Ernesto Priego: Please introduce yourself...

Daniel O’Donnell: I am a Digital Humanist and Anglo-Saxonist.

I was trained primarily as an Anglo-Saxon philologist at both the University of Toronto (1989) and Yale (1996). Toronto and Yale both were very strong in what you might see as traditional medieval studies: heavy emphasis on language training and detailed reading primary sources and in the sense that they have always been willing to use technology, in the footsteps of Father Busa. While I was an undergraduate, I worked at the Dictionary of Old English, primarily indexing semantic studies. The DOE was the first dictionary to be based on a completely computerised corpus, a decision that was made when the project was first set up in 1972.

At Yale, my dissertation was in essence a giant database: it contained an annotated discussion of every single textual variant in the corpus; I wrote most of it using a database programme at the time (something called Notebuilder, if I remember correctly). Initially my supervisor, Fred C. Robinson, and I thought about trying to hand in the database as my dissertation. We decided in the end that it probably wasn't worth the fight, however. And to be honest, we also thought that it would be a better dissertation if the data was surrounded by an analytic narrative.

I think the most interesting thing for me in my career thus far has been in fact my transition from somebody who defined himself primarily as an Anglo-Saxonist to somebody who defines himself primarily as a Digital Humanist. After my dissertation, I began editing the Old English poem Cædmon’s Hymn with the intention of publishing it as an electronic text. When the edition was finished, I planned to go back to being an Anglo-Saxonist and put digital stuff away--I used to complain that publishing the edition digitally had easily added another 5 years to the project.

Just as the project was finishing, however, I got involved with Digital Medievalist and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and began to work increasingly with scholars with whom my common interest was the use of digital technology in the humanities rather than Anglo-Saxon studies: digitally-oriented sinologists, slavicists, classicists, modernists, and so on.

Most recently, I've found this self-definition as Digital Humanist is even beginning to trump my self of identity as a textual scholar: I recently attended the VAST Virtual Archaeology conference in Brighton, followed immediately by the European Society for Textual Scholarship conference in Amsterdam. I’d never attended VAST before, and have long considered the ESTS to be a “home.” Surprisingly, however, it was at VAST this time that I seemed to have the most to contribute.

EP: Please do tell us about Global Outlook DH. What is it and how did the idea take shape?

DO: Global Outlook :: Digital Humanities is in essence a global Community of Practice or Identity for researchers and students who use digital technology in the research and study of the humanities, cultural heritage, and arts. Its primary goal is to provide a means for addressing what was a relatively complete lack of communication between researchers in High Income Economies vs. those in Mid- and Low Income Economies.

The primary impetus for my involvement came from my growing sense of the Digital Humanities as a paradiscipline, a sense that was evolving, as I mentioned earlier, as a result of the ever closer collaborations I was having with DH researchers who did not have a background in Medieval Studies.

What gradually became striking to me was the fact that although the range of background disciplines among my collaborators was quite diverse, their geographic locations were not. On the whole, I worked with people in laterally contingent regions: Japan, North America, Western Europe, occasionally Eastern Europe, and of course, the great “left-right” exceptions, Australia and New Zealand.

What I didn’t have were contacts who lived outside of this band: nobody in Africa, Latin America or the Caribbean, South Asia, South East Asia, and so on. Moreover, as Melissa Terras’s excellent infographic on the state of Digital Humanities demonstrated, this was also true of the discipline as a whole: despite its extraordinary growth in recent years, DH was more or less as tightly associated with the same laterally contingent regions as I was. All constituent organisations in ADHO were from these regions, as were almost all of the associations’ individual members. With the exception (at the time) of a single centre in Brazil and another in South Africa, Terras listed no DH centres outside of the usual Northern countries and Australia and New Zealand. GO::DH was set up to help address this isolation.

Three events really precipitated its development. The first was some discussions I had in Hamburg at DH 2012 with Jieh Hsiang, Marcus Bingenheimer, Christian Wittern, Peter Bol, Neil Fraistat, Harold Short, and Ray Siemens about opportunities and challenges for working with DH researchers in China and Taiwan; this led to the formation of the original mailing list (globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca) and the development of a small GO::DH organisation led by Marcus and myself. The second impetus was when Neil put me in touch with Alex Gil, who was just beginning his superb “Around DH in 80 Days” project. And the third was the INKE organised Birds of a Feather meeting in Havana in December 2012.

The Havana meeting was so important both because it built on the ideas we had developed through the other two events and because it helped widen the group’s membership. It also really helped us improve our proposal for the group! If you compare the (mostly pre-Cuba) proposal to ADHO for the formation of a Special Interest Group with the description of the project on its current website, for example, you’ll see a major difference in emphasis. The original document is primarily about “us” and “them”: it wonders why people in Mid and Low Income Economies are not part of the Digital Humanities as practiced in the High Income Economies, and asks the question from a High Income Economy perspective (as was appropriate since it was addressed to an organisation that consisted at the time almost entirely of researchers working in High Income Economies). At the Cuban meeting, however, we learned how important it was to turn the focus to “us”: our current project description makes it explicit that a global network is not about aid but instead recognising how much we have to share with, teach, and learn from each other.

An example of how this works is the GO::DH working group on “minimalist computing.” This is a group that has developed a very interesting research topic out of what most of us (Cuban as well as participants at the meeting from High Income Economies) saw initially and primarily as simple deficits in the Cuban infrastructure: e.g. lack of bandwidth and older computer hardware.

In discussion, however, we began to realise that these infrastructure issues provided lessons that were globally beneficial to the DH community: lessons on how to ensure the broadest possible access to digital cultural work can be useful worldwide. Often Digital Humanists in places like North America and Western Europe are too willing to work on the assumption that audiences have access to the latest technology and the the most powerful infrastructure. But in doing so, we forget that this is by no means true of even audiences living in High Income economies: for example, I have been recently working with 3D imaging of an Anglo-Saxon stone cross from a parish in rural Scotland: while some of the parishoners in this case do have access to the most sophisticated computing equipment, others either do not own a computer or have an old one lying around from the late 1990s. My thinking on how to deal with these audiences has already been shaped by the discussions we've had on GO::DH.

EP: Please allow me to follow that up with a question that might be difficult, as money is a key issue that it’s still hard to talk about across cultures. Where does the funding for GO::DH come from? Often just sharing experiences requires a particular privileged setting which can be taken for granted, the time to do it, the right tools no matter how basic. How can we ensure collaborations in the near future remain sustainable when there is great financial and contextual disparity between collaborators?

DO: GO::DH is funded, to the extent it is funded at all, in two ways.

The first and most obvious is a small amount provided by the office of the University of Lethbridge’s Vice President Research.

But the more sustainable funding comes from effort of its volunteers.

This is something I think we often underestimate in the Digital Humanities. Although the University of Lethbridge initially gave me $5,000 to fund the administration of GO::DH, that money is in practice either too little or too much for what we need. If we aren't actually paying salaries (for which $5,000 wouldn't be enough), what is there that we could spend it on? In terms of day-to-day expenses, it is actually the tremendous enthusiasm and willingness of others to pitch in that actually keeps GO::DH afloat.

I say this is an undervalued resource in DH because I have seen it play a role time and time again. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), for example, has a budget of between $80 and $100,000/year to pay for accountants, systems support, travel, and the like. But the real meat of their activity is the work of the council, conference organisation team, and editors of the Journal of the TEI. And that is work of a value you couldn't possibly buy with “only” $100k/year.

The real key with such organisations is to exploit the inherent value they contain: that is to say the in-kind value they can release that makes it mutually beneficial to both the volunteer and the organisation to work together. This can be by turning the activity into publications; providing leadership or other experience that is useful on a CV; or creating opportunities for people to become known and/or have an impact on their field.

When things work out, as I think they have so far for GO::DH, this hidden in-kind funding leaves you enough space to do creative things with the actual cash you are able to find. So in this case, because we don’t actually need money to run things, we have been able to turn the University of Lethbridge money to support an innovative research bursary programme.

To pick up the last part of your question: practicality and disparity of opportunity. This too is a fundamental recognition at the heart of GO::DH: that access to money is also a differential experience. Even among High Income Economies, funding opportunities vary widely. But access to funding is not simply a province of those in those countries: there are many funding opportunities, especially in the international and private philanthropic sectors, that are restricted to or require participation by researchers in Mid and Low Income Economies.

One of my goals for this first year at GO::DH is to create the mechanisms by which we can begin to access this funding. And once again, this is a question of bringing diversity of experience together to build something that is bigger than its parts. I am hoping, for example, to build a working group on funding that will include people with records of success and experience with various types of funders: the national funding agencies, UN and other International groups, and the many foundations interested in international exchanges. It is my belief that we can end up really helping each other by looking for ways to collaborate across regional and economic boundaries--both on our actual research and in our search for funding.

EP: All the best of luck; the project deserves it. It seems to me that sustainability should be a key issue: it is a shame when valuable projects disappear and the resources they created suffer digital rot after the funding runs out! A final question: how do you personally see the role of the global digital humanities in the advocacy for the humanities? In other words, what can DH initiatives around the world do to communicate the importance of the Humanities as a general field of knowledge?

DO: It is interesting that you ask this because, in a certain sense, the thinking that led to my role in developing Global Outlook Digital Humanities comes actually from the larger question.

For many years, my department has received an annual list of titles of literary criticism from India for consideration for purchase by our library. These are not (especially) books about literature in India, or post-colonial approaches to literature, or anything that represents something we might consider to be an Indian “speciality.” Instead these are books on the full range of literary studies: Indian literature, African literature, Victorian literature, medieval literature, and so on.

What has always been striking to me, however, is how few of these books we actually order. In fact, I have long suspected that the traditional humanities suffers the same kind of gap between networks that I mentioned above as being true of DH .

The Digital Humanities, to my mind, offers a way of addressing this gap, because it emphasises the paradisciplinary skills that people share over the disciplinary skills and networks that keep people apart. That is to say that I've always felt it might be easier to get people to share aspects of their lives as researchers, teachers, and students if we could first introduce them to each other through the extra-disciplinary skills and interests they share.

One early model for how this works is, once again, Digital Medievalist. In medieval studies, the cause of the network gap is not income (primarily) but the breadth of the “discipline”: a field of study that covers about a millenium throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, across numerous languages, and involves often very narrowly defined research specialisations is simply going to have large groups of people that never talk.

Digital Medievalist bridges this gap by focusing on the paradisciplinary interests that are shared by medievalists who use technology. The result is a community where many of the people who work most closely together in the executive and at the journal belong to disciplines that, in traditional medieval studies, might never come into contact with each other: Hispanists working with Germanists working with Anglo-Saxonists, and so on.

I also think, as your question suggests, that the Digital Humanities has an extremely important role to play in simply advocating for the value of the humanities. In my view, the arrival of the digital in humanistic study is what ensures us relevant: computers are the killer app for the Humanities. They both give us an opportunity to answer pressing societal questions in ways no other disciplines can and allow our students to apply skills they acquire in the course of their traditional study in ways that make sense in contemporary society.

In other words, the really interesting thing about the Internet it is not the underlying infrastructure--most of which is relatively stable technology--but the new ways of communicating, organising ourselves, and disseminating culture it is allowing. How teenage social networks have been affected by Facebook is a question for sociologists, not engineers; how blogging and texting is affecting writing is a question for rhetoricians, linguists, and literary historians more than it is computer scientists; how social media is affecting gatekeeping mechanisms in scholarly and scientific communications is primarily a question for historians of science and information scientists.

Likewise, our students’ much vaunted ability to think critically and express themselves well is of no more than intrinsic value if we do not also teach them how to use this training in the real, networked and computerised world. Courses in the Digital Humanities, especially those that offer hands on technical experience, offer an obvious route towards ensuring that humanities graduates are able to participate fully in economic and social life after they graduate--whether we mean this in terms of their ability to find meaningful employment or their ability to act as engaged citizens.

So in the end, I think the Digital Humanities will play a crucial role in advocating for the humanities--both because it is increasingly the paradiscipline that ties together what is otherwise a very fractured collection of relatively narrow and isolated cultural and historical disciplines and because it brings to the humanities an obvious practicality and extensibility that allows us to make the case more strongly for the societal relevance of what the public (by-and-large) pay for us to teach and research.