Tuesday Jan 21

Submitted by iamdan on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 14:19

Read the articles below and then add or respond to a comment,

 Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship 

Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities

Comments

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Submitted by SabrinaZirkle on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 14:31

In chapter six of the online text, the author argues that STEM and other related disciplines have shaped the kinds of tools that DH can use that could be limiting the field's scope of analysis. I agree that the DH could benefit from creating its own applications rather than only reacting to the existing media landscape. However, I do not believe that data visualization and interpretation techniques used by these other fields are necessarily purely quantitative, self-evidence, or autonomous. The manipulation of data presentation  to perpetuate an established narrative or bias occurs in disciplines that pride themselves on being purely rational and objective. For example, one of my classmate in the MJ school had a specific project in which they were expressly instructed to create digital graphics and analysis that distorted a set of objective facts in order to further a particular assigned political agenda. In regards to chapter five, I'm glad to see they pointed out that the inner workings of new tools like machine learning can sometimes create the black box effect in which tracking the methods and how an algorithm arrived from A to B. This impacts how a DH scholar might interpret the findings of a ML algorithm applied to a body of work.

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Submitted by emmakoslow on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 07:28

In chapter 6, the thing that stood out to me were the several examples it gave of digital humanities projects over the years. The author showed how they have evolved over the years with the development of new technologies and how they have the potential to combine with humanities. With the topics discussed in this reading, it should that as people became more comfortable with computers and their replacement with everyday tasks, that digital humanities became a more profound presence in people's lives. In the next chapter (chapter 5), the author goes more into how creators, who are used to receiving credit in the humanities, struggle to figure out how to get credit for their work in the digital humanities field. The rest of the chapter focuses on how digital humanities can be interpreted as a typical research field. How do people receive credit or if there are theories related to it are two major questions the author addresses. The first article gave me several ideas about how to present my paper on word processors. It gave me a good outlook and method of how to go about my research while the second one helps give the field more of a research perspective instead of simply being a combination of humanities with technology.

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Submitted by Shawna Sheperd on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 18:13

In both of these chapters I found that there is a focus on “mean-making” or how the authors put it as “notions of meaning.” In chapter 5, the idea of credit and creating guidelines for the evaluation of digital work gives individuals a sense of accomplishment for their work, regardless of it being considered part of greater scholarship or digital humanities cannon. Once these guidelines are established than the digital artifacts are used to shed light on new ideas/ thoughts / patterns. In chapter 6, the mean-making is focused on the projects themselves, how we can see or interpret things in a new light because of the digital technology used. The example they used was the Perseus project, where Blake, Whitman, and Rossetti archives were formulated. I find how technology has eased scholarly comparisons fascinating, especially since most of my own personal research is saturated with comparing online archives.

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Submitted by ifsmith on Sun, 01/19/2020 - 19:01

The first article dealt with some of the more logistical questions of DH in the academy: What does the scholarship mean when digital humanities are involved? How do we even define scholarship? Is DH a tool or a theory, both? I enjoyed thinking about the difference between digital humanities artifacts and digital humanities theories. If a digital artifact is used as a tool (say a code for counting keywords) to better understand an aspect of a text, however as the digital tools become more complex (beyond counting) then it becomes more difficult to understand what is happening and to what end. With theory, I assume that the author who applies the theory and the peers who reviewed the application of the theory know how it is operating-- usually I feel like the author has to spend a lot of time explaining how the theory works as a tool to articulate their idea. With humanities computing, there comes a moment when the tool extends beyond the understanding of the author and usually the reader creating a sort of black-box experience. I also liked thinking about coding and writing as parallel scholarly activities. Writing is a method for articulating ideas so if coding is also articulating ideas, isn't it also a scholarly activity?

 

The second article was quite difficult to read. Drucker's arguments were complex and her language was intensely academic. I focused on her central question: "Have the humanities had any impact on the digital environment?". I think that in the realm of cartography, Drucker made broad statements that are not necessarily true for a lot of cartographers/geographers. In her example about the cuneiform map, she argues that any spatial visualization of the early sites of cuneiform tablets would fail to accurately display the reality of how time and space operated during that specific historical and cultural moment. I agree that no map can encompass an entire reality, but neither can writing or any other method. What a map can do, especially a digital map, is describe and display information in a way that you can't do with writing. I think many map-makers would agree that maps are imperfect and they would be self-critical and self-aware of the performativity and constructed-ness of their maps. Perhaps Drucker's problem with cartography is that the self-awareness or critical understanding is not explicit or announced in the distribution of the visualization or product. 

 

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Submitted by agose on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 12:33

“Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities”

I found this article extremely poignant to my own dissertation project. There is certainly a tension in academia of what constitutes a dissertation in that it must always by convention be a piece of discursive writing. If DH is included, it must be as a supplement but not the final product. I think Ramsay and Rockwell made a convincing argument that digital artifacts can and should be understood as discursive objects/practices that fall under the theoretical principles that govern the humanities. As a historian, I am trained to view every historical object/artifact as a discursive/argumentative “thing;” therefore, it is very curious, as Ramsay and Rockwell point out, that this does not extend to modern scholarship, in which DH offers that opportunity to explain things through a different theoretical/methodological approach. In history as well as other disciplines, all modern theoretical models have to be carefully applied to the past to avoid anachronism, etc. Ultimately, they—theories of gender, sexuality and many others—present tools, themselves discursive, to explain and to abstract.

 

“Humanist Theory and Digital Scholarship”

In this piece, Drucker recognizes the dialectical and even at times hostile relationship between other disciplines (STEM fields and even social sciences) and the humanities. However, she asserts that digital humanities offers a tool to bridge the gap, complicating heretofore inaccessible, quantitative methods with humanistic methods and thus creating a practice that acknowledges the performitivity and constructedness of analytical tools while taking advantage of the opportunities they offer. She argues convincingly for a constructivist approach to knowledge, specifically the observer-oriented experience tools, including technology. For example, she uses maps to demonstrate the constructedness of the world, even with modern technologies like Google Maps that allegedly represent the “real.” As she shows, all modes of knowing, whether they be writing, cartography, etc, are relational acts in which each and every understanding of the “thing” under study is an individual and unique experience, reflecting the information presented as well as its audience. Ultimately, I think Drucker argues convincingly that the humanities have much to offer quantitative tools by introducing the constructedness of knowledge, ambiguity, variability, and, in the end, the humility that we simply cannot know “truth” or “real” through our own individual experience of the world, despite methodological and theoretical tools.  

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Submitted by cschnitz on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 19:59

Ramsay and Rockwell's chapter "Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities" really served to concretize the methodology versus discipline debate in the digital humanities for me, by locating it in the digital artifacts that humanists use (instrumentalize, prototype, build) in doing their work. They seem to take a provocative and effective stand for the methodological, comparing writing and coding/building by saying: "To ask whether coding is a scholarly act is like asking whether writing is a scholarly act. Writing is the technology—or better, the methodology—that lies between model and result in humanistic discourse. We have for centuries regarded writing as absolutely essential to scholarship." They later negotiate with an applied modification of the Turing test to the question of building/coding as scholarship, concluding that "If the quality of the interventions that occur as a result of building are as interesting as those that are typically established through writing, then that activity is, for all intents and purposes, scholarship." The invocation of the Turing test (and potential counterarguments about AI/automated writing through building) is interesting here, suggesting that, perhaps unlike just writing, building can take on some kind of life of its own, can be set into motion/action in a way that writing itself cannot as a technology. It also positions building as perhaps intrinsically liked to writing, perhaps as an evolved version of writing, though they do not directly explore that lineage/connection. Can building/coding be thought of as a version of writing, writing 2.0? Strengthening that connection would perhaps serve to reinforce Ramsay and Rockwell's argument in a way that has interesting implications for both methodologies/technologies. 

Drucker, in her own way, seems to get at that extension of the human to the digital in her chapter, but reverses it, calling for humanistic theories to inform digital scholarship. "Humanistic theory," Drucker says, "provides ways of thinking differently, otherwise, specific to the problems and precepts of interpretative knowing—partial, situated, enunciative, subjective, and performative. Our challenge is to take up these theoretical principles and engage them in the production of methods, ways of doing our work on an appropriate foundation." In any case, I think there is value in strengthening that fundamentally human connection to the digital humanities, tracing it either from the analog to the digital or the digital to the analog, where the analog is the more recognizably human (not automated), as a way of theorizing the cosubstantivity of both. 

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Submitted by cschnitz on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 19:59

Ramsay and Rockwell's chapter "Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities" really served to concretize the methodology versus discipline debate in the digital humanities for me, by locating it in the digital artifacts that humanists use (instrumentalize, prototype, build) in doing their work. They seem to take a provocative and effective stand for the methodological, comparing writing and coding/building by saying: "To ask whether coding is a scholarly act is like asking whether writing is a scholarly act. Writing is the technology—or better, the methodology—that lies between model and result in humanistic discourse. We have for centuries regarded writing as absolutely essential to scholarship." They later negotiate with an applied modification of the Turing test to the question of building/coding as scholarship, concluding that "If the quality of the interventions that occur as a result of building are as interesting as those that are typically established through writing, then that activity is, for all intents and purposes, scholarship." The invocation of the Turing test (and potential counterarguments about AI/automated writing through building) is interesting here, suggesting that, perhaps unlike just writing, building can take on some kind of life of its own, can be set into motion/action in a way that writing itself cannot as a technology. It also positions building as perhaps intrinsically liked to writing, perhaps as an evolved version of writing, though they do not directly explore that lineage/connection. Can building/coding be thought of as a version of writing, writing 2.0? Strengthening that connection would perhaps serve to reinforce Ramsay and Rockwell's argument in a way that has interesting implications for both methodologies/technologies. 

Drucker, in her own way, seems to get at that extension of the human to the digital in her chapter, but reverses it, calling for humanistic theories to inform digital scholarship. "Humanistic theory," Drucker says, "provides ways of thinking differently, otherwise, specific to the problems and precepts of interpretative knowing—partial, situated, enunciative, subjective, and performative. Our challenge is to take up these theoretical principles and engage them in the production of methods, ways of doing our work on an appropriate foundation." In any case, I think there is value in strengthening that fundamentally human connection to the digital humanities, tracing it either from the analog to the digital or the digital to the analog, where the analog is the more recognizably human (not automated), as a way of theorizing the cosubstantivity of both. 

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Submitted by natalie.p98 on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 20:31

Both of the readings assigned for the week managed to highlight the relationship between digital work and theoretical, humanistic aspects within the digital humanities. While reading Drucker’s work, I was intrigued by the last sentence: “the question is not, Does digital humanities need theory? but rather, How will digital scholarship be humanistic without it?” I think she poses an interesting question regarding whether digital work and scholarship is fundamentally involved with theory, and whether digital humanities exist without the relationship between digital work and humanism. Despite the complexity, I do think they can exist within a relationship together, as discussed by Ramsay and Rockwell, since digital work and humanistics both inform and learn from each other.

I was especially intrigued by Ramsay and Rockwell’s questions regarding what exactly digital work means in the scope of the humanities—is this work theoretical, or is it merely a tool for the theoretical? As I read, I heavily pondered this question, and I ultimately think the answer can ultimately be both; digital work in itself can be theoretical since it will be impacted by the the purpose of which it is designed to do, but it is also a tool since digital work, such as data mining, etc., can be used to investigate a theory within the humanities. I especially liked the statement that “digital artifacts like tools could then be considered as ‘telescopes for the mind’ that show us something in a new light,” since, to me, this demonstrates the give and take relationship of digital work and the humanities. Digital work can be used as a tool within the humanities, but the humanities provide the digital work with a purpose and meaning.

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Submitted by delamb on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 21:22

The Ramsay and Rockwell article presented a theoretical exploration of what constitutes scholarship in digital humanities. Being new to this field, I appreciate the context the article gave me to think about DH scholarship within and outside of academia. While I’ve used digital tools in creative work since the 1990s, I’ve engaged with the as a creator and not as a scholar. Basic elements like attribution for scholarly work in DH haven’t been concerns I’ve ever considered, and my core scholarship in social science works a bit differently, so I hadn’t ever made the connection with the real-world concerns of DH scholars in accumulating institutional capital for their work.

Though Ramsay and Rockwell leave their questions open, I find the concept of DH artifacts as “hermeneutical instruments through which we can interpret other phenomenon” and “instantiate theories” a useful construct. My background is in quantitative social science, and I’m familiar with peer-reviewed journals specifically devoted to statistical software and extension packages, where developers of analytical tools can contextualize their work. This provides an avenue for publishing scholarly labor peripheral to mainstream social science scholarship. While publishing in these journals may not carry as much normative weight as mainstream journals, their existence at least acknowledges that supposedly peripheral work developing tools to further analysis is a form of scholarship in and of itself.

 

The Drucker article was less informative or useful to my understanding. I appreciate the defensive tone of the article given the cultural and fiscal attacks humanities scholarship has endured in recent decades. Drucker’s principal goal seems to be asserting the importance of the “humanities” in DH relative to the “digital” — a defense of the qualified against the qualifier. I agree with Drucker in the sense that overly focusing on the tools and methods of DH risks diminishing the role of humanistic scholarship. However, I think Drucker’s argument relies too heavily on a strictly binary (pun intended) separation of technical and scientific disciplines from humanistic ones. Ramsay and Rockwell’s vision of tools, methods, and models extending humanistic scholarship better harmonizes with my understanding of DH.

I think Drucker makes some overly broad claims and even strawman arguments that impair the article’s central arguments. For instance, there is quite a bit of humanistic work around information visualization. Yes, any contemporary information/data visualization handbook will necessarily cover some statistical concepts and “the difference between a bar chart and a continuous graph … in professional terms,” which Drucker bemoans as unhumanistic. But except for technical manuals, contemporary handbooks will also cover basic color theory, typography, and visual symbology, all elements firmly rooted in visual arts scholarship. I have some dataviz books, mostly journalism-related, that delve into what a contemporary humanist would recognize as the semiotics of the chart, even if not using the phrase. There are several annual awards for visualizations explicitly as works of art. Drucker’s characterization of information visualization as a mechanistic statistical tool encroaching on the domain of humanities scholarship is not representative of my understanding and experience reading in and working with visualization. Perhaps Drucker’s understanding is dated, but the article cites references as recent as 2009, while Alberto Cairo’s modern classic of visual journalism, The Truthful Art, was first published in 2008. In my view, Drucker’s characterization is at best unfamiliar with contemporary scholarship in the field, and at worst a misrepresentation.

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Submitted by delamb on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 21:31

I just want to add that Drucker's characterization of information visualization (and later GIS and digital cartography) bugs me specifically because I once referred regularly on Drucker's Graphic Design History when I was working as a designer and this article seems somewhat at odds with what I expected.

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Submitted by Jane McGrail on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 22:43

In their chapter, “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities,” Ramsay and Rockwell argue that digital work in the humanities should still count as scholarship, but that ultimately it is the people doing this work who must make the case for their product as a valid scholarly and humanistic endeavor. They address the anxiety that digital work can cause in academic settings because it is not accounted for in most tenure and promotion proceedings. They also acknowledge that this kind of work can be difficult to evaluate. In response to these issues, they make the case for digital work as equal to other types of more traditional humanities scholarship. In order to make their argument, they suggest two ways of viewing digital artifacts as humanistic theories. The first is that “prototypes are theories, which is to say that they already contain or somehow embody that type of discourse that is most valued—namely, the theoretical.” They also offer “a second way to think of digital artifacts as theories would be to think of them as hermeneutical instruments through which we can interpret other phenomena.” These two premises explain that digital projects can be theories in and of themselves because they create new knowledge that scholars can use to understand the world. Ramsay and Rockwell also make it clear that the impetus is on the digital scholars to advertise their work this way by making clear how the work can advance a theory of its own.

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Submitted by phoebepowers on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 23:26

Honestly after reading these articles, I have a much broader sense of what the Digital Humanities include. Given the digital aspect of the discipline, the STEM background is crucial in order to understand the full process of DH. Overall, I honestly feel slightly more confused on what DH is exactly in terms of theory, computing, tools, etc. I'm left wondering if the Digital Humanities is reliant on the internet itself for success, and whether with the rapidly changing ways of technology that same reliance on internet will remain the same. I guess what I'm a little lost on is whether DH relies moreso on the computer itself or the computer as a means of sharing information around the world using the internet -- I guess it's technically a combination of both.

Furthermore, is the act of writing something original and new a necessary aspect of being a Digital Humanist, or can the more STEM-based actors at play also consider themselves under the realm of DH?

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Submitted by natalyv on Tue, 01/21/2020 - 06:08

I would agree that these readings have expanded my understanding of the scope of activities and fields that are encompassed by the Digital Humanities field. Chapter 6 detailed technological and STEM-related practices and advancements that aid in the field of digital humanities and allow progress in the work of digital humanists. It can be argued that these humanists are reacting to their time and technology and perpetuating change that is constantly evolving the work and methods used in the field and allowing a fluid definition of the word "digital humanities," which I also agree with, does make it more difficult to understand. The field seems so broad and its reliance on technology for the obvious digital aspect of the realm of work allows constant progress that can be accredited to technology in addition to the humanists using said technology. The digital humanities incorporate methods like computing and the use of digital tools, things which I am completely unfamiliar with, so it makes understanding the field and the wide scope of the field hard to process as its work is not clearly defined.

I think that having the ability to say you are adding to the field requires the creation of original work, but the methods used by the field permits STEM-based actors to fall under the realm as the use of technology to create in the field is the whole point since the digital humanities reacts to technology and the advancements that occur with time. Discussed in chapter 5, the broad field of digital humanities allows problems to develop in regard to distributing credit where it is due for created work, and the changes in technology allow an expansion of humanists which amplifies the number of contributors and credit to be given. The vastness of the field sanctions growth, development, and progress, but not without problems.

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Submitted by Mason Laney on Tue, 01/21/2020 - 03:47

In chapter 6, Drucker makes the claim that digital processing and visualization techniques are antagonistic to the humanities because they are "positivistic, strictly quantitative, mechanistic, reductive and literal". She then goes as far as to say that "the ideology of almost all current information visualization is anathema to humanistic thought, antipathetic to its aims and values". While reading through all of this, I found myself repeatedly disagreeing with what the author was saying. Perhaps this is because I am 100% a technologist and STEM person and have honestly never really found the humanities to be that enjoyable, so I felt personally defensive when Drucker seemed to attack the sciences. But even when I try to remove my own personal feelings from the equation, I still can't bring myself to agree with her assertion that visualization methods—and even the very fields of science, business, entertainment, etc.—are purely quantitative and leave no room for interpretation. Videogames, which are something Drucker specifically mentions, undoubtedly have many qualitative aspects to them, and I don't think that any of the things she lists are purely quantitative and literal. If digital visualization is purely quantitative and cannot be studied through a humanistic view, then how have the humanities survived? I feel like you could attempt to make the same argument of quantitativeness about text and other physical mediums (and it is certainly not difficult to counter the argument if it is applied to prose or visual art), although maybe I'm missing something about her argument. As the article went on, I found it increasingly difficult to follow the author's claims and ideas, so it is possible that her assertion is ultimately agreeable and I just got confused.

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Submitted by KaylaGibson on Tue, 01/21/2020 - 04:23

Ramsay and Rockwell bring up an interesting analogy about writing and scholarly acts in Chapter Five. They claim “writing is the technology—or better, the methodology—that lies between model and result in humanistic discourse. We have for centuries regarded writing as absolutely essential to scholarship,” but they continue to point out that “we do not mean to propose that the act of putting words on a page is scholarship.” Here, they point out how it’s not the physical movements of writing that make scholarship, but more the mindset and process. They continue to say, “if the quality of the interventions that occur as a result of building are as interesting as those that are typically established through writing, then that activity is, for all intents and purposes, scholarship.” This is important when considering Digital Humanities, a field that can be so difficult to pin down and define, especially when scholars argue over whether it is a field or a methodology. For those that lean towards DH being a methodology, the concept of a process or activity being allowed to be scholarly can be applied to DH.

In Chapter Six, the authors spend time addressing the question(s): “Have the humanities had any impact on the digital environment? Can we create graphical interfaces and digital platforms from humanistic methods?” The environment in which the question is asked makes it feel as though the answer is, obviously, yes. Taking a look at DH projects, even some of the ones suggested by classmates, it seems apparent the influence the humanities have had on the digital environment—Project Gutenburg, better, more efficient access of the Geneva Bible—all these have the humanities at their core. Moreover, the humanities teach critical thinking and reasoning, and at its core focus on human society and culture. What else is technology if not a way to advance, study, and further both society, culture, and human nature? 

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Submitted by alexmorton on Tue, 01/21/2020 - 06:11

Drucker makes two main arguments in Chapter 6, one that I found interesting and one that I disagree with. Regarding the first, questions about how the digital humanities have survived and changed over time alongside technology raises an interesting discourse. Has anything actually evolved or has digital advancement allowed the humanities to remain relevant without straying very far from its foundations in visualization and synthesis? The disagreement about how to make implicit ideas more explicit roots itself in the tension between the humanities and digitization. The combination and dichotomy of qualitative and quantitative experiences was very interesting to me, and I’m not exactly sure how to react to it. As for Drucker’s second argument in the chapter regarding spatial and temporal visualization and evolution, my gut reaction is to disagree based on the winding arguments and (personally) non-sensical explanations on how because time and space are constructs, there is not real way to quantify our understandings of some aspects of history. There is a good chance I could have misinterpreted the argument, so I apologize in advance.

As for Chapter 5, I found this piece to be much more sensical and realistic. It addresses how digital humanists feel about accreditation and accomplishment in an industry that is not strictly defined. How can someone get credit for something that may be rooted in something slightly ambiguous and more fluid in practice like the digital humanities? Ramsay and Rockwell addresses this by considering a series of guidelines that would solidify accomplishment, allowing digital humanists to create without fear of their work being separated from them.

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Submitted by dannych on Tue, 01/21/2020 - 14:27

I think the main takeaway from readings for me is the complexity of defining digital humanities. While this has been discussed multiple times in class, I had not grasped the full depth of the issue until this time around. Specifically, the issue of determining what is and isn't as scholastic work. I had not previously considered how tools could be also considered research in it of themselves. This theory now makes sense to me. If a scholar creates a utility that provides additional help in discovering new information, that in itself is a scholastic achievement, just like the telescope was. 

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Submitted by mari98 on Tue, 01/21/2020 - 14:47

In Chapter 6, the concept evolved around the impact the humanities has had on the digital aspect of digital humanities; Meanwhile, Chapter 5, dug into the issue on how to figure out whether a digital article or journal should receive as an academic article/journal. I understand why we we were given chapter 6 to read before chapter 5. Yet, Chapter 6 was a little harder to understand since I had to think about how digital methods have changed due to digital humanities. Chapter 5 was a lot more practical since an individual can put it to use after it's read. Chapter 6 gave examples to give evidence on how humanities has actual impact our digital methods. I enjoyed how Chapter 6 tied in the counting of words like we had in our previous reading since we know that machines count the words; machines can't read sarcasm in people's review articles which is what I thought of when the counting of words paragraph came into play. In chapter 5, the conclusion involved a sentence about whether we should fear machines due to the automated writing of scholarships. We should not fear machines' intelligence since there are things we as humans can pick out; that a machine can't such as sarcasm and emotions.

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