0.5 Non-consuming relevance: “the grub street project”

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Non-Consuming Relevance: “The Grub Street Project”

Laura Mandell

To summarize my response to Professor Muri at the outset: yes. And now onto some details. I am director of a project that has been modeled upon and is partly sponsored by NINES (our host for this event), a project mentioned in Professor Muri’s excellent paper. It is called 18thConnect, and, like NINES, it will aggregate and peer-review digital projects. 18thConnect differs from NINES in one major way, however: ECCO. The Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database, mentioned by Professor Muri, contains page-images of 140,000 texts ranging in size from a two-page pamphlet to the 1500-page Clarissa . The Text Creation Partnership has double-keyed 1,809 of these texts and then run out of money. 18thConnect has a development team at the University of Illinois, headed by Robert Markley. They are augmenting an OCR program by designing it to read eighteenth-century texts, specifically. After meeting with Martin Mueller a few weeks ago, I have come to believe that 18thConnect can play a crucial part in creating—not just an acceptable level of error in text files corresponding to ECCO’s page images, but actually a vital, immense dataset of eighteenth-century texts, minable by machines, word-searchable by all. That thrilling prospect will involve not just OCR but automated TEI tagging, automated linguistic markup, automated dictionary look-up, etc., etc. I attach at the end of this essay a table of all the organizations that could be involved in producing this vast data set and that could benefit from the text-cleaning process. If Martin Mueller’s Project 2015 really works, as I believe it will, new kinds of knowledge will come from textual data that will convince our institutions of the value of text as data, which will provide, as Professor Muri so aptly stated, the ground for making digital humanities a going concern. Academic institutions must become consumers clamoring for textual data if the humanities are to be relevant in the twenty-first century.

The phrase “consuming relevance”—almost quoted in the title to my response— comes from Frank Kermode’s book An Appetite for Poetry (1989). He says of the canon that it gives us books of timeless, “consuming relevance,” texts that have meanings and messages that were applicable to the time in which they were written but continue to be relevant and perhaps even prophetic, though the prophecy could of course be of the self-fulfilling sort arising as a consequence of veneration. Less abstractly, did Shakespeare understand modern psychology or partly produce it, a question of concern to Harold Bloom. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998). But “Shakespeare’s” production of our inner lives wasn’t his, as attendees at this conference know. Insofar as we have been shaped by Shakespearean drama, it has been through the mechanisms of bardolatry instantiated in the eighteenth century and mediated by new print technologies that made it possible for Shakespeare’s work to be disseminated beyond his wildest imaginings. Margareta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). The first modern editor and first modern apparatus materializes in the 1720s around Hamlet . See my “Special Issue: ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’—A Conclusion,” Literature Compass 7/2 (2010): 120–133, p. 125.