How do you define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities? - T. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Academic Sandbox (the blog) » My Scholars’ Lab Talk About n-Dime. On compensation. I have felt troubled, lately, by the number of tenured and — to a much lesser degree, tenure-track — faculty (pardon me, friends, all!)
Whom I’ve heard whining about the “uncompensated” time they spend on their digital humanities scholarship. They are not talking about the sorts of unpaid service many of us render every day in support of the digital humanities community: time spent planning conferences and other gatherings, serving on advisory and executive boards for various projects and digitally-oriented professional societies, advising graduate students and junior colleagues not our own, inserting scholarly voices into commercially- and institutionally-driven conversations about the transformation of our cultural archive in the electronic age, and offering methodological training or building resources meant to bootstrap other scholars in their ability to engage meaningfully with digital objects and processes.
No. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Whatever. It’s deeply weird. Tufte_wallpaper.2vf33bt6eq0wc0scws0kg04kc.bxj7bs82axw0g448owg4gc. Designing for the Web: A book by Mark Boulton. Digital Humanities vs. the digital humanist « HyperStudio – Digi. By Whitney Anne Trettien on April 26, 2010 What does it mean to be a Digital Humanist? In a Dave Parry’s widely-circulated, post-MLA2009 blog post, tauntingly titled “Be Online or be Irrelevant,” Parry argued that social media should be front-and-center in Digital Humanities: The more digital humanities associates itself with social media the better off it will be.
Not because social media is the only way to do digital scholarship, but because I think social media is the only way to do scholarship period. Perhaps not surprisingly, this claim sparked fierfce debate over the role, nature and future of digital scholarship. Last year, I completed a born-digital thesis for the Comparative Media Studies program here at MIT. Since its completion, though, I’ve found my work doesn’t have much resonance with the Digital Humanities community. A few months ago, I exchanged emails with Cheryl Ball, editor of Kairos, regarding another webtext I was working on. So what was I doing? Be Sociable, Share! Academhack » Blog Archive » Be Online or Be Irrelevant. “For [the theoreticians of photography] undertook nothing less than to legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning.”
-Benjamin, Little History of Photography I want to explicate some of the issues I raised in the last post, address some of the comments, walk back my position on at least one point (yes you are all right the word “bad” was not a fair characterization), and dig in on a few others.To keep these posts stylistically similar let me again start with two observations. 1. One of the essays I most enjoy teaching in my media studies classes is Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
When teaching this essay I often begin the class by saying Benjamin understood why Ebert was wrong. That is Ebert, rather famously claimed that while video games might demonstrate a high level of craft, they will never rise to the level of art. 2. Okay so onto the post. . . And so this is where I am really going to dig in. D i a p s a l m a t a: Digital Humanities vs the digital humanis. [Note: I'm cross-posting this, an article I wrote for the official HyperStudio blog, since this space allows for comments.] What does it mean to be a Digital Humanist?
In a Dave Parry's widely-circulated, post-MLA2009 blog post, tauntingly titled "Be Online or be Irrelevant," Parry argued that social media should be front-and-center in Digital Humanities: The more digital humanities associates itself with social media the better off it will be. Not because social media is the only way to do digital scholarship, but because I think social media is the only way to do scholarship period.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this claim sparked fierfce debate over the role, nature and future of digital scholarship. Last year, I completed a born-digital thesis for the Comparative Media Studies program here at MIT. Since its completion, though, I've found my work doesn't have much resonance with the Digital Humanities community. So what was I doing? Planned Obsolescence » The Stakes of Disciplinarity. There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humanities and its relationship to digital media studies. (See, for instance, the debate started by Ian Bogost’s post, as well as that provoked by Dave Parry’s first and second takes on the issue.)
Some of this debate arose, I think, from a sense of annoyance among folks who’ve been working in DH for years that suddenly, now, with the rise of social media and the visibility of those working in and on those forms, a bunch of attention is being paid to something called “digital humanities” — but the thing going by that name isn’t quite the same thing that it’s been for the past few decades, and the thing that DH has been is now being overlooked (or worse, dismissed) in favor of this new interest in digital media.
What such a reconstructed university would actually look like, I have no idea. Well, no. Like this: Like Loading... We Suck at Trending. Today Patrik Svensson, the director of HUMlab at the University of Umeå, presented at UCHRI. He had been asked to provide some "provocations" to stimulate a lively lunch discussion about directions for the digital humanities, although participant Tom Boellstorff pointed out that in the academy "we suck at trending. " Svensson started by noting the radical dissimilarity of the most frequently used words by Digital Humanities, which is described as "the annual joint meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs," and the Association of Internet Researchers.
Although both groups have been around for over a decade, their vocabularies seem to show little common ground. He also showed a number of position statements that advocated for, despaired about, and defined the digital humanities. Labels: digital humanities. Digital Humanities: Methodology and Questions | Matthew L. Jocke. Students in our new Literature Lab doing what English Majors do! Folks keep expressing concern about the future of the humanities, and the “need” for a next big thing. In fact, the title of a blog entry in the April 23, 2010 New York Times takes it for granted that the humanities need “saving.” The blog entry is a follow up to an article from March 31, which explores how some literary critics are applying scientific methodologies and approaches to the study of literature.
Of course, this isn’t really new. In her response to the article, Blakey Vermeule (full disclosure, her office is just three doors from mine) makes a key point to take away from the discussion. Not too long ago, a colleague took me aside and asked in all earnestness, “what do I need to do to break into this field of Digital Humanities.” . . . So, the answer to my colleague who asked what is needed to “break into this field of Digital Humanities” is simply this: questions, you need questions. Chronicle of Higher Education Article | Matthew L. Jockers. This week the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article written by Jennifer Howard about “literary geospaces.” The article featured some work I have done mapping Irish-American literature using Google Earth (and also profiled the work of Janelle Jenstad who has been mapping early modern London).
Photo by Noah Berger The bit about my Google Earth/Irish-American literature mash up resulted in several emails from folks wanting to know more about the project and more specifics about my findings. . . beware what you ask for. . . I began building a bibliographic database of Irish-American literature many years ago when I was working on my dissertation (Jockers, Matthew L. “In search of Tir-Na-Nog: Irish and Irish-American Literature in the West.” Southern Illinois University, 1997). In 2002 I received a grant from the Stanford Humanities Laboratory to fund a web project called “The Irish-American West.”
Ironically, on St. Here is a link to a Quicktime video of the Google Earth mash-up. Literary Geospaces - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hig. Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come: Adva. The web is thirsty for efficient, effective ways of retrieving useful information about the state of the field. This pressure creates an enormous market for those instruments that help individuals locate authoritative discourses and situated scholarship, and this, of course, is one of the traditional roles of the academic journal. Academic Journals are in the course of rethinking their management, methods, and publication standards. This year saw major panels at the AHA (American Historical Association) and MLA (Modern Language association), largely through the leadership of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
If they face this transition with courage and ingenuity, journals have the opportunity to plant themselves firmly as pillars of professional utility, scholarly collaboration, and authoritative knowledge as a public utility. I list here four major headings for the consideration of those trying to adapt academic publication to a web 2.0 world. 1.c) The need for permanence.
The Social Sciences began experimenting with visualization as early as the 1910s, when Franz Boas applied Kwakiutl place-names to an ordinary map to help him better explain the Kwakiutl world view. In the 1940s, scholars of folklore began abstracting these geographical diagrams into "synoptic diagrams" that showed concepts in relationship to each other. Since that time, scholars around a range of disciplines have used mental maps and synoptic diagrams for their powers at synthesizing a range of information from diverse fields. James A. Notopoulos, “The Symbolism of the Sun and Light in the Republic of Plato. Briefly, visualizations do two things to rational argument that text is very bad at doing. Synoptic diagrams are excellent at getting people on the same page. Visual diagrams are also particularly useful for ability to pan out. There's much to be said here, but I'll confine myself to mentioning two of my favorite tools and their uses. 1) PersonalBrain 2) MindManager.
Mapnik C++/Python GIS Toolkit | Welcome. Cascadenik - mapnik-utils - Project Hosting on Google Code. The Humanities Go Google - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher. By Marc Parry Palo Alto, Calif. Matthew L. Jockers may be the first English professor to assign 1,200 novels in one class. Lucky for the students, they don't have to read them.
As grunts in Stanford University's new Literature Lab, these students investigate the evolution of literary style by teaming up like biologists and using computer programs to "read" an entire library. It's a controversial vision for changing a field still steeped in individual readers' careful analyses of texts. Data-diggers are gunning to debunk old claims based on "anecdotal" evidence and answer once-impossible questions about the evolution of ideas, language, and culture.
The debate over the value of the work at Stanford previews the disciplinary battles that may erupt elsewhere as Big Data bumps into entrenched traditions. Authors and publishers have besieged Google's plan to digitize the world's books, accusing the company of copyright infringement. Once scholars like Mr. Partners in Provocation You need a team.