It's been an eventful quarter in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and Stanford Libraries! Writing it up, it's hard to believe it was packed into just three months.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

This quarter, I got the paperwork signed to start accessioning texts from the Global Medieval Sourcebook into the Stanford Digital Repository. At the end of the quarter, we had a meeting with metadata and technical staff about the next steps, and I’m excited to start experimenting with getting these texts into the repository and out to the world via WorldCat. This quarter an opportunity arose to co-author a paper with Prof. Kathryn Starkey and Mae Lyons-Penner on the evolution of the project and our current approach, for a special issue of “Seminar” (a German Studies journal) on digital curation. I’m looking forward to having the chance to articulate the considerations that led to the project’s current trajectory.

After 15 years of doing DH in some form or another, opportunities to sit in the company of fellow “veterans”, swapping tales of bygone years and campaigns won and lost, are a rare and wonderful treat. “Remember ‘Second Life’?” “Ugh, it made me so angry to have to virtually walk around to access information when we had this great thing called the ‘web browser’ where you could just search.” 

In these conversations, there’s little explanation needed (everyone remembers how it was), and especially after a drink or two, people will start opening up about failure. There’s no criticism or judgement, just commiseration.

This year I’ve had the opportunity to try to convince a number of graduate students — both at Stanford and beyond — to submit something to the international DH conference. I’ve been to every North America-based iteration of the conference since 2007, as well as a handful of the European ones, and especially for early career scholars it’s hard to find a better place for getting a broad sense of the field, ideas for possible directions for your own work, and a different kind of interdisciplinary feedback on your projects.

I really appreciate what the DH 2020 program committee has done this year with streamlining the submission process. The word limit is shorter, which makes it more feasible to get a submission together. If anything, it might involve a struggle to be concise. With the exception of long presentations, the maximum word count for any submission type (posters, lightning talks, short presentations, panels, and forums) is 500 words, about one page. But in the course of these conversations with grad students, I’ve been reminded that it’s not the length that’s the barrier, it’s the feeling of writing in an unfamiliar style if you’ve never submitted something to a conference before. You can find many examples of abstracts that were submitted to the DH conference online (e.g. this from the 2019 conference), but not everyone finds it easy to parse their structure. 

In my first summer as the DLCL ATS, I have concluded that the quarter’s reputation as a “slow” time is crucially overlooking all the conferences and events that get scheduled, precisely because it’s supposed to be “slow”. It’s certainly been quieter around the DLCL, with most faculty and students distributing themselves throughout the globe as soon as spring quarter ends, but distance has little impact on projects. Before the fall quarter gets too far underway, here’s a look back at the summer.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

Two undergrads, Nina Du and Tina Zhang, joined the project over the summer, courtesy of CESTA’s summer internship program. The direction I’d suggested for their work turned out to be a dead-end: the Versioning Machine performs well enough on mobile, and making further refinement would involve getting deep into the weeds of CSS. Instead, the students primarily worked on transcription and translation, and Nina did some work on a more mobile-friendly theme for the website. More recently, an opportunity has arisen for us to write a paper about GMS for “Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies”. I’m glad to have a deadline for making some progress on the restructuring of the project, focusing on publishing texts through our institutional digital repository rather than as a stand-alone website.

One of the most memorable panels at ACH was the one with DH Developers talking about how they got to where they are. Matthew Lincoln, Zoe LeBlanc, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, and Jamie Folsom all came to their careers in different ways, and work under different conditions. Even the largest shop (Scholars' Lab), with enough staff to have "junior" and "senior" developer roles, feels small, and everyone seemed interested in cultivating more of a community that crosses institutional boundaries. Some folks, including Rebecca, have begun to get involved with the emerging Research Software Engineering scene in the US. At the end, they called for more developers to tell their "origin stories", referencing the 2013 "Speaking in Code" workshop.