This week has offered plentiful opportunities to reflect on the current state of work in the digital humanities. On Monday, the CMT held its first joint workshop with the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin. One of the contributors to this event, Eugene Giddens (ARU), spoke about digital editing in his neck of the woods, early modern literary studies, characterizing it as almost entirely a history of failure. Fantasies nurtured in the 1990s—dreams of hypertext editions that would allow one to move fluidly between different versions of a work, exposing the many contingencies of the textual condition—have come to nothing. We have no online Shakespeare to can compete with the massed ranks of Ardens, Riversides and Nortons. We have few compelling online editions of other authors, major or minor. And in the rare cases where such editions have been completed, the bells and whistles (say, video-clips from modern performances of playtexts) may do more to obstruct than to facilitate engagement. Publishers seem to have despaired of finding a viable financial model for the online edition, while they continue to commission the familiar printed behemoths. Meanwhile scholars flock to sites that dump low-grade but plentiful facsimile images on the web. ‘Early English Books Online’ is the one unqualified success-story of digital editing in this area, and it isn’t (in the standard sense of the word) an edition.

Having absorbed some of the force of this analysis, it was surprising to go on a second collaborative event, a workshop on ‘Digital Editing and Digital Editions’ run at CRASSH on Wednesday. The speakers at this event were mainly upbeat about digital editing projects, one of them—John Rink of the Cambridge Music Faculty—having worked on an extremely complex and interesting project to create a variorum edition of Chopin (see http://www.ocve.org.uk/index.html and, relatedly, http://www.cfeo.org.uk/dyn/index.html). The miraculous interface for this project does things that Shakespeareans can only (continue to) dream of, allowing bar-by-bar comparison between the various original manuscripts and early printed scores, all of them testifying eloquently to this particular composer’s inability to stop improving and improvising, and to the material circumstances in which his works took shape. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the site continues to grow and may in future incorporate audio performances to further diversify and enrich its content.

The other presentation at this event was similarly inspiring. Here Eleanor Robson of Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science explored ORACC (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/index.html), the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, an ever-expanding archive of cuneiform texts that was initiated in the 1990s and which has continued to grow ever since. Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, ORACC was developed without direct funding, mostly it seems as a means of facilitating the research projects of its founders. The site offers an enticingly open, free-form model for online editing (Robson patiently explained that the site’s acronym alludes to ORAC, the supercomputer-sidekick of the intergalactic renegades in the 1980s sci-fi series Blake’s 7). This vast, intricately-coded archive of cuneiform texts has a very direct impact on teaching and draws together numerous research collaborations with sites and institutions across the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Wednesday’s meeting concluded with a round-table discussion chaired by Andrew Zurcher (Faculty of English) which aired questions of longevity (making digital projects last), interoperability (making them talk to one another), impact (making them useful), and respectability (making them count on a CV). The Cambridge Digital Humanities Network will be carrying these discussions forward in the coming months and years: watch this space for more information. Meanwhile, the CMT is hosting two lunchtime meetings in the next couple of weeks (see this site, under ‘Events’) to discuss nascent digital projects.

for further discussion of the CRASSH workshop, see the intranet Members’ Forum (click on the sidebar tab)

The National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket, Suffolk unexpectedly revealed some interesting material texts when I visited recently. Newmarket is famous as a horseracing town, but it is particularly important in the racing world not so much for its racecourse (a feature of over fifty towns and cities in the UK) but for its training ground, the Heath, a grass-covered chalk incline just outside the town which has remained unchanged since it was first used to train racehorses in the late seventeenth century.

Horseracing has taken place in Britain since Roman times. The breeding of fine horses has long been associated with royalty, but it was not until the later seventeenth century that horseracing as we know it today became central to the British sporting scene. I had (perhaps naively) expected the museum to explain more than it did about the social history of horseracing as an essential part of the life of Newmarket and many other racing towns.  Instead, the museum feels more like a shrine to the equine form, which is probably a better reflection of a sport concerned not just with the competitive racing of horses, but ultimately with the complex art of creating the finest possible equine physique. This obsession with the body of the horse is extended by association to the bodies of jockeys; among the many artefacts linked to jockeys that were afforded a relic-like status in the museum’s velvet-lined glass cases, the most macabre was the pistol with which the famous local jockey Frederick Archer fatally shot himself in 1886 at the age of 29.

While displays of stuffed horse heads, preserved horse feet, and equine enema equipment are all of limited appeal to the non-specialist, the museum is more interesting for the rich tradition of material texts associated with horseracing it reveals. There are some lovely examples of race cards, race tickets, and betting slips from the last few centuries, which provide a glimpse into the particular social and cultural context of this sport. The most significant material texts associated with horseracing, however, are the incredibly complicated graphs and diagrams of ‘sire lines’, essential reading material for any true connoisseur. These texts are the very foundation of this sport, enabling the precise genetic origins of individual horses to be traced back across hundreds of years. Sire lines have a revered status, informing the decisions of breeders, owners, trainers, bookmakers, and the many other people integral to this sport.

The pictures above show Derby silk scarves, which throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were produced annually in connection with the Epsom Derby, one of the most famous horse races. Printed with the name of the year’s winner, they also feature an elaborate collage of the names of all previous winners since the inauguration of the Derby in 1780, along with the details of each individual horse’s parentage.  These souvenirs exploit the iconic status of sire lines and the very poetic language of horse naming, turning intricate textual charts and diagrams into a highly aesthetic object.

As discussions and debates about the virtues and shortcomings of the increasingly popular digital book and e-reader rumble on, it has seemed inevitable that sooner rather than later, someone would write a book about a world in which people no longer know what a book is. The latest offering from the American children’s author and illustrator Lane Smith, It’s a Book (currently featured in the window of Heffers), is the first I’ve seen, and is a lovely, tongue-in-cheek contribution. Monkey sits absorbed in a book, while Donkey asks ‘What do you have there?’, and bombards him with more questions: does it scroll, blog, tweet, text, need a password, or do wifi? Where’s the mouse, and surely it must have to be charged?

‘No heavy message, I’m only in it for the laffs’, writes Smith in his explanation of how he came to write this book.  What I really enjoyed about It’s a Book is its clever simplicity. It is not a judgemental defence of the book as opposed to the computer screen, and it does not sentimentalise the materiality of the book, which one might expect it to do. Monkey’s repeated response to Donkey’s persistent questioning – ‘No. It’s a book’ – leaves enough space for the reader, child or adult, to consider for themselves the many virtues of the object they are holding.