Perhaps there are historical reasons why, at this particular moment, the humanities are so self-reflective. No perhaps about it, actually. We are somewhat lost at sea and the “digital” is part of the reason. This does not mean, however, that reflection is productive, and certainly not all reflection is productive…. I am particularly interested in the problem of rethinking rhetorical education to address shifting literacy practices. This, to me, is not narcissistic, though it does involve looking at the rhetorical practices of humanisits since it is fairly clear that what we will teach students is a function of what we do ourselves.
…Composing is a networked phenomenon because thinking is always already relational. I mean you are composing/thinking in words right? You didn’t invent that language, right? So, that’s obvious. Thoughts are constructed. Arguments are constructed. Evidence is constructed. Scholarship is constructed. That is, these things are composed of other things. That doesn’t mean they can be explained solely by those other things. Nor does it mean that we fully understand (let alone control) the processes of construction. However, I think we can recognize in this current (if somewhat navel-gazing) conversation, that a shift in the available compositional networks has created some discomfort. It causes us to recognize the constructed, networked characteristics of our legacy practices, characteristics that we had come to ignore (or forget) because they had been normalized.
In turn we are faced with choices that we never really recognized as choices before. We took invention to be natural. We read a book, and an interpretation came to us. Of course we had training and such to help us, but regardless of our methodological/theoretical preferences, in literary studies it ultimately came down to reading a text and developing an interpretation. Regardless of methodological differences literary interpretations were generically the same in general length, uses of evidence, structure of argument, etc. etc. The same was true in rhetoric and, I imagine, the rest of the humanities.
But that’s no longer the case. Now we have real choices to make that make real differences in the knowledge that we produce and the communities in which we participate. They make real differences in what we understand literacy to be and as such what we will teach to future generations of students (which is ultimately what concerns me). And here I would stretch far beyond the arguments related to “distant reading” which are the focus of Fish’s piece (and another error he makes, conflating this one practice with the entirety of DH).
In the end, I think it is entirely accurate to say that digital humanities from distant reading to middle-state publishing (like this blog) does little to improve our ability to conduct pre-digital scholarly practices or answer the questions of a pre-digital humanistic disciplinary paradigm. Digital technologies did not arrive to resolve the questions of the print humanities anymore than late industrial technologies arrived to resolve the questions of a pre-industrial humanities. As I often argue here, we are faced with ethical questions regarding how to proceed. What do we take from the 20th century into this one? Set aside, for a moment, the navel-gazing debates over methodological minutiae and consider what larger questions the humanities seek to answer in this century.
I certainly do not want to make a claim that I know what the humanities should be. I have a hard enough time finding my own scholarly way. However, I will make the argument that what the humanities was in the last century was largely conditioned (though not determined!) by the capacities of an industrial culture and that now those capacities are different and as such the humanities will change. Maybe the humanities will diminish or even disappear, but not necessarily. However they will change if for no other reason than the technological infrastructures on which they once relied have changed.
….A standard point of historical reference in thinking about the modern information revolution is the arrival of print in the fifteenth century, but perhaps a closer parallel is the way in which the growth of empire and the resulting changes in industry and agriculture transformed Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. David Simpson has pointed out how Wordsworth’s reference to ‘bright volumes of vapour’ in his poem ‘Poor Susan’ in the Lyrical Ballads may refer to the over-production of cheap and worthless literature – a data deluge whose effects preoccupied Wordsworth. The prostitute Susan in Simpson’s interpretation is one of an army of alienated and rootless people who pervade Wordsworth’s verse: beggars whose anxious movements reflect the pointless and repetitive movements associated with the introduction of machines; vagrant farmworkers who have been disconnected from the land by enclosure; discharged soldiers who move through the landscape like ghosts. Concerns about the nature of the society emerging at that time united such disparate figures as Burke and Cobbett. Burke fretted that the state was becoming ‘nothing better than a partnership agreement in trade of pepper or coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved at the fancy of the parties’. From a completely different stance, Cobbett expressed his horror at the way in which the cash nexus was becoming all pervasive: ‘We are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents’.
Part of our role as scholars of the digital humanities should undoubtedly be to challenge those glib historical claims frequently made about modern developments in information technology. A longer historical perspective suggests that today’s developments are but another step in a long revolution in in the structuring of knowledge and its representation. The invention of the codex at the beginning of the Christian era was just as remarkable as the appearance of the iPad. The creation of the biblical concordance in the twelfth century was equally revolutionary – the idea that sacred text could be broken up according to an external and abstract pattern of alphabetization verged on the sacrilegious. Without the Western adoption of Arabic conceptions of zero at about the same time, digitization would have been still born. And of all the mechanical inventions which transformed human life, few have had greater impact than the appearance of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century, factories and railways transformed the very structure of time. Each age has had its information revolution, but nevertheless it seems that what happened at the end of the eighteenth century dwarfed them all. We can see this by the way in which reactions to those changes which so alarmed Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke and Cobbett are still evident in our everyday language.
….This then is the challenge for the digital humanities: to create a new type of humanities which will transform science and technology and achieve a revolution comparable to that revolution of understanding sought by Coleridge. How have the digital humanities risen to this challenge? There can be no doubt that the practice of humanities scholarship has been transformed by the increasing availability of digital tools and resources over the past ten to fifteen years. A recent study by Mark Greengrass and Stephen Brown found that 89% of a sample of 149 humanities researchers used the Web on a daily basis and 77% had been using the Web for five years or more. Likewise, in the LAIRAH study, 81% of a sample of humanities researchers identified themselves as extensive users of digital resources, and 83% agreed that digital resources had changed the way in which they did their research. However, these studies also indicate a problem for the digital humanities. Overwhelmingly, the digital resources used by humanities scholars are commercial packages produced by libraries and digital publishers such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Early English Books Online, Literature Online or JSTOR. Usage of the specialist packages produced by digital humanities centres based in universities is, by contrast, very low. For many humanities scholars, the most pressing need in developing digital infrastructures is not to increase engagement with the digital humanities but rather to secure access to commercial packages which their institutions cannot afford, such as the monstrously expensive Parker Library on the Web.
The digital revolution has occurred, but its course was dictated by libraries and commercial publishers, and the digital humanities as formally constituted has largely stood on the sidelines. The well-known digital humanities centres in British universities such as King’s, Glasgow, Sheffield and Belfast have of course produced dozens of digital projects over the years, but the impact of these has generally been very limited compared with the major commercial packages. A great deal of effort has gone into developing subject associations for the digital humanities such as the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, but these look increasingly irrelevant and marginal to wider digital scholarship. The international Digital Humanities conferences are, as Jerome McGann has recently emphasized, preoccupied with inward-looking discussion on metadata and standards, and seek to establish what McGann calls ‘tight little disciplinary islands; tight little techie islands’ . Patrick Joula has recently produced a devastating analysis of academic journals for the digital humanities, showing that they are rarely cited by other scholars and fail to attract contributions from scholars in leading universities. The digital humanities consistently punch beneath their weight.
In previous posts, I’ve shown how WordSeer can be used to explore small, well-defined questions:what word did Shakespeare use for ‘beautiful’? Is the occurrence of the word ‘love’ the same in the comedies and tragedies? This post is different. WordSeer has now developed enough to support a simple, but complete, exploratory analysis.
The question we’ll think about is this:
“How does the portrayal of men and women in Shakespeare’s plays change under different circumstances?”
As one answer, we’ll see how WordSeer suggests that when love is a major plot point, the language referring to women changes to become more physical, and the language referring to men becomes more sentimental. You can watch a screencast here, or just read this post.
The monologue in a crowdsourced world: have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?
The longer I work in DH, and the more I consider what the digital medium makes possible the more the idea of me standing up and telling people what I think and thus by implication what they might think seems frankly bizarre. I increasingly dislike the idea of the single voice speaking with some kind of a spurious authority. One of the great assets of the digital, and what it encourages and enables is multiple voices entering into a dialogue and creating new knowledge out of conversation and discussion. In what follows, therefore, I propose to look carefully at this apparent contradiction.
As I continue to plan out this spring’s Digitizing Folk Music Historycourse with the ace librarians, archivists, and technologists at Northwestern University’s library, I keep returning to the concept of annotation as a core concern for digital historians.
I suspect that literary scholars have done a lot of thinking about annotation, but have historians? Chauncey Monte-Sano has a good post about teaching annotation on the teachinghistory.org website. Her post is directed toward K-12 education (important!). But I think the art of annotation also has bigger implications for historical teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. So too, it proposes new modes of research, publication, and scholarly communication in the field of history.
If we broaden the term annotation to mean commentary on other objects, texts, data, and information, it becomes both practically and metaphorically the very stuff of historical interpretation. It is the assembly and analysis of artifacts, documents, media, statistics, and other kinds of evidence. It is the very glue that holds evidence and argument together in primary research. Which is to say that it is the stuff of argumentation, the art of building an interpretation out of close, creative, convincing analysis of evidence.
Collection Achievements and Profiles System and DPLA Crawler Services
This is a quick strawman proposal for what the Digital Public Library of America should build as the first parts of a generative platform. This document is not in a finished state, but just as the DPLA has been good at opening up its process with the Beta Sprint, I wanted to release this document early even in this unfinished state.
I attended the December DPLA Technical Workshop in Cambridge and was inspired by the discussion there. I hope that this document makes it clearer some of the approaches I and others at that meeting were advocating. I shared this with the DPLA Interim Development Team a couple of weeks ago, and now that development has started I thought I would share it here as well.
While the first iteration of the DPLA platform may be set and on its way, I still wanted to share one vision of what a generative platform for aggregations might involve. The main point is to get the DPLA to the aggregations they likely need to present at some point. This document leaves aside the question of whether creating aggregations is a good idea. The desire to create aggregations is a big, often unquestioned, assumption of big digital library projects. I think what is set out below is one simple architecture for accomplishing aggregations in a very Web-centered way while potentially having more reuse outside of just aggregations.
Introduction
This proposal gives a high-level overview of one possible DPLA technical architecture. This gives the idea of what a beginning of a scalable, extensible DPLA platform could look like. The architecture starts with a foundation in the distributed digital collections which already exist on the Web. The platform set out here works with the way the Web works while allowing the DPLA to meet its goals. As a result it will also help cultural heritage organizations to meet their goals for greater discoverability of their collections.
Collecting and keeping track of the those existing collections is the job of the Collection Achievements and Profiles System (CAPS). The metadata CAPS collects can be reused to do focused crawls of digital collections through a DPLA Crawl Service. The results of those crawls can be analyzed, and the data used for a variety of applications including topical or format aggregations, mashups, visualizations, and other internal and external tools.
We have the advantage of arriving late to the game.
In the cut-throat world of high-tech venture capitalism, the first company with a good idea often finds itself at the mercy of latecomers. The latecomer’s product might be better-thought-out, advertised to a more appropriate market, or simply prettier, but in each case that improvement comes through hindsight. Trailblazers might get there first, but their going is slowest, and their way the most dangerous.
Digital humanities finds itself teetering on the methodological edge of many existing disciplines, boldly going where quite a few have gone before. When I’ve blogged before about the dangers of methodology appropriation, it was in the spirit of guarding against our misunderstanding of foundational aspects of various methodologies. This post is instead about avoiding the monsters already encountered (and occasionally vanquished) by other disciplines.
Everything Old Is New Again
A collective guffaw probably accompanied my defining digital humanities as a “new” discipline. Digital humanities itself has a rich history dating back to big iron computers in the 1950s, and the humanities in general, well… they’re old. Probably older than my grandparents.
The important point, however, is that we find ourselves in a state of re-definition. While this is not the first time, and it certainly will not be the last, this state is exceptionally useful in planning against future problems. Our blogosphere cup overfloweth with definitions of and guides to the digital humanities, many of our journals are still in their infancy, and our curricula are over-ready for massive reconstruction. Generally (from what I’ve seen), everyone involved in these processes are really excited and open to new ideas, which should ease the process of avoiding monsters.
Most of the below examples, and possible solutions, are drawn from the same issues of bias I’ve previouslydiscussed. Also, the majority are meta-difficulties. While some of the listed dangers are avoidable when writing papers and doing research, most are discipline-level systematic. That is, despite any researcher’s best efforts, the aggregate knowledge we gain while reading the newest exciting articles might fundamentally mislead us. While these dangers have never been wholly absent from the humanities, our recent love of big data profoundly increases their effect sizes.
My aim for that paper, and for this, is to think through my hesitation with regard to the new, history, form, and meaning. Briefly put, and not saying anything new as yet I think, I value new forms and processes of discourse, ones that seek to overcome limitations inherited from the past in order to make meaning in new ways. These forms and processes would have to, perhaps, ignore history and the methods of meaning making it affords us. However, I also value history, however problematic, insofar as it allows us to contextualize, understand, and make judgments about the new. In my MLA paper, and with further elaboration here, I consider received forms and processes of scholarship, especially as such scholarship (which is being challenged by digital media) operates within a political economy of academic employment and instruction and intellectual discourse. My concern, specifically, has to do with the manner in which the discourse surrounding what we still call the job market has been inflected by the advent and valorization of the so-called digital humanities. DH has, it seems to me, implicitly promised young scholars jobs if they are able to write code, create databases, or otherwise interact with networked computers in an expert manner, often by prioritizing alternative academic, or alt-ac, careers. My purpose is not to argue against the value of DH broadly, but to question how DH or new media interacts with and informs the political economy of academic instruction, production, and employment in the humanties. Read Full Post Here
[T]his article is a call for a refocusing of academic work on historical videogames. A call for an approach that does not get detained by primarily examining the particular historical content of each game (i.e. historical accuracy or what a game ‘says’ about a particular period it depicts) but instead tries to establish an analytical framework that privileges analysis of form (i.e. how the particular audio-visual-ludic structures of the game operate to produce meaning and allow the player to explore/configure discourse about the past). The benefit of this is that we do not just gain knowledge of a particular historical representation but instead, conclusions about form (a particular game-structure’s operations) are then transferable to an understanding of games made up of similar ludic (and audio-visual) elements.
….It is defining and understanding these structures and how they operate in games, including the whole raft of new aesthetics that this implies, which is the most important task facing historians or other scholars interested in historical videogames. When we look at one game’s content, we understand no more than that. If analysis of content is necessary, then surely it is better left to those scholars that specialize in the historical period that the game tries to represent? However, as scholars that wish to study historical videogames then our first concern must be the form that exerts influence over virtually every aspect of production and reception. And which, in its relation to the historian/developer’s choices, decides the content. When we look at the videogame form in this way we can, I hope, begin to create a cohesive understanding of how games represent the past and what structures create particular opportunities for players to explore, understand and interact with these representations.
….This approach is far from complete and I make this call in a collaborative spirit. If taken up, this will no doubt become a complex analytical approach to construct but one which will benefit our understanding of this new form of historical expression. I also realise that this post is probably in many regards ‘preaching to the converted’ and many of the excellent pieces on this site display an understanding of the importance of analysing the structures at play within videogames if we are to understand the medium as a historical form and therefore, games as history at all. In a sense, this call to privilege form over content is also a simple point. However, I do believe that it is one worth making explicitly if we are to further develop a cohesive approach to historical videogames. Here at the relatively early point in the mediums life we are well placed to together offer the beginnings of an understanding of how and what, videogames enable in terms of playfully engaging, configuring and experiencing, discourse about the past.
Lecture at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18 April 2011: A new talk about open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School.
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