0.5 Non-consuming relevance: “the grub street project”  (Page 2/9)

However, a much newer technology is evoked by the phrase “non-consumption,” which my title almost quotes as well. The Google Research environment proposes to offer the “non-consumptive” use of texts, noted by John Unsworth, Lisa Spiro, and Don Waters in various essays and talks about the Google Settlement, anticipated and actual. John Unsworth, Computational Work with Very Large Text Collections: Google Books, HathiTrust, the Open Content Alliance, and the Future of TEI," Text Encoding Initiative Consortium Annual Members' Meeting, Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 13, 2009 http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/TEI.MMO9.pptx , accessed 1 March 2010; Lisa Spiro, Digital Humanities in 2008, II: Scholarly Communication&Open Access (External Link) , accessed 1 March 2010; Don Waters, “The Changing Role of Special Collections in Scholarly Communications,” Research Library Issues 267 (December 2009), (External Link) , accessed 1 March 2010. 18thConnect, like NINES, will provide an alternative to that research environment, one that has been constructed by scholars and librarians working together, a necessary competitor to Google. But as Professor Muri noted, we cannot give away proprietary texts such as those in Gale-Cengage’s ECCO catalogue. We have been given permission by Gale to ingest those texts into a search engine that allows for full-text searching and, we hope, data-mining. Users of 18thConnect will not be allowed to “consume”—i.e., read —the ECCO texts, if their libraries do not subscribe to ECCO, but only to use these texts, use-value somehow being imagined as completely distinct from the exchange-value that prompts consumption and production, library budgets and Gale-Cengage profits. The Grub Street Project provides another way of “using” texts: mapping them. And this cultural analysis of textual relevance via mapping will open up worlds of thought as yet undefined.

As we move from the consuming relevance that prompted literary scholars to virtually memorize a circumscribed set of texts to the non-consumptive data-mining and mapping that will generate we-know-not-what-kinds of knowledge, there is another form of consumption dogging us, the kind of “consuming” mentioned by Professor Muri in this paper: “time-consuming” tasks. And when she uses the phrase, she describes what is happening for her at a university that sounds identical to my own. She talks about how her “research time is eaten up” by the multiple problems confronting the Grub Street Project, institutional, financial: ultimately her time is eaten up by public relations problems endemic to scholarly editing and the digital humanities. I want to reiterate all Professor Muri’s articulations of these problems, but I’ll do so in the most textually economical way, through anecdote.

I was offered the opportunity to be a grant reviewer for SSHRC’s Image, Text, Sounds and Technology (ITST) projects in literary and textual studies, described in Professor Muri’s Appendix A. The quality not just of the projects but of the applications for these funds was astounding—it actually made me realize how far ahead the digital humanities are in Canada, but this isn’t the time for indulging in nationalistic sentiment. The participants on this adjudicating committee all knew that there would not be enough money to fund projects that should have been funded, no matter what. And in fact SSHRC is in the process of reorganizing the granting structure precisely in order to let the excellent digital humanities projects compete against traditional projects of lesser quality and value. See SSHRC's discussions about restructuring: (External Link) SSHRC itself wishes to improve those statistics found in Appendix A: they would say yes to Professor Muri’s comments here.