Keynote panel, ‘Big Digital Humanities?’

Day 2 was introduced by Craig Bellamy, and began with a keynote panel with Peter Robinson, Harold Short and John Unsworth, chaired by Hugh Craig. [See also Snurb's liveblogs for Robinson, Short and Unsworth.] Robinson asked ‘what constitutes success for the digital humanities?’ and further, what does the visible successes of digital humanities mask? He said it’s harder for scholars to do high quality research with digital methods now than it was 20 years ago. But the answer isn’t more digital humanists, it’s having the ingredients to allow anyone to build bridges… He called for a new generation of tools and methods to support the scholarship that people want to do: ‘It should be as easy to make a digital edition (of a document/book) as it is to make a Facebook page’, it shouldn’t require collaboration with a digital humanist. To allow data made by one person to be made available to others, all digital scholarship should be made available under a Creative Commons licence (publishers can’t publish it now if it’s under a non-commercial licence), and digital humanities data should be structured and enriched with metadata and made available for re-use with other tools. The model for sustainability depends on anyone and everyone being able to access data.

Harold Short talked about big (or at least unescapable) data and the ‘Svensson challenge’ – rather than trying to work out how to take advantage of infrastructure created by and for the sciences, use your imagination to figure out what’s needed for the arts and humanities. He called for a focus on infrastructure and content rather than ‘data’.

John Unsworth reminded us that digital humanities is a certain kind of work in the humanities that uses computational methods as its research methods. It’s not just using digital materials, though it does require large collections of data – it also requires a sense of how how the tools work.

Read Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

We seek a postdoctoral researcher for a three-year research project, entitled The Transformation of Knowledge, Culture, and Practice in Data-Driven Science: A Knowledge Infrastructures Perspective: http://knowledgeinfrastructures.gseis.ucla.edu/index.html.

One of the most prevalent debates within the Digital Humanities (DH) is the idea that practitioners should just go about doing rather than talking, or to practice “more hack, less yack.” In other words, instead of pontificating and problematizing, DH scholars should be more concerned with making stuff, and making stuff happen. The “more hack, less yack” mantra has been going on for a while now, and has brushed up against some challenges; notably Natalia Cecire’s (@ncecire) argument for the need for a ThatCamp Theory to uncover the theoretical leanings of the digital humanities, in Alan Liu’s call for the need to integrate cultural studies into dh approaches, and in the recent TransformDH collective, set up by Anne Cong-Huyen (@anitaconchita), Moya Bailey (@moyazb) and M. Rivera Monclova (@phdeviate) to bring race/gender/class/disability criticism to the digital humanities.** In many of these debates, it seems as though the “theoretification” of DH is viewed with suspicion as it disturbs the implicit good nature of much of the DH community. Roger Whitson (@rogerwhitson), for example, mused on whether the digital humanities “really needs to be transformed,” arguing that: “It seems to me that the word “guerilla” reappropriates the collaborative good will of the digital humanities, making it safe for traditional academic consumption and inserting it into the scheme Stanley Fish and William Pannapacker (@pannapacker) highlight.”

I’ve been musing on the “more hack, less yack” issue recently, and it seems that Tara McPherson’s (@tmcphers) essay “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX” in Lisa Nakamura (@lnakamur) and Peter Chow-White’s (@pachowwhite) recent collection Race After the Internet may offer some important insights into this ideological impasse. In her essay, McPherson argues that in the mid-twentieth century, a common structural logic developed due to computerization, one which argued for the importance of “modular thinking”, “common-sense” and disciplinary hyperspecialization. By focusing on processes which work via the modular form—simple blocks by which a complex system is broken down and analyzed by individual groups—the rationale of this system appears “common-sensical”, thereby obscuring the actual political and social moment from which it emerges.

Read Full Post Here.

SEASR lets users arrange and manipulate small computational “components” in series to allow data to be ingested, analyzed, transformed, and visualized. CDS produced about three dozen of these components to explore how collections of literary texts can be studied using these tools. More information, downloads, and samples are available at http://teicomponents.wordpress.com/.

Download the TEI components for SEASR either from the Brown Digital Repository or GitHub.