Jockers, Matthew L. 2013. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Topics in the Digital Humanities. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Page 220

Humanistic research takes place in a rich milieu that incorporates the cultural context of artifacts. Electronic text and models change the nature of scholarship in subtle and important ways, which have been discussed at great length since the humanities first began to contemplate the scholarly application of computing.

Page 217

Methods for organizing information in the humanities follow from their research practices. Humanists fo not rely on subject indexing to locate material to the extent that the social sciences or sciences do. They are more likely to be searching for new interpretations that are not easily described in advance; the journey through texts, libraries, and archives often is the research.

Page 213

Humanities scholarship is even more difficult to characterize than are the sciences and social sciences. Generally speaking, the humanities are more interpretative than data driven, but some humanists conduct qualitative studies using social sciences methods, and others employ quantitative methods. Digital humanities scholarship often reflects sophisticated computational expertise. Humanists value new interpretations, perspectives, and sources of data to examine age-old questions of art and culture.

Page 223

Borgman is discussing here the difference in the way humanists handle data in comparison to the way that scientists and social scientist:

When generating their own data such as interviews or observations, human efforts to describe and represent data are comparable to that of scholars and other disciplines. Often humanists are working with materials already described by the originator or holder of the records, such as libraries, archives, government agencies, or other entities. Whether or not the desired content already is described as data, scholars need to explain its evidentiary value in your own words. That report often becomes part of the final product. While scholarly publications in all fields set data within a context, the context and interpretation are scholarship in the humanities.

Pages 220-221

Digital Humanities projects result in two general types of products. Digital libraries arise from scholarly collaborations and the initiatives of cultural heritage institutions to digitize their sources. These collections are popular for research and education. … The other general category of digital humanities products consist of assemblages of digitized cultural objects with associated analyses and interpretations. These are the equivalent of digital books in that they present an integrated research story, but they are much more, as they often include interactive components and direct links to the original sources on which the scholarship is based. … Projects that integrate digital records for widely scattered objects are a mix of a digital library and an assemblage.

Page 219

In the humanities, it is difficult to separate artifacts from practices or publications from data.

Page 219

Humanities scholars integrate and aggregate data from many sources. They need tools and services to analyze digital data, as others do the sciences and social sciences, but also tools that assist them interpretation and contemplation.

Page 215

What seems a clear line between publications and data in the sciences and social sciences is a decidedly fuzzy one in the humanities. Publications and other documents are central sources of data to humanists. … Data sources for the humanities are innumerable. Almost any document, physical artifact, or record of human activity can be used to study culture. Humanities scholars value new approaches, and recognizing something as a source of data (e.g., high school yearbooks, cookbooks, or wear patterns in the floor of public places) can be an act of scholarship. Discovering heretofore unknown treasures buried in the world's archives is particularly newsworthy. … It is impossible to inventory, much less digitize, all the data that might be useful scholarship communities. Also distinctive about humanities data is their dispersion and separation from context. Cultural artifacts are bought and sold, looted in wars, and relocated to museums and private collections. International agreements on the repatriation of cultural objects now prevent many items from being exported, but items that were exported decades or centuries ago are unlikely to return to their original site. … Digitizing cultural records and artifacts make them more malleable and mutable, which creates interesting possibilities for analyzing, contextualizing, and recombining objects. Yet digitizing objects separates them from the origins, exacerbating humanists’ problems in maintaining the context. Removing text from its physical embodiment in a fixed object may delete features that are important to researchers, such as line and page breaks, fonts, illustrations, choices of paper, bindings, and marginalia. Scholars frequently would like to compare such features in multiple additions or copies.

Page 214

Literature in the Humanities goes out-of-print long before it goes out of date, so efforts to make older, out-of-copyright books available greatly benefit these fields.

Page 214

Borgman notes that the bibliographic coverage of journal literature is shallow in the humanities. The ISI Arts and humanity citation Index only goes back to 1975. In Sciences it goes back to 1900. In the social sciences it goes back to 1956. Also SCOPUS does not include the humanities.

What is interesting about this is that the humanities are the least cumulative of all the disciplines in the sense that they do not build on previous knowledge so much as we examine previous thought.

Page 214

Borgman on information artifacts and communities:

Artifacts in the humanities differ from those of the sciences and social sciences in several respects. Humanist use the largest array of information sources, and as a consequence, the station between documents and data is the least clear. They also have a greater number of audiences for the data and the products of the research. Whereas scientific findings usually must be translated for a general audience, humanities findings often are directly accessible and of immediate interest to the general public.

Borgman, Christine L. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

My notes

Page 147

Borgman on the challenges facing the humanities in the age of Big Data:

Text and data mining offer similar Grand challenges in the humanities and social sciences. Gregory crane provide some answers to the question what do you do with a million books? Two obvious answers include the extraction of information about people, places, and events, and machine translation between languages. As digital libraries of books grow through scanning avert such as Google print, the open content Alliance, million books project, and comparable projects in Europe and China, and as more books are published in digital form technical advances in data description, and now it says, and verification are essential. These large collections differ from earlier, smaller after it's on several Dimensions. They are much larger in scale, the content is more heterogenous in topic and language, the granularity creases when individual words can be tagged and they were noisy then there well curated predecessors, and their audiences more diverse, reaching the general public in addition to the scholarly community. Computer scientists are working jointly with humanist, language, and other demands specialist to pars tax, extract named entities in places, I meant optical character recognition techniques counter and Advance the state of art of information retrieval.

Page 63

A discussion of fraud in the humanities involving a book on gun ownership

In one case, allegations of inadequate, and accurate, and unverifiable data to support much-publicized conclusions about the historical rates of gun ownership led to the revocation of a major book prize and the loss of the author's University position.

The book is called arming America. The Astorian is Michael Bellesaies

p. 6

Retrieval methods designed for small databases decline rapidly in effectiveness as collections grow...

This is an interesting point that is missed in the Distant reading controversies: its all very well to say that you prefer close reading, but close reading doesn't scale--or rather the methodologies used to decide what to close read were developed when big data didn't exist. How to you combine that when you can read everything. I.e. You close read Dickins because he's what survived the 19th C as being worth reading. But now, if we could recover everything from the 19th C how do you justify methodologically not looking more widely?

Discussion of the methodological difficulties involved in close reading: i.e. there is no such thing as "just reading."

Culler, Jonathan. 2010. “The Closeness of Close Reading.” ADE Bulletin, 20–25. doi:10.1632/ade.149.20.

Page 16

One benefit of traditional hermeneutical practices such as close reading is that the trained reader need not install anything, run any software, wrestle with settings, or wait for results. The experienced reader can just enjoy iteratively reading, thinking, and rereading. Similarly the reader of another person's interpretation, if the book being interpreted is at hand, can just pick it up, follow the references, and recapitulate the reading. To be as effective as close reading, analytical methods have to be significantly easier to apply and understand. They have to be like reading, or, better yet, a part of reading. Those invested in the use of digital analytics need to think differently about what is shown and what is hidden: the rhetorical presentation of analytics matters. Further, literary readers of interpretive works want to learn about the interpretation. Much of the literature in journals devoted to humanities computing suffers from being mostly about the computing; it is hard to find scholarship that is addressed to literary scholars and is based in computing practices.

Page 15

Rockwell and Sinclair on the importance of staying up-to-date on commercial developments in text mining and text-handling:

we are practicing thinking in the humanities while the way people read, the tools of reading, and information privacy and organization are shifting around us. These shifts matter. If we continue to treat textuality as a subject, we need to understand how text can be mined.

Page 15

Rockwell and Sinclair call for

a new kind of literacy that allows us to continue our pursuits as humanities scholars in the changing world we find ourselves in.

Page 14

Rockwell and Sinclair note that corporations are mining text including our email; as they say here:

more and more of our private textual correspondence is available for large-scale analysis and interpretation. We need to learn more about these methods to be able to think through the ethical, social, and political consequences. The humanities have traditions of engaging with issues of literacy, and big data should be not an exception. How to analyze interpret, and exploit big data are big problems for the humanities.

Page 6

Computer-assisted research in the humanities, by contrast to the Cartesian story and traditional humanities practices, has almost always been collaborative. This is due to the variety of skills needed to implement digital humanities projects. It is also linked to the relationship between the practices of interpretation in the development of the tools of interpretation, be the tools for analyzing text or digital editions. Anyone who has used tools forged by another person is in collaboration, even if one isn't personally influencing the provider of the tools. The need to collaborate, though acknowledged in various ways, has been a professional hindrance, as anyone who submits a curriculum vitae for promotion listing nothing but co-authored papers knows.

Pages 6-7

Collaboration is not always good. It separates the interpreter/scholar from the designer/programmer who implements the scholarly methods. Willard McCarthy notes that the introduction of software "separated the conception of the problems (domain of the scholar) from the computational means of working them out (baliwick of the programmer) and so came at a significant cost.” As computing is introduced into research, it separates consumption, implementation, and interpretation in ways that can be overcome only through dialogue and collaboration across very different fields. Typically, humanities scholars know little about programming and software engineering, and programmers know little about humanities scholarship. Going it alone is an option only for the few who have time to master both. The rest of us and up depending on others.

Pages 1-2

… Practices are changing. Older forms of communal inquiry are being remixed into modern research. We have come to recognize how intellectual work is participatory even when it includes moments of solitary meditation. Internet conferencing tools allow us to remediate dialogical practices, collaborative communities such as Wikipedia and Twitter depend on contributions by a large group of users, and the communal research cultures of the arts collective or engineering lab are influencing the humanities. Accessible computing, data availability, and new media opportunities have provoked textual disciplines to think again about our practices and methods as we build digital libraries, process millions of books, and imagine research cyber-infrastructure that can support the next generation of scholars. We have recently begun imagining large-scale humanities-based projects that require a variety of skills for implementation – skills rarely found in a solitary scholar/programmer, let alone in a Cartesian humanist. We find ourselves working in teams, reflecting on how to best organize them and then reflecting on what it means to think through with others. This inevitably turns to methodological reflection that takes new media into account as we try to balance our traditional Cartesian values with the opportunities of open and communal work.

p. 141

Initially, the digital humanities consisted of the curation and analysis of data that were born digital, and the digitisation and archiving projects that sought to render analogue texts and material objects into digital forms that could be organised and searched and be subjects to basic forms of overarching, automated or guided analysis, such as summary visualisations of content or connections between documents, people or places. Subsequently, its advocates have argued that the field has evolved to provide more sophisticated tools for handling, searching, linking, sharing and analysing data that seek to complement and augment existing humanities methods, and facilitate traditional forms of interpretation and theory building, rather than replacing traditional methods or providing an empiricist or positivistic approach to humanities scholarship.

summary of history of digital humanities

Structure of the fundamentals class

The structure of the camp

description of DHSI

Bialkowski, Voytek, Rebecca Niles, and Alan Galey. 2011. “The Digital Humanities Summer Institute and Extra-Institutional Modes of Engagement.” Faculty of Information Quarterly 3 (3): 19–29. http://current.ischool.utoronto.ca/system/files/pages/publications/fiq_3-3.pdf#page=19.

Jänicke, S., G. Franzini, M. F. Cheema, and G. Scheuermann. n.d. “On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges.”

Fuchs, Milena Žic. 2014. “The Future of Publications in the Humanities: Possible Impacts of Research Assessment.” In New Publication Cultures in the Humanities: Exploring the Paradigm Shift, edited by Péter Dávidházi, 147–71. Amsterdam University Press. http://books.google.ca/books/about/New_Publication_Cultures_in_the_Humaniti.html?hl=&id=4ffcoAEACAAJ.

Really interesting idea: do an analysis of humanities researchers in general (DARIAH) and Holocaust researchers in specific (EHRI). One is very heterogeneous, the other very homogeneous (at least in terms of working conditions and, broadly speaking, data sources).

description of "arts and humanities researchers"

Benardou, Agiatis, Panos Constantopoulos, and Costis Dallas. 2013. “An Approach to Analyzing Working Practices of Research Communities in the Humanities.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7 (1–2): 105–27. doi:10.3366/ijhac.2013.0084.

Data in digital scholarship

p. 53

Discussion of collaboration in DH:

Collaboration is not, however, without its own problems and challenges, as scientific research practices have demonstrated. Aside from questions about how collaborative work will be reviewed for tenure and promotion, internal procedures for distributing authority, making editorial decisions, and apportioning credit (an especially crucial issue for graduate students and junior faculty) are typically worked out on a case-by-case basis with digital humanities projects.... Precedents worked out for scientific laboratories may not be appropriate for the digital humanities. While the lead scientist customarily receives authorship credit for all publications emerging from his laboratory, the digital humanities, with a stronger tradition of single authorship, may choose to craft very different kinds of protocols for deciding authorship credit, including giving <pb n="54"/>authorship credit (as opposed to acknowledgement) for the creative work of paid technical staff.

Bout how actual contributions to authorship of humanities work goes uncredited, except in acknowledgements

Great justification for collaborative authorship!

Mumford, Stephen. 2012. “Combination Acts.” Times Higher Education (THE). February 16. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/combination-acts/419019.article.

Can the humanistic bent in DH counteract the `self-hating human” part of technocracy?

You may consult input from amazing people like @GoogleGuacamole and @actualham who have very intentionally integrated (not just mentioning or requiring) Twitter use in their courses and implicated its value in students' connections with their professional network.

This strikes me as one of the more politically regressive parts of their argument and it is foundational. One of the key interventions of DH, broadly defined, is to turn a bright light on the conditions of academic labor and production. Anyone who has written a monograph—even an essay—knows that it was not done by individual scholarship. It is almost always the product of the labor and institutional support of a large number of people. There is a fantasy, a destructive fantasy, of the sole scholar working silently at a desk needing nothing more than a stack of books or papers and time to produce a work of scholarship. In fact, every author depends on a greater or lesser support network that includes librarians and archivists, peers and grad students, editors and (yes) tech support, to give an incomplete list (often the very most important support is given by life partners who labor to free time for the writer). The individually-credited monograph hides all of that labor or pretends that labor was merely incidental and unconnected to the intellectual work that appears in print. The "project-based learning" in DH (as described by the authors below) tend to make that labor visible and, in the best of cases, credited. This phrase encourages me to think that the authors' "progressive politics" is abstract, divorced from material conditions of production and reproduction. People without the ability to mobilize the requisite networks of support labor—parenting scholars, adjuncts, non-professionals—are demonstrably damaged by the fetish for "painstaking individual scholarship." The burden is especially borne heavily by women. It is not what I recognize as progressive, but is rather deeply conservative.

If this was in a peer-reviewed journal, the reviewers would hit this very first sentence with a demand for extensive citation. In the spirit of generosity, I assume the authors have references. But the problem with starting this piece, in this venue, this way is that now everyone who thinks of themselves as having a stake in this DH thing is invited to see themselves as this "advocate" they invoke. In the vast majority of cases, they will not recognize the second half of the sentence as something that they have ever, or would ever, advocate. This may be intended as a polemic that will spark serious conversation, but with the very first words a lot of the audience that would be interested in engaging this piece sees a straw man and a misrepresentation. With that, the essay only reaches those who are inclined to agree with it in the first place. That now makes me wonder, in a less generous spirit, is this an effort to engage in a debate, or is this clickbait?

I'm sure it feels unparalleled to the authors. But this is precisely the kind of claim that even a humanist shouldn't make without providing data. It may be true, but they aren't giving me any reason to not read the phrase in this edited form: "the unparalleled level of material support that it feels like Digital Humanities has received." Without doubt, when a student makes a statement like this in a paper written for my history classes, I lower their grade if they fail to provide evidence. Why should I make an exception for these experienced professionals?

I just view the DH movement as fundamentally different:

...pushing the tech industry toward a more interpretative, suspicious, less technocratic, conservative, managerial, <del>lab-based</del> practice.

Is it?

I'd be more interested in an article that began with observing this possible lacuna in DH and explored ways that DH has or might address questions of "identity and politics."

?

Seems like a pretty big difference.

Really? There's not research to be done here? I find that hard to believe. Why not simply ask Don Waters or Brett Bobley?

Et tu?

Lots of dependence on "implications" in this argument. I've never heard a DH scholar even vaguely make a statement like this. In fact, it's converse is probably most often used to signal that such work is necessary beyond whatever project or tool is being showcased.

And why not? The authors present such a narrow and traditional notion of the humanities that work against their claim to be returning politics to literary study.

That was a lot of background/build-up on UVA literary critical history for such a vague association.

Interesting, but I'd like to see a citation here.

Also, not sure it's fair to say that the Common Core was/is favored by the Right.

Okay, maybe I'm just a neoliberal by this definition.

This framework is repeated throughout: because of the success of B, A no longer has value. I don't see how that's true in terms of the structure of English departments/university priorities or digital humanities rhetoric.

So the problem is that someone besides a traditional independent academic researchers is getting paid to do "humanities" work? Expanding the definition of scholarly labor to include such positions seems far more radical, both politically and economically, than anything outlined here.

Got a better idea?

perlegi

Reference to GO::DH

co-creators

This is important. All abstractions can be grounded in some concrete event or situation. However, the practice of starting with theory often ignores this and students struggle to grasp abstractions that are suspended in space. Given that all abstractions have origins, it should be easy to situate instruction in something concrete.

Originally intended as upholding the virtues of the humanities in opposition to science and technology, I'd like to co-opt the argument for the humanities within, mainly, technology. We need more humanists in tech!

The chat will lead into a backchannel discussion of a “Disrupting DH” presentation at the 2016 Modern Language Association conference in Austin, TX.

Wow. This is the most interesting statement that I've read in a while. Wish I could pin an annotation...

Really helps me justify my career arc, turning from literary criticism as a career to software "development."

I think like we're working with a very limited (even if acknowledged) definition of commentary/annotation. We're really just talking about expert analysis laid over a text, which is nothing new, though as pointed out below this tradition can achieve a new dynamism in the online environment.

What I think is more interesting about annotation and the digital humanities is the potential for readers themselves to become truly active contributors to the knowledge surrounding the texts--not simply served explanation for their relatively passive comprehension.

Great line. What does this mean for the state of the humanities?...

anew vs recover

Good line.

Good quote re false binary of new and old technologies of interpretation, etc.

A binary worthy of breaking down...

Computer assisted practices never completely divorced from the human.

Demystifying (and conflating) "technology" by applying it to the most humanist of practices.

Nothing against this, but it's not the game I'm in.

Question is, though, can the same tool be used to do both distant reading and close reading?

Again, I don't get all the anti-science rhetoric and anti-intellectualism when it comes to talking about teaching. Was active learning invented in science classes? No. Was John Dewey a scientist? No. Either way, does any of that mean that we should reject something because it was done in the sciences or said by a scientist?

There are whole journals devoted to research on teaching humanities topics: history, philosophy, writing, literature, etc. All ignored in this article.

Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes

Must look this up.

Another useful (and cool) definition

Always like seeing acknowledgement that scholarly primitives haven't changed, just our means for doing them. Stephen Ramsay's Reading Machines is a good, quick read about this in terms of digital humanities algorithmic criticism.

The ability to fluently read/react with a text at a given level of address be treated as a literacy.

Definition for manifestations of the text. Maybe useful in discussing interface as the encountered work?

Might be useful in thinking about what an “edition” is—must it include all items most editions currently include, or are those conventions or manifestations of values, and not necessary values themselves?

I like this idea of defining a level of text and than comparing across texts—would like to see more of this at the level of code and interface design and tool design decisions (e.g. how do different digital archives deal with making sure visitors see more than the alphabetically or chronologically first few items in the collection? how do different DH sites allow people to comment? what is the difference among moderation or voting systems?).

I think this is my favorite definition of “text” (as humanities scholars use the term) that I’ve encountered.

This is a great example of the type of critical thinking involved in scholarly digital building—often such projects include hard thinking about the exact nature of scholarly objects. Patrick Murray-John has a fantastic article that further discusses “where the theory is” when scholars design and build (Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing). The penultimate paragraph in particular lists some of the critical questions that arise out of designing for an “item” in a digital archives platform.

And even if we don’t yet have a way to run and experiment and/or gather results, we can use “speculative experiments” to learn about digital objects (such as a digital edition) by imagining and designing for a hypothetical and/or future circumstance.

Es wäre an dieser Stelle zu klären, wie sich die Idee der looped research zum Gedanken einer 'looped scholarship' (vgl. Über Digital Humanities, Human Computing und Looped Scholarship. Eine Notiz./ LIBREAS.Tumblr) verhält.

Eine Zusammenfassung zu diesem Aufsatz unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Verhältnisses der Wissenspraxis Bricolage zu den Digital Humanities gibt es auch im Redaktions-Tumblr von LIBREAS.

Claudia Müller-Birn unterscheidet drei Annotationsebenen:

• concept level
• identification level
• external knowledge level

mit zunehmender Vernetzungskomplexität.

This insight, good though it is, rests on the assumption that we faculty know and can teach how to be happy in our work.

http://www.one-tab.com/page/Nx--r0sKQNir8QoKxnU-0g

https://www.google.com/search?q=mla+2011+ramsay+defining+digital+humanities&oq=mla+2011+ramsay+defining+digital+humanities&aqs=chrome..69i57.13899j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=106&ie=UTF-8 http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates http://stephenramsay.us/text/2011/01/08/whos-in-and-whos-out/ http://www.briancroxall.net/buildingDH/ http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/blog/lines-sand-or-growing-pains-stephen-ramsay-and-digital-humanities-2011-mla http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/introduction-theory-and-the-virtues-of-digital-humanities-by-natalia-cecire/ http://sites.library.northwestern.edu/dh/ https://www.google.com/search?q=stephen+ramsay+humanities&oq=stephen+ramsay+humanities&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.4522j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=106&ie=UTF-8 http://cdrh.unl.edu/about/faculty/ramsay.php https://twitter.com/CDRH_UNL http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Machines-Algorithmic-Criticism-Humanities/dp/0252078209 http://www.unl.edu/english/faculty/profs/sramsay.html http://stephenramsay.us/ http://stephenramsay.us/2013/09/25/dh-job/ http://stephenramsay.us/2013/09/12/why_im_in_it/

Digital Humanities can look at authors and publishers and the relationships they have with one another.

Scalar's mission statement