DH Ghost Towns

Digital humanities (DH) not only helps us rethink the way we teach texts—it can also help students to redefine the very notion of what a “text” is and how texts might be read. In this essay, I reflect on two different class assignments—one in a literary analysis course and one in a senior capstone book history course—that engage students with DH projects in order to broaden their conceptions of literary texts, their publication and reception histories, and the networks of people involved in the production of these texts. However, this essay is also about how working with DH projects also inevitably leads students to “abandoned” DH projects: defunct links, broken webpages, and hacked blogs (in fact, the first DH project I reflect on now no longer seems to exist at all). Fortunately, what have seemed initially like setbacks ultimately led to valuable classroom discussions regarding not only the benefits of digital tools and archives for literary scholarship but also the problems of digital decay and the sustainability of DH projects: equally important conversations to have with students.

My foray into teaching with DH first began with the dissatisfaction I experienced teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an analog, printed text. As an enthusiastic but naïve first-year professor, I had told my students that they could use whatever edition of Frankenstein was the cheapest or on their shelves already, thinking students would find my easygoing flexibility appealing. To my surprise, I found myself leading a class discussion in which the passages I quoted in class did not match many of my students’ editions, and this was when I first learned that Shelley had published two versions of Frankenstein, one as the twenty-one-year-old wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1818 and a later, heavily revised version published after the deaths of her husband and several of her children and friends in 1831.1 The class conversation that ensued regarding these different versions and how they altered the students’ interpretations of Frankenstein’s characters and themes proved unexpectedly, but thankfully, worthwhile. Ever since, I have made space in my British literature survey classes to compare one or two of the more significant changes between Mary Shelley’s 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein. These discussions work well as introductions to book history and discussions of authorship and textual fluidity. That the two “official” but different versions of a famous text continue to be widely published challenges what students take for granted about the permanence of published texts.

This experience also made me fussier regarding the precise edition of Frankenstein that my students acquired for my classes, ensuring that I selected the more relevant 1818 version of Shelley’s text in my Romanticism survey courses but indulging in the 1831 version in general literary analysis classes (Victor Frankenstein is a much more dramatic “mad scientist” in the later version, and I confess I prefer him to his 1818 character). I also began collecting various print editions of Frankenstein and would reserve a day for students to explore the several different publications—scholarly, popular, paperback, and anthologized—in order to compare differences in how the texts were published and marketed as well as how editors notified readers of which version they had selected to publish and why. Students were astounded when a “Note on the Text” would not appear at all, such as in the Barnes & Noble “Children’s Edition” of Frankenstein. However, what I really wished I could do was somehow teach a class in which students could read both the 1818 and the 1831 versions of Shelley’s novel side by side. Through a DH tool called JuxtaCommons, I was able to do exactly this in a literature course focused entirely on the works of Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and Lord Byron.

Instead of assigning a physical publication of the novel, I instructed students to read both versions of Frankenstein simultaneously via JuxtaCommons, a digital collation website. The brainchild of Romanticist scholar Jerome McGann and product of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship—although it is much more commonly referred to simply as Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online), JuxtaCommons would enable students to compare both versions of the novel in a scrollable digitized collation, and they would consequently be able to appreciate what Anne K. Mellor describes as “critically significant differences” between Shelley’s two versions.2

Incorporating JuxtaCommons in my classroom worked well for a number of reasons. The digital collation is relatively user friendly: visitors upload at least two different texts and the JuxtaCommons heatmap highlights the differences between the two texts, drawing lines among the collated documents for a stronger side-by-side comparison. Even better, the two Frankenstein texts were already collated and curated on the site, so I only had to provide my students with a link that would take them directly to the side-by-side visualization. The reading of the novel was admittedly less romantic than reading from a physical copy, as some students pointed out, but since most of the students had read a version of Frankenstein before, they did not much mind reading with more of a focus on Shelley’s composition and revision process. Students were also pleased that accessing Frankenstein from the JuxtaCommons website meant that they had one less textbook to purchase, and this assuaged the students’ remaining frustration over being required to read a side-by-side digital collation of the text. The best consequence of the experiment, of course, was that my students analyzed Shelley’s altered passages in interesting and thoughtful ways that ultimately led to essays, for example, on the revised concept of fate in the 1831 edition, on the two texts’ evolving Romantic sensibilities, and on Elizabeth’s character arguably becoming more dynamic, selfish, and impatient in the revised version.

However, there were a number of problems in using JuxtaCommons, and in the process my students noticed that in some ways the platform seemed out-of-date. While most of my students were able to access the collation comparison with relatively little difficulty, a handful of my students seemed to have perpetual problems with accessing the side-by-side visualization. There might have been several reasons for this: it is possible that the traffic created by my thirty-five literature students had overwhelmed the website and that this was causing the site to load slowly or not at all. Or perhaps the number of students with older, hand-me-down laptops and desktop computers or slow internet access created problems unrelated to the website’s server. Whatever the case, I did not always feel that the students could reliably access the tool at any time they needed, and so I had to provide some alternative plans for students. Happily, the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein are also separately published electronically through Romantic Circles, but without the side-by-side comparisons and heat-mapping tools.

In spite of these technical difficulties, I certainly would still describe JuxtaCommons as an invaluable tool for my research and my teaching; however, to borrow Peter Schillingsburg’s metaphor regarding internet archives, the website did start to seem like a root cellar that had not been cleaned out for some time.3 In fact, regrettably, as of the writing of this essay, JuxtaCommons is no longer accessible at all. Even when the site was still running, my students noticed signs that indicated the site was a type of digital ghost town: an RSS feed published on the site’s main webpage no longer functioned, and the JuxtaCommons blog had been hacked by a Korean spambot for the previous few years.4 While Juxta and its Commons still worked effectively as a collation tool, my students expressed unsettled feelings about working with a web-based tool that had been seemingly abandoned by its maker (although this did make for a fitting application of Shelley’s literary themes). This experience led to a class discussion in which students concluded that digital spaces require frequent updates and improvements to maintain usability and credibility—something they further agreed would be taxing on an academic department’s or a library’s budget and resources.

Given the experience I had with the Frankenstein project, the next time I taught a book history seminar, I decided to have my students review and critique a list of digital archives and tools as a way of introducing students to DH and moving our class topics from the history of the book to the future of publication and reading habits. The activity was also preliminary for our class’s final project of working with our library’s Special Collections to transcribe, edit, and digitize a selection of the school’s rare books and documents. Students worked in groups to explore and compare existing digital archives in order to formulate goals for what their group’s digital archive might look like down the road, and this plan would help to inform their editorial procedures and task lists that semester. As a class, students recorded observations about the DH projects on a shared Google Sheet for over fifty digital archives hosted by universities, private and public libraries, and other institutions and historical societies, including larger DH projects like the Cervantes Project, the Database of Early English Playbooks, the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive, Folger Digital Texts, the Shelley-Godwin Archive, and the William Blake Archive, as well as smaller sites like the American Antiquarian Society’s Louis Prang and Chromolithography site and Trinity College Dublin’s Gothic Past, both of which used Omeka, the platform we would use to host our own digital exhibits. The questions students answered on the shared Google Sheet included these:

• What are the purpose and parameters of this project?
• Who is the organization, institution, or individual who hosts/owns the site?
• What date was the archive last updated?
• How is the archive organized (by timeline, map, thematic categories, etc.)?
• How user-friendly is this website?
• Does this archive have any broken links or other “problem areas”?
• How might someone use this digital archive?
• What is something interesting you discovered or learned from perusing this archive?
• What kind of contact information is provided for the archive’s creators or host?

Because most of the English majors in my class were new to digital humanities, more than one group expressed surprise at how much harder it was to navigate most of the websites as compared to, say, Amazon.com. This prompted a class discussion that returned us to Robert Darnton’s concept of the “communication circuit,” which encompasses the key players that are involved in the conception, publication, and marketing of a published work, and how this list of key players (and demands for funding) only increases when digital spaces are involved.5

As a class, we talked about how archives—whether physical or digital—depend on people’s labor, physical and technological infrastructure, and funding sources. For the students’ own digital archive projects, they acknowledged that the survival and completion of their long-term goals would depend on future students and librarians to continue and maintain their projects. Students had observed that while many of the archives they reviewed in class were alive with updates, Twitter feeds, and recent announcements, there were other digital archives that seemed to have been abandoned in the early 2000s, with defunct hyperlinks and outdated website backgrounds and graphics. These orphaned projects were still rich with preserved texts and documents, but the decay from having existed without updates or upkeep kept the site from functioning as it had originally been intended, and the outdated appearance of the website rightly flagged my students’ suspicions regarding the sites’ credibility and current relevance.

Given that we cannot always acknowledge the people on the other side of the screen or verify that an online tool or archive has an active community of editors, authors, and technical support working behind the scenes, how, then, do we as teachers affirm that the sites and tools we assign to our students are still viable and usable resources? Whom can we expect to tidy up these electronic root cellars full of texts and tools? Is there a place in the classroom to inculcate a level of critique and discuss the lifecycle of these tools? Should we also routinely confront these questions when we teach from printed editions of texts—or do digital texts age differently from printed ones? Ultimately, what does it mean to teach with another person’s tools?