This document discusses two topics: institutionality and interdisciplinarity. It notes that scholars in book history and related fields are constantly repositioning themselves institutionally and collaborating across disciplines. The author provides an example of an insightful interdisciplinary conversation they had. They raise questions about how institutionality and interdisciplinarity intersect and interact, and potential solutions. The author concludes by suggesting that conferences like SHARP and DH could plan cross-conference panels to further encourage interdisciplinary work.

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Nicholas Morris
SUNY­Buffalo
SHARP 2013
Plenary Talk
In their introduction to the recent collection of essays French Global: A New Approach to
Literary History, editors Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman explain their theorization of the
Global with an intriguing and productive metaphor: a global positioning system device, or GPS. The best
feature of a GPS device ­ and productive for their and my usage ­ is its constant ability and willingness to
"recalculate". Furthemore, it allows users to situate and navigate themselves. McDonald and Suleiman
argue that the GPS metaphor allows us to think on a global and local scale at the same time. So, to start
with a couple rather fanciful questions: for each of us individually and for SHARP collectively, what does
the chorus of GPS voices telling us to recalculate sound like? What would it be like to listen to someone
else's?
I would like to use this concept of academic GPS and recalculating to bring up two topics that
have run implicitly through many of the papers and panels, and more explicitly through the discussions and
chats during coffee breaks, receptions, and dinners: these two topics are institutionality and
interdisciplinarity. First, we constantly position and reposition ourselves institutionally, whether it be in
terms of university infrastructures, supervisors or dissertation committees, resources of all kinds ­ or
notably for book history ­ access to rare books and archives. Second, while book history and
interdisciplinarity seems to have come a long way since Robert Darnton famously diagnosed the problem
some 30 years ago, we still constantly reposition ourselves as we actively collaborate with scholars from

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other disciplines and people from other professions; we reposition ourselves as we learn more about
precedents and antecedents...connections and conflicts...outside our specialities; we reposition ourselves
as we learn new methodologies and apply them in innovative ways to our own research. Just yesterday I
was talking to an Asian Studies grad student who works on woodblocks and intellectual property. It was
not your typical academic conversation: "What are you doing?" "Oh, that's nice" and visa versa. Rather it
was the kind of conversation that I have come to expect from what is only my third SHARP conference:
one where we recognized something productive in each other's work and examples. We were talking
about woodblocks and the Monotype typesetting machine, my current research. I have thought about the
conversation constantly since, and whether we work on something together in the future or not, that
interdisciplinary thinking can allow us to see the rain forest for the trees. But the questions and fears I
have in this regard remain: what is the intersection of institutionality and interdisciplinarity? what does the
street map of that intersection look like? what happens when one comes up against the other? what are
the solutions?
On Friday afternoon, Whitney Trettien opened her lightning talk on Little Gidding and the
Harmonies by talking about following ­ via Twitter ­ Roger Chartier's opening plenary here at SHARP and
Willard McCarty's simultaneous Busa Award plenary at the yearly international digital humanities
conference, held this week in Lincoln, Nebraska. On her way to Philadelphia from Lincoln, Whitney was
sitting in the Minneapolis airport following the streams under their respective hashtags. As she described it,
all of a sudden something wonderful happened: the streams merged. The overlaps and potentialities were
visible to those of us here in Cohen Hall who follow friends and colleagues on Twitter, or who had the
streams of #DH2013 and #SHARP13 running at the same time. When I first thought about this, I said,
"well it's a shame they were scheduled the same week". Next year they should be scheduled so they don't

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conflict. But summer conference season is hectic, and there are committees and a million logistics to
consider. And then I thought a bit more: why couldn't it be a good thing? Something like a planned version
of the serendipity Whitney experienced, for not everyone is, or should be, on Twitter. What prevents
SHARP from holding cross­conference panels with other conferences ­ not just DH ­ held at the same
time. In our 21C world of Skype and Google+, why can't panel A­4 consist of two SHARP attendees and
two DH attendees, on both programs, at both conferences, at the same time, skyping into each other's
sessions. It's just an idea. But, to borrow an suggestion from Michael Suarez's plenary on Friday evening,
ideas are instantiations in waiting.