Do we want a blog? asked RA Zaqir Virani after taking on our social media responsibilities in Summer 2013. Programmer Martin Holmes, always sensitive to the last updated ISO date on any webpage, pointed out that we’d let our News page languish in the past. We’d have to commit to posting regularly. Being a reader
of other projects’ blogs, I liked the idea, but worried about adding yet another responsibility
to my list. After all, digital humanists already have to work twice as hard, first
by doing the digital project and then by writing about it in other venues (Dunn). There are many defunct or sporadic blogs adrift in the digital seas, including
my own Occasional Drama blog, which has more-than-occasionally foundered between the Scylla and Charybdis of parenting
and publishing. Did I really want to take on more unrewarded labour, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls blogging (1018)? Since you are reading our project blog, you already know that I said yes to the stress, but we needed first to be clear about the purpose of such a blog and its value to
MoEML.
Being academics, we did some research on blogs. A quick search of the MLA International Bibliography for the search term blog with the results limited to Publication Type = website turns up fifty-one results. That result simply tells us that there was a menu item
entitled Blog on the website when the MLA’s bibliographers paid a visit. It tells us nothing about
the genre of the blog, its voice, or its purpose. So we made a more granular study
of the project blog, looking at sites we know and like.
Various models have emerged in the last decade for the project blog. In some cases
the blog IS the project (e.g., In the Middle) or the project is built on a blog-like platform such as Omeka, DH Press,1 or Scalar, but in most cases projects use blogs to advertise, document, and/or celebrate their
work. In the UK, projects often set up a blog to report on their progress as they
construct their tool, edition, or database. MoEML was a keen follower of the Locating London’s Past’s 2011 WordPress blog in the lead-up to their December project launch.
That blog, a valuable scholarly record of the decisions made by the GIS specialists
who georectified the 1746 Rocque map and linked it to an OS map, became their Mapping Methodology statement. A blog can be a useful open-source marketing and news tool for subscription-based
projects. The Orlando Project, for example, has a Cambridge portal to the database and a project page at the University of Alberta with an integrated blog-like news feed. The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, an open-source database developed at Leeds and now hosted by the University of West
Sydney, maintains what might be called a post-project WordPress blog to track FBTEE-related reviews, scholary outputs, and team activities.
In developing our own model, we had to address some key questions:
How would a blog differ from our news items, Facebook posts, tweets, documentation,
and extra-MoEML publications?
Will the blog stand apart from the MoEML site or be integral to it?
Will we write in the voice of the project or as individual voices, and who will write the posts?
What will we write about and what value will the blog bring to our scholarly community?
How often will we add a new post and how long can we sustain a blog?
How would the blog differ from our news items, Facebook posts, tweets, documentation,
and extra-MoEML publications? We already use Facebook and Twitter to celebrate, inform, self-market, and provide
updates. We’ve noted in our Social Media Guidelines that we use the Blog for longer news stories (longer than one usually finds in Facebook or in our News Briefs) about project developments, challenges we’ve encountered, our working practices,
and reflections on our work. As an open-source, ongoing, federally funded project with a local team and contributors
around the world, we have plenty of things to say about how we work, what interests
and sustains us in our work, and what the scholarly landscape looks like from our
point of view. Some of our more theoretical discussions will make their way into publication
venues outside MoEML, while the outcomes of our technical debates end up being formalized on our Praxis page. The blog provides a virtual space where we can write about issues that arise in [our] academic work, but in a different context,
a different style, with a different audience (Estes 974).
Will the blog stand apart from the MoEML site or be integral to it? We have opted not to use a blogging platform on a separate site. Our posts are XML
files, encoded with the same TEI tagset as all our other born digital files. This
strategy allows us to draw upon MoEML’s Personography and Bibliography, make links
to pages within the project, and point to our own posts. In the teiHeader, we assign
posts to the following document types: BornDigital, Paratext, and ParatextBlogPost. If the post is written by a student, we add the additional type Undergraduate or Graduate. (Click on the links to see all the documents assigned that a particular document
type, or click here to read more about MoEML’s document type taxonomy.) In our eXist database, we store the XML files in a folder called Blog for our convenience, but the Blog page itself, accessible via the News menu, is generated
by including, in reverse chronological order, all the files with the document type
ParatextBlogPost. We have not created a comment feature, but you can always send feedback using the
Send Feedback link on the left side of every page.
Courtesy of VMworld 2013 Bloggers
Will we write in the voice of the project or as individual voices, and who will write the posts? The project does have a voice, embodied in our style guide, and we strive for a consistently scholarly tone across our editions and encyclopedia
entries. But, as a genre, the blog is personal. In the Middle’s Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes that sharing some personal information is an essential part of blogging (Steel, Cohen, Hurley, and Joy 1022). Blog posts afford opportunities for individual team members and contributors to
speak in their own voices. We are self-conscious team members, each with designated
areas of responsibility, particular strengths, and unique ways of working. As project
director, I like the range of voices at our team meetings. As time goes on, we will
welcome new voices to the team … and, we hope, new voices to the blog in the form
of guest posts from outside the team.
What will we write about and what value will the blog bring to our scholarly community? As we have indicated in our Social Media guidelines, Some of our blog posts will be reviews of other projects, digital tools, books, resources,
or articles. Digital scholarship is still under-reviewed and under-reported. We can
provide a service both to cognate projects and to our users by reviewing other resources,
especially digital ones. In the coming months, we’ll be reviewing projects with cognate interests (London,
digital maps, gazetteers, toponyms, early modern big books) and/or similar technologies
(GIS, TEI, versioning).
Courtesy of The Folger Shakespeare Library
Some posts will be personal stories about our passions, motivations, and challenges.
Over the coming months, you’ll be hearing about my first experience of London (as
an adult, that is), our bidding war over the 1618 Stow, and why the RAs sign their
emails Stow4Life. Taking inspiration from On Rereading Poly-Olbion, Andrew McRae’s inaugural post for the forthcoming Poly-Olbion project, where he speaks candidly about the experience of reading Michael Drayton’s epic poem, we’ll be telling you what it’s like for us to read Stow’s Survey. We’ll also share with you some of the behind-the-scenes discussions, debates, and
discoveries that take place at MoEML team meetings. Traditional scholarship presents research as a product. But the process
– the delight of discovery, the possibilities we consider and reject, and the way
we work together to make the product better, the new competencies we develop – is
also worth documenting. On the one hand, sharing the questions before we have all
the answers opens a space for discussion of issues across cognate projects. On the
other, we’re in the processing of redefining scholarly work. At least once a week,
I find myself thinking that nothing in my New Historicist graduate work on non-Shakespearean
drama prepared me to build a GIS-enabled gazetteer, edit a map, encode a text, or
direct a team. The blog can be a space for meta-reflection on how MoEML typifies (and, we hope, advances) new forms of scholarship.
How often will we publish a new blog post? Well, we have ten in the workflow for encoding
and ideas for several dozen more, so you can expect to hear from us every few weeks
... at least until our funding runs out in 2016!
Notes
Since 2016, DH Press has renamed as Prospect. (JT)↑
References
Citation
Davies, Matthew, Tim Hitchcock,
and Robert Shoemaker, ed. Locating London’s
Past. U of Hertfordshire, U of London,
and U of Sheffield. Open.
Drayton, Michael. Poly-Olbion. or A chorographicall
description of tracts, riuers, mountaines, forests, and other parts of this renowned
isle of Great Britaine with intermixture of the most remarquable stories,
antiquities, wonders, rarityes, pleasures, and commodities of the same: digested in
a poem by Michael Drayton, Esq. With a table added, for direction to those
occurrences of story and antiquitie, whereunto the course of the volume easily
leades not. London, 1613. EEBO. Reprint. Subscription. STC 7727
Steel, Karl, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Mary Kate Hurley, and Eileen A. Joy. Why We Blog: An Essay in Four Movements.Literature Compass 9.12 (2012): 1016-1032. DOI 10.1111/lic3.12012.
Jenstad, Janelle. To Blog or Not to Blog.The Map of Early Modern London, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 20 Jun. 2018, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG6.htm.
Chicago citation
Jenstad, Janelle. To Blog or Not to Blog.The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed June 20, 2018. http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG6.htm.
APA citation
Jenstad, J. 2018. To Blog or Not to Blog. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London. Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/BLOG6.htm.
RIS file (for RefMan, EndNote etc.)
Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
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TEI citation
<bibl type="mla"><author><name ref="#JENS1"><surname>Jenstad</surname>, <forename>Janelle</forename></name></author>.
<title level="a">To Blog or Not to Blog</title>. <title level="m">The Map of Early
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Janelle Jenstad, associate professor in the department of English at the University
of Victoria, is the general editor and coordinator of The Map of Early Modern London. She is also the assistant coordinating editor of Internet Shakespeare Editions. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer Academy at the Stratford Festival,
the University of Windsor, and the University of Victoria. Her articles have appeared
in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), Approaches to Teaching Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from
Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Brill, 2004), New Directions in the Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), and Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (MLA, forthcoming). She is currently working on an edition of The Merchant of Venice for ISE and Broadview P. She lectures regularly on London studies, digital humanities, and
on Shakespeare in performance.
Research assistant, 2013-15, and data manager, 2015 to present. Tye completed his
undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.
Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–present; Associate Project Director, 2015–present;
Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014; MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander
comes to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge digital humanities project at the University of Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project
to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the
Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor. She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social
and material artifacts, and is interested in the development of digital resources
that will improve access to these materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation
and conservation. An avid traveler, Kim has always loved both London and maps, and
so is particularly delighted to be able to bring her early modern scholarly expertise
to bear on the MoEML project.
Programmer, 2018-present; Junior Programmer, 2015 to 2017; Research Assistant, 2014
to 2017. Joey Takeda is an MA student at the University of British Columbia in the
Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA
honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria
in 2016. His primary research interests include diasporic and indigenous Canadian
and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Graduate Research Assistant, 2013-14. Zaqir Virani completed his MA at the University
of Victoria in April 2014. He received his BA from Simon Fraser University in 2012,
and has worked as a musician, producer, and author of short fiction. His research
focuses on the linkage of sound and textual analysis software and the work of Samuel
Beckett.
Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC).
Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database
implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the
project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was
a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.
