Description

Our guest today is Kathleen Lewis. Kathleen is the first in a series of graduate student spotlight guests, which is a way for us to highlight the digital humanities work being done by our amazing graduate students here at the University of Alabama. Kathleen is a doctoral candidate in the composition and rhetoric in English studies program in the Department of English. Her research uses new materialism to explore recomposition and circulation of the pride flag on social media platform Tumblr.

Season: 3

Episode: 3

Date: 3/2024

Presenter: Kathleen Lewis

Topic: LGBTQ Flag on Tumbler

Tags: Social Media Studies; Digital Rhetoric ; Rhetorical Velocity

The post ADHC Talks Podcast- Graduate Student Spotlight: A Conversation with Kathleen Lewis (3.3) appeared first on Alabama Digital Humanities Center.

Probably like a lot of grad students, my mom will often ask me how my work is going. And normally, it’s not so much that she wants to know what I’m doing; she just wants to know that I’m happy doing whatever it is that I’m doing. But all last year, I was running around visiting about 40 medieval manuscripts located in more than a dozen special collections libraries across Europe and the UK, and she needed to be able to explain my behavior to others. She finally asked: But like… what are you doing? When you visit a manuscript, and you’re there all day, what do you do?

Fair question.

When we say “manuscript studies” what does that even mean? When you spend hours with a manuscript, what are you actually doing there besides marveling at centuries old pigments and that sweet sweet old-book smell?

When I’m in the room with, say, a thirteenth-century tome of saints’ Lives, the first thing I usually have to do is collect myself because how cool?? I often think about the hundreds of people who have flipped through these exact pages for hundreds of years. Unnamed scribes, rich patrons, naive children, greedy sellers, trusted librarians, and many of my own scholarly idols. Manuscripts are these sorts of nodes linking countless people together for countless reasons, and I get to touch them.

So, after I finish freaking out internally for a minute, I get to work documenting as many details as I can. This rich metadata informs my ongoing dissertation work and prompts new questions and new avenues for future research.

But to answer my mom’s question (what are you doing?) and for anyone else who’s curious, I thought I might provide a brief how-to-visit-a-medieval-manuscript guide based on my experiences:

1. Plan Ahead
   • Figure out what you need to see: If digitized images of the manuscript you’re interested in are available online, study these thoroughly first. Not only will this save you time later when you’re on-site, but any evidence you can collect at this stage will also strengthen your case for why seeing the physical manuscript is necessary in the first place. If no digitization is available, all the more reason to see the real thing!
   • Who’s gonna pay for that?: Unless you’re uber-wealthy or something, funding applications will need to happen well in advance, so budget your time for this stage as well.
   • Get your papers in order: Most institutions will require a formal letter of support from your advisor and proof of your status as a student or researcher. Keep these documents handy both in digital and hard copy.
   • Make contact: Don’t be scared. Get a hold of the appropriate library staff, explain your research project, and request access. At this stage, you’ll of course schedule your visit, but you should also make sure that you and the librarians are on the same page about your research plans. Are photos permitted? What documents are required? etc. I once had a Welsh lady scold me because of a misunderstanding over email, and nobody wants that.
2. Come Prepared
   • Register: When you arrive, you’ll typically need to register for a library card, so bring the necessary identification and any other documentation the library requires. This too can take some time, so budget for this step in your schedule. Soon, you’ll have a little collection of library cards :)
   • Pack your bag: Normally, you are not permitted to bring a bag into the room — because you might be a dirty little thief — so be prepared to pull your essential items out of your bag. I like to carry a clear plastic envelope folder with all the essentials:
     • extra pencils with a sharpener
     • a clear ruler and retractable tape measure
     • a pocket magnifying glass
     • and extra paper copies of all required documents
3. Be Kind
   • Support the codex: Despite popular images of researchers wearing white gloves, handling parchment manuscripts with clean, dry, uncovered hands is actually the generally recommended method. Wearing gloves can make your movements clumsier, leaving you more likely to potentially damage the material. Always use the proper supports to minimize strain on the manuscript’s binding, and adjust these supports as needed while you work.
   • Support the staff: BE COOL. Librarians and library staff are the guardians of these precious objects. Do as they say, be patient, and be kind. Their first priority is to protect the manuscript, not to cater to the whims of over-eager researchers. I recommend not wearing headphones at all during your visit as these will make you less responsive to staff instructions.
4. Document Everything
   • Use your time wisely: Give yourself a comfy window of time to do your work — ideally about 2 hours per manuscript. Establish a procedure for yourself to follow in advance, and be sure to prioritize focusing on the essentials first in case you’re short on time. You’ll kick yourself later if you run out of time to document the one dang thing you were there to see.
   • Record, record, record: Take detailed measurements, including the dimensions of the manuscript, the area of the writing space, the average height of the ruled lines, all in millimeters! Count the average number of lines per column and the number of columns per page. Note any unique features like characteristics of the scribe’s hand, any added glosses and marginalia, and other decorative elements.
   • Take pics: If permitted, take as many photos as possible to minimize your reliance on memory or hurried notes later. Be aware of the library’s restrictions beforehand, and always ask again in-person for further guidance. When taking photos, include in your frame a little slip of paper identifying what you’re photographing. This will save you headaches down the road when you’re up late at night trying to recall if that was folio 351 recto or folio 357 recto…
   • Turn every page: After you’ve collected all the essentials, if there’s time left, savor the moment. Turn every page. Take your time. Let yourself meditate on it. Let yourself notice what you didn’t expect to see. And take notes, lots and lots of notes.
5. Follow Up
   • Tidy your notes: Read back over your data and make sure everything will be intelligible to you six months from now. If you took photos, name each of them with a consistent file naming convention (ex: CITY_LIBRARY_COLLECTION_MS#_FOLIO#_recto/verso), and back them up in one (or two) other places besides your phone.
   • Transcribe your photos: When doing your own transcriptions, finding a guiding text for comparison, even if it is not an exact match for your manuscript copy can be extremely helpful, particularly if you’re a beginner to medieval scribal hands. We’re on the cusp of having more reliable OCR for medieval manuscripts through platforms like Transkribus, but as I write this blog, we aren’t quite there yet. This stage takes a significant amount of time, but it also gives you the opportunity to really get close to the text, working letter by letter. You’ll really come to sympathize with medieval scribes. I totally get now why so many scribes left colophons complaining about how arduous the work of copying is and how maddening it can be to make a mistake despite all of your careful attention over many hours and many days.
   • Thank your librarians. Thank your advisors. Thank your funders. Thank everyone who made your research possible.

And by the way, you don’t have to travel to far flung libraries to encounter these beauties. Just last week, I put together a visit for UVA students to see some of Rare Book School’s medieval materials, and not only did the staff at RBS generously open their doors, but we even had the great Barbara Shailor (gasp) and Consuelo Dutschke (double gasp) there to lead the session. It was such a treat organizing this opportunity for students to get curious about manuscript studies and ask: but like… what are you doing?

“I am not a woman,” says Megwind, “I am a spirit, although the form of the thing is misleading I will admit.[..] You are taken with my form which I admit is beautiful,” says the girl, “but know that this form you see is not necessary but contingent, sometimes I am a fine brown-speckled egg and sometimes I am an escape of steam from a hole in the ground and sometimes I am an armadillo.”

“That is amazing,” says my grandfather, “a shape-shifter are you.”

“That is a thing I could do,” says Megwind, “if I choose.”

“Tell me,” says my grandfather, “could you change yourself into one million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality neatly stacked in railroad cars on a siding outside of Fort Riley, Kansas?”

“That is a thing I could do,” says the girl, “but I do not see the beauty of it.”

“The beauty of it,” says my grandfather, “is two cents a board foot.”

- Donald Barthelme, “Departures” (emphasis added)

Jeremy Boggs’ Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program DesignLab class today had fellows sharing quotes that resonated with them, from Frank Chimero’s Shape of Design. Many of their choices focused on the importance of beauty, creativity, magic in design choices/work, sitting alongside function (or being a part of functionality). This conversation added to my thinking on how I divide scholarly values, from specific current instantiations of those values. For example: the point of a dissertation isn’t a proto-monograph; it’s practicing building and sharing knowledge as an active member of a specific community.

Or, another example: during my dissertation research, I tried to separate foundational textual scholarship field values (e.g. around authority, methodology, documentation), from how traditional Scholarly Editions usually look. It’s useful to have Scholarly Edition as term of art; and it’s useful to imagine additional ways we can realize those same scholarly field values, that look very different (like my participatory digital Ulysses edition).

I’ve shorthanded for myself this kind of parsing what we’re trying to do with scholarship from how we most often go about that, this values vs. the popular form of those values we’ve settled on, as “values vs. their instantiations”. That last word is an awkward choice! but it’s where my brain settled. (In a forthcoming-imminently journal article, I talk more about this kind of comparison of motivating scholarly values vs. how scholars including me—for good reasons, often!—default to time-tested specific forms and methods for pursuing those values.)

Scholarly values can be realized via many many methods, forms. What I’m getting from Jeremy’s session today, and my Praxis Fellow colleagues’ interpretations of Chimero’s design book, is: how I often pursue creative rereads of scholarly values—using different methods/forms than norms—isn’t just about the best way I can reach the “functional” values of my scholarly fields. (I’d thought it was!)

What I’m doing is also adding to those values (at least how I frame them to myself), trying to include joy, experimentation, justice, community (and Chimero’s “magic”?) as equivalent scholarly values, fully alongside the more widely agreed on Values of a Given Scholarly Field (e.g. clearly communicating the methodology of digital edition interface design choices, is one such Field Value).

(Thanks to my colleagues Jeremy Boggs, Oriane Guiziou-Lamour, Kristin Hauge, Gramond McPherson, Emmy Monaghan, Amna Tarar, and Brandon Walsh for teaching me via today’s conversation!

This post is an expanded version of some Bluesky tweets I posted 9/26/2024 during the session.)

On my very first day at UVA, I met Rennie Mapp at a bus stop. I asked this random woman for directions, we shared the short ride to Central Grounds, and she asked me about what my plans were here in Charlottesville. I was absolutely beaming with energy for all the plans I didn’t yet have, and after listening to my ecstatic ramblings, Rennie gave me an enthusiastic pitch about all the exciting opportunities available for digital humanities research at the university. She gave me her card, and I had to know more. I wasn’t a medievalist then, I didn’t have an advisor yet, I didn’t even really know where to find New Cabell, but first thing, I knew I ought to look into this DH business.¹ Since then, I’ve been dipping my toes into all things DH at UVA. I have spent the past several years exploring DH methods through workshops, coursework, conferences, and collaborative projects — building a prototype of a digital edition (something I’ll touch on in another blog post) and working on XML-encoding projects like Lives of the Saints: The Medieval French Hagiography Project with the mentorship of my advisor Amy Ogden. My dissertation project is the culmination of all these experiences and a chance to push the boundaries of what a digital edition can offer.

So, salut, SLab enthusiasts! My name’s Loren Lee (from Tennessee) and I’m thrilled to continue integrating DH methods into my research and to contribute to the Scholars’ Lab as this year’s Digital Humanities Fellow. I’m in the last year of my PhD in the French Department, where I specialize in medieval literature, manuscript studies, and Old French translation. For years now, I’ve benefited from the relentless encouragement of my mentors in the French Department, and now, I have fuller access to the rich guidance available through the Scholars’ Lab community. The DH Fellowship gives me the opportunity to dedicate this year to completing my dissertation — a digital edition of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman verse redaction of La Vie de sainte Marie l’Égyptienne known as Version T.

Version T, which has never before been published translated into a modern language, offers a compelling narrative of bodily and spiritual transformation as the penitent saint Mary chooses to abandon her former life as a prolific sex worker in favor of ascetic, solitary existence in the desert. For decades, she lives peacefully, grazing on grasses and drinking directly from streams, modeling for readers profound humility. But Version T complicates the basic narrative of good-girl-gone-bad-gone-good-again, suggesting that the act of offering one’s body for the comfort of others is not just redeemable, it is downright Christ-like. Despite the rich manuscript tradition surrounding this text, it has been somewhat neglected in scholarship, which is another one of the reasons why I’m so eager to work on it. Although saints’ Lives as a genre was hugely popular in the middle ages, modern scholarship on the literature of the period has been largely fixated on more ‘secular’ texts like romances. By examining challenging texts like La vie de sainte Marie l’Égyptienne, we can gain a greater appreciation of medieval popular culture and we can build a more nuanced understanding of female representation in the middle ages.

My dissertation will offer new insights into this puzzling text while also experimenting with innovative digital editorial methods. Readers of my edition will be able to more intuitively visualize common medieval manuscript features like textual variations among the extant copies, excised elements like cut out miniatures and ripped folios, and scribal errors and abbreviations. All of these common aspects of medieval manuscripts are typically lost as they are tidied up in print editions, but they are integral to the manuscript reading experience. Flexibility is something that digital editions can offer in a way print cannot, and I’m eager to explore how dynamic publishing systems like Quarto can shape the way a modern audience reads a medieval text. My project seeks to make a commentary on the profound digital turn in manuscript studies, which has forever changed how we access and interact with premodern sources and how we conceptualize preservation and accessibility.

This year at the Scholars’ Lab, I’ll be working on transforming my XML-encoded manuscript data into a functional, interactive digital edition. While I’ve laid much of the groundwork already — completing XML encoding for the eight manuscript copies I’m working with and making progress on key translations (more on this in another blog post) — I still have a lot of work ahead. My hope is to create an edition that not only presents the text but also fosters a deeper understanding of the editorial choices that go into creating such a work.

The Scholars’ Lab is the perfect place for this next phase of my research. With mentorship from the SLab’s experts like Jeremy Boggs and the chance to collaborate with my fellow DH scholars in Praxis, I am confident that I’ll be able to produce something truly innovative. I’m also looking forward to engaging with the wider digital medievalist community, learning from their insights, and hopefully establishing for myself a foothold in the field as both an early career medievalist and DH scholar.

Throughout the year, my blog posts will share updates about my own progress, challenges, and discoveries, and I’ll point interested readers in the direction of other cool developments in the intersection between digital humanities and medieval manuscript studies.² I’m eager to see how the year unfolds with the support of the Scholars’ Lab team and how we can do some new tricks with some very old books.

In the blog series “Researcher questions” the Artes Research team shares some common and/or pertinent questions that we get from researchers at the Faculty of Arts. The goal of the series is to share the advice that we give more broadly, as it might be helpful to others as well or make you consider something you had not thought about before.

Sometimes, researchers ask us to close off access to a dissertation that had initially been made available in Open Access through our institutional repository Lirias. The main motivation for this is the fear that publishers won’t be willing to publish the material if it can already be freely consulted online. This fear stems from a general anxiety that characterizes the dissertation process: the idea that developing your dissertation is still something you mainly do alone, without publicly sharing too many details, driven by, on the one hand, a feeling of insecurity to already share your work before it’s “ready” and, on the other hand, the worry that your ideas might be “stolen”.[1] However, more collaboration can only help to improve the project. In this blogpost I will address some common concerns and show that sharing your dissertation in OA offers various advantages and does not contradict the ambition of publishing your work.

Am I obligated to make my dissertation available in Open Access?

At KU Leuven, OA for your dissertation is a choice, not an obligation. While you are always required to archive the electronic version of your PhD thesis in Lirias (practical guidelines about how to upload your dissertation can be found here), opening it up publicly is not mandatory. We offer the following accessibility options:

1. Public access: if you select this option your dissertation will be placed under a temporary embargo of 12 months starting from the date of your defense. This means that during those first 12 months, only internal KU Leuven users (staff and students) will be able to access your work. After the expiration of the embargo, the dissertation will become openly available so that everyone can find and read it. Of course, you can also choose to make your dissertation immediately available in Open Access. Just contact the Open Access Support Desk and they will gladly remove the embargo. The other way around is also possible: if you prefer a longer embargo period (e.g. 2 or 3 years) just ask them to make the change.
2. Permanent embargo: this means that your dissertation is indefinitely only available for internal KU Leuven users.
3. No access: while this option is available it is actually only recommended for material that has to remain strictly confidential (e.g. for economic or political reasons) as it means that nobody, except for a few repository administrators, can consult the file. Even you and your (co)supervisor(s) cannot access the dissertation anymore.

Most KU Leuven researchers go for the public access license so that they have 12 more months to either decide to close their dissertation off longer, or let it become publicly available.

I want to stress here that the choice you make when uploading your dissertation is not permanent. It might not be the best time to decide about the accessibility of your work when you are about to defend. I know from experience that this is a very stressful time and that you are not up to dealing with practicalities. Maybe you aren’t really familiar yet with how repositories and Green OA work and don’t have time to figure out the details. And you probably haven’t decided yet if, let alone where, you wish to publish your research, meaning that you can’t take publishers’ policies regarding the matter into account. Therefore, a solution might be to initially share your dissertation in OA, so that others can engage with your work while you are still exploring your options. Once you have signed a contract with a publisher and they prefer you to (temporarily) restrict access to your dissertation, you can always ask the Open Access Support Desk to change the availability.

Why would I publish my dissertation in Open Access?

Making your dissertation available in OA has various advantages. First and foremost, it cannot be denied that OA will increase readership and boost citations as your work will be easily findable and accessible to interested readers both inside and outside academia. This in turn promotes active debate about your research, and the feedback can be a great help when revising your manuscript. Moreover, your work can be picked up much faster on a global scale, which increases your chances of collaboration and puts you on the radar in the international job market.

While it might seem contradictory, the fact that your work is out in the open can also help to bring it to the attention of publishers. For example, back in 2013, Harvard University Press stated that thanks to OA the odds increase of them picking up the dissertation under the slogan “If you can’t find it, you can’t sign it”.[2] Open Access is also interesting for publishers from a marketing perspective. Thanks to the open availability the work can already attract readers and instigate discussions, the same audience will most likely also be interested in reading the reworked publication.[3]

What you might need to verify before publicly sharing your dissertation is if you are using material that is protected by copyright licenses (e.g. images, archival sources, etc.), or if you are working with personal data of living individuals. It’s best to already solve these kind of issues at the start of your project, but if you still have some uncertainties about this, just reach out to us or our colleagues from the Copyright Support Desk.

Will a publisher accept my manuscript if the dissertation is available in Open Access?

Unfortunately, a resource or up to date index that collects publisher policies concerning this issue does not exist. In any case, such a resource would be hard to maintain since policies are not set in stone and can change over time. Presses also do not provide much data about OA dissertations that they publish and it has been a while since surveys last asked publishers about the possible impact of OA on their willingness to publish dissertation-based books. Nevertheless, we can gain some valuable insights from older surveys about this topic.  

Most notably is the study conducted in 2011 on the policies of arts, humanities, and social sciences journals and university presses.[4] They found that fewer than 5% of total respondents would never consider to publish a dissertation that is already available in OA. In other words, the great majority of the journal and university press editors surveyed were open to publish such a dissertation, on the condition that the original content was substantially adapted. Needless to say, their decisions to publish were made on a case-to-case basis (just as with any type of publication). The survey also revealed that publishers are much more concerned with the quality of the work than prior access to, what they qualify as, an unpublished dissertation. A similar, smaller-scale UK survey conducted in 2015-2016 surveyed 23 university and commercial presses, again in the field of arts, humanities, and social sciences.[5] Their findings revealed that none of the respondents would outright refuse to publish a monograph derived from a dissertation available in OA.

From these studies, and from our own experiences and anecdotal evidence we have gathered along the way, we can conclude that most publishers consider, without prejudice, submissions derived from openly available dissertations. Publishers most often expect you to significantly revise, rewrite, and reframe your dissertation when turning it into a monograph or article. As they consider major edits to be inevitable, they don’t particularly mind that the dissertation is openly available and won’t reject your manuscript on the grounds of prior publication.[6] However, publishers’ policies naturally differ; there are still publishers that may object to the open availability of your dissertation. More broadly speaking, there are also publishers that do not publish monographs that are too close to a PhD thesis in general, regardless of the dissertation’s OA status.[7] Don’t be afraid to just contact the publisher you are considering and, if need be, alter the availability of your dissertation with just one email to the Open Access Support Desk.

Does OA facilitate plagiarism?

Besides the fear that OA will prevent future publication, another common concern is that OA increases the chances of your work being plagiarized. This fear is unwarranted: OA can actually help to protect your work, as plagiarism is much easier to detect when the original work is freely available. Furthermore, if you are aiming for a book publication, it will take some time to rework your PhD into a monograph. If your work can be consulted online in the meantime, you create a transparent public record of your research. This can serve as proof that you formulated certain ideas first, protecting you from scooping rather than enabling it. This way, OA can deter plagiarism and idea theft.[8]

Takeaways

While I wanted to demonstrate in this post that OA is not something to fear, but to embrace, I do want to underline that you always have the final say in how you wish to share your work based on your own experiences, prospects, and what you feel comfortable with. The key takeaways I want to leave you with are:

1. KU Leuven has an opt-in policy for OA when it comes to dissertations, and you are free to select your preferred availability.
2. OA can help bring your work to the attention of interested scholars, possible future employers, and potentially even publishers.
3. The chance that a publisher will reject a manuscript based on an openly available dissertation is minimal, but you can always just contact them to clarify the matter. If they do make objections, remember that the availability of your dissertation can always be altered.
4. OA deters instead of enables plagiarism. 

If you still have concerns or questions about the availability of your dissertation or any other digital scholarship-related matters, do not hesitate to contact the Artes Research team!

---

[1] Kathleen Fitzpatrick has described this unease with publicly sharing the dissertation process and puts forward digital scholarship as a way to eliminate such anxieties: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Dissertating in Public,” in Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities, ed. Virginia Kuhn and Anke Finger, 2021, 19–23, http://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0239.

[2] “Can’t Find It, Can’t Sign It: On Dissertation Embargoes,” Harvard University Press Blog (blog), accessed August 19, 2022, https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2013/07/cant-find-it-cant-sign-it-on-dissertation-embargoes.html; also cited in: Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual,” in Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Implementation, ed. Kevin L. Smith and Katherine A. Dickson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016), 206.

[3] Cirasella and Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual”, 210.

[4] Marisa L. Ramirez et al., “Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers,” College & Research Libraries 74, no. 4 (2013): 368–80, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-356.

[5] Christian Gilliam and Christine Daoutis, “Can Openly Accessible E- Theses Be Published as Monographs? A Short Survey of Academic Publishers,” The Serials Librarian 75, no. 1–4 (2019): 5–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2019.1589633.

[6] Cirasella and Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual”, 206; Fitzpatrick, “Dissertating in Public”, 22-23. A study conducted in 2018 alsoconcluded that onlya small percentage of dissertations are published as books with relatively few changes: Karen Rupp-Serrano and Jen Waller, “Dissertation-to-Book Publication Patterns Among a Sample of R1 Institutions,” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 6, no. 1 (2018): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2187. If a publisher is right to see the dissertation and the monograph as two completely distinct species, or whether we should approach the dissertation more as an already finished product that could be published as such, is another discussion that I won’t address here.

[7] E.g. “Publishing Your Book with MUP,” Manchester University Press, accessed August 19, 2022, https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/resources/publishing-your-book-with-mup/.

[8] Peter Suber, Open Access, MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 23–24; Cirasella and Thistlethwaite, “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual”, 212.