Tuesday, Feb 11

Submitted by iamdan on Thu, 02/06/2020 - 11:41

Read the items linked below, and then add or respond to a comment sharing your thoughts:

(Long reading; don't bog down)  Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing

Trainsplaining 

Blessing Critique

Comments

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Submitted by SabrinaZirkle on Thu, 02/06/2020 - 14:33

Although it seemed a little unusual at first, the "Screenshots" video grew on me as I thought about it because the performance captures the way in which the human mind can think. I sometimes feel like I have multiple tabs open in my brain, just as the performance showcased: I'll have one with music, one with my inner monologue, others with images, and occasional alerts running through my mind. Did Professor Anderson create this one as well? The "Trainsplaining" performance reminded me of a how a music producer might mix together different tracks and samples to create something new. In the similar way, the field of DH is a collaboration and remixing of various media, technologies, and systematic approaches.

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Submitted by KaylaGibson on Mon, 02/10/2020 - 15:16

I had the same immediate response! At first, especially in the "Trainsplaining" video, I felt a little overwhelmed trying to focus on everything all at once and understand what was going on. Then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much that mirrors being human—we have all this sensory data coming at us from multiple angles all the time, and it can be difficult to sort through it. I was also a little taken aback by the sounds of the video, but again, once I thought about it I realized that trains are anything but quiet. The controlled chaos of the video really portrays that well. 

I also enjoyed how the other video, "Blessing Critique," had a link to a previous version/draft. Transparency in academia can be hard to come by, and I always appreciate when people are unafraid to say "here was another idea/concept that wasn't quite right." I think it makes ideas and themes more approachable, especially for people who may be new to them. DH is a great space to showcase this transparency (for example, in OERs where you can edit and adjust the material as you learn something new).

And yes, I believe Prof. Anderson created both videos.

As for the Speculative Computing piece, I enjoyed how the authors looked back on the history of philosophy to see how it forms our current approaches and opinions. For example, the reference to Aristotle and how he asked not just how truthful a thing was, but how (or bow, which I believe is a typo in the piece) a piece was made. In DH, how something was made can be a major factor in why that piece is impactful.

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Submitted by Shawna Sheperd on Thu, 02/06/2020 - 15:39

I love this focus on affective response and how that is conveyed through a video. Not only is the layering in “Blessing Critique” provide a video that relates to a person’s memory and personal expression but it’s a very creative way to incorporate all these different mediums into one video. I also thought “Trainsplaining” was a very unusual approach to a video but it really did make me feel a little uneasy, which I believe was the video’s purpose. A big part of both of these videos was the “ambiguity” that was associated with both. (Not knowing the purpose of the trains or owls or the having the main image be the guitar not the player -- making the video universal in relating). In reading “Speculative Computing” I thought it was useful to frame the concept in terms of traditional and generative aesthetics because it informs how these methods are purposeful in the interpretation of computational processing. I also enjoyed learning a little bit about temporal modeling and how it is embedded in subjectivity and uncertainty. 

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Submitted by cschnitz on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 22:29

I was really struck by the inclusion of the process of revision within the "Blessing Critique" video—showing the drafting process on video (or even print) is not something that I've encountered in any academic or professional context. The move from the literalist interpretation with the horse footage to the more interpretive drag racing footage is one that is largely motivated by affect and including affect as a valid reason to revise aesthetically seems like a radical approach to/reimagination of the process of academic critique. This video showcased the "humanity" of the digital humanities—I'm trying to further work out how else this affective, generative approach could be integrated into other kinds of (perhaps more traditional, written, or more experimental and reader-inclusive/generated) academic work? 

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Submitted by natalyv on Mon, 02/10/2020 - 04:36

I also found the ongoing revising interesting as the first idea or interpretation was re-evaluated and reconstructed to target the impact left by the response and its imagery. It was a new experience witnessing the drafting process you mentioned wherein the crafting of the response video was depicted and compared to the final product that utilized previous techniques and themes but altered them in an attempt to eave the desired effect on a viewer in combination with the actual text of the poem as images and sound were incorporated to best suit the text. Your statement was well said insofar as that the "humanity" was evident in the video demonstrating the construction of a digital humanities project aimed to emphasize humanity and human qualities like pathos. The transition shown in the video towards a less literal interpretation of the poem exemplifies the abilities of the digital humanities that reaches beyond simple, literal responses or translations and rather ones that include visuals and sounds with digital tools and construction to develop greater models and responses. It would be interesting to explore the way such techniques can further work from other disciplines.

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Submitted by emmakoslow on Mon, 02/10/2020 - 05:09

I have to say that this week's reading assignment really intrigued me. I enjoyed the fact that included videos as it seems fitting for the upcoming project. It showed perfectly the cognitive creativity that exists in humans and how it can influence others using visuals and sound. It was also ironic that I did the reading right after watching the Academy Awards, the ceremony which honors motion picture creativity. In Blessing Critique, I admired how it shows digital humanities not as humanities subjects assisted by technology but as technology influenced by human creativity. It was a unique perspective that I have not seen much of. I enjoyed the Screen Shots video a lot. It showed how sound and visuals come together to make something completely different and creative. It was a bit unusual at the beginning but the message soon became clear. As for the article, I enjoyed that it was basically a perfect accompaniment to the videos, explaining the aesthetics of computer processing and how that can influence the users. It showed a different side to digital humanities that focused on the part that is meant to influence human emotions emphasizing the human in humanity.  

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Submitted by ifsmith on Mon, 02/10/2020 - 21:02

I really enjoyed watching the two videos. "Trainsplaining" was particularly engaging to me: the combination of the music and the owls and the trains was emotional and made me feel curious. I think the quote below the video ("Affective scholarship is linked to memory, personal experience, and creative expression.) reveals something really interesting about how so much scholarship aims to be "non-affective." So much scholarship almost seems dead-- the text sits on a screen or page and there is no voice in the words or pleasure in engaging with it, other than a sort of disembodied intellectual stimulus. The text sits statically as if it was never created by a human being or cared for by its author. The videos, on the other hand, bring the author and the life of the material right to the surface for the person engaging with the video. In the train video, when the voice starts exclaiming about the speed of the train I started feeling really invested in the experience of watching the video. 

The final product creates a more complex and emotional response for viewers and also shows the complex process of composition. This idea of "conceptual interference" emerges when you start putting new things next to each other or on top of each other. 

The Drucker article was very difficult to read. I like how she describes the PlaySpace and the temporal modelling, but I'm not quite sure I knew exactly what she was talking about...

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Submitted by natalie.p98 on Mon, 02/10/2020 - 22:07

I really enjoyed the emphasis of visualization within the reading and videos for this week! In Drucker and Nowviskie's "Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing," I was struck by the pondering upon "some specific qualities and tools of Temporal Modeling, especially as they relate to the embeddedness of subjectivity, uncertainty, and interpretation in every act of representation." Tools of visualization and imaging in themselves can provide one with more information and interpretive framework, especially since the implications of an image can pose several questions about the material being visualized in said image. It's interesting to think about this in relation to our video reports; will specific choices I make in the way I visualize the material impact the end product and interpretations of said material? Furthermore, I found both "Trainsplaining" and "Blessing Critique" interesting; I have little experience with video editing, so it was informative to learn about the capabilities of layering and mixing images. Additionally, I think it was a great way of demonstrating how these kinds of visuals can be interpreted in relation to other works regarding the emotions they can inflict upon a viewer. I definitely had an emotional response to both videos, and it really made me want to think of ways of inflicting similar emotions in my own video report.

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Submitted by Mason Laney on Tue, 02/11/2020 - 01:53

I found the two videos to be very intriguing. In "Trainsplaining", the video started out simple and rather peaceful, with the sounds of an owl, crickets, and a distant train accompanying chill, lo-fi music. Over time, as the music sped up and more and more images and sounds were layered on top of each other, the video became more chaotic to symbolize the disruptive message of the words on screen and the approaching train. I thought that the format of the video was very interesting. I came into it without any expectations, and after the intense climax of the video, I had felt as though I had just had an emotional experience or watched a mini movie.

The "Blessing Critique" was also really interesting. The combination of multiple layers of video, text, and music is something very much unique to digital videos. It produced a very complex final product that I will keep in mind whenever composing something in a digital space. It wasn't possible for me to keep track of all of the elements at once, though I think there could be value in that: to get the whole experience, you have to watch it multiple times and focus on different parts, much like a video game that has multiple possible endings.

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Submitted by alexmorton on Tue, 02/11/2020 - 12:58

Johanna Drucker’s “Speculative Computing” supplies an interesting discourse on ambiguity, specifically in relation to digital humanities. For one, digital humanities need a certain amount of imaginative ambiguity to thrive. However, this confrontation with the need to make such things unambiguous for the sake of clarity suppresses certain modes of expression. The point that as humans, we put things in order to “allow computational methods to operate effectively” is valid to me. Certain conventions are necessary to provide accessibility and continuity, especially with something like computer processing. Drucker insists that this “order of things” exists as a byproduct of human faults becoming naturalized in everyday life. I’m not sure if she views this as a stark negative, but I think a certain amount of order is completely necessary for things to function effectively. 

As for the videos, I thought they were super interesting. Kayla’s explanation was spot on to me that it was all overwhelming, but that was the point. “Blessing critique” showed the process of revising a video, something I had not seen before and found super intriguing.

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Submitted by delamb on Tue, 02/11/2020 - 13:01

I found both of the readings/viewings from Dan quite helpful in redeveloping/reconceptualizing the video project. I'm going to focus most on "Trainsplaining" because it intrigued me most. "Trainsplaining" offered some interesting ideas about composing & compositing for the screen. Showing most of the tools compositional tools on-screen was ::chef's kiss:: technique given the content. By showing the individual video panes, text applications, etc., and by showing the cursor manipulating volumes & opacities, and by changing focus by selecting different windows, the software tools and even the underlying hardware used to compose the video themselves became elements of the composition — making the medium literally the message.

Speaking of media and messages, or "massages", the content and composition of the video put me in mind of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, wherein book designer/graphic design Quentin Fiore supported McLuhan's arguments about media, technology, and meaning through innovative use of typography, photography, and composition for the printed page. Fiore also designed one of my most prized possessions: a copy of R. Buckminster Fuller's I Seem to Be a Verb, which is composed with brief passages of text and images, right-side-up and left-to-right in blank ink on the top, and upside-down and right-to-left in green ink on the bottom. In the center, a single, continuous thesis runs throughout the entire book, flipping over and running backwards just like the top/bottom, black/green content. Reading this thesis, it becomes clear that the brief texts and images are thematically related to the content of the thesis paragraph on those pages. It's truly a remarkable book.

"Trainsplaining" offered me a glimpse of how some of the print compositional ideas I find so intriguing in I Seem to Be a Verb and The Medium is the Massage could be applied within a different medium of digital video. In writing that, I realize that it sounds a bit like Drucker's critique that we've seen in a few articles now: are digital humanities compositions and scholarly tools truly revolutionary if they are simply adaptations or evolutions of methods that existed prior o digital media? But I don't think that's the case with "Trainsplaining" as I interpret it. In some sense, it is a bit like an extension of McLuhan-esque argument and a Quentin Fiore-esque visual composition. But I think the way Dan makes the tool use central to the video captures the truly revolutionary nature of the digital technologies involved in creating digital video compositions. When Fiore was designing The Medium is the Massage and I Seem to Be a Verb in the late 60s/early 70s, he was working with then-new technologies like phototypesetting, but he was stretching the boundaries of the print medium. McLuhan argued in Massage that "electronic" (which I'll consider as equivalent to "digital" here) technologies would come to function as a metaphorical extension of the nervous system in the way that a hammer is an extension of the arm. But I think "Trainsplaining" shows how digital video can be more than an extension of the nervous system and function in ways that "[recalibrate] behaviors and understandings of affect, abstraction, and ambiguity," as Dan puts it. In other words, I think "Trainsplaining" comments well on how digital creative technologies can function more as further extensions of the psyche than the nervous system — and all the "affect, abstraction, and ambiguity" that entails.

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Submitted by Jane McGrail on Tue, 02/11/2020 - 14:11

The reading and videos for this week all pointed to a kind of humanities endeavor that does not have to be concrete and clearly defined. Drucker writes that "logical, systematic knowledge representation...is not sufficient for the interpretation of imaginative artifacts." This argument that Drucker makes throughout the article, that the methods we use to communicate something shape how we understand and produce knowledge is an interesting claim that I don't think is always sufficiently considered in humanities work. In other fields, knowledge representation sometimes happens more creatively, but in the humanities our typical method of communicating arguments is the article, the conference paper, or the book. All of these methods guide the reader through the claim that the author has sought to prove. This form is not well-suited to collaborative knowledge production because it provokes critiques of the argument rather than individual interpretation. The videos we watched this week were a helpful way of putting this creative argumentation into practice to offer another mode of knowledge production.

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Submitted by phoebepowers on Mon, 02/17/2020 - 16:00

The Drucker reading was thought-provoking; in this contemporary era, a complete understanding of the technology which we use is possessed by nobody. A complete and total understanding of technology at complex levels is not possible for the human brain to fully comprehend. As a result, humans are frequently being taken advantage of as a result of their lack of technological understanding. For example, Edward Snowden leaked information regarding the public's engagement in technology, which nearly 99% of the population had no clue was being monitored. So when Drucker says that Digital Humanities is also involved in explaining and breaking down our understanding of the technology which we are, often mindlessly, using with little thought of the technology beyond the flat surface. 

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