Kramer’s Capsule Reading Reviews

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)

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