The Digital Humanities has existed as an institutionalized field of research at Stanford for now more than a decade, drawing undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers from around the globe. This series, a collaboration between Arcade and Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, spotlights leading research in the digital humanities at Stanford, and asks key contributors to reflect on the expansion of the field, its culture, and the major misconceptions that remain.
Why has this field sparked so much public engagement in its projects and debates? How has the digital humanities changed what it means to be a more “traditional” humanist? And how is the field engaging new developments in technology like artificial intelligence?
In this interview, Interventions editor, Charlotte Lindemann, speaks with Senior Lecturer of English and Director of the Digital Humanities Minor, Alice Staveley.
CHARLOTTE LINDEMANN: Would you mind starting us off by introducing yourself? And in particular, what drew you to the digital humanities and how did you get started working in the field?
ALICE STAVELEY: I’m a Senior Lecturer in the department of English at Stanford. I also direct the Honors program in English, so for the last ten years, I’ve overseen a lot of undergraduate honors thesis work. In a decade, I’ve watched the evolution of topics as they come through the department, and it’s been interesting to see when certain fields, like the digital humanities, start influencing students’ larger intellectual aspirations. I also direct the digital humanities minor at the university, which has existed for about a decade. I became Director six years ago. That role helped me think through how you would telegraph what the digital humanities is, particularly as it’s designed at Stanford for undergraduates to pursue a degree certification in it.
To answer your question, what drew me to the digital humanities, I would have to say that it was because I was at Stanford, surrounded by colleagues helping to build the discipline. My scholarship primarily centers on Virginia Woolf and Modernist studies. About ten years ago, I was making a turn in my research to engage more deeply with Woolf as a self-publisher. I had been writing on people in her orbit whom we hadn’t known about before, people who had worked at her private press, The Hogarth Press. One of my big pieces before I became a practitioner of the digital humanities had to do with a marketing agent, Norah Nicholls, I had found in Woolf’s business and archival papers. I was trying to excavate a portrait of her, broadly speaking, in this context.
I was struggling with how capacious my thinking was becoming around the difficulty of how to write this kind of portrait in a way that was archivally rigorous and intervened in questions in my field about women and publishing. This was in the early teens, and several of my colleagues in the US, Canada and Britain were also working with these archives and having not dissimilar questions. And this is always the exciting thing in scholarship, right? When you realize you’re not the only one. You, perhaps, feel at first that you need to be the only one having a certain set of questions around the topic so that you can produce a definitive original argument. But we had this revelatory moment at a Woolf conference in 2012 where we all sat down in one of those in-between panel moments and recognized that joining forces with each other could be much more productive than seeming to compete with one another. We started talking about what would we do collectively to open up Woolf’s business archives to public view and to help us all separately and together push forward research in our field.
It was also, helpfully, an intergenerational team because by that time I had younger colleagues who were being trained in book history or information studies and Modernism who were a little more fluent in what was going on in the emergent digital humanities. I remember a younger colleague of mine, who is a longtime collaborator now, who said: why don’t we pitch for a grant to build an archive, a digital archive? That launched our journey, and started us thinking about why would we build a digital archive? What would a digital archive of publishing documents initially related to Woolf’s private press look like? And what would be our larger goals for that kind of activity?
That’s how it all began for me. It was a moment of clarity for me, almost an epiphany, in the modernist sense of the word, when we realized that, in order to write autonomously but also solitarily, we had been necessarily working within a framework and a set of expected protocols that in many ways repressed and, indeed, suppressed a more collective mode of academic labor and the new knowledges pathways that could emerge from a different work formation that tackled a broader, more interdisciplinary set of questions. That became something that we thought about a lot and then wrote about extensively, which the turn to digital humanities helped us articulate.
Book and publishing studies is also in some sense well suited to this turn toward the digital arena because it deals with big questions of scale and distribution and reader reception and archival access. Working to build a resource that would not be just for us, but for others as well, was a way of grappling with some long-standing questions in the humanities field itself.
I wonder, situated as you between archival studies and digital humanities, can you tell me a bit about how digital humanities has changed archival studies? What transformations have you witnessed as those two fields were brought into conversation, and has there been any pushback from either side?
That’s a great question. I can hear, for instance, my colleague Tom Mullaney in History in my ear. We were co-teaching a course for the honors program a couple of years ago, and he said that when we talk about digital archives, you must remember that 99% of archives are not and likely never will be digitized. I think that was really important to relay to the students as we were helping them navigate institutional–what I call brick-and-mortar–archives. And yet, of course, so many institutions are digitizing their artifacts now and that’s not something that should be surprising, it’s very much based in new library practices. One of the foremost ethical engagements of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project was our commitment to working in partnership with libraries and librarians and archivists and to honor and engage their ways of thinking about material textuality. That became a formative intellectual intervention in how we thought about data structure.
So here we were, initially, interested in these documents, and thinking that we’d like other people to be able to see them. But we quickly realized there’s more we could do with the digital display. For example, we realized we wanted to interanimate these objects, so suddenly the search function became a crucial question for us; what type of content management system (CMS) to use became a kind of thorny intellectual issue. Do we do this a little superficially, or do we actually dig deep into the kinds of platforms that would allow us to do what we want to do with the documents, and have them interconnected with each other across archives? Because ultimately, publishing history, indeed most historical work, involves diasporic archives. Pieces of paper exist in many different institutions that dialogue with one another. But it’s very hard to travel to the University of Texas to see a document whose correspondent is in the University of Reading in the UK. So, we were aware that we were leveraging some of the deep advantages of a digital practice, which would allow us to ascribe the kinds of metadata that would allow those documents to pop up and be in instantaneous dialogue in our site. We wanted to work with existing library protocols for cataloging that we could replicate digitally and have them shape our data and information structure.
That brought us a lot of wonderful partnerships. We’ve had conferences with head librarians, archivists, and technologists across three countries, which we probably didn’t envision in 2012, and which required more grants that were designed particularly for international collaborations around collections and with investments in cultural heritage. It’s been enormously rewarding because the kinds of discussions we can have are not exclusive to our own academic training. There’s a push for us all to understand how professionals in other arenas of the university work and to bring them into this project.
So, this is really “interprofessional” research, not just interdisciplinary.
Right. We describe MAPP as a “critical digital archive,” which is a phrase from digital archive studies, and means that we are aware that what we’ve built, and continue to build, is not a fully comprehensive archive. Of the 600 folders that relate to Woolf’s Hogarth Press, for instance, we’ve digitized the contents of about 200; and then we moved over to the Harry Ransom Center, and we digitized a lot of files there, dipping into the papers of the William and Jenny Bradley agency, which had some Hogarth Press material, as well as the papers of Alfred Knopf, founded around the time of the Hogarth Press; we’ve also digitized files from the Harcourt Brace archives at the New York Public Library, and other materials from the University of Sussex and Washington State University, Pullman, so we’ve selected and curated what our site will be able to offer, which is a lot, but we have no illusions for total comprehensiveness.
And that’s been a big question in the digital humanities, I believe. How do we account for the fact, epistemologically, that the data is often not complete?
Yes, there is something extraordinarily catalytic about being able to hold these unpublished papers in the brick-and-mortar archive, and to sort of riffle through these dialogues, paper in hand, that aren’t necessarily widely known. You can have this serendipitous experience in an archive where you think you’re looking for one thing and actually find you’re chasing the hare of another thing. We spoke about this at length when we were building the critical digital archive, to see if we could find ways of building that feeling into the search mode. We had a colleague, Catherine Hollis, who said it would be great if we could build a ‘serendipity button’, which made us laugh. But we wanted to keep the pliability and excitement of the search while also honoring and declaring, in fact, on the landing page that multiple things are going on in our archive. For one, it’s not complete, we’re not finished. We’re always adding documents. Gaps are not absences, they’re possibilities. We try to maintain that porous sense of going to find something on the site and then finding something else that’s interesting, and might take the viewer down their own digital rabbit holes.
One thing we’re doing now is starting to think about how to use visualizations that explicitly document absence. My colleague Claire Battershill, who is in the Department of English and Information Studies at the University of Toronto, is this summer going to be working with students to think about how you visualize for what’s there and what’s not there. Visualization is coming to the fore in our thinking about how and where we want to take MAPP next.
Sure, as a scholar and academic, you may then have to travel to other archives to fill in the gaps, but at least we might open up the door for you to know where you need to go, or even which librarians and archivists to reach out to. These specialists are extraordinary because they often will send you things that relate to your questions that may not be in our archive. So, then our archive has helped you find a source for new things. It’s almost like it creates a digital community. There’s this social aspect both abstract and actual that’s been really exciting in our work on MAPP. We get emails from all kinds of people, for instance, book collectors or people who have books in their home published by the presses we feature that were given to them and that have marginalia, and they want to know more about the book’s history. So there’s been this real broadening of our sense of what value in the broadest sense that academic research in book history has for the world.
This is such a great example of the imbrication of the digital and public humanities, which has been a running theme in my conversations with other researchers at CESTA. From your perspective, is the public dimension somehow built into the spirit or essence of the digital humanities, or is it something you just happened upon by chance.
I don’t think it was by chance for us. We were fascinated by the role that books as objects have in cultural formation, identity formation, and reader reception in a world that is in this very transformational moment, where people are reading on screens more frequently and the meaning of a book is shifting in the era of the ebook. We want to show that the back room negotiations over how books get made in the 1920s or 1930s have resonances for how the industry works, even today, and how the interrelationships of people through their correspondence around books can open up connections that have a magical quality: you now have access to the things that go on behind the scenes and to how things get made, and therefore they’re not so far removed from you. So we were always very self-conscious about the interconnected dimensions of what we’re doing as interrogating cultural phenomena over time, and building bridges for our viewers between the past and the present, and to some extent the future.
But there are a lot of ways we engage the public as scholars and academics, and it starts in the classroom. For instance, I’m teaching a modernist class in which I talk about building of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, and then they go off and build their own lives and careers, but they ‘return’ in ways where you realize you’ve had an impact, however small, and something you’ve been working shapes their professional interests; for instance, just last week, a student from several years back wrote me to say she’s working in podcasting in London, and she sent me a podcast she’s developed about teenage ‘zines in the 70s, a print artifact turned aural and digital, which reminded me there is a dotted line from my classroom into the public sphere. And then on the other side, we have some very clear public humanities initiatives that have been part of MAPP. The University of Reading has a very well-established volunteer outreach program in their Archives and Special Collections. An archivist at Reading who was working on MAPP, Helena Clarkson, began a volunteer transcription project, where community members were invited to come into the archive or work remotely on our transcripts. This solves a technical issue, on the one hand, for us: if you put a handwritten letter from Virginia Woolf online, it’s not going to be machine readable unless you transcribe it. A lot of our correspondence, given that the archive dates from the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s, is a photograph of the original document, which can’t be machine read because it’s a PDF. So, if you want to be able to data mine it or start making a network of relationships around words and texts in a digital archive, documents have to be machine readable.
There are now some automated handwriting transcription softwares available, but a transcription project like the one at Reading serves multiple broader community purposes. It brings community members into the archives, in our case, a whole range of people, some who are retired, people who are underemployed seeking engaging volunteer work, others who just want to be at the university working with fascinating materials and with others. They ultimately transcribed about 900 of our letters, which provided us with a crucial scholarly apparatus while, at the same time, bringing their own fresh perspectives on the voices in the letters they were hearing.
That’s quite an image. You have the original correspondences in the archive, and then you have this whole community of transcribers connected by their shared interest, and then, on top of that, you’re making these resources digitally available to the broader public, which is like a third layer of community building.
And I think that’s a testament to that early meeting where we congregated the five original founders and thought about what we needed out of this project in non-traditional ways. Perhaps professional advice in 2012 would not have told me to build a digital archive, and maybe I should have just kept going with the printed sources I had. But this project utterly transformed what I can say, at a very deep level, about Virginia Woolf, because what I could not have imagined then, but now understand, is that in making something and using digital tools to build an archive, I was effectively tapping into what it might have been for her to go and buy a hobbyist press, to set it up on a dining table, and to start thinking about fiction in different ways and building up a community of people around her because she wanted to publish them. All those things we knew about Woolf became much more poetically and richly embedded in the way she was talking about herself as a writer for me. So, this collective that we built has resounded, really powerfully on the way I think about Woolf.
This brings us right to the question of where your personal intellectual investments lie, with regards to digital methodologies. To what extent do you see yourself as someone who is interested in the technologies themselves, and to what extent are these methods, for you, a new way of opening up old questions and, in that sense, more of a means to an end?
This involves for us a classic feminist intervention in digital making, and I’m thinking of Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio, who talk about this in their book Data Feminism. A tool is not just a tool, in this sense. The tools allowed us to build what we did, but even at the beginning, we had to talk about which tools we might choose and to grapple with the materiality of the apparently immaterial, very early on. That was a big revelation for me. The one thing I remember learning with great clarity at the outset was that infrastructure is a form of argument. How we chose our CMS and how we decided to design our spreadsheets to hold our metadata meant deciding what we wanted to capture. The columns on our spreadsheets were going to become the material from which we were going to be able to connect documents, so we had to ask: what were those columns going to capture? That was a big question. Column and tabular grids became a really important form of knowledge for us, and how we designed for that knowledge capture was crucial.
For example, we’d been talking about the role of secretaries in the publishing office, but where were traces of the secretaries on the documents we were digitizing? We did notice there was a protocol on business letters where you would see, in the bottom corner, two sets of initials separated by a slash, so you might have L.W., Leonard Woolf, for instance, and then you have a slash followed by two initials in lowercase. That’s the typist. That’s the secretary or the clerk who is typing the letter. So there is a very, very subtle trace of the press workers, who are processing these papers. We realized that we hadn’t set up a column for that data point initially. I remember sending this urgent email saying, if we don’t have a column for this rubric , even when we know only their initials and not their full names, then we doubly occlude the women workers. We discovered that there’s this whole nest of questions around metadata and ethics. So, we rectified it—we added another column. We still don’t necessarily know the identities of the initials, but we’ve opened space for them to be seen and potentially further researched going forward.
Actually, this ambition, to unearth more about the lives of women workers in publishing, became another big project, freestanding but adjacent to MAPP. We’ve just published a book with Edinburgh University Press, Women in Publishing, 1900 to 2020. That’s been in process for five years. There are many variables that came into that topic, but one of them was that moment where we realized just how much else was out there in other archives on women workers at all levels of professionalization within this industry, and how much of it hadn’t been written about? That was the propulsion to put together a large edited collection that could intervene in the field of feminist book history. It just came out, and we have eight editors, so we continued to break convention even in terms of who is on the spine!
I wonder if you would agree that the digital tools in your scholarship almost add an extra layer of meta-awareness about methodology—whether collaboration or data structure.
Yes. Like that day where we all were sitting around the table and realized that infrastructure is a form of argument, which of course is not an unknown equation in the digital humanities, but we don’t always, in other spheres of discussion, tend to describe methodology as infrastructure. That realization helped us break the frame on the other ways we had been writing, to notice that all our arguments were in some sense infrastructural ones. That argument is also infrastructure. That argumentative structure necessarily subordinates some ideas in order to elevate others. So that became a meta-moment, which has even affected my own commentary on Woolf. I now hear the way she writes in her diaries and letters about presswork entirely differently.
This process of building something step by step and carefully choosing your tools sounds like it was enormously beneficial in that it gave you a critical perspective on your own methods. Do you have any concerns as an educator about the fact that certain kinds of technologies—like the ones you’ve engaged with, or even like ChatGPT—are becoming more and more easily available to students who might have very little understanding of the infrastructure behind them?
Don’t we all worry about uncritical engagement? And part of our job as academics is, of course, to iteratively teach ourselves and our students how to engage critically and thoughtfully with the world. But I will say that I have colleagues who are deeply trained in digital methodologies and quantitative text analysis who are thinking about this and going into the classroom with a comprehensive understanding of how to teach it. Personally, I can go as far as explaining the risks or the pitfalls to my students, but I will always turn to my colleagues who have more expertise in this specific and relatively new disciplinary area with questions for how to navigate these challenges. I will be incorporating digital methods into my courses on Modernism in the future and I want to teach about archives which necessarily will involve how archives are being used and arguably exploited by large language models and text recognition programs. One thing that’s exciting to acknowledge in all this is that while we may be specialists, one of the reasons we’re academics, I hope, is that we love to learn. I love to learn, and I’ll learn so that I can then teach and write about things that were once new to me. And that’s certainly how it works in digital humanities.
A lot of our work happens across generations. I work with senior colleagues who have engaged with the digital humanities in certain ways but who don’t necessarily need these methods for much of the scholarship they produce. And then I have younger students who have been taking courses in CS and statistics and digital ethics and data science, and they come to me through CESTA as RAs with a body of technical knowledge, which is really important and advances my own research.
For example, a couple years ago, I was able to work with students as transcribers to get some of the financial records related to the Hogarth Press digitized. They’re all handwritten, but they document the day-to-day sales of every single book that the Hogarth Press ever sold, so they are a gold mine of cultural book historical data and information about the economic history of interwar bookselling. The students were fascinated by what they were transcribing. We would have weekly meetings around topics related to modernism, cultural history and bookselling. We were really in it together, chasing down much undocumented history, and that was hugely exciting. Once we got a lot of data together, I would ask them questions about how we could visualize it. These were not skills I was trained in during graduate school! But they were trained at Stanford, involved in CESTA, but also educated in their data science courses or in their statistics courses. And then we would have big debates about what we’re actually seeing in the data, because they would have larger questions of context and situatedness and missingness and what might not be there or what could this one case study tell us, for instance. They had learned about these problems in their education here–what was probability, what was a data set, that a data set was a construct–in their statistics classes. I insisted that this article would be a co-authored piece with the students, so it’s got six authors on it, for obvious reasons. So, there’s a lot we can learn from students and with crediting them as our collaborators as well.
And it sounds like there might be, actually, a range of what we could call digital humanities identities. We have the hardcore digital humanists who teach the nuts and bolts classes, and then the people who dabble in these methods in a range of ways, picking them up when they’re useful, and then, at the other end of the spectrum, must be what we could call the “traditional” humanists. Does this seem accurate, from your perspective? To what extent have the digital humanities changed what it means to be a “traditional” humanist?
I think this may in part be a generational question, or difference of perspective between scholars trained in different methods of research. For me, it’s very important to think about dialogue across these kinds of perceived divisions between different schools of thought on what the digital humanities is, how it impacts so-called ‘traditional humanities’ because we are all for better or worse in a brand new age where the ‘digital turn’ affects so much of what we do and how we think about what we do as educators and scholars. This is where collaboration comes in, for me. For instance, while I would consider myself a traditional humanist in some ways, I’m not interested in being boxed in: when I go into meetings with students, they don’t know the history of bookselling in Britain or Virginia Woolf as a writer and all the traditional arguments that swirl around her as a canonical Modernist. That’s part of what I’m bringing to the table. I’m educating them and they’re educating me. This is the takeaway: I think there are questions you can ask, but you can’t always answer unless you’re working together. That’s a bigger societal question that I would like to particularize to academia. I can’t tell you the number of times other colleagues have given me insight into the depth of their knowledge about medieval book history, or some other highly specialized field. Actually, without this turn to digital humanities, I don’t think I would have been aware or so deeply engaged in fields outside my own period. This cross periodization through my engagement with the digital humanities has helped me find new angles on Woolf that I wouldn’t have expected. It has been deeply crucial. And that’s what the digital humanities, as it were, brought me.
The digital humanities, in some ways, brought you back to the traditional humanities.
It did. Yes, with new eyes! It brought me back to thinking about technologies writ large. That textuality is necessarily mired in a history of how communication and stories were told and preserved by people in a particular time and place. Defining those keywords has helped me hear resonances, say, in Woolf’s description of her time as a typesetter and as a publisher, that I probably wouldn’t have intuited as powerfully. It’s all about cultural resonance as well as cultural situatedness.
There will be different reasons people now turn to the digital humanities even as it becomes a more established set of methodologies and tools that are taught at younger levels–as it should, precisely because no one is outside the digital turn. Even what we could call “non-digital” humanists use all kinds of technologies, card catalogs, concordances, text files, as much as they turn to the internet almost reflexively now for sources, for instance. In fact, many ways of finding books in the library now require you to engage with a digital interface. We all go to Google to source information. I mean, the number of things I was able to find out about bookshop history just through Google Scholar was shocking. So, in terms of churning the landscape and offering more for us to sift through, digital tools and digitization have become unignorable. But, as you say, there will be people working more heavily on the critique of the methodology, and then there will be the people who will be leveraging the tools. But I hope there’s not a hierarchy between those things. As you can see, I think our team is very non-hierarchical, and we’re interested in the ways that structures of work can ineluctably put in place divisions or hierarchies, and how those can frustrate knowledge making.
Also, as director of the undergraduate digital humanities minor, the digital humanities is always, for me, rooted in these very deep questions that humanists have always asked, about context, method, source, and meaning. The digital humanities offer us ways to try and gain new traction on old questions. That’s my new and old mixture. We should be in the business of asking questions, because the humanities isn’t always about giving a solution to something. It is about trying to apply new lenses to these intractable and long-standing questions about what it means to be human. So we can’t ignore these massive revolutions in information and communication and publishing technologies that are mediators of and drivers for the dissemination of and discussion around these questions. I think it’s a very exciting, and intellectually very vibrant time to be in this field.