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.

Editing at Sea

I came home from a year's sabbatical at Cambridge on the Queen Mary 2 -- the dream of a lifetime. I've spent a lot of time on the Maine coast. You can see ferries and cargo ships far out at sea, and I yearned to traveling on one of them, feeling the swell of waves, smelling the clean salt air, watching sun glint off water or storms whip up whitecaps.

I'd printed out my book manuscript, and my plan was to spend the voyage line-editing while watching the sea and its life slide by beyond the ship's rails. 

I was editing the chapter on Anglo-Saxon imagination and the sea, sitting in the ship's library and looking out at the fog, as repeated announcements asked a crew member to report to his supervisor in the kitchen. The ship was searched and he was determined to be missing; the captain turned the ship back. Eventually shipboard video was located that showed the crew member slipping overboard several hours before; given the water temperature, it was clear the search was for a corpse.

I joined crew members and other passengers on deck, squinting against the fog, trying to peer into the gray-blue sheet that was the water many feet below. At dusk, the captain reversed course once again, giving up the search.

The crew sails together for six months at a time, working seven days a week, 12 or 15 hours a day, then getting two months off before the next shift. They live in close quarters, share bunkrooms, get to know one another very well. They were rattled and upset. But the show -- and life aboard the Queen Mary 2 is nothing if not a show of opulence, service, entertainment, constant attention to the wants and whims of passengers -- went on.

After that, I sat in the library, concentration shot and editing abandoned, peering again into the fog, craving a sight of land, another ship, a whale (a few passengers had seen them) -- anything but the shifting liquid light that had surrounded us since we left England.

When we arrived in Halifax for a day on land, I eagerly inhaled the air and its odors: pine trees, hot sun on asphalt, decaying seaweed, truck exhaust. Coffee shops and human bodies and grassy earth. 

When we sailed into New York Harbor two days later, I awoke at 4 a.m. to take photographs of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. I suspect I was the only passenger also photographing the Port of Elizabeth and gazing with longing at the Shore Parkway, watching the late-night/early-morning traffic pulsing like the city's heartbeat.

Back on land, we went to Maine to visit family, as I've done every summer. I watched the big ferries and the cargo ships creep by on the water, barely visible far in the distance. And I was glad to be grounded.

Digital Medieval

Here's the start of a list of people and places doing medieval studies in digital contexts.  It's partly a resource for myself, so I have a place to keep track of what others are up to, but also intended as a resource for readers. I'm keeping a separate list of digital manuscript facsimiles.

This list is fragmentary at the moment and will be enlarged significantly.  Please let me know of additions.

Ælfric's Homilies on Judith, Esther, and the Maccabees
Anglo-Saxon Charters
Early English Laws
Medieval Bookbindings 
Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 - 1220
The Riddle Ages
Studying Judith

Attempting to Do Digital Humanities

Back at the beginning of the millennium, I tried to put together a web-based edition of a bunch of scraps of biblical lore in Old English (some incorporating Latin) that are copied into about a dozen and a half manuscripts now held in libraries in London, Cambridge, and Oxford and date from the tenth through twelfth centuries.

The texts overlap in the various manuscripts, with some nearly identical, but most varying in one way or another. I made a rather goofy facsimile of a page from one of the manuscripts in the fashion of Victorian re-drawing of maps and illustrations, to try to show the colors used for the large capitals as well as the arrangement of the text on the page:

This is from the twelfth-century manuscript known as Cotton Julius A.ii, which also contains a prayer, a "Dialogue" between Adrian and Ritheus, and a translation of some proverbs by the Roman statesman Cato and related material.

I wanted to make a non-linear hypertext edition in which readers could jump between edited text, diplomatic transcription, translation, detailed manuscript description, and other texts with similar materials depending on interests and on experience with manuscripts.

But I didn't have the coding skills to make the edition as sophisticated as I wanted it to be, nor the social engineering skills to get someone else to do it for me (or with me). More problematic: as I worked on the edition, I realized the coding languages, conventions, and possibilities were in rapid flux, so any digital edition I might publish would rapidly become out of date.

Here's a translation:

Here it says about the two thieves who hung with Christ.  In Hebrew, they were called [Acha]sachat and Macros, and in Greek Malica and Ioca, and in Latin Cismus and Dismus. Cismus lived, and Dismus did not live.
Noah's ark was three hundred fathoms long, and fifty wide, and thirty high.
Saint Peter's Church is three hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide and the steeple one hundred twenty, and it has twelve thousand and fifty lights, and there are sixty-two steps in the stair.
Solomon's Temple was sixty fathoms long and sixty high and thirty wide. And there were a hundred and seventy thousand workers who carried the stone, and a hundred eight thousand that cut and joined them, and there were three thousand, three hundred officials.
Istorius said that the length of this Middle-Earth was twelve thousand miles, and its breadth six thousand three hundred, not counting a few little islands.
Man has two hundred nineteen bones and he has three hundred sixty-five veins, and there are that many days in twelve months, and a hundred twenty years has thirty-thousand and six hundred days. 

I ended up compiling the full text of the materials into a nice traditional, linear, print publication (with no colors).  You can read it in English Studies if you have access to an academic library, or know someone who can download a pdf and email it to you.

I still want to explore the possibilities of digital editing and publishing, though to start with I need a project that's somewhat less complex, in the number of manuscripts and/or in the variability of the texts.