I submitted an abstract to Digital Humanities 2011 and was pleased when it was accepted. But the idea needs work and I hope to do some of that here over the next two months. And to be clear, the title of this post is not the title of the talk. I did use the phrase "self-digitizing communities" and I do think that's an interesting concept. By way of limited introduction, I think of it as a somewhat self-explanatory phrase that I'm using to describe communities of common interest or practice that have done an evidently good job of putting themselves online. I'm not going to overload this post with bibliography but I do want to mention Melissa Terras' recent article "Digital curiosities: resource creation via amateur digitization" as one indication that there are parallel evaluations of Internet resources going on. Melissa kindly cited my article, "Diversity and reuse of digital resources for ancient Mediterranean material culture". That looked in part at numismatics, which is one good example of a self-digitizing community.
Throwing in "tessellation" is new here. As a mathematical term it means a surface divided into areas with no gaps between them and no overlap. By the standard of "no overlap," I'm misusing the term. It's unlikely that a set of Internet resources from within one community won't have shared scope so I'm more focussed on the idea of tessellation as complete coverage; and I like the evocation of mosaic tessera.
The "community" that I'm looking at now is Christianity. That's a big topic, I know, so I'm going to let my thoughts develop over a few posts, with the point being to use anything worthwhile in the DH2011 talk.
An opening observation is that I conceive my interest in Christianity and its manifestations on the Internet as an investigation of the reception of ancient Roman culture in the modern world. I stress the New Testament canon as a set of Roman-period texts. It is therefore interesting for me to walk along the streets of my neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY, see churches and recognize the influence of Rome. That's the personal perspective. The professional perspective will move me from observing this sustained engagement with one aspect of ancient Mediterranean culture to finding a model for Digital Humanities. Beyond that, I'm tempted to say that to the extent this engagement occurs on the Internet, it is Digital Humanities. Or rather, we can array a series of internet resources in a sequence that blurs both the line between community-sourced and academy-sourced Digital Humanities and blurs any difference in goals and nature that might exist the two.
One form of "tesselation" is the representation of the historical variety of Christianity on the Internet. For now I'll illustrate that by a lightly annotated list of more or less "official" websites with a bias towards modern manifestations of those forms of early and medieval Christianity that were current in the Mediterranean and further east.
I could keep going and list sites that explore internal variety within these forms of Christianity or look beyond the edges of Christianity to find beliefs that only overlap with the New Testament (think Mandeanism [Wiki">Wikipedia]). But such a list is only part of suggesting that the representation of Christianity on the web is both one model for and also a form of Digital Humanities. I move very slightly in that direction with a list of sites that belonging to modern Christian denominations that are self-conscious invocations of long-lasting Christological">Wikipedia or soterological debates. In plainer language, those terms refer to the questions "Who or what was Jesus Christ?" and "Who will be saved and how?".
[And just as a note, The Universal Life Church (http://www.themonastery.org/) deserves a place in this discussioin but its practitioners(?) aren't exclusively Christian so I leave them for another day. And for that matter, Unitarian Universalism isn't exclusive either but does acknowledge its Christian history.]
While the sites on the list of Christian denominations have content that directly discusses the New Testament - our Roman-period text - these sites, because they feel some need to justify approaches that fall out of the mainstream, really get into the matter. In particular, see the YouTube channel of the Biblical Unitarians or their article "Do You Have to Believe in the Trinity to be Saved?". There's lots of exegesis at both links. Shifting a little bit, try this video defense of women in the ministry as embeded in the Out of Ur blog.
Exegesis, of course, is about the Bible and here I do start to be a little jealous about what Christianity has achieved. Follow this link to the opening of Mark on the site BibleGateway.com. Here's the same text in Ukranian. Arabic. And Greek. And by the way, if you want to read many of these versions on your iPhone or iPad, no problem. Try Paul Avery's Holy Bible app. It's very cool.
The Greek text is very relevant here. The edition I linked to takes its text from the 1881 The New Testament in the Original Greek. That's out of copyright and I'll return to that point later. I am more interested in the ability to undermine the concept "Original Greek". I don't mean to suggest that Mark wasn't written in Greek, rather to raise the issue of textual variants.
The fourth century AD Codex Sinaiticus is in the running for being the earliest complete Christian Bible to survive from antiquity. Not the earliest text of the NT since there are papyus fragments. Just earliest extant assembling of the books we now find in a Christian Bible. The modern history of the codex is fun but slightly irrelevant here until very recently. I'm now particularly interested in "א" (as it's known) because of the efforts to digitize its pages. Follow this link to the image of Mark 1 as found on the website of the Codex Sinaiticus Project. Then zoom in closely on the first verse by repeatedly clicking at the top of the left hand column of the manuscript image. After moving in about 5 or so times, you start to see the corrections that were made to the text. It's interesting that the nomina sacra ΙΥ ΧΥ is corrected to ΙΥ ΧΥ ΥΥ ΘΥ (an abrreviation for "Jesus Christ Son of God") by the first corrector of the manuscript. There is a nexus of access here that is impressive. I note that we are not far removed from the Biblical Unitarians concern to stress the humanity of Christ as distinct from the Trinitarian approach endorsed by most self-identifying Christians today.
I do, of course, think that the Codex Sinaiticus Project falls into the mainstream of what we call "Digital Humanities". But I can move very quickly in and out of that institutionally sanctioned world when thinking about the codex. Again, as complete copies of the Christian Bible go, Sinaiticus is an early one. It brings together the set of books that appear in many bibles, plus some other texts now considered apocryphal. It's especially interesting as an indication of the New Testament canon at the time. If the history of the development of the NT canon is of interest, you can do worse than by starting at the website The Development of the Canon of the New Testament. I particularly like the table of cross-references and reciption. Its author says, "This subject is an avocation of mine. I am not a scholar and cannot read any ancient languages. There is no original research here; I have freely copied from professional historians..." Regardless, the site is still useful. Perhaps you want to go beyond the text that appear in the NT. Again, start on the web at Early Christian Writings. That's another great site. Read with caution, of course, but I'm assuming that's the attitude we all take to all sources of information.
I'll begin to come to an end by noting Professor Marc Goodacre's NTBlog. I'm linking to his brief discussion of a video from the Saint John's College YouTube channel. You can see their nifty interactive timeline here.
In all of this, I don't know where "Digital Humanities" ends and amateur digitization begins. To oversimplify, this means I'm happy with the "Big Tent" tagline of the DH2011 conference. I'm interested in connections between information and practice that enable new approaches to knowledge discovery that are self-reinforcing. It's not by accident that I've listed Wikipedia pages and mentioned YouTube. I could also have listed Twitter accounts and FaceBook pages (thoug FB is less DH-ish).
The above points don't align exactly with anything in my DH2011 talk. When the abstract for that becomes available online, you'll see that I was somewhat betwixt and between issues when I wrote it. But it should all come together here as I get some ideas off my chest.
