Report on Humanist, Digital Humanities, Paris, 2006
Summary
Once again Humanist has continued a slow, steady growth, with no radical changes. As it approaches its 20th anniversary (in May 2007), serious thought, supported by real money, needs to be given to its now quite antiquated technical management systems.
Management
Humanist is tended chiefly by one person, the Editor, occasionally by the Assistant Editor (David Gants). On the average running Humanist requires ca. 30 minutes per day, 365 days per year.
Technical help is supplied by Shayne Brandon (IATH, Virginia), who once again is to be commended for his help at crucial points throughout the year. Rarely when it is needed, help comes from the Office of Information Technology (OIT, Princeton). IATH maintains mail relaying, message digesting and archiving functions, OIT the Listserv software. Apart from keeping the archive and fixing breakdowns in the software, IATH also supports Humanist by managing the yearly changeover in archive volumes.
Technically competent members sometimes freely volunteer their services as well. This year, David Sitman (Tel Aviv) once again volunteered to look at an annoying problem, described below, although he could not figure it out in the time he had.
Membership and messages
Statistics regarding membership and messages are given in the accompanying Excel file, 2 membership data for Humanist 0607.xls,as follows:
(1) Membership data for 2002-3 to 2005-6
(2) Group data, arranged by geographical area
(3) Number of messages per year from 1993-4 to 2005-6
(4) Chart of membership from 2002-3 to 2005-6 from (1)
(5) Chart of membership by geographical area from (2)
(6) Chart of messages per year from (3)
It is, as usual, difficult to know what these statistics indicate other than the slow, steady growth on which I remarked earlier. Note that the Humanist year begins 7 May.
As you can see, the absolute number of members is up by 75 overall from last year, to 1458 members – the largest number it has reached since the beginning. The gain is primarily due to the US, Canada and the UK, of 42, 9 and 9 members respectively. By percentage of population (correcting for the anomalous result for Micronesia), Canada, Sweden and the UK have shown the most remarkable growth. In the case of Sweden, Patrik Svensson’s Humlab, in Umeå, is likely responsible.
The grouping of countries by geography and by dominant language is quite rough. It shows, as expected dominance of the primarily Anglophone countries.
The chart of messages per year continues to show a puzzling variation, up and down. Given the nature of Humanist as it has evolved over the years, however, I suspect that this variation has more to do with the editor’s level of participation, i.e. the degree to which he “stirs the pot”, from year to year. Trendlines have been added to make generalizations somewhat easier, esp to highlight the very slow but steady increase.
Events
There were no extraordinary events within Humanist itself during the year apart from signs of an ageing mechanism, for which see below.
In the citation of the Lyman Award for 2006, given to the Editor, the Selection Committee repeatedly noted Humanist as a reason for its decision. James O’Donnell, Provost of Georgetown University and chair of the Committee, referred to “the long-running (now almost twenty years) intellectual salon that its denizens know just as ‘Humanist’—the e-mail list of all lists, a second home to many of us, a place where we listen and speak and think and ruminate and inform ourselves, and go back out into the world better prepared to make sense of it and to make our own contributions.” See www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/newsrel2006/prlymanaward2006.htm for more.
Publication
Humanist is a publication of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Office for Humanities Communication (King’s College London). Since 1995-6, when Stanley N. Katz was its President, Humanist has also been an affiliated publication of the American Council of Learned Societies. Following the two elections to the Presidency since then, of John D’Arms in 1997 and of Pauline Yu in 2003, I have written to the new President to re-establish and attempt to strengthen ties. These continue to be cordial but otherwise inconsequential.
Problems and recommendations
About six years ago, Malgosia Askanas (Spoon Collective) reconstructed the mechanism for running Humanist, based on much earlier work by Michael Sperberg-McQueen. She did the programming and other technical work free-of-charge in exchange for a place to stay in London – the Editor’s house. Since then, apart from Shayne Brandon’s occasional tinkering, no technically competent attention has been paid to this mechanism. In the intervening years, communications technologies have improved as well as multiplied in kind. Simultaneously, the level of spam and other malicious attacks on Internet resources have radically increased. The service Humanist uses at Virginia has received much attention from spammers.
Current problems are as follows.
- Nearly every day the Editor receives some (but not all) submissions to humanist@princeton.edu in an abnormal form. Normally the process goes like this: (1) messages submitted to Humanist are forwarded unmodified to me; (2) I send them to lists.village.virginia.edu for digesting in the manner designed by Askanas and Sperberg-McQueen; (3) the machine at Virginia sends the digests back to me; (4) I send them to Listserv at Princeton, (5) which then sends me back each digested group of messages specially packaged with a link for approval of the posting; (6) once I click on that link, the message-group is then sent out by Princeton. Now what sometimes happens is that steps 1-4 are circumvented, so that I receive a message for the first time as (5). I then have to extract the message and submit it myself for posting by means of the normal process. When David Sitman examined the problem, he could not figure out why the curtailed process was happening with some messages but not with others.
- Another problem is with the archive of messages, which for various reasons are from time to time polluted by unwanted postings. To clean these out, Shayne Brandon needs to take specific action, which seems to me a waste of his time. Some way is needed for the Editor to do such maintenance himself.
- For whatever reason, spammers have been able to pick my Virginia address, and by that means are able to pelt me with a huge volume of messages, which are duly forwarded to my College address. Whether there is a way of filtering these out, absolutely or provisionally, I do not know but would greatly appreciate some relief from the flood.
In addition, there has been no mechanism whatever for archiving the biographical statements sent in by new members, nor any means of making them available. This could well be a quite valuable resource. At the moment all these statements reside on the Editor’s home machine.
To address the problems technical attention is required. But given the age of the current mechanism, it would seem wise to get a competent person to examine the entire operation of Humanist, fix what needs fixing and negotiate with the Editor to make any structural changes that would make Humanist easier to run.
I therefore propose that some money be spent hiring a suitable person to undertake a comprehensive technical review and all necessary repairs. Humanist has operated for nearly 20 years now at no cost to any organization other than King’s College London, Virginia and Princeton universities. A small amount of occasional funding for technical review and repairs would seem more than simply justified.
As I wrote last year and the year before, the ACH and ALLC have rarely used Humanist, and although the endorsement has been unwavering, these associations have not invested resources in its operation. Imaginative administrative help, for example to organize guest editors of topical discussions, would be one way to improve Humanist that would require some investment. A rotating part-time studentship at the (post-)graduate level, funded by ADHO, would have the benefit not only of enlivening discussion but would also strengthen the field as a whole. I also mentioned last year that a technical audit was in order.
Ending on a note of gratitude is, however, also in order – to the wider, highly diverse communities of people who sustain Humanist, and so our voice in the world; more specifically,to the organizations of ADHO for their endorsement and support.
W. McCarty, Editor