(Hello fellow NUDHL-ers. I came across an article and wanted to share it with all of you. I’m interested to know what everyone makes of it. I’m cross-posting to the HASTAC website as well. Happy Thanksgiving!)

President of the AHA and American environmental historian William Cronon recently published an intriguing piece in the November issue of Perspectives on History. In “Recollecting My Library . . . and My Self,” Cronon ponders what is lost in the transition from material text to digital text. His own interests in senses of place and the nature of storytelling really shape this piece, and I found it a very compelling claim about the potential pitfalls of our embrace of the digital. I thought it would be worth sharing, to see what others make of this.

He points out a few dangers that the “digital revolution” poses to “building personal libraries.” As others have pointed out before him, the ease of retrieving information has fundamentally transformed the research process. Cronon also points out that the digital turn imperils a source’s context, comparing the ease of computer searching with a return to the Roman scroll. He discusses his own difficulties in locating a piece of information that he’s already collected in a digital storehouse vs. a material library. I think Cronon is signaling toward important problems here, and I wonder how other researchers (not just historians) are grappling with these same challenges in their use of the digital. Cronon somberly points out that digital evidence gathering is forcing a change in how historians conceive of themselves through their research processes:

“This lifelong process of creating a scholarly self by means of an intellectual and emotional journey whose way-stations are marked by passionately remembered texts — many of them so dear to us that we keep them close to us for our entire lives — is being transformed in the fragmented world of search and scroll that has become our dominant metaphor for knowledge itself.”

If this transformation (which reads to me, in this account, as something woefully lost) is inevitable, as Cronon claims, what are we to do about it? He points out that what is at stake in this transformation is not just a form of practice but a sense of identity. So how are digital researchers to maintain their “memory palaces,” as Cronon calls them? How are we to construct these palaces at all? If the materiality of the research process is being lost, is it also being replaced? Is there a materiality to the digitized research process? Is the memory palace still there, but in a different form? Can we still construct a scholarly sense of self when the trek to the archive is not a journey to a foreign country, but the act of opening a laptop? Can we maintain a sense of context through the iPad?

I’m eager to hear what others have to say about this transformation.

The other night, Jade Werner  and I presented “A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis.” Attendance was strong and the post-presentation discussion lively and we’d like to share our work as broadly as possible. The link below features the presentation slides, full transcript of our remarks, and links to our live collation and analysis environments using Juxta Commons andVoyant Tools. The presentation (a) introduces our the object/subject of our study, (b) outlines a brief history of text analysis, (c) discusses and displays new digital tools, and (d) outlines popular text analysis methodologies.

This presentation came about through a collaboration between Jade and I on her wonderful scholarship on the two versions of the Lady Morgan novel The Missionary (1811) and its edited version Luxima, The Prophetess (1859). Having cleaned up the texts, we are now exploring new interpretations enabled and enhanced by online text analysis tools. Please take a look and feel free to get in touch with us with any questions/comments.

http://cscdc.northwestern.edu/blog/?p=687

Emily, it’s too bad you weren’t with us on Friday to add to the conversation. (This began as a response to your post, but it became too long.) A lot of the points you mentioned in your post truly resonated with me as well – especially the notion of ‘building things’ as scholarship, which to me suggests several possibilities for study as we explore departures from an era of mainly discursive inquiry (high theory being especially possible in an era of ‘invisible’ print) to a very material time marked by varieties of communicative technologies that mingle, compete, succeed, and fail at different times. I’m borrowing much of this from Ramsay and Rockwell, who of course suggest the possibility of ‘building things’ as a new direction for scholarship.

Perhaps building things, then, rather than arguments, is a productive direction for the future of the academy, although our things will certainly be invested with arguments in some way. In this sense I think I’m approaching DH from a different perspective than Jillana, though I am not at all resistant to developing a new theoretical framework along the way. I do think however that I’m probably motivated toward the material possibilities of DH by three things: 1) my anxieties about the futures of academic labor; 2) my (measured) optimism for the possibilities of digital humanism, especially re: cultivating a public audience; 3) following my interest in the history of printing and bookmaking, my desire to consider the ‘electronic revolution’ as historically contingent, but also the latest link in a communications continuum (contra Parry, 435). These motivations touch on issues such as power (in the academy, not in society) and legitimacy of academic work, which I hope we discuss at more depth at the next meeting. I think it merits some attention, and I think I speak for the graduate students here. The problem of evaluation of digital work is complex, as Ramsay and Rockwell rightly recognize (76), but it has every consequence for humanistic study if “To ask whether coding is a scholarly act is like asking whether writing is a scholarly act” (82). Juliana, you expressed similar concerns in your post and at the table. I agree with you that they introduce a variety of dilemmas, however important ones. I was also glad to speak with Amanda after the last session about some of these issues (and much of what I write here came up as we spoke).

In the first decades of printing, the press was glorified as a divine miracle (and condemned as demonic), but four centuries later it was (generally) taken for granted, invisible. If we only began to reconsider the printed book as a technology because of our recent saturation in consumer electronics, perhaps the future will bring with it a regularization (in copyright, habituation, etc) that will render the internet more ‘invisible’ than it seems today. I have no way to predict the future, of course, but if this could be the case, I think it makes sense to wonder about what scholarship we can build for the future, especially as a young scholar anxious to benefit from the digital tools around me and to give back to the greater community. In other words, I think we as humanists seriously need to consider building things in the attempt to sustain intellectual inquiry, and that we should regard this direction not so much a concession to a neoliberal turn, but to act constructively and publicly in what is merely a new, if unstable and constantly developing, communicative environment. It will be hard, though – clicking “publish” after writing these posts always brings me anxiety!

Themes:

DH as Lens-light-way of thinking parry 431, 436 R&R 79,

Digital as object of study vs. set of tolls for humanistic inquiry Parry 433

DH to expalnd digital tech to interpretational procedures

DH relationship between tools and theory

New textual methodology requires redeployment of textual analysis models

Building/hacking/interpretation issues (i.e. can one interpret DH without making the tools)

Building/hacking/creation as theory

Sorting, access, dissemination vs. interpretation, self evident reflection central to Humanities

How do computers allow Humanities ambiguity and incommensurability?

Culture studies model–high/low culture divide through interpretation and coding?

Break down saying and doing/ praxis & theory

Humanities/post-humanities, human (435-6) 437 Drucker 87 (dismisses) humanists not problematizing DH.

Social integrations/ inclusion such as metaphors for labor vs. feminized humanities offering race/gender/class critiques through DH (Bianco 98, 99) Liu, Chapin, Cecire

BREAK OUT:

LEGITIMACY–professional, academic, intellectual Inclusion: is everything digitial enhanced DH.

Does a DH text online make a text “richer” than a pdf? Further exploration of above topics addressed or overlooked

Hi all, long time no see. i’m looking forward to the discussion ina few hours. One of the chapters we are reading for this second meeting is Alan Liu’s “Where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?”. Some great points abouthaving to think not only how to reach society, but the impacts in the new modes of life and discourse were very well put, but I think we could elaborate on that in the discussion. Again, as in many texts, the question of someone having to be able to code to be considered a digital humanist arises (in this text in form of an anecdote). I’m still undecided about this. i like to think of myself as a humanist that has a huge interest on the digital impact in my field of study, which is certainly changing, and therefore i have take part on discussions on digital humanities. If I am going digital? Well, who isn’t? (even though Blackboard is not the best platform ever created…).
And now, for the digital humanists that can code: could a critical, analytical scholarly work come in digital form? (not Pdfs etc), really use tha tools to enhance the knowledge being presented. My question, besides of coming from the readings for this session, has been in my mind for a while now. I’m in the process of creating a magazine/ journal in my Home Dep. And we’ve had three meetings and can not come to a conclusion if a innovative digital form taht brings academic knowledge will be as seriously-taken as a old-fashioned journal (open-access, thank god, was unanimous).

I’d just like to offer a few scattered thoughts and questions about the readings for this week, to note the ideas I found most interesting. These are in no particular order, so please forgive the untidiness.

In our first meeting, Jillana declared that if our enterprise wasn’t going to offer her a new kind of theory or a fresh critical lens, she wasn’t interested in pursuing it. I found this remark ringing in my ears as I worked my way through the set of readings for this week, since many of the authors gesture toward the same dilemma. In outlining some of the arguments made for digital artifacts as scholarship or argument, Ramsay and Rockwell describe Margaret Masterman’s framing of digital tools as “‘telescopes for the mind’ that show us something in a new light” (79). McCarty also picks up on this conception of the digital, to ask, “What can the digital humanities do for the humanities as a whole that helps these disciplines improve the well-being of us all?” (119).  I’m interested in learning more about how other group members envision the digital transforming their scholarship in a way that is more than just quantitative. As an historian, how can the digital change the kinds of questions I can ask, not just with respect to scale and scope of my work? That’s part of the reason I was excited to join in this year-long discussion. I want to figure out how this can transform the way I understand and approach scholarship. (To be quite honest, I’m also interested in the way digital tools can increase my productivity and research efficiency, but I think that’s worth leaving aside for right now.)

Similarly, I’m interested in the idea (posited by Ramsay and Rockwell) that a researcher must understand the mechanics of the digital tool they’re using (its composition, function, etc.) in order for that tool to be considered a form of scholarship or argument (80-1). How does this demand for precise understanding of a digital tool interact with McCarty’s question about whether DH is just for gruntwork (“drudgery”) or for something more?

The idea of legitimacy (professional, academic, and intellectual) was another prominent theme in our last meeting, and resurfaces this week. I found one of Hall’s questions intriguing: “Is the turn toward computing just the latest manifestation of and response to this crisis of confidence in the humanities?” (134). How does everyone feel about this way of framing the computational turn?

I found Scheinfeldt’s distinction between ideas and “organizing activities” intriguing (125). I wonder if this is a problematic distinction, especially following the Ramsey/Rockwell piece, which grapples explicitly with the idea of digital artifacts as argument/theory/scholarship.

Finally, how does materiality factor into the debate about whether digital projects count as scholarship/argument, or whether DH is a legitimate field of scholarship?

These are just a few points I thought might be worth pursuing. I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on the material and debates at hand.