DH: Interests and Concerns

Andrew Keener

Hello all,

My name is Andrew Keener, and I’m a first-year Ph.D. student in the English Department. It was truly a pleasure to join all of you on Friday to discuss a some meanings and complexities of digital humanities, and I look forward to the next session. Special thanks go to Michael and Jillana & all at the Kaplan Institute.

In this post I’ll share something about myself, as many of you already have, but I also want to briefly revisit some ideas in our Friday session (some of these points were touched on by Michael in the previous post). Much of my interest in the digital humanities results from my own interests in the history of the book and the literature of the Renaissance. I’m particularly interested in the circulation of Continental literary forms on the early English book market, as well as the collaboration among authors, printers, and booksellers. Fellowships and courses at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Rare Book School inspired me to take up bibliographic methods, and now I’m thrilled to have the Newberry so close by. I spend as much time as possible in the archive handling the artifacts, but I also find myself relying to a large degree on digital tools. For example: the uploaded microfilm copies in Early English Books Online (EEBO) with its corresponding Text Creation Partnership texts, the Electronic Short Title Catalog, and other digital scholarly projects like UToronto’s ‘Lexicons’ and Martin Mueller’s ‘Word Hoard.’ These are great resources and truly useful instances of scholarly service. I confess the material books still seem more like ‘texts’ to me, but combining rare book research with the available Renaissance digital scholarship has been a rich experience so far.

Friday’s session was very useful but my definition of digital humanities remains admittedly nebulous. I’m comfortable with Josh Honn‘s loose definition, though, mainly because it allows me to unite a series of interests that don’t fit normally under the rubric of a single department. Digital humanities, then (to reiterate), can refer to (1) the electronic scholarly resources we use to address our questions; (2) the publication of our work in electronic forms; and (3) scholarship about this transitional period between print and digital. As Claire Stewart said, though, we are still in the ‘dark ages’ in our understanding or capability with digital technology (for humanistic purposes or otherwise, I think),  and so I feel decidedly more comfortable with the first 2 parts of this definition until we have some historical perspective on the changes we are undergoing now. This presents exciting possibilities through which the academy might recuperate a public audience. Without a doubt, our current, theoretical understanding of print culture and other forms of media (TV, radio, etc.) come to our aid when we use or create projects like ‘Lexicons’ or the ESTC. But the issue is vexed; there is also value in delivering and reformatting the historical and literary record for future generations in ways that prioritize the presentation of the primary documents without imprinting them with a decidedly ’20-teens’ look. Just how to do this is the real question. I look forward to meeting again next time and thinking more deeply about these and other things.

Meeting #1 Reflections

Michael J. Kramer

A few themes I discerned from our first meeting. This is quickly written and meant to inspire corrections, negations, queries, wonderments, questions. Please add your own perspective, perceptions, affirmations, theories, frustrations, curiosities, concerns:

DH, D vs. H, D & H, DH as R&D

The question is not only what does the digital offer the humanities, but also what can the humanities offer the digital? Both questions are important, and the dialectic between them might be especially productive.

DH and Research

How does DH help us to frame old questions in new ways? How might it help to develop new questions? Can definitions of DH constrain? Can more constrained definitions of the emerging field be helpful at times? How might each of us in our work (as scholars, teachers, technology folk, librarians) dive into the the “transductive plasma of interpretation” that Rafael Alvarado describes in his essay on Debates in the Digital Humanities?

DH and Scale

DH seems to increase awareness of scale—of the oscillation, often rapid, between difference amounts of evidence or information. Does it have something to offer humanities scholars in this movement between the small (zooming in on the hi-res detail of a famous painting) and the large (a huge text corpus or dataset)?

DH and Speed

DH similarly seems to pose the possibility of both speeding up humanities research/teaching and also, more surprisingly, slowing it down. You can search across vast pools of data or text or information quickly. You can also use the digital to slow down concentration on particular evidence, arguments, phenomena, methodologies, practices. Once again the key modality to explore may well be the oscillation between different speeds of research/teaching.

DH as Episteme

How does DH relate to the current historical moment? Is it a weird instantiation in the academic world of new managerial practices and structural phenomena? Are we experiencing the transformation of knowledge into “information” so that the urge is not to understand so much as to “do something” with what we are studying? Is modularity replacing the specificity, friction, resistance of humanities theory and critique? Is there a rapprochement between poststructural critique and larger systems of which we are part (Lane Relyea’s fascinating observation)? Is there a growing emphasis on large-scale and small-scale levels of knowledge and interaction but a loss of the middle-ground between the macro and the micro? Is DH a kind of shadow world of larger structural and cultural systems? Does this mean that it is an ominous development or something that takes or even subverts the dominant ideas and practices of our era in potentially new directions?

DH and Democracy

Two very different (or perhaps not?) questions of inclusivity and exclusivity arose. First, in what ways do the digital humanities pose new linkages between specialized scholarly work and broader public outreach? Second, are the digital humanities an intervention, either explicitly or implicitly, in the existing hierarchies of the academy itself? The first question is about the kind of work going on with a group such as Imagining America or the Public Humanities in a Digital World initiative at University of Iowa (two of many examples in the US context alone). The second is far more fraught, particularly for graduate students and junior scholars, in that the modes of exploring scholarly questions through the digital humanities (cooperative rather than solo, through new modes of communication and publication, in new forms and formats) potentially reshape the ways in which individual distinction leads to prominence or even just a foothold or halfway decent position in a humanities discipline. How many risks does a young, aspiring scholar in the humanities want to take? What kinds of structural changes in the academy (tenure and promotion questions being the most fraught and pressing) would preserve the best aspects of vetting while allowing scholars to take more of these kinds of risks? Is it possible to picture a humanities landscape in which the current superstar system is replaced by something more democratic and egalitarian? Could the digital help in this project?

DH and Print Culture/Embodied Culture

We tend to start out by thinking of the digital as opposed to the book and print culture, as well as to face-to-face culture of the traditional classroom, but might we actually be able to find ways that the digital weaves through (streams through?) the material in transformative and productive ways? The digital not as a rupture from prior technologies, practices, and modes of scholarship/teaching/life but rather as a continuation? If so, how? In what ways? To what ends?

DH and Pedagogy

What should DH in the classroom look like? Coursera? New kinds of interactions between face-to-face and online teaching? Should it be more efficient and cheaper or more complex and expensive?

What else? What did I miss?

DH and Pedagogy

Katrin Voelkner

Good morning,

My name is Katrin Voelkner and I am the director of the Weinberg Multimedia Learning Center (MMLC) and a faculty member in the German Department. My scholarly background is in the history of the book and it has been thrilling to add multimodal environments and practices to my work and somewhat neglect my research on linear narratives and bound books. (But I still consider myself a book addict and the Improbable Libraries is one of my favorite sites.)

As my professional focus has shifted more towards pedagogy and the role digital technologies play in teaching and learning I want to advocate for including pedagogy in our definitions and discussions of digital humanities. How do digital technologies impact our teaching methodologies and our students’ learning? What types of digital literacies do we want to see our students developing? How can we include the development of digital literacy regularly into our classrooms? What are sustainable practices for working with the various resources on campus? How do we as humanists best collaborate with librarians, technologists and IT people?

And speaking of teaching: I teach from 12 to 12:50 on Fridays and apologize that I will come late to our Friday discussions.

My favorite year

Claire Stewart

In late 2001, after the renovation was over and dust had settled, we had a party in the library to celebrate Scholarly Resources & Technology @ 2East, a new collaborative concept and new physical home to Digital Media Services and Collection Management (two library units) and the Academic Technologies group of central IT. Dan Garrison came to the party. Over wine, he told me about his 10-years-in-progress translated scholarly edition of Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica. He was planning a print edition when the work was all done, but had been thinking of an online edition as the translation progressed. Bill Parod (AT) and I were both intrigued. To make an extremely long story short, somehow we convinced our respective administrators to let us work with Dan on his digital project, with only loose goals and timeline, and little idea about how it would be achieved, technically.

To my 2012 eyes, the online version of book one, released in 2003, looks deceptively simple, even slightly long in the tooth in spots (resizable frames!) but it would be impossible to overstate how much I learned during My Favorite Year and how instrumental the experience was in framing my ideas about collaboration, creativity and the digital humanities. As a senior tenured full professor, Dan outranked both Bill and I in pretty much every sense. Bill was a technologist of many years experience. I was barely out of librarian babyhood, trying to help the organization figure out what its role should be in supporting scholarly technology projects, and supervising a small production team in what probably would (at that time, anyway) best be described as a skunkworks . On the Vesalius project team, however, we were partners and equals. Dan and I tackled the production and content aspects: what was the ‘stuff’, how did we need to capture and encode it digitally, what was the best scale on which to work for naming schemes, data streams, text chunks, footnotes, anatomical drawings, annotations, facsimile pages? Dan and Bill tackled indexing and search, presentation and web wizardry, mucked about with Vesalius’ hand-drawn characters and with polytonic Greek and Hebrew in the days before browsers reliably supported Unicode, considered how it should look, feel, and function. Bill and I grappled with infrastructure, resources, standards, scalability and organizational politics. Team members specialized, and we came to appreciate our strengths and our limits: the pros and cons of various possible XML attributes were maddening to some of us but fascinating to others. We lucked out in hiring a very talented NU undergraduate student, Paul Clough, to do the TEI-XML encoding. (Incidentally, a few years later, Paul came back to work in the library; he now oversees the in-house book digitization operation in Digital Collections, and is just completing his Masters in Library and Information Science.) The entire project was a huge leap of faith. We figured it out as we went along, with a lot of helping each other but also a lot of help from the wider DH community, the TEI community in particular. We were patient with each other, and we learned to adjust our expectations and goals as we realized where we had overreached, and where things were possible that we hadn’t imagined at the outset. There was nothing service about it, but it wasn’t ‘pure’ humanities, pure library or pure technology either, it was all of the above and greater than the sum of its parts.

The Vesalius project was mostly a digitization, digital production and publishing project, but I believe the lessons apply just as well to software development, any kind of infrastructure-building project, teaching, designing research, and indeed any kind of collaborative inquiry or shared work.

I’ll conclude with a brief summary of my background: I floundered around in math, chemistry and physics as an undergrad before making the happy switch to humanities. I have a BA in English Literature (minor: Humanistic Studies) from Saint Mary’s College and an MLIS from Dominican University. I’ve worked at NU since 1994, and am now the director of the Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation (CSCDC) and Head of the Digital Collections Department in the University Library. Here’s my Northwestern Scholars profile. Incubating projects and helping to develop infrastructure to support digital publishing, digital humanities and curation of digital research data is a key focus on the Center, and direct collaboration with faculty and students on these projects will be an important activity for us. I spend most of my time synthesizing, organizing and managing these days, and in addition to a general love of technology, I’m particularly interested in issues of scale, constructing solid teams, skill expansion and organizational development, and have a strong sideline in policy issues (copyright, etc.) I’m really looking forward to NUDHL!

About: me, DH

Chris Comerford

I am the Director of Information Technology for Weinberg College, having joined Northwestern in 2010. The past two years have allowed me to meet a number of people engaged in various uses of technology as part of academic pursuits, which only emphasized the need for me to learn more about many areas outside “traditional IT”.

Digital humanities has been one of those areas, and the ambiguity of its definition has been a challenge for someone who has not been a humanist (or academic of any sort). So far, I am inclined toward a “bigger tent” definition that includes both builders/makers and users/practitioners. I can envision people who use technology for humanities work today be looking to build new tools and platforms tomorrow and inspire succeeding generations of DHers. Interestingly, a career in IT can follow a similar progression: a desktop/laptop support person who uses specific tools and technologies becomes a systems architect or application developer who creates new tools and technologies.

More than anything, I am eager to participate as someone who comes from a non-academic background to learn not only about DH but also about the academic roots that fuel its growth.

Notes from a “recovering” techno-phobe…

lmk921

Hi. I’m Lisa Kelly, a 4th year in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama program.  My research focuses on how nineteenth-century British actresses engaged in reputation management and the rise of celebrity culture through participation in philanthropy, advertisement, and autobiographical presentation of self.  This means that I spend a lot of time pouring over digitized 19th century periodicals and creating networks among people and events.  I am also a “recovering” technology luddite.  I often feel like I am the last to embrace technology in an academic setting, I used powerpoint in a conference presentation for the first time in 2010, and only bought a connector to set my laptop up to the smart equipment in NU classrooms this past spring quarter after my students insisted on seeing videos to accompany our discussion of film and television.

But I did get the connector and I now feel pretty comfortable showing videos at least.  Scared as I was to use technology that could potentially fail at conferences and in the classroom, however, my dissertation project would not be possible without the ability to search huge databases of periodicals and the archives of many companies that are far away from Chicago.  So, for now, at least, I fall on the side of using digital humanities to enhance a traditional project.  This year I want to learn more about the scope of the digital humanities and how I can use tools to enhance my research and also to broaden my students’ experience in the classroom.

What is DH and what am I doing here?

Raff

When the question  “What is Digital Humanities?” is posed, I’m inclined to say that it’s whatever we collectively say it is.  Against seeing it that way, one might think that DH has some essence.  The massive amount of disagreement, especially among its practitioners, lends credence to the view that it has no essence.  Accordingly, when DH practitioners debate about the definition of DH, it’s probably right to conclude that they are  not offering competing claims about the true nature of DH;  instead, they are just offering differing practical visions of what DH could be.

Despite being a bit dismissive of the debate around defining DH, I find these goings-on interesting, albeit from an outsider’s perspective.  I’m not a DHer in any sense.  Sure, I write on computers, but since about 2 billion other people do that, I’d like to think that’s not sufficient for getting classed as a DHer, however permissive definitions might become.  I’m interested  in DH, however, as a philosopher.

Most philosophers could not care less about DH.  Most of us philosophers have the following attitude, “Whatever those literary and cultural studies people do with ‘texts’ and computers have nothing to do with our work.”  Brazen and bullheaded as that might sound, it’s probably right.  Recently, I was thinking about whether property rights are  best understood as a contingently related set of rights and duties to others or whether some essence underlies and unifies all such instantiations of said rights.  Obviously, DH doesn’t bear on this question.  All the same, there might be some questions that DHers ask or raise that is, or ought to be, of interest to philosophers.

First, some DHers, for instance, challenge our notion of authorship.  While some of the theoretical arguments against more traditional ideas of authorship were already expressed before by philosophers (think Derrida and Foucault), the new claims of DHers are worthwhile to philosophers as well.  Second, DHers highlight real ethical quandaries about how systems of  higher learning ought to reformed to achieve their  proper ends  and how scholarship is best conducted and what its proper aims are.

For my purposes right now, however, I’m interested in a more subtle question at the core of DH.  What is it that literary scholars do?  Philosophers of literature have not paid much attention to the activity of those who play a pivotal role in the modern practice of  literature.  Even when I read a non-DH scholar like Lauren Berlant, I’m struck by what she purports to be doing.  She is not, as I might have naively imagined, just offering readings of books and films.  She does things like propose theories of citizenship.  This is weird.  It is equally weird when DHers say that DH is about constructing things.  I, again naively, would have thought that literary scholars aren’t about constructing anything really, as their jobs were to read books and tell us what they say.  Now, I’m playing up the naivete, since I am, of course, well aware of that the simple model of what literary criticism encompasses is very much old school.  This way of thinking may track the New Critics, but perhaps not many others.  Literary criticism today is often also cultural criticism.  Criticism here means both  explication as well as appraisal.  Constructing things to that end, be they codes or theories of citizenship, might be necessary.

Though I don’t have the old school picture of literary criticism in mind (at least not anymore), there is still much to learn about the ways of the literary critic.  I’d like to think more about how, if at all, literary critics  contribute to the creation of knowledge.  I’d like to think about what, if anything, unifies the humanities, something that literary critics talk about but about which philosophers often roll their eyes.  I also would like to think about what follows from thinking of literature as a practice constituted by producers of literature, regular consumers, and elite consumers like literary critics.  Finally, I want to know how the emergence of DH affects these answers.

Life Cache? Literary Cache?

Juliana Seroa Da Motta Lugao

Dear members of NUDHL,

I have a very good reason for writing so late: yesterday I was watching the presidential debate, live-twitting, live fact-checking online and today I was doing… the same thing, but for the local elections in Rio de Janeiro. The time I most enjoy using all this web tools is when elections come . For some reason, I sense that the voters enjoy having the digital tools to engage as citizens. Well, I was a journalist before coming back to academia, that might also mean I’m an election/ debate addict.

I just came from Brazil to start the PhD in the Spanish and Portuguese Department here at NU. I’m part of the first class of this new PhD Program, which makes everything very exciting. My major interest is memory and memory studies in the literary field. But I will be working mainly with contemporary authors and how this genre, this kind of discourse is shaped today. If literature was at some point the space that shaped discourses, reactions, even documented eras, where is it now? Still in the literature? Is it somewhere else? Finally, how does the Internet influence all that?

Also, when we talk about this eternal archiving the web provides I can’t help to think about the traditional archives. How did the “big data” change the way we store raw-material for our own memories? And how do we perceive other’s memories? I have more questions than answers now.

Part of thinking about Digital Humanities and thinking through it, for me, is how the digital is invading every sphere of life and thinking, many times without getting the needed attention.

P.S: Sarah, I’m also a bookie, always guilty for spending so much time on the internet and not on my beloved paper-made objects.

Can’t wait to meet you all!

Juliana

Kevin: Life, the Digital Humanities, and Everything

Kevin Baker

Hi!

My name is Kevin and I am a second-year PhD student in History, a Mellon Science Studies Research Fellow, and a new HASTAC scholar. My work explores the political and economic uses of computer simulation modeling in the 1960s and 1970s, paying close attention to the interrelationship between human-computer interaction, emotion, experience, and scientific credibility. In my past work, I’ve looked at the early philosophical reception of cybernetics in East Germany, its reconciliation with dialectical materialism, and the discipline’s uneven organizational implementation by the ruling Socialist Unity Party. I can be found in a variety of places: on Twitter, academia.edu, my website, and on the historiography wiki Videri.

I come to the digital humanities from, perhaps, an uncommon direction; I’ve been digital for quite a while longer than I’ve been a humanist. Before I became a history major in my late undergraduate days, I had worked for a several years on the grunt end of the IT sector, repairing computers, managing servers, and mostly doing the unglamorous work of removing spyware and viruses from factory-floor computers. Since the very beginning stages of my training as a historian, digital methods and tools have been the often invisible background assumptions in the way I approach research, writing, and organizing information. Maybe for these reasons, my definition (insofar as you can call it one) of the digital humanities is, like Josh’s, a pragmatic, process-oriented one: DH is the kind of work humanists do with when they have access to an expanding digital toolkit (while never abandoning the critical reflexiveness of our disciplines). For me, it also involves a political commitment to open access, copyleft, and transparency.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to meeting all of your tomorrow and working with everyone this academic year!

What is to be done?

Josh

I am the Digital Scholarship Library Fellow at Northwestern University Library’s Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation. I know, that’s a lot of capitalized words, especially for an introductory sentence, but, essentially, I am a librarian (MLIS) with a humanities background (MA American Studies) who consults and collaborates with Northwestern faculty and graduate students on digital humanities research and pedagogy projects, referral to and training on digital research tools, and other scholarly digital publishing initiatives. In addition to this work, I’m also a designer (web and print), I read a lot of Latin American fiction in translation and contemporary American literature, and I also have some modest scholarly side projects such as marking up a Max Beerbohm short story in TEI and using digital tools to analyze and visualize literary texts. You can find me online at my website and on Twitter.

As far as definitions of digital humanities go, I tend to be an agnostic in the semantic debates, the who’s in and who’s out (who cares!) arguments, and try to focus on doing. I know that’s radically naive, and I also know that, as a librarian, I’m a bit privileged and can afford that view, but it also helps me stay centered and focussed on creating, and while I see myself often as a collaborator with faculty and graduate students (and vice versa), I also understand a large component of what I do is support-ish. Anyway, the definition of digital humanities I usually run with is three-pronged:

  1. Humanities research enabled and informed by digital means.
  2. Humanities publication through new digital means.
  3. Humanities scholarship on digital technology and culture.

Honestly, I don’t believe this definition is broad enough, and there’s something freeing about being a part of a field that one can’t even define, but I think this covers three very important approaches, all of which can be exclusive of the other and still count as digital humanities (e.g. research can be done digitally and published in print). Missing from this definition are a few crucial things such as coding, programming, metadata creation, etc. For instance, I most definitely do think marking up a text in TEI is a scholarly activity in and of itself. The one thing I am OK with is the use of the phrase “digital humanities” which I feel is a necessity for a field trying to define itself, make its case, and in many ways is seen as an oppositional force. That doesn’t mean DH is always radical, but it does mean its new and not yet commonly accepted.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting everyone, sharing ideas, debating, collaborating, and so on. I’m very excited for NUDHL and have had the privilege of working with both Michael and Jillana on digital humanities projects and think they are to be commended for their trailblazing spirit and for convening this workshop!

DH def

Kellen Bolt

Hello digital comrades-

I’m Kellen Bolt, and I’m a first year PhD student in English. More specifically, I’m interested in 19th-century American lit & culture with particular emphases on immigration & diaspora and American Imperialism.

My interest/knowledge of the digital humanities (which is counter-intuitively singular?) is only nascent & emerging, and thus the introductory readings have profoundly impacted my understanding of it. While “digital humanities” is a buzzword du jour, I have only recently began to understand what it is and what its potential impact on the humanities (& beyond) will be.

The DH, as far as I can gather, is both a methodology and a movement that is responding to/evolving alongisde the shift from print to digital/electronic culture. DH, at home within this new virtual realm of circulation and production, offers or demands that we ask new questions, push back against older—perhaps, out-dated—modes of publication, and engage more directly with the public sphere. How does one put this into practice? Must we all be programmers to be DH? Such a reductive & restrictive definition makes me shudder. As a collaborative, interdisciplinary methodology, DH negates such essentialism. The ability to conceive of and complete a scholarly project in DH seems increasingly less tenable and is perhaps increasing less desirable. Indeed, the DH is a continuum that ranges methodological tools like data mining & statistics to online peer-review & wikis to the digital publication of journals, books, and archives.

Perhaps my greatest interest in the DH is its (theoretical) commitments to democracy & publication. Online access to texts, archives, scholarly journals, and other academic tools gives us the opportunity—though we shouldn’t take it for granted—to connect to the public sphere. Non-academics can access & use our work without having to maintain a costly professional membership or subscription. Through this commitment to democracy, the DH offers to revitalize the humanities both inside & outside the ivory tower. While I do not want to over-glorify or naively predict the scope or intellectual trajectory of DH, I do want to posit that DH occupies/will occupy a relatively unique position among the humanities, and we should use it to advance both the cause of our fields and the cause of open & democratic knowledge production.

Working Beyond Digital History

Amanda Kleintop

Hello! I am Amanda, a first-year grad student in the history department and new HASTAC scholar. I am interested in the U.S. South in the Civil War and post-emancipation. I have been involved in some way with the digital humanities since my freshman year of undergrad at the University of Richmond, where I interned with the Digital Scholarship Lab there, which largely focuses on digital history research. In my own undergraduate honors thesis, I used Network Workbench, social network analysis software, to model the social relationships between African American Virginians after the American Civil War. This digital method allowed me to better organize my sources and to understand black loyalties in Virginia during the Civil War and the concept of Unionism. As I begin studying history at Northwestern, I am excited to stay involved with digital scholarship research while also exploring the impact and implications of this research outside of history and in an interdisciplinary setting.

In my own research, I, like Emily, turned to the digital humanities as a way to organize and eventually visualize my historical sources. I am also particularly interested in the digital humanities as a teaching tool and for its potential to share and reuse information, much as Spiro articulates in Debates in the Digital Humanities, both in general and particularly as a way to connect academic and public history. With that said, here is my attempt to define digital humanities: The digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field in which scholars have integrated new media with humanities research in order to reach wider audiences and synthesize information more effectively.

I look forward to continuing these discussions in our meeting tomorrow.