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Nele Noppe

Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values - 1 views

www.foundhistory.org/...stuff-digital-humanists-like

digital_humanities academia humanities

shared by Nele Noppe on 06 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • there are different strains of digital humanities. Bethany might define those strains as “old” and “new.” I’d probably divide things along more disciplinary lines, looking to a tradition of digital humanities that comes out of literature and one that comes out of public history. If I had to place myself along these axes I’d probably land where the “new” and “history” strains meet. There are, of course, lots of other ways to slice the pie.
  • digital humanities starts to look a lot like a social network. Indeed, in some ways digital humanities increasingly is a social network built, for better or worse, on Twitter’s platform.
  • It takes its values from the Internet
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The procrastination principle (or “end-to-end argument”) is a design principle that states that most features of a network should be left to users to invent and implement, that the network should should be as simple as possible and that complexity should be developed at its end points not at its core, that the network should be dumb and the terminals should be smart. This is precisely how the Internet works. T
  • There is an analogous value in digital humanities. Innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations.
  • Digital humanities makes some similar assumptions in its commitments to open access, open source, and collaboration. As Bethany has said elsewhere, “how many other academic disciplines or interdisciplines work so hard to manifest as ‘a community of practice that is solidary, open, welcoming and freely accessible’ — a ‘collective experience,’ a ‘common good?’” We allow allow all comers, we assume that their contributions will be positive, and we expect that they will share their work for the benefit of the community at large.
  • It follows, therefore, that if digital humanities is a social network, then one of the things that will help us understand it better is looking at the things around which the network coalesces, the stuff digital humanists like
  • Like: Twitter / Don’t like: Facebook.
  • Like: Agile development / Dislike: long planning cycles
  • Like: DIY / Dislike: Outsourcing.
  • Like: PHP / Dislike: C++.
  • Like: Extramural funding / Dislike: Intramural funding.
Nele Noppe

Humanistic Coding? | Re-mediation Roomy-nation - 0 views

www.patrickgmj.net/186

programming humanities phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 16 May 10 - Cached

  • Humanities/Teaching Practices and Principles

    Inefficiency
    Thinking and reflection from a humanities perspective is anything but efficient. It's not about the straightest path to a goal, it's about exploring the various twists and turns along the way. Tell all the Truth, but Tell it Slant / Success in Circuit Lies.
    Specs/schmecs
    In the humanities, we want to open up as many possibilities as we can. Explore. Take a random path and see what happens. Your final draft of an analysis will always be very different from what you first thought you were going to produce.
    Complexify
    When's the last time you heard a humanist say or write, "I'd like to simplify that idea."? It's just not what we do. We like to "complicate the idea", "explore the nuances", "unpack the implicit assumptions". "Complexify".
    Scope-creep
    One of the hardest things to explain to a student in the humanities is what, exactly, it takes to move from writing a B paper to writing an A paper. If you are bold and tenured, you might tell them that they need to give "a certain 'je ne se qua'", to which the most likely response is, "WTF?". I think that what we want is scope-creep. Go beyond what we've covered in class. Explore things that you think are suggested in the assignment, but aren't explicit in the assignment. Move beyond the specs, and power through sorting out the consequences of doing so. Scope-creep is the bread-and-butter of the humanities. Maybe of any pursuit in academia, for that matter?
Nele Noppe

Information Age Without Humanities = Industrial Revolution Without Steam Engine | HASTAC - 0 views

www.hastac.org/...evolution-without-steam-engine

academia humanities fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 24 Jan 10 - Cached
  • without the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened.  Steam powered everything.  What powers the Information Age?  It's not computation--that's a foundational component but we could each have a fabulous desktop or laptop or mobile device now that connected to some gigantic All Powerful centralized mainframe and we would not have the Information Age.  
  • It's not even the Internet. 
  • What is responsible for an Information Age, where all levels of habits and procedures of communication and interaction have changed dramatically in less than two decades, is the World Wide Web. 
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The World Wide Web is the steam engine of the Information Age.  And without the humanities, virtually everything about the World Wide Web is a muddle.  All of the key issues of how knowledge is exchanged, how it is created, what its role is in the world, how it functions and changes, how one kind of idea influences another, how knowledge travels, leads to a complex History of Ideas the likes of which we have not seen before.  
  • Dinner table conversation, Berners-Lee notes in his memoir Weaving the Web, often center on the key humanities question:  what it means to be human. 
  • everything that was constantly shaped by the environment and then constantly selecting environments associationally, driven by interest, pleasure, desire, fear, superstition, belief, understanding, and other deeply human conditions that had nothing to do with even the most powerful of computers.  These humanistic questions haunted the small boy; he wanted from earliest age to make a computer that could be like the human brain.   The World Wide Web approximated that because it is based on a human, social, interactive, creative, associational concept of thought and humanity. 
  • clearly universities under stress are finding ways to cut back courses and programs and are looking at the humanities as not relevant to the student of today.  They have it entirely wrong.  The humanities are the most important tool we have for understanding, with any kind of historical perspective and critical depth, all of the new arrangements of our world, precisely because those new arrangements of our world are rooted in an associational, interactive, qualitative humanistic concept of mind and society, not in a machinic, quantitative, linear, hardwired, fixed, or even measurable computational model.  
  • Of course, I have also spent the last decade arguing that the humanities are missing the boat by not claiming our centrality to the Information Age.   This is our age, I keep saying, if only we take responsibility for our role in its shape and its future.  That's the challenge, should we choose to accept it.  
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