Comments on: What the Digital Humanities (Is)n’t: Free

By: Laura Mandell

Laura Mandell — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 06:55:02 +0000

(Lou: will the TEI ever be able to afford to run usability studies on the web site?)

By: Laura Mandell

Laura Mandell — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 06:00:19 +0000

Yay! Laura

By: Lou

Lou — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:26:18 +0000

You’ll be pleased (I hope) to know that the “used-by” line was reinstated in the HTML version of the Guidelines last summer, in response to several requests on TEI-L.

By: Laura Mandell

Laura Mandell — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:18:59 +0000

Lou, thanks so much for commenting– I stand corrected, both for apostrophes and for being far too glib about the TEI Web site. But my evidence is a paper that Syd Bauman and Dot Porter gave at the DH Meeting in College Station, 2009. The TEI had received complaints because people couldn’t tell where elements were supposed to go from the list of elements, in other words, without reading through the prose of the guidelines. Syd and Dot did some datamining on the prose and discovered that in 90% of the instances of an element’s name occurring, there was also mention of its parent element. They concluded, in fact, that the TEI guidelines were fine.
But in order to train the contributors to the Poetess Archive Database, I had to transform the guidelines to include in the table of elements another row that says, “goes inside,” which you can see here: http://www.dighum.com/PAManual.html
Someone — I can’t remember who it was — told me that the TEI used to have a “contained in” row in the tables describing the elements. Would you consider re-instating that row? It would be so so helpful, and I do think Syd and Dot’s datamining of the guidelines missed the point. (Forgive me, Dot and Syd, if you read this, and let me just say that both of them do SO much outreach, answering questions, helping us with glitches: their overall ethos was violated rather than reflected by this study.)
And Lou, you are absolutely right: at the TEI meeting in 2009, on the panel about the future of the TEI organization organized by Susan Schreibman, someone mentioned revising the web site.
Thank you for reading my blog and making me revise its content. [And improving my grammar!]

By: Lou Burnard

Lou Burnard — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:29:28 +0000

“it cannot afford usability studies, at least, not any except those evaluations that it’s own unpaid contributors launch (unfortunately, they think they have done a very good job).”
I forgive you the greengrocer’s apostrophe, but really Laura is it fair to castigate the TEI community both for not performing any usability studies and also for thinking that such evaluations as it does make are “very good”? What evidence do you have for either of these assertions? The TEI is a community effort — it is can only be as usable as it users want to make it.

By: Laura Mandell

Laura Mandell — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:38:20 +0000

Thank you for this important response, and I think maybe HASTAC was developed precisely as an interface between scholars and that "broader audience" that MLA now needs to address. MLA would do well to move in that direction.

By: Kathi Inman Berens

Kathi Inman Berens — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 09:09:08 +0000

This is a smart corrective to the pervasive assumption that because a user need not pay for information accessed online that it is “free.” Your tally of the labor involved in launching DH projects (TEI, 18th Connect) in broken fingernails & broken marriages is gripping. In theory, I agree with your argument. But in my particular experience (I am the well-meaning but naive blogger alluded to above), Mark Sample’s blog is the only way I learned about the DH panels at MLA. I have been away from MLA for more than a decade. It’s not news to you that DH is changing the field; but for people like me who left the academy and who still care about the field, open access allowed me to find information that changed my perception of the MLA. It wouldn’t be at all hard to make program information accessible w/o having to register on the mla.org site. Rosemary Feal’s incredible optimism and her drive to move the organization forward (evident her in tweets) tells a new story about MLA. The panels and conversations I’ve seen thus far are fantastic. If MLA could find a way to get that message out to a broader audience than just its membership, then maybe reliance on Mark Sample’s blog wouldn’t be necessary.