37 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2019
    1. It was ecological (and, by luck, even millennial). The aim was to restore a reasonably high approximation of wholeness to the disaggregated fragments into which editors had systematically fractured Blake’s original works during more than a century of strenuous editorial efforts to render them, and him, more readable by making them more compatible with the habits and dominant institutions of modern culture

      In this case "ecological" involves the restitution of fragments. Put another way, negotiating a difficult landscape -- a diaspora of text and images through coincidence and for the sake of making images more easily viewed and texts more easily read by divorcing them -- and bringing back some coherency.

    2. ecological effort

      Interested to see how vital the use of "ecological" is to the author and their argument. From this initial use I think they mean to say that their efforts gather together textual and pictorial fragments from all over/ a complex habitat/ landscape. There are good reasons to distrust natural metaphors, however, since they often lend themselves to teleological analyses that depend on evocations of the natural cycles of birth, maturation, and decline and "evolution" over time.

    1. The web is functioning as a site of online hyper-surveillance and trolling of Black activists engaged in the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the US and beyond

      Look at this statement in relation to the #transformDH site, projects like Documenting the Now, and the Syrian Archive.

    2. a historical trajectory of global capital’s thirst for expansion at the expense of Black life

      This resonates with passages from TJ in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" (via the essay by Michael Hardt on "Thomas Jefferson on Democracy in AQ). How the imperial power (which emphasizes manufacturing) puts the colony at a distance (the place that emphasizes the production of raw materials/ agriculture). The labor of black people, in particular, is put at a distance and obscured/ erased by the system of global capitalism.

    3. rather than follow the traditions in new media and information studies that primarily focus on racial representation without direct ties to the material conditions of oppressed people

      Something to think about related to the proposed project re: archiving past, current, and ongoing work of the Shockoe Bottom advocates. The need to go beyond representing the movement to linking the drive for a Shockoe Bottom Memorial Park to "the material conditions of oppressed people" in Richmond and the declaredly New New South.

    4. By making these connections more visible, my hope is to shift discourses away from simple arguments about the liberatory possibilities of the internet toward more critical engagements with how the internet is a site of power and control over Black life

      The Internet is built like most societal structures: for the benefit of white people and for the sake of white supremacy. It is ABSOLUTELY not free of structural inequities. And yet black people were early adopters/ enthusiastic users of the "communications affordances" the Internet allowed (thinking of Black Planet and, more recently, Twitter).

    5. suggest that the web is a panacea of social liberation and empowerment

      There is a utopian strain that runs within DH and the adoption of digital tools. One example: "We need to archive protest movements so that they aren't as ephemeral and so that the story of those involved can endure beyond the parameters of the invention in public space." It fails to see how that same digital archive could be used to surveil/ doxx/ generally discrimate or endanger the people who were involved.

    1. But a numerically savvy reader will want to see some distributions and error bars before assessing the significance of these results. So here are yearly values for fiction.

      Show me the data for each year; give me points, not lines; another example of the visual nature/ representation of data; data as a picture; data as an image; does art history, in teaching close looking, have anything to say to this? Initiatives like "The Writer's Eye" or "The Clinician's Eye" or "Visual Practices Across the University" would suggest the answer is "yes"

    2. when literary genres become less like nonfiction, is that merely a sign of some instability in the definition of “nonfiction”? Did it happen mostly because, say, the nineteenth century started to publish on specialized scientific topics?

      Other good questions for the data...

    3. The language of nonfiction changes somewhat more rapidly than the language of the other genres, but none of them remain constant

      The steeper incline of the black non-fiction line means that its top 10K are changing more rapidly than the other genres; so, as a baseline it is anything but unchanging; an important adaptation on Underwood's part; asking good questions of his data (this one being: "How constant is non-fiction as a baseline?"; the answer is not constant, as all)

    4. At each 5-year interval, the Spearman similarity is being measured between the 40-year span surrounding that point and the period 1700-1740.

      It is still remarkably difficult for me to interpret these graphs. Not trained to do it, in fact. If the visualization is the new block quote, then it make take longer to read the graph than the text. There is much to grasp, question, read, and look at.

    5. But the steady decline in the similarity of all three genres to nonfiction is interesting. Literary histories of this period have tended to pivot on William Wordsworth’s rebellion against a specialized “poetic diction” — a story that would seem to suggest that the diction of 19c poetry should be less different from prose than 18c poetry had been. But that’s not the pattern we’re seeing here: instead it appears that a differentiation was setting in between literary and nonliterary language.

      There is the interpretation; guided by computational analysis but needing some explanation by the author, who possesses some baseline of knowledge; unfair to say that one animates the other, however; a true Aristotleian synergy of form-content, not some Cartesian separation of body and soul, tool and analysis

    6. In the graph above, I’ve done that with four genres, in a collection of 3,724 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century volumes (constructed in part by TCP and in part by Jordan Sellers — see acknowledgments), using the 10,000 most frequent words in the collection, excluding proper nouns

      This is a difference between the humanities and the sciences: Underwood summarizes what the graph communicates, in his own words; this is also done in the sciences but under a much more narrow set of terms and according to more strictly established formulas/ recitations; and the tendencies of each is why they are so difficult for the practitioners to understand one another

    7. you could generate a list of word frequencies for two genres, and then run a Spearman’s correlation test

      The example, below: the top 10K words, in terms of frequency, in a corpus at a given time, compared to the baseline of non-fiction; can then trace that over time to get a better diachronic sense

    8. When we compare groups of texts, we’re often interested in characterizing the contrast between them. But instead of characterizing the contrast, you could also just measure the distance between categories

      In inter-textual study, it is possible to put value on the interval, the gap between the genres; instead of saying, this thing (whose being/ontology I am describing is what distinguishes the genres

  2. Jan 2019
    1. the neoliberal insistence that the value of higher education must be understood instrumentally in economic terms

      The left should also insist on some level of instrumentalism; maybe not in dollars but certainly in terms of our duties as citizens (to be politically engaged, for instance) and what our scholarship does for society.

    2. academic precarity

      "precarity," the "crisis in the humanities"; instead of trying to save it why don't we put within in "the seed that will cause it to explore" (Warburg); instead of defending it all the time -- and engaging in the genre of "a defense of the humanities" -- let's talk more about dark humanism, how the humanities/ Humanismus curriculum grew up with fascism in Germany, and how exclusionary the study of Greek and Latin culture has been.

    3. the role of social media in fostering public intellectuals

      Do certain academics really call themselves "public intellectuals"? For whatever reason I find "public-facing" or to talk about a curriculum known as the "public humanities" much more palatable.

    1. What is new today is that the Internet and, most recently, Web 2.0 have altered the very idea of effective public communication by changing the relation between “experts,” traditionally those with something valuable to communicate

      For example, what is an academic use of Medium and Twitter?

    2. thinking critically about metadata

      Meaning, a true innovation would be to stop saying: "I'm just using the standard here" (the Census standard, et. al) and to try and fashion a means of tagging and cataloging that is more equitable.

    3. corpora, databases, distributed repositories

      This can also be digital art history: What is the data of your dissertation within the discipline of art history?... and make those texts and numbers part of a database that is open source.

    4. Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees

      The visualization of data (particularly novel renditions), fits my interest in forms of knowledge across the university and infographics. As in: "The Weight of History" by Reynier Leyva Novo. It employs INk, a software developed to compute the weight, volume, and area of the ink used in printed documents. Including "5 Nights" (2014), which visualizes five revolutionary texts that constituted the basis of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century (from left to right, texts by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Muammar al-Gaddafi).

    5. a detailed examination of the close versus distant reading debate

      There is a good case to be made for this as a false binary. Distant reading in the form of text mining, tokenizing/ lemmatization, and, say, topic modeling requires a very close reading of that output: clusters need analysis.

    6. a time when economic retrenchment has accelerated a long-term decline in the perceived value of the humanities

      At this moment I find an instrumental approach to the humanities to be much more productive than pounding the table and saying "You can't quantify this!" I think academics need the cognitive re-frame that emphasizes what their work does/ what the deliverable is in order to work against the tendency of "It's complicated and needs further study."

    1. Humanities 2.0” series of articles in the New York Times
    2. DH’s pedagogical implications

      What does DH in pedagogy look like? -- Prism? -- A class annotating a single text with Hypothesis? -- BoxNotes? -- An immersive environment using VR? -- Creating a website? -- Editing Wikipedia? -- Incorporating a Neatline or StoryMap assignment? -- Creating a presentation for social media using Adobe Spark? -- Geo-referencing using ArcGIS?

    3. Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work
    4. It is impossible to estimate how many younger scholars may hesitate to begin work on digital projects, knowing (or sensing) that their labors will count for less during the important career-making moments

      How to square the denigration of digital projects when it comes to tenure review and the drive for DH experience in job postings? Another instance of the piling on of professions within the academic sphere? Reseacher, writer, teacher, public historian, activist, digital humanist?

    5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
    6. SGML, HTML, XML

      SGML = Standard Generalized Markup Language, "a standard for how to specify a document markup language or tag set... SGML is not in itself a document language, but a description of how to specify one." So a set of guidelines, like TEI?

    7. oxymoronic DH

      Can DH and the process of digitization deal with the material concerns of objects? I would say YES; marking up a text is one of the best ways to analyze it closely, including aspects of condition, interventions made by owners, marginalia, etc.

    8. technē

      "the passing off of techne as if it were critique": paraphrase: are those with technical skills passing off what they do as critique/ analysis/ hermeneutics without really contributing anything?

    9. Since the great majority of new scholarly editions established in the last twenty years and more have some prominent digital component (electronic text, hyperlinks and hypermedia, and so on

      Common components of digital scholarly editions: Digitized (electronic text), transcribed, translated; hyperlinks and hypermedia

    1. to create the Committee on Alabama Monument Protection

      The members become arbiters when it comes to decisions about monuments and -- based on the ideology made clear by the name of the "Alabama Memorial Preservation Act -- the gatekeepers against renaming, re-contextualization, and removal.

    2. relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance

      To paraphrase: The State, cities, and/or citizens can't change a monument/ memorial AT ALL, EVER.

    3. to exempt certain art and artifacts, the Department of Transportation, local governments, universities, and utilities under certain limited circumstances

      This language and that related to "waivers," above, are where the authors of the act allow the possibility of changes in certain cases. But this is a careful parsing of language in the final portion of an act whose purpose is clear: the State of Alabama wants to guard against changes and reinforce barriers to re-naming/ re-contextualization/ removal with the full force of the law.

    1. The plan alone is groundbreaking, having been directly created by current Section 8 residents in partnership with Piedmont Housing Alliance

      Jordy Yager works for both the Daily Progress and cvilletomorrow