RIP RT @theHapacalypse: Oh no! RT @LAist Silver Lake’s ‘Walking Man’ Marc Abrams Found Dead in Hot Tub http://bit.ly/a0TR8j #

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V. excited abt my gorgeous new bookcandy from @skylightbooks “Cartographies of Time” http://bit.ly/dnRtcr /thx @ganderman1 for the gift #

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My summer began with a trip to Fairfax, Virginia for THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp). The good people at CHNM have created something wonderful in THATCamp: it’s a user-generated unconference on digital humanities, which means that the organizational principles are quite different from those I’ve experienced at any other academic conference. And I have to say that it was hands-down the most productive, friendly, conversational, collaborative, egalitarian academic conference I’ve ever attended. And the quality of ideas and materials were not compromised, contrary to what some might think. Get ~100 super-smart, geeky/nerdy academicky types together and force everybody to check their egos in at the door, and watch great things happen.

Follow @THATCampSoCal on Twitter for information on a regional THATCamp in Southern CA, happening March 13-14 at Occidental College! Web site will be up soon too, and I’ll post the link here. (I’m not the main organizer, but am helping out).

The rest of the summer was spent here at home in East Hollywood (with a couple of brief forays out of town) writing my dissertation and working as a developer on Tim Tangherlini’s Danish Folklore project. I also took on the job of a writing computer program for a UCLA English professor that parsed the digitized text of Piers Plowman. This was pretty fun given that a) I’d read PP in college, and b) the fact that Middle English still has yogh (Ȝ ȝ) and thorn (Þ, þ) characters. Those of you who’ve experienced the joys of working with “non-standard” (i.e. non-English) character-sets and computers know what I’m talking about. I used Perl for its regex features–this was also somehow fun since I haven’t used Perl since about 2000 when I was still working for Berkeley. Ah, the geekery.

I made some decent progress on my dissertation over the summer, and was particularly motivated at the prospect of going on (drumroll please) the academic job market this academic year. I knew that the market was tough, but I hoped that I would have some chance at a job given that my specialization is in a field that’s arguably expanding rather than contracting. So September-October and into November and trickling into December, I spent many hours preparing job applications. Those of you in academia know that this is no small matter. One application, for example, asked for the following:

1. cover letter
2. C.V.
3. writing Sample (25-30 pages)
4. statement of current and future research interests
5. statement of teaching philosophy and experience
6. 2 sample syllabi
7. 3 recommendations

I spent numerous hours putting together these materials, customizing and sending off the various packages. I consulted with my advisors, attended job market workshops at UCLA, gave a mock interview, and tried my best to keep working on my dissertation through it all.

Long story short, I didn’t get a single nibble in response to the applications I sent out. Instead, I got a number of rejection letters, many of them citing 400, 600, even 900 applicants for a single position. Yikes. I’ve known from the beginning that it’d be rough, but this is really rough. As the NY Times reported, the number of humanities professorship jobs in the U.S. has dropped ~35% since last year, which was already down ~25% from the year before.

I’m definitely not alone, as both the statistics and an informal survey of my colleagues bears out. Those people I know who do have interviews have them for adjunct, lecturer, or otherwise short-term positions. As Brian Croxall explains in The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty, contingent faculty make up the bulk of the academic workforce today, and this isn’t a sustainable situation. Of course we knew this already (well, some of us, anyway), but maybe the fact that Brian’s piece was picked up by The Chronicle of Higher Ed means that those at top are finally getting it?

In any event, the whole experience has been a very sobering one. At the same time, I can’t say that I haven’t been realistic about the situation all along, and that I also haven’t been open to alternative post-doctoral careers. In fact, in addition to the professorial jobs, I am also applying to what some people on Twitter are labeling #alt-ac (alternative-academic) jobs–and I did get to the final round of interviews for one. The challenge now is to find a position in which I can utilize the full range of my skills, training and experience (technical and humanities).

Aside from the Job Market Epic Fail, I’ve found my research and work pretty fulfilling this past year. I made progress on my dissertation and Litmap, and have received much interest in them both. One chapter of the dissertation will be published in a book forthcoming in 201o (more info to come). Although writing continues to be the hardest thing I do, it’s probably also the most rewarding when I actually sit down and do it! I recently discovered Scrivener for Mac OS, which I absolutely love and highly recommend as a writing composition framework/tool, by the way.

On the programming side of things, I did a lot of database work leading up to the fantastic Orient North: Mapping Nordic Literary Culture conference at UCLA in early December, at which the Mapping Danish Folklore, Ibsen Elsewhere and Mapping Icelandic Manuscript Production projects were featured. Coming off those projects, I was hired by UCHRI as the lead programmer for the Digital Media Learning Competition, which was picked up as part of Obama’s new STEM educational initiative. In sum: busy, busy, busy, but fulfilling in that I’m getting to keep up my programming chops, work in all kinds of environments and with new people, and see how people are using technology in all kinds of innovative ways.

I also have a cool little gig along with Brian Croxall working for the Scholars’ Lab / NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, helping put together a clearinghouse of resources for humanities scholars working with geospatial/GIS tools. And last but not least, I’m going to geek summer school! Oh, and did I mention that I’m planning on filing my dissertation at the beginning of June? Time to get writing.

On to 2010!

Sterling’s first point is that:

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

I thoroughly disagree with the definition of “literature” expressed here, and I’d venture to say that a good number of people writing literature and writing about literature would too. A piece of writing needn’t be mono-national in order to qualify as literature. There’s plenty of literature that isn’t. And what does Sterling mean by “language-based”? Did he mean to say “monolingual”? Again, a text needn’t be monolingual in order to be literature. Absolutely not. Apparently Sterling is honing in on the notion of a national literary canon and taking that as his definition of literature. I would agree that this idea of national literary canons is (and always was) invalid and outmoded, and that we need to move away from it if we haven’t already.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
3. Intellectual property systems failing.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.
7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

All of the above points speak to the idea of “literature” as necessarily print-based and connected to the print media industry. Why not use the words “print media industry” instead of including this under the titular umbrella of “literature”?

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation
9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.[sic]

As before, these points are premised on a very specific notion of literature as the literary canon that is necessarily connected to the print media industry.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

Again, the fact that Sterling hasn’t defined the term “literature” is very confusing here. Where is the line between literature and “subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression”? It’s as though he assumes we’re all working from the same definition, but this definition is far from clear. He seems to be suggesting, though, that under the old print media economy, access to publication meant that a text had achieved literary status. At least in the non-niche genres (i.e. not fantasies, romances and teen books). But it’s confusing.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.
13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

Here, Sterling swings back to thinking about medium specificity. Books are just one medium among many; digital media challenge the longstanding monopoly of the printed book in terms of the production of “texts.” In these points he seems to want to say something more general about the book’s place within a larger media ecology.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

I’d love to hear examples of this! Sounds kind of exciting maybe, and yet I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that I can quite think of anybody who fits this description. What exactly is meant by “steeped within the disciplines”? And how does one become “virtual intelligentsia”?

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

What exactly do these have to do with literature? Does he mean to imply that the academy defines the literary canon, and that this system is now compromised?

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Has Sterling read a report somewhere that the production of poetry in general is down, or is it that “literary” poetry is dwindling by some measure? I’d love to hear an explanation of this statement, and also wonder how it connects to the other 17 items.

In short, I find these points to be fairly confusing, and think a definition of the term “literature” is sorely lacking — and perhaps misused in some cases. I’m sure the post was meant to be provocative and therefore a bit ambiguous and open-ended, but then again I’m not sure that it says anything new, and in some cases I just find it plain perplexing.

Without further ado, here are my notes:

• Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the definition of  the Digital Humanities in terms of theory/praxis issues. I see the Litmap project as being the “praxis” component that exists together with the theoretical part of my research: in other words, it is not a standalone component, but rather something than needs to be understood within the larger context of my dissertation project.
• Litmap is a tool I’ve created to help and enable me to read and theorize literature.
• Ideally, Litmap helps to illuminate the text, to create new knowledge about the kind of spatiality that is at work in the text on a narrative level.
• Litmap is not a distance reading tool (à la Franco Moretti)
• Litmap is meant to be used in conjunction with the primary text at hand, then.
• Unfortunately, Litmap does not count as work towards degree!

Moving to the Show & Tell portion of the presentation (below is an approximate screenshot of what I demo’ed while I spoke from the notes pasted below it):

• The example I’m showing is a map of The Rings of Saturn [Die Ringe des Saturn], a novel by W.G. Sebald.
• In the right-hand column, I’ve listed the “lexia” in which place names are mentioned in the book. These places are then plotted on the map on the left.
• The narrative of The Rings of Saturn is structured around the 1st-person narrator’s retelling of his walking tour of an approximately 30-mile stretch of eastern English coastline (in Suffolk). This journey is mapped in red on the map. As you can see, it has an vaguely figure-8 shape.
• As the narrator retraces his path, he tells stories of places that are spatially/geographically removed from the local area of his walking tour. This creates a narrative network of places that becomes increasingly global in scope:

At this point I zoomed out on Litmap to show approximately what you see in the screenshot below:

• Here we have a visual illustration of place that conceives of local place (i.e., Suffolk) as having a global history.
• My argument (which I of course explain in much greater detail in my dissertation) is that in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald illustrates a spatialized view of history that sees the local as globally defined (and here I draw on the work of Henri Lefevbre, Doreen Massey and other thinkers on space and place).
• (Incidentally, the orange lines on the map denote the trajectory of Joseph Conrad’s life, which is described in Chapter V of The Rings of Saturn. More colors, icons, etc. on the map in general coming down the pipeline soon. Plans for more fine-grained data visualization have been brewing with the help of data visualization guru friend @noahi, and the mysql database in the background is ready to support it…)

What Litmap helps with:

• Visualizing connections.
• Identifying how many place names are geographically specific in a given text (and there are many in The Rings of Saturn!)
• Mapping various texts throws the geographical/spatial specificities of each into relief. (This will become much clearer when I’ve completed the mapping of the 2nd book, which is in progress. The differences are pretty remarkable).

Challenges and limitations:

• In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald has a “cosmological” notion of historical space in addition the local and global one. It is not possible to map this cosmological notion of space using the Google Maps API!
• Using the Google Maps API (or similar) restricts the user to that vision/version of geographical space. When you’re working with that data, be aware that you’re working with those pre-provided layers of information, which have their own inherent assumptions built in.

The End.