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jatolbert

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: A Genealogy of Distant Reading - 0 views

  • Because Radway’s voice is candid and engaging, the book may not always sound like social science.
    • jatolbert
       
      I wonder what social science he's been reading.
  • In calling this approach minimally "scientific," I don’t mean to imply that we must suddenly adopt all the mores of chemists, or even psychologists
    • jatolbert
       
      And yet the effect is the same: scientizing processes and products which by their very natures as human works resist scientific analysis.
  • social science
    • jatolbert
       
      Again, this is a very different social science from that in which I received my own training, which has long held to the notion that objectivity is not only unobtainable, but undesirable.
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  • But computational methods now matter deeply for literary history, because they can be applied to large digital libraries, guided by a theoretical framework that tells us how to pose meaningful questions on a social scale.
    • jatolbert
       
      I wonder about this. Is he suggesting that examining a large corpus of published works is the same as examining an entire society? This would seem to ignore issues of access and audience, literacy, representation, etc.
  • The term digital humanities stages intellectual life as a dialogue between humanists and machines. Instead of explicitly foregrounding experimental methods, it underlines a boundary between the humanities and social science.
  • Conflations of that kind could begin to create an unproductive debate, where parties to the debate fail to grasp the reason for disagreement, because they misunderstand each other’s real positions and commitments.
    • jatolbert
       
      Similar to the conflation of sociology with all of the social sciences.
  • the past
    • jatolbert
       
      Is it appropriate to conflate the -literary- past with -the past-? That is, can any study based wholly on texts claim to be in any way representative of things outside the sphere of what we call "literature"?
jatolbert

The "Digital" Scholarship Disconnect | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • Digital scholarship is an incredibly awkward term that people have come up with to describe a complex group of developments. The phrase is really, at some basic level, nonsensical. After all, scholarship is scholarship. Doing science is doing science. We don't find the Department of Digital Physics arguing with the Department of Non–Digital Physics about who's doing "real" physics.
  • Soon, people wanted to start talking more broadly about newly technology-enabled scholarly work, not just in science; in part this was because of some very dramatic and high-visibility developments in using digital technology in various humanistic investigations. To do so, they came up with the neologisms we enjoy today—awful phrases like e-scholarship and digital scholarship.Having said that, I do view the term digital scholarship basically as shorthand for the entire body of changing scholarly practice, a reminder and recognition of the fact that most areas of scholarly work today have been transformed, to a lesser or greater extent, by a series of information technologies: High-performance computing, which allows us to build simulation models and to conduct very-large-scale data analysis Visualization technologies, including interactive visualizations Technologies for creating, curating, and sharing large databases and large collections of data High-performance networking, which allows us to share resources across the network and to gain access to experimental or observational equipment and which allows geographically dispersed individuals to communicate and collaborate; implicit here are ideas such as the rise of lightweight challenge-focused virtual organizations
  • We now have enormous curated databases serving various disciplines: GenBank for gene sequences; the Worldwide Protein Data Bank for protein structures; and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and planned successors for (synoptic) astronomical observations. All of these are relied upon by large numbers of working scientists. Yet the people who compiled these databases are often not regarded by their colleagues as "real" scientists but, rather, as "once-scientists" who got off-track and started doing resource-building for the community. And it's true: many resource-builders don't have the time to be actively doing science (i.e., analysis and discovery); instead, they are building and enabling the tools that will advance the collective scientific enterprise in other, less traditional ways. The academic and research community faces a fundamental challenge in developing norms and practices that recognize and reward these essential contributions.This idea—of people not doing "real" research, even though they are building up resources that can enable others to do research—has played out as well in the humanities. The humanists have often tried to make a careful distinction between the work of building a base of evidence and the work of interpreting that evidence to support some particular analysis, thesis, and/or set of conclusions; this is a little easier in the humanities because the scale of collaboration surrounding emerging digital resources and their exploitation for scholarship is smaller (contrast this to the literal "cast of thousands" at CERN) and it's common here to see the leading participants play both roles: resource-builder and "working" scholar.
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  • Still, in all of these examples of digital scholarship, a key challenge remains: How can we curate and manage data now that so much of it is being produced and collected in digital form? How can we ensure that it will be discovered, shared, and reused to advance scholarship?
  • On a final note, I have talked above mostly about changes in the practice of scholarship. But changes in the practice of scholarship need to go hand-in-hand with changes in the communication and documentation of scholarship.
  •  
    Interesting short piece on challenges of digital scholarship
Leslie Harris

Computing Crime and Punishment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    The article discusses a computer-based analysis of word use in the court reports of trials at the Old Bailey from 1674 through 1913.
jatolbert

The Digital-Humanities Bust - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • To ask about the field is really to ask how or what DH knows, and what it allows us to know. The answer, it turns out, is not much. Let’s begin with the tension between promise and product. Any neophyte to digital-humanities literature notices its extravagant rhetoric of exuberance. The field may be "transforming long-established disciplines like history or literary criticism," according to a Stanford Literary Lab email likely unread or disregarded by a majority in those disciplines. Laura Mandell, director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University, promises to break "the book format" without explaining why one might want to — even as books, against all predictions, doggedly persist, filling the airplane-hanger-sized warehouses of Amazon.com.
  • A similar shortfall is evident when digital humanists turn to straight literary criticism. "Distant reading," a method of studying novels without reading them, uses computer scanning to search for "units that are much smaller or much larger than the text" (in Franco Moretti’s words) — tropes, at one end, genres or systems, at the other. One of the most intelligent examples of the technique is Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper’s 2016 Atlantic article, "How Has the MFA Changed the American Novel?" (based on their research for articles published in academic journals). The authors set out to quantify "how similar authors were across a range of literary aspects, including diction, style, theme, setting." But they never cite exactly what the computers were asked to quantify. In the real world of novels, after all, style, theme, and character are often achieved relationally — that is, without leaving a trace in words or phrases recognizable as patterns by a program.
  • Perhaps toward that end, So, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, wrote an elaborate article in Critical Inquiry with Hoyt Long (also of Chicago) on the uses of machine learning and "literary pattern recognition" in the study of modernist haiku poetry. Here they actually do specify what they instructed programmers to look for, and what computers actually counted. But the explanation introduces new problems that somehow escape the authors. By their own admission, some of their interpretations derive from what they knew "in advance"; hence the findings do not need the data and, as a result, are somewhat pointless. After 30 pages of highly technical discussion, the payoff is to tell us that haikus have formal features different from other short poems. We already knew that.
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  • The outsized promises of big-data mining (which have been a fixture in big-figure grant proposals) seem curiously stuck at the level of confident assertion. In a 2011 New Left Review article, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," Moretti gives us a promissory note that characterizes a lot of DH writing: "One day, after we add to these skeletons the layers of direction, weight and semantics, those richer images will perhaps make us see different genres — tragedies and comedies; picaresque, gothic, Bildungsroman … — as different shapes; ideally, they may even make visible the micro-patterns out of which these larger network shapes emerge." But what are the semantics of a shape when measured against the tragedy to which it corresponds? If "shape" is only a place-holder meant to allow for more-complex calculations of literary meaning (disburdened of their annoyingly human baggage), by what synesthetic principle do we reconvert it into its original, now reconfigured, genre-form? It is not simply that no answers are provided; it is that DH never asks the questions. And without them, how can Moretti’s "one day" ever arrive?
  • For all its resources, the digital humanities makes a rookie mistake: It confuses more information for more knowledge. DH doesn’t know why it thinks it knows what it does not know. And that is an odd place for a science to be.
jatolbert

Open Stacks: Making DH Labor Visible ← dh+lib - 1 views

  • When infrastructure is understood as an irrational social formation, emotional labor tends to compensate for a perceived lack of resources. Scholars who are used to the invisibility of traditional library services, for instance, find that digital projects expose hierarchies and bureaucracies that they don’t want to negotiate or even think about, and the DH librarian or one of her colleagues steps in to run interference. Why can’t the dean of libraries just tell that department to create the metadata for my project? After all, they already create metadata for the library’s systems. Why can’t web programming be a service you provide to me like interlibrary loan? I thought the library was here to support my scholarship. Why can’t you maintain my website after I retire–exactly the way it looks and feels today, plus update it as technology changes? In some conversations, these questions may be rhetorical; it may take emotional labor to answer them, but doing so exposes the workings of the library’s infrastructure–its social stack.
    • jatolbert
       
      More conflation of DH with all digital scholarship
  • How does DH fit within this megastructure? According to some critics, DH is part of the problem of the neoliberal university because it privileges networked, collaborative scholarship over individual production. If creating a tool (hacking) or using computational methods has the same scholarly significance as writing a monograph, then individualized knowledge pursued for its own sake, the struggle at the heart of humanistic inquiry, is devalued. Yet writing a book always depended on invisible (gendered) labor in the academy. Word processing, library automation, and widespread digitization are just three examples of the support labor for traditional scholarly work that Bratton’s globalized technology Stack has absorbed. (And we know that the fruits of that labor are in no way distributed equitably.) What has changed in the neoliberal university is that the humanities scholar becomes one more node in a knowledge-producing system. Does it matter, then, whether DH work produces ideas or things, critics say, if all are absorbed into a totalizing system that elides the individual scholar’s privileged position? This is of course a vision of scholarship that is traditionally specific to the humanities; lab science and the performing arts, for example, have always been deeply collaborative (but with their own systems of privilege and credit).
  • DH librarians, whose highly collaborative work is dedicated to social justice and public engagement, may be one particularly vital community of practice for exposing the changing conditions that create knowledge.
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  • like the fish who asks “what is water?”–most scholars are unaware of the extent to which their work, professional interactions, and finances are imbricated with the global technology Stack.
    • jatolbert
       
      Also not sure that this is true.
  • Many DH programs, initiatives, and teams have arisen organically out of social connections rather than centralized planning.
  • the myth of scarcity
  • Scholars often presume that because libraries acquire, shelve, and preserve the print books that they write, that the same libraries will acquire, shelve (or host), and preserve digital projects.
    • jatolbert
       
      This is a natural assumption, and in fact is true in many cases.
  • digital scholarship
  • DH
  • digital scholarship
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