I meant to have this post out and published weeks ago, but moving has put such a spin on things!
Back in July, I attended the Scholarly, Digital, and Social Editing Conference at the University of Saskatchewan. Several months before, Peter Robinson, the organizer, had approached me and asked if I would present a paper for a conference he was putting together. I agreed, and then proceeded to not think about it much until the conference approached.
The schedule is here, and though the majority of the names might not mean much to you if you're outside of digital humanities and textual editing, for me, several of my academic heroes are on that list.
A great mix of people were present, representing a variety of disciplines and areas were present, and many of them were from overseas, including a large complement of Australians. A nice balance was struck, from my grad student perspective, of experienced and established scholars and some more new to the field. Because of the variety of people combined with their heightened interest in the topics being presented, the discussions following presentations was always stimulating, and sometimes resulted in some passionate debates.
For example, Robinson's talk was focused on digital humanists. One of his lines of argument was that digital humanists and scholarly editors need to stop collaborating (for a more detailed description of this presentation and others, see Geoffrey Rockwell's excellent conference notes). An energetic discussion ensued with scholars on both sides.
Barbara Bordalejo's assertion that transcribers are not editors, however, probably inspired the most dissent from audience members. Listening to the dispute that followed made me really appreciate conferences; while some I have attended had probing questions, I have never witnessed the spirited and knowledgeable discussions that went on at SDSE.
The keynote presentations and several of the others were a pure intellectual joy to listen to, and the projects and ideas that people were working with left me with a small notebook full of notes. I particularly appreciated the folks who were outside the humanities/academic field. Ben Brumfield, a software designer (if I remember correctly?) had a great presentation on amateur editions, and asked some very relevant questions throughout the conference. Paul Flemons, who works more with biology, offered a similarly valuable different perspective.
As a grad student among such eminent scholars, I had many "eep!" moments. My paper was on the same-old "Here's what I've been working on with the Dunciad" material that I've presented variations of before, so I wasn't terribly excited about it; however, it went over well enough. However, I was honestly more excited to be able to not only listen to the various presentations, but also to talk to the presenters afterwards. So many of the scholars were incredibly gracious, and I had lovely conversations with the likes of Melissa Terras, Laura Mandell, Paul Eggert, and Peter Shillingsburg, the latter of whom I had a great conversation with about logging with draft horses and retirement. And, of course, I met some other grad students, all of whom were working on fascinating projects.
There are too many amazing crowd-sourcing projects going on to which I would love to contribute. I've also been inspired to look ahead to my own PhD projects coming up in the next few years. I really can't imagine a better conference to attend, and I am thankful to Peter Robinson for stopping me in the hallway back in the early fall.
Yay, conferences!
A select few websites from the conference:
Geoffrey Rockwell's notes
The Atlas of Living Australia, sharing biodiversity knowledge
Papyri.info, for the study of papyrus - the sheer amount of information and documentation is incredible!
Transcribe Bentham, making Bentham's manuscripts available
And, a shout-out to the project I've worked on, created and curated by Allison Muri, the Grub Street Project!
