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.

Hi NUDHL Gang!

When we had our last text-based discussion, I found the submissions by members about themes and ideas they wanted to discuss very helpful (in case you didn’t notice when I combined them and made that list for our discussion).

As you get ready to come over to Kaplan, if anyone has anything they found more relevant or interesting and want to be sure gets attention today, please post–even if it’s list and author style like I did–before the meeting. I think this will help structure our discussion.

My initial contribution is to keep on the table the discussion some of us had after Ben Pauley:

-what constitutes scholarship

-how does DH connect or conflict with the notion of individual scholarship (hactivism could be considered along with this)

And then, from the Gold readings, which are rich with great questions:

-where can we find non-whiteness in DH? Why, as Tara asked, is embedded whiteness present? What are it’s effects? What are ways to deal with systemic white privilege in DH?

-Not only race, as George Williams suggests, but disability, gender, sex, ethnicity, nation–these have strange positionings both in code and at the user interface. How do we acknowledge this? How do we change this?

-Here’s some things I would like to unpack:

What happens when we choose a specific practice–all of which are part (or, as some argue, not part) of DH;

media specific interpretation (I call it textual analysis or close reading) ala McPherson’s UNIX example;

labor/capitalism/neo-liberal presumptions; practices such as performance (hacking in Losh) vs interpretation (i.e. textual analysis);

everyday practices of computing vs constructing the basis and logics of tools functioning (McPherson and Williams, at least);

recognition that DH must do analysis that is media specific, not use old tools of film, etc;

thinking not just about digital divide or images/info collected about non-dominant groups (race, disabilities) but inclusion in logics;

choosing not to code (Posner) because of who one is (embodiment);

rethinking embodiment, self, divisions as suggested via disability).

I’m really excited about our discussion because the encoded race, sex and gender in digital technologies is at the heart of most of what I teach. I’ll share a hardware image to give you an example. It is of male and female ports. Ports are named male and female in order to fit (guess which one is male). The same is true with hard drives. The one that turns on your computer is “master” and other hard drives available to the computer are “slaves.” Apple recently revised this terminology, but it was there until about 2005.

How do hardware stereotypes reflect the DH issues we’ll be talking about today? We are responsible for DH, if not hardware, so this is a question of profound importance to me.

Looking forward to a lively discussion!

Hey everyone, it’s a little late, I know, but Michael asked me and I agreed it would be a good idea to write about the first research presentation of 2013 in our NUDHL workshop.

Professor Ben Pauley came from the Eastern Connecticut State University to Northwestern to present a new tool he is now developing. As a member of the Defoe Society, he is developing a tool to catalogue all work that might have been written by Defoe. Just as every author in 18th century, there’s always a mystery involving the writer’s persona, the actual works. Scholars normally use word patterns to claim the authorship of an Unknown/ unsigned text, coming to the question : “If not by (DEFOE), than who?”

If we ignore possibilities of plagiarism or of having influence over other writers of his own time (as many scholars do), the number of texts attributed to Robinson Crusoe’s writer is of astronomic proportions. And that’s what Ben is trying (really, the tool is already in a soft trial, one could say) to gather with his tool. I really wish we had his visual presentation, specially the way he is thinking the cataloguing process to create a better tool. Keywords such as “work” gain a complete new meaning, especially if our reference is the cataloguing “manual” of the library of Congress.

Apart from trying to understand his new categories, we had a vivid discussion about calling the development and launching of this tool a scholarly work/ publication or not. I guess we all have been discussing it for at least a quarter now, right? If other work will be enabled by it, if the scholarship in Defoe’s studies will profit from it, and maybe be developed in ways that would otherwise be impossible, why not? His (Ben’s) first impulse was to say he would not list it as part of his scholarly publications…

Also, as co-founder of Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker (www.easternct.edu/~pauleyb/c18booktracker), an index of freely available facsimiles of eighteenth-century editions, Ben seemed a little skeptical about the future of collaborative platforms. He noted that the contributions were not as abundant as he expected. In our discussions trying to understand why, one of the hypothesis were the search for originality when, again, you want to publish a work. So people would be less willing to share their findings during research, because they can become primary materials. Well, we all know it’s how you read it and use it that counts, but the risk is considered to big. Authorship, originality and our very beloved copyright, again, ladies and gentlemen!