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X-Post: Notes on McGann’s Radiant Textuality
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?
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?
- Mark Sample, “Notes Toward a Deformed Humanities,”http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/, 2 May 2012; ”Scholarly Lies and the Deformed Humanities,” http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/17/scholarly-lies-and-the-deformative-humanities/, Sample Reality Blog, 17 May 2012.
- Tom Scheinfeldt, “Game Change: Digital Technology and Performative Humanities,” 15 February 2012, Found History Blog, http://www.foundhistory.org/2012/02/15/game-change-digital-technology-and-performative-humanities/.
HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL
We are delighted to welcome our 11 (!) HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL. The HASTAC Scholars come from a wide range of fields across the humanities and will be contributing to both the NUDHL blog and the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) forums this academic year. The HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL are:
- Emily Vanburen, History
- Aaron Greenberg, English
- Amanda Kleintop, History
- Kendall Krawchuk, Slavic Languages & Literatures
- Sarah Roth, English
- Beth Corzo-Duchardt, Screen Cultures
- Lisa Kelly, Theatre and Drama
- Kevin Baker, History
- Raff Donelson, Philosophy
- Juliana Serôa da Motta Lugão, Spanish and Portuguese
- Jade Werner, English
Notecards & Cowboy Hats
How do we not only take notes, but also take note of the ways that the digital transforms the research process?
At the tail-end of our first meeting, Justin Joyce brought up the question of how he might apply the digital to his collection of notecards that attempt to codify whether the good and bad guys indeed wore white or black hats in classic Western films.
At first, we pondered how computational power might not be very adept at addressing the difficult questions of judging the good guys from the bad (not that people are that skilled at this task all the time either!). This is, of course, one of the key questions about thinking through algorithmic analysis. But then we began to talk about more than just how the digital is not some kind of positivistic fantasy of attaining definitive analysis. We also broached the question of wether new modes of presenting research in digital form might provide fresh possibilities for the ways that argument look, feel, and what they ultimately mean. Could Justin do something interesting merely by scanning his original notecards and presenting his findings in the digital medium in ways that might produce new perspectives on his research question?
This part of our conversation came back to mind for me when I recently browsed a few blog posts by Rachel Leow (thanks to Josh Honn for the link), Matthew Kirshenbaum, Sasha Hoffman, and Thomas Riley. These posts all relate efforts to use both analog and digital modes of note taking in their research. Tools used: DevonThink, Scrivener, Zotero, Evernote, among others. I share these musings with graduate students, librarians, and tech folks among us as potentially useful explorations of what we might call “the question of the digital note.” It strikes me that this is not only a practical issue of managing research, but also a question of how the structure of the research process in the digital medium might inspire new ideas, approaches, questions—in short the research process, transferred into the digital in more consciously developed ways, might lead to new kinds of findings.
DH: Interests and Concerns
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
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
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
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
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…
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?
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.