ABSTRACTS
EXPLORING THE ARCHIVE IN THE DIGITAL AGE CONFERENCE
Anatomy Theatre and Museum, King’s College London
6 – 8 May 2010
Maite Usoz de la Fuente and Gabriela Mejan, King’s College London
Archiving Archives: the status of serialised publications as archives and within the Archive
Dr Paul Spence and John O’Neill, King’s College London
Performance, edition and archive: scholarly challenges in digitising Hispanic theatre materials
The ‘Out of the Wings’ project (http://outofthewings.org.uk) “aims to expose the riches of the theatres of Spain and Spanish America to English-speaking researchers and theatre professionals” using a virtual framework which facilitates the collection, management and dissemination of information about plays, authors and translators. The project draws on the tools and methodologies of not only traditional scholarship but also the emerging ‘Digital Humanities’, which foster collaboration across disciplinary, institutional and international boundaries.
We will describe the challenges in building a digital resource which aims to both inform and be informed by an audience interested in performing Spanish/Spanish American plays in English: the database of plays which will form the project’s scholarly core will be supplemented by user-centred tools that will enable people to suggest changes, propose new plays and re-configure the information provided to suit their own objectives. We will discuss the conceptual and methodological implications of this approach for scholars interested in theatre-based practice and scholarship, making reference to related research being carried out at King’s and further afield.
Research embedded within the project, focusing on Cervantes’ ‘La entretenida’, aims to create an encoding model for a digital edition of Cervantes’s play ‘La entretenida’ that, in the same way as the ‘Out of the Wings database, seeks to respond to the needs of different potential end users, such as academics, performers, and translators. Modelling the text through XML (according to the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines) makes it possible to reflect the instability of the text, which arises both from the process of production and from the nature of theatre as a genre, by producing multiple views of the punctuation. The encoding model also allows one to privilege the verse through various formatting options, in a way that is not possible with traditional printed editions, and to generate sophisticated indices that allow different user-groups to search the text in new ways. The methodology could be extended not only to other works by Cervantes but also to other Spanish Golden Age plays (and indeed drama more generally).
Dr Claire Taylor, University of Liverpool and Dr Thea Pitman, University of Leeds
Keynote address
Ernesto Priego, University College London
The Tell-Tale of Burning Paper: Traditional and Digital Archival Research in Comics Scholarship
A look back at the past of comic books is always clouded in the smoke of furnaces: the history of comics is, indeed, the history of their destruction. (Gravett and Stanbury, 2006). The comics historian faces a double challenge: on the one hand, the need to prove comic books’ historical relevance in a social context that still largely denies them cultural legitimacy; on the other, the urgency to overcome the “intoxicating aroma” of mere nostalgia. So-called “traditional” and digital archiving of comics and related materials can prove essential for comics as a particular form, but an understanding of what comics are and do from a ‘materiality’ point of view is important to understand the implications of either preserving and collecting printed comics, digitising them (Wright 2008), encoding them using mark-up languages (Walsh 2002), conducting research using digital resources and/or reading and preserving digital comics.
The specific relationship between comics and mechanical technology is rooted in the development of newspapers and periodicals in the 1890s. This created technical circumstances that defined the form we now recognise as “comics” and, importantly, a series of social characteristics in their creation, distribution and reception. Archival research requires understanding comics as a form defined by a set of more or less fixed formal features and by a series of interconnections with other media, including that in which it appears (the newspaper, the magazine, the blog, etc.) and the social context in which it is produced and received (Marion 1993). This paper aims to discuss the challenges and boundaries that the multimodal, multimedia nature of comics poses to the researcher in the digital era.
Sophie Kelsall, King’s College London
Using Facebook as a Dynamic Participatory Archive
The Internet has completely transformed the process of archiving and accessing records, making it possible to freely consult digitised, searchable collections without geographical or temporal constraints. So-called Web 2.0 applications, which make it easy for users to produce their own content, have further expanded the multitude of new archives being available online. Among these, Social Networking Sites (SNSs) represent a source of potentially rich data on computer-mediated communication and offer new opportunities for people to negotiate and perform ethnolinguistic membership. For researchers interested in young people and how they engage in social life, it has become arguably very difficult to ignore their use of SNSs.
However, SNSs constitute unusual digital archives in that they are both dynamic and participatory. Unlike paper archives, they are in flux: data can be edited and removed, making records becoming potentially unreliable or outdated. The most important departure from paper archives, however, is probably their interactive quality. Researchers can modify and even become part of the archive when they need to join a site in order to access data within it. This direct penetration of the archive can be challenging for academics used to face-to-face interaction and static texts. This paper reviews some of the key methodological issues that have emerged when using SNS Facebook as part of an ongoing ethnographic study of youth of Latin American descent in London. It focuses especially on questions of expertise, interaction, and the ethics of conducting online research.
Prof Diana Taylor, New York University
Keynote address
Valentino Gianuzzi and Carlos Fernández, University College London
A Digital César Vallejo
The Vallejo Archive (El Archivo Vallejo) is a digital resource devoted to the study of the life and work of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. The Archive’s principal aim is to make available online Vallejo’s complete writings and to offer documents, texts and contextual information of difficult and restricted access even to specialized scholars. It is complemented by other scholarly resources such as a complete iconography, an annotated bibliography and an edition of Vallejo’s correspondence. Vallejo’s work will thus be available not only in a fully-searchable digital transcription, but also through the images of the first editions of his books, which are in general the most authorized textual source for the works he published during his lifetime.
The initial step for setting up the Archive has been an intensive archival work started in 2006 and still in progress. Part of that archival research has been published recently in the book César Vallejo: textos rescatados (Ricardo Palma University Press). The paper will discuss the double process that is currently being carried out of a more traditional archival research in Peruvian public and private archives (such as Peru’s National Library or the Juan Espejo Asturrizaga Archive), and the more technological work of preserving the material found in order to make it available to the vast majority of scholars. The paper will address the benefits and shortcomings of this method.
A small, preliminary version of the Vallejo Archive is currently available online, housed at Hoftra University’s César Vallejo Studies Center, at http://archivovallejo.wordpress.com.
Ana Belén Rodríguez Fontecha Universidad de Oviedo / King’s College London
La musicología en España
El propósito de este ensayo, es el de trazar un perfil del actual panorama de la musicología en España y de cómo las nuevas tecnologías han influido en las técnicas de investigación durante las últimas dos décadas.
La enseñanza de la musicología en las universidades españolas lleva solamente implantada desde el año 1985. Previamente los musicólogos españoles llevaban a cabo su actividad investigadora a través de cátedras específicas, aulas de música y conservatorios superiores, único lugar donde podía se podía alcanzar la titulación de musicólogo. Durante ese tiempo se llevó a cabo un tipo de investigación dedicado a la recuperación del patrimonio musical español, y tratado desde un enfoque positivista, donde rara vez se incluían ejemplos musicales. Sin embargo, en los últimos años se han desarrollado extensamente los estudios críticos y analíticos, para los que las nuevas tecnologías se han vuelto indispensables. Hoy en día, el uso de las nuevas tecnologías, el conocimiento general de las mismas u otros conocimientos específicos como los programas de edición de partituras, se combinan con los métodos de investigación tradicionales. En este sentido, trataremos entre otros los siguientes puntos fundamentales:
- Abaratamiento de los costes de edición de partituras.
- Grabación en CD o DVD del patrimonio musical histórico y contemporáneo.
- Consulta de fuentes in situ.
- Fuentes consultables desde otras plataformas como internet y sus problemas de fiabilidad, temporalidad, etc.
- Estudio de la titulación de musicología con carácter no presencial en la Universidad de la Rioja.
- Valoración de cómo han afectado estos puntos a la difusión de la labor musicológica en España.
Prof Fernando Gómez Herrero, Oberlin College, USA
Do “Digital” and “Humanities” Go Well Together?: A Virilian Reflection
This presentation will take into account the influential work of the French intellectual Paul Virilio, a truly demanding “anthropologist” of communication technologies. I have initially in mind his provocative text The University of Disaster (Polity, 2010), that deals with the conditioning of knowledge production and university life in our conjuncture.
Is it possible to put “digital” and “humanities” together? What does such “old-label” field of studies mean at the beginning of the new century in form, content, function, etc.? How deeply does it relate –if at all– to what might have meant for those with an awareness of past, tradition, archive, background? How does digitality affect old and new “humanities” (or the “liberal arts”)? I want to explore the negativity of the possibility of a relationship (or “dis-relationship”) initially assuming a Virilian standpoint in the aforementioned text. I will put it in relation to others by him against a wider notion of “literacy.”
Timespace mutations is one of the fundamentals underpinning Virilio’s world. Reality becomes virtual reality, increasingly intolerant of older modalities of non-digital being.
A favorite category of Virilio is speed, a mutational conditioning of knowledge production that does damage to previously more stable timespace arrangement.
According to Virilio, the supremacy of the screen over the written word spells disaster for a university system that has been passed down since the year 1000. We are currently experiencing a crisis in the foundations of knowledge structures, and indifference will not turn it around. This presentation will synthesize some situations in the pedagogic floor of US academy. I will take into account the Virilian staging of the sciences without a conscience, and his rejection of the traditional division of education into humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. The increasingly “totalitarian” continent of virtuality has pushed all other forms of knowledge into the small closet of “history.” I will look into the Virilian presuppositions of his own radical critique. It’s not clear where Virilio builds the foundations of his own critique. Yet my admiration for him does not go away.
Ana Gorría Ferrín, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, España
¿la biblioteca de babel?
Crítica literaria: memoria, autonomía y autoridad en algunas bitácoras literarias en lengua española.
Internet como medio ha venido a modificar los mecanismos de selección, recepción e interpretación de los documentos. En buena medida, el ritmo de las bitácoras ha modificado el concepto de “actualidad” en todos sus ámbitos (también en el literario) basados en la extrapolación de experiencias literarias, asociados al ámbito de la lectura vivencial, de la pluralidad y de la creación de lugares que luchan contra el concepto de campo que Bourdieau caracterizara como definido por “la limitación, la lucha, la convención y el consenso pactado, la posibilidad de la crisis del sistema y la desigualdad en la distribución de fuerzas”[1].
La bitácora literaria, que lleva a cabo en su propia fundación el mal de archivo que diagnosticara Derrida como uno de los síntomas del actual horizonte de expectativas cultural, es al mismo tiempo el punto de intersección entre el concepto de campo y el de juego, tal y como ha subrayado Bordieau: ““El sentido del juego es a la vez la realización de la teoría del juego y su negación como teoría [2].”
El propósito de esta comunicación es llevar a cabo una lectura crítica de algunas de las bitácoras más representativas del universo cibernético en lengua española, proponiendo el género textual de la bitácora literaria como un ejercicio que oscila entre la creación documental, la memoria, el texto autobiográfico y el de la acumulación literaria. Del mismo modo, se impone la necesidad de un registro de Internet que permita a la hora de valorar la recepción e impacto de las múltiples manifestaciones artísticas en humanidades, el acceso a los investigadores a este material que surge en su nacimiento, siguiendo la metáfora borgiana, como un universo de difícil y árida comprensión.
Chus Martínez Domínguez, Xurxo Pantaleón Cadilla, Antonio Somoza Cayado, A Navalla Suíza, Xavier Cid, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, España
Aplicación Web para el tratamiento, conservación y divulgación de la Historia actual. El caso del Proyecto de Investigación Interuniversitario “Nomes e Voces”: http://www.nomesevoces.net
La ponencia realizará un análisis del modo de investigación histórica en la era digital a través de la experiencia y los avances conseguidos por el Proyecto de Investigación Interuniversitario “Nomes e Voces”, cuyos resultados se divulgan a través de la Web http://nomesevoces.net. El procedimiento de trabajo desenvuelto por este Proyecto y su línea de colaboración iniciada con A Navalla Suíza, equipo de especialistas en el asesoramiento y desarrollo de comunicación en Internet, propician un ámbito para el diálogo y la creación conjunta que prolonga el hecho investigador a través de instrumentos alternativos para la catalogación, ordenación de contenidos y divulgación.
La experiencia conseguida en el proceso de trabajo de “Nomes e Voces” nos permite tener una perspectiva innovadora sobre la convergencia entre la metodología de investigación y el desarrollo de herramientas Web apropiadas, tanto para la fase de archivo y catalogación como en la fase de divulgación.
La metodología de los trabajos realizados nos acerca a nuevas formas de desarrollo en el estudio de la Historia, que incorpora y substituye instrumentos y procedimientos que inciden de modo particular en la mecánica del trabajo y sobre todo en su visibilidad e interpretación.
En cuanto a la herramienta, presentamos el desarrollo de una aplicación Web, el phpCan, que da respuesta a las necesidades del equipo de historiadores, tanto como herramienta interna de catalogación y archivo de documentos digitales, como aprovechamiento de eses datos archivados para presentaciones multimedia de diversos tipos con carácter divulgativo.
Dr. Gerben Zaagsma
The politics of digitisation? Exploring online digital sources in Jewish history
If we are to strenghten the position of digital history within the humanities it is essential to discuss how traditional historical practice is impacted by new technologies. To date though, many discussions tend to focus on technical problems while shunning methodological reflection. Yet if we look at digital sources available on the internet today important questions can be raised regarding their production and use in historical practice. In this paper I will focus on the production of digital sources and in particular on processes of selection. Archives, libraries and other cultural institutions involved in creating digital sources select materials to be digitised on the basis of a variety of criteria which include research interests and agendas but also relate to broader societal concerns such as processes of nation building and memorialisation. Can we speak in this context of a politics of digitisation and, if so, what implications does that have for historical research?
Currently available digital primary sources in the field of Jewish history provide a good case study to analyse the methodological implications of using digital sources in traditional historical practice.
An analysis of available sources on the Internet illustrates how both academic as well as extra-scholarly concerns play a role in selection and funding materials to be digitised. It is, for example, not coincidental that an abundance of Jewish newspapers in German or Hebrew can be consulted online today whereas no digital Yiddish newspaper collection exists. It is also no coincidence that some of the most important digitisation projects in the field have been done in Germany. At the same time a careful examination of these projects also illustrates, the importance of the sources they offer notwithstanding, how historical interpretations influence selection choices.
Harriet Deacon
The Role of Digital Tools in Networking the Archive and Heritage Sector: The Case of the Archival Platform in South Africa
The Archival Platform is an initiative based in South Africa that was established in May 2009 to help improve communication and information-sharing between government, academics and professionals in the archive and heritage sector. The Platform engages with questions of digitisation policy and the use of digital resources for teaching and research. It also mobilises and builds communities in the African heritage and archive professions through social media. The Platform has a monthly email newsletter, a website, Facebook fan page and twitter feed, building these online platforms alongside face-to-face networking and advocacy. The Platform is already changing the way information is shared and accessed within the professions, and providing new ways for government officials, professionals and academics to interact.
http://www.archivalplatform.org
Prof Willard McCarty, King’s College London
In the Age of Explorations
[1]. Bordieu, Pierre: La fuerza del derecho. : Santa Fé de Bogotá : Uniandes [etc.], 2000.
Estudio preliminar [y traducción] Carlos Morales de Setién Ravira, p. 62.
[2] . Bordieu, Pierre: El sentido práctico. Madrid, Siglo XXI, 2007, p. 150
