Author: Michael J. Kramer

This Friday: Jillana Enteen Research Presentation

Michael J. Kramer

The Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory Research Workshop invites you to join us for:

Jillana Enteen, “Technologies of Transitioning in Thailand: Create-your-own-Surgery, One-Click SRS and other Opportunities Online for Surgery Tourism”

This paper advances queer methodologies by looking at how websites generated in Thailand to attract Western medical tourists depict bodies in transition: both from the perspectives of sex/gender surgeries and transnational travel. The tools of digital humanities enable database collection and cultural studies claims about the shifting strategies and multiple translations deployed.

Friday, Dec 7, 2012, 12-2pm
Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Conference Room
Kresge Hall, 1880 Campus Drive, #2-360
For more information, please visit www.nudhl.net. If you have any questions, please contact co-convener Michael Kramer, mjk@northwestern.edu.
NUDHL is supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, The Graduate School, History Department, American Studies Program.

FYI: THATCamp Jewish Studies, Chicago IL, 12/16/12

Michael J. Kramer

THATCamp Jewish Studies, Chicago IL, 12/16/12
http://jewishstudies2012.thatcamp.org

We are pleased to announce the first THATCamp Jewish Studies, to be held during the Association for Jewish Studies 44th Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. THATCamp Jewish Studies will run from 9:00am-12:30pm on Sunday, December 16th at the Sheraton Chicago. Registration is free if you are already registered for the AJS Annual Conference. Registration is $15 if you are not attending the AJS Conference.
What is a THATCamp?

THATCamp stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp.” It’s a small, informal meeting where humanists, social scientists, and technologists of all skill levels can explore issues related to Jewish Studies, technology, and digital media. There are no formal presentations or prepared lectures; rather, THATCamp attendees create sessions, ideas, and collaborations on the spot and learn directly from one another. Amanda French, THATCamp Coordinator and Research Assistant Professor at George Mason University, will assist participants with the session planning process both before and during THATCamp Jewish Studies. Sessions topics may include any question, theme, or project related to Jewish Studies, technology, and digital media. THATCamp is a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Learn more about THATCamps across the humanities at http://thatcamp.org.

Registration for and further information about THATCamp Jewish Studies can be found at http://jewishstudies2012.thatcamp.org.

Reading Digital Sources from Ben Schmidt, Sapping Attention Blog

Michael J. Kramer

We need to rejuvenate three traditional practices: first, a source criticism that explains what’s in the data; second, a hermeneutics that lets us read data into a meaningful form; and third, situated argumentation that ties the data in to live questions in their field.

— Ben Schmidt, “Reading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs,” http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html

 

Discovery vs. Justification

Michael J. Kramer

The always-sharp Trevor Owens:

Discovery and Justification are Different: Notes on Science-ing the Humanities

which builds upon one of the suggested NUDHL readings from our last gathering:

Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing (Spring 2012 version),” in Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, ed. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/data/gibbs-owens-2012-spring/.

 

Kramer’s Capsule Reading Reviews

Michael J. Kramer

Ch. 5, Ramsay and Rockwell, “Developing Things”

“building as a distinct form of scholarly endeavor” (77)…”a prototype is a theory.” – Manovich (77)…”theories thus become instruments” – William James (79)…”The question, rather, is whether the manipulation of features, objects, and states of interest using the language of coding or programming (however abstracted by graphical systems) constitutes theorizing” (83)…”so we may substitute ‘What happens when building takes the place of writing?’ as a replacement for ‘Is building scholarship?'” (82-83)

Ch. 6, Drucker, “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship”

“Have the humanities had any impact on the digital environment? Can we create graphical interfaces and digital platforms from humanistic methods?” (85)…”we have rarely imagined creating computational protocols grounded in humanistic theory and methods” (86)…spatial and temporal modeling (90-94)…replacing “what is?” with “what if?” (92)…”flexible metrics, variable, discontinuous, and multi-dimensional” (94)

Ch. 7, Bianco, “This Digital Humanities Which is Not One”

“Does the digital humanities need an ethology or an ethical turn? Simply put, yes.” (97)…”This is a rant against the wielding of computation and code as instrumental, socially neutral or benevolent, and theoretically and politically transparent…” (100)…”composing creative critical media” (102)…”rather than aesthetics rationally locating the innate beauty of a thing, aesthetics works procedurally in the organization of perception as an affective and embodied process. It designs and executes that which can be experienced as synaesthetically (aurally, visibly, and tacitly) legible. To intervene or critique social or political relations means to create work that offers a critical redistribution of the senses. Representational criticism, such as interpretive analysis, does not address work at the level of ontology, the body, the affective, and the sensible. In order to get to sensation and perception, a more materially robust mode of critique is necessary” (105)…”assemblage theory” (106)…”compositionism” not as a “critique of critique” but “a reuse of critique” – Latour (107)…”Critique’s primary action is that of exposure, and if informatic technologies have altered one aspect of politics and culture it would be a reconfiguration of what is exposed and exposable and what remains illegibly layered–not veiled. The Internet and digital technologies provide a set of platforms and affordances for exposing human actions and older, analog, informative archives (alphabetic documentation, legal records, etc.) superbly.” (108)…”We live exposed. Might we begin to experiment with ways to shift or move out of the utopian ideal of unveiling the already unveiled, executed through acts of destructive creation, to take up the troubling disjuncture between what is felt and what is real and to move from interrogative readings to interactive, critical ‘reuse’ compositions through what Latour terms a ‘progressivism’ that is predicated on immanence and upon what I would argue are nontrivially changed material conditions?” (108)….”Digital and computational modes are embedded, object oriented, networked, enacted, and relational. The digital humanities is one subset of computational and digitally mediated practices, though its current discursive regime articulates itself as an iteration of the one world, a world both felt and real.” (109)…”work in computation and digital media is, in fact, a radically heterogeneous and a multimodally layered—read, not visible—set of practices, constraints, and codifications that operate below the level of user interaction. In this layered invisibility lies our critical work” (109).

Ch. 8, McCarty, “A Telescope for the Mind?”

what is computing in and of the humanities for? Are we for drudgery? If not, with regards to the humanities, what are we for? (120)

Blog posts, Scheinfeldt, “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?”; Hall, “Has Critical Theory Run Out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship?”; Hall, “There Are No Digital Humanities”

method vs. theory

Ch. 24, Parry, “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism”

My hope is that DH can be something more than text analysis done more quickly (434)…use of Benjamin’s method, rather than ask is photography art? ask what does having the photograph do to our conception of art? (435)…”ontology” (436)…”The digital changes what it means to be human and by extension what it means to study the humanities” (436)…”digital humanities is an understanding of new modes of scholarship, as a change not only in tools and objects but in scholarship itself” (436)

Ch. 29, Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”

“How the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today’s great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital is thus a question rarely heard in the digital humanities…” (491)…from one poem to “the archive, corpus, or network” (494)…from block quotations to graphs and charts (494)…”the insecurity of the digital humanities about instrumentalism” (499)…”rethink the idea of instrumentality” (501)

A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis, 11/14

Michael J. Kramer

Subject: A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis – SRTS event Nov 14th

 

Please join us for the last Scholarly Resources & Technology Series event of the fall quarter:

 

A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis

 

Date: Wednesday, Nov 14th

Time:  5:00pm to 6:00pm

 

Using computers to analyze and visualize literary texts is a practice with a long history in the digital humanities. This presentation outlines that history and also explores a few of the latest digital tools enabling scholars to use computational methods to analyze individual texts and corpora. The presentation will use Jade Werner’s work on the revision history of Lady Morgan’s Luxima,The Prophetess (1859). No programming experience required.

 

Presenters: 

Jade Werner, Doctoral Student, English Department

Josh Honn, Digital Scholarship Fellow, Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation

 

Registration not required. 

 

—————-

Also a reminder for this Friday’s event at noon in the Library Forum Room

 

Professor Owen encourages you to bring your iPad to follow along.

 

 

Sincerely,

Scholarly Resources & Technology Series team

 

 

X-Post: Notes on McGann’s Radiant Textuality

Michael J. Kramer

X-posted from Issues in Digital History.

I am going to write a longer commentary on Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (Palgrave, 2001) in an upcoming post, but a few sections of his preface and introduction (“Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993-2000) are striking for how relevant they remain over ten years after he wrote the book:

McGann organizes his book around two main arguments:

The first is that understanding the structure of digital space requires a disciplined aesthetic intelligence. Because our most developed models for that kind of intelligence are textual models, we would be foolish indeed not to study those models in the closest possible ways. Our minds think in textual codes. Because the most advanced forms of textual codings are what we call ‘poetical,’ the study and application of digital codings summons us to new investigations into our textual inheritance (xi).

McGann’s second argument is as follows:

Digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials, and on certain specialized problems in computational stylistics and linguistics. In this respect the work rarely engages those questions about interpretation and self-aware reflection that are the central concerns for most humanities scholars and educators. Digital technology has remained instrumental in serving the technical and precritical occupations of librarians and archivists and editors. But the general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology seriously until one demonstrates how its tools improve the ways we explore and explain aesthetic works—until, that is, they expand our interpretational procedures [italics in original] (xi-xii).

Here is McGann asking 11 years ago that we not view the computer in opposition to the book, but as a continuation of the history of the book. Perhaps more crucially, he argues that we should fit what would become known, a few short years later, as the digital humanities (not yet a popular term for the field in 2001) into the critical traditions of inquiry that are the precinct of modern humanities scholars:

We have to break away from questions like ‘will the computer replace the book?’ So much more interesting are the intellectual opportunities that open at a revelatory historical moment such as we are passing through. These opportunities come with special privileges for certain key disciplines—now, for engineering, for the sciences, for certain areas of philosophy (studies in logic), and the social sciences (cognitive modeling). But unapparent as it may at first seem, scholarship devoted to aesthetic materials has never been more needed than at this historical moment (xii).

To the end of developing “scholarship devoted to aesthetic materials,” McGann posits the following imagined debate between a pro-digital humanities scholar and an anti-digital humanities scholar:

Computational systems…are designed to negotiate disambiguated, fully commensurable signifying structures.

‘Indeed! And so why should machines of that kind hold any positive interest for humanities scholars, whose attention is always focused on human ambiguities and incommensurables?’

‘Indeed! But why not also ask: How shall these machines be made to operate in a world that functions through such ambiguities and incommensurable?’ (xiv).

Finally, McGann notices how the digital humanities potentially reunites what Nietzsche divided into the “Lower Criticism” of philology with the “Higher Criticism” of historicism and aesthetic inquiry. The digital does not reduce the critical insights of “Higher Criticism,” McGann believes; rather, it asks, perhaps even demands, that humanities scholars reimagine the higher levels of advanced critical inquiry in relation to the fundamentally transformed foundations of “Lower Criticism” when those foundations of text, source, evidence, archive are placed into the digital medium:

In our day the authority of this Nietzschean break has greatly diminished. Modern computational tools are extremely apt to execute one of the two permanent functions of scholarly criticism—the editorial and the archival function, the remembrance of things past. So great is their aptitude in this foundational area that we stand on the edge of a period that will see the complete editorial transformation of our inherited cultural archive. That event is neither a possibility nor a likelihood; it is a certainty. As it emerges around us, it exposes our need for critical tools of the same material and formal order that can execute our other permanent scholarly function: to imagine what we don’t know in a disciplined and deliberated fashion. How can digital tools be made into prothetic extensions of that demand for critical reflection? (18).

Performing and Deforming the Humanities?

Michael J. Kramer

During our first meeting, we did not get to discuss the additional readings from Mark Sample and Tom Scheinfeldt fully. Perhaps we can use our blog to do so?

So much emerging talk of digital humanities scholarship is focused on the line between the humanities and the sciences/math through “big data,” data-mining, and macro-scale analysis of corpora or large bodies of text or information. But these articles bring us to that other, often fraught boundary: the one between the humanities and the arts.

What do you think of Sample’s call for a “deformed humanities,” with all the possibilities it opens up and the problems it raises? What do you think of Scheinfeldt’s interest in a “performance humanities” pursued through digital technology?