Map recap/update

It occurs to me that some of you might not know about the mapping project. Those of you who do might want more information on my sources and my progress. Here is an update on what the project is, how it's going, and why I think it's important.

Last spring I was inspired by Martin Foys's project to assemble a digital map of all versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Most editions of the Chronicle are collations: that is, they take some annals from each and present them as one text. I find this misleading, at the very best.

Nine manuscripts or fragments exist:
 A-Prime The Parker Chronicle (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 173)
A Cottonian Fragment (British Museum, Cotton MS. Otho B xi, 2)
B The Abingdon Chronicle I (British Museum, Cotton MS. Tiberius A vi.)
C The Abingdon Chronicle II (British Museum, Cotton MS. Tiberius B i.)
D The Worcester Chronicle (British Museum, Cotton MS.Tiberius B iv.)
E The Laud (or "Peterborough") Chronicle (Bodleian, MS.Laud 636)
F The Bilingual Canterbury Epitome (British Museum, Cotton MS. Domitian A viii.)
H Cottonian Fragment (British Museum, Cotton MS. Domitian A ix.)
I An Easter Table Chronicle (British Museum, Cotton MS.Caligula A xv.)

I  began my project by mapping the invasion sites--inherently geographical entries-- of manuscript E:

Ninth century invasion sites, Peterborough

Clicking on a location exhibits the place name, date, facsimile, transcription, and translation of the annal:

Annals mentioning Thanet

This project is part of a larger effort to create a searchable map of the Peterborough Chronicle and, eventually, to incorporate optional layers for the other Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as well. I began working with a programmer to create a database that will sort the sites by place, event, and date range. A complete database will make the map  an interactive site unto itself, reinvigorating the scholarly discussions of empire, borderlands, nation-building, warfare, changes in the English language and paleography, pre-printing book creation and dissemination, and sociological issues embedded in the texts’ chronological structures.

This summer I began my second pre-database stage: comparative mapping. This map  charts sites from 10th c annals exclusive to any version of the Chronicle, displaying the regional and temporal privileging of each. Again, this is part of a larger endeavor to incorporate all mentioned places in each variant into a searchable, layered map/website.

HOLLER. 10th century locations exclusive to each version.

One can easily spot emerging patterns, which is encouraging because the versions' relationships with one another are notoriously difficult to trace.

Theoretically this is a project of both abstraction and production: in limiting the contexts and locations within these annals, each user will be creating a new object to be interpreted—one that sheds light on relationships within and among the textual variants. The evolution of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is notoriously difficult to discern, but perhaps visualizing its texts on a map will help us see new connections among them in what Franco Moretti might call a “diagram of forces.”

Yet even at this stage, the map is more than a diagram. Google Earth visually contextualizes the Chronicle’s events; zooming the viewers to particular locations and offering related hyperlinks, the map creates living memories for sites that usually don't have any registers for modern readers. The zoom and linking features also call attention to the multiple temporalities with which we're working.

The Chronicle Map’s practical uses range from referential index of place-names to digital compilation of the Chronicle’s texts; from battle-field map to paleography app. And can you imagine the teaching applications?! Importantly, creating a space for non-specialists to visually explore the chronicles and their content, especially in relationship to one another, will improve their accessibility and bring the texts into medievalists’ mainstream discourse.

Chronicle map and identity crisis

Hello, readers! Wishing everyone as lovely a fall as ours here in Durham.

I thought I'd follow up with some more detail about my extracurricular meetings and their consequences. 

I've been lucky to attend working groups, discussions, lectures, and meetings about integrating the digital into my research (and department), but I’m not much more experienced in digital development than I was when I started the project almost a year ago. 

The advice I've received has been thoughtful and motivating. So now I find myself in a strange place-- knowing what I need to learn, but not knowing how or when to learn it. Drupal might work (and indeed, a friend of mine is working on it). TEI could help. Omeka seems promising.

I can't even tell if this is my fantasy or reality.

Yet here are those pesky exams, and foreign language flashcards, and my students, and our dogs. And after that will be the prospectus, and foreign language reading, and my students, and our dogs.  And then the dissertation...you see where I'm going with this. I don't want to abandon textual study for a digital degree, so how can I justify spending all this time and on learning something that--it sounds strange to say--I shouldn't be learning right now? 

That's precisely what I was wondering when I attended Dyan Elliott's "Counterfactual Twelfth Century" presentation in lieu of the "Meaning of Digital Humanities" talk today. I began tweeting (with permission) but soon found myself distracted. I was missing those great phrases, interesting linkages, and difficult names. I was trying to share but losing the presentation’s most intricate and poetic points.

To whom did I owe this reporting, anyway? Was I doing this for notes, as a listening exercise, or because it was digital and "that's what I do"? No matter the reason for trying, I was bad at it. My tweets weren't helpful or detailed. I was losing on both sides. I had to choose medieval or digital in yet another moment of multidisciplinary multitasking. But here’s the catch: I didn’t want to choose.

Why?

Because whether it’s Anglo-Saxon Chronicles or Semi-Saxon dream visions, this stuff is just too damn cool for people to miss.

I remembered that I want this Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Map because the texts are difficult, marginalized, and under-studied. I want to make them accessible, relatable, and fluid. I want the map to prompt new scholars with new interpretations and new interests. That's why I was at a medieval event-- that's why I was tweeting there, too.

So I'm back to feeling good about my digital inklings. I feel justified in my interest. I won't let difficulty (and at times, seeming impossibility) distract me from what I know-- what I see-- is important. 

But now I need some help. Conversation and advice, of course, but more drastically perhaps, practice and experience.

Until next time, wishing everyone strength in their convictions and help where they need.

HASTAC post

Thanks for returning, kind readers!

I've been delightfully busy: conference abstracts, baby showers, cross-country birthdays, digital humanities meetings, TEI presentations, Chaucer lectures, Chronicle mapping, and perhaps most importantly, becoming a HASTAC scholar! 

I'm thrilled to be joining "a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities."

As a scholar, I will "blog, host online forums, develop new projects and organize events...around rethinking pedagogy, learning, research & academia for the digital age."

Hooray!
I've just posted a couple of entries on their website, so I thought I 'd try cross-posting myself, in the spirit of experimentation and sharing (it's pasted below). 

Until soon, promising a much-sooner next time!

"Pinterest. Instagram. Steampunk. Cosplay. Food trucks. Mumblecore. Anti-perfumes. World of Warcraft. Plus, typography goes shopping; Apple and value; True Blood and queer brand communities; and place-making and food ways at a Filipino restaurant near you (or not)."

What an opener, no?! Julia Lupton continues the blog post about her design and marketing courses here: http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2012/09/29/design-writing-and-marketing-fictions/

She really got me thinking about the connection between how and why I've been hoping to integrate new technologies into my own classroom.

I came to medieval literature through medieval architecture (thank you, Annabel Wharton), and I've maintained an interest in teaching my students about how we interact with texts as well as in space. In fact, I recently learned about a fascinating social sciences unit taught by some of my colleagues in first-year composition. During a few class visits to the Chapel Hill cemetery, students take notes on the gravestones, focusing on desciptive writing. They later read social science journals and ultimately write a conference paper on their own "reading" of the cemetery as cultural record. 

Professor Lupton's courses focus on the newest technologies with which we interact;  the cemetery unit uses old stones and epitaphs as the objects of study. But is there a way to do both? If so, it seems that would involve more than just following an archaeologist on Twitter. But what would it look like for freshmen in college to conduct field research, engage in secondary readings, and join interdisciplinary (or at least multimedia) communities-- all for an English class?

Like Lubpton, I "believe that courses in the writing and the humanities that engage with the designed world can matter immediately to how all of us make our livings, in the broadest possible sense."

And at this stage, I'm wondering what I can do about it. 

On Beowulf, Unferth, and the Lance scandal

I was lucky to begin teaching my first literature sections with Beowulf and some smaller Anglo-Saxon poems this morning. Teaching at 8 and 9am can be rough, but the students can be quite promising—they are, after all, those who signed up for class at 8 or 9am. And yet, not all of them are the go-getters that we’d all love to teach; some are the slack-asses who forgot to look at their sections, or who registered so late that they ended up here on accident. There’s really no telling what will happen.

I was THRILLED by my 8am class. It started slowly, as it should, but an attentive and interesting group emerged as the time passed. I got some thank-yous and follow-up questions at the end, which bodes well for a group of curious students.

Beowulf manuscript

My 9am class was brutal. Very few were responsive; very few were engaged; many looked annoyed. None of my warm-up strategies worked—it was difficult to get them to talk about what they didn’t like in the poems and impossible to get most of them to loosen up, chuckle, or seem engaged. Of course, there were the “happy few” who jumped in, but the vibe was all wrong.

And I didn’t help myself, either. After asking them to find an example of synechdoche (which I mispelled on the board), I waited through a few minutes of predictably awkward silence. When I broke it, I pointed out that no one could find anything because no one had marked in the book; I explained that reading without reading actively was a waste of time. I showed them my oh-so marked up text, and we all agreed that it’d be easier for me to find an example because of my annotations.

A hand went up.

I called on its student, who asked:

“Can you find an example for us?”

SURE I CAN.

…

…

…

Shit.

So much for establishing my credibility in a class full of skeptics!  I actually ended the class with, “Well, I hope your weekend will be better than your morning.”

UGH.

Thankfully, a thoughtful student came up after class with a question she’d brought up in an email. She asked why, in a warrior society like Beowulf’s, Unferth’s envy of him was so big a deal. Competition drove much of their culture, so why was the man who challenges Beowulf portrayed as such a bad guy?

Some brief background: when Beowulf arrives in hopes of killing Grendel, he introduces himself with a series of boasts to 1) establish his lineage and identity, and 2) show justification for the Danes to trust him. An introduction like, “Hey, I’m Beowulf. I’m soooooo good at what I do—I’m such a badass. I’ve killed tons and tons of creatures because I’m awesome. By the way, my family tree is ridiculous. Do you know who my dad was?!” is a bit off-putting to contemporary readers, but one can see the usefulness of the verbal CV to a community plagued by invasion.

Sea monster on Viking longship

In any event, when Beowulf arrives, Unferth is a bit moody. In Seamus Heaney’s words, Unferh “spoke contrary words” because he was “sick with envy” when he suggests that Beowulf’s swimming match with Brecca was motivated by vanity rather than glory. Moreover, Unferth protests, Beowulf didn’t win the race as he claims; Brecca “made good on his boast upon you and was proved right.”

Beowulf responds by bringing something new to the story—sea monsters. He claims to have killed nine of them in the race and, marked by fate, was shown to be the stronger swimmer. Rendering his opponent’s rhetoric as silly, childish brattiness, Beowulf notes: “The fact is, Unferth, if you were truly as keen or courageous as you claim to be Grendel would never have got away with such unchecked attrocity, attaks on your king.”

Can you feel the sting?

It seems, then, that competition is important to Anglo-Saxon society and their continental kin, but equally important is what we might call sportsmanship. If someone beats you, fine—give him the gold (or horses, or kingdom, or whatever) you promised and get on with it. There’s very little room for bitterness in a world so marked by interdependence and so desperate for safety. Yes, the hero gets the goods, the fame, the earthly (and perhaps heavenly) glory, but that’s something to celebrate and, even more importantly, something that is likely to benefit the entire community.

But is this the same today? When I saw that Lance Armstrong had given up his fight against doping claims, I wondered if he’d been just run down by thousands of Unferths bitter about his successes and their own weaknesses. But perhaps they are right; there’s certainly some evidence of Armstrong’s drug use. As an ex-runner, I’m still upset by Marion Jones’s abuse; I had looked to her as a great female role model. As an Austinite who saw Lance bring together a community, open up the sport of cycling, and help my friend dying of cancer, this news is even more upsetting. 

If, like the Anglo-Saxons, we benefit from our heroes’ successes, in what way to we reap the reward? If they don’t compete for fame, for glory, why do they compete? More importantly, for whom do they compete? Don’t they know the risks their taking with our trust, our pride, and our support? Does unity forged in a lie keep its bonds, or will it unravel with the truth?

In this literature, the hero is welcomed and rewarded by the community he helps to save or he is buried by those he fails. In either case, there’s no cheating—especially not fate. 

Gold from Staffordshire Hoard

            

Stages of grief

...or, how one room nearly ruined my life.

Stage 1: Denial 

Moving in, May 2011

Stage 2: Anger

Wood floors, June 2012

Stage 3: Bargaining

Selling the giant couch (for nothing, it turns out)

Stage 4: Depression

Removing chair rail, respackling x 3, and painting. Are we making it worse?

Stage 5: Acceptance

BOOM.