research

WGBH Media Library and Archives

Beth Corzo-Duchardt

From: Allison Pekel <allison_pekel@wgbh.org>
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 12:04 PM

I am working with a project that I thought might be of interest to the
American History Community.

I work for WGBH, Boston in the Media Library and Archive and the Archive
has been funded by the Mellon Foundation to work with academic scholars who
have interest in utilizing our moving image and sound materials through the
course of their research. We hope to increase public awareness of the vast
collections that digital repositories hold by publishing our entire
archival catalogue online, for open access and use.

Placing the catalogue online however is only the first step, as records may
be incomplete or misleading. To help enhance the quality of our records, we
are inviting scholars, teachers and students to research our catalogue and
contribute their own discoveries and findings back to us. There are even
limited opportunities there to catalogue and curate an online collection
specific to your field of research as part of Open Vault (
http://openvault.wgbh.org<http://openvault.wgbh.org/>). Final products
could include essays on your topic, streaming public access to one
selection of media in your collection, supplying metadata for the items in
your collection and/or presenting your findings at a conference.

As a producer of Frontline and Boston Local News, we have quite a few
materials in the American History genre, so if you have an ongoing research
project and would consider utilizing moving image and sound materials in
your work, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Allison Pekel
WGBH Media Library and Archives
Allison_Pekel@WGBH.org

Discovery vs. Justification

Michael J. Kramer

The always-sharp Trevor Owens:

Discovery and Justification are Different: Notes on Science-ing the Humanities

which builds upon one of the suggested NUDHL readings from our last gathering:

Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing (Spring 2012 version),” in Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, ed. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/data/gibbs-owens-2012-spring/.

 

Notecards & Cowboy Hats

Michael J. Kramer

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.

Meeting #1 Reflections

Michael J. Kramer

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?