In 36 years you accumulate a lot of paper even if yr schtick is supposed to be all about digitization, etexts, etc. You still accumulate reports and articles and minutes and logs and off prints and publicity glossies and lists, things you wrote, things your friends wrote, things you read and enjoyed, things you felt you ought to read and enjoy, things you printed out because they looked as if you might enjoy them if you ever got round to reading them, things people sent you with touching dedicatory notes, things with sentimental association with times and places long since disappeared…. What’s to do with all that paper?
Most of it is by no means unique to me, so I could confidently think of its preservation as Someone Else’s Problem. but there seems to be a law somewhere about the inverse relationship between the size of the SEP field and the size of one’s ego, since I keep finding myself thinking about how jolly interesting this collection of stuff might be to anyone interested in the last three decades of digital humanities, as refracted through my experience of it. I know such beings must exist, I see they even get degrees in it, though who knows for how much longer.
So I spent the last couple weeks of October skimming through the junk.
Fortunately (or not) OUCS has a large dry basement, formerly used to house the air conditioning systems for the machine room, now used to store old furniture and other things people cannot bear to be parted from. I have been allocated some space and into it my boxes are to be conveyed just as soon as I finish packing and labeling them. As of 1 Nov, when I gave up, there are neatly queued up for the basement store
- 41 small. numbered boxes containing miscellaneous articles, offprints, manuals, reports etc.
- 10 chronologically-ordered small boxes containing detritus from assorted events and conferences I attended between 1977 and 2000
- 2 boxes containing the delegate packs and abstract volumes from the ALLC/ACH or ACH/ALLC or DH conference, also going back to the late seventies, with just a few gaps.
- 3 boxes of papers and other material relating to the short glory days of the Humanities Computing Unit
- One or two more about the Oxford Text Archive (already very well represented down in the OUCS Basement)
- One box of very dusty old junk relating to my activities during 80s, in the field of database design and support
- Four or five boxes of TEI memorabilia, including committee documents and drafts and working papers never digitized. Several copies of Ps 1 to 5… CDs from various TEI training events.
The contents of many of these boxes was catalogued back in the days when I had time to catalogue and an assistant to actually do it, on a Macintosh using a hypercard stack I wrote. Many years ago also I wrote a script to export that in SGML (of course), and that SGML file has since been converted into a TEI XML file (quelle surprise), so I know what (at least in theory) should be in many of them without looking. So I contented myself with cataloguing very roughly only the conference fallout boxes in addition, and put off to a rainy day any investigation of the others.
And acting on the suggestion of the current librarian of Senate House, who just happens also to be the current chair of the DRHA standing committee, I also put into a separate box every surviving document relating to or produced by the DRH(A) series of conferences… yes every one of them from 1996 to 2010 inclusive. Said box has now been shipped off to the library at senate house for digitization, and will form the raw material for my forthcoming intensely interesting study on the evolution and sociology of academic conferences concerning the emergence of the Digital medium and its effects on the Humanities. Maybe.