessions!”

Because one goal of the Institute is to build the capacity of participating institutions (from the policy-and-collections-building side to the infrastructure-and-interfaces side to some serious scholars-bootstrapping-each-other goodness!), we encourage you to collaborate with your colleagues in IT, the library, your local (digital?) humanities center, and interested academic departments. We’ll be giving careful attention to applications from institutional “teams” who can be represented in each track — but individual applicants are encouraged, too.

The deadline for consideration for tracks 1 and 2 is September 1st. Track 3’s deadline is the 1st of December. Read all about the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, check out our amazing faculty, and apply at our website.

First announced at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, the “Graceful Degradation” survey is now open at:

http://graceful-degradation.questionpro.com/

This is a survey of the digital humanities community — broadly conceived — on project management in times of transition and decline, and what we see as the causes and outcomes of those times. We invite participation by anyone who has worked on a digital project in or related to the humanities.

Decline is a pressing issue for digital scholarship because of the tendency of our projects to be open ended. One could argue that digital projects are, by nature, in a continual state of transition or decline. What happens when the funding runs out, or the original project staff move on or are replaced? What happens when intellectual property rests with a collaborator or an institution that does not wish to continue the work? How, individually and as a community, do we weather changes in technology, the patterns of academic research, the vagaries of our sponsoring institutions?

“Graceful Degradation” is being conducted by Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab in the United States and Dot Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory in Ireland. The survey will run through September 2009, when initial results will be presented during a poster session at Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts in Belfast. Full summary results will be presented and published in summer 2010. All responses are held confidential, unless specific permission to identify people and projects has been granted. Participants will have the option to grant this permission at the end of the survey.

We encourage your participation and look forward to sharing the results of the survey!

Please contact degrade.gracefully@gmail.com if you have any questions.

The “inhibition” question demands serious engagement by scholars, programmers, librarians, and advocates for shared data and transparent, flexible, open services. To be effective, this engagement must come at many levels simultaneously: we must work to build core infrastructure to support GIS and leverage the strengths of (primarily government and academic) data providers; we must carefully analyze past successes as well as failures in the digital humanities in order to move forward with more robustly-imagined scholarly projects; and we must interrogate both a toolset that has evolved to suit scientific inquiry (that is, positivist models of physical behavior and dense, detailed, precisely-defined data sets, generally synchronic) and our own inherited systems for interpreting the human record within a spatial field. Above all – because place and space, whether specifically geo-referenced or wholly conceptual, are common denominators in humanistic disciplines – we must make a concerted effort at supporting and understanding what it is that we do, when we “do GIS.”

Today, I’m proud to announce that the Scholars’ Lab has been funded by the NEH to host three tracks of an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, on the theme of “Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.”

We’re especially proud of the fantastic group of faculty and advisory board members who have signed on to the Institute. These people come from libraries, digital humanities centers, a variety of academic departments, and the world of entrepreneurial GIS. Our faculty include: Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Diana Sinton, Anne Knowles, Sean Gillies, Schulyer Erle, Shekhar Krishnan, Andrew Turner, Madelyn Wessel, Josh Greenberg, Martyn Jessop, Todd Presner, David Germano, Benjamin Ray, Bethany Nowviskie, Joseph Gilbert, Christopher Gist, Kelly Johnston, Bess Sadler, Adam Soroka, Wayne Graham. The advisory board for the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship includes: Dan Cohen, Tom Elliott, Worthy Martin, James Boxall, Scot French, Neil Fraistat, John Krygier, Jennifer Green, Martha Sites, Abby Smith.

A first four-day event will be geared toward library, museum, and digital humanities center professionals, competitively selected from public service and collections stewardship areas as well as information science and cyberinfrastructure support fields, and will aim to shape policy and build the technical capacity of the institutions they represent to support boundary-pushing geospatial scholarship. Their ongoing work in implementing a standards-based, open source infrastructure for discovery, delivery, and manipulation of geospatial data would be supported through an online clearinghouse and open-access community to be maintained long-term by the Scholars’ Lab.

In the second year, the NEH Institute will fund 20 humanities scholars and advanced graduate students, many of whom may be affiliated with participating Round One institutions, to train on and critique the open source and standards-based GIS tools and geospatial approaches to humanities scholarship being developed and documented by UVA Library and its collaborators and peers. As a contribution to the success of the program, the Scholars’ Lab will also independently fund up to 5 short-term scholar- or developer-in-residencies in the two years following the first Institute (a total of $40,000 in funding). These mini-residencies — in which Institute attendees or faculty return to collaborate with the Scholars’ Lab on specific projects — will promote ongoing scholarly engagement, software development, and information sharing around the theme of Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.

The curriculum and outcome of both Institutes and our series of mini-residencies will be made available as part of a planned information clearinghouse, supported by a graduate “online community manager,” who will work closely with the dedicated, full-time GIS staff of the Scholar’s Lab over the course of the next two years. The goal of this clearinghouse is not only to offer technical bootstrapping for libraries and museums new to sophisticated GIS support via Web services frameworks, but also to provide differing scholarly perspectives on GIS for the humanities, from within the coherent narrative of a multi-institutional effort (which we hope this Institute will foster) to build modern infrastructure, support innovative digital projects, and open up dialogue about the causes and conditions of the digital humanities community’s uncharacteristic inhibition toward GIS.

Stay tuned as we nail down the schedule for the Institute and open up the application process for funded attendees!

These are a few of my sketches for the last iteration of the Ivanhoe Game, the one that’s still available for play. I must confess — as much as I loved the design process in all its stages — that I haven’t played a really good game of Ivanhoe since we moved away from the more prosy and simple interfaces of the Turn of the Screw game (undertaken when Geoffrey Rockwell was a visiting scholar at UVA and I wrote moves like this) and the Haruki Murakami / D. G. Rossetti games I played in the wee hours of the night with my first baby sleeping in my arms. (The Rossetti one, on Jenny, in which I imagined a company specializing in flesh-bot reproductions of Victoriana, was re-printed by Laura Mandell at Romantic Circles and in Jerome McGann’s Like Leaving the Nile.)

These images were done mostly after the process Johanna describes in her Ivanhoe chapter — although you can see, in JD’s book and in the Java application online, the on-screen rendering of some of the icons and navigation elements sketched below. A couple of the wackier ones — stemma trees that reach up to a starry sky of Ivanhoe moves — were never entirely realized. I’ll leave them without annotation.

The SpecLab years — our over-hummused, thoroughly pita’d luncheon-club heady think-tank days — were the most amazing moment in my working life as a digital humanist.  Steve Ramsay, Worthy Martin, Andrea Laue, Nathan Piazza, Shane Liesegang, Ben Cummings, David Patch, Jim Allman, Geoff Rockwell, my old friends, will we see their like again?

I’m touched more than I can say that Johanna has dedicated her book to Jerry and me.

What follows is a quick-and-dirty transcript and (for me) a few fun questions. Did Sallie Lyons Taliaferro ever receive this message from Mary C. Jackson Mann (wife of Rev. Charles Mann of Ware Church)? Why was it hidden on a mail route hundreds of miles away from sender and recipient? Now that we’ve re-discovered it in Gran’s dresser drawer and he has asked me to look into its preservation, to which of a couple of logical Special Collections libraries might we offer it? And is Mary Mann really calling the Yankees “pumpkin-heads” in her botantical meditation, below?

Taliaferro, seated.

Envelope:
Gloucester Co.House Va
Octbr 18^th

Miss Lizzi J. Mann

Mrs William B Taliaferro
Care of Hon^ble James Lyons
Richmond
Va

Letter:
October 18^th 1862

I return your sheet thus promptly my dear friend, in order to thank you for your last, which was received by Wednesday’s Mail; & also to allay any apprehensions you may have with regard to the safety & quiet of our County.

We have neither seen, or heard of a Yankee since you left; every one is bright, & cheerful, & I may say hopeful for the future. The Servants all quiet, indeed I am inclined to believe the Stampede over.

Lincoln’s Proclamation was certainly vile in the extreme, but it seems to have made no impression here, excepting that of increased disgust & hatred for the writer, his Anathemas are powerless, & will return with vengeance upon himself. I assure you I have not heard of an individual who thought of leaving their home, to escape the evil to come.

D^r W^m has been obliged to postpone his visit to Richmond for the present, he has been quite an invalid, has had several Chills; day before yesterday I walked over to enquire after him, & found him, looking interesting in Gown, & Slippers; he missed the Chill yesterday, & I hope the attack is over. Our sympathies have been excited for several of our friends; Mr George Tabb has lost his youngest Daughter from Diptheria, she died at Aubrun.

Mrs D^r Coleman, formerly Miss Tucker, also lost a Child, indeed her only Child from the same awful, & apparently unmanageable disease; she had been in Richmond for some Months, & had left her Child with Martha Page, she reached here however ten days before its death; Mr Mann buried it at Eagle Point; & Georgia Tabb at Auburn, I have heard of no other cases, so must regard these as not indigenous, but rather isolated.

Mr Mann met with Mrs Bryan at the Court House on Wednesday, she reports George recovering, & says “he is a splendid fellow, so patient, & cheerful”, & many other encomiums, all of which I knew, but could not refrain from repeating, that you too might appreciate my Boy.

We hear almost every week from William, his last near Charlestown, contained quite an exciting account of a brush he had with the Yankee Picket in which two of our Men were killed, & a Lieutenant taken Prisoner, he does not give their names.

We have been quite busy for the last day or two, securing our Apples, — a Month since the Trees were loaded, & if they had matured, we should certainly have had twenty Barrels, they have decayed, & fallen however — in such quantities, that we have given Cartloads to the Hogs, & now have only three or four Barrels for the Winter, but these are splendid, the finest green Pippins. I hope many a cold Winter’s day may find us enjoying a pleasant chat over a good fire, & with a plate of the same fine Apples between us my dear friend.

The Elmington household sat the morning with me yesterday, they are unusually bright, & all look well.

I am glad to report your little ones well, it was my purpose to ride down to see them this week, but Mr Mann has had such frequent calls upon his Horse, that I have not had an opportunity of going out for more than two weeks.

Mrs Lloyd with Jane, & Minnie are to spend the Winter in Richmond, they informed me they would occupy the House opposite Mrs Hubards; Miss Sally Lee, & Cornelia intend making an effort to return to Alexandria, which I suppose they can accomplish by attaining a leave from our Yankee Masters at the Point.

It begins to look quite like Winter, the leaves are falling, and each night a frost threatens us, it is quite cold enough, but I am glad it is deferred, for our garden is so gay with Flowers that it would be a pity to have them nipped, the Dahlias, Verbenas, &c are in full blosson: we still have an abundance of Vegetables & are now enjoying Sweet Potatoes — and every thing around us is as quiet, & peaceful as if there were neither sin, sorrow, or Yankees in the World, we have one thing to remind us of the latter, & that is a Fine Pumpkin patch.

It was particularly kind in you my dear Mrs T- to give me the means of holding another talk with you, ’tis true, as you perceive, I have nothing worth saying, but I do not yet assume to have the wisdom to keep silent, except when important things are to be uttered.

Please give my love to the Gen^l & tell him we most highly appreciate his kind efforts in George’s behalf. Kiss the Children for me.

I hear Mr Warner T- is at home, but we have not seen him — the D^r is greatly amused at his Brothers report of their drinking Coffee at Sue’s, costing $2.50 per lb — we Country folks have learned to do without such luxuries.

Good bye my friend, with much love from us all
Ever yours truly.
Mary C Mann

The roustabouts are hoisting the tents. There’s a whiff of funnel cake in the air. Step right up! as the latest issue of the Teaching Carnival rolls into town. But first: a definition and a common-sense reminder or two. Finally, a nod to our most recent hosts, Chuck Tryon and David Parry, and also to fellow 3.6 carny Jeremy Boggs of Clioweb.

Now, new and notable posts in higher ed:

For most of us, the term has ended and caps have flown at graduation, but there’s still a good bit of solidarity being shown around #grading on Twitter. It will be interesting to watch how these hashtags wax and wane through the academic year and a sorry #jobmarket. #Tenure, anyone?

Speaking of which, the Chronicle reports that St. John’s University has converted 20 contingent instructor positions in its writing program to tenure-track assistant professorships. This comes despite an economic picture that has Dean Dad reflecting on an Inside Higher Ed prediction: Next Budget Victim? Joy.

Ready to join me in lending a hand from the dark side? Claire Potter makes some observations on how to think like an administrator.

Back in the classroom, Mark Sample gets proactive, with some concrete ways that technology can help us cope with growing class sizes. Michael Wesch’s class class runs class, while William Pannapacker (the Chronicle’s “Thomas H. Benton”) takes some pedagogical pointers from reality TV. Any way you slice it, the stakes for us and for our students are seeming higher — as Alex Reid thinks through the future of work and the future of higher education and Cameron Blevins surveys the divide between traditional and digitally-oriented departments, from the perspective of a grad school applicant. (Blevins concludes that the long-term advantage lies with schools that “demonstrate their support for digital scholarship on an ideological level.”)

The Zotero mothership has landed, adding (to its powerful new syncing and public-profile features) a game-changing ability to share resources in groups. Expect to see collaboration happening around Zotero in synchronous and asynchronous ways — with exercises that ask students to work together across departmental and institutional lines, and instructors building research databases with their classes, semester by semester. It’s a good thing that thoughtful people like Jo Guldi and Lisa Spiro are meditating on the age of digital citation and collaborative authorship in the humanities.

Along similar lines, Noah Wardrip-Fruin shares four surprises at the end of his year-long experiment in blog-based peer review. Meanwhile, a “three-member panel of 10-year-old Michael Nogroski’s fellow classmates at Nathaniel Macon Elementary School unanimously agreed Tuesday that his 327-word essay “Otters” did not meet the requirements for peer approval.” Likewise, Alex Halavais muses on open access, peer review, and what his colleagues know. Are yours your best reviewers?

And because some level of peer-to-peer will remain face-to-face, Educause Quarterly produced a special issue on the design of learning spaces.

Blackboard announced the acquisition of its competitor, Angel Learning, raising some concerns about dwindling options for so-called learning management systems. (Who needs ‘em, anyway? say Matt Gold and Jim Groom, in an ongoing conversation, covered by TeachCarn 3.5.)

Some electronic ink has been spilled in dissecting Amazon’s Kindle DX as a college textbook device, but Sonja Drimmer is more interested in the presence of print (-on-demand).

Collin Brooke contemplates tools (including greater ambitions for tag clouds) as small pieces too loosely joined. Bill Wolff focuses on teaching students to create meaningful tags. David Bill looks at what’s happening in higher ed and begins to think through learning, grades 6-12. And Mills Kelly rethinks the capstone course.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Maureen Dowd is an idiot. And still it moves: Monika Rankin runs a Twitter experiment in her classroom.

As semesters draw to a close, we either contemplate summer work (maybe even in distance ed) or we get more serious about educating ourselves. The University of Mary Washington held its annual Faculty Academy (web casts and audio to come; meanwhile Jeff McClurken describes Day One). Lauren Pressley reflected on 14 sessions of a Wake Forest course for teaching librarians about teaching. Gardner Campbell offered a pedagogy workshop on the concept of audience in a Web 2.0 world. (Catch the four-part series of posts and videos at the link above). Bill Turkel and Edward Jones-Imhotep ran a physical computing workshop in Toronto, around the theme of consumer electronic waste: Hacking as a Way of Knowing. Workshop participant Geoffrey Rockwell shares some images and thinks about why fabrication is taking off in the humanities. And in that vein, Dave Lester kicks off a summer reading group around Turkel’s Winter Reading for Humanist Makers.

The end of term is also a time for celebration, even in more melancholy senses of the word. Kathleen Fitzpatrick mourns her Pomona College colleague, David Foster Wallace. And May brought news of the loss of Wyoming professor and poet Craig Arnold, whose Volcano Pilgrim blog recorded his final research expedition, to Japan.

Arnold reads here from his poem, “Asunder,” on University of Wyoming Television. Both men were recognized for their commitment to classroom instruction.

But sumer is icumen in, though all things draw to a close. Keep an ear to the ground for the release of Teaching Carnival 3.7, and don’t forget to suggest your posts for inclusion.

I’m thrilled at Andy’s return to Alderman Library, where we both worked as graduate students on the Rossetti Archive, and happy that he and Brad Pasanek, also new in our English Department, are bringing fresh energy to text-based digital humanities at UVA. The Scholars’ Lab has been working closely with Andy and Brad, and also with Alison Booth and Chip Tucker on their projects (a database of collective biographies of women, and a Web-based application for teaching prosody, respectively). All of this work, coupled with an exciting, soon-to-be-made announcement of a new director for our treasured Rare Book School, means that UVA English, home of Bowers and Studies in Bibliography, is about to get very interesting to digital humanists again.

So it seems like perfect timing — besides being a centenary year for ACS — to revive a long-neglected project of mine: a scholarly edition of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s vexed volume of Poems and Ballads, 1866. In other words, I’m going to stop hoarding one of my most darling treasures, and plaster up my work in progress here.

There’s probably not a better way to begin a blog like this, than with a healthy dose of Lorem Ipsum. It’s an essential tool for designers of page and screen, helping us to imagine how our spaces will appear when they are filled with “real” content — a kind of metasyntactic variable, at scale.

What fascinates me about “greeking” (so called) is its hidden textual history, tracked down a bit several years ago by a Latin scholar at a Virginia college, but still inadequately explored. Okay, it’s mangled Cicero, metastasizing everywhere since the advent of desktop publishing and the Web — but did it spring fully-formed from the head of a Letraset designer in the ’60s, as in the earliest examples we can find? Or will we yet locate an elusive Aldine specimen book, evidence of the first time a printer said, “I need some fake text” and grabbed what was to hand, started swapping it up?

Lorem Ipsum becomes an even bigger cypher for me: of the ways we use our textual inheritance; of how physical those impulses are and how little they have changed in the digital context; and of how much we still have to figure out.  It’s the digital humanities.  It’s my own Etaoin Shrdlu, but with less signal for the noise.

I’m hoping this blog will be a place where (with a greater measure of discipline than this post may suggest!) I can explore some connected concepts of textual criticism, spatial and temporal representation, scholarly communication, the relation of constraint to poetic production and interpretation, and — still fairly new to me — the ins and outs of higher ed administration in the context of digital humanities labs and academic research libraries.

In other words, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent accumsan, orci id placerat dignissim, purus massa euismod orci, id ultricies leo risus ut orci. Fusce vitae felis vitae augue iaculis suscipit.

Now, don’t get me started on widows and orphans.