Computational processes generate lists: lists of numbers, lists of words, lists of coordinates, lists of properties. We transform these lists into more exalted forms — visualizations, maps, information systems, software tools — but the list remains the fundamental data structure of computing, from which most other structures are derived. Whenever we treat the world as data, we are nearly always creating lists. But what sort of *texts* are these, and can we consider them the same way that we consider other texts within the humanities? In this paper, I offer some meditations on the nature of lists, and suggest that it is the paucity of information they provide — and the ways in which that paucity licenses narrative and explanation — that allows us to imagine computational representations as texts that can play a fruitful role in the wider context of humanistic inquiry.

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I first met Janet Murray when I arrived at MIT almost 25 years ago. At the time, she was working on her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, while I was working on Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Murray, along with the members of the Narrative Intelligence Reading Group, was an early guide for me to the emerging realm of digital culture and helped to shape my thinking in ways that I will never be able to fully acknowledge.

A few years later, Murray and I worked together, along with Ben Singer and Ellen Draper, to create The Virtual Screening Room, the prototype for a fully interactive digital textbook for studying film analysis. In many ways, what we constructed together using Hypercard was more advanced than anything we’ve seen so far coming out of the realm of e-books, with hundreds of clips on command from almost as many movies to illustrate core concepts in film editing.

… Murray recently released her long-awaited new book, Inventing the Medium: Principals of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. On one level, the book is a textbook designed to help designers in training develop a fuller, more robust understanding of digital media, one which builds productively on principles she first outlined in Hamlet on the Holodeck, but which also reflects on the past decade plus of developments as many once cutting edge practices have now become normalized and routinized within digital media. This book captures some of the thinking she did as the chair of her program at Georgia Tech, which remains one of the most forward thinking about new media platforms and practices.

On another level, the book is a theory of media — especially of media change — with a strong emphasis on the intersections between technology and culture. I was delightful to see how much more deeply Murray had read and thought about media theory since the first book, and in the process, she is pushing all of us to think more deeply about what it might mean to consider the digital as its own medium rather than as a delivery system for multiple media or what it might mean to think about the local choices made in digital design as contributing to a larger evolution of that medium. Murray’s writing has shifted in a more technical direction than her first book, which was very much an argument for why humanists should engage with new media production and critique, but she remains very much a humanist at heart, who sees digital media as making vital contributions to our contemporary culture. Inventing the Medium is an epic accomplishment, one which we will all be mining for years to come.

In this interview, Murray reflects about the larger conceptual framing of the book, what it has to say about the nature of media change and the role of design in constructing contemporary culture. Her thoughtful and engaging responses to my questions should provoke further reflections about the state of the art in digital design.

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Read Interview Transcript (Part 3) Here

Todd Presner (Duke ’94), gave the following presentation at Duke on January 24 entitled “Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities: From Berlin to Los Angeles and Beyond.”

Presner, Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at UCLA, where he is the Director of UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of the Digital Humanities Program, introduced his award-winning “HyperCities” project (http://hypercities.com), a digital mapping platform that allows students and scholars to “go back in time.” The presentation was generously funded by Duke’s Center for Jewish Studies and the German Studies Department.

In last December’s NITLE Digital Scholarship Seminar, Teaching DH 101, I presented my experience designing and proposing a new digital humanities course at St. Norbert College. In that talk, I found myself arguing, somewhat to my surprise, for interdisciplinarity—by which I mean clear association with one of the humanities disciplines that converge under the digital humanities tent—in digital humanities courses. In short, I claimed that a digital humanities course grounded in a familiar academic discipline might stand better chance of being understood and approved by curricular committees and, frankly, students who are unlikely to have heard, much less understand, the term “digital humanities.” I use the term interdisciplinary with a strike-through not to disavow the cross-field collaborations that underlie and energize digital humanities work, but to highlight the idea that interdisciplinary work, by definition, requires collaborators from distinct disciplines…

…I want to suggest that relying on the term “digital humanities” can at times be a tactical error, especially for solo practitioners at institutions—large or small—without an established DH culture—in other words, at the vast majority of colleges and universities. By thinking through the interdisciplinarity of DH courses, I hope to offer a model for “curricular incursion” that might aid such practitioners. I haven’t abandoned Bethany Nowviskie’s strident call for interdisciplinary methodological training. In many ways, I hope to suggest a practical model for a “pandemic” curricular reform that can reshape institutions beyond the (meteoric?) glow of major DH centers.

…To think more broadly for a moment: I would suggest that DH will only be a revolutionary interdisciplinary movement if its various practitioners bring to it the methods of distinct disciplines and take insights from it back to those disciplines. As Ted Underwood recently argued (against Stanley Fish’s New York Times provocations), “digital humanities is not a discipline or a coherent project. It’s a rubric under which a bunch of different projects have gathered—from new media studies to text mining to the open-access movement.” For Underwood, “what’s actually interesting and new about this moment” are its “new opportunities for collaboration both across disciplines and across the boundary between the conceptual work of academia and the infrastructure that supports and tacitly shapes it.” I heartily agree.

…At some institutions the digital humanities community can operate independently, perhaps with the flexibility of institutional or grant funding far and above what their more traditional humanities colleagues can hope for. As DH grows rapidly, however, the vast majority of its practitioners will work within institutional structures formed by traditional humanities categories. I don’t write this out of despair. As many of you know, I’m with Thoreau: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection.” Instead, I want to suggest that these institutions offer a unique opportunity for DHers to emphasize the interdisciplinarity of their work and open new conversations that will expand the “big tent” of digital humanities even further.

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In the very useful survey of the “history web” in their 2005 book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web , Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig identify the range of genres that encompassed the historical content on the web: archival sites, exhibits and scholarly essays, teaching and learning sites, and discussion forums and organizational sites. Even though Cohen and Rosenzweig failed to account for the way that blogs, YouTube, and social media would eventually permeate the history web, I like their categories because they continue to the give us a way to think about what we do when we create public history online. We tend to provide access to collections, to offer interpretation, to offer instruction, and to offer a forum for conversation, both general and professional. So, as I began to think about the critical issuing in effectively using data visualizations in public history, I wanted to consider them in relationship to the activities above. Since Sheila has already written a great post on collections and enhancing access with visualizations, I’d like to focus both on their interpretative and instructive use, building on Trevor’s thoughts from his last post on discovery and communication.

For public historians, the mode of online outreach that has the longest history is that of interpretative exhibits, whether as companions to a physical exhibit or as independent works of scholarship. Despite the liberating possibilities for disjunction, many of exhibits hue very closely to the linear narrative structure of traditional narrative history. In doing so, they have demonstrated varying degrees of success in offering the public a glimpse of the richness of the past. Two sites from the National Museum of American History demonstrate the wide range of approaches. Both “The Price of Freedom” and “A More Perfect Union” are beautiful sites, but one presents a linear and reductive narrative of military history and the other presents the difficult topic of Japanese internment during World War II with a range of voices and perspectives that highlights historical complexity. The difference here is in the effort to bring together evidence in a user interface that allows for the consideration of many perspectives and multiple causality, as opposed to offering a single perspective that simplifies the past.

Successful or unsuccessful, most exhibit sites have the benefit of offering visitors a range of contextual information in both the text of the basic narrative and in the descriptions that accompany individual artifacts, images, or documents. This contextual information is essential for a public who may not have a deep background to bring to their encounter with primary historical materials. Data visualizations can short circuit the tendency to present simplistic narratives about our collections. Unfortunately, however, data visualizations that concentrate the user interface into a single interactive screen can also significantly reduce our ability to offer the public necessary historical context if we’re not careful.

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“The Scientific Revolution” is as apt a name as any for a period which set the world in motion. Something feels fundamentally different on this side of its amorphous borders than what came before, and this difference is felt most keenly in the sciences. This is not a paper about the scientific revolution; it will not reveal the steady stream of precedents before the great publications of Copernicus and Vesalius, nor extol the seeds of modernity sown by Great Men of the seventeenth century. This paper neither intends to limit the so-called revolution to some warm summer morning under an apple tree, nor to extend it up through today and back to the peripatetics.

It is enough to know that, several hundred years back, a vast increase in scientific quantity resulted in a corresponding change in scientific quality. The learned eighteenth century European saw the world much differently than his fifteenth century counterpart; a far greater gap, indeed, than between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. I argue that a perfect storm of sufficient, though not necessary, conditions existed in early modern Europe to facilitate what has often been called The Scientific Revolution.

The revolution was neither inevitable nor instant. The rapid growth of science could not have occurred without a host of clever ideas and serendipitous events; however, those factors could not have existed nor led to such stark changes without being situated within their larger environment. The thesis is simple: a steady stream of scholarly activity, combined with a naturally compounding increase in scholarly network size, created conditions in which science could (and increasingly likely would) flourish and change. The scholars already existed, a continuation of ancient tradition, and the network increase came about from a multilayered mix of socio-political, economic, technological, and geographic factors. This paper is about some of those factors which facilitated the growth of scholarly networks, and the power of those networks to, in turn, facilitate revolutionary science.

This essay will unfold somewhat dissimilarly to most concerning the early modern period. While this first section on the Republic of Letters will be well-grounded in secondary sources from the history literature, it is here the essay will part ways with traditional historical studies. While the following sections will draw some inspiration from the social sciences, the majority of the following research is based off of primarily physics- and computer science-driven network science techniques (rather than those from sociology), as well as modeling techniques drawn from network science and philosophy of science. Some detours will be taken in the science of complexity and emergent phenomena.

Individual historical materials will be purposefully eschewed in favor of the analysis of extremely large volumes of primary sources aggregated together. Ideally, research of this sort should transition smoothly between “distant” (Moretti 2007) and “close” reading, grounding the abstract nature of Big Data into the grubby reality of half-faded manuscripts and other ephemera. This study, however, is intended as a proof-of-concept that good historical work can be done without necessarily leaving the general for the specific. Of course, work of this nature can only be done when driven by a sound historical theory, and it is in this spirit that I will use (and in some cases test the hypotheses of) the research of previous historians.

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• Along with the explicit philosophical and cultural aspects of coding—e.g., open source, geek culture, hacking, hacktivism, black hat vs. white hat, etc.—code itself is a form of writing with a dual audience: machines and other coders (including one’s future self). Others may want to read and modify that code in the future. Such a task becomes far more difficult when the code does not show an awareness of the culture. But beyond simply the practical issue of code maintenance, if you skip the culture, you’re missing out on half the fun. Code culture has a long history of humor, stylistic and methodological debates, and cult-like devotion to a particular tool/language/platform/idea. One cultural touchstone of coding is a knowledge of the three virtues of programmers: laziness, impatience, and hubris. Without developing this trio of qualities, you will never be a Real Programmer. Read Full Post Here

Lee Ann Ghajar, I code, you code, we code…Why Code?, February 16, 2012

• I’d argue that pushing humanists to learn to code for the sake of coding equates with learning how to use a tool without understanding where, when, and why it’s useful. And that the Pavlovian response methodologies of projects such as CodeAcademy have a instructional niche, but they misrepresent the process of becoming a coder, the complexities of speaking languages that give us narratives of infrastructure, relationships, and information retrieval. As decontextualized rote response mechanisms, they are retrograde pedagogical steps in an era when critical thinking ought to be a hallmark of educational effectiveness. Read Full Post Here

Sarah Ruth Jacobs, Academic Call to Code and the Networked Self, February 6, 2012

• Davidson and Leavitt’s calls to code, both of which espouse a leftist politics of democratic or Do It Yourself coding, make me reflect on the different values that are currently competing in the software programming and academic spheres; proprietary models v. open access/open source models. In particular, the academic debate about open access to academic knowledge recently reared its head in Congress, when in December of 2011 the Research Works Act, an act that would block mandates of public access to federally-funded research, was introduced to the House of Representatives. This act is likely a response to recent moves on the part of the Obama administration toward better access to scientific publications (see the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 and the subsequent Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data and Scientific Publications). While the Research Works Act will probably not pass, it speaks to the conflict inside and outside academia between privileging information and disseminating information, between profit and public interest. Read Full Post Here

“Game changing” is a term we hear a lot in digital humanities. I have used it myself. But try, as I was asked to do for a recent talk at Brown University’s Ancient Religion, Modern Technology workshop, to name a list of truly game-changing developments wrought by digital humanities. I come up short.

Struggling with this problem, I found it useful in preparing my talk to examine the origins or at least the evolution of the term. I’m sure it’s not the earliest use, but the first reference I could find to “game changing” (as an adjective) in Google Books was from a 1953 Newsweek article, not surprisingly about baseball, specifically in reference to how Babe Ruth and his mastery of the home run changed the game of baseball. This is a telling, if serendipitous, example, because baseball fans will know that Babe Ruth really did change baseball, in that the game was played one way before he joined the Red Sox in 1914 and another way really ever since. Babe Ruth’s veritable invention of the home run changed baseball forever, from the “small ball” game of infield singles, sacrifice bunts, and strategic base running of the late-19th and early-20th centuries to the modern game dominated by power and strength. As Baseball Magazine put it none-too-flatteringly in 1921: “Babe has not only smashed all records, he has smashed the long-accepted system of things in the batting world and on the ruins of the system has erected another system or rather lack of system whose dominant quality is brute force.” From what I could gather from my quick survey of Google Books, for the better part of the next thirty years, the term is mainly used in just this way, in the context of sports, literally to talk about how games have been changed….

But when we use the term in these other arenas—i.e. in ways other than in the literal sense of changing the way a sport or game is played—in order for it to be meaningful, in order for it to be more than jargon and hyperbole, in order for the “game-changing” developments we’re describing to live up to the description, it seems to me that they have to effect a transformation akin to the one Babe Ruth effected in baseball. After Ruth, baseball games were won and lost by new means, and the skills required to be successful at baseball were completely different. A skilled baserunner was useless if most runs were driven in off homeruns. The change Ruth made wasn’t engendered by him being able to bunt or steal more effectively than, say, Ty Cobb (widely acknowledged as the best player of the “small ball” era) it was engendered by making bunting and stealing irrelevant, by doing something completely new.

In the same way, I don’t think technologies that simply help us do what we’ve always done, but better and more efficiently, should be counted as game-changing. Innovation isn’t enough. Something that helps us write a traditional journal article more expertly or answer an existing question more satisfactorily isn’t to me a game-changing development. When you use Zotero to organize your research, or even when you use sophisticated text mining techniques to answer a question that you could have answered (though possibly less compellingly) using other methods, or even when you use those techniques to answer questions that you couldn’t have answered but would like to have answered, that’s not to me game-changing. And when you write that research up and publish it in a print journal, or even online as an open access .pdf, or even as a rich multimedia visualization or Omeka exhibit, that to me looks like playing the existing game more expertly, not fundamentally changing the game itself.

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I chanced across an discussion last night on twitter which aligns with a problem I have been considering – how can the digital humanities include social sciences and science, if at all?  This relates to the question of creating an undergraduate curriculum of some sort in Digital Humanities which would be truly interdisciplinary, that would work for scientists and social scientists as well as humanists.

People may argue that the sciences have always used the best available digital technologies, indeed, they invented most of them.  It may be fairly argued that a desire to appear more “scientific” and therefore more academically respectable (and better funded) animated many humanists to start playing with tech toys, and in same cases this would be a fair criticism.

It can also be objected that the fundamental difference in end goals – the scientific  quest for general laws against the humanities valuing of the unique, are so at odds with each other as to limit any hope of real collaboration.  I don’t think science will ever have a theory of everything, but they will come close and I don’t see any objection to walking the road to understanding together….

I think if we begin from the start point of our disciplines and our traditional disciplinary groups, we will ask questions about the digital which are grounded in our existing administratively convenient academic boxes. But if we ask those same questions from the perspective of the student – “How do digital tools enhance research led pedagogy?”,  ”How do digital tools facilitate collaboration and ‘peeragogy’?”, and “What new questions can I ask using digital tools” then we are obliged to answer them not just from the perspective of the humanities disciplines, but across all of the “Studium Generale”

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The Journal of Digital Humanities will offer expanded coverage of the digital humanities in three ways. First, we publish scholarly work beyond the traditional research article. Second, we select content from open and public discussions in the field. Third, we encourage continued discussion through peer-to-peer review.

The journal will be comprised of individual works that were selected as Editors’ Choice in Digital Humanities Now. These works range from written texts, to visual arguments, to audio-visual presentations. In order to promote the peer review of non-traditional scholarship, each issue will include solicited reviews of digital tools. When the community focuses extensively on a particular topic, a special section of the issue will feature the broader conversation. In our inaugural issue, Natalia Cecire, a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, will introduce and guest edit a special section about theory and the digital humanities.

The works considered for inclusion in the Journal were made available for public consumption outside of formal publication methods by more than 400 scholars and groups in our Compendium of the Digital Humanities. From the more than 15,000 pieces published or shared by the digital humanities community last quarter, 85 were selected as Editors’ Choice in Digital Humanities Now. Of these 85, the ones that most influenced the community, as measured by interest, transmission, and response, have been selected for formal publication in the Journal.

We invite the digital humanities community to participate further in the review process through open peer review of the items selected for the Journal from February 14-29. If you would like your work to be considered for Digital Humanities Now and the next issue of the Journal, you can learn how to submit your work.

Our hope is that scholarship in the digital humanities is both refined and expanded through an open discussion of the ideas proposed and the methods pursued in the Journal.

- The Editors

Dan Cohen, Sasha Boni, Jeri Wieringa, and Joan Fragaszy Troyano