Behrend Talks: A Penn State Podcast
Join Dr. Ralph Ford, Chancellor of Penn State Behrend, and guests for conversations about interesting things happening in the Erie community.
Behrend Talks: A Penn State Podcast
The digital humanities and the Frankenstein Variorum, with Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar
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Dr. Ralph Ford, chancellor of Penn State Behrend, talks with Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, professor of digital humanities, about the Frankenstein Variorum and the Mary Russell Mitford Archive.
Hi, I'm Dr. Ralph Ford, Chancellor of Penn State Behrend and you're listening to Behrend Talks. Today, my guest is Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of our Digital Media Arts and Technology Program, which we all refer to affectionately here as the DIGIT program. So welcome to the show you, Elisa.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Hi. It's great to be here.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Well, thanks for joining us. Not only that you do many things, of course, we're going to talk about today. You are also a faculty affiliate for the Public Policy Initiative here at Penn State Behrend and you hold a Ph.D. and a master's in English Literature both from Penn State. So you are a Penn Stater through and through. And you earned a bachelor's degree in English from Washington and Jefferson college before coming to Behrend, which I remember well, because it was during the pandemic.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:It was so weird. 2020.
Dr. Ralph Ford:2020. That's right. You taught at the
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Wow. Okay. I was just telling my University of Pitt Greensburgh. And part of your research, you serve as the principal editor and organizer of an international team that is producing a comprehensive intro to DH students this. That I wasn't always a professor of archive of the letters and works of the English writer Mary digital humanities. And it was it was it in a midlife crisis. I Russell Mitford. And we're going to talk more about her. First let's start with what led you to this work in what we know of as Digital Humanities? don't know, I didn't want to stagnate and I wanted to do something was really a project. The Mitford project was the beginning of it. I had written a book and I was climbing through the tenure ranks in the University of Pittsburgh system. And I achieved tenure. And I looked around me and thought,"What will I do next?" And I had a the beginning of the Mitford project in my mind then. But I also knew that to edit the works and letters of this really interesting writer, was going to be a big challenge. Because she wrote continuously hundreds and hundreds of letters from over the course of her life from like the 1790s, into like, 1851. The morning, she died, she finished a letter and sent it off. And just this pile of letters I've been reading in the archives for like a good decade when I was a young professor, and everybody, lots of people work with those letters, they're in paper, they're in a little public library with like bad air conditioning. And, you know, everybody's, there's a huge call to digitize her letters. But she's also very prolific as a popular fiction writer and a poet. In the 19th century, she was an early professional woman writer, and just actually having something computerized about her would have been great. At the time, I didn't know much about the digitization processes, the methods, how you would do it, I was just like, what's my next scholarly project going to look like? And then I found out, yeah, they can't really do that as a print book. It would have been a series and they would have had me cut a lot of her letters. And the expense of this could would mean you can't just buy this, a university library would balk at buying a 16 volume set for writer who's not like Mark Twain, right? Like, you know, she's a little bit on the on the verge. And that's how I got involved with the digital humanities, I could do it for free, or you know, get some grant funding and get locked a website into the air that's text searchable, and we can even do the research while making the project. It's also going to be collaborative, which is a lot more fun than working by yourself. So that's got me started.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So how would you define the digital humanities?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:This is a really difficult question to answer. Nobody is really happy with any of the answers that have been put out there at this point. But I am gonna say what I told my intro to digital humanities students today, that How would you know, this is probably a dissertation. But for it's the human side of computing. And that has been with us since the beginning the idea that we humans are trying to find technological solutions to interesting problems. And those solutions turn into the the size and shape of the equipment that we're using to do our media production or to do to solve a particular problem. The way that humans get involved with the technological, I think is the field the broadly defined of the digital humanities. Now that takes a lot of shapes that our listening audience, what exactly do we mean, when we say sounds like is that like a cultural analysis of how we interact with machines? Yes, it is also something to do with how we apply computers and code and programming to answer humanity's research questions like, What was it like for a woman writer in the 19th century to professionalize and who was their social network? Right? It has a lot to do with how we work with, we think of as the grounds of knowledge in the field. So and it might also have something to do with what's happening with digital humanities? computation to tell us what we think we know, like in the fields of artificial intelligence, like can you how reliable is the technology? We're working with to get us accurate and authentic information. So all of these are in the domain of Digital Humanities, I think.
Dr. Ralph Ford:but it's actually the ability to digitize large volumes of information that you couldn't before, right? Run analyses? I know that's not trivial at all. But also, you can collaborate now with people in a way you couldn't before.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah, in a big way. That international project team, you're talking about works, because we have ways of connecting with each other back then in 2013. When we formed the Mitford project, half my team was meeting on Google Hangouts. So when we shifted to, you know, the pandemic, and moving into zoom was like, wow, I was like, can we use Hangouts? Oh, I guess Zoom is sort of like a desktop version of that. But we weren't. It wasn't so weird for us to be involved in and even get our students involved with each other's across campuses that we've been kind of doing that already. Yeah. Collaboration is awesome.
Dr. Ralph Ford:You talked about the fact that, you know, the thought about computing and how it interacts is not new. I mean, you go back and you look at this field, and you might think it's relatively new. That's not true. Because back in 1946, actually, IBM was looking at this, and they were looking at the texts of Thomas Aquinas and somehow connected this to punch cards. What were they trying to do? I mean, this was one of the one of the early applications of computing was seemingly digital humanities.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah, so this is a Catholic priest, and he was he spent years of his life, he was analyzing Medieval Latin. And this it's a weird parallel I'm gonna make that we come out of Digital Humanities between my author Mary Russell Mitford, and Thomas Aquinas is like, you find somebody who has an awful lot of big pile of documents, like a big documentary record. And you can use that as a basis of evidence. In his case, this is like the foundations of modern computational linguistics. He wanted to understand how people worked with verb tenses in Latin, totally esoteric stuff. But those punchcards or capturing words and their contexts, and like, you know, how words were being used, and what words were clustering around them. We use that word clustering today, so naturally. But it began with papers and punch cards that machines could read. And IBM started building a technical infrastructure, supporting his project. He read what Father Roberto Busa had to say about this. He actually he lived such a long life, and he died in like 2011, or 2013, somewhere around there very not too long ago. He's reflecting back on what he calls technological miniaturization, that stuff got smaller and smaller. In the beginning, he was talking about, like, you'll be these giant numbers of like, how, how many rooms of punch cards, you had to fill the start of this project, and then by the 1990s, all of his work was down into a CD ROM. And then, you know, they put it on a website. And the CD ROM is like a single disc. Now, I don't if anyone remembers those now. But like, if you live through the history of technology, a digital humanities project like that, one. It's still going. I think there are people who are still working on the Index Thomisticus which such as the project he started, and it's there. They're studying linguistic trees, and mapping grammar, all from what he started with those punch cards. Which tells you something about one thing that I find really cool about digital humanities is the remediation. When forms of technology disappear. Does the project die? Some of them do, some of them don't. So what makes a project robust and sustainable? How does it last? Is the digital always ephemeral? And what can make it sustainable? Those are really exciting questions for me.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So we think about like the digital enhancements. And by the way, my my field of research is imaging and how you improve, you know, often looking at things, whether it's space, or you know, looking through a telescope, or looking at text. And I look, you know, I look at this, and it's often very hard to read. So I guess it's part of it as well. Are we uncovering things we couldn't see with the human eye through digital enhancement? Is that is that part of what you you do? And what we're finding? And is anything really interesting come out of that?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah. So thinking of a couple of areas here, where if you work with manuscripts, handwritten texts, one area of great interest is authentication. How old is the paper? Do you know if that was an authentic piece? Is a piece of artwork or a piece of literature by somebody? Is it a signed legal document? Was the paper stock that it came from like from 100 years later, right? And you can do sort of a chemical analysis of that paper and come back and find out you know, or, you know, find out what the pigments were a piece of artwork and whatever. And that's an area of Digital Humanities. It's very big. The other side of it is what if you're just reading a lot of texts? And one thing I find very appealing about digital humanities and not so appealing about research traditionally in English was in before I became a digital humanist, it was fairly conventional to write a write a paper where I would go to the archives, I do some reading, I write a paper that would conjecture, I pull some quotes from the writer. And I was sort of like cherry picking my evidence to make the point. And I would sort of be aware of when I'm reading my own stuff, or reading other people stuff that, gee, I could have picked other stuff that might not validate my claim as well, but it was very rhetorical. I never liked that. I think I've always had I was the kid in grad school in the English program who didn't like the theory too much. I liked some of the theory, but I really liked having evidence. I there's a little scientific grounding in me somewhere. And that's why I love the manuscripts is like I could you know, actually look at something you know, from hundreds of years ago, and and all of that. If I can work quantitatively or at scale with a lot of digitized documents and work with them systematically. I can read a whole lot more evidence and put it in front of people so that we can share our data, we can have data driven humanities, which does scare some of my colleagues a little bit. Critique of Digital Humanities, kind of famous one that Robert Roberto Busa faced. the Father Busa during the Aquinas project back in the 1950s. He was the first critique and I feel it sometimes that you let the technology become the excuse for the project. And you're not actually saying anything, anything anymore, you're just providing miles and miles of data. And back in the 1950s, that was the first time I felt it. I feel it occasionally, if I walk into a conventional, old fashioned lit conference, and I'm realizing, yeah, I'm putting a network graph about 50 texts in front of people and their eyes are glazing over. And it's like, it's not like it doesn't feel like a human story anymore. And that's a tension we face. You know.
Dr. Ralph Ford:How do you answer if someone you know, we know academics say raise your hand at a conference and say, yeah, very critically. Oh, yeah, that's happened. So how do you answer that?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:I try to answer it by making a better humanities project. Because the humanities matters, absolutely. Like there needs to be a interesting story to tell, there needs to be a reason to do the work. So here's an example of this, that I'm about to go to a conference in Paderborn Germany, it's the text encoding conference. I'm probably people are going to be excited about my methods. But I'm going to be sharing a view of the Frankenstein variorum. Which is a little project I've been working on that involves comparing five versions of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. And that's, that's a smaller scale project than Midford. But it does involve making a big deal about every bit of variation between when she hand wrote in her notebook, and each print edition between 1816 and 1831. And what I have is miles and miles of data about commas and semicolons and boring stuff. My student helpers, and I were looking at this and saying, This is great. We can see on these hotspots, all the variations, but they're boring, like, why am I and I feel like like, yeah, we can do something to kind of fade those out and put forward the really exciting ones where she struck out a whole passage and rewrote it. And the creature in Frankenstein looks completely different. Like we need to find a way to do it better. It's not just about putting all the data in front of everybody, but finding a way of shaping it if there's art in that, there's graphic design, in that there's layout in that. And i need my students to help you with that, because they're better at this than me.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So, of course, I mean, they're always amazing. And let's switch to we'll get to your students here in a minute. And it's a good segue. You made a mid-career change, which I did isn't always that common in higher ed, you move from one institution to another you came here from Greensburg did to Behrend in 2020. So why?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Why did I do that? Wow. You know, I don't I stopped asking myself that every day.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Something must have attracted you to Behrend.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah. Wow. Is that what a year that was? It was right before the pandemic lockdown. I came up it was January of 2020. I guess the COVID germs were in the air and we didn't know it yet. And I came to visit Behrend for the first time. I was applying for full professor at Pitt, Greensburg. And I'd had a lot of support at that little college. It is an amazing little inventive, innovative place. And it's sort of the place that grew me up I guess. I learned that at a regional campus, that's not the Central Research Hub, you can actually do more adventurous research and people valley around you and you can connect across disciplines and all of that good stuff. And I was going up for full professor in the Pitt system. And I had a bunch of digital humanists, you know, on my dossier who were writing letters, and I see I don't know why I'm looking at the job ads. But I see in September, something in the Chronicle about Penn State Behrend needing a program chair for DIGIT. I had seen something the month before that they needed someone to teach Python and I thought, that's interesting. I knew Aaron Mauro was up here. He's somebody I knew. And I was like, what's going on at Erie and I realized later that he was on to Brock and Sharon Dale was retiring and I didn't know all of these people yet. I just decided well hell with my stuff. I might as well apply and gee, if I get the job, maybe I'll go back to Pitt, and they'll pay me a little more. So they I wasn't really that serious about it until I visited. And I realized, I met students. It's a big program. And it's like, wait, wait, wait, oh my gosh, they have something here that's much bigger. There's more resources. Yes, the students are smart. I noticed that right away. The campus just what. Paradigm shift! What if I were running a major, I pick green spring break, we had built a little certificate program that was meant to connect disciplines like math and English and history. And you could have a digital studies certificate with some digital humanities, but my classes were small. Up here, I've got full classes, I just had a class of two classes of 27. We're overflowing the room. Like, I love that that energy is great. I don't have to fight as hard to have this program. But this program is a major. And that interests me a lot. And that's what drew me. I worry about it sometimes. I want to make sure that DIGIT isn't a unicorn and a DH a unicorn... We talked about this, DH is an acronym for digital humanities are the abbreviation we commonly use. If my colleagues and I talked about being the DH unicorn were in your school, people are like, Oh, you're the one who does the computer stuff. So I don't have to do it. And we don't want that. You know, I didn't have that at Greensburg. I don't want it here. But like when I had a certificate program, we did connect like we have a little network together. And people could be history and digital humanities right.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Aaron Mauro who helped us start the program, who has since left for family reasons, but he was in history.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:I believe he was an English. Like me. Yeah, it's a kind of a text processor like me in a way of it. Yeah. In somebody was into natural language processing. People have Faulkner Chatbot. That was a lot of fun when he was here. Yeah.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Well, Iguess I associated him with history projects. But what are...
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:He came out of both of those things. Yeah.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So how do you, you know, how do you describe the DIGIT Major? This is our you know, it is our digital humanities major here. You said, it's doing really well.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:It's digital arts and digital humanities. It's both and it's, it's called Digital Media, which I think is a nice fusion of the two. We get a lot of students who want to come and work with images, some want to come and work with sound and acoustics. And a few of them are like I want to learn data visualization and graphics and web development. I think a lot of them are coming to be, they have a creative design element. We always get students. I see my We have a whole set of archives here, which. students as creators or they're creatives, digital creatives. If you will. The humanity side of it might not be what's drawing them. But I hope it's what keeps them. Because you the interest of that the idea of oh, "there's some old documents from the Behrend family". Wow, you can see Mary Behrend's artwork on a calendar sheet. We can digitize that cool, right? Like some of those things that you didn't even realize were a thing before you took the class, I think is kind of...
Dr. Ralph Ford:Give you years of work to look at it. Oh, yeah.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Among many other projects. So you know, how do you, if you're giving advice, what, what sort of student is drawn to the program? And how do you counsel people into the program? Or what are your discussions you have when you're recruiting?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah, I don't have to do much because they're coming to me. So they come to me across the Penn State system, which is kind of fascinating. They're students who will start their first two years and one of the Eastern campuses all the way at the other end of the state, where they're coming from a different campus. And they're always interested in "wait, what classes do I need to take?" I gather that they're coming here because we're the only program of its kind across the university. You can do pure digital arts and just work with graphics and media, there are different niche majors for that a University Park. I think it's the fusion, there's a combination of technologies that you get as a DIGIT student, and a chance to explore and synthesize that makes, again, it kind of expands the horizons of our students. Are they aware of what they're going to be when they join the program? I'm not sure.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Probably not.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:But they seem pretty excited about it. Like in every class, I think what's really special about it is every class involves projects and building and design, you might get quizzed sometimes, but like testing isn't really like, you don't need to learn the computer language for the sake of the computer language. The whole point is that you're going to learn to build something, and you're going to learn how to learn. And since the technologies are changing so quickly, that's optimal. We're always doing that. I'm always shifting gears in what kinds of projects we're going to do next semester. So there's a excitement about that the students help in establishing what we're going to learn next. And I also am going to say, No, we're not going to use that proprietary technology. I want to help you become decision makers to work with the robust stuff that's going to last. And so learning how to evaluate that becomes a key feature in the program too.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So the other thing that I like about the program is that there's a lot of flexibility. They get to choose their different concentrations, they can mix and match. What are
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:I like to call this a garden of forking they? paths, which is a board preference. Like they yeah. But they don't get once I make them read it. But sure, yeah, you can choose your choose your own adventure. So currently, we've got sound in motion. There's data visualization. There's something called Digital Humanities. Nobody knows what that is. And then there's this the other one, modeling and There are a lot of great options, and I love running simulation, no one knows what that is either. We're about to rename those. We're putting through a little pile of curriculum revisions. But there's this idea that PE modeling and simulation gets you making interactive interfaces, and also examining how people interact with things, what choices when you give people a choice, how do they decide which direction to go, game falls into that. So game classes, students who specialized in that could do a minor, right? Data visualization gets you over in the business school, you can go, we've got kind of a friendly handshake with the MIS program. In fact, we've have a DIGIT graduate, who went on to do an MIS grad degree, and I think just graduated. Sam Andrew. And a lot of our students sort of go and do the MIS minor with DIGIT or sometimes a double major. And so that's one where you investigate spreadsheets and databases and take some graphic design and maybe do the databases minor with it, too. So that's that's kind of fun. Sound in motion attracts the creatives who want to make and build and do acoustic things, we might I think we're talking about splitting that into because there's enough sound going on that it could be its own area. And then animation is it this is the other one. But that gets you into the technologies of extended reality and the stuff that we know Behrend is already famous for with a bar lab, we have students building content that we're hoping that our lab can can share, actually. So there's a nice synthesis. So that's a big one. And then digital humanities is, it's in the core of the major but it gets you. Currently there's this emphasis in geography and archiving and web development that you you can kind of specialize in if you want to, there. through them. But what still kind of strikes me though, is you can connect the business school and yes, other parts, but there's still a strong liberal arts core, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's the core of the major. I guess I'm kind of I feel responsible for that, in a way. Yeah. What makes us liberal arts? That's a good question. I think it might have to do with the kinds of projects we take on. It's maybe a little bit unusual for an undergraduate to be able to curate documents or curate digital document collections, and analyze them. But I have students who grab the transcripts of games from and pull them using computation, regular expression matching, pull them into shape for something that you can run through natural language processing and analyze, do a sentiment analysis, study the use of verbs that kind of thing. And make a point about what makes the Stardew Valley genre distinct in the game world. And I think that's, that's a kind of analysis that's a little bit equivalent to the kinds of things I can make them do. Which is, let's try Moby Dick with some distant reading tools and see what happens. How do you read this a little bit differently computationally with with some of those tools attached.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So what other, you know, you've run just fine through some projects. Any other really interesting students projects stand out to you in the last few years?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:I could talk about Behrend 75. Because that's one we did deliberately knowing the 75th anniversary was coming. byMy DIGIT 110 class, were looking at things like archival materials, and creating digital archives out of manuscript resources and going to the library and working with Jane Ingold has been wonderful. She like basically lets us work with anything. And so the idea there is the challenge is what story can you tell what can you find and I'm, you know, on the ground trying to help find a new project. So I've had five or six different student groups, working on different parts of the archives. The Behrend family traveling, the Behrend families papers seem to be really interesting to them. That struck a common connection was her son, Warren, and when he died, the students found his last letter is very appealing because he's a college student like that. Oh, right. And it's, it's a fall semester. It's December, his last letters are driving the Duesenberg home. So they were attached to that, like they found a bond, right.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Yeah, when you read it and yeah, yeah, how he was, you know, they were very fond of their cars. They lived, you know, a very grand lifestyle in many ways, although connected to the community. We also have a book for example, that was written by our previous librarian. let you know about Rick Hart, but their letters back and forth with the architect very, you know, just great stuff in there.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:I should say Warren wasn't driving the Duesenberg of course. They were writing. He was writing
Dr. Ralph Ford:No. He was not. about the He was writing about the fact that he wanted to drive it.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Or how was the Duesenberg holding up. And so the students the cool thing about that is the students had to read the word Duesenberg and find out what the heck that was. And they said, that was a little adventure, every everything like that is sort of a chance for an adventure. So yeah.
Dr. Ralph Ford:You are correct in that, but it was another new car. I can't remember exactly.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah, he was in another. Yeah, exactly. And then the school bus and all of the details of that. So the students were they made a little website, and they needed to tell the story. Of course, it's, you know, December. I had my senior, some of them had been involved in the pilot project for these in the DIGIT 110 class. It's just 100 level, like, you're not going to get a perfect polished website. But he said, okay, now that you're in digit 400, let's try to put all of these get like five or six projects. Now, let's put them together and see if we can connect them with a search engine, and polish it up and make a Behrend 75 project. Which they did last fall, and learned a lot about, you know. Let's make sure the code base has a lot of features in common, it standardizes. it synthesizes it. And kind of like an information systems project. And they got something up and running on a production schedule over a semester. It's some, I think of it as sort of lab was a kind of internal Open Lab project, if you will. The idea, it's like, it's going to be the 75th anniversary next year. Let's go.
Dr. Ralph Ford:No no. we can wait to you know, love to see more of it this year as we go through the 75th. So, I really appreciate that. So what do our students do after they graduate?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Wow, they do all kinds of things. So I am learning what they do. I usually hear interesting things about what they're doing. The most interesting one recently has been Mia Borgia. She did an internship with Larson Texts, here in town. And she was just starting to learn JavaScript. And at the edge of her comfort zone, they have this big media production challenge. They needed a coatings team, and she put herself into learning on the fly. And they hired her. She's a junior software engineer. And we were both like, yes, a DIGIT student made good. It was something like she had a lot of actual on the ground project experience that got her ready to do that. And I'm so proud of her. So that's one.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Yeah.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:So others will find their way in places like Erie Insurance. Like they'll find their way into a company and become somebody who's relied on for understanding the infrastructure really well and how the media production works. And then some of them found their own film companies like Oddity Productions. Which is doing a premiere this Saturday. They'll form their own thing, right.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Did you say Oddity Productions?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Oddity Productions
Dr. Ralph Ford:Is it here in Erie, Pennsylvania?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:It's here in Erie, Pennsylvania and they're doing a film premiere called Portrait of the Universe. So this is Danny Pakulski. He's a recent DIGIT graduate, partnering with I think, Simon Yahn. And that was that sort of DIGIT from Behrend partnering up with the Rochester Institute of Technology, right. And doing... and this is kind of a film that I think plays around with extended reality. So our students are being very inventive about what they do with their next steps. So it's kind of fun to see.
Dr. Ralph Ford:I like to see them, as well, taking some risks and doing something entrepreneurial that really fits in their passion when they leave. So that's yeah, that's what we want to see. Well, I'd like to switch back to Mary Russell Mitchell.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yes, indeed.
Dr. Ralph Ford:She plays a large part in your research, and I think your passion. So tell us who she is. Why is her work important?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Wow. Okay. So she is a very prolific, well published, woman writer, and I could stop there. She's a contemporary of Jane Austen, who didn't live as long. And that's one of the reasons I find her very interesting. Midford has this long life. And she wrote a lot. And whatever you might think of her, like, is she a hack? That's fine, right with the fact that she's successful. She wrote plays that were performed on the London stage. And they weren't they some of the most of the word historic, epic tragedies. And you know, what's exciting about that, is they're being performed in the 1820s. About 30 years before that was the age of, well, revolution. The French Revolution, 1789. Before that, you know, these US upstart US colonies, right? The Brits, she's in England, this is London. The Brits are anxious that revolution is going to happen where they live, and they're looking at Europe. Europe's tremendously unstable, right? Napoleon is rocking Europe, right? And here's Mary Mitford. She's writing poems about Napoleon's dreams. She's writing plays about, oh, we're not going to set those in England. Oh, she did do one in England about the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell, that they banned because they worried showing a king being deposed on the public stage was going to be the anxiety inducing and might cause a revolt. But she usually set them in places like Italy, which is safely far enough away. And they're about, you know, insurrection and you know, unstable regimes regime change. So that's how I started researching her as an old fashioned English professor. I wanted to know, she wrote a play. On the same topic, the Foscari family that Lord Byron also wrote a play about, only his plays weren't being performed. He wasn't allowed to live in England anymore. By that time, the 1820s, he's living as an expat exile in Europe. But he has his play published for people to read. Mitfor's play was published. She finished it like months before he did. And she was worried about getting it staged because she thought everyone's gonna think I had it like I just copied Lord Byron. But she didn't she was there first. Except really what it is, is they were in the same source materials at the same time. For me, that's a hot research topic. Why? Why is Mary Mitford... If you look at her on a website, she wears a bonnet, she's prim. She's like Jane Austen, right? She's a prim, proper English, gentle woman. And Lord Byron is anything but proper. If you go read about him, he's the scandal of the ladies. He's in the aristocracy. What is it that these two have in common? Turns out, they've got people in common. People who knew them who were close friends with both of them, they just moved in different social circles. And these are things that I've learned from working at scale with Mitford's letters. Who knew whom, how were the books transmitted, moving around Europe and England, there's so much you can learn.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So you've discovered all these connections that you didn't know before?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:with the network of... The network of books and artwork. It was sort of like, Jerome McGann was the 19th century scholar of the 19th century, who basically said, you know, the whole point of doing humanities research on past centuries, is to find out what could be imagined and why at that time. And it's like, why were people thinking about this? What was haunting them? What was bothering them about it? And I feel like, yeah, the digital humanities has helped me explore that a little bit more.
Dr. Ralph Ford:How do you quote? Well, we, you know, traditionally called publish, how do you disseminate this work? Is it? Is it an archive? Do you write about it, you go to conferences, all those all those?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah, all of those. Now, I have a particular passion that's maybe a little peculiar in the digital humanities for web work. And I think it fits here at Behrend, because my students are designers and creators. I have them building every project on the public facing web. And we use Git and GitHub. And open source tools. This is a little unconventional. A lot of times when people teach a class and teach students to build websites, they save it on a thumb drive, and they turn it in at the end of the semester, but I want the building to be real. For scholarly work, this is a bit controversial. Because yes, anybody can put anything they want on the public web. It's important that things are peer reviewed. And it's important that you have your scholars have a chance to respond to it. So I do a combination of putting stuff up where it's publicly available, and publishing about it and speaking about it at conferences. And that's shoot, that's been the secret of my career as a college professor for the past couple of decades. It's worked, it's worked, right, like I'm here, I'm a full professor like, I will never have...I am never going to run out of things to publish about. And I'm still going to be building on the public web and teaching people how to do that.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Clearly you are very passionate, and curious about a lot of a lot of different subjects. You know, I'm just going to switch a little bit here to before we end. You know, it's August 2023. Future generations ever listening to this. How's that? Wow, I understand your work. We're going to put it that way. But ChatGPT, AI, these are the discussions of the day. Is it impacting what you do with your students? Your research? How?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Wow, I think people have said that this particular semester has been the one where professors are ripping apart their syllabi and worrying, nail-biting. Where I live, I think, oh my students in my darkest hours, they're going to just take my coding assignments and go to ChatGPT and just, you know, give me back whatever ChatGBT gives them. Which means I'm always trying them out on ChatGPT to see what that's gonna look like. But I also realized I can't stop them. And nor would I want to. I can, the more we explore it, we shouldn't turn our backs on this. We as humanity scholars, we as faculty in any discipline, we need to be studying this, and we need to be involved. Open AI when they started last year, we felt like that name open, that they were going to fully disclose how things operated. And then they kind of closed their doors. We sort of live when universities we live in this place where we're, we're on the border with capitalism, proprietary tools, technology, the resources we use. The thing that I think is the most anxiety inducing about AI is what happens to the grounds of knowledge. What happens to what people understand is true. In the era of large language models, the ChatGPT will, you can ask it to tell you something about the French Revolution. And it may be partially, it's usually partially accurate. It's likely to get something wrong. And it's never gonna give you the same answer twice. Because it's not really intelligent. It's that we're the stochastic that they use, it's like it's a randomly generated thing. It's there's a randomness to what it pulls back. But it's also based on statistical probabilities of which words fit together in small units. That's cool. It does amazing things. It's a great starting point. I'm worrying, and I think a lot of my colleagues are worrying about what happens when people take the productions of these chat boxes as ground truth. What I think's going to happen is that we're going to need a lot of fact checking. We're going to need to build institutions to help find out what's reliable and what isn't. And I think we need to be very involved in making our own language models and seeing how they work. So that's a short answer.
Dr. Ralph Ford:Well it's a really hard, really hard question. And, you know, I've used it a lot. I find it a good writing partner. Sometimes if I'm in a meeting and people are talking about something I don't know about, I can ask it and at least gives me something something some basis to. Okay, I can follow the conversation. But my conclusion right now is, we're not at the point of Skynet from Terminator. Yeah, I don't think we need to worry. It's not even close. It feels to me a bit more, like I liken it to if we want to go with sci-fi, and Star Trek, where they talk to the computer, and that would give them information about a planet or something like that. They don't know that it was always right. And maybe that's not the perfect analogy. I think it's a very useful tool to your point, but I am finding where you still can go deeper than what ChatGPT gives you. I think you know, this is just one perspective. I'm looking at it largely from a writing actually, interestingly, a writing perspective. on the right, a lot of the you know, I find it as a tool to sometimes say, What do you think of this writing and critique this, and you can ask it some interesting questions.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:The dialogue is fun, the back and forth. I have a friend who teaches playwriting, and he was thinking what he was going to do is have his students create plays that involve back and forth with the bots, right. That you will purposely engage in this and you try to come up with something startling and unconventional. But what's happening there, is the human partner is putting creative thought into it. And that's where you can have a lot of fun. I think the thing of that kind of bugs me about it. Now, I did some research on this, I gave a talk about AI, just a month ago, at a conference about markup, which is one of the technologies I use. And I was saying, you know, somebody was saying, you don't need to write XML markup languages. And maybe you're gonna ask me about that in a minute. Because AI can do that for you. And I tested that assumption that was my paper was, hey, wait a minute. That's not really true. Because yeah, it'll give you the impression, it'll give you the form. But there's something real that we do when we're applying the, you know, describing a manuscript or describing a historical artifact that the bot can get you started, but you need to finish it, you need to go in and correct it. And it's also, it loses context, there's a short memory span that it has, at least in the current form. I concluded with something though, when I was investigating this back in the 90s, of artificial intelligence. Then was hooked into databases. And there is a form of computation. We need to get my colleague pullin agro all in here to talk about this. But there is in knowledge production, that we could associate with artificial intelligence. But this is not that. This is a much more pared down, restricted thing, that is mixing language. It's kind of playing with word-salads. It's not hooked up to a database in that sense, like it's in the sense of, you're not doing a database query, what you're doing is plugging in words. And it's finding out based on vector embeddings data, what what seems like it might be the best fit in response to you.
Dr. Ralph Ford:So based on material that's on largely on the web.
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Yeah. Or based on material that we don't know because they're not telling us.
Dr. Ralph Ford:They're not telling us. That's right. Yeah. And I actually have some background in neural networks. I have some sense of like, how it works, but no one really tells you how it works, right? A lot of ways you know, that may not make sense but you generally know the techniques that they're applying but the devils in the details. But anyways, we're coming to the end. This has been a great interview and I have learned a lot about digital humanities and the DIGIT major. That being said, any last word? Anything that you want to add to the conversation?
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar:Wow, that's a challenging one. I think it's been a lot of fun being here and talking about digital humanities. I want to say it's been an adventure coming here. And you know, I woke up this morning first, it's the second first day of classes for me because I teach every day of the week. But I said, you know what, it's good to be alive and a practicing digital humanist go into class. I am loving this adventure. So thank you.
Dr. Ralph Ford:That's great. Well, we're glad that you decided to come here we bring a lot of enthusiasm and it's great to see this you know, relatively new program growing and all of the interest and great projects our students are doing, you know, and of course, when they graduate that's that's that's really proof of something and they go out and they do something. Well anyways, Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of our Digital Media Arts and Technology program has been a great conversation. I'm Dr. Ralph Ford, You have been listening to Behrend Talks.