Digital medievalists need libraries
A month or so ago, the incredibly nifty Digital Medievalist launched its new journal, RSS feeds and all.
(In passing, I love journal-TOC RSS feeds. They’re the greatest thing ever, like having your very own pull service or academic librarian. I’m glad the Digital Medievalists were so forward-thinking. That said—folks? Fix your URLs, please. I guarantee you won’t be using Cold Fusion forever, and the sooner you make Cold Fusion emit futureproof URLs, the less hair-tearing you’ll have to do when you move off it.)
I ripped through the whole first issue as soon as I heard about it—and yes, I also am proof (if any more were needed) that medieval studies spawns more text geeks per capita than any other discipline there is. How does one not love an article on digital paleography?
Because I’m an armchair accessibility wonk, I also very much appreciated the article on ensuring accessibility of digitized medieval collections. Nothing earthshaking about the techniques or the methods, just a good, solid reminder that accessibility needs attention. Worth perusal, especially for digitization librarians.
The article that grabbed me by the throat and shook, however, talked about digital critical editions and why they’re going away. I really felt for the author; I’ve seen the Ivory Tower shoot down digital-edition projects again and again. Not to mention that I’ve now and again ranted on the subject of markup tools and why they’re horrible.
The story-in-brief here is that the article’s author, desirous of creating digital critical editions of various and sundry works, got frozen out by prestigious print publishers, when they discovered “that electronic editions cost no less than print editions to produce and require staff to be educated in the new possibilities.” (I might add that the revenue stream of such a work is uncertain at best.) He then built himself an academic fiefdom to put out such editions; he says he’s been moderately successful, but he’s not satisfied.
He blames the unwillingness of scholars to grant due professional credit to the authors of electronic editions (isn’t it just bloody funny how academia is falling all over itself to use digital resources, but doesn’t in the least want to produce them?) and the appalling state of production tools and workflows. (I have no quarrel with that last point, of course, but I confess to a mild amount of bogglement that he thinks TEX is somehow easier than your average XML editor.)
What I want to know is, where the seven hells are this guy’s librarians?
Of course no for-profit or even cost-recovery publisher is going to touch digital editions. Too much expense, not enough audience. Of course spare-bedroom fiefdoms can’t pick up the slack; nothing can that lives only as long as a spare bedroom.
But academic libraries are doing these jobs by the metric tonne. We know things about TEI that people who wrote the Guidelines don’t. (Such as, TEI-Lite is unusable because it doesn’t allow both <head> and <label> at the beginning of a text division. What blockhead decided that, pray?) A lot of us have humanities backgrounds, even humanities-computing backgrounds; I really wasn’t kidding about ex-medievalist text geeks.
And neither publishers nor fiefdoms tend to pay any attention at all to the long-term survival of the result. Libraries are different. Long-term survival of knowledge is our business.
There’s a lot of buzz buzzing about how to extend open-access into the humanities space. I submit that journals aren’t the place to start. Open-access journals, institutional repositories, and so forth didn’t get any legs until the current system started getting too messy for the sci-tech-med folks. To extend those gains, we academic digitization librarians need to keep an eye out for areas where the current publishing system breaks down for humanities scholars. This is one. So let’s get cracking.