I know a few undergraduates have attended NUDHL events, and I’m guessing many of NUDHLs regulars work with and teach undergraduates, so this may be of interest. Loyola University’s MA in Digital Humanities is fantastic, as is its Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. Forwarding on this note from Steve Jones:

Dear colleagues,

A reminder that now is the time for applications to the MA program in Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago (for fall 2013 semester). Information on the curriculum is available at the CTSDH website:

http://www.ctsdh.luc.edu/ma_digital_humanities

And that page also contains a link to the free online application:

http://www.luc.edu/gradschool/application/procedures.shtml?application=/gradschool/application/biology.shtml

Please refer interested students to the program and encourage them to email me directly with any questions.

With thanks,

Steve

—–

Steven Jones
Professor of English
Co-Director, CTSDH
Loyola University Chicago
http://stevenejones.org

The Searle Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning is hosting a workshop for graduate TAs and instructors, “Pedagogy in the Digital Age,” on April 18th, 5:00-7:00pm. Come learn about how to incorporate new technologies and tools into your classroom teaching! Panelists include NUDHL conveners, Michael Kramer and Jillana Enteen, as well as Josh Honn (Digital Scholarship Fellow, NU Library) and Beth Corzo-Duchardt (Gender Studies TA and HASTAC Scholar).  For registration and further information, please visit the Searle Center workshops website:

http://www.northwestern.edu/searle/calendar/index.html#tab3

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Michael gave a fantastic talk on Alan Lomax and Harry Smith today. I was struck by Lomax’s role as an unwitting anthropologist who took up in the 60s and 70s (what must have appeared to be) a deeply suspect, almost neocolonial project to categorize and staticize world music and dance. As one astute commenter on BoingBoing puts it, Lomax “seemed to hold his subjects in contempt […] preferring to keep his ‘peasants under glass.'” His cosmopolitan and, as Michael termed it, “democratic” vision must have seemed dangerously close to that of the cosmopolite cum cultural imperialist, a position Derrida ventriloquizes best: “I am (we are) all the more national for being European, all the more European for being trans-European and international; no one is more cosmopolitan and authentically universal than the one, than this ‘we,’ who is speaking to you.” Okay. So that’s one way to think of Lomax: as engaging in a specific type of anthropological project, a type of project that (thanks to Clifford Geertz and the publication of Malinowski’s diary) was passing out of style at the time and had become deeply morally suspect.

Michael’s talk also suggested to me another way of thinking about Lomax. Rather than only seeing him as carrying the torch for an anthropological approach and perspective that would soon–and rightly–come under attack, we can also see him as a precursor to what Franco Moretti calls “distant reading.” That is, Lomax’s Global Jukebox anticipates, and perhaps in part is the inspiration for, a style of scholarship popular today, one which privileges connection over content, the collective system over the individual item.

I wonder if Lomax is a link between a discredited perspective in anthropology and perhaps its revivification in the field of digital humanities and literary studies. I wonder what this tells us about the new privileging of  “networks,” “interconnectedness,” and “systems” made possible by digital technologies and expanding sets of data. I wonder what this tells us about the unconscious assumptions we hold when we approach and try to parse this data.

Significantly, as the Q&A to Michael’s talk made clear, the Cantometrics coding system that Lomax pioneered was designed to forge connections; in other words, the 37 criteria did not reflect, so much as they created, patterns and commonalities among disparate musical cultures. The same (as Moretti admits) goes for distant reading; the criteria, the units of analyses, imposed upon texts necessarily yields connections and patterns because that’s what they are designed to do. They create the supposedly “objective” connections they are looking for (Moretti flirts with objectivity, I think). Lomax’s Cantometrics, as Michael noted, appear dated, arbitrary, and a bit bound up in assumptions of the cultural superiority of Western mode of measuring “difference” and “commonality.” As inspirational as Lomax clearly is as a sort of proto-digitalist, I wonder if he is also a cautionary tale, making visible the pitfalls inherent in today’s digitally-driven “distant” scholarship.

The MLA has developed a “Commons” (like creative commons) and their newly launched publication is Literary Studies in the Digital Age. It’s an evolving anthology devised to keep the Modern Language Association engaging with the DH.

One contribution, David L. Hoover’s “Textual Analysis” is particularly worth visiting. It engages nicely with our last NuDHL meeting and with how we might use digital tools in literary scholarship.

Here’s the link: http://dlsanthology.commons.mla.org/textual-analysis/