Teaching After Trump: Digital Preservation

I wrote a post last week about how I walked into class with a lecture outline and the plans to talk about sustainability and preservation in digital humanities and found myself speechless as I realized the landscape was shifting under my feet.

The following class meeting was committed to a visit to our library's rare books room; we have a small collection, useful for teaching, of manuscript leaves and early printed books that really helpful to have in conjunction with digital reproductions on Early English Books on Line and the British Library.

But for the next week, I wrote a lecture. After 25 years in the classroom, I usually write an outline, not a lecture. But this one, I needed to get right. Here's a portion of my comments to the class.

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I have long had a policy of not talking directly about politics in class. But right now, we're in a situation where what is going on is too important not to talk about. Also, I have tenure, so I can talk about politics. Therefore, it seems to me, in the current situation, I must.


The new administration has removed information on a wide variety of topics from the White House website. The presidential website of the previous administration (archived here, but no longer live) includes sections on civil rights, climate change, education, health care, immigration, disabilities, ethics, equal pay, veterans, and women's issues.

The current site has eliminated all of these sections, leaving references only to energy, foreign policy, jobs and trade, law enforcement, and a strong military (but not veterans).

Meanwhile, the new regime has instructed officials at the National Parks, the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, and several other federal organizations to freeze communications: no press releases, no peer-reviewed publications, no tweets, no blog posts, until new policies governing the release of information can be put in place.

That has not happened yet.

Meanwhile, National Parks employees who tweeted climate data were forced to delete those tweets, leading to the creation of rogue accounts like @BadHombreNPS and @AltUSNatParkService. These might be run by parks employees; no one is sure.

The day after the inauguration, Trump’s press secretary went on the news and insisted that the crowds attending the inauguration were “the largest ever” despite aerial photos, Metro statistics about numbers of riders, and police estimates suggesting it wasn’t true. Trump has long been tweeting pretty much whatever he feels like, with little regard for the truth.

Most recently, Trump issued an executive order banning Muslim (but not Christian) people from certain countries from entering the US, even if they held green cards. The US Attorney General, Sally Q. Yates, called this unconstitutional and issued a stay of the order, and Trump fired her.

Trump’s attack on truth is comparable to what has been done under previous totalitarian regimes. A totalitarian government is centralized, controls the flow of information, allows no dissent or criticism of the people in power. Trump’s attempts to discredit legitimate journalism and science are comparable to efforts in other totalitarian regimes of the past to silence anyone with dissenting views.

Trump has appointed Steve Bannon to the National Security Council, a move without precedent but one that gives significant power to the head of Breitbart News, a corporation dedicated to expressing rage against women, people of color, and non-Christians.

Trump’s demands that National Parks employees delete tweets and stop communicating with the public recall book burnings that occurred across German cities in 1933.

Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January and appointed Joseph Goebbels to institute a massive propaganda campaign. In May, across the country, people went into bookstores and libraries and took out books deemed "un-German" -- written by foreigners, Jews, liberals, pacifists -- and burned them.

As I wrote in my last post, teaching just got a lot harder. And teaching students to be critical consumers of on-line information just got a lot more crucial.

Teaching After Trump: What Is A Book?

When I teach courses on medieval literature and the environment, I know that there are issues that are going to intersect with contemporary politics that I have to navigate with caution. But yesterday, when it dawned on me in the middle of a class meeting that "What Is A Book?" is political, I was pretty well blind-sided.

The course looks at the transitions from manuscript to print and from print to digital, and tries to throw codicology, history of the book, and digital humanities in the air together to see what kinds of configurations stuff drops into. I've taught the course only once before, four years ago, so I'm still in a very fluid period of making stuff up as I go along.

Yesterday we were looking at the Appendix to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. My students all know that technology is terrible because it makes us distracted, but Davidson engages with the prophets of doom and makes a good case that there are also things to value, and rather than rejecting it, we should engage with technology and figure out what it can do.

The Appendix turns out to be a good introduction to the book, and the course, because it lists "Twenty-First Century Literacies" like attention, collaboration, global consciousness, and ethics. It raises good topics for discussion and gets the students and me pretty quickly beyond the problems of how social media and mobile devices are distracting us into other issues involving the ethics and affordances of technology.

The night before class, I'd spent half an hour or so on Twitter following the new president's gag order on US scientific agencies and national parks, the scrubbing of anything that could be interpreted as related to climate science from government websites, the silencing of agencies like the USDA and the CDC. (Salmonella, anyone? Zika?)

Davidson lists sustainability and preservation near the end of the appendix. She uses "sustainability" to refer to environmental issues like the amounts of electricity needed to power computers and servers, but digital humanists use the same word to refer to the creation of digital texts and databases in forms that will outlast current hardware and software configurations and still be readable, decades or hopefully even centuries into the future.

The related issue of "preservation" has to do with keeping copies of things -- archiving materials created digitally, as well as figuring out how to keep copies of things that began their life as material objects. If something originally in book form is preserved in pdf, is that the same as the original? What if there are different copies owned by two different people who made notes in the margins? How important are those notes?

Cotton Vitellius A. xv. is the manuscript that contains the unique copy of Beowulf. It was put together, probably in the seventeenth century, out of two different collections written several hundred years before, but a couple hundred years apart from each other. It contains the Nowell Codex, a late tenth- or early eleventh-century copy manuscript of two poems, including Beowulf, and three prose texts. Is that a book? Or is a medieval collection of materials different than what we think of today as "a book"? Are photographs of the Beowulf manuscript the same as the actual manuscript? What if we could print a 3-dimensional copy, retaining the texture of every page?

People who deal with other media ask related questions. Is a CD version of a song the same as its 45 rpm vinyl original? Is a DVD copy of "Singin' in the Rain" the same as a print of the film on several reels of 35mm film?

Preservation also deals with avoiding loss of data, which was a big problem in the early days of computing but is less acute now, when storage is cheap and it's easy to store redundantly. The issue of data that lasts forever, like social media posts that haunt people hunting for a job, looms larger.

So there I was in class, talking about the relatively long life of manuscripts in comparison to things like punch cards and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and suddenly I apprehended the enormity of the new administration's deliberate suppression and even destruction of information.

I don't know if this material is being mirrored or archived in some other country that's now freeer than the United States or if, horrifyingly, decades of data that the new regime considers to be "alternative facts" or even "a hoax" will simply be destroyed. I don't know what the consequences might be of stopping research in the sciences and humanities dead, and how quickly it might recover if (when?) we get ourselves back on a course of sanity, four years or more from now.

But there I was talking about issues that, six months ago, seemed to have nothing to do with politics in the United States. Yet even though they have nothing to do with hot-button issues like climate science or women's health care, issues of data preservation and sustainability are completely politicized.

It caught me completely by surprise. I hadn't prepared to teach a class that was politically charged, and I found myself floundering. I said that whatever anyone's politics, our classroom had to remain a space for civil discourse. I said that I grade on how persuasively students organize and present their research, not on what their opinions are, and I hoped that students would feel free to disagree, even with me.

I need to do better, though. I need to make it clear that scrubbing websites is comparable to burning books and neither has a place in democracy.

I'm thankful for tenure. I'm thankful that I teach in a university, and a state, that isn't moving to silence its faculty. And I'm deeply sobered and dismayed by the implications. Teaching with integrity used to mean not smoking or sleeping with the students. It's become far more difficult to navigate the environment of alternative realities, suppression of scientific fact, and abrogation of human rights.

I now feel a grave responsibility to step up and state clearly that these things are not right. But I have to do so in a way that maintains respect for students with different views and allows for an open classroom atmosphere, that keeps the classroom a place of inquiry and the development of critical thinking, not a lecture on the ills of the people currently in power.

Teaching just got a whole lot harder.

Most Commonly Used Words: All the Presidents

Luke DuBois at Hindsight Is Always 2020 has charted the most common words used by each of the presidents. The results are historically embedded, but the differences are fascinating. Here's the most common word used by each president:

Washington: gentlemen
Adams: France
Jefferson: limits
Madison: enemy
Monroe: parties
Adams: mutual
Jackson: bank
Van Buren: results
Tyler: Texas
Polk: Oregon
Taylor: empire
Fillmore: deem
Pierce: central
Buchanan: slavery
Lincoln: emancipation
Johnson: republican
Grant: products
Hayes: coinage
Arthur: likely
Cleveland: treatment
Harrison: wages
Cleveland: reserve
McKinley: Puerto
Roosevelt: corporations
Taft: procedure
Wilson: processes
Harding: relationship
Coolidge: veterans
Hoover: unemployment
Roosevelt: democratic
Truman: Soviet
Eisenhower: nuclear
Kennedy: alliance
Johnson: tonight
Nixon: truly
Ford: barrels
Carter: US
Reagan: deficits
Bush: idea
Clinton: 21st
Bush: terror

DuBois doesn't include Obama in his analysis, but the Boston Globe made "wordles" for several of his speeches. His most commonly used words in speeches from 2009 to 2011: nation, people, Americans.

Interesting contrasts among back-to-back presidents: limits / enemy, mutual / bank, slavery / emancipation, alliance / tonight, terror / nation, truly / barrels. Other than that, no comment.

Lost in the Digital Debate

I've had the privilege of hearing and seeing quite a few live performances of classical music recently, and it's served as a reminder that in addition to dynamics and pitch and time, music has a spatial dimension that recordings can't capture, even high-fidelity stereo and surround-sound systems designed to give the feeling of sitting in the midst of a performance.

The length of a keyboard, the movement of fingers along strings, the arrangement of musicians playing different instruments -- these are lost in an audio recording.

A recording, whether analog or digital, is a substitute we've come to take completely for granted for hearing a live performance. We can listen to the same recording over and over and over again. Vinyl records lost quality in the repetition, the grooves worn down and the sound quality diminished over time, but CDs and MP3s retain whatever qualities they had in the initial recording, no matter how many times they're played.

Audiophiles argue fiercely over variations between analog and digital recordings, but both replace the presence of human beings with a flat piece of plastic that produces sound waves coming out of speakers. A record or a CD or an iPod can't interact with a human auditor.

Meanwhile, people are panicking about the demise of the book, as most of us move to reading on screens of various kinds, for various purposes. You might not have a Kindle, but you're reading this blog on a screen, and your email, and maybe Facebook or the news, scholarly articles or Google.

According to Socrates, written language is a lousy substitute for the spoken word. No matter how many times you ask a book a question, you get the same answer. We've moved since Socrates through stone and wax tablets and papyrus and animal skins to paper. In the past decade, we've fixated on the idea of the book as a physical object rather than a medium for transmission of language.

Watching hands on a keyboard last night, then walking home and hearing an owl hoot twice behind me and to my left, and another bird twittering to my right, I wondered what it is about ink on paper that, at this moment in time, inspires both devotion and fear of loss.

On Not Seeing the Mona Lisa, or the Water Lilies

I suppose it's reasonable that I, a generalist, not a scholar of Renaissance art, should be granted no special access to the Mona Lisa, no particular ability to view the painting, much as -- for reasons I recognize as good, and having to do with preservation -- non-specialists might be able to look at two facing pages of, say, a Gutenberg Bible under glass, but not to sit down in an easy chair paging through it at leisure.

But right out there in a museum, ostensibly in public, I was unprepared for how deeply it was impossible to see the Mona Lisa. It is surrounded by a barrier keeping viewers perhaps fifteen feet away, and covered with glass. What I saw, then, was a ghostly face and the reflection of an exit sign over a door at the back of the gallery, punctuated by flashes from the scores of people in the room taking selfies and snaps of each other.

It got me thinking about reproduction. Digital techniques today allow the surface to be mapped, a model of the texture created, and the image itself photographically rendered onto such a textured model. I'd have gotten more out of looking at a good reproduction of the painting than I did looking at glass and reflected light. I got a better look at the painting someone was selling along the river, with Mona Lisa's face on a cat, than I did at the original.

Monet's Water Lilies are hard to see for another reason: their scale. I had the great, vast privilege to see them on display in the purpose-built gallery in L'Orangerie, mounted on slightly curved walls in an oval-shaped room.

I looked from the front, but the room is barely large enough to see the whole painting. The edges fade into peripheral vision and the details of the paint, layers over layers making a textured surface, fade into the distance.  Looking from the side, I could focus on the near end of the painting, or the far end, but never both at the same time. Up close, I could examine the texture, the detailed use of color, but only for a tiny fraction of the paintings at one time.

And only retreating once more to a distance could I see the shadow of light on the surface of water, or the shape of a tree in the foreground.

The vastness of the paintings, for me, foregrounds the landscape, makes it a kind of actor in the interaction between viewer and image.  I felt myself reduced in scale, in scope, in agency, as a human viewer. What one sees is not landscape, it is one human's interpretation of landscape, but it gives that landscape something that gives pause. Water and light overshadow human scale, force a recognition that the human place in the world is limited.

What Professors Do: Spring Break

I'm working on a lecture I'll give at my own institution next month on "Digitizing the Humanities" in an effort to persuade the people at my own institution of the importance of investing in, practicing, and theorizing our digital future(s).

Increasingly, my own scholarly processes occur on-line.  I wrote a conference paper last year comparing the transitions from manuscript to print and from print to digital using scholarship -- articles and books -- obtained entirely on line and read entirely in digital formats. Arthritis has made writing by hand difficult for me for more than a decade, so there's no point in printing stuff out to mark it up, and these days I often read books or articles on iPad while tapping away on a computer.

Just to complete the digital loop, and for the sake of seeing if I could do it, I read the paper from my iPad rather than printing a copy to read from at the conference. For my non-academic readers who may be unfamiliar with this process, one of the things faculty do is go to conferences and read their papers to each other and then discuss them with each other and the audience. Our education system, in which faculty share ideas and habits of thinking with students in lecture or, ideally, small seminars, is another vestige of oral culture.

The dissemination of our ideas through oral delivery is a technology older even than the manuscript codex, one of a few lingering artifacts of the oral traditions of preservation and recitation of cultural memories that have shaped us as humans for millennia, even as we have shaped our cultural narratives through collective and repetitive telling.

As we move from printed materials toward digitally enabled methods of transmission and storage of uncertain sustainability and future, we also continue the shift from oral transmission of epic, lyrics, drama, political oratory, and education to something else, whether it's enabled by the (print and digital) technologies of writing or of audio and video recording.

What do we gain as we move to digital transmission of ideas? What do we lose?

We gain a lot of digital tools that enable faster answers to questions like, "What has been published about sexuality and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?" We also get to ask different questions, like "Do men and women use pronouns differently in this digital corpus of letters from the early modern period?"

We lose books as physical artifacts. We lose (at least as digital technologies exist today) stable arrangements of text and image on a printed page. We lose certain familiar physical, spatial relationships to books that have enabled our habits of reading, though as screens and the devices they're embedded in improve, the relationships between print and digital will keep shifting.

The transition from oral to written took many, many centuries, and as I've already suggested, oral transmission of ideas is not completely gone. The transition from manuscript to print took several generations, and handwriting is also not gone: school kids still write stuff out, some people still send each other letters through the mail, the check as a financial instrument isn't quite dead, and we still put our physical, handwritten signatures on tax returns and credit slips and passports.

Even though technological change seems to be accelerating, the transition from print to digital is likely to go on for a few generations. We need to keep asking these questions: what do we gain? what do we lose?

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I've also graded a couple of sets of papers during my spring break, contacted a student's advisor, gotten a little more exercise than usual, caught up on sleep, and kept up with the usual routines of kid supervision, dog walking, and housework.

Unfinished items on the list: a couple of reports, letters of recommendation, preparation for next week's classes, and some reading for an article I'm working on together with a student. I'm about to power down for Shabbat, but I'll get to some of those on Sunday.

Meta-MOOC: The Future of Higher Education

In my on-going efforts to stay (sort of) current about many things digital, I've signed up for a few MOOCs with the idea that I should experience one before formulating a solid opinion about the trend.

I've never finished one.  In fact, I've never so much as started the readings and assignments for one.

But recently I heard (on Twitter, I think) that Cathy Davidson was offering a MOOC on the future of higher education, a MOOC that would be about MOOCs, about the possibilities of what she calls "massively collaborative on-line education."  I assigned chapters of Davidson's book, Now You See It, in a seminar last semester called "What Is A Book?" and I thought actually learning from her would be a very interesting experience.

I signed up, assuming it would be the same old story: nice idea, no follow-through.  However, I logged in the other day and started poking around the course, and the ideas were intriguing, and the introduction posts from other students were interesting, so I logged in again another day and wrote a post introducing myself and opened up some of the assigned readings, and they sat open in the browser all day, and eventually I shut everything down unread.

Then I got some follow-up emails to my Introductions post, and so I logged in to the course again, and started actually skimming the assigned readings.  I clicked on the link for the videos, but I really do not have any patience for watching videos (with all due respect to The Mate, a filmmaker!).  There was also a link to "cue cards," so instead of watching the videos, I skimmed those, apparently drafts of the lectures given in the videos.

There are weekly quizzes so I opened one up to see how I could do and scored 12 and change out of 15, without paying a whole lot of attention, and then a window popped up in the middle of my screen informing me I had "done excellent" on the quiz and inviting me to "join the signature track."

For a mere $49, assuming I can score above 75 percent on all the quizzes and do some reasonable fraction of the assignments, I'll get some kind of certificate of completion for the course: "Official. Verifiable. Shareable."

I closed the window. 

There's a bar across the top of the screen that says, "Earn a Verified Certificate for this course!" A note below that tells me I still have six days and 21 hours to change my mind.

One of the assignments for the first week is to log in to the course wiki and read, and possibly edit, the "Community Constitution," which sets out principles for on-line, collaborative learning.  A model for such a constitution is provided in the "Mozilla Manifesto," also known as A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age.  That document includes a paragraph headed, "The Right to financial transparency."

The FutureEd course does not include mention of financial transparency in its community constitution.  It does provide the following principles:

• Free and open source modes of learning promote the availability of knowledge as a public resource while open exchange of ideas gives knowledge value.
• Transparent, community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.

Huh.  I'm not finding the efforts to get me to pay for a certificate to be particularly transparent.

I took the quiz a second time (you get ten tries) and scored 15.00 out of 15.00.  The questions were multiple-choice, and most of the answers were in effect "all of the above," and I couldn't tell you what any of the questions, or the answers, were.

So have I learned anything yet? 

I'm finding the course contents intriguing, and the premise that we have an opportunity to do something paradigm-busting with the internet, rather than just using it to reproduce existing modes of knowledge transference while allowing it to change the ways we think without paying much attention to what those changes might be, an important one.

As with all the other MOOCs I've signed up for, I'm not seriously committed to completing this one, because all the responsibilities of a full-time job and a full-time life come first.  But as of right now, I'm curious about what week two will bring.  Updates to follow, probably.

Manuscript Facsimiles

A list, to be updated as I come across others, of digital manuscript repositories on the web.  Please let me know of others I've missed.

Alfred's Translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis, Universitätsbibliothek Kassel
Bayeux Tapestry
Beowulf Manuscript
Book of Kells, Trinity College Dublin
British Library's digitized manuscript page, and their blog
Bodleian Library
Damian Fleming's detailed list of digitized manuscripts
DigiPal Database of Manuscripts On Line
Digital Walters (Baltimore)
Lichfield Cathedral
Open-Glam Open Collections
Paris Psalter
Parker Library
Trinity College Cambridge
Trinity College Library Dublin
Worcester Cathedral Library and Archive