[4 November 2008]

This is the third in a series of posts about recent travels.

From Mannheim, I traveled to Dublin to visit the Digital Humanities Observatory headed by Susan Schreibman; they stand at the beginning of a three-year project to provide access to Irish work in digital humanities and to prepare the way for long-term preservation. I wish them the best of luck in persuading the individual projects with whom they are to collaborate that the use of appropriate standards is the right way forward.

From Dublin, Susan and I traveled to Trier for <philtag n=”7″/>, a small gathering whose name is a macaronic pun involving the German words Philologie (philology), Tag (congress, conference, meeting), and the English word tag. The meeting gathered together a number of interesting people, including several of those most actively interested in computer applications in philology, among them Werner Wegstein, who has organized most of the series, and whom I know from way back as a supporter of the TEI; Andrea Rapp, one of the senior staff at the Trier center of expertise in electronic access and publishing in the humanities; and Fotis Jannidis, currently teaching in Darmstadt and the founder and editor of the annual Computerphilologie, as well as a co-editor of the important electronic edition of the young Goethe. Wegstein is retiring from his chair in Würzburg, thus leading to the creation of a new chair computational philology, for which both Rapp and Jannidis were on the short list; on the preceding Friday, they had given their trial lectures in Würzburg. Either way, Würzburg will get a worthy successor to Wegstein.

The general topic this year was “Communicating eHumanities: Archives, Textcentres, Portals”, and several of the reports were indeed focused on archives, or text centers, or portals. I spoke about the concept of schema mapping as a way of making it possible to provide a single, simple, unified user interface to heterogeneous collections, while still retaining rich tagging in resources that have it, and providing access to that rich markup through other interfaces. Susan Schreibman spoke about the DHO. Haraldur Bernharðsson of Reykjavík spoke about an electronic edition of the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda, which cheered me a great deal, since the Edda is dear to my heart and I’m glad to see a well done electronic edition. Heike Neuroth, who is affiliated both with the Max Planck Digital Library and Berlin and with the Lower Saxon State and University Library in Göttingen, spoke on the crucial but underappreciated topic of data curation. (I did notice that many of the papers she cited as talking about the need for long-term preservation of data were published in proprietary formats, which struck me as unfortunate for both practical and symbolic reasons. But data curation is important, even if some who say so are doing a good job of making it harder to curate they data they produce.)

There were a number of other talks, all interesting and useful. But I think the high point of the two days was probably the public lecture by Fotis Jannidis under the title Die digitale Evolution der Kultur oder der bescheidene Beitrag der Geisteswissenschaften zur Virtualisierung der Welt (‘Digital evolution, or the modest contribution of the humanities to the virtualization of the world’). Jannidis took as his point of departure a suggestion by Brewster Kahle that we really should try to digitize all of the artifacts produced til now by human culture and refined and augmented Kahle’s back of the envelope calculations about how much information that would involve, and how one might go about it. At one point he showed a graphic with representations of books and paintings and buildings and so on in the upper left, and digitizations of them in the upper right, and a little row of circles labeled Standards at the bottom, like the logs on which the stones of the pyramids make their way to the construction site, in illustrations of books about ancient Egypt.

It was at about this point that, as already pointed out, he said “Standards are the essential axle grease that makes all of this work.”