Susan Brown is the project director of the Orlando Project, which has for more than a decade been exploring new ways of undertaking feminist literary history collaboratively using computers. Its major product is the born digital scholarly textbase
Patricia Clements is the founding director of the Orlando Project, which has for more than a decade been exploring new ways of undertaking feminist literary history collaboratively using computers. Its major product is the born digital scholarly textbase
Isobel Grundy is the founding co-investigator of the Orlando Project, which has for more than a decade been exploring new ways of undertaking feminist literary history collaboratively using computers. Its major product is the born digital scholarly textbase
Stan Ruecker is the co-investigator and lead designer of the Orlando Project, which has for more than a decade been exploring new ways of undertaking feminist literary history collaboratively using computers. Its major product is the born digital scholarly textbase
Jeffery Antoniuk is the systems analyst of the Orlando Project, which has for more than a decade been exploring new ways of undertaking feminist literary history collaboratively using computers. Its major product is the born digital scholarly textbase
Sharon Balazs is the textbase manager of the Orlando Project, which has for more than a decade been exploring new ways of undertaking feminist literary history collaboratively using computers. Its major product is the born digital scholarly textbase
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
The case of the Orlando Project offers a useful interrogation of concepts like
completion and finality, as they emerge in the arena of electronic publication. The
idea of doneness
circulates discursively within a complex and evolving
scholarly ecology where new modes of digital publication are changing our conceptions
of textuality, at the same time that models of publication, funding, and archiving
are rapidly changing. Within this ecology, it is instrumental and indeed valuable to
consider particular tasks and stages done, even as the capacities of digital media
push against a sense of finality. However, careful interrogation of aims and ends is
required to think through the relation of a digital project to completion, whether
modular, provisional, or of the project as a whole.
When can a digital scholarly project be considered finally done
?
When can a digital scholarly project be considered finally done
? Perhaps never.
Something done is past, irrevocable, requiring nothing more and indeed immune from
further action. The case of the Orlando Project, a large-scale and longstanding digital
humanities undertaking, reveals an arbitrariness, even a fictiveness or
contradictoriness, to the notion of completion of the project as a whole or even of its
major online product. Digital humanities projects are considerably more prone than
traditional humanities undertakings to riding off into the sunset until the next
installment rather than being laid to rest. Doneness
circulates discursively
within a complex and evolving scholarly ecology where new modes of digital publication
are changing our conceptions of textuality, at the same time that models of publication,
funding, and archiving are rapidly changing. Within this ecology, it is instrumental and
indeed valuable (indeed, as Matt Kirschenbaum suggests here, highly satisfying) to
consider particular tasks and stages done, even as the capacities of digital media push
against a sense of finality. However, careful interrogation of aims and ends is required
to think through the relation of a digital project to completion, whether modular,
provisional, or of the project as a whole.
In the digital humanities we often organize undertakings in terms of projects
,
research endeavours that are probably, ideally, a collaborative enterprise carefully planned to achieve a particular
aim
Oxford English Dictionary 2007, project
to project
suggests, are
future-oriented. Some — an example would be the nora Project [nora] — last about as
long as the money from a particular grant, but others — the Perseus Project and the
Women Writers Project are examples — continue over many years and multiple grant
funding cycles. A successful project is thus not necessarily geared to realizing a
particular aim
. Perseus as an evolving digital
library
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
A planned or proposed undertaking; a
scheme, a proposal; a purpose, an objective
Oxford English Dictionary 2007, project
So there's clearly a lot that scholars involved with such projects want to do without
being done, particularly insofar as being undone is compatible with disseminating
materials to others and engaging in scholarly dialogue about them. At root is not
only, as the introduction here suggests, a culture of perpetual prototypes that
mitigates desire for closure, or funding structures that poorly support the
finishing
process for non-commercialized projects. It is also the very
multi-faceted nature of much digital humanities research, which so often straddles
the divide between content development and technological experimentation. This
interplay between traditional humanities content and innovative methodologies means
there is always more to be done.
The Orlando Project, with its aim of producing the first full scholarly
history of women's writing in the British Isles
Brown et al. 2006, home page
The project’s cofounders (Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy) were new
to digital humanities research, so our notions of scholarly process and completion
related to conventional print publications. As Claire Warwick has noted, the idea of
what is complete
or publication-ready
in academic culture has emerged
from a complex set of human factors relating to such matters as the attribution of
credit by institutions and funding structures, as well as the conception of what is
required intellectually for a product to be done
Working at the interface between humanities research questions and evolving digital methods means that projections about the trajectories of digital humanities work are less likely to be accurate than those of traditional scholarship. This is not to say that any research project may not run into snags or unforeseen delays - instances, particularly in the history of earlier scholarship, include Samuel Johnson's having to restart his dictionary mid-stream because he realized that working with small slips of paper would be better than the old technology of full sheets - but these are less often related to the methodology per se of the scholarly undertaking. In the case of Orlando, the ambition and experimentality of what we had undertaken on the technical side had a radical impact on the progress of the literary work with which it was interdependent, both because key researcher time was involved in the development of the custom tagset we developed and successively refined as a key component of our methodological experimentation, and because we had to build in-house production and delivery systems from scratch in ways that we had not anticipated. The risk of these sorts of impacts is endemic to methodologically experimental research of any kind, and particularly relevant to digital humanities work. Such impacts don’t mean that the project is not pursuing its aims effectively, but they can have a major impact on anticipated timelines and perceptions of productivity, especially if the project has been articulated in relation to a particular aim or deliverable.
Digital humanists therefore need to plan and sequence with care their deliverables, which are important not only because our work must take objective form to be shared with our colleagues, but also because those are the ways in which we are accountable to the funding bodies that make our often costly work possible. Given the risk-oriented nature of experimental research, it is strategic to promise outcomes that are both multiple and modular. The Orlando Project struggled for funding in later stages as a result, we believe, of a project design that focused on a single, end-loaded monumental deliverable.
The big ta-da!
moment of publication is a very common strategy, one followed
by the Blake Archive in 1996 with its release of
ta-daprovides both that crucial sense of satisfaction and progress for the participants and a landmark achievement that constitutes important evidence of completion of at least a phase of the project for funding agencies. It has drawbacks, however. Focus on an end deliverable can obscure interim accomplishments. The Orlando Project's research plan was designed to proceed through a number of stages. Indeed, the milestones and the mid-term review required by the MCRI Program are examples of the kind of official part-done marker which, although it may not arise organically from the research needs or achievements and is imposed from the outside by the bureaucratic rules of another entity, can nevertheless be used by researchers as a spur to setting and meeting meaningful interim goals. Many of those markers were, however, internal to the project, which meant that they didn't provide the same kind of objective sense of progress that comes with public release. Externally, and for our funding agency, what registered was what we had not done, rather than what we had accomplished. An immense online
productsuch as that Orlando promised from the outset does well then to be balanced by some objective, interim goals. In addition, the launch that suits a book does run somewhat counter to the ongoing life of many digital projects if it leaves people thinking that the project itself is finished.
Other projects have made their way into the world rather differently, in ways suggestive of ongoing curation. The Poetess Archive, for instance, began as a series of rather modest web pages that have grown over time in both scope and sophistication, moving from HTML into XML with a sophisticated search interface. Editorial ventures perhaps lend themselves particularly well to an incremental approach. The Brown University Women Writers Project (http://www.wwp.brown.edu), for instance, first transcribed and encoded texts, made printouts available and partnered with a publishing house, and released Renaissance Women Online. By the time Women Writers Online was made available by subscription, it was clear that, although it was a major event, it was part of a continuing project. Just as software projects typically put out numbered releases, which provide the triumphant moment of celebration while suggesting that more is yet to come, designing projects to incorporate such incrementalism by way of staged releases that mark phases of accomplishment or a number of discrete and in some way publishable deliverables, seems a particularly useful way to structure digital projects.
So it seems crucial to design digital humanities projects with a number of discrete and in some way publishable deliverables. Ideally, these should be modular, that is, functionally independent of one another. This means each has the potential for separate funding, can proceed on its own, and can provide a satisfying moment of completion. Modularity, however, suits some kinds of projects better than others. Both content and software systems often rely on the interrelation of various parts that can make it a challenge for one part to develop independently of the others. And even where a high degree of modularity is possible, modules usually need to be integrated at some point, so careful coordination to ensure eventual compatibility is still necessary, as well as an eventual convergence of module completion.
Various factors can work against modular publication.
done. Yet doneness there was relative: there occurred a regular effect whereby the production of a new entry spurred significant improvement in several supposedly complete ones. An iterative process developed, not unlike the successive stages required in traditional humanities research, where the gradual accretion of knowledge slowly modifies the researcher’s view and understanding of material. There was a strong sense both that the content work had to progress to a certain point of intellectual maturity, and that there were intellectual demands for a certain degree of coverage. We wouldn’t be
done, for instance, without having completed the materials on Virginia Woolf or George Eliot. Because much feminist work has resisted the establishment of a small canon of female writers at the expense of others, such major writers needed to be situated in relation to less prominent contemporaries, and because we rejected a separatist understanding of literary history, we needed to include some male and international writers. Despite the apparent modularity of our content, we held off publishing until we had 1,149 entries completed. Thus, where scholarly content is concerned, a certain critical mass may be held necessary to establish scholarly confidence in the quality of a resources. Whether that threshold constitutes a single digital object, such as an edited text, or thousands of objects will vary. But it can work against a modular approach. Further revision is of course possible: the
Technical considerations constitute a further challenge to modular publishing, since a prototype is one thing and a debugged, multiple-browser-supporting, polished publication vehicle is another. We know that users are very easily put off by frustration in the use of new resources or tools, so publishing components that are unstable or poorly integrated may have a seriously negative impact. In the case of
Orlando shifted to a more staged publication model by uncoupling the electronic from
the print publication, so that the former stands alone initially. Yet the textbase
was published relatively complete. Thus, while structuring projects modularly is
highly desirable for a range of reasons, truly modular publication may present
challenges with respect to audiences from beyond the digital humanities community.
Research domain, project conceptualization, and publication options are all crucial
determinants of how done
will be defined for a particular project. Project
members need to arrive at a shared understanding of what constitutes an acceptable
degree of intellectual maturity, critical mass of content, and technological finish
at initial publication. This is particularly important since projects often seem to
be judged by both funders and traditional humanities users according to their state
at first release, as if they were a book. Once a first set of material is released,
staged publication — such as the addition of new components, functionalities, or
alternative interfaces — and incrementation — such as additions to or enhancement of
existing content — become easier. However, in project planning, it seems
strategically important for researchers to stress to funders the value of interim
publications and subprojects, and generally not to allow a major deliverable to
swallow up the identity of a project as a whole, so that the perception that the
former is done
does not carry with it a sense that the latter is also
finished. Release or version numbers, or other ways of flagging the open-endedness of
an electronic publication may be helpful in this regard.
Digital projects, if they aim to move beyond prototypes and court a mainstream
humanities user community, need to recognize at the planning and budgeting stage the
very high overhead involved in the development of delivery systems robust and usable
enough to be considered in some sense finished.done
in
several respects.
Published is traditionally done, as David Sewell argues in his essay in this cluster.
But published electronic projects don’t get put on a shelf in a library. Being
unconstrained by print materiality reinforces the arbitrariness of deciding that
something is done in the sense of complete
, which is defined in the
Having all its parts or members; comprising the full number or amount; embracing all the requisite items, details, topics, etc.; entire, full.Published may mean (provisionally) done without meaning complete, and there is of course a long tradition of encyclopedic print publications issuing a series of updates or supplements. Digital publication allows us to define done in terms of the kind of intrinsic completeness suggested by the
fullhistory of women’s writing in the British Isles. Our contract with our publisher recognises the provisionality of our completion by stipulating for updates, as well as in the plan for the volumes of discursive history. We’ve increased and enhanced both content and functionality semi-annually since publication.
The done
founded on digital publication is fragile in another sense because of
the rapidity of technological change. The stability of book technology means that a
book can be done and put to rest by both authors and publishers: even if it goes out
of print, so long as copies endure in libraries they can continue to be used in
perpetuity. But digital publications require more active support. Even if no
technological enhancements are desired, for an electronic text to remain usable, it
has to be stored somewhere in a form that is accessible to evolving technologies.
This means it requires more active curation: even a quite straightforward web
publication becomes unusable if it can’t keep pace with browser releases. A new
version of a project produced to migrate with current standards and practices is
different from a second print edition in a number of respects. While both respond to
a perception of continued demand for the product, the electronic migration is
required to keep the resource accessible at all, and it does not supplement the first
edition, which in the case of print will persist, but materially speaking supercedes
or replaces it. This means that updates to electronic publications, while having a
decided formal edge over errata slips or supplemental volumes, bear the additional
burden of keeping the text in circulation. Being done with a digital publication may
mean that the work disappears entirely from use.
The potential evanescence of a project’s digital output creates pressures on the scholar, team, or publisher to keep it available. The academic community is still groping to discover how best to sustain digital publications over the long term. In the meantime, to meet even modest needs for technical migration and to keep content current, projects must continue to find funding, which can be challenging if a project is perceived as done as a result of publication. The Orlando Project, as part of its strategy of sustainability, licensed the textbase to the University of Alberta, and the University in turn sub-licensed it to Cambridge University Press. This arrangement created a revenue stream to help support the project’s preparations for publication and its updates and ongoing activities. It also sustains Orlando’s identity at its home institution and gives a broader constituency than the team members an interest in the project’s success. This is important because, although like other ongoing projects Orlando has been able to obtain research funding for new initiatives, maintenance funding is a major challenge.
Part of the problem is in how we conceive of digital publications. Many ongoing
digital publications should be understood by analogy with journals, for whom
done
can be applied to particular issues but not to the relevant research
area. Continuing work despite previous publication is then part of the mandate,
rather than the extraordinary burden it would seem in comparison with a book. The
analogy applies only in part, because of course the entire text of a digital
publication is fluid and subject to ongoing revision as that of a print journal is
not. But it helps conceive more appropriately what done
might mean for a lot
of digital projects, with their capacity to increment and to migrate both
technologically and with their field, just as does the analogy of the library for the
Perseus Project.
Indeed, from a theoretical perspective, an electronic publication will arguably never
be done
precisely because of the nature of electronic textuality. Print texts
are susceptible (as indeed were manuscripts and printed texts) to all sorts of
repurposing, from reissue through quotation and anthologizing, to reprinting or
incorporating in works of graphic art. In a digital environment, this aspect of
textuality is greatly intensified by the ease with which one can sample
texts,
and the ability to separate content from presentation in digital formats means that
entire works can be readily reformed or deformed. To take a familiar digital activity
as an example, textual editing in an electronic environment must be reconceived as
involving several different modes of editing. A TEI-conformant XML edition can form
the basis of other quite divergent editions, such as an intentionalist rather than a
genetic or fluid-text
edition such as the Rotunda Press edition of Melville’s
doneto an extent always provisional.
The fact that electronic texts are not static leads to the thorny issue of archiving
them, surely a marker of some kind of doneness. For although the digital
archive
is used loosely to refer to the total volume of material available in
digital form, attempting to do for digital culture what government, university,
museums, and other organized archives have done for print culture — preserve records
of the past so as to allow others to access it in the future, including selection,
arrangement, conservation, cataloguing — is a major challenge. Even the term
archive
may suggest misleading parallels between older archival practices
and what is possible or appropriate for digital materials. People deposit books,
personal papers, or theses in an archive, where they remain, unchanged, unless a
medium like acid paper demands conservation, for future generations to consult. That
may be possible for some resources such as collections of static web pages, as
recorded by the Internet Archive, but for dynamic digital resources such as the
Orlando Project, archiving even a substantial set of web pages would be only the tip
of the iceberg. The Orlando Project has committed to archiving with the University of
Alberta Library, which currently entails a fairly well-defined set of practices
designed to ensure long-term survival of the data. However, current practices are
unlikely to be able to document either the dynamic text or the research process,
which was an experiment in large-scale humanities research and computing. We can
archive our internal materials, such as meeting minutes, policy documents, and so on.
We have an archive of all past versions of the documents that make up the textbase,
and of past versions of the delivery system (code and content), so that what it
looked like in the past is recoverable. But particular versions will only be
recoverable as we have machines that run the browsers and the coding behind them. We
need as a community to grapple further with the question of how to archive dynamic
resources.
Funding bodies such as SSHRC have policies requiring the public archiving of data,
even though many researchers are unaware of this requirement and despite the fact
that the country lacks the standards and indeed the facilities to permanently archive
digital material You are viewing a document archived by Library and Archives Canada. Please note,
information may be out of date and some functionality lost
But archiving alone would represent a form of doneness that many digital projects hardly seek. We want
Nor should sustainability be narrowly conceived. Informal user feedback on
undone: if we are to evolve useful tools and resources we need carefully to assess how people use them and experiment with ways of making them better. Such inquiry is integral to the Orlando Project’s continuing research, since two of its major aims were to establish the viability of extensive, domain-specific semantic markup to enable new kinds of scholarship, and to help shift scholarly users of electronic materials towards more complex engagement with electronic resources. The project also aimed to leverage the markup in ways that we did not have the resources to implement: whether we can ever have done with, that is to have realised, those ambitions will depend on future developments.
The Orlando Project directs its research towards two practically inexhaustible
fields: women’s literary history and the capacity of computing — specifically of
extensive XML markup — to serve the needs of this area of humanities inquiry.
Done
becomes, over the course of such an ongoing and complex digital
project, a strategic, continually negotiated marker valuable in a range of ways for
defining a specific stage of a process which is not unlike that of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu’s solo periodical To be continued as long as the Author
thinks fit, and the Public likes it
Donefor
Although they are by no means all unique to digital publication, the factors outlined
here, ranging from project conception and design through modes of textuality and
publication to complications in sustainability and archiving, work collectively to
complicate what done
means in the context of digital research. They come of
participating in a rapidly transforming context for research and publication in the
humanities. Many of these threads are tied together by a common concern that has not
been present for major projects that issue in print publication: the question of how
to make the results of the research continuingly available to others after the point
of initial publication. Whatever done
means for a particular project, those
involved face the challenge of ensuring that it does not paradoxically mean a swift
end to scholarly circulation and contribution. While a comparison to the loss of the
library at Alexandria in the pre-print era might be a tad hyperbolic, it is sobering
to contemplate the waste of knowledge and intellectual effort that would result from
the failure of the academic community to resolve the thorny problem of how to sustain
access, over the long term, to the results of the first generation of experimental
endeavours in the digital humanities if we can’t figure out what is to be done.