The next time Chad Sansing tells me he’s written a short story, I think I’ll read it immediately. You can skip my preamble, too, and download PDF or EPUB versions of his sobering, dystopian near-future meditation on American education gone awry — The Evaluation — right now. Other formats, below.

Several months ago, my husband posted a brief, sci-fi vignette to the Cooperative Catalyst, tagging it with phrases like “merit pay,” “standardized testing,” and “school discipline.” I didn’t realize he had continued the story until a couple of weeks ago (a grim Saturday we spent in our pajamas, mourning Aaron Swartz), when he made a CC-licensed version of the full thing available online.

Still, I didn’t read it — at least, not all of it. Just enough to know I wanted to wait for a quiet moment. Tonight, I was reminded of “The Evaluation” by this report of brave teachers at three Seattle public schools whose act of civil disobedience is to refuse to administer and be judged by deeply flawed standardized tests. So I returned to Chad’s story, and was struck enough by it to interrupt his dinner at Educon 2.5, to insist that he send me a plain-text version, for dolling up and posting in multiple formats, right away. You can read it here:

PDF (prettiest)
EPUB (for iBooks and various readers)
MOBI (for the Kindle)
TXT (for remixing)

Chad teaches middle school humanities at a grassroots, teacher-led (ie. not corporate-run), arts-infused charter school in Albemarle County, Virginia — the Community Public Charter, which he helped to found. He writes and speaks frequently about redeeming what he calls an “authentic and democratic” education, for teachers and students alike, from a culture driven by dehumanizing standardized assessment and punitive notions of discipline. You can find him at @chadsansing, Classroots.org, the Co-Op Catalyst, the National Writing Project, Democratizing Composition, and probably a handful of other outlets I don’t know about. He’s the teacher you wish your kids had, every year.

[This is the text of an invited talk I gave at the 2013 MLA Convention, as part of Michael Bérubé's presidential forum on "Avenues of Access." The session also featured Matthew Kirschenbaum and Cathy Davidson, and was subtitled "Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication." My slides are available here, and if you like this talk, you may also be interested in my RBMS keynote, Reality Bytes.]

Most mornings, these days—especially when I’m the first to arrive at the Scholars’ Lab—I’ll start a little something printing on our Replicator. I do this before I dive into my email, head off for consultations and meetings, or (more rarely) settle in to write. There’s a grinding whirr as the machine revs up. A harsh, lilac-colored light clicks on above the golden Kapton tape on the platform. Things become hot to the touch, and I walk away. I don’t even bother to stay, now, to see the mechanized arms begin a musical slide along paths I’ve programmed for them, or to watch how the fine filament gets pushed out, melted and microns-thin—additive, architectural—building up, from the bottom, the objects of my command.

I’m a lapsed Victorianist and book historian who also trained in archaeology, before gravitating toward the most concrete aspects of digital humanities production—the design of tools and online environments that emphasize the inevitable materiality of texts, and the specific physicality of our every interaction with them. I suppose I print to feel productive, on days when I know I’ll otherwise generate more words than things at the digital humanities center I direct at UVa Library. Art objects, little mechanisms and technical experiments, cultural artifacts reproduced for teaching or research—cheap 3d-printing is one affirmation that words (those lines of computer code that speak each shape) always readily become things. That they kind of… want to. It’s like when I learned to set filthy lead type and push the heavy, rolling arm of a Vandercook press, when I should have been writing my dissertation.

I peek in as I can, over the course of a morning. And when the extruders stop extruding, and the whole beast cools down, I’ll crack something solid and new off the platform—if a colleague in the lab hasn’t done that for me already. (It’s a satisfying moment in the process.)

Sometimes, though, I’ll come back to a mess—a failed print, looking like a ball of string or a blob of wax. Maybe something was crooked, by a millimeter. Maybe the structure contracted and cracked, no match for a cooling breeze from the open door. Or maybe it’s that my code was poor, and the image in my mind and on my screen failed to make contact with the Replicator’s sizzling build-plate—so the plastic filament that should have stuck like coral instead spiraled out into the air, and cooled and curled around nothing. Those are the mornings I think about William Morris. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing just ahead of the main deadline for proposals to DH 2013, the primary conference of the international digital humanities community. It is my great privilege to chair the program committee for this year’s conference, which will be held in Lincoln, Nebraska. The PC are the stalwarts who design and coordinate peer review for the conference, pitch in to cover for delinquent reviewers, make final decisions on its intellectual program, and partner with local organizers in selecting invited speakers (we’ll look forward to a keynote from David Ferriero, chief Archivist of the United States, and it’s a Busa Award year, so we’ll honor and hear from the wonderful Willard McCarty).

“DH” is a new name for an old gathering. When I first encountered it in the 1990s the conference was called ACH/ALLC, after two professional associations (themselves dating to the ’70s) that had been sponsoring a joint meeting on computer-assisted humanities scholarship since 1989. The Digital Humanities name came in the mid-aughties, with the formation of a broader Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. ADHO has expanded, over time, to include Canadian and Australasian DH associations, as well as an international consortium of digital labs and centers. Shortly, we’ll welcome a Japanese association to the fold as well. (For a whirlwind history of big moments in DH, see John Unsworth’s “What’s ‘Digital Humanities’ and How Did It Get Here?“)

DH is my home conference — the (only) one I look forward to all year, and have attended most religiously since I was a grad student. This event, and the welcoming, rollicking, inventive, pragmatic, learned, egalitarian, global humanities computing community that coalesces around it, are without a doubt the reason I finished my doctorate, stayed in the field and in the academy (not, interestingly, self-identical in DH), and do all the things I do at places like the Scholars’ Lab, ADHO, ACH, NINES, SCI, RBS, MediaCommons, and MLA.

So, I’m pretty invested in getting things right as conference chair.

I’ve reviewed for DH since I was a child (well, almost), served as a program committee member for the conference twice before, was its vice-chair in 2010, and have had helpful conversations with several of our past smart, thoughtful, hard-working chairs — so I know this weekend, as proposals flood in and I gear up the system for the next phase, is one of several moments in the process when I can expect to be biting my nails. To assuage my nerves, communicate some of the good work the PC has been doing so far, and to make things a little less opaque for everybody, I’m writing this post. The cats in my title need herding. The ship is a slow one to turn around. Read the rest of this entry »

about nowviskie.org

Bethany Nowviskie writes here on the digital humanities, #alt-ac and graduate training, textual criticism, libraries, and scholarly communication. This page also houses a traditional vita and information on projects and software. Nowviskie is President of the ACH, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship (including the Scholars' Lab) at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute. Her muse, according to Willard McCarty, "is one angry B."

recent/upcoming

I am deliberately scaling back on travel this academic year. Major lectures and events include: a keynote on the Scholars' Lab at the University of Tokyo, an invited talk on digital materiality at the MLA Convention's Presidential Forum; Neatline workshops at the Universities of Maryland and Virginia, and various appearances during a stint as a Lansdowne Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria in Canada. I will also teach a Rare Book School course and chair the annual Digital Humanities conference in the summer of 2013.

featured

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• a skunk in the library
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Nowviskie.org and its contents are the sole responsibility of Dr. Bethany Nowviskie and are not meant to reflect the opinions of her employers, colleagues, children, or imaginary friends.

Questions? Comments? Connections to be made? Contact me at bethany@virginia.edu