0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 2/18)

I advance two basic hypotheses:

1) We need editors—lots of them. We have before us a new model of intellectual life in general and especially within the humanities. We have valued scholarship that is difficult to produce and almost as difficult to understand. When a 2009 tenure track job listing asked for candidates who can support contributions and original research by undergraduates as well as MA students within the field of Classics, almost none of nearly two hundred applicants had been trained to think about what MA-level students, much less undergraduates, could contribute to the field or about what meaningful research they might be able to conduct. A recent article by Blackwell and Martin 2009 explores the potential of undergraduate research for revinvigorating teaching in classics. Another interesting model of undergraduate research in Art History can be found in Flaten 2009. A few had creative ideas and had even experimented in their teaching but they had done so outside of—and in some measure in spite of—their formal training. Most of those with whom we spoke shifted uncomfortably in their chairs as we pressed them on this point.

We have vast amounts of work before us—far more than a relative handful of salaried academics can accomplish and plenty accessible to our students and to those who love a given subject but maintain a day job doing something else. Peter Robinson has also spoken of how this deluge of material has presented digital editing with its greatest opportunity: new collaboration models where scholars, students and the interested public can make contributions to digital editing Robinson 2010. We need to edit the entire record of humanity. Brute digitization provides physical access to digital representations that are qualitatively more useful than anything possible in print—print publication constitutes only a small dimensional reduction of the space in which we now move. At least as important, we have at our disposal a growing set of analytical tools that can make these sources intellectually as well as physically accessible. The development of computational tools to provide greater intellectual access to digital collections is a heavily studied topic; for some recent work see Chen et al. 2006, Shaw et al. 2009. At one end, we can detect not only words and phrases but also ideas in vast collections of data—the bigger the better, in fact. Interesting work in this area has included metaphor discovery (Pasanek and Sculley 2008) and quotation detection (Schilit and Kolak 2008). The same currents that flatten individual human analysts provide the lift on which many of our algorithms can soar, allowing us to find within vast collections patterns that yield themselves to deep contemplation—and indeed, to the most traditional of intensive reading. Text or data mining in historical collections and its potential to support intensive reading has been examined by Kirschenbaum 2007, and Clement 2008. At the other end, we can now automatically generate background information—a workable commentary—with which to contextualize what we see. And we have begun to attack the greatest of all logistical barriers in intellectual life—the heretofore impenetrable barrier of language. In print culture, we could do nothing with documents in languages that we had not studied. Already today, if we combine machine translation of individual words as well as passages, morphological and syntactic analysis, dictionary lookup, and text mining we can begin to work with sources that were once inaccessible. Further detail on these topics can be found in Crane, Babeu and Bamman 2007.