STG Events

The Computing in the Humanities Users' Group and CIS

present

Digital Humanities, Metadata, and the Need for Control

Brett Barney
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
University of Nebraska, Lincoln


Noon, Tuesday, March 18
Conference Room 200-202
169 Angell St.

Digital humanities is a showcase for control freaks. The struggle for control goes much deeper than the well-publicized furor over the Google Books project; it is constitutive of the field of digital humanities itself. The allure of exerting control over more texts (or greater control over a relatively small set of texts) is what has driven scholars to create the major pioneering digital humanities projects. I intend to discuss grant-funded research for one of those projects, the /Walt Whitman Archive/, and the ways that research highlights the need to acknowledge control as a fundamental component at all stages of a digital editing process--beginning with the creation of the markup standards themselves. With the Whitman Archive's work on the Interoperability of Metadata grant as a backdrop I will offer some words of caution, some words of encouragement, and some speculation about how the best projects might be able to best manage their control issues in the future.

Brett Barney became interested in digital humanities when he was hired as a research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive in 2000. He has worked on a variety of projects, including the Willa Cather Archive and the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online. He is Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and project manager and Senior Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive.