Brian Croxall

I used the LGF comment on Mixx I thought you might get a few more looks at a very worthy blog….

This comment was originally posted on Rethink.

Thanks for making this data available, Mark. The open-source scholar rides again!

This comment was originally posted on SAMPLE REALITY

Actually, where you lost points was saying “open-source professor” instead of naked professor.

This comment was originally posted on SAMPLE REALITY

i love the article

This comment was originally posted on rajnish3783′s posterous

#MLA10 Tip: Use the word “rhizomatic” whenever possible. Rhizomatic rhizomatic.

This comment was originally posted on SAMPLE REALITY

Absolutely!

As someone who did not attend the conference who did read Brian’s paper and the other pieces about Brian’s paper and followed #MLA09 I was struck but what you very accurately describe: a great deal of naval gazing about the so-called importance of the digital humanities at MLA. Your point is absolutely correct: if the digital humanities had become so sedimented in English departments as the articles and hype suggests then Brian (and the many other wonderful people we follow on Twitter who did not get interviews and will not land jobs) would have had multiple interviews and will have multiple job offers.

The truth of the matter is that we are far from where we need to be and what we need to have happen: a complete overhaul of what higher education and, for our purposes, English departments, consider to be the work of the academy so that we might get to the point of being able to, as you envision, “completely change what it means to be a humanities scholar.” Brian’s 600+ followers recognize the value that he provides for teaching, learning, and research, as his students do, I’m sure. But there are thousands of faculty and graduate students in English departments who still don’t/won’t/can’t understand the value of what he (and all of us) do to enhance teaching, learning, and research, in a contemporary society. (Indeed, I have had to fight to even get courses in web design and visual rhetoric approved by my Writing Arts department because of concerns from certain faculty members. Ironically, once the proposals got past the department committee, there were no problems at the college level other than those relating to document formatting and some elaboration.)

The question, of course, always comes back to: where do we go from here? Do we continue to gnaw away, bit by bit, until there are enough MLA president tweet invites to give the community a good shake-up? There are simultaneous too many and too unsatisfactory answers to these questions. All I know is that I’m looking forward to being a part of the conversation.

Thanks for an excellent post.

This comment was originally posted on academhack

I agree, #MLA10 has the chance to be the most rhizomesque conference ever.

This comment was originally posted on SAMPLE REALITY

Clearly, there has been a lot of focus on “Digital Humanities” this year because of the rise of twitter and, as such, DH has now been associated with social media almost exclusively. This is unfortunate. Though Dave mentions the fact that MLA has supported DH in the past (Matt’s book is a great example) no one really thought that support was worthy of such attention until this year. What’s the difference? The rise of twiitter. Great. But, DH is more than that. Has been, will be, and ought to be if someone like Brian (and myself) and others want a brick and mortar traditional job (which, though this is another conversation, I’m not so sure I do). I think if we look at the what got the attention, for the most part, we see Brian’s blog post and the dissemination of that blog post on twitter, which is in itself remarkable and clearly facilitated by digital media. But, what about the other MLA papers listed at Association for Computers and The Humanities (http://www.ach.org/mla/mla09/index.html) — an organization, by the way, that has had sessions at MLA since 1996? Some of which discussed preservation and access, gaming, virtual worlds, text mining and visualiations to name a few. And what about the audience member who asked the question about the gadgets? I was there too and it wasn’t a bad or misguided or even shallow question. What *are* DH scholars doing that is different than traditional scholarship? What work *has* changed the nature of scholarship? And what in the world is wrong with asking that question? We ask the same of our students.I agree with Steve. There is a lot of good work out there describing the influence digital analysis, interfaces, visualizations, databases, etc. has had on scholarship and the way that DH has changed the way we think about the objects we study. This work is not as easy to point to or explain as the affect of 1million followers on twitter or 5000 comments on a blog–all of which is great and wonderful too, no doubt– but the SLOW rise of DH is about the hard work involved in thoughtful discussions about scholarship done with digital tools in digital environments. The discussion is not new this year and everyone having it is not on twitter.

This comment was originally posted on academhack

At the 1997 MLA in Toronto–that long ago? My.–I read a paper called . . . wait for it . . . “Hypertext Theory Post-Postructuralism” at a session sponsored by the ACH Tanya mentions above. I was upset that some folks were upset that humanists (and the MLA specifically) were–supposedly–ignoring technology. Here it is, in its entirety, not redacted, for whatever it might be worth in the context of the current discussion.

Hypertext Theory Post-Post-Structuralism

MLA 1997, Toronto Session 207: Computers and Theory
Association for Computers in the Humanities

Although I have spoken before on various aspects and implementations of digital media, this is the first time I have delivered a paper conceived as a deliberate intervention in the work of hypertext theory. I mention this because my remarks today rest on the assumption that hypertext theory, especially literary hypertext theory, has, by this time — Sunday, December 28, 1997, 1:30 PM — accumulated sufficient numbers of monographs, published papers, and conference proceedings such that it is recognizable as its own distinct, palpable body of critical literature. And I trust it will be a revelation to no one here to suggest that bodies have histories. (Witness, for example, George Landow’s recently revised edition of his widely-read study Hypertext, now entitled Hypertext 2.0.) Part of my project today, as indicated by the tendentious temporality of my own hyper-hypenated title –a symptom of what Michael Joyce often calls the “anticipatory nextness” that permeates our state of living — is to think about how we might begin historicizing literary hypertext theory as a series of events in the disciplines served by the Modern Language Association, disciplines which have given rise to some of the field’s most provocative and proactive voices. This is desirable not least because attention to genealogy and family matters cannot fail to teach us something about what hypertext theory is and is doing today. Hypertext theory also strikes me as a useful case study for tracking the professional response of humanists to new information technologies — and so in that sense, this paper functions as a partial account of one particular, historically and institutionally locatable instance of the encounter between “computers and theory.”

I should mention at the outset that I am not alone in attempting bring some historical perspective to literary hypertext theory. Several of Michael Joyce’s recent talks have taken this direction, especially one called “Forms of Future,” a haunting paper delivered first in Berlin and later at MIT. Indeed, Professor Joyce spoke earlier today on the subject of “Post-Hypertextuality.” Jay David Bolter has also contributed to this same discussion in a talk entitled “The Impact of Global Hypertext on Literary and Cultural Theory,” delivered at last year’s MLA in Washington DC. This important paper, which to the best of my knowledge has not since been republished, and which begins, “What I want to address is not the significance of hypertext . . . but rather its lack of significance. Why hypertext has had so little influence on theory in our profession in the past decade,” forms part of the intellectual backdrop for my own remarks today.

Now in one sense the task of historicizing literary hypertext theory ought to be quite straightforward, since the work undertaken by the various scholars associated with the field is well-documented in the professional literature. It is not difficult, for example, to reconstruct relevant activity at specific academic venues, such as the MLA convention — as I’ll take a few minutes to do now.

Although humanities computing in the broadest sense — encompassing such fields as linguistic computing and text analysis — has enjoyed a presence on the MLA program since the late seventies, the first panels with the word “hypertext” in their title do not appear until 1988. One session at the 1988 convention is sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities under the characteristically conjunctive rubric of “Hypertext and Literature;” the other is a special session on hypertextual writing practices organized by Terence Harpold. Panels or papers from Harpold, as well as such influential scholars as George Landow, Paul Delany, Stuart Moulthrop, Gregory Ulmer, Jay Bolter, and Michael Joyce appear on the convention program again in 1989, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1995, and 1996. At the 1990 Chicago MLA, a session organized by Harpold on “Canonicity and Hypertextuality: The Politics of Hypertext” is especially noteworthy for including Ted Nelson, the computer scientist responsible for coining the term hypertext in 1965.

This timeline is significant because it has direct bearing on the notion of a convergence between literary theory, specifically the poststructuralist mandate, and hypertext’s emergence as a usable writing technology. Certainly mine is a thumbnail history, performed on the fly, and a narrow base from which to draw broad conclcusions. Nonetheless, the MLA program is not without value as an index of trends and fashions at work in the profession at large. So what I’d like to suggest first is that the convergence narrative, which has been taken up as one of literary hypertext theory’s foundational precepts, cannot be effectively sustained solely by recourse to parallel chronologies of theoretical and technological developments. In 1986 for example, one year after the Intermedia system debuts at Brown, J. Hillis Miller noted the following in his Presidential address to the Modern Language Association: “[L]iterary study in the past few years has undergone a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such and has made a corresponding turn toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base.” By the phrase “an orientation toward language as such,” I take Miller to mean precisely such locutions as Derridean differance and Barthesian jouissance. By contrast, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearian Negotiations, two texts which as much as any can lay claim to foundational status in the work of the New Historicism and cultural studies, are published in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Apple introduces Hypercard in 1987, and Storyspace enters public distribution soon after. Now none of this is to suggest that the writings of Barthes and Derrida do not retain significant explanatory force when placed in dialogue with hypertext as a writing space; I want to make that very clear. My point is more modest and more moderate: I am not convinced that the narrative of convergence, which carries with it an unavoidable chronological bias, is the one that most effectively reflects the intellectual climate in the institutional spaces in which literary hypertext theory was and continues to be articulated.

That said, I’d like to now turn toward the question of what role literary hypertext theory might have after, or post post-structuralism, at a moment in which the technological base of hypertext appears to be shifting from stand-alone systems like Storyspace and Intermedia, to the distrubuted client-server network of the Web, what Jay Bolter called “global hypertext” in his paper last year.

As well as I can determine, the first MLA presentations to make particular reference to the World-Wide Web took place four years ago, in San Diego at the 1994 convention (remember that the Web began assuming graphical form in mid-1993, following the release of the Mosaic browser some months earlier). Significantly, the Web debuts at MLA not in sessions devoted to hypertext theory as such, but rather in a paper entitled “The World Wide Web and the Virtual Document: A New Rhetorical Contract,” presented by one William Dennis Horn, as part of a panel sponsored by the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing. The Web also receives notice in several papers from another 1994 panel entitled “Practice and Ideal in Electronic Scholarly Editions.” Meanwhile, a special session from the same MLA on “Structures of Discourse in Cyberspace” includes papers on MOOs, IRC, and E-Mail, as well as a talk by Michael Joyce on hypertext fiction — but so far as I can deterimine, no papers directly addressing the Web. At the 1995 convention in Chicago, papers given over to the Web are again scant by comparison with other Internet and multimedia technologies. And it is not until Alan Liu’s 1996 special session entitled “The Canon and the Web: Reconfiguring Romanticism in the Information Age” that the Web is explicitly presented as capable of interventions in literary theory and literary studies on the order of Terry Harpold’s earlier “Canonicity and Hypertextuality: The Politics of Hypertext.”

So what does this mean for us here today? Jay Bolter assessed the situation well last December when he said:

“In the past, cultural theory could study other media (such as television) from the relatively secure vantage point provided by print and the institutions in which print is embedded. But in the future if digital media like the Web become the principal vehicle for academic exchange, then theory will have to become complicit with the new technology at some level simply in order to continue its work.”

Some weeks after hearing that, when I first began drafting this paper, I included a paragraph recounting a television commercial for MCI’s on-line service. Some of you may know the one I had in mind. Against a backdrop of cascading data and luminous VDT screens a voice intones: “There is no race. There are no genders. There is no age. There are no infirmities. There are only minds.” The point — or so I wrote at the time — is not just that insipid refrains of this sort will draw commentary from an academic establishment predisposed to anaylising the material conditions of race, gender, age, and infermity. The point — I wrote — is also that academic humanism will increasingly find itself linked in the very same network of technological relations which define the media ecology of the MCI commerical: in theWeb’s slender degrees of separation, http://www.mci.com is never much further than a couple of clicks away from, say, the Voice of the Shuttle index, or even, god bless us, http://www.mla.org.

That sounded right at the time. But now I’m not so sure. Let me share with you a piece of email I received some months back. In fact, I continue to receive several like it every few weeks:

Dear Webmaster:

Not all links are created equal. Some deliver surfers, some deliver browsers and most don’t deliver at all.

How would you like a link that gets a 75% click-through and all the visitors are shoppers already interested in what your selling?

Only a link from the CatalogMart can deliver this qualified traffic.

[. . .]

CatalogMart visitors are buyers, not ’surfers’! Most of them come through the major on-line services and pay for their access. CatalogMart doesn’t get traffic because it’s pretty or fun. Our visitors come to the CatalogMart to request catalogs for products they are interested in buying by direct mail. They are not ‘clicks’ or ‘hits’ but real customers. And more than 75% of our visitors follow the links to our “Connected” sites.

The cost of a link with descriptive text is only $100 dollars per month. An incredibly low price for directing thousands of interested shoppers to your site.

[. . .]

Thank you for your time.

Regards, Denise Navetta denise [at] savvy [dot] com

I submit to you that this email message documents an instance of what we might term white-collar hypertext theory, in which the once brute-force mechanism of is taking on far more complex social and especially economic layerings. If high-impact graphic design was the first major stage in the commercial makeover of the Web, I’d argue that we are now witnissing the opening moves of a second, far more subtle stage, one in which the phenomenology of the HTML link, once the Web’s great equalizer, is changing rapidly. Recall, for example, last spring’s controversy between Microsoft and Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster had filed suit against Microsoft after Microsoft created an “unauthorized” link to Ticketmaster from a Web page located on a Microsoft-owned server. To quote the Wall Street Journal: “Ticketmaster maintains that the unauthorized link dilutes the value of its own sponsorship by companies such as MasterCard, and says that Microsoft was able to attract advertising to its Seattle Sidewalk site based on the Ticketmaster link. ‘They want to suck up our content and keep the advertising revenue from it,’ says Ticketmaster’s CEO.” Several months later, the Journal reported that increasingly, corporations were retaining attournies to investigate the feasibility of “link licenses” which would govern the conditions of one site’s linking to another: “‘Links establish a connection between two businesses, and people really want to be able to control that,’ says an intellectual property attorney.”

Likewise, I would place the recent appearance of web rings in this category. A web ring consists of a series of sites devoted to related topics which share a common linking protocol, such that, whereever a user enters the ring, they are offered the option of proceeding forward to the next site in the ring or back to the previous one (or to a central administrative site, the hub of the ring). There are Web rings devoted to everything from Elvis to S&M. Investors Business Daily reports that, “The trend is rapidly gaining momentum — in January, webring.com, a directory for Web rings, listed about 1,000 rings. By September, it listed 18,000, encompassing some 200,000 Web sites. Webring.com estimates that its number of “hits” is going up at a rate of 22% per quarter.” Another company, LOOPLINK, describes their service this way: “By sharing the site traffic among loop member sites, every LOOPLINK member benefits. Every time a new site is added to the loop, traffic within the loop increases, benefiting all loop members. It’s like being in a popular mall. The loop is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The Derrida that is perhaps most relevant to hypertext theory now is not the Derrida of Of Grammatology or even The Postcard, but the Derrida of Given Time, his mediation on gift economies, counterfeit currencies, and eternal returns. For clearly the crass commercialism of white-collar hypertext theory — its looplinks and webrings and click-throughs and link licenses –is in fact only a more localized instance of the situation now facing the academy as a whole. As scholars like Alan Liu are now pointing out, post-industrial business theory — whose chief rubrics, codified in hundreds of books and the proceedings of countless management seminars, consist in such formulations as ‘knowledge work’ and ‘lifelong learning’ — is directly positioned to compete with the academy for the material and lexical conditions of knowledge. Or else as historian David F. Noble notes in an article entitled “Digital Diploma Mills” currently circulating on a number of listserves, Sheerson Lehman Brothers estimates the potential worth of the education market at several billion dollars, even going so far as to suggest that education will replace healthcare as the “focus industry” of the future. If such predictions are accurate, the humanities as we know them now will remain intact only to the extent that their differance can be reflected outward, across the pay-per-view reticulations of an increasingly homogenized and impermeable mediascape.

Stuart Moulthrop is fond of saying, “No ideas but in production.” This is, of course, an updated take on the poet William Carlos Williams’s dictum, “No ideas but in things.” It is also, perhaps, a skewed sidewinder aimed at the production regimes of global capital. In truth, part of me is still sympathetic to the old ideal of humanitas, that there is a place for ideas which may never realize themselves in material form. But in the end Stuart is surely right, for if we in the academy don’t produce, direct, and distribute our ideas, then Disney and Time-Warner will be only to happy to do so for us. I’ll spare you the rest of that particular jeremiad, you’ve heard it before I’m sure, but I will say that increasingly I’ve come to think that the greatest longterm significance of Hypertext 2.0 and other books like it may be as alternative histories, documents of what once was, indeed almost never was. So in place of convergence’s mighty dream of a common language, I suppose I would proffer something more deliberate: a weather eye watching with vigilance all ships at sea in the dilating moment of the now; the mind’s eye turned inward in remembrance of some extraordinary things past whose time may yet come round again; and all hands calloused and lined from hours spent working the forms of the future.

This comment was originally posted on academhack

The ugly truth is that the real impact of Croxall’s paper can be measured by his employment status.

I had the pleasure of sitting across from Brian at a THATCamp and he is a great guy and indeed a rising name in digital humanities. And I agree absolutely that search committees are valuing the wrong thing if a person like Brian isn’t getting interviewed. But there you have it. The university still gives only lip service to the digital humanities and those wishing to enter the workforce need to keep that in mind.

The digital humanities are for the tenured.

This comment was originally posted on academhack

Lauren,
If you haven’t already, you might want to check out the MLA’s wiki on evaluating digital scholarship: http://wiki.mla.org/index.php/Evaluation_Wiki

I found the page on Documenting a New Media Case especially helpful as I consider my own new media endeavors in light of self-evaluation and promotion.

This comment was originally posted on lauren’s library blog