Research & Innovation

In this case, the story is complex, ragged, and unfinished. I am a character in it. As I sit down to tell it, my role in the story is changing in ways that aren't yet clear or, truth be told, entirely comfortable to me. When I wrote a version of this tale five and a half years ago for a Modern Language Association roundtable on institutionalizing queer studies, it was much breezier and more assured. Change is always discomfiting, but I offer this story in the hope that others might learn something from the fifteen-plus years I've spent helping to build and then directing one of the few stand-alone programs in LGBT studies in the United States. I teach at the University of Maryland's flagship campus in College Park. In the 2013-2014 academic year, the program will give up its autonomy and merge with the women's studies department. Many details of the merger and concomitant restructuring of the program and the department are far from settled, which is what I mean when I say this story is unfinished. Enough prologue, though. Let's get to the story.

Visitors to Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., can avail themselves of free shuttle cars to help them make their way about the sprawling suburban campus. The cars are clean and quiet and always appear within minutes of being summoned, and the drivers always know where they are going. Or almost always: During my weeklong stay my drivers repeatedly told me this was their first trip to Building 126, Microsoft’s corporate archives. One or two had to look it up on Bing Maps.

The 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution and the 1988 National Language Policy.

Contemporary poetry seems to be a shell game between narrative, lyric, and metaphoric threads. Collier’s poems are shaped without being metric; he maintains excellent control of the stanza, but if you’re the sort of reader who’s hungry for a couplet you’ll be starving after reading this volume. As for narrative, these poems aren’t stories, and temporal markers only come up every sixty miles or so. Collier’s poems are long, lonely highways with lots of passing metaphor to recreate the motion. The roads are paved; there are signs and gas stations. But you’ll never find these interstates on a map.

Would best-selling novelist Len Deighton care to take a walk? It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned. They were being used in the new ultramodern Shell Centre on the south bank of the Thames, not far from his Merrick Square home.

In her debut poetry collection The Glacier's Wake, Katy Didden attends to the large-scale tectonics of the natural world as she considers the sources and aftershocks of mortality, longing, and loss. A number of the poems in the collection are monologues in recurring voices specifically those of a glacier, a sycamore, and a wasp offering an inventive, prismatic approach to Didden's ambitious subject matter. As poet Scott Cairns says, Didden's is a capacious voice, able at once to deliver both wit and wonder, canny insight and meditative mystery. In The Glacier's Wake, the scientific, the elegiac, and the fantastical intertwine in the service of considering our human place constructive and destructive, powerful and impermanent amidst the massive shiftings that are occurring endlessly all around us.

In Tongue Lyre, Tyler Mills weaves together fragments of myth and memory, summoning the works of Ovid, Homer, and James Joyce to spin a story of violence and the female body. Introducing the recurring lyre figure in the collection—a voice to counter the violence—is Ovid’s Philomena, who, while cruelly rendered speechless, nonetheless sets the reader on an eloquent voyage to discover the body through music, art, and language. Other legendary figures making appearances within—Telemachos, Nestor, Cyclops, Circe, and others—are held up as mirrors to reflect the human form as home. In this dynamic collection, the female body and its relationship to the psyche traverse mythic yet hauntingly familiar contemporary settings as each presents not a single narrative but a progressive exploration of our universal emotional experience.

During this time digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in English than any other departmental home.

Unlike a literary manuscript or a film master, however, there was no culturally sanctioned depository or repository, no library or archives to bequeath with the newly recovered source code.

In order to assert the importance of retaining books and other physical artifacts even after they have been microfilmed or scanned for general consumption. “A primary record,” the MLA told us then, “can appropriately be defined as a physical object produced or used at the particular past time that one is concerned with in a given instance” (27). Today, the conceit of a “primary record” can no longer be assumed to be coterminous with that of a “physical object.” Electronic texts, files, feeds, and transmissions of all sorts are also now, indisputably, primary records. In the specific domain of the literary, a writer working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past, because the basic material evidence of their authorial activity — manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals — is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm. This essay therefore seeks to locate and triangulate the emergence of a .txtual condition — I am of course remediating Jerome McGann’s influential notion of a “textual condition” — amid our contemporary constructions of the “literary”, along with the changing nature of literary archives, and lastly activities in the digital humanities as that enterprise is now construed. In particular, I will use the example of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland as a means of illustrating the kinds of resources and expertise a working digital humanities center can bring to the table when confronted with the range of materials that archives and manuscript repositories will increasingly be receiving.