Sonja Drimmer: Enough with these three-year projects that sound flashy and use the latest technology but are obsolete even before the project is done, leaving a trail of underemployed postdocs behind.

The Middle English Dictionary is an invaluable resource. It was started in 1925 & finished in 2001. Rather than chasing speed & scale at the expense of quality, we need to invest in the long term by funding the skills & slow labor research requires. There’s no future for the humanities otherwise.

Enough with these three-year projects that sound flashy and use the latest technology but are obsolete even before the project is done, leaving a trail of underemployed postdocs behind.

The future of the humanities, if we’re allowed to imagine it, is shockingly, refreshingly analogue. It’s sustained investment in humans and skills that take a long time to acquire, and the funding of permanent positions that allow people to put those skills to use and avail their work to others.

It sounds naive to insist that this is where the future of the humanities lies because of the seeming utility of pursuing it, but I dont think we should allow so-called pragmatism to make us forget or abandon our convictions.

*futility

one of my dear friends is doing some very cool work in her own art practice around deliberate slowness. this is a couple years old, but she just held a conference last week that delved even further into this notion

Slow: Taking Care at MASS MoCAbalance.ddtr.net Taking Care occurs episodically, in times set aside for intense focus and dedication as I listen to the words of care shared with me for the project. Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to parti...

UCLA had a great plan of St Gall website which was terrific when I taught monastic art in 2015. Returning to the class in 2023, most of its links were broken. Now it's gone completely:

Horn and Born? Still on the case! obis.oberlin.edu/record=b1006...

Oberlin College Libraries / Any Formatobis.oberlin.edu

Ha! See my reply!

OMG I LOVED THAT SITE! Didn’t realize it was gone. Well this reaffirms that the $300 I spent on this at a used bookstore a few years ago was not wasted.

yeah, it was really good. And for a class of 30 students, more immediately useful than Horn and Born. So I think there's space for digital, and things it does well. But the sites need maintenance built in, which is a long-term commitment that a lot of institutions probably can't make.

Absolutely. Social media doesn’t really accommodate nuance but I don’t mean to say that there’s no place for the digital. However, as you suggest, it needs to be thought about with an eye to sustainability, and that’s just not, historically, how the academy approaches it.

But I’ll add, if someone told me that I had $1million to invest in a five-year project, rather than something with a supposedly blockbuster “output” promised at the end, I’d see how that could support X grad students’ learning of Latin or Ge’ez or Greek etc.

I work on what is considered the most canonical place in American academia (medieval British Isles) and I don’t think anyone comprehends, for example, the sheer volume of Latin and other documentation that survives which has yet to be edited and published much less translated.

This 👆 x a million-billion

In my mind there’s little difference between sustainable projects in either analogue or digital media, but the latter certainly seems to be able to pull a lot of funding without requiring any assurance it’ll have usable output in a decade.

There are very much digital groups with an eye to sustainability (the Text Encoding Initiative folks are a great example), but it doesn’t seem to be an expectation broadly.

I think this sounds about right, yeah.

and I sympathize! Not knowing anything about programming, if I had an idea even half as cool as that St. Gall site the last thing I'd want think about is "will this survive when the university moves to a different tech platform at some point in the next 6 months to 50 years?"

There are some simple ways to preserve the "guts" of a digital project even if the project itself does not function forever (it won't). Preserving the files in a durable file formats allows them to be used in other iterations. The problem is that documentation/cataloguing is not sexy, so these

Princeton had a small page about Classical Arabic poetry including recordings of some poems being read in Arabic, with bilingual text etc. It was made using Flash- and when Flash stopped being supported it broke and had not been fixed…

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