Dissertation Abstract--the one for publication

ABSTRACT

GENRE, DATABASE, AND THE ANATOMY OF THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE

Elizabeth J. Vincelette
Old Dominion University, 2010
Director: Dr. Jeffrey H. Richards


The purpose of this study was to define shared characteristics of literary digital archives, specifically to explore how conceptual and structural qualities of such archives express generic qualities. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars resort to metaphors, and this study offers the metaphor of anatomy as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. The definition of the anatomy genre draws from Northrop Frye’s in Anatomy of Criticism, in which Frye describes how anatomies are characterized by proliferating lists, the mixing of prose and non-prose forms, and self-reflexivity—under the guise of knowledge accrual, investigation, and discovery.

Criticism from digital humanities, new media, historiography, literature, and archival studies informed this research, in particular critical theory on genre and epistemology, and research on physical and digital archives. Because the definitions we apply to our digital technologies are under development, this dissertation participates in the overall emergence of terms in digital humanities theory.

Several case studies analyzed the interface and underlying structures of four literary digital archives to consider how they represent the material past, and how design of visual elements and functionality manifest characteristics of the anatomy genre. The case studies suggest that literary websites, exhibits, and archives participate in the anatomy genre, but that some sites are more “anatomical” than others, and some sites do not align with the genre at all. The ability to designate a digital project as an anatomy depends more on encyclopedism, detailism, and its continual updating, than on any other factors.

In addition, my own experience constructing a literary digital archive from historical manuscripts informs this investigation of genre, in particular my role as the researcher-archivist and how identity affects my approach to the archive. Historically, metacommentary has always been part of the anatomy genre, and this study positions methodological criticism as an expression of metacommentary.
The study concludes by considering the implications of literary digital archives for scholarship and research, including effects of power, institutional impact, and the profession of “English” itself, especially in light of the anatomy genre’s tendency towards proliferation and unfinishability.

Photo of the Day

One of Sunny's kittens. I miss having them around, but with the stray, un-neutered male nearby, I had to do something. The first time she was pregnant, it happened when we didn't think she was old enough. After the litter (nine!), we went to get her spayed only to discover she was anemic and needed medication first....but, guess what happened before she was well enough? Kittens again. It's a great reason to get your animals spayed or neutered when they are young. I didn't expect to be an owner who would have kittens twice! They were gorgeous, though, and all found good homes.

diss definition

It’s always hard to answer the question, “What’s your dissertation about?”

I have one answer for non-academics and another for scholars.

My own idea of what it is has changed over the last couple of years. I now see it as a “textual studies” dissertation more than anything else. For a while I wanted to say it was a “digital humanities” dissertation, which it still is, I suppose, but that was before I realized (after reading a bunch of things) that DH isn’t exactly a “field,” and that I’d better situate what I’m doing in a field.

Matthew P. Brown comments that if "textual studies" is "understood as a concern with the transmission of the book and the manuscript as physical objects taken up by human agents and conveyed through material media, we can begin to glean its relevance to studies of communication, interpretation, subject formation, and historical change" (81).

Brown’s definition suggests a broad notion of textual studies that incorporates the history of the book, including the most recent manifestation of textual evolution—electronic text. Within English studies, both textual studies and new media concern electronic textuality, as does the additional sub-discipline known as digital humanities.

Brown, Matthew P. “Cultural Studies, Materialist Bibliography and the New England Archive: Editing an Elegy from King Philip’s War.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999): 81-89. Web. Academic Search Complete. 20 September 2008.

Walt Whitman Levis Commercial

If you haven't seen it yet, there's a Levi's commercial that uses the Walt Whitman poem "O, Pioneers!" as its soundtrack.

I used it in my classroom to discuss popular culture representations of literature in American media. Today I decided to gather more information about it and quickly found a number of people writing about the commercial online.

People are divided over whether there's some sort of corruption of taste happening with such a use of Uncle Walt. That sort of opinion espouses a "high culture," Arnoldian point of view.

I think Whitman may have liked the idea, self-promoter that he was.

Photography

I'm starting a new photography website here: http://elizabeth-vincelette.webs.com/

SEO 2

Because digital humanities addresses where new media and literary-historical materials meet, Elizabeth Vincelette has participated in a number of conferences across the field of English studies. Over the last two years, she has attended and presented papers at CCCC in New Orleans, LA, Computers and Writing in Athens, GA, and the Watson Conference at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. See

www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw_pages/schedule/CW2008_Tentative.doc

OTHER CONFERENCE LINKS HERE

Vincelette has also taken a course in the TEI, or Textual Encoding Intiatiative, at the DHSI (http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive) in Victoria, British Columbia. The DHSI, or Digital Humanities Summer Institute, is devoted to the development of digital humanities scholarship and provides courses for scholars seeking hands-on training in computing skills relevant to the humanities.

For her dissertation project, Vincelette will digitize and encode an archival collection from the late nineteenth-century. The collection contains a number of materials related to the newspaper The Independent.

Publications include an article in the online journal NeoAmericanist entitled “Press One for American English” (http://www.neoamericanist.org/archive-winter08/papers-winter08.html) and an article in The Edgar Allan Poe Review (Fall, 2008). A forthcoming publication regarding parody, authorship, and copyright, is in the works.

The following is an abstract of “Identity and Ideology: Press One for American English”:

In the American imagination, the myth of the mainstream projects an ideal of English as the legal, official national language, a belief that conflates socio-historical attitudes about language with nationalistic ideology. A music video on YouTube, entitled “Press One for English,” debuts at a time of increasingly vocal protests about nationwide English-only laws. The video represents a piece of pop-propaganda dependent on both its lyrics and its visual icons to advance its ideological stance on language. Regarding English as an earned right identifies it as symbolic capital, a political symbol used to identify what it means to be American, as well as to control that identity. The social order expressed in the song suggests a collective ideal of an America in which today’s immigrants are expected to assimilate by learning English, just as was “always done” by immigrants in the past. The song uses entertainment as a vehicle for nationalism—and ultimately for a type of propagandist pedagogy to promote the American dream, a linguistic self-reliance that expresses national identity and becomes part of a civic story dependent on assimilation.

SEO

SEO--search engine optimization. I suppose this is on the fringes of what I study with composition and digital media, but it's a fascinating turn in the once-utopian scene of the Internet.

I'm interested in a book called Google Bombthat's selling well.

So, here's a sample of an SEO type of post that performs the type of work needed to promote oneself:

As a doctoral candidate, Elizabeth Vincelette is currently writing her dissertation on digital archiving from a digital humanities perspective. Creation of the archive, entitled Independent Women, will take place over the next two years, along with the theoretical portion of the dissertation.

For the second year in a row, Vincelette will attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (see http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive), in Victoria, BC, in order to participate in training in the TEI, the Textual Encoding Initiative. TEI is a form of XML used in digital humanities scholarship to encode textual materials.

As part of her dissertation project, Elizabeth Vincelette will encode historical manuscripts related to the newspaper The Independent. Materials include letters, poetry, manuscripts, and a collection of autographs. The materials originated in a scrapbook, which appears to have been kept by a woman in the 1880s. The correspondence in the collection dates from 1880-1881, so it is likely that the materials were placed in the scrapbook near that time; evidence for that time frame is found in the collection itself in a letter.

Vincelette will select materials from the entire collection in order to create a digital archive pertaining to the women authors in the collection. Her focus will be on women’s authorship in nineteenth-century American periodicals.

Elizabeth Vincelette has two publications to date, including “Press One for American English” (available online at http://www.neoamericanist.org/archive-winter08/papers-winter08.html) and an article in the Edgar Allan Poe Review (Fall 2008), which is not yet available online. She has a forthcoming publication on copyright and parody on YouTube.

For the last two years, Vincelette has attended a number of conferences, including CCCC in New Orleans, Computers and Writing (see www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw_pages/schedule/CW2008_Tentative.doc ) in Athens, GA, and the Watson conference in Louisville, KY (see louisville.edu/conference/watson/2008%20Watson%20Conference%20Program.pdf). Upcoming conferences include CCCC in San Francisco, CA, and Women in the Archives in Providence, RI (see http://www.wwp.brown.edu/about/activities/wwp20/schedule.html). Her research interests include American literature and digital humanities.

Her blog, Tech Tonics, is at http://techtonicsblog.blogspot.com/.