Sakai and the Early Modern Virtual Research Group

1. Sakai and the Early ModernVirtual Research Group Dr Simon Hodson s.d.hodson@hull.ac.uk www.earlymoderntexts.org vre.earlymoderntexts.org vre.politicaldiscourse.org.uk

2. Hull - UEA VRE Consortium JISC VRE Project: • Three years from January 2005. • Explore the use of Access Grid and Sakai to pilot a VRE supporting a dual-site, jointly taught MA programme in the history of political discourse. • Designed for expansion from the outset. British Academy Project: • Eighteen months from April 2006. • Explicitly to expand our activities and the VRE by using Access Grid and Sakai to support a geographically dispersed ‘Virtual Research Group’. Team: Professors Glenn Burgess and Howell Lloyd at Hull. Professor Colin Davis and Dr Mark Knights at UEA. Web-developer, Paul Beckett and the servers based at UEA. Project Manager, Simon Hodson at Hull. What is a VRE…? And why should early modern scholars be interested in it?

3. Outline • E-Science, Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Environments? Do I need to justify our interest in collaboration? • Stimuli to Collaboration in the History of Political Discourse • Interdisciplinarity. • Total History. • Digital Resources. • Distance and Project Momentum. • Early Modern Virtual Research Group • Access Grid • Sakai • Research Agenda • Wiki • Group and User experiences • Next?

4. What is a VRE? Definition offered by the UK OST e-Infrastructure Working Group A VRE is a set of online tools, systems and processes interoperating to facilitate or enhance the research process within and without institutional boundaries. The purpose of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is to provide researchers with the tools and services they need to do research of any type as efficiently and effectively as possible. This means VREs will help individual researchers manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in doing research. In addition they will facilitate collaboration among communities of researchers, often across disciplinary and national boundaries.

5. VREs and e-Science in the Arts and Humanities / for historians? RePAH (Sheffield-DMU): Managed Research Environments… A portal for plug-in research tools, including easily customisable workflow management tools, resource discovery tools and above all systems for managing (and sharing) this data. http://repah.dmu.ac.uk/report Arts and Humanities e-Science Scoping Project: History http://ahds.ac.uk/e-science/documents/Greengrass-report.pdf Just connect… • Connecting large, disparate data sets (interoperability, metadata standards)… • Connect historians and data (MREs)… • Connecting historians with each other, holding out the prospect of increased collaboration between geographically dispersed researchers, or simply between historians who wish to collaboratively and cumulatively on the same data sets and resources.

6. Why Collaborate? Do scholars in the Arts and Humanities, History want to collaborate? • Historical scholarship remains dominated by the single-authored brick, the research monograph. • Rozenzweig: cautious argument in favour of changing historical practice. • Contrasts the ‘possessive individualism of historical practice’ with the ‘communism of the scientific ethos’. Roy Rozenzweig, ‘Can history be open source?’, Journal of American History, 2006. • UK Research Assessment Exercise scarcely encourages collaboration or electronic outputs… Scholarly reasons to collaborate (transformations in the discipline): • Interdisciplinarity: fusing of methodologies. • The challenge of ‘total’ history: overcoming specialisations. • Digital resources. Less why collaborate, than how collaborate…

7. Interdisciplinarity: from the history of political ideasto the history of political discourse • Transformation of the canon: • Lost voices: women, lower orders. • Neglected genres: pamphlets, ephemera, songsheets. • Other forms of expression: visual media, rituals, customs, gestures. • Concern with language: • Social history increasingly concerned with how lower orders expressed themselves. • Importance of linguistic context for understanding political discourse. • Language and definitions were a battleground. • Importance of context, but which context? • Diachronic context of tradition? • Synchronic context of immediate discourse?

8. Total History: Commonwealth? • Translation of the Latin res publica, and the French république. Awareness of classical scholarship; European developments. • Conceptual change: 16th and 17th centuries these terms did not mean what they now mean. Where did the anti-monarchical meaning come from? • Contested term: Analytical term, like state or polity? Or carried notions of public good? • Rejected by élite writers: res plebiae. • Appealed to in popular revolt: common good. • Contexts: Impact of crises, moments of contestation: French Wars of Religion, English Civil War, French Revolution. • Images, Genres, Literature… Analytical panopticon…

9. The Explosion in Digital Resources!!! • EEBO: Early English Books Online • EEBO: immense resource: nearly every printed work from 1450-1700. • PDF facsimiles • Textualisation by the TCP • ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online • Gallica, Biblioteca Virtuel Saavedra Fajardo. • Amplification of pre-existing scholarly trends: • shattering the ‘canon’: pamphlets, ephemera, newssheets, songs… a mouse-click away! • full-text resource: ‘humanist’ and electronic textual analysis… • factors around translation, reception, re-reading, rather than just production… • What is the best way to exploit these developments?

10. Hull’s history of European political thought project An accidental pilot… • Challenge: geographical range. • Objective: ‘greater coherence and broader scope’. • 17 collaborators at 14 institutions in 9 countries. • Collaboratively-authored framework document established terms of debate. • Four major workshops (inc. Dordrecht, Statenzaal) + one expansion workshop. • Blackboard used as a forum (exchange of documents, discussion board). • Prompted our interest in technology aided collaboration for dispersed research groups. • How do you maintain momentum between workshops and capitalise on their achievements…

11. Sakai and AG for a ‘Virtual’ Research Group ‘Virtual Research Group’: Different constructions of the Commonwealth and Polity • Launched at a workshop in September 2006. • 22 researchers at 13 UK institutions. • Comprising historians of political discourse and culture, social and cultural historians, literature scholars, political scientists. • Geographical range of expertise: Britain, France and North America. • Chronological range: 15th - 18th centuries. • Bid to AHRC to extend the project over three more years: Constructions of the Early Modern Polity: An Investigation of Linguistic Contestation and Conceptual Change. Monthly AG Seminars • Eight to date, covering 10 themes, started in November 2006. • Combination of full Room Nodes and Desktop Nodes. • Seminars have generally involved 12-15 participants at 8-10 sites. • Full participation: up to 17 PIGs and 8 Room Nodes (UEA, Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, York, Essex, Oxford). Early Modern VRE Research Group

12. Virtual Research Group Seminars Early Modern VRE Research Group

13. Sakai and AG for a ‘Virtual’ Research Group Use of Sakai • Used in conjunction with AG: asynchronous collaboration between seminars. • Collaborative and communication tools: announcements, e-mail, discussion board, resources, wiki, web-content. • Seminar materials posted in the wiki before the event. • Ongoing debate: Allows comment, further analysis and contributions after the seminar. • Seminars recorded: digital audio and Memetic. Redistributed through Sakai. • Wiki Entries: Creating a significant resource: citations, discussion papers, debates, bodies of evidence etc. Early Modern VRE Research Group

14. Virtual Research Group Portal Early Modern VRE Research Group

15. VRG’s Research Agenda Themes explored to date… • Methodology: History of concepts (begriffsgeschichte, concepts in social history?). • Methodology: Words and Concepts. • Virtues of the commonwealth: honesty/honestas (literature, conduct books). • Commonwealth (and Republic) in England (diachronic). • Commonwealth in 1649 (moment of contestation). • Transatlantic Republicanism in the eighteenth century. • Republicanism in New England and New Netherlands (UoGeorgia guest). • Res publica, chose publique and république in France. • Plebeian views of the commonwealth in the rebellions of 1549. • Conceptual change and contestation: polemical use of conventional terms. Early Modern VRE Research Group

16. Wiki: Conceptual Change, République - État Early Modern VRE Research Group

17. Wiki: Bodin, evolution and translation Early Modern VRE Research Group

18. VRG Experiences: conversations and collaborations • Interdisciplinary conversations: we have not overcome the difference of approaches, preconceptions, language and prejudice among collaborators… • Concepts or moments of contestation? • Have not yet achieved the conceptual panopticon for ‘Commonwealth’. • Environment perfect for supporting the Group, exchange of material, building up a resource of evidence. • Fine-grained collaboration, collective authorship? Two articles to be written this summer will further test the wiki’s fitness for purpose. • Do intense, sustained conversations/collaborations transform scholarship? • Wiki: potential for multiple contributions, collaborative authorship and publication to the web. • ‘Open source’ history: published (collaboratively-written) articles will be supported by wiki-material: citations, sources, seminar debates. • Desiderata forms a core of our AHRC funding bid. • Reluctance to interfere with other participants’ entries… Early Modern VRE Research Group

19. Virtual Research Group Portal: Attribution Early Modern VRE Research Group

20. User Experience / Scoping • Response to both platforms very favourable: excited by the possibility of regular research seminars for cumulative collaboration. • Technologies combining well to support the research activity. • Interaction of Wiki with Resources extremely useful; public pages. • Need to invest human resource in AG preparation and operation. • ‘this service is run on a best-efforts basis’… • Induction: criteria for participation must be scholarship rather than technological awareness. • A little hand-holding goes a long way. • Feedback on the wiki: WYSIWYG / Footnotes / Export As… This project remains a pilot… • Considerable material for articles. Don’t yet know how collaborative authorship will work, how successful it will be… Early Modern VRE Research Group

21. Next? Virtual Research Group to Virtual Community? • The evolution of a VRE through the development of an ongoing and sustainable Virtual Research Community. • Early Modern Texts Forum as a community VRE? • Umbrella for a number of VRE supported projects. • Resources: from manual filestore to Repository, mechanism for metadata for digital objects. • Annotation tool: mechanism to turn digital resources into collaboratively edited scholarly editions. AHRC Bid: Constructions of the Early Modern Polity: An Investigation of Linguistic Contestation and Conceptual Change. • Collaboratively authored work: series of essays looking at methodology, moments of contestation and conceptual change. • Supporting material: articles, discussion pieces, evidence, seminar discussions to be published from the Sakai environment. Early Modern VRE Research Group

22. Thank You - Questions? Dr Simon Hodson s.d.hodson@hull.ac.uk www.earlymoderntexts.org vre.earlymoderntexts.org vre.politicaldiscourse.org.uk