Remarks made at the Fredric M. Miller Memorial lecture, May 8, 2012, at the Historical Societyof Pennsylvania. Many thanks especially to John Palfrey for his lucid and inspiring remarks about the aims and progress of the Digital Public Library of America. Note that I spoke previously about the National Digital Library of Korea; see that talk for photos of the “dibrary.”

**

There is no Frigate like a book
To take us lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of Prancing Poetry
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a human Soul.

–Emily Dickinson, www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19730

Alexandria is a port, the busiest seaport in Egypt. Of course it is: where else could the most famous library of antiquity have been built but in a city with a busy port? That’s almost a contradiction in terms, that phrase "busy port" — the safest, most sheltered waters are those that must inevitably be roiled by everyone’s embarkings and disembarkings. Such places earn the hubbub of a hub precisely through their initial state of calm repose.

And if books and pages are ships and horses in Emily Dickinson’s formulation, then libraries too are busy seaports and coaching inns and highways "without oppress of toll." Libraries and archives and museums, like ports, including airports, are still and primarily places we come to to get somewhere else, to be transported. And this is as true or even more true of digital libraries as it is of physical libraries: on the web, many sites are only as powerful as their ability to get you somewhere else as quickly as possible. Google, notably, does its utmost to get you off Google.com as fast as it can: Google accrues power by giving it away.

I have argued elsewhere — or, rather, elsewhere I have released a small balloon of an idea into the atmosphere — that the DPLA should or at least could be rooted in a physical space, a building. The genesis of that idea did not, in fact, come from my deep love of libraries as places, although that is a love that goes back to my childhood. Standing in a library, for me, is as heady as standing by the ocean, and in both places I always have similar vague impulses to escape to barely imagined islands just across the horizon. But no: the first notion I ever had that a digital library could be a physical library was sparked by nothing less than learning that one exists.

The National Digital Library of Korea (also called the "dibrary"), which opened in 2009, is, in fact, a building. It took seven years to build, at a cost to the Korean government of about $112 million dollars US, and by some accounts it contains over 116 million “pieces of digital content,” which would make it almost eight times as large as the Europeana digital library, which claims 15 million items. That 116 million number, however, is probably based on a definition of “pieces of digital content” that includes (say) database records, and is therefore not measured in the same units as most digital libraries. But reports also testify, more believably, that the dibrary has digitized 380,000 books, and that is a very respectable number.

The National Digital Library of Korea is an eight-story building (five of those stories underground) that seats 550 patrons, and it runs 300 TB of server space. The physical space and the equipment are so advanced as to seem almost fictional. On the main floor there are touch-screen help kiosks. There are 3D monitors that do not require viewers to wear 3D glasses. There is a Global Lounge running PCs in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Vietnamese. There are multimedia viewing and creation and editing spaces as well as meeting and café spaces. There is a permanent art installation that “displays customized videos based on a user recognition function.” There is an enormous screen reserved only for 3D text, including “user messages.” There is a Laptop Zone, and there is a “Productivity Computer Cluster” whose desktop computers have large monitors and multiple monitors. There are more touch-screen kiosks, these dedicated to the sole purpose of reading digital newspapers. There are electronic tables with touch-screen surfaces, and on those tables you can see digital surrogates of historic Korean books as they lie open flat before you, seemingly in the table rather than on it. There is a connecting bridge called the Way of Knowledge that connects the National Digital Library of Korea with the National Library of Korea, and projected on the walls of the Way of Knowledge are “motion-sensitive interactive contents.” And, of course, there are are D.to, N.to, and U.to, the dibrary’s adorable mascots.

Regardless of whether the Digital Public Library of America ever realizes itself in a building, it is important, I think, to remember two things. First: library, archive, and museum buildings are no longer the only gateways to culture and ideas — but the new gateways are also physical. To put it in a sound bite, hardware is the new harbor. If nothing else, libraries, archives, and museums can provide everyone, especially "the poorest," access to these new "transportation" devices; the Gates Foundation has already recognized this truth in its support for putting public computers in public libraries. Second: digital libraries do bring people to physical places, especially when those places have unique originals of digitally ubiquitous representations. Putting digital content online, as many of you doubtless know, increases rather than decreases visitors: representation is no subsitute for presence.

I’m pleased that the DPLA seems to be leaning toward being primarily an aggregator of metadata and content for this very reason: the DPLA is likely to drive traffic to libraries, archives, and museums in both the digital and the physical spaces. And the DPLA is also likely to launch more than a few ships, some going exploring, and some returning home.

Here’s the letter that I sent on January 12, 2012 in response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s request for information on public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research.

***
To Whom It May Concern,

As a humanities researcher, I am vitally interested in policies resulting from your discussions about public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications. The policies you adopt will very likely have repercussions for all scholarly research, especially that which is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and most especially that which is supported by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. Other federal agencies, too, support humanities research: the Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and the National Archives should all be included as you formulate answers to the questions you pose in your request for information.

You ask, “How can policies for archiving publications and making them publically accessible be used to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific enterprise?” Substituting “scholarly enterprise” for “scientific enterprise,” I can certainly speak to the latter point: policies that ensure that federally funded publications are open will improve scholarly productivity in all fields. The fact is that scholars often communicate among themselves using the same communication tools that the public uses: e-mail lists, Google Groups, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. In order for research to be shared in these media, it must be shareable, and to be shareable, it must be open. If scholar A’s institution subscribes to a particular journal and scholar B’s does not, a link send to scholar B by scholar A will not work. Even within a university, scholars will find that a link they send their students or graduate students often does not work if those students are off-campus. The “paywall” puts significant obstacles in the way of spreading information, which is the heart of scholarly productivity. Scholars who do not learn about relevant information may spend many months or even years in futile pursuits.

Those of us who work in the digital humanities are particularly aware that public access to our research makes our work more widely known by other scholars as well as by the public. The digital humanities researcher Melissa Terras has also written about the importance of public access in raising a publication’s profile among other scholars and the public: in her piece “What Happens When You Tweet an Open Access Paper,” she traces the increasing popularity of a peer-reviewed paper that she posted in an open repository: “Prior to me blogging and tweeting about the paper, it got downloaded twice (not by me). The day I tweeted and blogged it, it immediately got 140 downloads.” The downloads only increased, and, ultimately, she wrote, “This post was mentioned in the Times Higher [Ed] last week, and the paper has now been downloaded 805 times in total.” Note that open access to her paper, and her ability to link directly to the paper from social media such as her Twitter account and her blog, ultimately led to reporting on her work in a major newspaper.

In 2011 at the Modern Language Association annual meeting, I gave a paper with the tongue-in-cheek (but true) title “Your Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends Won’t Read Your Peer-reviewed Article if They Have to Pay for It, and Neither Will Strangers,” in which I related the experience of discovering that several members of my social network, both scholars and non-scholars, were interested in reading my arcane work on Victorian poetic form if they could gain access to it freely. That (very short) paper is freely available at amandafrench.net/blog/2011/01/07/twitter-facebook-article/ should you care to read it. In that paper, I cited a study by Jason Priem and Kaitlin Light Costello presented at the 2010 meeting of the American Society of Information Science and Technology titled “How and Why Scholars Cite on Twitter.” As I wrote,

It was one of my most clicked-on links for the year, with 118 views—many of the links I tweet to news articles and so on get only thirty or so clicks. The authors studied a sample of 46,515 tweets from twenty-eight scholars — seven scientists, fourteen social scientists, and seven humanists — and reported that “In our sample of tweets containing hyperlinks, 6% were citations. Of these, 52% were first-order links and 48% were second-order.” By this, they meant that 52% of the links went directly to peer-reviewed work, while 48% were links that went to non-peer-reviewed work about peer-reviewed work: blog posts and news articles, for instance.

One of the main reasons that scholars tweeted these “second-order” links was that they worked for everyone: “[S]cholars may prefer to link directly to the article when it is open access but will resort to second-order links to bypass paywall restrictions. Participants were attracted to open-access articles for Twitter citations; Ben said ‘I would certainly be much more likely to link to things if they were more readily available.’ ”

That study, as well, is openly available at mail.asis.org/asist2010/proceedings/proceedings/ASIST_AM10/submissions/201_Final_Submission.pdf. As I hope is clear, I frequently make use of (and share) conference papers for my research, and therefore, I give a decided “yes” to your question, “Should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies?” The format in which scholarly research is published should make no difference to its public availability.

It is true that the scholarly work I have mentioned so far has not been explicitly funded by the U.S. government. However, I reiterate that humanities researchers do indeed receive federal funding, and I am no exception. In 2009, a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, the funding arm of the National Archives, allowed me to work for a year on a project to update the curriculum of the Archives and Public History graduate program at NYU with department chair and principal investigator Dr. Peter Wosh. We were more than happy to distribute the results of this project publicly, online as well as through scholarly channels such as the annual meeting of the Society for American Archivists and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. This work would certainly come under the aegis of the Issa Research Works Act, an act which troubles me deeply. For another example, I have applied for a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for the year 2012, and although the funds for this fellowship come from a private foundation, it is possible to likely that any work I produced while doing research at the Library of Congress would also qualify as federally funded research.

Finally, I work at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), a humanities research center which has benefited greatly from federal funds, and which as a body is committed to public access to scholarly publications. The Center itself, which has conducted more than $20 million in grant-funded research, relies on a nearly $3 million endowment achieved with the assistance of two Challenge Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. CHNM’s work, like that of any scientific research center, relies on both federal and private funding: CHNM’s work has been recognized with major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Historic Records and Publication Commission, and the Sloan, Mellon, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas, and Kellogg foundations. Since 1994, CHNM has been a leader in improving students’ understanding of history and the humanities through digital media, in building digital archives and mounting online exhibitions, and in developing software tools for scholarship. In 2010, CHNM’s websites had almost 500 million hits and nearly 20 million unique users, and its software tools are used by more than a million scholars and students every day.

I hope to have convinced you that humanities researchers and the federal agencies that support them are interested parties in the development of policies related to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Please consider, too, the tremendous extent to which research done at institutions of higher education is made possible by the tax policies of the federal government: such research belongs to the public. Thank you for your work.

Amanda L. French, Ph.D.

Remarks made at the Digital Public Library of America plenary meeting at the National Archives on October 21, 2011.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

John Donne. “The Sun Rising.” Poems of John Donne. 2 vols. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896. p. 7. Accessed 20 October 2011. HathiTrust Digital Library <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4112186>

The aubade is a lyric about lovers parting at morning. Its opposite and counterpart is the serenade, an evening song in which one lover greets another. “Serenade” has somehow become a more common word in English than “aubade” (they used to rhyme), but we are familiar enough with the scene of the aubade, as when Romeo and Juliet argue over whether that’s a lark or a nightingale they hear at the close of their night together, or when John Donne berates the annoying dawn in “The Sun Rising.” The aubade is a slightly inverted genre: it recognizes that in the world of work, the sun’s rising is a beginning, while for lovers, the sun’s rising is an unwelcome ending.

Those of us who love books, reading, and the library (three separate ideas that are associated but not congruent, of course) are now somewhat in the position of a lover tangled up in someone’s warm limbs at dawn. The unruly sun of the digital text is rising, and it is calling us to plodding work, to the daily ballet of bureaucracy, when I for one would far rather snuggle down under the covers with . . . a book, or with my beloved ideals about books, reading, and the library. My love song for the library as we have known it would praise, first of all, the fact that the library’s favors cost me nothing. As early modern poetry would be the first to admit, it is perfectly possible that love can exist in a, shall we say, commercial relationship, but I am speaking here of ideals. Secondly, I would praise a library’s infinite variety, from Robert Browning to Nora Roberts, a plenitude that custom cannot stale. Thirdly, I would praise a library that will support me in my moods of contemplative repose as well as in my moods of raucous communion.

All these might be called aspects of the soul of a library I could love, of libraries I have loved. But my love is not platonic. As Donne writes in another poem, “To our bodies turn we then, that so / Weak men on love revealed may look / Love’s mysteries in souls do grow / But yet the body is his book.” We need proof of love. Entire coffee table books have been compiled with nearly erotic photos of gorgeous library buildings, cathedrals of culture. How will the Digital Public Library of America be embodied?

I think the DPLA must manifest itself as more than just a website. There must also be many largely hidden, quiet services, generous services to the public, to developers, to existing libraries. These must be both technical and social, and might include linked open data and metadata, APIs, persistent URIs / DOIs, reference and literacy services, preservation services in the form of an independent reliable repository, continual attention to accessibility and discoverability, and even policy work at the highest levels of government. A site that merely aggregates existing content without providing such services would seem to me like a Galatea, a lovely statue with no humanity other than what we project upon it.

I fully agree that “if it’s not online it doesn’t exist,” but I think that if it’s only online, it only half exists.

And. (So.)

I want a building. A public building, not a data center, not a warehouse. I do not need a building, but I want it with the irrational desire of a lover. I know that it’s not on the radar of the DPLA project yet, but I wanted to plant the seed of that idea today. A monument to the ideal of an informed citizenry, a culturally, intellectually, and emotionally enriched citizenry.

One important note about the aubade: lovers who plan to reunite in the evening of the very same day whose morning saw a reluctant parting are allowed to figure in the aubade. (You can look it up in either Wikipedia or the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.) The aubade is not just for lovers who anticipate a long, painful, and perhaps permanent separation. I am confident that ours is one such aubade, that our workday will end in a gleeful rendezvous with the soul and body of a library.

Here’s a paper and accompanying slides about the National Digital Public Library planning initiative I wrote for the Electronic Resources and Libraries Annual Meeting in Austin, TX. I append the plain text below. See also the bibliography.

Imagine a National Digital Library: I Wonder If We Can

*****

Recently, unexpectedly, I’m completely keen on going to Korea. Why?

Because I’m dying to see these guys in their natural habitat. These are D.to, N.to, and U.to. They are the mascots for the National Digital Library of Korea, also called the “dibrary,” which opened its doors (yes, doors) in Seoul on May 25^th, 2009. According to the dibrary’s website, “Smart D.to is a digital knowledge messenger who searches for the information you require. D.to is blue, a futuristic color, and represents the messenger delivering necessary digital knowledge.” N.to, the green mascot, “loves nature and green ideas,” and “symbolizes the freedom of the world of knowledge.” And the red mascot is “warm-hearted U.to,” who “symbolizes the guidance to the ubiquitous world, who will be with us at anywhere and any time.”

You have to admire the charm of of ditching a dry mission statement for a trio of brightly-colored 21^st-century allegorical figures as rococo as any  be-draped nymph or undraped cherub in the Library of Congress.

You also have to admire people who would literally build a digital library with a sign out in front identifying it as such. The National Digital Library of Korea took seven years to build, at a cost to the Korean government of about $112 million dollars US, and by some accounts it contains over 116 million “pieces of digital content,” which would make it almost eight times as large as the Europeana digital library, which claims 15 million items. That 116 million number, however, is probably based on a definition of “pieces of digital content” that includes (say) database records, and is therefore not measured in the same units as most digital libraries. But reports also testify, more believably, that the dibrary has digitized 380,000 books, and that is a very respectable number, one larger than the 300,000 ebooks offered for lease by NetLibrary, for instance.

The National Digital Library of Korea is an eight-story building (five of those stories underground) that seats 550 patrons, and it runs 300 TB of server space. The physical space and the equipment are so advanced as to seem almost fictional. On the main floor, pictured here, there are touch-screen help kiosks. There are 3D monitors that do not require viewers to wear 3D glasses. There is a Global Lounge running PCs in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Vietnamese. There are multimedia viewing and creation and editing spaces as well as meeting and café spaces.

There are more touch-screen kiosks, these dedicated to the sole purpose of reading digital newspapers. There are electronic tables with touch-screen surfaces, and using those tables you can see digital surrogates of historic Korean books as they lie open flat before you, seemingly in the table rather than on it.

There is a permanent art installation that “displays customized videos based on a user recognition function.” There is an enormous screen reserved only for 3D text, including “user messages.” There is a Laptop Zone, and there is a “Productivity Computer Cluster” whose desktop computers have large monitors and multiple monitors.

There is a connecting bridge called the Way of Knowledge that connects the National Digital Library of Korea with the National Library of Korea, and projected on the walls of the Way of Knowledge are “motion-sensitive interactive contents.”

And there is, of course, D.to, N.to, and U.to. Get my drift? Feel a sudden longing to go to Korea?

But the Korean dibrary is not just about fancy physical spaces or symbolic cartoon characters: it’s very much about providing a whole set of national library services for Korea. In September 2009, just a few months after the dibrary first opened, Korean law was altered in order to give Korean dibrarians the authority to collect and indeed responsibility for collecting Korean data from the open web. Certain kinds of data were legally required to be deposited in the national digital library so as to enable not only preservation but also “the production and distribution of alternative materials for the disabled.” Now centrally coordinated by the National Digital Library of Korea are all kinds of digital services, from training programs to inter-library loan. The dibrary is even charged with creating a “one card system that gives access to 699 public libraries nationwide,” a system scheduled to go live in 2012. And once Korea has fully nationalized as many library materials and services as it can, it’s apparently not going to stop there: last summer a meeting was held to plan a China-Japan-Korea Digital Library, an Asian digital library or portal modeled after The European Library project. To me it sounds like the second step toward the single digital library filed contentedly away in the humming systems of the starship Enterprise, waiting to be addressed with a question: “Computer . . .”

In fact, the first article lobbed into the recent discussion of a U.S. national digital library is titled “A Library Without Walls,” indicating that its author is using the traditional definition of a digital library, the one that defines a digital library as strictly digital. Robert Darnton, that piece’s author, is the director of the Harvard University Library. In October of 2010, he convened a meeting at Harvard of “42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds” to discuss how to create a national digital library for the United States — “That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public,” as he wrote on the New York Review of Books blog afterward. Darnton made no mention of a building, nor Korea, and user messages displayed on a large 3D monitor were apparently the farthest thing from his mind. He evoked instead “the Republic of Letters,” Voltaire and Jefferson and their Enlightenment ideals of widely shared knowledge.

Similarly, in an October interview with Jennifer Howard for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Darnton said, “One of the first things we discussed was the financial problem. It didn’t take long for people there to arrive at a conclusion, which is: We can do it. Everyone seemed convinced that this is certainly within the scope of a funding campaign by foundations.” Grant-making government foundations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation were probably included in that category as well as private grantors such as the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, but apart from that there seems to have been little hope that the U.S. government would step in directly to fund such a project. Nevertheless, what the group of research library leaders pictured sounded more like a public library than like a research library.

Said Darnton, “The agreement was very solid about the desirability of this thing, and then there was discussion about what ‘this’ was. In general, I think it fair to say, everyone thought the library should be one for the American people, by which I mean not an exclusive research library but a grand collection of books that could be used in junior colleges and high schools and institutions of every sort throughout the country.” Public librarians began to notice that they were being left out of the discussion of how to create this thing that sounded a good bit like a public library, and Darnton and his group began to make changes in response.

By December, when Harvard’s Berkman Center announced that it was officially taking on the planning initiative as a project, the National Digital Library had become “The National Public Digital Library of America.” Public librarians were also invited to participate in the discussions, and public library groups such as LibraryCity with similar goals began to join the general public dialogue in academicky forums such as the Chronicle of Higher Education. Initial meetings of the DPLA are still being funded by the Sloan foundation, and although it’s early days yet, there’s no talk of seeking Congressional funds.

Andrew W. Mellon’s father, Judge Thomas Mellon, whose financial success would eventually result in the formation of the Mellon foundation, would have approved of leaving governments out of it, as David Canadine reports:

In November 1881, Andrew Carnegie offered $250,000 for the construction of a municipal library, on the condition that the corporation [of the city of Pittsburgh] commit $15,000 a year to its maintenance. To meet this condition, state law would have to be changed, enabling the corporation to earmark public funds for this purpose. The Judge believed in reading, he was acquainted with Carnegie, and they shared Scottish ancestry, a devotion to Burns and Spencer, and a passion for free enterprise. But he was vehemently against this gift, fearing that any such statutory alteration would open still wider the floodgates of municipal profligacy, civic debt, and caucus corruption. He proposed an alternative scheme, whereby a library would be built and maintained by the public subscriptions of rich individuals, and for a time his plans carried the Select Council. But the Flinn-Magee machine was determined that the Carnegie scheme should prevail, and the ensuing battle would last five years. Eventually, in October 1886, the Select Council accepted Carnegie’s terms, with the Judge casting the only dissenting vote. Meanwhile, Carnegie had increased his gift to one million dollars, to finance not only a library but also more extensive buildings devoted to the arts, science, and technology. As a result, the city’s annual obligation for maintenance rose to $40,000 a year, confirming the Judge’s worst fears about municipal profligacy and waste.

It always surprises me a little, naïve fool that I am, that there can be any doubt that a library is a public good that contributes to a more informed and happier citizenry, and that it is therefore a legitimate expense of government. But of course, tax-supported public libraries as we know them today have really only been around since the middle of the nineteenth century, and in fact it was that same Andrew Carnegie who would do the most of anyone to create a national system of public libraries in America. Had the Judge prevailed, heaven only knows whether we’d have public libraries at all today – the Pittsburgh library under discussion was the very first of over 1600 libraries Carnegie would fund in the United States on the condition that local governments commit to supporting them. (Though Carnegie had built one library previously in the tiny Scottish town where he had grown up.)

And of course, governments have slashed public library budgets in both the U.S. and the U.K. lately, to the point where one group of library users in Milton Keynes checked out all the books in their local library as a protest against its planned closing.

So, then, Darnton is apparently wise not to seek federal funding for a National Digital Public Library of America, although leaders at the National Archives and the Library of Congress are indeed involved in the planning, and although appeals to Congress may yet be on the menu. Consider, too, that we have already had a “National Digital Library” initiative, and while it was not a failure, it was certainly not widely transformative. Some of you may even remember all the way back to 1990 when the Library of Congress’s American Memory pilot project began, ending in 1994 having digitized (and put on CD-ROM) some 200,000 public domain items related to American history. In 1994, the National Digital Library took over the same work, and beginning with $60 million over five years ($45 million of it donated by technology corporations) eventually digitized about 9 million archival items in the public domain for American Memory. One critique of this project, influenced by Michel Foucault and titled, unoriginally enough, Library of Walls, points out that it was very far from being in the American public’s interest: “[T]he ‘National Digital Library’ is anything but the ‘plain vanilla’ presentation of historical material,” writes Samuel Collins. “Rather, the entire American Memory project from its inception in 1990 to its continued development today shows [...] a careful selection and organization of materials designed to both highlight the institution of the Library of Congress and appeal to the Library’s ‘clients,’ especially Congress.” The Library of Congress, let us remember, is not de jure the national library of the United States.

And yet surely the largest problem with creating a Digital Library of America is the province of both Congress and the Library of Congress. Let me hear you say it: copyright. We saw in the case of the National Digital Library of Korea (which is physically linked by the Way of Knowledge to the existing National Library of Korea, a national library de jure) that the Korean government was willing to change its laws in order to better enable the digital library to do its work of preservation. Is our government willing to do that? Does anyone know how much it costs to hire a lobbyist, and does anyone know whether Mellon or Sloan can pay for that?

Well. Copyright. In any case, you might be asking yourself: What does this have to do with me, a humble Electronic Resources Librarian? A few things. First of all, pie in the sky, imagine an American national library consortium, and imagine the bargaining power such a consortium would have with STEM journal publishers. As it happens, Korea is again an illuminating example. In 2002, an assessment of a Korean digital library effort for university researchers called the Research Information Service System (RISS) discovered that 95% of its users were seriously frustrated by their inability to access the full text of foreign journal articles. Korean libraries simply could not afford to pay the permission fees. Four years later, in 2006, Korea had formed a consortium: the Korea Electronic Site License Initiative (KESLI), partly modeled on OhioLink, increased “the use levels of scholarly information to six times higher than average than before.” Imagine that.

More realistically, if there really does come to be a serious national initiative in which academic and public librarians actually partner on providing broad access to electronic resources, that’s a change electronic librarians in research libraries should to be aware of, too, and foster or resist as judgment suggests.

Lastly, and most importantly, whether this ever winds up affecting Electronic Resources librarians, if it does come to pass, it will affect us as citizens.

It is therefore good to know that there are ways in which we can share our thoughts. The intrepid director of the Center for History and New Media, Dan Cohen, is ON THIS VERY DAY attending a meeting of the DPLA, and he is more than willing to receive the wisdom of the crowd via Twitter. Hashtag: #dpla.

NDPLA also has an open e-mail list that anyone can join, and a wiki that anyone can edit. I for one plan to follow this project closely as it evolves and share my opinions via the listserv and other means just as soon as said opinions descend voraciously upon me like a Cooper’s hawk diving for a mouse in the reading room of the Library of Congress. You should do likewise.

(And tell them you want the National Digital Public Library of America to have a cool building like they have in Korea. We can put it in Detroit.)

*****

Addendum: In the course of researching this paper, I put together a spreadsheet with some basic information about some large digital libraries – in that category I include commercial products such as NetLibrary and OverDrive and Audible as well as university and foundation projects such as HathiTrust and Europeana and government initiatives such as the National Library of Norway and Gallica, the national digital library of France. Feel free to browse and analyze. j.mp/lg-dig-lib

The below is cross-posted from the THATCamp SoCal (The Humanities and Technology Camp Southern California) blog at socal2011.thatcamp.org/01/12/notes-on-freebase-bootcamp-session/

***

I’ve been hearing about Freebase for awhile now, especially from Jon Voss, who organized and ran THATCamp Bay Area, so I figured I’d go to that BootCamp session here at THATCamp SoCal. I’m very, very glad I did. It was taught by Kirrily Robert, who’s Skud on Twitter. As I said on Twitter, I had thought that Freebase was simply a place where people could upload their datasets, and it is that. But it’s also a rather amazing project that’s a bit difficult to explain if you don’t know what open linked data is. And if you don’t know what open linked data is, why then the rather charming animated video that Kirrily showed us might be of use (it’s about “Metaweb,” which is the name of the company that owned Freebase before Google recently bought it, but it gives the idea — www.metaweb.com will now resolve to freebase.com):

Kirrily is the developer liaison for Freebase, but I thought she did a great job of pitching the workshop to us non-developer humanist types, and I think that the actual developers who were there (including Joyce Ouchida from USC) probably also got a good idea of what Freebase is all about and what they could do with it. We started by looking at the Freebase page for William Blake:

You may notice (I did) that a good bit of Freebase content comes from Wikipedia; one of the things that struck me like a hammer about Freebase is how purely factual it is. And, later, how it’s the relations between things that constitutes Freebase’s “entity graph,” not prose — the video above even begins by evoking what a pain words are and how their meanings are contingent. It’s all very poststructuralist. I love it.

We moved quickly into editing, which wasn’t any harder (in fact quite a bit easier) than editing Wikipedia. I did a good bit of work on my pet go-to topic, the villanelle, adding several instances of “poems of this form” (Bishop’s “One Art,” for instance, for which I also had to create a page in Freebase, though others, such as Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” already had pages). We then looked at how to construct Freebase queries in MQL, Meta Query Language, and we talked about how to use Google Refine to clean up Excel data sets for use in Freebase. (That alone was a terrific tool to learn about.)

What I’m wondering now is whether Freebase might even be a better site to send students to for factual information research than Wikipedia; I’m not sure. In the session, I asked what Freebase is for: whether it’s a destination research site or a provider of structured semantic data for developers. Kirrily said that they had discussed that very question rather a lot at Freebase, and that their usage statistics show that the latter use is by far the more common. If I did more development, I can definitely see how I’d be all over Freebase’s linked data — so, so useful in building applications. Kirrily mentioned one example at conflicthistory.com. It made me think seriously about building something I’ve had in mind for some time: a site backed by a database of poetic forms are tagged with their forms (sonnet, triolet, villanelle etc.) and other features, and I can see that sucking in some of the existing Freebase data to that would save a load of work. I went out and registered poeticforms.org right away, in fact.

Anyway, thanks Kirrily and THATCamp SoCal — this was a great session.

Centers and Organizations

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)

centerNet: An International Network of Digital Humanities Centers

National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities

Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory

Meetings

Digital Humanities Annual Meeting

THATCamp

Journals and “Journals”

Digital Humanities Quarterly

Literary and Linguistic Computing

Digital Humanities Now

Books

Blackwell Companion to the Digital Humanities

Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Talk

HUMANIST listserv

Digital humanists on Twitter (Dan Cohen’s Twitter list)

Digital Humanities Questions and Answers

Tools

Digital Research Tools wiki (DiRT)

Guides

A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities

arts-humanities.net

Below is an expanded and revised version of the talk I gave at the South by Southwest Interactive panel Swarming Plato’s Cave: Rethinking Digital Fantasies on March 16th, 2010. Talking with some folks at SXSW both before and after the panel definitely helped my thinking; thanks to all of you, not least those of you who twittered so well during the panel. Thanks also to William Burdette for putting together the panel and for putting up related links on the Mediated Humanities website at www.mediatedhumanities.org/sxsw.

*****

Plato’s allegory of the cave is an extended metaphor put in motion for the purpose of convincing us that everything we perceive and believe may be no more real than a shadow. It is an explanation of why regular people think philosophers (e.g., Plato and Socrates) are crazy: the regular people are stuck on the notion that what they think is real is in fact real, they can’t appreciate the reality that the philosopher appreciates, and the philosopher finds it very hard to explain this other reality to them and anyway is not very motivated to do so. The allegory of the cave is a thought experiment, a parable, a myth, and a theory about the nature of reality, and it’s also just an enduringly intriguing scene to try to visualize, as the terrific short film we’ve just watched shows.

But it’s also a story, a narrative, and as such it has a form, a structure: that two-thousand-four-hundred-year-old structure, I’d like to point out, is an extremely common one in the contemporary genre known as fantasy. And, of course, if that structure is common in fantasy, it’s common in science fiction as well.

When you think about it, it’s a bit odd that bookstores lump together science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction is very much about technology, and generally involves the construction of a future or alternate world whose chief characteristic is advanced technology; the accompanying narrative usually explores the problems and opportunities of that technology. Fantasy, in apparent contrast, involves the construction of an alternate world that more or less resembles the Middle Ages, a world entirely without technology. The universes of the fantasy genre, however, have magic, and, as Arthur C. Clarke famously said in his 1958 work Profiles of the Future, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The common factor in fantasy and science fiction, of course, is that creation of an alternate world, a world that is recognizably not this one.

Plato’s allegory of the cave, like science fiction and fantasy, also posits an alternate world, a world that is recognizably not this one. In its narrative structure, there are two worlds, and the hero is the only person (or almost the only person) who can travel between those two worlds. I have named these worlds World One and World Zero, names which correspond to the visible world and the invisible world. We need to avoid the term “the real world,” because it’s often precisely the question of which world is more real (not to mention which world is better) that is at issue. In Plato’s allegory, the dark cave with its flickerings is an image of World One, the visible world, the world of limited ordinary perception; while the dazzling world of sunflare and shadow is World Zero, the nonexistent, absent, invisible world, the exotic extraordinary other world of pure thought, which the philosopher hero tries and inevitably fails to describe to the chained inhabitants of World One.

There are plenty of sci-fi/fantasy narratives that have exactly this structure: ordinary World One, exotic World Zero, and a hero who travels between them. I’ve listed some, but I’m sure you can name others.

In these narratives, the alternate world might be an island, say. Or it might be another planet. Or it might be an alternate dimension accessible through a portal in this world. Or it might be an alternate time, either in the present or the past. Or it might be a spiritual realm. Or it might be a dream, or an illusion — this often turns out to be the case for narratives in which the hero is a woman, as for instance The Wizard of Oz and (the original) Alice in Wonderland, stories in which women can have adventures only if they are not real adventures. World Zero, in short, is a secret or hidden or inaccessible or invisible world constituted by its apparent non-existence. Some sci-fi/fantasy narratives not listed here, of course, simply set up an alternate World Zero and allow whatever world actually surrounds the reader or audience to serve as the visible World One, and we ourselves become the hero who has experience of both. But here I am concerned primarily with narratives that explicitly represent two worlds and are explicitly engaged with the contrast between them.

So if that’s the case, if Plato’s allegory is in many ways a sort of proto-fantasy/sci-fi story, what does it all (as they say) mean?

Well, one question worth pursuing is this one: Which world is the digital world?

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes worry that I spend too much time looking at screens: computer screens, smartphone screens, TV screens, movie theater screens, and (of course) screens on which slides are projected. Am I cutting myself off from the real world? Am I insufficiently mindful and overly mediated? Am I, in short, watching “shadows of artefacts” all day long, just like the prisoners in Plato’s cave? There are plenty of people who would say Yes, yes you are, you and all those other SXSW attendees. Get out of the dark cave of your parents’ basement, nerd, and get some sunshine. Stop with the fantasy already. Writers like Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr and (most recently) Jaron Lanier bring us a version of this message, a version which is often more complicated and careful and sometimes even caring than I’ve made it sound here, and their books do well here at SXSW. These thinkers seem to fit neatly into the role Plato ascribes to the philosopher: he who stays with the cave-dwellers in order to do the hard work of convincing them to cease investing so much in mere shadows of artefacts, the hard work of “turning the mind as a whole away from the world of becoming, until it becomes capable of bearing the sight of real being and reality at its most bright” (Waterfield 245).

Yet Plato’s allegory of the cave need not be a touchstone only for anti-mediationists. That philosopher figure, trying vainly to explain the workings of the unseen world to those who do not understand, is also a highly resonant figure for the technologist. Anyone who’s done even the mildest form of tech support can relate to the communication barrier that Plato’s philosopher experiences, that sense of trying to explain sunshine to the benighted, whereas even the Luddiest Luddite can’t accuse any of the screen people of never once having experienced the Luddite version of unmediated reality. But if you’ve coded, you’ve experienced a world of pure logic that others haven’t. Similarly, a Twitter fan like me certainly feels that there’s a reality to that world that people who “don’t get” Twitter (and have therefore never used it) have no access to. Plenty of popular World One World Zero narratives simply scorn the Muggle World One and meander through the luxurious specs of its own particular techno-magical World Zero.

World One World Zero narratives, including Plato’s allegory of the cave, often turn out to be perfectly flexible on the “is tech good or is it bad” question. The most popular and enduring narratives are always those, I verily believe, in which we get to have it both ways: we get to enjoy our technology and our fears about technology at the same time, just as, in the Wizard of Oz, we get to enjoy Dorothy’s adventures while ultimately being assured that her true place is at home. Anything else is probably too simplistic to hold our interest for long. Only those who might arguably be spending too much time with screens are interested in horror stories about spending too much time with screens.

Some of the most quintessentially geeky fantasies have an apparently anti-fantasy moral, The Matrix being certainly a much more interesting example than Surrogates. In his talk yesterday, Jaron Lanier recommended a 1909 sci-fi story by E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” as a story with exactly the same message: it is bad to live in the mediated world, however pleasant: it is good to live in the real world, however difficult. (This, by the way, is not precisely Lanier’s argument in his recent manifesto You Are Not a Gadget: he is, after all, the father of virtual reality. Much of his concern about today’s Internet is that it is insufficiently fantastic, that it lacks the fluidity and weirdness it once had, that the mediated world is now a suburb where it was once a phantasmagoria.) It’s always remarkably easy for fantasy to be anti-fantasy without, apparently, causing us much cognitive dissonance. Plato’s allegory of the cave, that remarkably imaginative story, is only one small part of the utopian narrative The Republic, elsewhere in which Plato famously banned the poets, the dramatists, the imagineers from his ideal community.

Similarly, James Cameron uses famously advanced cinematic technology in order to create narratives that apparently warn strongly against technology. Historically, the moral of the unsinkable Titanic has always been that man puts too much faith in technology, but the meta-narrative of Cameron’s movie Titanic is as technologically idolatrous as ever — so long as that technology is used in the service of storytelling. The story of Avatar is the story of a man who abandons a familiar modern mechanistic world in order to wear a loincloth and fly dragons, and yet surely not a single person who saw the film (3-D or otherwise) failed to discuss the film’s inviting technological innovation and exciting technological expense. To traverse the green jungle of Pandora is to become a part of the computational sublime. Stories such as Avatar and Dune and Star Wars (I’m talking about the original, the New Hope, here) that narrate a competition for protagonist mindshare between the futuristic technology of science fiction and the primitive mysticism of fantasy inevitably come down on the side of the spiritual, the ineffable, the magical. Neo discovers that he is the One. Luke turns off his targeting computer and scores a bullseye by trusting the Force. Jake Sully transcends the turbocharged tanning bed that puts him into the body of his avatar with the help of a mystical tree. It doesn’t matter. Through the power of metaphor, when magic wins, technology wins. It’s not so much that the technology is indistinguishable from magic as that the magic is indistinguishable from technology. For this reason, I think, even these apparently anti-fantasy, anti-mediation, anti-technology stories are beloved by we screen people, we people of the screen.

I am going to go out on a limb here (though not literally, like Jake Sully), and say straight out that Avatar is a bad movie. It was fine, it was entertaining, I enjoyed it, I went to see it with my brother and enjoyed spending that time with him, but without getting solemn or hysterical about it, I’ll still propose that it is a bad movie. It is a bad movie because it goes a bit too far over that “having it both ways” line, that line that separates the paradoxical from the hypocritical. Put it this way: if I take Jake Sully as my model, what sort of real-world action or belief does that translate into for me? Pandora’s jungle has a sort of real world visual equivalent in, say, the disappearing Brazilian rainforest, but Avatar is clearly not recommending that we go primitive. On Pandora, all creatures are designed with organic USB cables, and Pandora itself is repeatedly troped as a network. (“It’s a network,” explains Jake Sully.) The harsh truth is that computers are not at all “green” (Google the carbon footprint of Google sometime), and that by participating in the network we know, we are putting our own planet’s lush jungles in danger.

Better versions of the World One World Zero narrative have a legitimate and balanced argument that stands up to scrutiny once we strip out the allegory, the metaphor. Plato, for instance, is arguing both that regular people should trust philosophers when philosophers say that there’s a different way of looking at things and that philosophers should keep on striving to explain their different way of looking at things to people who have good reason for their lack of comprehension. That remains good counsel both for people who call tech support and for people who provide tech support.

But it’s not just a problem with Avatar; it’s a bit of a problem with the binary structure of the World One World Zero narrative itself and the egocentrism involved in relating to the single hero (or elite few) who can travel between those two worlds. The best science fiction and fantasy narratives, whether on screen or in print, often refuse or alter or complicate (or we might say, “deconstruct”) this compelling structure, just as Randall Bennett’s xkcd comic famously shows us the limitations of The Matrix‘s logic.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, not only alters the gender of the hero, but also makes sure that the narrative and the meta-narrative are in sync: we’re never allowed to forget that the Buffyverse is above all allegorical. The ordinary world and the extraordinary world are the same, in other words, not opposed at all. The demons, Joss Whedon repeatedly makes clear, are Buffy’s demons. We do enjoy it on the literal level, of course: there are literally kick-ass martial arts fights. But Whedon entrusts us to remember the metaphor, so that watching Buffy is always to be aware that you are watching a story that tells you baldly, if allegorically: women are strong, in all possible ways. The episode of Buffy called “Normal Again” posits with unsettlingly convincing logic that Buffy may simply be psychotic, schizophrenic, that the demons she fights are simply the product of her own disordered brain. But, ultimately, Buffy the heroine and Buffy the series firmly refuse the “it was all a dream” gambit that made the turn-of-the-century Wizard of Oz and Alice and Wonderland safe for popular consumption. And the series ended (at least on television, though it continues as a graphic novel) by happily robbing Buffy of her superhero singularity, distributing the special abilities normally reserved for a protagonist to a whole passel of potential heros.

Any why only two worlds? Why not many? The structure of the classic Star Trek posits dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of different worlds, not simply two. Moreover, of course, it was a multiethnic team who visited these worlds: the clear allegorical meaning of Star Trek was always that different cultures are to be explored and understood, not demeaned and demonized. My housemate in graduate school was a linguist in the Anthropology department, and he often taught the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Darmok,” in which Picard attempts to understand the language of a radically different culture, a culture whose elliptical language could only be understood by learning their history.

Or why have a single hero at all? Why not many? If you like science fiction and fantasy, as I do (which I hope is clear), you may well love postmodern novels, some of which use the conventions of science fiction and fantasy but play with narrative structure. I highly recommend David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for instance, which consists of six separate interwoven stories. As soon as one narrative is half-told, it breaks off and another begins. We begin by hearing the story of a doctor on a nineteenth century sea voyage to Malaysia, go through several almost unrelated stories until we arrive at a typically sci-fi dystopian future in which a slave clone tells the story of her spiritual awakening. Only then do we begin to get the end of every story in reverse chronological order, until finally we’re back in the nineteenth century, understanding at last just how all six of these worlds and their six trapped heroes are connected.

Or consider David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a novel that has a well-deserved reputation as a difficult masterpiece of postmodern literature, but which is also a highly readable tragicomic piece of science fiction set in a dystopian near-future America with herds of feral hamsters and giant fans blowing airborne pollution north to Canada. Infinite Jest‘s structure is famously complex, which is part of the fun of reading it: Michael Silverblatt once hesitantly remarked to the author that the novel seemed to him to be “written in fractals,” to which Wallace replied, “I’ve heard you were an acute reader. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidal fractal.” James Cameron’s movies pretty much suggest that mechanical technology (ships, tanks) is totally harsh while narrative technology (CGI, 3-D) is totally awesome, but David Foster Wallace’s writings suggest, much more delicately and persuasively and fractally, that narrative technology might be a bit of a problem — all narrative technology, up to and including the most basic gears and pulleys of narrative itself. To put it bluntly, Infinite Jest makes you desperately want to find out what happened and then refuses to tell you what happened. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick has put it, Infinite Jest strongly hints that “whatever answers we’re seeking won’t be found in the text, but in the world beyond.”

The world beyond: whichever world that may be.

We create worlds and universes so easily now: the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, Oz, Narnia, Middle Earth, Pandora. That term “information superhighway” sounds quaint these days at least in part because a highway traverses at the very most a continent, a laughably small territory to ascribe to the Internet. There are never only two worlds and there is never only one hero who has lived in both: that was as true for Plato as it is for us, if we can only remember it.

Here’s a little spreadsheet I put together about Twitter use at three conferences: Digital Humanities 2009, THATcamp 2009, and the (just-ended) Modern Language Association convention of 2009:

As you can probably see, what I did was to divide the total number of tweets during the date range of the conference by the number of days of the conference to get the average number of tweets per day. There are only 3.62 days of data for MLA because I downloaded the Twitter archive at about 4pm today instead of waiting until after midnight to get a full day’s data. At Digital Humanities in the summer, we weren’t yet savvy enough in the ways of Twitter to create an archive before the conference, so most of the first two days of twittering is probably lost for good. And, not at all by the way, have you given money to Twapperkeeper lately? That service is becoming essential. Someone go write an NEH, NSF, IMLS, NHPRC, or Mellon grant with the developer. I’m busy blogging.

I also counted (well, got Excel to count) the number of unique Twitterers. For me, the most interesting statistics are definitely these: only 3% (at most) of MLA attendees were twittering, while almost twice as many people twittered about THATcamp as actually attended it. (THATcamp, as if you didn’t know, is The Humanities And Technology conference camp.)

This year, I was a little disappointed not to go to MLA, especially since it was right down the road from me in Philadelphia. I’d have liked to go, but, like Brian Croxall, I couldn’t afford it — and I didn’t even have a paper to deliver. Last year I went to San Francisco and had a grand old time. I gave a paper on Google Book Search, I met some Internet celebrities, I met some academic celebrities, I met my longtime Internet friend Michael Bérubé in real life for the first time (MLA prez! 2012! kewl!), I hobnobbed with the old UVa gang, I went to a panel about Twitter, I went to a panel about digitizing manuscripts, I heard a paper by John Lyon about the Penguin Archive, I heard a paper by Mark Edmundson about the dangers of the digital, I bought and read a copy of Candide with cartoons on the cover, and I blogged about the conference afterward. I had a great time, and I felt like a learned a lot.

I was therefore looking forward to following along with MLA via Twitter, but I was again disappointed. Somehow I had thought that at least some of those analog humanists at MLA would be twittering by now. The Executive Director of MLA was twittering; why shouldn’t they? I thought I’d get to read at least a few lyrically concise reports of panels in my non-digital field of poetic form, panels such as “Sonnets in Stories” and “Literary Form and the Social: Victorian Poetry” and “The Thinking Proper to Poetry.” But no: there seemed to be almost no one twittering except the digital humanists whom I already know very well — poor Kathleen Fitzpatrick practically turned herself into a secretary for me, and Mark Sample was apparently glared at and hissed at and mentally calumnied for attempting to keep the rest of us apprised. I’m spoiled, now, because the people I follow on Twitter tend to be terrific at reporting on the conferences they attend; I followed the Society of American Archivists’ conference back in August, for instance. And then, too, even at the conferences I’ve attended this year, it’s been terrific to be able to see what went on in the sessions I wasn’t able to attend in person.

The point is that the reportage coming out of MLA was very digital-humanities-centric, not least because of Twitter. No one is more aware of that than we digital humanists. Everyone (by which I mean everyone on Twitter) has been expressing doubt about William Pannapacker’s assertion that the big story of MLA 2009 was the digital humanities. Pannapacker wrote in the Chronicle that “the merger of literature and technology is no longer the obsession of a few hobbyists” — for one thing, it hasn’t been quite that marginalized for quite awhile. (Hi to all my Twitter buddies at our own special Office of the Digital Humanities at the NEH!) What does seem more accurate is Pannapacker’s observation that “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time” — except, again, I feel as though I’ve known that for at least five years, and I could make a good case for ten.

For instance, one of the MLA papers that got the most Twitter ink was a great piece by Brian Croxall. I know Brian quite well, mostly through Twitter, though I first met him down at Emory in 2007, then again at last year’s MLA, then again at THATcamp this summer. I’ve followed Brian’s hunt for a job and the birth of his third child on Twitter, and today I was very pleased indeed to see that his paper earned him quite a bit of attention. All that Twitter ink put it in the automatically generated digital humanities journal DH Now, and then it was deftly written up by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and then it was blogged with tremendous vitality by Bitch Ph.D., whom the profession plundered and squandered.

Let me put it this way: Brian’s paper was big news only on Twitter and in the blogosphere. Which, however, means that it was big news. Period.

Twitter is writing. Hello! MLA members! Twitter is writing! Twittering often feels like chatting — and indeed Twitter is in some ways simply a global public instant-message service with the clever addition of asymmetrical channels of communication — but Twitter is writing. And that makes it distinctively different. The Twitter comments about Brian’s paper didn’t really amount to much more than you’d get in a hallway after a particularly honest paper about the asbestos-like conditions of being a “Visiting” Assistant Professor at Clemson. (I’ve been a “Visiting” Assistant Professor, too, by the way, in a place where I was, you know, living, not visiting, and where I would have liked to stay.) But those comments were in writing. And, you know, so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and all that.

Now, Brian’s paper was very good indeed, but what was especially brilliant was that he posted it at the same time that he would otherwise have been reading the paper aloud to a room full of interested and sympathetic listeners, listeners largely without smartphones, sitting similarly without laptops in a room without wi-fi where to send an SMS message would be nearly grounds for ejection. The lesson digital humanists learn, especially by using Twitter, is that scholarly conversations move quickly now, because they can, and one had therefore better be as quick as possible to join in that conversation. Monthly or quarterly journals and annual conferences used to be the way that scholars talked wrote among themselves, but now it’s e-mail listservs (yes, still) and, better, the much more public blogosphere and twittersphere.

Let us refresh ourselves, for a moment, with this very fuzzy and very infringing YouTube video:

Usually what one quotes from this gem of pop culture is the immortal phrase “These go to 11″ or “This one goes to 11.” However, what I want to suggest is that the emerging forms of scholarly communication among digital humanists go to 10 — but 10 is louder. Here’s the metaphor, or allegory, as I see it.

• Amplifier that goes to 10 = Old scholarly communication, such as insanely slow-to-publish journals.
• Unseen but perfectly possible amplifier that goes to louder 10 = New scholarly communication, such as Twitter, blogs, unconferences, and models such as the journal DH Now and the book Planned Obsolescence.
• Amplifier that goes to 11 = Second Life and ilk. Not, ultimately, an improvement.
• Watts, phantom power, gain, reverb = Functions of scholarly communication, such as learning, arguing, establishing a reputation, filtering information.

Here’s looking forward to #MLA11. It’ll be interesting to see what happens then.

In honor of Veterans’ Day (also known as Armistice Day), I’m posting here a short essay on the poem that inspired the Flanders poppy, John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.” This “essay” is actually a section of my 2004 dissertation, which concerns the 19-line poetic form called “the villanelle”; in the course of researching that, I noodled around with some rondeaus as well (or “rondeaux,” if you want to get all French about it), and, to put it plainly, I just got really really interested in the most famous rondeau of all, “In Flanders Fields.”

From “Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle”

A much more significant individual poem in the social history of the French forms than Pound’s “Villanelle” was John McCrae’s rondeau “In Flanders Fields,” first published anonymously in the December 8, 1915 issue of London’s widely-circulated illustrated magazine Punch:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

“In Flanders Fields” was a tremendous popular phenomenon in World War One. Its author, John McCrae, was a Canadian doctor, Scottish by birth, who had served in the Boer War of 1899-1902; he died in 1918, just before the war ended, of pneumonia. Although it is not clear who first singled out the poem in Punch for attention, by 1917 it was so well-known that one famous Canadian Victory Bonds poster and billboard could simply allude to it (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Canadian Victory Bonds poster, Frank Lucien Nicolet, 1917.

The Victory Bonds campaign had been meant to raise $150 million; instead it raised $400 million, and the poster’s artist, Frank Lucien Nicolet, was awarded a prize by the Canadian government. At least a dozen songs based on the poem appeared between 1917 and 1919, including one by John Philip Sousa. “Reply poems” also proliferated. Most famously, the Flanders poppy became an instantly recognizable symbol worn in Canada and Britain on November 11, Remembrance Day, to commemorate the Great War dead.

Few of the patriots and propagandists who quoted the poem seemed aware that it was an example of a traditional French form, a form with a name, history, and fixed scheme. Such knowledge was irrelevant, or seemed so. Reply poems, for instance, invariably imitated “In Flanders Fields” even to the point of lifting entire phrases from it, yet just as invariably altered the scheme even when apparently attempting to emulate it. Medieval and Renaissance fixed-form rondeaus were of ten, thirteen, or fifteen lines; in the nineteenth century, the post-Romantics (including Banville in his Petit traité de poésie française) overwhelmingly preferred the fifteen-line scheme: aabba aabR aabbaR, with the refrain (“R”) consisting of the first few words of the first line of the poem. McCrae’s poem, like the rondeaus of post-Romantics such as Banville and Dobson, adheres precisely to this scheme, whereas the scheme of Moina Michael’s 1918 reply poem “We Shall Keep the Faith” is only somewhat similar:

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet — to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields. (Michael 3)

The scheme of Michael’s poem is abbcd eeffggR gghhR; it is a form based essentially on stanzas of rhymed couplets with a single hemistich appended to each stanza. With its three top-heavy stanzas of varying length, it looks like “In Flanders Fields,” but it is almost as different in structure as it is in tone, diction, meter, and sense. Moina Michael, a teacher at the University of Georgia, had seen McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” reprinted in the Ladies’ Home Journal just before the Armistice in 1918, and the poem and accompanying illustration (see Figure 3) moved her so strongly that, she reported, she immediately composed the above poem on the back of an envelope.

Figure 3: Ladies’ Home Journal 35.11 (1918 Nov): 56.

Subsequently, Michael was the prime mover in getting the Flanders poppy adopted as a Remembrance Day symbol, and was the first to sell artificial poppies as a fundraising tactic. Despite her great investment in the poem’s message and symbolism, however, she remained unaware of the tradition behind its form.

Perhaps the most notable example of ignorance of the rondeau with respect to “In Flanders Fields” came in 1919, when a posthumous collection of McCrae’s poems was published. A biographical essay appended to In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems explained at length that “In Flanders Fields” was a highly original variety of sonnet. Sir Andrew Macphail, who had edited the University Magazine at McGill University in Montreal when McCrae was a student there, claimed that he had known that McCrae was the author of the anonymous poem in Punch because he recognized its form, having remembered publishing an earlier poem of McCrae’s titled “The Night Cometh” with the same scheme:

It will be observed at once by reference to the text that in form the two poems are identical. They contain the same number of lines and feet as surely all sonnets do. Each travels upon two rhymes with the members of a broken couplet in widely separated refrain.[…] It was a form upon which he had worked for years, and made his own. When the moment arrived the medium was ready. No other medium could have so well conveyed the thought (50).

Macphail, unaware that both poems are rondeaus, argues that their (supposedly) unusual form is proof of McCrae’s originality. Macphail, led in his opinion by another semi-literary army officer, even avers that “In Flanders Fields” has reached such a height of innovative structural excellence that its novel “sonnet” form might well become fixed:

The poem was first called to my attention by a Sapper officer, then Major, now Brigadier. […] This officer could himself weave the sonnet with deft fingers, and he pointed out many deep things. It is to the sappers that the army always goes for “technical material.”

The poem, he explained, consists of thirteen lines in iambic tetrameter and two lines of two iambics each; in all, one line more than the sonnet’s count. There are two rhymes only, since the short lines must be considered blank, and are, in fact, identical. But it is a difficult mode. It is true, he allowed, that the octet of the sonnet has only two rhymes, but these recur only four times, and the liberty of the sestet tempers its despotism,–which I thought a pretty phrase.[…] One is so often reminded of the poverty of men’s invention, their best being so incomplete, that one welcomes what–this Sapper officer surmised–may become a new and fixed mode of expression in verse. (53-5)

This ingeniously incorrect explication shows that the fact that “In Flanders Fields” was a rondeau had nothing to do with its popular success. It was not held up as an excellent example of the form, as it is today in some poetry handbooks. The form was unknown to most of McCrae’s contemporary readers, even to those with literary pretensions and with a strong desire to prove that McCrae was a gifted poet. There can be little doubt that if the sapper officer had known of the rondeau, Macphail would have argued that skill with a traditional form rather than formal innovation was McCrae’s particular gift. Clearly the influence of modernism’s “make it new” philosophy had sufficiently permeated the mainstream for Macphail to be able to cite inventiveness as a positive trait for a poet–yet Macphail seems slightly embarrassed to be taking such a position: “one welcomes” innovation only because there is little else to welcome.

The explanation for John McCrae’s adoption of the rondeau form is likely to have been almost exactly the opposite of that forwarded by Macphail. McCrae’s rondeau, like Stephen’s villanelle, shows that its author is writing from the cautious margins rather making daring Poundian forays from the safe center. To be Canadian was to be at least as provincial (by London and Oxford standards) as to be Irish; McCrae, ten years older than Joyce and by profession a doctor, never made the move that Joyce made away from late-Victorian styles toward a fresh and international, or extra-national, modernist experimentalism. McCrae had begun publishing poetry in McGill’s University Magazine, Varsity, and Canadian Magazine in the eighteen-nineties. In form many of McCrae’s poems, like Joyce’s in Chamber Music, were simple abab or aabb stanzas; there were also several ballads, indicating that McCrae had been influenced by the pre-Raphaelites and/or by Scottish models. Two poems, “Isandlwana” and “The Song of the Derelict,” are on a scheme which appears to be a rather unusual ballad variation: aRaRbbbR. Robert Burns’s “Duncan Gray,” composed about 1792, is on the same scheme; the Scotland-born McCrae might here be placing himself in a Scottish tradition. That the rondeau was a “French” form may have contributed to his interest in it (though his models were more likely to be the English examples of the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties); McCrae’s poetry, with its French and Scottish and English schemes, almost seems to imitate the elbow-to-elbow populations of French, Scottish, and English extraction in Montreal.

“In Flanders Fields” has in the twentieth century probably been considered most important in the context of Canadian poetry and Canadian national identity. The scholar Thomas B. Vincent addresses the question of why the heroic ideal survives in the work of McCrae and other Canadian poets of the Great War when British poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen abandoned that ideal; he attributes this difference chiefly to Canada’s emerging nationhood:

Instinctively, if not consciously, the Canadian poets discovered that, culturally, Canada was not Britain. They understood what poets like Owen were talking about; they had the personal experience required to appreciate that. But they knew in their poetic guts that the grim vision of life that energized Owen’s verse was not relevant to Canadian imagination in a central way. […] Among intelligent Canadians, there was no denial of the obscenities of war or of the moral implications of these brutalities, but there was also no denial of the perception that war contributed significantly to national maturation […] (167)

In this argument, McCrae’s poetry defines itself as Canadian by defining itself against British poetry, but it might be more accurate to say that McCrae’s poetry defines itself as Canadian by defining itself with pre-war poetry and values. McCrae’s values, like his poetic forms, were just behind the curve of nations more secure in their nationhood.

Still, when compared with the typical rondeau in Gleeson White’s 1887 anthology Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles &c, “In Flanders Fields” looks remarkably modern. “The Sweet, Sad Years,” by Rev. Charles D. Bell, D. D., for instance, begins “The sweet sad years; the sun, the rain, / Alas! too quickly did they wane” and continues in the typical key of a pleasurable romantic melancholy expressed in end-stopped lines, archaic diction, and inverted syntax (153). The association of such predictable poems with the rondeau form had never fully entered public consciousness, but serious poetry professionals still remembered, and judged “In Flanders Fields” harshly not only by comparing it to the more radical poems emerging from modernism, but also by comparing it to the puerile rondeaus that had emerged from the vers de société movement. When In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems was reviewed in the July 1919 issue of Poetry along with several other war-themed works, Alice Corbin Henderson (whose unfavorable review of Joyce’s Chamber Music had appeared in the previous issue of Poetry) recognized “In Flanders Fields” as a rondeau. This, she considered, was in itself a flaw:

The books listed above are mostly journalism, but now and then some poem lifts the emotion of the moment into song, thus winning a chance of survival after the moment has passed. John McCrae achieves this in the much-quoted In Flanders Fields–achieves it by sheer simplicity and concentration in the expression of a moving and tragic appeal. Another poem on the same motive a living soldier’s address to The Anxious Dead is perhaps still finer, and its quatrains fit the subject better than the too slight rondeau form of the first. (221)

Henderson was virtually alone among critics in awarding even this qualified praise to “In Flanders Fields”; the poem’s very success with an ignorant public probably doomed it in the discriminating eyes of the modernists and their inheritors even after the reputation of the French forms for “slightness” had been forgotten. Yet “In Flanders Fields,” rather like Stephen’s villanelle, was neither wholly akin to its “too-slight” schematic progenitors nor wholly divided from them, though certainly the poem achieved too perfect a compromise with traditional forms and values to be attractive to the modernists.

“In Flanders Fields” has long been disregarded or harshly judged by literary scholars, most notably by Paul Fussell in his well-known work The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), who writes that “words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far” to describe the final stanza of the poem. Fussell also avers that “indeed it could be said that the rigorously regular meter with which the poem introduces the poppies makes them seem already fabricated of wire and paper,” even though the poem’s meter is by no means clumsy, varying through caesura and enjambment if not through substitution (249). Fussell nevertheless makes an interesting point about the implications of the poppy as a choice of symbol; in Fussell’s argument, the image of the poppy–like the rondeau form, which Fussell does not discuss–serves to link McCrae’s poem with the work of the Decadents:

It would be a mistake to imagine that the poppies in Great War writings got there just because they are actually there in the French and Belgian fields.[…] For half a century before the fortuitous publicity attained by the poppies of Flanders, this association with homoerotic love had been conventional, in works by Wilde, Douglas, the Victorian painter Simeon Solomon, John Addington Symonds, and countless others. (247-8)

Fussell sees “the conception of soldiers as lovers” in the lines “Short days ago / We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, / Loved and were loved, and now we lie / In Flanders fields”; such references serve to link the poem only too firmly, in Fussell’s view, to “Victorian male sentimental poetry” (248).

Fred Crawford, in his 1988 book British Poets of the Great War, shares Fussell’s judgment: “That the poem’s closing seems unworthy of its beginning results from two abrupt shifts–the change in tone to the demand and threat of the last six lines and the use of chivalric imagery and diction […] outside the pastoral tradition for which the reader has been prepared” (38). Both critics seem to resent what is after all nothing but a standard volta in the third stanza, finding the turn both unconvincing and offensive, and the more so because the first two stanzas of the poem seem to promise a fully modernist take on the Great War. As Vincent writes, “Indeed, the narrative voice of the poem has some disturbing similarities to that of Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’ ” (169). Vincent, like Crawford and Fussell, places the poem in the pastoral tradition, but because none of these critics discuss the rondeau form, they all miss the point that the poem is most influenced by the faux-pastoral and decidedly chivalric “tradition” of late-Victorian Paris and London. The false pastoral of the “French forms” becomes, even if unintentionally, highly appropriate for the false pastoral of the battlefield, and one of the chief points of “In Flanders Fields” is that pastoral conventions simply cannot be applied any longer.

One of the most interesting aspects of the poem, I would also argue, is the very “demand and threat” that Crawford recoils from. Surely one of the best reasons for its effectiveness as propaganda is its barely buried exposé of the true engine of war: the poem appeals only apparently to loyalty; ultimately, it appeals to fear. And fear is why we fight. The central image is of a spectral vengeance that seems more frightening than any merely human war, and the foe seems less menacing than the potentially traitorous civilians on “our” side. The poem’s readers were no doubt glad to purchase absolution from an unconfessable fear and guilt by buying indulgences in the form of Victory Bonds and British Legion poppies.