To supplement our all-too-brief discussion about DH and philosophy at the last NUDHL meeting, here is Lisa Spiro’s “Exploring the Significance of Digital Humanities for Philosophy.” That title, could/should also be inverted to read the significance of philosophy for digital humanities. Anyway, lots of interesting points, links, and resources in the post.

Hello Digital Humanists!

A friend back in Brazil just sent me the link to this exciting project based in Rio. What does it have to do with us? Everything. Freenet is discussing the future of the internet (well, you might ask, isn’t everyone?) in a collaborative way. Part of the project is trying to collect videos of experiences with the digital, aiming 5 different themes. Why don’t you take a look at the site (versions in English, Portuguese and Spanish)? Maybe we could send a video as a group!

http://www.freenetfilm.org/

With the help of some colleagues from Loyola and IIT, I’ve started Chicago DH, an informal group of/for scholars, technologists, librarians, and others dedicated to sharing digital humanities events, announcements, questions, and discussions in and around Chicago. Our goal is to use Google Groups along with a forthcoming website (http://chicago.digitalhumaniti.es/) and Twitter account (@ChicagoDH) to share DH events and announcements across the many campuses in the Chicago area in the hopes of building a stronger community and sharing learning resources and opportunities. If you’re interested in joining the mailing list (to which you can also post) please visit https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chicago-dh and request to join. Hopefully as we get more users across all of our institutions it can become a vital and vibrant resource. Michael and Jillana, if you’re interested in participants from other campuses, please add NUDHL meeting session announcements to this list!

Hello NUDHLers! My schedule blocks me from attending the sessions this quarter, but I have been attempting to make up for my absence through occasional conversations with some of you as well as though fthis blog. I also found Ben Pauley’s visit to be particularly interesting and helpful.

Emily, thanks for jotting down some of your thoughts in preparation for tomorrow’s session. While I’m (again) not going to be there, I want to pass along to you all two brief articles that might be somewhat germane. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece this week that gives  accounts of three graduate students working on “digital dissertations” at Emory, Stanford, and UVa. It’s important that their projects are getting some press, although the article still seems to understand their projects as exceptional in some way (at least, that’s how I see it). The link to the article is here. Another good piece on the changing nature of the dissertation that appeared in the Chronicle on the same day is here. To branch off of some of your comments then, Emily, I’m beginning to wonder about how this supposedly crowning achievement of doctoral study could/needs to change, and exactly where this priority lies in relation to other DH questions. How can/should DH make our graduate studies programs sustainable?

I realize that through my comments here I’m late in joining what I’m sure is already a rich and developed conversation this quarter. I only wanted to share these articles and to register a couple thoughts. I hope the meeting goes well tomorrow, and I’ll try to join you all in person again A.S.A.P.

ASK

Hello all –

In anticipation of our meeting tomorrow, I just wanted to throw out a couple of questions that came up for me during the readings. My apologies, but they’re more bullet points and random questions than anything organized. Will look forward to talking with everyone tomorrow.

1. In his very brief piece, “The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing,” Daniel Cohen discusses the way the “social contract of the book” transforms when moving from traditional print publishing to digital publishing. As he points out, the producers of these publications have dedicated a great deal of energy toward their side of this contract. But he claims that many “fewer efforts have been made to influence the mental state of the scholarly audience,” or what he calls the “demand side” (320). But how can we go about doing this? What would this look like? Cohen proposes the idea of community-based curation as a means of selecting publications and promoting them to consumers (321). What would this look like? Where do digital journals fall in this picture? Similarly, I find his call for greater acceptance of publications regardless of their print or digital status intriguing, but what are the problems inherent in recognizing “outstanding academic work wherever and however it is published,” whether the work comes from a blog or a peer-reviewed journal (320)?
2. Cohen’s piece and others for this week, especially Witmore’s “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” made me wonder more generally about the way materiality and aesthetics influence the shift from print to digital publication. I found Witmore’s pieces interesting for the way they seem to collapse any hard-and-fast distinction between digital and printed texts and the way we interact with (or address) them.
3. Alexander Reid’s “Graduate Education and the Ethics of the Digital Humanities” touches on many of the questions we tossed around in our last meeting, regarding incorporating DH training into graduate education. He proposes the idea of a requirement that grad students acquire a “digital literacy,” which he admits would vary across disciplines. So, as in our last meeting, we’re confronted with a series of challenging questions: What constitutes a digital literacy? How can departments expect grad students (and faculty, for that matter) to simultaneously acquire and teach a digital literacy? How can this digital literacy be maintained, so that it does not become outmoded? In building resources into departments (like hiring educators with the ability to teach graduate students these skills, or establishing university-wide initiatives), how might this move inadvertently reinforce existing hierarchies already endemic to higher ed? Considering the realities of funding and resources, and especially coming from an institution with extremely limited resources (where there were lots of first-generation students, like myself), this seems to me a significant problem. On a related point, I come from an MA program that trains both PhD-bound students and students aspiring to teach in secondary ed. Would this digital literacy apply to both, or to each group in different ways? And finally, as always, this piece brings me back to Jillana’s question from the first meeting: how much of this digital literacy is just learning to use new technologies, and how much of it is learning to use new technologies to ask new questions? We might look at Reid’s description of his own department on p. 359, for example.

On the topic of humanists writing code, I wanted to share this pretty awesome and definitely hilarious coding language called Vigil, “the eternal morally vigilant programming language,” written by and for moral philosophers. You can find the code on GitHub at https://github.com/munificent/vigil, but the best part (unless you hate philosophy and code jokes, I guess) is the documentation, especially the FAQ.