Laura Mandell

NEH NINES Summer Institute 2011

We are gathered at this NEH Summer Institute for a high purpose which, I would

argue, is fundamentally this: to defend the need for expertise in the Humanities and to

redefine its form. In this opening talk, I ll just set out the stakes as I see them, but of

course, as a Humanities expert, I ll do it through recourse to history, and in particular, the

history of disciplinary specialization, a legacy bequeathed to us from the Enlightenment.

In his own Introduction to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John

Locke spends a great deal of time worrying about the political implications of insoluble

disagreements, insisting that misunderstandings of the meaning of words are what fuelds

them. Obviously the transition from monarchical to republican rule, which he can

imagine at this point, troubles him: his anxiety-curing fantasy is that all disagreements

can be arbitrated solely through rational means once people completely agree upon the

precise meaning of the words they are using. Jonathan Swift portrays a world governed

by utterly rational agreements, the Houyhnhm society of horses depicted in Book IV of

Gulliver s Travels, and as George Orwell long ago pointed out, the result is a society in

which no one can disagree. To do so would be to accuse oneself of irrationality – aka

insanity. And in one of the first major tributes to the psychology of projection, Swift

portrays a resolutely rational but completely insane Gulliver at the end of the Travels

stopping up his nose against the stench of Humanity.

We in the Humanities don t have to worry about this because we have a long

tradition of critiques of rationality, Swift s among them.

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 But Locke s fantasy led another direction as well. I ll just restate the fantasy

again: if everyone can completely understand the meaning of everyone else s words, truth

will rule in a democracy, just in the same way that a king rules in a monarchy. The

motivation behind Locke s radical nominalism – his essay has been seen as proposing

more about the workings of language than the mind, at least since Horne Tooke s

Diversions of Purley published in the 1790s – the motivation, political anxiety, drops out

as the drive for greater and greater terminological precision takes the form of medical

nosologies and other specialized texts. Robin Valenza has fully traced the emergence

during the eighteenth century of expert diction or what we sometimes call disciplinary

jargon.

Here we might worry as much or more than the sciences. I remember the assault

against literary theory during the late culture wars including an attack on English

professors, for writing incomprehensible treatises. I remember seeing excerpted in the

pages of Harper s Magazine my friend Judy Frank s response. I m paraphrasing here.

You wouldn t ask a physicist to stop using jargon when speaking to another physicist.

The work of specialists in any discipline requires a technical vocabulary. And of course

the point of an undergraduate and graduate education is to learn disciplinary terminology

and methods.

There is a countervailing point of view. Jurgen Habermas sees modernity as an

incomplete project precisely insofar as the specialists have not brought their insights back

to ordinary citizens. But in preventing any changes from being leveled for inadequate

functioning, Humanities disciplines are covered there as well: 1) we do an incredible job

with pedagogy, avoiding the problems of dwindling enrollments besetting the fields of

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chemistry and computer science, for instance; and 2) we even have a specific subdivision

in our fields devoted to addressing citizens, the public humanities, which we see as

worthy service.

Service. Service is part of the Holy tenure triumvirate: service, teaching, research.

Disciplinary representations are adjudged adequate if the citizenry can be targeted

through service and teaching. Not. Research.

I will take one of the most difficult books I have encountered in a long time,

Jerome Christensen s Romanticism at the End of History. I argued with a friend about

the value of the book: thank God, said I, that I work at a teaching institution and so am

habitually reminded that I must be able to communicate my research to human beings.

Reformulating your ideas in terms comprehensible to most people is, my friend countered,

a waste of time. While you are trying to communicate with students, James Chandler and

Jerome Christensen will have achieved higher levels of understanding by referring via

shortcuts to what they already know: they can build higher.

But higher for whom? For themselves and an elite group of readers? Whereas

instrumental or applied fields always find their justification for isolationist expertise in

medical or technological advances, what are ours? What is this expertise building up to?

Is it completely irrelevant to anyone except those of us in the discipline?

Of course the ends of instrumental and applied reasoning, of scientific

experimentation, are unexamined and open up huge questions. But no matter how

problematic, they are relevant to citizens lives, entering into those lives at the level of

daily practices and tacit knowledges. If the sciences have trouble because they do not

build into their discoveries and fabrications cognizance of human significance, as if

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living longer in whatever state were good in itself, the Humanities err in not taking

account of day-to-day relevance in their thinking about human significance. What I want

to suggest here and wish that we may have an open mind about as we undertake this

week s work is the following possibility: that our research would be better as research,

our theory as theory, if it functioned as part-and-parcel of thinking it through.

I hope the import of this statement is visible: it suggests that digital projects which

enable achieving new knowledge by multiple users—even non-academic, aspiring

experts—might require the kinds of thought and publication that goes beyond mere

service. Or, a better way to put that might be: it argues that incorporating service into

research makes it much better research.

I ll now give two examples.

When I came to the first NINES Summer Workshop held circa 2005, by Jerome

McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, I had a set of web pages containing bibliographies of

materials related to my own Poetess Archive. The bibliographies were organized in ways

that made complete sense to me but left some of my collaborators a bit at sea: no matter,

thought I, they just need more information about how my site is organized. These static

web pages were in fact simply the public equivalent of all my notes, say 3x5 cards,

collected as preparation for writing and publishing an argument.

But things changed at the NINES workshop. Bethany held a design class in

which she said, I want all of you to ask, What would motivate all kinds of people to

come to a site like mine, and what kinds of research question would they expect to be

able to answer? Following those instructions changed everything about the site,

everything: server location, data entry, site design, tools used, and even collaborations

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needed. Every decision about designing the database made by me and my collaborator

(incidentally, he has a Ph.D. in particle physics), every decision required confronting and

answering hard questions about disciplinary form. I felt at the end of the process that he

should be awarded an MA in English. Imagine trying to work together to determine how,

logically, mathematically, algorithmically, any work of literature in particular counts as

transatlantic. I m not sure that makes the project the equivalent of an article or book,

though indeed I was promoted to full professor based on this work, based on a letter

written by my chair who has no experience with the digital and which I will share with

you this week. But equivalencies: if all we had to do was establish equivalencies

between digital and print research, we wouldn t need to hold an NEH Summer Institute

on the topic; the task would be mundane.

My second example requires imagining a scenario, first at our moment, and

second, at a moment forty years hence. You are writing a book about Romantic

Melancholy, and it is the first day of your research leave. Over breakfast, you get onto

your wireless and peruse the library catalogue, finding some titles of related items in the

stacks, and searching a few proprietary databases purchased by your library. You finish

your coffee, jump into your Prius, drive to the library, search for parking. Once inside,

you go to the reference desk: you know there is some kind of online catalogue containing

texts important in the history of medicine, but you cannot remember the name of it – the

reference librarian helps you. Then you show him or her that you are not getting enough

hits when you search ECCO and EEBO, and he shows you some alternate terms to use:

mumpishness, for instance. He also mentions a special collection at the Clark that you

might apply for an ASECS grant to go see. Next you walk to the stacks, go to the

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PR8500s where you find the books you had gotten call numbers for on your laptop this

morning. You had been trying to judge which of the books you should trust as

authoritative on the latest research: one book published by Oxford UP is missing from the

stacks, and, when you check at the desk, they tell you that another professor has checked

it out. You will order that on Amazon dot com. In the stacks, you find another book that

had not come up when you searched the online catalogue this morning. This book is

titled, Everything Laura Mandell needs to know about melancholy before writing her

book, which you grab, as you dash out for lunch.

Now, forty years hence. No library. No stacks. No reference desk. Just you and

your laptop. Have you been fired? No. Right now, a group led by Robert Darnton at

Harvard is creating something to be called the Digital Library of America, designed to

digitize all university-library books that will be shared digitally across universities. As

Chuck Henry, President of the Council of Library Information Resources puts it,

university libraries replicating each other s holdings are too expensive to sustain. We

must eliminate [quote] redundancy.

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 When I gave a talk at Cornell delineating this scenario and some ways that we

might intervene in it, to protect our understanding, our own ways of understanding and

filtering information, one response was, I m so glad you spoke about library search

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engines. That s actually not what I m talking about: I m talking about our whole

embodied way of being scholars, and, to repeat Jerome McGann s persistent refrain,

when our thinking world is redesigned, we have to be at the table—we cannot leave it to

librarians. We, professors, students, researchers, must make this environment, and the

only way we can be at the table is if such work is recognized by departments and

administrations for the research about research that it is. Part of what we do when we

work theoretically flows through our hands, and we won t know what part that is until it

is gone, unless of course, we think this through, and preserve it.

So I ll show you a success story, a very minor one, that I hope indicates the

necessity of fully opening one s mind and working toward reconceiving research, or

maybe even fully understanding it for the first time, in a changing world that demands

our intervention. This work was done by a fictitious technical editor Laura C. Haystack

who was up for tenure, examined by participants in an MLA workshop about which

Susan will give you more information later. This editor writes in a scripting language

called XSLT. And here is the fruit of some of her work, which I ll show you live.

She oversaw the TEI-encoding and the transforming-into-web-pages of the

Letters of Robert Bloomfield, an edition edited by Tim Fulford. Bloomfield was a

working-class poet, and Elizabeth Glover (formerly Bloomfield) was his mother. If you

search in Google for Elizabeth Glover or Elizabeth Bloomfield, here is what you get:

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But if you search for Elizabeth Bloomfield Glover –

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The first three hits are web pages from this electronic scholarly edition, and a fourth is

the xml encoding for one of those pages, showing you all the information about

provenance, editing policies, collaborators, and coding.

To get these to be top returns required manipulating metadata properly.

Overseeing coding or algorithms for name extraction so that a recipient of letters comes

up in a google search requires learning to publish information in a form that enables

research. And this form of publication could be much more sophisticated, including topic

modeling, APIs, and publications about the work done in our research journals. The

point is, this publication saves the laboring-class poet s mother from oblivion, for

students, for future researchers—in making her a top return, it militates against a culture

in which the past comes to be seen as nothing more than obsolescence. The tenure judges

at the MLA worskshop said that this expert s work was equivalent to technical writing.

Is it? If not, what kinds of theorizing and argumentation are involved that may be

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invisible to an uninformed eye? Do we want researchers in Humanities disciplines doing

this work, and if so, how will we reward them?

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