Laura Bang! (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
barefootsong) wrote2010-01-22 10:13 pm
barefootsong) wrote2010-01-22 10:13 pm
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An afternoon at the National Gallery of Art
Today I attended a roundtable and lecture at the National Gallery of Art. The roundtable discussed "Digital Projects in the Humanities" and the lecture was titled, "The History of Books and the Digital Future."
The roundtable began with four individual presentations of scholarly web projects, followed by a Q&A session.
[The World of Dante], presented by Deborah Parker, University of Virginia — This site would have been much appreciated in the class I took on Dante in undergrad! We had to memorize all the circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven for that class and I spent a lot of time making my own charts to help me remember all that (I think I'm more of a visual learner), so all the maps (especially the interactive Botticelli one!) on this site look really cool. The site seems very well put together, easy to navigate, and wonderfully cross-referenced. I could wander through this site for hours!
[Digital Karnak], presented by Diane Favro, University of California—Los Angeles — This site is less accessible to the general public than the Dante site is, since Digital Karnak deals with a specific site that is important to Egyptologists and archaeologists. The interactive timemap that shows how the site changed over time is interesting, and the link to a Google Earth virtual reality model (where you can see buildings rise and fall over time) is quite amazing, but there is little else for someone who is not a specialist in the subject. The site provides very little explanatory material as it was designed solely to be used as a teaching and research aid, where professors and scholars would add their own voices and interpretations to the material available.
[European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO)], presented by Urs Schoepflin, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte — This project sounds interesting and the presenter highlighted some pretty cool artifacts/collections in his presentation. The main content collection is to be found [here], where users can browse through different categories to find compilations of open-access information on various European cultural objects. The pages and content can be a bit clunky and the strength of the collection lies in the science materials (but that is to be expected since non-science disciplines have yet to embrace the open-access initiative as readily). The ideas behind this project are appealing and I do hope that this project will continue to improve in the future.
[The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590-1635], presented by Peter M. Lukehart, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts — The interface of this project is quite nice, but it is once again a collection with a limited appeal. This collection documents the history of a specific institution during a specific timeframe and will therefore have only a very specific audience. In addition, the images and links to reference materials in the catalogue tie the site to the National Gallery of Art, which is great for local scholars and those who can travel, but less helpful to those who are further afield. Still, the interface for the site is very nice, including the TEI encoding of the texts. The guided search feature provides variants for all names that are indexed, which would be extremely useful, but all variants are listed immediately beneath what has been chosen as the authority name, so that if one is looking for a variant that begins with a different letter than the main entry, one still needs to know the main entry name in order to avoid scanning the entire list of options.
The presentations were all interesting and it is exciting to see what is happening in the realm of digital humanities, but I have reservations about the long-term usefulness of some of the projects with narrower and/or less broadly appealing subjects.
The lecture, given by Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard University, was also interesting, although it did not meet my expectations. The lecture was titled "The History of Books and the Digital Future," but rather than discussing these topics in a broad manner, Darnton spoke specifically about a book that he is currently in the process of writing and planning. He gave several anecdotes about the French banned books trade during a two-decade span, which were very interesting and certainly something I would like to read about (Banned Books Week is my favorite time of the library year), but did not seem to constitute "The History of Books" other than in a very narrow sense.
As far as "the Digital Future," the scope was again limited to Darnton's own book. He has plans to publish this book in a tiered format. I'm not sure I followed the plan entirely, but I believe there will be some sort of tangible book with digital supplements. The digital supplements will be offered in various levels of detail, depending on the reader's depth of interest in the subjects. So, for instance, the tangible book will have the main overview of the French banned books trade in the late 17th-century, and if one is further interested, one could click on supplements online to reveal more detailed information about specific chapters, or to read selections from the French documents with accompanying translations, or to peruse complete digital copies of the French documents. While this is an interesting concept, it seems rather too ambitious to be really useful in the "Digital Future" — there are so many issues of who will digitize/encode these documents and who owns the copyrights and such. Not to mention the problem of what constitutes the text itself and how to deal with citations if the readers can pick-and-choose their own content and, as Darnton suggested, also print-on-demand their own tailored version of the text.
I enjoyed these lectures very much, as they provided much to think over and peruse further. It was definitely an afternoon well-spent!
The roundtable began with four individual presentations of scholarly web projects, followed by a Q&A session.
[The World of Dante], presented by Deborah Parker, University of Virginia — This site would have been much appreciated in the class I took on Dante in undergrad! We had to memorize all the circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven for that class and I spent a lot of time making my own charts to help me remember all that (I think I'm more of a visual learner), so all the maps (especially the interactive Botticelli one!) on this site look really cool. The site seems very well put together, easy to navigate, and wonderfully cross-referenced. I could wander through this site for hours!
[Digital Karnak], presented by Diane Favro, University of California—Los Angeles — This site is less accessible to the general public than the Dante site is, since Digital Karnak deals with a specific site that is important to Egyptologists and archaeologists. The interactive timemap that shows how the site changed over time is interesting, and the link to a Google Earth virtual reality model (where you can see buildings rise and fall over time) is quite amazing, but there is little else for someone who is not a specialist in the subject. The site provides very little explanatory material as it was designed solely to be used as a teaching and research aid, where professors and scholars would add their own voices and interpretations to the material available.
[European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO)], presented by Urs Schoepflin, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte — This project sounds interesting and the presenter highlighted some pretty cool artifacts/collections in his presentation. The main content collection is to be found [here], where users can browse through different categories to find compilations of open-access information on various European cultural objects. The pages and content can be a bit clunky and the strength of the collection lies in the science materials (but that is to be expected since non-science disciplines have yet to embrace the open-access initiative as readily). The ideas behind this project are appealing and I do hope that this project will continue to improve in the future.
[The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590-1635], presented by Peter M. Lukehart, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts — The interface of this project is quite nice, but it is once again a collection with a limited appeal. This collection documents the history of a specific institution during a specific timeframe and will therefore have only a very specific audience. In addition, the images and links to reference materials in the catalogue tie the site to the National Gallery of Art, which is great for local scholars and those who can travel, but less helpful to those who are further afield. Still, the interface for the site is very nice, including the TEI encoding of the texts. The guided search feature provides variants for all names that are indexed, which would be extremely useful, but all variants are listed immediately beneath what has been chosen as the authority name, so that if one is looking for a variant that begins with a different letter than the main entry, one still needs to know the main entry name in order to avoid scanning the entire list of options.
The presentations were all interesting and it is exciting to see what is happening in the realm of digital humanities, but I have reservations about the long-term usefulness of some of the projects with narrower and/or less broadly appealing subjects.
The lecture, given by Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard University, was also interesting, although it did not meet my expectations. The lecture was titled "The History of Books and the Digital Future," but rather than discussing these topics in a broad manner, Darnton spoke specifically about a book that he is currently in the process of writing and planning. He gave several anecdotes about the French banned books trade during a two-decade span, which were very interesting and certainly something I would like to read about (Banned Books Week is my favorite time of the library year), but did not seem to constitute "The History of Books" other than in a very narrow sense.
As far as "the Digital Future," the scope was again limited to Darnton's own book. He has plans to publish this book in a tiered format. I'm not sure I followed the plan entirely, but I believe there will be some sort of tangible book with digital supplements. The digital supplements will be offered in various levels of detail, depending on the reader's depth of interest in the subjects. So, for instance, the tangible book will have the main overview of the French banned books trade in the late 17th-century, and if one is further interested, one could click on supplements online to reveal more detailed information about specific chapters, or to read selections from the French documents with accompanying translations, or to peruse complete digital copies of the French documents. While this is an interesting concept, it seems rather too ambitious to be really useful in the "Digital Future" — there are so many issues of who will digitize/encode these documents and who owns the copyrights and such. Not to mention the problem of what constitutes the text itself and how to deal with citations if the readers can pick-and-choose their own content and, as Darnton suggested, also print-on-demand their own tailored version of the text.
I enjoyed these lectures very much, as they provided much to think over and peruse further. It was definitely an afternoon well-spent!