Difficult Thinking, Cultural Criticism, and Niceness in DH

Suggested Reading and a Summer Institute

In “Difficult Thinking about the Digital Humanities” from last week’s reading, Mark Sample discusses critical thinking in comparison to facile thinking and how accounts of facile thinking “eliminate complexity by leaving out history, ignoring examples, and – in extreme examples – insisting that any other discourse about the digital humanities is invalid because it fails to take into consideration that particular account’s perspective.”  He references Alan Liu’s call for more cultural criticism in DH as an example of similar initiatives.  Liu’s call for more cultural criticism in DH seems more of a side note in our recent readings, including this week’s “Digital Humanities and the ‘Ugly Stepchildren’ of American Higher Education” by Luke Waltzer.  I would’ve liked to read more on the subject of DH criticism outside of the methodology conversation, as described below in articles by Alan Liu and Adeline Koh:

Rough stuff.

I also have below another Koh article that could be read in conjunction with Tom Scheinfeldt’s “Why Digital Humanities Is ‘Nice’” and Lisa Spiro’s “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.”  Koh focuses her argument on the neutrality of “niceness” and the exclusionary nature of more “hack” than “yack,” articulating my personal anxieties regarding the social and technical requirements of DH.

On additions to the syllabus for today’s DH Pedagogy topic, I suggest taking a look at the Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching Institute, or HILT2015, an annual summer institute that provided workshops on digital pedagogy and criticism with courses such as “Getting Started with Data, Tools, and Platforms” and “De/Post/Colonial Digital Humanities.”

Disciplinarity debates – suggested readings

The media analysis project David proposed seems extremely timely. The top hits in a Google search on science and humanities brought up article after article about the crisis in the humanities, the perceived or false threat to the humanities by scientific and quantitative approaches, the scientism and the humanities (cf the very public 2013 argument between Leon Wieseltier and Steven Pinker in The New Republic – http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities and http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114172/leon-wieseltier-scientism-and-humanities ), etc. It all gets so old after while! And it’s not a new set of concerns.

But I came across a NEH grant proposal narrative / position paper prepared by SUNY Binghamton in 2008 for a project that sought to address the Science v. Humanities smackdown before it ever reached its current frenzy. They begin with “C.P. Snow’s (1959) description of the humanities and sciences as ‘The Two Cultures.’” And the project was aimed at breaking down this dichotomy where it matters most, at the level of the classroom (rather than continue the argument at the disciplinary level, which doesn’t actually do anything but feed the fire). Some of the project description is understandably very specific in terms of activities, but it also addresses larger theoretical questions, such as how humanities research and scientific research can complement or enhance each other in a given subject, and how a holistic investigation and interpretation of evolution, for example, could encompass different approaches to the material that are both equally valid and equally necessary: “Through evolutionary theory and its study of both ultimate explanations (such as biological fitness) and proximate explanations (such as the function and importance of the arts to human survival and development), we think that the 21st century will witness an integration of human-related subjects. Moreover, because of its emphasis on the crucial developmental functions of art, this integration can help restore the centrality of the perspectives and subjects currently associated with the humanities. ”

The project description also surveys the modern history of this disciplinary antipathy, which I think is very useful for background. Although it is not specifically a DH project, it addresses some fundamental assumptions and anxieties that contribute to current divisions and drive the debate in academia. And, as these ideas “trickle down” into the popular press, they generate both the less partisan articles like those David suggested, as well as those that politicize and perpetuate these divisions in (I think) unnecessary ways. The proposal is here: http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Wilson-02.pdf

Ways that Humanists Think About Data – An alternative text for in-class discussion

Up to this point, I’ve enjoyed our in-class discussions. Typically,  I leave with an unfocused, impending fatigue that transforms during my subway ride home into a grounded awareness of the gaps in my thinking about DH theory, what questions I have more generally about how DH fits into the larger context of humanistic inquiry in the academy, as well as a slightly more refined awareness of how I see myself finding my place in the field.

Last week I left, running through potential ideas for my data project, wishing I had articulated the desire for (in an effort to create a lexicon) a more specific discussion about terms related to actual DH projects. I found myself trying to anticipate the unique ways in which humanities scholars think about data. Data sets and maps generally, are obviously representations of a more complex, dynamic, ambiguous world. How have DH practitioners found inspiration in this reality, and what potential solutions and tools already exist? How can the gap between the “real” and the represented be used fruitfully? How can uninterpreted data result in new ways of seeing?

After reading Stephen’s Ramsay’s “Programming with Humanists: Reflections on Raising an Army of Hack-Scholars in the Digital Humanities” I found myself setting aside time to research what exactly went into “word frequency generators” and “poetry deformers”. He mentions a list of tools for analyzing text corpora: tf-dif analyzers, basic document classifiers, sentence complexity tools, etc, as well as natural language processing tools, as potential programs that could be built during a computer science introduction focusing on humanities computing. Hashing out a basic explanation about what these programs do, and potentially a bit about how they do it, would contribute an additional, fruitful dimension to our praxis seminar discussions. I have a sense that learning more about what tools exist would go a long way in helping me zero in on a meaningful dataset.

**As an aside, as I bet not everyone will have had a chance to read this particular article, I should mention that I also really appreciated Ramsay’s extensive list of supplemental reading materials, some of which I have read (The Question Concerning Technology Martin Heiddeger, and others that I would love to spend some time with like NOW, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for example.)**

During my research I came across an excellent blog post by Miriam Posner titled Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction in which she engages some of the questions that are preoccupying me in lieu of having to choose my dataset. In her blog post she provides a transcript of a talk she gave at the Harvard Purdue data symposium this past summer. Her talk focused on the unique ways that humanists think about data vs say a scientist or a social scientist, and the implications of these differences for librarianship and data curation. I’ll list a couple prescient quotes and a link to her post. If you have some time, check it out!

“It requires some real soul-searching about what we think data actually is and its relationship to reality itself; where is it completely inadequate, and what about the world can be broken into pieces and turned into structured data? I think that’s why digital humanities is so challenging and fun, because you’re always holding in your head this tension between the power of computation and the inadequacy of data to truly represent reality.”

Or

“So it’s quantitative evidence that seems to show something, but it’s the scholar’s knowledge of the surrounding debates and historiography that give this data any meaning. It requires a lot of interpretive work.”

Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction

Cheers,

Taylor

 

 

Relevant Article

Hey guys,

While still trying to navigate a solid definition of Digital Humanities, I came across this Slate article discussing DH’s significance and how it fits into academia. I’ve been struggling with some of our assigned readings, so the purpose of this post was for me and anyone else who was feeling overwhelmed with the introduction to our most recent topics.

Digital Humanities and the Future of Technology in Higher Ed

-Scarlett

Relavent Readings For This Week

Hi All,

Here’s two articles relevant to some of our class discussions thus far. The first, Five Ideas for Digital Labor History, is a short piece by Tobias Higbie, Associate Professor in History at UCLA, in which he presents five ideas that labor historians can engage with DH. The second article, Laboring Wikipedia, follows up on Higbie’s use of Wikipedia as a class project for students to engage and collaborate in course materials. As a final class project that replaces the traditional term paper, students from his upper division labor history lecture create/edit Wikipedia entries on topics relevant to the class. Some things he highlights included project process, student experience, and future changes.

-Maple

Learning to notice and critical making

Hi All,

Re: Last week’s section on critiquing and theorizing DH, I would add Patrick Murray-John’s “Theory, Digital Humanities and Noticing,” and Roger Whitson’s blog post “Critical Making in Digital Humanities: A MLA 2014 Special Session Proposal.” Both pieces deal with the distinction between hacking and yacking, and address why this distinction is misguided.

In the former case, Murray addresses the perception that through DH, computer science is invading the humanities and laying waste to its traditions (i.e. yacking). He argues that the very opposite is happening: the humanities are invading comp sci and bringing with them questions and modes of thinking that can “help us identify why we are writing the code in the first place and help us recognize what promising directions or ideas are available.” (Granted, he also acknowledges that humanities’ practices risk (though don’t necessitate) making comp sci projects bloated and untenable.) Furthermore, he states that the hack v. yack conversation itself is a result of unfamiliarity and the fact that high theory trains one to read specific kinds of rhetoric, but not code, much like how traditional computer science trains one to read C, Java, Python, etc., but not Joyce. Thus, from within either camp, the intersection of the two may look like bad practice, when in fact it may just be different practice, which, through increased familiarity and emergent theory born out of DH projects themselves, will make more sense as a simultaneously self-critical and immediately practical endeavor.

In the latter case, Whitson gives a brief survey of “critical making” in the digital humanities and in the process he argues that “[b]uilding or making can take many different forms, all of which are critically and theoretically engaged. As Jean Bauer has argued, databases are ‘steeped in theoretical implications,’ and [], so are programming languages, data models, interfaces, algorithms, and the heads, spindles, platters, motors, and plastruders found in hardware and printers. In short, methods, tools, and applications exist in recursive relationships with discursive practices.” In other words, there is no tool that does not always already contain horizons for critical engagement, and to explore these horizons can take the form of explication through rhetoric, but it is just as possible and just as valid for this exploration to be folded into the project itself. For an example from the arts, I could write about Francis Bacon’s Crucifixions, or I could just as productively look at them and visually consider what arguments about the substantiality of paint, the limitations of representation, etc. are already folded into the works themselves. This is likewise the case for any well-thought-out DH project; at least some critical self-reflection will be embedded into the work itself. Consideration of the limits, strengths, distortions and implications of one’s tools is inherent in any mature practice.

— Ashleigh

DH in the news + Research tools

I think that the readings of these first weeks cover almost all the aspects of the DH debate. However, in our discussions we have also pointed out how the interest in DH can also be traced in newspapers’ articles both online and in print. Indeed, if you look for major newspapers contribution on DH, you’ll find many articles discussing fundamental issues of DH.

I really would like to read an article reconstructing how DH have been perceived, presented and discussed in the news media. Thus, the reading I would like to add to the syllabus is something that maybe doesn’t exist yet (or probably I haven’t searched enough). I think that this kind of contribution could add interesting insights to the DH debate (especially because of DH’s insistence on openness as one of its fundamental values).

Regarding DH pedagogy, a possible addition to the syllabus could have been some readings focused on useful digital tools on the organization of academic research (and I guess this is not just for humanities but for all researchers). For instance, in this workshop (https://historyprogram.commons.gc.cuny.edu/september-11-digital-tools-to-control-the-chaos/) we discussed how to structure the process of finding, reading and storing digital sources and  which are the tools that we can use to organize our research practices.
For instance, we have learned the possibilities of combining different software (such as Pocket, Evernote, Zotero, Dropbox etc.) in order to develop a structured work flow.

This is a list of interesting article on how to use Evernote for academic purposes: https://www.evernote.com/pub/raulpachecovega/evernoteforacademics#st=p&n=e5d8fbd0-c4cf-480c-a9a4-2aeca1308d9c

 

 

 

Another possible reading…

One possible reading that could be added to future versions of this class is:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/readers-defintions-of-ed-tech-buzzwords-confusion-and-skepticism-continue/57301

This blog post addresses terms related to both education and technology deemed common yet confusing. These buzzwords were gathered by The Chronicle of Higher Education from a survey conducted of their readership. One of the terms featured prominently is “digital humanities.”

The brief article is followed by a table displaying a sampling of survey answers. You can see up to 100 of the guessed meanings from respondents for the highest ranking terms. Considering that survey participants are mostly professionals in the education field, it’s alarming and disappointing to see the misconceptions of the term “digital humanities,” or worse, the number of answers that essentially say “I have no idea what this is.” Even answers that are mostly accurate often contain a “what I think this means is…”.

The article mirrors our first week class exercise of student-offered definitions, before our understanding was clarified by the essays in section I of Debates in the Digital Humanities and other readings. The piece might be a valuable addition to the syllabus, though, since it (along with the survey responses) offers a glimpse at how DH is currently viewed, rightly or wrongly, by academia at large.

For the record, while I initially was as off-the-mark about the term as some of the Chronicle’s survey-takers, my preferred definition is now Matt’s definition from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, i.e “an emerging field of humanities scholarship, teaching, and practice that is grounded in digital sources, methods, tools, and platforms.” (Gold)

As a self-confessed word-nerd or word-wonk, I’m somewhat reluctant to use the words “digital” and “humanities” in a definition of “digital humanities,” but I’m sticking to it. I admire its thoroughness while still being relatively concise. With some guidance from m-w.com, I see it would be easy to swap “computerized and/or electronic” for “digital,” and “humanities” with “philosophy, arts, and language studies,” but I’d only do that if the clarification was necessary.

 

Works Cited

“Digital.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2015. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/digital>.

Gold, Matthew. “Digital Humanities.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. 143-149. Print.

“Humanity.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2015. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanity>.

Young, Jeffrey R. “Readers’ Definitions of Ed-Tech Buzzwords: Confusion and Skepticism Continue.” Web log post. Wired Campus. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 Aug. 2015. Web. 26 Sept. 2015.

 

What isn’t code?

I’ve been thinking more about “What is Code?” by Paul Ford, and the relationship of code (whether a given iteration or the Platonic ideal) to human discourse and language (whether spoken, signed, written, grunted, pictured).

Last semester I had my first experience writing actual code, learning to use the language R for a course in data visualization.* It was incredibly difficult, not least because, as I insisted, “my brain just doesn’t work that way.”

But it’s language, right? Like human language, code has grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Like human language, there are often many ways to say the same thing, but only some of them will be intelligible, clear, and get the result you want. (Human language, however, is much more forgiving when it comes to sentence structure.) Just as learning human language (sometimes) requires a lot of exposure and/or memorization, so (usually) does learning code.

Ford says “C gave you an abstraction over the entire computer, helping you manage memory and processes inside the machine. Smalltalk gave you an abstraction over all of reality, so you could start dividing the world into classes and methods and the like” (43).

Doesn’t symbolic representation and language do the same for us? I’m sure it’s hardly an original analogy. But language is the medium through which we encounter and understand the world. It’s an abstraction “over all of reality” that allows us to encounter reality. It categorizes experience and structures thought.So, I’m wondering how far the comparison stretches.

Human language is not unidirectional – a set of utterances aimed at achieving a result in the external world – it also impacts our thinking and comprehension and emotional states. Does code operate both ways as well?

Well, as Ford suggests, quoting from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, “A computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations … it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” (104).

Unlike most human languages, which slowly evolve over millennia, new types of code are constantly in R&D. (At least, it’s probable that more people know R or C++ these days than Esperanto or Volapuk.) Watching computer languages develop, with their specialized vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and logic –which we can use to create, interpret, and “express ideas about methodology” — are we actually witnessing new ways of describing the world take shape in real time?

You know how frustrating it is when no word exists in [your native] language for an idea or feeling, or a word for something can’t be translated? Ford describes something similar: “But my first thought when I have to accomplish some personal or professional task is, What code can I use? What software will teach me what I need to know? When I want to learn something and no software exists, the vacuum bugs me …”(112).

Lastly, if language is the foundation of a culture, what about code? As Ford says of the various camps coders fall into, “These languages contain entire civilizations.” But it’s more than personality types and whom he entrusts with what tasks. The way he describes frameworks, for example, code has the potential to manifest types of cultural or institutional discourse:

“There are hundreds of frameworks out there; just about every language has one”. (84)

You have entered into a pool with many thousands of other programmers who share the framework, use it, and suggest improvements; who write tutorials; who write plug-ins that can be used to accomplish tasks related to passwords, blogging, managing spam, providing calendars, accelerating the site, creating discussion forums, and integrating with other services. You can think in terms of architecture. Magnificent! Wonderful! So what’s the downside? Well, frameworks lock you into a way of thinking. (86)

Isn’t most [all] of the critical theory of the past 50 years aimed at the unlocking discursive frameworks that have shaped human relations and the way we think about the world?

This is a very broad analogy, I realize. But that’s the way my brain works.

*Technically, this is not true. In the early 1980s my stepbrother (now a lifer at IBM) had a Commodore Vic-20 and taught me to write simple programs in BASIC that would do 
things like tell my stepsister she was stupid, or print my name across the screen in 
alternating white and black columns. When I expressed interest in learning more, he 
held up the thick BASIC manual and I ran off screaming into the land of literary 
language and The Phantom Tollbooth. What a mistake!

Addition to the syllabus?

Hey all,

I was poking around thinking about what could have supplemented our reading for the first couple weeks of class, and came across this call for proposals for the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. To my mind, the couple of paragraphs below speaks to a number of the questions that have arisen for us: What counts as digital humanities? Who makes those decisions? And do DH projects have to involve code?

I don’t know that this is actually a source that should go on the syllabus — I think probably not, seems more appropriate for a blog post (!) — but it helped to clarify some of the contemporary thinking in the academic community about what DH is and who gets to decide (those folks listed at the end, I guess).

Destry

Call for Proposals, Digital Humanities 2015

Call for Proposals

Digital Humanities 2015: Global Digital Humanities

 

  1. General Information

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) invites submission of abstracts for its annual conference, on any aspect of digital humanities. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • humanities research enabled through digital media, data mining, software studies, or information design and modeling;
  • computer applications in literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical studies, including electronic literature, public humanities, and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship;
  • digital arts, architecture, music, film, theatre, new media, digital games, and related areas;
  • creation and curation of humanities digital resources;
  • social, institutional, global, multilingual, and multicultural aspects of digital humanities; and
  • digital humanities in pedagogy and academic curricula.

For the 2015 conference, we particularly welcome contributions that address ‘global’ aspects of digital humanities including submissions on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field.

Presentations may include:

  • posters (abstract maximum 750 words);
  • short papers (abstract maximum 1500 words);
  • long papers (abstract maximum 1500 words);
  • multiple paper sessions, including panels (regular abstracts + approximately 500-word overview); and
  • pre-conference workshops and tutorials (proposal maximum 1500 words)

The deadline for submitting poster, short paper, long paper, and multiple paper session proposals to the international Program Committee is midnight GMT, 3 November, 2014.  Presenters will be notified of acceptance by 6 February, 2015.

V. International Program Committee

Chair: Deb Verhoeven
Vice-Chair: Manfred Thaller

Jeremy Boggs (ACH)
Brian Croxall (ACH)
Øyvind Eide (EADH)
Jieh Hsiang (centerNet)
Diane Jakacki (CSDH/SCHN)
Kiyanori Nagasaki (JADH)
Tim Sherratt (aaDH)
Stéfan Sinclair (CSDH/SCHN)
James Smithies (aaDH)
Tomoji Tabata (JADH)
Karina van Dalen-Oskam (EADH)
Sally Wyatt (centerNet)

Outgoing Chair: Melissa Terras