Afterword

I am happy to be included in this collection, and honored to be asked to provide some closing observations. The Whitmaniacs have done a great job in calling together this collection of experts in that vital field of scholarly endeavor, “digital scholarly editing.” And even granting the editors’ expressed suspicion of the term “scholarly” in their introduction, and everyone’s qualms about the metaphorical use of the term archive, I haven’t yet heard anyone express doubts about the currency of, or need for, editing. On the contrary, these essays have opened new vistas on the scholarly edition, from Stephanie Browner’s “generous editions,” to Elena Pierazzo’s “distant editing,” to Julia Flanders’s social editions, to Dirk van Hulle’s genetic editing of Beckett’s gestalt, to Marta Werner’s murmuration of bird poems and Robert Warrior’s important introduction to the history of Indigenous publishing and editing, from the seventeenth century’s James Printer to the contemporary work of N. Scott Momaday, and Warrior’s own work.

I am reminded of Frank Kermode’s Wellek Library Lectures, published in 1985 as the book titled Forms of Attention, in which he explains why we keep paying attention to certain writers and texts. I wrote/spoke about Forms of Attention at “The Face of Text: Computer-Assisted Text Analysis in the Humanities,” the third conference of the Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis (CaSTA), at McMaster University, in November 2004. In that paper (available online from my home page), I wrote:

For as long as there has been humanities computing, humanities computing has been about the representation of primary source materials, and about building tools that either help us create those representations or help us manipulate and analyze them. Source materials might be—and have often been—texts, but they might also be drawings, paintings, architectural or archaeological sites, music, maps, textiles, sculptures, performances, or any of the other forms in which the record of human culture and human creativity can be found. Under that description, it might seem that we’ve been working steadily at more or less the same thing, for quite a long time now—more than half a century. But it would be a mistake to make that assumption, and a disservice to impute mere stasis or repetition to the field. In fact, over the half-century leading up to now, there have been significant accomplishments and significant changes. As a result of them, and (even more) as a result of changes in the world around us, . . . I think we are arriving at a moment when the form of the attention that we pay to primary source materials is shifting from digitizing to analyzing, from artifacts to aggregates, and from representation to abstraction.

By “abstraction,” in that talk, I meant things like transcription, indexes, social networks, and even games (the Ivanhoe Game, specifically). Coincidentally, 2004 was also the year in which the Google Books project was launched, and from that followed a whole new scale of abstraction, based in the quantitative analysis of massive numbers of machine-readable texts, which would lead to a pivot in the direction of text analysis, machine learning, and eventually artificial intelligence (AI) as well—lead, indeed, to the collision between those two cultures of error pointed out by Fotis Jannidis. I didn’t know that particular computational turn was about to happen, but I could tell that we hadn’t exhausted the generative possibilities of the computer in 2004, nor had we yet, in 2022, when the symposium from which these essays emerged was held.

It occurred to me then that 2022 was the thirtieth anniversary of digital humanities (DH) at my university, the University of Virginia. In 1992, the library at UVA made a commitment of space (thanks, Kendon Stubbs) to a new Electronic Text Center, to the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), and also to the Rare Book School (RBS), which was moved in that year from Columbia to UVA. When I talked recently to Kendon about 1992, he said that the RBS was a hedge against the possibility that all this digital stuff would blow over, but he was joking, of course: RBS itself has had a significant impact on teaching digital methods (for example, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s courses on the analytical bibliography of digital media). It seems appropriate here to note that what made UVA such a force in DH in the 1990s and the early 2000s was the fact that the digital work of projects like the Whitman Archive, the Blake Archive, the Dickinson Archive, and the Rossetti Archive was grounded in decades of scholarship on the history of the book, on bibliography, and on the need to understand how these things are made and why they are made that way. Cassidy Holahan, Aylin Malcolm, and Whitney Trettien certainly illuminate this point in their essay, and I thought of Jerome McGann’s influential 2001 book Radiant Textuality, in which he explains why the digital edition is a better lens for understanding the book than another book could ever be, which is still true today, as it always will be.

This brings us to the problem of publication. Publishing has always had an important role in scholarship: to fix scholarship in durable book form and to make its dissemination feasible and sustainable. We know how to publish books, and as has been pointed out here, we understand what we might call the “total cost of ownership” of these objects. On the other hand, the publishing of digital scholarship and digital scholarly editions is more of a challenge, though it has its own long history in our field, from Wilhelm Ott’s Tübingen System of Text Processing Programs (TUSTEP) to UVA’s Rotunda imprint, to the University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold. UVA’s Rotunda was something I helped to start because I saw the necessity of formal publication for digital editions. But before writing the Mellon proposal that launched Rotunda, I had worked for a couple of years with the University of Michigan Press to try to get them to publish the Rossetti Archive. Ultimately, they could not wrap their minds around publishing something that was a perpetual work in progress, and I now understand that, because I now see that same problem from the perspective of preservation. The scholarly edition, the object of attention, needs to change hands at these key points in the life cycle of information, in order to allow these different agents to perform their functions: first publishers, then libraries, then archives. The Rotunda imprint, too, did not end up publishing the Rossetti Archive, precisely because it remained a work in progress until recently. Rotunda has, however, published a number of other important (and finished) digital editions, including John Bryant’s “Fluid Text” edition of Melville’s Typee manuscript (rev. ed. 2009).

Jerry McGann is not a contributor here, but his work informs the whole volume. His generosity of spirit, his instinct for upsetting the apple cart, his ideas about the social production of literary and scholarly objects, and his sheer playfulness were all crucial ingredients in the early days of IATH. He brought us the Blake folks, the Dickinson folks, and the Whitman folks too. His social network was formative for IATH and for UVA’s impact on this emerging field of digital scholarly editing. I got to know Jerry when I invited him to be a member of the editorial board of the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture, and much to my surprise, he said yes and committed his reputation to this sketchy idea. And all of these essays, in inventive and adventurous ways, are extending that spirit of generosity. I think particularly of Ed Folsom’s remark during the symposium: “Digital Humanities to me means Collaborative Humanities.” Collaboration—real-time versus serial—is indeed the hallmark of DH. UVA’s first web page went up in 1992: it was a report to the Mellon Foundation on the serials crisis, and (as a hopeful aside) if you look hard enough, you can still find it on Brewster Kahle’s Wayback Machine, archive.org. Publishing that one page was a collective effort involving Kendon Stubbs, Jim O’Donnell, Anne Okerson, and John Wilkin. The work of DH has always been the work of many hands, and always will be. The first UVA web page is a small example; at the other end of the scale is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the world’s largest and longest-lasting ontological undertaking, which Julia Flanders described as a metastandard for organizing arguments about texts. It is also known as an international and multilingual set of guidelines for encoding all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for the purpose of interchange and analysis, and incidentally, preservation. TEI represents collaboration on a large scale.

To that point, Marta Werner said during our exchanges at the symposium that, “without my students, I could not do what I do,” and Ken Price noted that the Whitman Archive really began when he found Charlie Green and other grad students at William & Mary who understood how to use computers for something more than word processing. I’m still not sure whether those students were the clover or the bee, but in my own experience, the truth about DH is and always has been that it is dependent on intergenerational collaboration. The editor of a digital scholarly edition is not only a maker of connections among texts, as Dirk van Hulle says, but also a maker of connections among people, and at its best, that has resulted in the intergenerational transfer of intellectual, institutional, and reputational capital. As I suggested earlier, I was the beneficiary of that, as a junior professor working with McGann. But the importance of students in DH projects cannot be overstated, especially graduate students; and the importance of DH experience to those grad students is very real as well. Many of them, including two of this volume’s editors, have become faculty or have gone on to other successful careers. From UVA, there was a DH diaspora, spawning not only individual careers but also centers (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities), which in turn have had their own generations of diaspora.

We also witness in these essays important insights into archival preservation. I am thinking here particularly of K.J. Rawson’s excellent piece on the preservation of the records of trans people in archives, and the important question of what is missing from the archive, but also the equally important question of whether archives should “out” their subjects, or “deadname” them, or both, or neither. These questions have always been with us (many archival collections have stipulations about the time that must pass after the death of their subjects before their records are made available, for example), and Rawson mentions the analogy of respectful handling of Indigenous materials not intended for the uninitiated. But in that same spirit, Sarah Patterson shows how the preservation of an archival record, in this case the minutes of Colored Conventions, makes possible an analysis of a movement that might look uniform or even monolithic from a distance but that proves to be riven with factions and competing agendas when seen up close. Daniel Pitti’s Social Networks and Archival Context project (SNAC; a.k.a. Facebook for the Dead) comes to mind as a project that is both collaborative and necessarily confronting the kinds of questions raised by Rawson and Patterson. You’ll find it at snaccooperative.org/; and be warned, it is an almost bottomless rabbit hole that allows you to traverse many archives, following the records of people in relation with other people—a social network, indeed.

The transformations described here in scholarly practice and the emphases of DH work may be found in the institutions I have been describing, as well. As of July 1, 2022, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities became a unit of the UVA Library, and when our renovated main library building reopens, it will be co-located with the Scholars’ Lab. We’re now beginning the process of coordinating their missions and programs, and we will be preserving the identity of each in the process and looking to the future of both. This is thanks in large part to an external review by Ray Siemens, Trevor Muñoz, and Miriam Posner, who recognized that this small but significant change could be key to the future of DH at UVA.

And another development, the beauty and terror of which may be divined from the issues raised in Nicole Gray’s essay, is that, after a formal process and due deliberation, the archives and special collections unit in my library has committed to collecting the history of DH, beginning of course with UVA’s history in the field, but most definitely not ending there. I am certain that the folks in archives and special collections at UVA would agree with Gray’s point that we must balance the attention paid to this effort against the attention taken away from other tasks: those invisible dollar signs, as Steve Ramsay described them during one of the symposium discussions, in querying our contributors about the economics of their endeavors. Deanna Marcum’s aphorism that “preservation begins at creation” comes to mind, and I think ruefully of the fact that I didn’t understand this very well when I was helping to make the many projects now unprepared for preservation.

Save the records of your DH production processes, because we want them. Before I left IATH in 2003, I did send fifteen thousand emails (printed on acid-free paper, in archival boxes) from the Blake Archive to the University of Minnesota’s Babbage Institute, an actual archive focused on the history of information technology, so that fifty years from now there would be a record of at least this small part of the history of the transformation of scholarly publishing. Now I and my colleagues, and perhaps many of you, can step up to the challenge of preserving the history and the products of DH, or as I have been thinking of it lately: I can do something in this final chapter of my UVA career to clean up the huge mess I created in an earlier chapter.

Thank you—contributors, editors, readers—for bringing your brains, your hearts, and your digits to this meeting of the minds on the subject of digital scholarly editions: it is a rich subject with a fascinating past, a formidable present, and far-reaching future.