When I first arrived at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, I wrote somewhat rapturously of the Center as a fecund site of interdisciplinarity, cradling librarians, computer experts, and humanists of all stripes. While the summer has sped past, my wonder at this fertility, at the consistency and ease of engagement between and among scholars, has not diminished. One of the real joys of working at the Center this summer has been the conversations with those in the university who are occupied with diverse problems and concerns and seem eager to reach beyond themselves, and beyond their disciplines or departments, to solve them. This sort of interdisciplinarity demands humility. It insists that we don’t ourselves know everything, that we cannot locate the solution to every challenge in our personal tool belts.
Today is my last day at the Center and in Love Library. After work, I will set off home to Texas, driving through Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, headed for THATCamp, the SAA Conference, and the School of Information poster session. Like Joshunda, whose posts I have so enjoyed reading this summer, my internship at CDRH has functioned as the capstone to my MSIS, and its completion marks the conclusion of my graduate career and, with any luck, the inauguration of my professional life.
On to the nuts & bolts: In preparing my final report on authorial attribution, I was struck by the work of Stanford’s Matthew Jockers, who applied nearest shrunken centroid analysis, a technique developed to diagnose cancer types, to the Book of Mormon. Rather than simply attributing authorship to discrete sections of the complex publication or to the overall corpus, Jockers and his coauthors detected and measured authorial “signals,” which allowed them to make predictions about influence. Monolithic authorship is thus dispersed, and editorship, excerpting, and other influence identified as discrete ingredients in the authorial soup.
Back in June, Kay Walter suggested authorial attribution as a useful summer project, with the expectation that my findings might help the Center move into an area that was largely unexplored here—or, indeed, decide not to invest in attribution. I remain convinced that attribution is best attempted with a statistician at one’s elbow. The attribution-for-amateurs approach promoted by Patrick Juola’s JGAAP tool, detailed in earlier posts, seems inadequate for serious attribution work, a blunt tool that fails to complement the detailed scholarly inquiry that must accompany thoughtful attribution attempts.
Cather scholar and bibliographer Bernice Slote provides an evocative glimpse of Lincoln circa 1890 in her essay “Writer in Nebraska,” which opens her edited volume The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). She writes: “In Lincoln there were opera cloaks and oysters in ice, but always in spring came the smell of burning prairie grass, for this was still the edge of the frontier, and the frontier still had teeth.” I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at the Digital Workshop in Lincoln this October. One hundred years later, burning prairie grass has disappeared from the landscape of this city, but I like to think that the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities still occupies a frontier of sorts.
[Image: “Walt Whitman Photograph #106,” 15 April 1897. “ “One of twelve extant photographs taken during the Cox sitting, this one with Nigel and Catherine Cholmeley-Jones, the nephew and niece of Jeannette Gilder, editor of The Critic.” Held at Ohio Wesleyan University, Bayley Collection. Available online through UNL Libraries Content DM.]
