Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011 on Journal of Digital Humanities

A Community-Sourced Journal

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, which represents the best of the work that was posted online by the community of digital humanities scholars and practitioners in the final three months of 2011.

We wish to underline this notion of community. Indeed, this new journal is predicated on the idea that high-quality, peer-reviewed academic work can be sourced from, and vetted by, a mostly decentralized community of scholars rather than a centralized group of publishers. Nothing herein has been submitted to the Journal of Digital Humanities. Instead, as is now common in this emerging discipline, works were posted on the open web. They were then discovered and found worthy of merit by the community and by our team of editors.

Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The last ten years have seen the development of what looks like a coherent format for the publication of inherited texts online – in particular, ‘books’. The project of putting billions of words of keyword searchable text is now nearing completion (at least in a Western context); and the hard intellectual work that went into this project is now done. We are within sight of that moment when all printed text produced between 1455 and 1923 (when US copyright provisions mean that the needs of modern corporations and IP owners outweigh those of simple scholarship), will be available online to search and to read. The vast majority of this digital text is currently configured to pretend to be made up of ‘books’ and other print artifacts. But, of course, it is not books. At some level it is just text – the difference between one book and the next is a single line of metadata. The hard leather covers that traditionally divided one group of words from another are gone; and while scholars continue to pretend to be reading books, even when seated comfortably in front of their office computer, this is a charade. Modern humanities scholarship is a direct engagement with a deracinated, Google-ised, Wikipedia-ised, electronic text.

Introduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities

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I came to theory because I was hurting—
the pain within me was so intense I could not go on living.

—bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice”¹

The silicon chip is a surface for writing.

—Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”²

The debates around the role of “theory” in digital humanities are debates about the relationship between saying and doing. It therefore seems appropriately inappropriate to introduce a special section on digital humanities and theory with poetry, a kind of utterance in which language, it is still conceded, may do as well as say. Marianne Moore’s “In the Days of Prismatic Color” begins:

Review of WordSeer, produced by Aditi Muralidharan, Marti Hearst, and Bryan Wagner

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The WordSeer tool, developed at the University of California, Berkley by Aditi Muralidharan and Marti Hearst with research partner Bryan Wagner, is an exploratory analysis or “sensemaking” environment for literary texts. The tool is based on an understanding of literary analysis as a cyclical, rather than a linear, process, a notion that has been underemphasized in tool development where visualizations and datamining have generally been seen as exposing the text for scholarly treatment. WordSeer allows you to read a text, search for relationships between words and phrases, examine grammatical relationships, and examine produced heat map and tree visualizations.

Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Data seems to be the word of the moment for scholarship. The National Endowment for the Humanities and a range of other funders are inviting scholars to “dig data” in their “Digging into Data” grant program. Data itself is now often discussed as representing a fourth paradigm for scientific discovery and scholarship (PDF). What is a humanist to do in such a situation? Does data, in particular big data, require humanists to adopt a new methodological paradigm? Or, are the kinds of questions humanities scholars traditionally have explored through close reading and hermeneutic interpretation relevant to big data? In this brief essay I suggest some of the ways that humanists already think about and analyze their sources can be employed to understand, explore, and question data.

Getting Started in Digital Humanities

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

When I presented at the Great Lakes College Association’s New Directions workshop on digital humanities (DH) in October, I tried to answer the question “Why digital humanities?” But I discovered that an equally important question is “How do you do digital humanities?” Although participants seemed to be excited about the potential of digital humanities, some weren’t sure how to get started and where to go for support and training. Building on the slides I presented at the workshop, I’d like to offer some ideas for how a newcomer might get acquainted with the community and dive into digital humanities work. I should emphasize that many in the digital humanities community are to some extent self-taught and/or gained their knowledge through work on projects rather than through formal training. In my view, what’s most important is being open-minded, experimental, and playful, as well as grounding your learning in a specific project and finding insightful people with whom you can discuss your work.

Review of Bookworm, produced by Benjamin Schmidt, Martin Camacho, et al.

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Bookworm is a tool that allows users to create visualizations charting the use of words or phrases in selected large corpora over specified periods of time. The software was developed by a group of researchers at the Harvard University Cultural Observatory ¹ as a follow-up to the 2010 project that resulted in a cover story in Science, the Google Books Ngram Viewer, and the coining of the term ‘culturomics’. Bookworm development is still in its alpha phase, but already the software shows great promise as a tool for scholarly exploration of historical trends in large collections of books.

When Digital Humanities Was in Vogue

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“More hack, less yack,” they say. I understand the impulse, and to some degree admire the rough-and-tumble attitude of those in digital humanities whose first priority is getting things done. Hell, I like getting things done. But I cannot agree with the distinction between theory (little-t) and practice that this sets up, nor the zero-sum logic that it implies—i.e., that in order to do more we must speak less. “More hack, less yack” is, of course, just a slogan, a “spontaneous philosophy,” a stopgap. But stopgaps won’t do now that digital humanities is in vogue.

Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 of n: An Introduction

This piece builds on a bunch of my recent blog posts that have mentioned networks. Elijah Meeks already has prepared a good introduction to network visualizations on his own blog, so I cover more of the conceptual issues here, hoping to reach people with little-to-no background in networks or math, and specifically to digital humanists interested in applying network analysis to their own work.

Review of QueryPic, produced by Tim Sherratt

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

QueryPic is a graphical search summarizer that mines content in the Trove newspaper archive from the National Library of Australia. The program is part of Tim Sherratt’s larger TroveNewspaper software project, which allows researchers to obtain parsable data from the Trove collection. QueryPic searches the Trove newspaper archive, scrapes the returns, and graphs the results of the search. QueryPic uses the Python programming language, and is available on GitHub under a GPL v3 license.

Theory First

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to be reasonable about the relationship we’d like to see between digital humanities and “Theory.” Each should inform the other. After all, humanists who put big-T Theory before any empirical data foolishly close their ears to the new evidence digital can create; digital humanists who ignore theory entirely jeopardize not only their careers but the soundness of their conclusions. To take two examples from the theory-friendly side of the spectrum in digital humanities; we should heed Natalia Cecire’s call to treat digital humanities as important because it transforms humanistic practice; but we should also be mindful of Ted Underwood’s concerns that claims for the primacy of theory often amount to little more than a power play, serving to reify existing class distinctions inside the academy. In practice, this probably means digital humanists can keep calm and carry on, with greater tolerance for the occasional French name tossed into the discussion; meanwhile the theory-inclined should know they have a seat at the new table, though not necessarily at the head. Even more hack, better yack. What’s not to love?

Clustering with Compression for the Historian

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

INTRODUCTION

I mentioned in my blog that I’m playing around with a variety of clustering techniques to identify patterns in legal records from the early modern Spanish Empire. In this post, I will discuss the first of my training experiments using Normalized Compression Distance (NCD). I’ll look at what NCD is, some potential problems with the method, and then the results from using NCD to analyze the Criminales Series descriptions of the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador’s (ANE) Series Guide. For what it’s worth, this is a very easy and approachable method for measuring similarity between documents and requires almost no programming chops. So, it’s perfect for me!

What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

After five years “workin’ on the railroad,” I find myself confronting one of the central paradoxes of doing digital humanities–what Jerome McGann, one of the leading scholars of electronic texts, calls the problem of imagining what you don’t know. In digital humanities, what we think we will build and what we build are often quite different, and unexpectedly so. It’s this radical disjuncture that offers us both opportunities and challenges.

Spatializing Photographic Archives

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The extensive and carefully illustrated White Paper for our NEH-sponsored “Spatializing Photographic Archives” project can be downloaded as a large PDF (26.5mb).

The White Paper describes the open-source software tool we’ve developed, and our reasons for wanting to forge a new approach to making digital tools for scholars. It also examines the implications of our approach for photography. After examining the history of landscape photography in the American West, we show how by stepping outside the photographic frame and unfreezing a photograph’s frozen instant, we can reveal many hidden aspects of photography and create new kinds of works.

Who You Calling Untheoretical?

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

[A note from the author: This blog post, as a piece of prose, is very much of the moment when it was written. Likewise its reception has been based on its tone as well as its content. So, rather than take this chance to revise the piece, I have decided to annotate the original text in the style of a documentary editor, although I have only annotated my own text, leaving the text of my commentators, Chris Forster and Jeremy Boggs (see below), alone. Aside from a few minor, silent corrections for editorial consistency, all new and supporting material can be found in the footnotes or set off by square brackets.]

“Humanities in a Digital Age” Symposium Podcasts

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On November 11th, the University of Virginia’s Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures hosted a daylong symposium on “The Humanities in a Digital Age.” The symposium included two panels—one on Access & Ownership and the other on Research & Teaching—and two keynote talks.

The first keynote was given by Stephen Ramsay, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

When disciplines collide, as they do throughout digital humanities, the various practitioners mutually benefit from the different knowledge and skill sets that others bring to our collaborations. But there is also an inevitable gap between how different individuals working in different areas understand their various tools and techniques, and in how they understand their own thought processes. For THATCamp and digital humanities, that causes two related tensions as programmers and critics move more closely together in their joint work. The first tension is the relationship between “hack” and “yack” in the phrase often heard at THATCamp: “more hack; less yack.” The second is the broader question of the role of theory in digital humanities — its perceived absence among some and what steps can be taken to recognize what others call theory in digital humanities. Those tensions, though, will be easily resolved by addressing the disjunction between what coders know to look for as being important and what critics look for in their work to develop theory. In short, the two groups do not yet know what the other notices (in text or in code) as the first step toward understanding their work.

Digital Humanities as Thunderdome

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Recently at a workshop on digital tools for the humanities, a Stanford graduate student rather poignantly noted that oftentimes collaboration with computer scientists felt more like colonization by computer scientists. This statement, even if not true, is far too sharp to ignore. Frankly, I think it is true. Not long after that workshop, I attended a THATCamp, where I spent my time teaching folks how to use Gephi, and I tried to spend some time telling them that the network they create is the result of an interpretive act. I don’t think they cared, I think they just wanted to know how to make node sizes change dynamically in tandem with partition filters. This is an issue that has concerned me for some time: the way wholesale importation of digital tools, techniques and objects into humanities scholarship tends to foster a situation where rich, sophisticated problems are contracted to fit conveniently into software.

Philosophical Leadership Needed for the Future: Digital Humanities Scholars in Museums

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Nik Honeysett, Head of Administration for the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution.

Originally published as part of a YouTube crowdsourced panel for the Museum Computer Network Conference 2011 on the barriers to and benefits of implementing digital humanities methodologies in museums.

Critical Discourse in Digital Humanities

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My interest in the role and nature of criticism in the digital humanities grows out of a question that Alan Liu recently asked: Where is the cultural criticism in the digital humanities? Although I’m not convinced that digital humanities needs its own brand of cultural criticism beyond what its constituents would normally do as humanists, the question resonated with me because it made me wonder (with only silence to follow): where is the criticism in the digital humanities?

Words and Code

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Originally tweeted by Tom Scheinfeldt on November 10, 2011 and Ryan Shaw on November 11, 2011.

Please Write it Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Tom Scheinfeldt provocatively suggested that “DH arguments are encoded in code” and that he disagrees “with the notion that those arguments must be translated / re-encoded in text.” I don’t think this is how this works.

What I see as the key issue is not so much whether digital humanists need to “re-encode” their work in writing. Digital humanists, like reflective designers of all stripes, are already doing a lot of writing. They are creating documentation, making wireframes, etc. The question here is: what kinds of writing should humanities scholars who design software and make things in code be doing?

Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching)

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Much of what I do in my classroom doesn’t necessary count as “digital humanities.” I certainly don’t present my classes as digital humanities classes to my students—or to my colleagues, for that matter.

If anything, I simply say that we’ll be doing things in our classes they’ve never done before in college, let alone a literature class. And literature is mostly what I teach. Granted, I teach literature that lends itself to digital work: electronic literature, postmodern fiction, and even videogames. We do a great deal of close readings in these classes. It’s familiar, even comfortable territory for my students. But we also—and this is what surprises my students—spend much of our time building and sharing.

Marked Bodies, Transformative Scholarship, and the Question of Theory in Digital Humanities

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2011, Natalia Cecire’s off-the-cuff suggestion of a THATCamp Theory set off a ferment of planning and arguing in the digital humanities community. It sounded like a great idea to me. Beginning with a session on “diversity in digital humanities” at THATCamp SoCal in January 2011––well attended both in person and remotely––I had been collaborating with an amorphous group of scholars engaged with critical cultural studies, queer studies, and ethnic studies in the context of the digital. We had been thinking about ways to connect the ethic of making that is central to digital humanities with a greater self-consciousness about the way everything is structured and its cultural politics; I was keen to continue and broaden that conversation.

Where Are the Philosophers? Thoughts from THATCamp Pedagogy

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In October, I attended THATCamp Pedagogy, where I met loads of lovely humanists, each of whom is doing fascinating things with digital tools to study humanistic questions or asking humanistic questions about digital content.

There was one core humanistic discipline largely absent from this unconference: my own, philosophy. This is not new, nor surprising. It is, however, deeply regrettable.

It’s All About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In 1901, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to create a system of exclusion and control designed to keep the newly-formed nation ‘white’. But White Australia was always a myth. As well as the Indigenous population, there were already many thousands of people classified as ‘non-white‘ living in Australia — most were Chinese, but there were also Japanese, Indians, Syrians and Indonesians.

Here are some of them…

All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Following a fascinating talk by Ed Finn on the changing role and source of literary criticism in a digital age, Natalia Cecire queried the implicit neutrality of a term like “nerd.” Melissa Harris-Perry’s reclamation aside, the racialized and gendered aspects of nerddom, and by extension the digital humanities, offer opportunities for a more explicit engagement with positionalities that lead “white men to feel embattled.” How do those outside the categories white and male navigate this burgeoning disciplinary terrain?

Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011 Conversations Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“The debates around the role of ‘theory’ in digital humanities are debates about the relationship between saying and doing.” Natalia Cecire

“The Real Faces of White Australia”

Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011, Reviews Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Newspaper strip visualization

Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011: Featured Article Excerpts

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“Modern humanities scholarship is a direct engagement with a deracinated, Google-ised, Wikipedia-ised, electronic text.” Tim Hitchcock

An ego network from wikipedia.org