The Virtual Observatory and the Roman de la Rose: Unexpected Relationships and the Collaborative Imperative | Academic Commons

The Virtual Observatory and the Roman de la Rose: Unexpected Relationships and the Collaborative Imperative | Academic Commons

I found this article in the December 2007 Academic Commons issue. It intrigued me because it took two digital projects, seemingly as opposite on the academia spectrum as they possibly could be and drew some strong parallels to one another, and by doing so, was able to pinpoint cyberinfrastructure within a humanist point of view. This was very helpful me, as an old fashioned English major used to stuffy texts and houndstooth jackets, to be able to apply the idea of cyberinfrastructure into the study of literature and other humanities areas.

The article, by Sayeed Choudhury and Timothy Stinson, both from the John Hopkins University, starts off by picking two digital libraries: The Virtual Observatory (VO) and the Roman De La Rose Digital Library. The VO is a typical area, structure, application that one would expect from a digital project: large complex datasets shared, visualized and analyzed by a group of astronomers. The Roman de la Rose Digital Library is a collection of digitized medieval manuscripts chronicling the many different editions, write-ups, illuminations, citations and so on and so forth of the Roman de la Rose.

The traditional view is that these two areas of academic discipline have nothing in common: one is numbers and the other is a qualitative analysis of a medieval work of literature, but Choudhury and Stinston draw some strong parallels in order to establish the shape that cyberinfrastructure can take place in the humanities by suggesting that we expand our defintion of the term "data-rich." According to Choudhury and Stinson, "data-rich" does not have to refer to technology, but rather the ease and difficulty that the practitioners are able to generate, acquire, and process data. For example, in 1627, the Roman de la Rose, had been written, illuminated and studied many times over and had a wealth of data that could be transmitted and used to create new data, and this was way before computers.

Then article goes on to talk about the data deluge: it is not just happening in the more quantitative disciplines, but also in the humanities because manuscripts, being "data-rich," still retain their original values and meanings, but also acquire new interpretations and values with each new generation of academia. This also includes metadata generated. Therefore, the humanities field has just as much presence and need for a cyberinfrastructre to keep it all from losing the progress of information through the ages.

In a sense, the scientific datasets are a modern equivalent of medieval manuscripts. Choudhury and Stinston point out that the many different versions of the Roman de la Rose that build off of one another mirror the intertextuality of World Wide Web and digital media provides an opportunitu reflect more accurately on forms of medieval textuality and transmission of information that may have been lost during the print era.

I felt that Stinston and Choudhury's article heavily drew on ideas and theories of new forms of scholarship and how digital curation can make that possible. It also exposes the need for humanities computing and gives it an adequate place within the information spectrum of the humanities discipline by doing something inherently "liberal arts," comparing two distinct opposites and drawing parallels to show that its not all that different!