Posts from the ‘defining the digital humanities’ Category
The Critical Digital Humanities presents a CDH research panel with presentations by April Durham and Kimberly Hall. They will present drafts of recent research in digital humanities for discussion and comment.
Wednesday . April 10 . 12:30 – 2
English Department Conference Room
Refreshments will be served.
New CDH Talk : Production & Pedagogy with Professor James S. Tobias
February 25th, 2013
April Durham
Production and Pedagogy: Design in the Digital Humanities Classroom
Dr. James S. Tobias . Associate Professor . Department of English . UC Riverside
Thursday . March 14 . 3-4:30 pm . English Department Conference Room
Refreshments provided.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information on this and other events, please visit the website at ideasandsociaty.ucr.edu
The Critical Digital Humanities group at UCR announces a reading group:
“Rhetoric & Critical Digital Humanities Scholarship: Rethinking Interactions with Digital Scholarship in terms of Agency, Rhetorical Address, and Reception”
The readings include short articles from the recent collection Debates in the Digital Humanities. The three articles are available by emailing your RSVP. Please see the flier below for the addresses. Kimberly and Rochelle will lead the discussion
This reading group will lay the foundation for an ongoing discussion about this year’s theme addressing the rhetoric of digital humanities scholarship.
WHEN: Wednesday . January 16 TIME: 1-2:30
WHERE: English Department Conference Room . HMNSS 2212
lunch will be served!
The three articles from Debates in the Digital Humanities are also available at the links below:
Lisa Sipro, “This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities”
Alan Liu, “Where is the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities”
This event is sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Workshops in the Humanities.
This event has been rescheduled – please see this post for details:
http://cdh.ucr.edu/2013/01/06/rhetoric-and-remix-reading-group-rescheduled/
The Critical Digital Humanities group at UCR announces a reading group:
“Rhetoric & Critical Digital Humanities Scholarship: Rethinking Interactions with Digital Scholarship in terms of Agency, Rhetorical Address, and Reception”
The readings include three short articles from the recent collection Debates in the Digital Humanities and Bernard Stiegler’s book, For a New Critique of Political Economy. Participants should obtain the Stiegler book as we will be discussing it in its entirety.
This reading group will lay the foundation for an ongoing discussion about this year’s theme addressing the rhetoric of digital humanities scholarship.
WHEN: rescheduled for January 16th, 1-2:30pm
WHERE: English Department Conference Room . HMNSS 2212
lunch will be served!
This event is sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Workshops in the Humanities.
Despite its title Stephen Marche’s article, “Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities,” is more against the algorithmic era we currently live in than the digital humanities. Marche writes that “algorithms are inherently fascistic,” but the concern is really about readability.
Algorithms are a tool for distant reading, as Marche states; however, the problem arises when algorithms need to be read themselves. A close reading of an algorithm is problematic, except of course for those mathematicians, computer scientists, and other professionals trained in such procedures. Overall, it is difficult to see whether Marche is really worried about the power wielded by the creators of the algorithms, or the social acceptance of relying on algorithms in general.
The irony of Marche’s misguided polemic is its underlying call for a greater understanding of the “smooth machines” that run the algorithmic code. Instead of being against the digital humanities, Marche is really pointing to a change in modern society, a detachment from the visceral world of the analog to the somewhat intangible, but very material world of the digital.
Marche’s anxiety expresses itself first through the amorphous nature of the burgeoning digital humanities. Marche then skewers academia, complains about Google, and shudders in fear of an electronic, financial armageddon. For Marche, literature is something to be handled, touched, and loved. Data, in contrast, is lifeless, meaningless, and untrustworthy.
Algorithms are not inevitable, and they are not perfect, but they are definitely part of the modern technological world we live in. The goal of the digital humanities is not to be “the next big thing,” but to understand the bigness of the algorithms that are already all around us.
While here in our corner of the net, we are working on figuring out the potentials of “contemporary transmedia theory and practice” including interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the MLA is concerned with getting a grip on the parameters for evaluating digital scholarship and the structures both departments and individual scholars need to support one another. After twelve years, the MLA has issued updated guidelines to address the interdisciplinary, collaborative, and practical aspects of digital scholarship.
Because we require institutional legitimacy to have access to the normal trajectory of an academic career, these guidelines are important and necessary. If we want to be able to make solid arguments with traditionalists like Stanley Fish But as it is important to also be critical of state apparatuses, I would like to point to the ways in which these guidelines tend to contain the very openness that is the potential of this work. Of course I’m not arguing for a reprieve from the intense rigors demanded of any kind of scholarship. But I do find that efforts to understand that comprise lists and limiting language are generally about limiting the unexpected, the chaotic, the weirdness that a field like digital humanities (especially when it includes the critical) is constantly renewing by its very nature.
So while the MLA guidelines are meant, in all consciousness, to support the varied ways digital scholarship can exist and to encourage departments interesting in including digital scholars in their faculty to open themselves up to “invasion” from other disciplines or formats for scholarship that may not include paper publications, it also begins the fencing-in that is the road to “state machine” status (to use a D&G concept) or in other words, it begins to frame the ways in which even such untraditional projects as bizarrely mapped digital archives or interactive, spatial texts can be limited to narrowly defined categories and institutional parameters.
Ryan Cordell’s post, “DH, Interdisciplinarity, and Curricular Incursion,” has been receiving some traffic on Twitter lately among the digital humanities crowd, and for good reason. Cordell shared his experience of trying to introduce an “Intro to DH” course at a liberal arts college. The course was initially rejected, but more for language and approach than content.
What, after all, would be a DH introduction course? The term “digital humanities” is itself problematic, as I’ve written about recently. On the one hand, the amorphous qualities of DH point to inclusion, interdisciplinary collaboration, and real-world digital skills. On the other hand, however, lacking a solid foundation in a single discipline is a problem that can foster anxiety and confusion – what many DH’ers see as inclusiveness can also be seen as digital inside-baseball.
What I admire in Cordell’s post is his awareness of limits. Cordell surely appreciates the benefits of the digital humanities, but he also understands and appreciates the confusion and consternation surrounding DH. Cordell sees the need for an anchor, that DH must be rooted somewhere:
I use the term
interdisciplinary with a strikethrough not to disavow the cross-field collaborations that underlie and energize digital humanities work, but to highlight the idea that interdisciplinary work, by definition, requires collaborators from distinct disciplines.
I plan on including that last phrase, “requires collaborators from distinct disciplines” in my definition of the digital humanities from this point forward.
Ethan Turpin’s newest solo exhibition, Stereocollision will be on display at the California Museum of Photography from January 14, 2012 – April 14, 2012. I attended the opening reception on February 18th and was struck by how the exhibit was asking viewers to think critically about how we see and engage with images.
Turpin worked with the museum’s Keystone-Mast collection of historic stereoscopic images (late 19th and early 20th c. precursors to the 3-D image) and digitally reworked them to reflect very 21st century concerns about globalization, environmental damage, and the consequences of industrialization. In one image he combined a historical birds-eye view of Manhattan and inserted an isolated mountaintop castle into the cityscape. While some of the images made it easy to see the manipulation of the photos, others, such as the cityscape photo, were disconcerting in their believability and this believability forces the viewer to question how images, particularly images presented as “historic,” are read.
Turpin is very overtly playing with the “truth value” that we invest in photographs. He writes, “We are at a time in history when the photograph is easily manipulated while retaining its authority and false promise of truth. Given that our culture is increasingly visual in its languages, there is a wealth of ways to reflect one’s society by engaging its images.” Most of the images must be viewed through special glasses held to the eyes in order to combine the two images into a single perspective and this duality of reading can prove frustrating because you often have to position yourself at exactly the right height and distance from the photograph in order to create the full 3-D effect. This maneuvering requires work on the part of the viewer and asks you to think about what you are possibly not seeing when you look at the images. You first encounter them side-by-side on a stereo card and you have an idea about the image, but you can’t fully understand it until you see it through the provided glasses. In this way, the images refuse any easy “reading” by requiring the viewer to participate in the process of creation. This reflexive process makes you aware of what you allow yourself to “see” when you look at a photograph.
The exhibit also brings issues of technology to the forefront in both the artistic process and the experience of viewing the stereocards. While the images are very obviously presented as historical, they are also very knowingly brought into conversation with the current 3-D film phenomenon. The exhibit brings to mind the adage, “No media is new media,” and plays very knowingly with our visual vocabulary that has been informed by the recent resurgence of 3-D films. Turpin has anticipated this familiarity and subverts it through his use of the “historical.” By layering historical images, the shock is not the creation of three-dimensional depth, but in thinking through what depth actually means. In one image Turpin layers the surface image of an Arctic crevasse over an image of an industrial steel structure, making it appear as if the steel I-beams were holding up the vast expanses of ice and snow. This image seems to comment directly on the environmental concerns present throughout the exhibit, but it also seems to me to speak to our conception of technology; what we often perceive as natural or untouched is very often undergirded by a deliberate and manipulated structure that determines how and what we see. When dealing with images, we must be concerned with what we perceive to be the surface because there is often a world beneath the surface that, although invisible, has as much to do with our act of seeing as does the visible.
The exhibit is wonderful on its own, but it also creates a really interesting dialogue with the CMP’s other current exhibit dealing with more contemporary images: RENDER. You still have almost two months to view the exhibit and no matter your historical interests, the exhibit speaks powerfully to the concerns of all scholars of digital humanities.
Ethan Turpin’s website can be found at: http://www.ethanturpin.com/
CMP’s website can be found at: http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/
In his latest blog post at the New York Times (he’s only recently admitted it’s a blog, by the way), Stanley Fish is attempting to cause a ruckus in the Digital Humanities community. It’s working, the ruckus that is, not his argument.
Once again he uses Milton to skewer the DH’ers into submission, in this case to shed light on the blasphemous ways of the quantitative.
Fish states that the usual way of performing work in the humanities is to begin with a question that is informed by research. Good.
But in the digital humanities, “the direction is the reverse…first you run the numbers, and then you see if they prompt an interpretive hypothesis.” Not so good, and not what the digital humanities are all about.
Fish is arguing here against a purely computational process that relies blindly on quantitative analysis, and that’s okay. His argument isn’t so much about the digital humanities then, more so it concerns privileging quantitative analysis over a deep and personal qualitative reading. There is no real argument here.
The problem, one that DH’ers and Stanley Fish share alike, is solidly defining the Digital Humanities. There is no actual face to the Digital Humanities in general–there are too many aspects of the research being done, the tools being used in the classroom, and the social networking going on between faculty and students of widely dispersed disciplines and universities to give one easy definition. The fluidity, the amorphousness of the Digital Humanities appears to be the real burr under Fish’s saddle.
Fish’s latest article: “Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation”
