Beyond Methodology: Digital Humanities as a Way of Thinking
English 480 Portfolio by Carly Schnitzler
One of my favorite working digital artists posted this on Instagram a few weeks ago—in it, the artist's hand is shown in a video, moving as if creating shadow puppets against against an unseen wall. Instead of shadows cast, though, a gaggle of digitally rendered lines trace the movements of his hand, an augmented reality software program he developed to play with hapticity and the generative relationship his own body has with technology. These lines are more than shadow, more than light cast against movement. Because of their digital transcription, these lines take on a life of their own, separate from his body but entirely reliant upon it.
When thinking about summing up my work and experience in this course, I thought about this piece. The projects we've embarked on in English 480 have expanded my modality of thinking, beyond dialogue, beyond writing. Creating in the way we have, through digital video and audio, has opened up an expanded register of thought and creativity. I consider myself a writer. My best thinking is done through writing—putting words on a page forces the tempo of mental thought to slow, something that is beneficial for both the clarity of my ideas and my own neuroticism. In this class, though, I was encouraged to try a different mode of thinking—instead of putting ideas into words, putting them into words, images, movement, sound. This kind of digital creation grew the sensorium of my thinking, in much the same way the lines in Zach Lieberman's above post expanded and transformed the initial movements of his hand.
So, while digital humanities is certainly a methodology of doing research within humanities fields, it is also a way of thinking and creating that goes beyond them. And I am grateful for this course in giving me the leeway to experiment with this new kind of thinking and the tools to do it.
Portfolio Video
The following video shows a little bit of everything from our creations in this course, from Snagit screen capture poetry to Adobe Rush video editing and Audacity podcast producing. I focused on how I found the humanity in the digital humanities, looking at the affordances of playing with the tonalities of sound and the human voice (often mine) while creating scholarly digital work. My script and storyboard for the video is linked here.
Digital Humanities Project Report
To first dip our toes into the water of digital creation, we were first tasked with writing about a digital humanities project that interested us. I have long loved e-poetry and have recently been exploring AR/VR technology in the English Department's Digital Innovation Lab, so Amaranth Borsuk's work of augmented reality poetry, Between Page and Screen immediately came to mind as the subject for this report. The final edited version is linked here and an earlier draft is linked here.
Between Page and Screen is an experimental work of e-literature, created in collaboration between artist and scholar Amaranth Borsuk and coded by programmer Brad Bouse. Its authors describe it as a “kind of digital pop-up book”—readers hold the small physical book, which contains no words and only hieroglyphic Quick Response (QR) codes up to the webcam on his or her computer at the web address www.betweenpageandscreen.com and poems are projected onto the screen (Borsuk). Of the physical book, digital poetics scholar Jessica Pressman in her article “Reorienting Ourselves toward the Material: Between Page and Screen as Case Study” says: “You open its covers and realize immediately that this is not for you” (Pressman, 317). The physical pages of the book are only made legible to readers through the software via the screen, appropriate, given the subject and main characters of the work. Between Page and Screen is staged most often as a series of letters—more specifically, love letters sent after a quarrel—between the two main characters, Page and Screen.
We wrote these reports individually using a 'sprint' within a group, something that brought me back to my pre-grad school life working at a digital media startup. These accountability check-ins gave me a useful forum to float ideas with my group along with necessary beginning-of-semester structure. At the encouragement of my group, I wrote the report for Between Page and Screen in the second person ("you") as a hybrid report and creative writing piece.
Digital Humanities Project Video
Original Draft of DH Project Video Report (above and linked)
After writing the original report, we were then charged with transforming our writing into a short video, acclimating us to the expanded sensorium of DH production. Between Page and Screen was a challenge and a delight to transform in this way—in many ways, the work of e-poetry lent itself to this media jump naturally (it is called Between Page and Screen, after all). I found it initially challenging to have all sensory elements firing at once in my process of creation—visual, sound, movement, and verbal narration. The storyboarding process helped begin to cohere these elements, my original storyboard is linked here. A transcript of the narration for the video is linked here.
My initial iteration of this video report, embedded above, was a challenge and great fun to create. However, it has moments of clear focus on one sensory element (i.e. just narration, without much else going on, or just visuals, without much else going on), without the true cohesion of sensory input that digital video production on Adobe Rush affords. I revised my original iteration, with a hopefully better sense of cohesion and more refined editorial touches below.
Revised Draft of DH Project Video Report (above and linked)
In this version, I cut down significantly on footage and voiceover in the beginning. I completely redid my voiceover, making small changes and tweaks throughout, to both the narration and my intonation. The footage remains largely the same—my edits focused mainly on the narration/script and introductory concision, since those were the primary "problem areas" of the first draft. My newly revised script that corresponds with this iteration of the video is linked here.
Podcast
Before our extended Spring Break and subsequent pandemic-induced transition to Zoom classes, my wonderful classmates Jane McGrail, Isabelle Smith, and Natalie Perez and I did a podcast on issues of information accessibility and insularity within the digital humanities. Our live in-class podcast performance from March 5th is linked here. Our guiding question during our live show and for my individual edited version was about the relationship between public and digital humanities. Does, and if so, when does digital mean public?
We talked in depth about the ethics of open source softwares and journals, the accessibility of digital resources in and outside of academia, and exemplary digital projects that are paving the way forward for publicly accessible digital humanities work.
I edited an individual cut of our podcast using open-source software Audacity. Called the Axis of Access, my podcast below is a refined and edited version of our thoughtful in-class conversation.
Pinterest Video
For our final original project, we were tasked with doing a video investigation into algorithmic perceptions of our own identities on the social networking aggregation site, Pinterest. Using a tool developed by UNC's Digital Innovation Lab, I conducted description analyses of the different results from same search terms between my long-term personal account and my alter ego’s Pinterest account, a dummy account created specifically for this project. Pinterest searches, as it turns out, can reveal much about algorithmic perception of identity, in my case particularly around gender and parenthood.
My video, called "Pinterest-ed in Who I Am" explores questions of demographic targeting and motherhood on the social networking site. It is composed in the vertical format on Adobe Premiere Rush, which afforded many interesting editing moves, like the immediate comparison between personal and alter-ego profiles (one on top of the other) that goes on in the video.
Comments
Over the course of the semester, I responded to class readings, participated in in-person and virtual discussions, gave peer feedback, and completed some fun, experimental in-class projects. These are all linked below.
Reading Responses
Peer Feedback
Draft of Counter Cartographies
Dispersed Digital Poetry Project Narrative
Improvisational Projects
In class, we did some really fun, creative projects to acclimate ourselves with the digital editing software (Adobe Premiere Rush, Snagit) used to create our projects. I really enjoyed these as in class exercises, they caused me to think a little bit outside of the box on immediate notice with relatively low stakes. I'm hoping to replicate exercises like these for a class I'm teaching on Writing in the Digital Humanities (ENGL 105i) next spring. A short video demonstrating the uses of screen-capture software Snagit, called We Learn Pride, is linked and below.
A short haiku made on Adobe Premiere Rush, called February Moon, is linked and below.
Final Thoughts
This class challenged and inspired me to approach scholarship creatively, with an eye towards holding ideas in tandem with our senses (audio, visual) beyond the linguistic. While most of my continued research will be done in writing, I hope to carry on with some of the creative projects started in this course and combine rigorous scholarly work with creative outputs. Creating the Between Page and Screen video in particular showed me some of the subtleties of integrating A/V digital creativity into scholarship, marrying the two to be somewhere in between critical and creative work. Work that blurs this line has long been a favorite of mine, now I feel I have the tools and am getting the bearings to do it with more nuance.