Gold raises the question of which hierarchies, uneven distributions of labor, and value systems DH might preserve even as it seeks to change the way academic work is done
It's important to have this kind of self-reflection as a discipline and as a person/ scholar. It seems this is what a lot of this critique of DH is getting at; it can be a discipline that radically changes the way academic work is done while also needing to improve it's own inclusivity and self-awareness.
regulation has beenfar less successful in the United States than in the European Union
I wonder what Canada's regulation is like. Also I wonder what sort of regulations have been/ could be put in place to curb google? I am not well versed in that aspect of tech and law/policy.
Dewey Decimal System.
There is a podcast called Behind the Bastards that did a whole episode on how the dewey decimal system was created by a not great guy and how the system has it's creator's bias ingrained into it. The title of the podcast is The Man Who Pioneered Libraries and Sexual Harassment if anyone is interested.
“professor style
I watched this video (https://youtu.be/sfkYXVdkUEE) recently about the gatekeeping and issues with the academia aesthetic. It brings up issues that align with what this article has talked about so far. It is nice to see these status quos and accepted norms questioned and criticized for their bias and perpetuations of harmful stereotypes. And the fact that it is done here, in an academic paper and in formats like youtube makes it more accessible and I think just having more content out there in general critiquing these norms is good overall
whether it truly makessense to outsource all of our knowledge needs to commercial search engines
We had a week where we listened to a podcast and read an article about how algorithms can be biased and since then I've had at least two conversations with people about this, explaining to them that algorithms are not as infallible as we take them to be.
This made each viewingunique and unpredictable as I relinquished my digital creations to the unreliable andnefarious online infrastructures
This brings a whole nother meaning to death of the author
understandingcreativity as an integral competence to critical thinking
It's interesting that this writing links creativity to critical thinking. I watched a video a long time ago, I looked for it but was unable to find it, it was an educator or scientist talking about how inquisitive and questioning children are in early elementary school but by the time you get high school they don't really ask questions. The video is, I believe getting at how traditional school tends to grind out the questioning, critical thinking and therefore creative mindset of its students. It's doubly interesting then, in my experience, that these are the mental traits that are highly valued in university education (and post university education/ work)
Instead ofplacing the computers on a desk with its corresponding chair,
This act of translating digital works to physical could be considered an art form itself
A work of e-lit cannot be recited, printed or translatedinto another medium without a significant loss or change in its meaning
I don't think I've seen this exact concept come up in our course so far and thinking back to the maps we made last week it certainly seems to be true. If videos or links to other webpages were included in the maps we made, printing them out or even someone recording a video of a walkthrough of the map would be significantly different than if someone got to experience the map themselves in its original digital format. It's an interesting concept that they tie to non-digital humanities with their example about translating poetry.
This makes it ever more imperative thatwe provide citizens with the ability to undertake criticaltechnical practices, both in order to choose how to managethe digital breadcrumbs they leave as trails in publicspaces, and to pull down the blinds on the postdigital gazeof state and corporate interests through the private use ofcryptography and critical encryption practices
It's interesting that this article views digital humanities as a vessel for educating the public on how the digital world works and further asks what its ethical duties to society are.
rather than mandating that all scholars shouldproduce the same kind of work. The aim is to open digitalhumanities to different forms of scholarly work and criticalapproaches that would widen the field and enrich itsintellectual capacities.
I think in general, most academia suffers from this kind of gatekeeping. It seems though that we are conscience of it now, as you see initiatives like women in stem happen. Opening a discipline up to diversity inevitably results in different forms of work and critical approaches.
This is also to foreground theimportance of the politics and norms that are embedded indigital technology, algorithms and software
I think we've touched on political topics in a few of our readings but it would be interesting to learn more about the politics of DH itself. I'm sure a whole course could be made about digital politics.
redlining was banned under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But in many ways, HOLC and the Federal Housing Administration had already written the textbook for racist real estate practices.
This reminds me of the Hays code in Hollywood, which in the 1930s banned media from showing explicitly queer people and relationships. Even though the code was dropped in the 60s (I think) it has still taken many many years for queer representation to come to the main stream films and shows. Once these systems have been set up they can become so ingrained in society that simply removing them doesn't easily solve the problems they created.
but the impact of redlining is still felt in cities like Cleveland, where redlined neighborhoods are some of the most starkly segregated in the country.
I am currently discussing a similar topic in another class, analyzing how colonialist tendencies, policies and ideals are still very much present in how we view and deal with our environment. It's a different topic and a different class but basically I am learning in depth in a few classes this semester how racist acts of many years ago still affect the same communities today. Simultaneously fascinating and depressing.
What does his critique of the geographer prioritizing “mind and vision” say about a (western) understanding of knowledge, truth, authority, etc.?
I think western knowledge tends to rely on a perennialism or essentialism way of knowing and learning. In a class on education we recently discussed the different philosophies of learning and the First Peoples Principles of Learning was later introduced to us. I think in the latter strategy a more holistic and reflective way is encouraged, rather than the supposedly indisputable "mind and vision" that western (and colonizing) cultures have prioritized.
What kind of users might prefer which tool, and why
The Open Streets Map seems like it would be more useful for actual students or faculty of the school, it has notes of where parking is (both bike and car) and what each building is called, where footpaths are as well as other amenities, and safety resources that the google map does not mention. The shapes of the buildings and even the parking lots differ between the two and, without having personally visited this campus, it seems the OpenStreet map gives a more accurate layout in totality that the google map does. The google map, does show a few businesses, that if you are looking for it may be helpful to use it for. I would be curious how adequate each map's search function is because while google might not initially show you all options through it's search engine you can end up with options or specifics, whatever you want. It has been my experience that that is where other apps or programs lack
I finally ended up putting each date and subhead into its own div, and giving it a padding-left of 330px
It's funny how often, when peaking behind the curtains of a project or research, the experts in their field may not be experts in presenting their field and can end up doing these sort of hack jobs to get the result that they want. Not a bad thing, if anything I think it's a little funny to see these sort of programs being altered by someone who can't (or doesn't want to) go in and change the program at it's coding level. It's certainly inspiring to someone like me who lacks technological/ coding skills and knowledge.
which changes your screen to mimic how a color-blind person would view it
This is a really cool (and important) tool. The topic of how to make presentations accessible had come up in a lecture I attended before and while they brought up that certain colour schemes can be hard to read for colour-blind people they kind of just brought it up without offering a concrete solution like this.
comparative time scales of the concept of the longnow
Interesting to see these time scales laid out in these seemingly concrete ways. In between the now and nowadays timelines I think a lot of people have their own personal way of time. ex. "little while ago" for some might mean 3-4 weeks, for others, 6 months and maybe up to a year or two ago.
The fact is that spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion oftime, that we literally cannot ‘tell time’ without the mediation of space
Ah yes, space-time. It is considered that one is useless without the other. If my friend were to make a meeting time but not give me a place (space) to meet how could i meet them and vice versa, with only a place and no time there is still no concrete way of meeting other than by luck. It's interesting to me that this question then comes up when this article is discussing the presentation of timelines
Do they really belong
Similar to that question we asked at the beginning of this course. what counts as digital humanities, what to exclude from it?
she says they picked it up with equal ease
I think Twine is so easy to learn because we have almost all run into this style of content in choose your own adventure books which are rather popular on their own. Twine makes this process even easier by making an accessible and clean interface. I don't know if anyone else ever tried to make a choose your own adventure but when I did when I was younger it was difficult to keep all the pages in order and remember where each one led and which story lines were finished etc. Twine turned that into a very straightforward process.
It’s also a deeply unfair game, which is of course the point, and a game you do not win so much as survive.
This reminds me of a game called Pathologic about curing a plague, it is also a kind of depressing game in that lots of odds are stacked against you and sometimes you can do everything right and still not get a good result (I haven't actually played just heard a lot about it). I sometimes wonder what the point of these games are because usually people wants stories for the escapism right? I think as this creator talks about, there is a sort of power being able to face horrible things head on and video games can help you do that emotionally while still remaining physically safe.
GamerGate,” the culture war that continues to rage within the world of video games, is the game that touched it off.
I've heard about GamerGate but I did not know about it's origins. wild
Even this rapid survey of the current game platform situation shouldgive the reader a sense of its diversity and possibilities for depth
This might be a bit too off topic but all the talk of games as ways of storytelling also got me thinking about board games, and tabletop games as well. These games have also advanced in a rather similar way to video games i think. Starting off with simple games then moving to more elaborate ones as well as the making of different genres and different modes of interaction. Having a deck of cards can let you play a lot of different games, D&D lets you play the same game over and over again with vastly different settings and tales, certain board games have expansion packs, each type can vary how much you need to consider/ interact with the other players.
, meaning that interpersonal relations are crucial to their play.Asking other players for information or goods, or fighting them, is a keycomponent to interacting with the world.
This is another aspect I find really interesting when you start to consider videogames just another facet of storytelling. The fact that not only is the creator making a story for you to explore but that other consumers can alter your experience in a very direct way.
Some contain tactile or haptic feedbackmechanisms, such as vibration. For most, their buttons are the sole meansof input; the Wii, however, added its physical orientation as an additionalway for users to communicate with the game.
It's an interesting concept to consider how the interface interacts with the player of a game as another aspect of storytelling. Movies, books and lots of media wont react to or take input from the consumer. The only other time I can think of when this happens is when humans are verbally telling stories.
Compare such mysterious story elements to a bad PowerPoint presenta-tion. The latter does not draw us in, failing to summon our willing efforts tosee it advance
I attended a lecture once on how to make good powerpoints and I kinda thought it would be a bit of a waste of time honestly but they brought up some really good points about how much info to include as well as how to structure visuals and stuff like that
After all, we come to tell storiesin order to share our material, not to conceal it.
I think finding the balance is key. I'm sure many of us have experienced watching a show/ movie (or even a documentary) that after many minutes (or hours) has not given us any answers or sizable clues to the questions/ mystery posed at the beginning. And of course it can also be boring when answers are just given straight with no curiosity developed on the part of the audience.
. As Nick Montfortargues, a story “has a poin
In the lecture this week, Bryan Alexander says that a story has mystery or intrigue, or makes the reader/experiencer curious. I liked that way of thinking of it but I am interested to read further on this take
onstories (or very bad stories) are thingswhich do not attempt to engage us, or fail miserably at i
It seems that with a definition such as this the term story becomes more a personal decision than a black and white concept to be accepted by everyone. If one person was unmoved by an object but someone else saw meaning in it they may see it as a story.
Radio spawned the “theater of the mind
does that make podcasts to radio what netflix is to cable?
I have often returned to the Pudding for inspiration
These readings with links embedded within them provide great distractions :)
This visualization is an example of distant reading
Is google also using distant reading, when you look up a word and google has a little graph of it's usage over time? Edit: oops, the paragraph below answers this question
that we tend to overestimate ouractual knowledge
the idea that history is written by the the victors also applies to the publishing world.
gatekeepin
I was wondering when this word was going to crop up in this DH course.
A theory of learning that emphasizes general-ization has shown researchers how to train models that have thousands of variableswithout creating the false precision called “over#tting.
I had to look up overfitting and it wasn't quite what I thought. It is about when a model fits too closely to theoretical data. This can happen because too few data points are used and can further limit the model's ability to consider other data/situations. I thought this was interesting as it reminded me about those videos talking about how algorithms can be biased and I had never heard the term overfitting before.
distant reading is presented as a recent change of course
Seems to me distant reading is the computer form of having grad students doing a bunch of grunt work. I think as the article is going to try to get at, distant reading has its own computational history and humanities also has it's own history of big data analysis.
Computer-aided literature studies have failed to have a significant impact on the field as a whole
I think paragraph goes on to essentially say that the questions being asked were not well suited to this tool. There's a connection to earlier when they talk about the fact that computational methods could be introduced to literary studies with the view of filling a gap in knowledge. So it makes sense that initially these computer based methods weren't seen as effective because scholars didn't know the right questions to ask.
Readers of Moretti’s early experiments on large collections were accordingly tempted to interpret them as a normative argument that the only valid sample of literature is the largest possible one
I think this is something people misinterpret about big data, as this article talks about in the beginning. It's the classic quantity vs quality argument. Again, about Paul Schacht's research he talks about analyzing Dicken's writings and using a big data method let him do that but analyzing more and more novels past the ones Dickens had wrote wouldn't have made his research better.
criticism would gain nothing if we let meticulous hypothesis-testing drain all the warmth and flexibility from our writing
It's intriguing, I think this paragraph has summed up digital humanities in a way all those articles from week 1 weren't able to do for me. DH seems to be a constant balancing act (and then analysis) between the digitization of research and presentation and the flexible way humans have of thinking. Maybe this has been really obvious to everyone else but the topics we have covered in the last few weeks (digitizing physical literature and no big data research) have really highlighted that aspect of DH.
That is the point of using a clearly-defined sample of readers and novels
I have to admit, it is probably because I come form a science background, but I like this way of doing research, using numbers and data wherever possible. I don't have fond memories of trying to analyze books in high school for metaphors or other literary tools.
Literary scholars have been much slower to imitate her methods, which depended on questionnaires, interviews, and numbers.
It's really interesting to read about the kind of questions being asked by these scholars. They are all quite creative questions and it makes me think about what I may what to do for my final project.
I want to emphasize that distant reading is not a new trend, defined by digital technology or by contemporary obsession with the word data
I think the Paul Schacht video for this week will have a lot of similar opinions to this article, just based on this first bit of reading. Like he says in the video, the distant reading analysis helps him to answer his question but he still had to use his intuition to come up with the question and he has to interpret the results. The term Big Data can make it seem like a human element is lost but I think that is very much not the case.
There is nothing wrong with writing a history of food in America
this analogy, although seeming kinda silly actually helped me understand this bit
It would be natural to immediately ask what would possibly motivate anyone to contribute constructively to such a thing
The idea that if people are not motivated by profit they will not do work
Some readers took to social media to criticize this moment between characters as anti-Semitic. The author sought to explain the character’s use of the analogy before offering an apology and saying that she had asked her publisher to remove the passage from digital versions of the book immediately.
This leads to a whole other off-topic conversation about how authors are being held accountable directly and often very quickly after they publish a book and then whether or not to alter a book based on the loud feedback from readers.
If the subscription arrangement is severed, the entire oeuvre becomes inaccessible
I've had this experience, and it was frustrating. I wrongly assumed that I would access to past posted content from when I had my subscription.
Paper copies were once considered originals, with any digital complement being seen as a bonus
I still think this way, with the exception of few things (like videos, personal blogs, emails etc), in the back of my brain I always think that you could track down a physical copy of the thing I'm lookin at on the internet.
Federal agencies, obliged to cease all but essential activities, pulled the plug on websites across the U.S. government, including access to thousands, perhaps millions, of official government documents, both current and archived, and of course very few having anything to do with Obamacare
I had no idea that the end of Obamacare had caused so many websites to stop running. The fact that they ceased so quickly and could've continued that way gives a lot of thought about how even though the internet is accessible and has no central control, there is still power structures and control.
Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books
This whole analogy was a really good way of putting into perspective what the internet goes through.
And like the internet’s own designers, Berners-Lee gave away his protocols to the world for free
This reminds me how penicillin went unpatented by it's discoverer in hopes to have it be widely accessible.
the network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize
I have often heard that the internet was and is to this day held up and maintained by a few people that started things as hobbies. I don't know how true this is but it does add to that mythos and magic feeling that the article mentions technology (and the internet) can have.
it would be challenging to figure out what photos someone might have seen if they searched the site at a given point in time
Thinking about the search function as a thing that has changed over time, either due to it's own functions or just the things it had access too is a bit mind bending.
That is, if one just wants to make the case that something was said at a particular point in time
You still run into the problem of history being written by the 'winners' too. It is easier to find and discuss things that were explicitly written but to read between the lines or consider what/who was left out of the written record is a more intricate process
In this case, it is worth differentiating the informational qualities of a source from its artifactual qualities
Artifactual qualities must be easy to lose as a physical object is digitized and why the systems we learned about last week (dublin core, DCMI Vocab etc.) are so important to understand and utilize in digital humanities. This article has made me pause a few times to draw connections to or contemplate my own experiences.
The rings of a tree testify to weather conditions and changes in climate
This kind of blew my mind a little bit. I remember learning about primary and secondary sources in high school but it was mostly explained that wikipedia did not count as a primary source but it could lead to some good primary sources. I've never been taught this or thought of primary sources like this.
page description
Where does the metadata get this information? I assume the person who made the web page would input this information, I just don't think I did this for my website/ pages. Might be something I have to go back and experiment with
data types
Does this mean that metadata can have its own metadata to further describe that? I think that was mentioned in the write up for this week. Like the column name is employee ID but employee ID has a data type attributed to it. Or would that all be considered Metadata specifically for the column and not for the column name? can it have layers like that? I'm not even quite sure my own question makes sense.
Spreadsheets
This spreadsheet really points out to me how its hard if not impossible to have data be useful without metadata. Without those column and row names those would just be random numbers. It reminds me of how time and space are intertwined, it is essentially meaningless to have one without the other. This also made me think about how media can end up unreliably reporting data without the context of metadata.
3D models
I made a 3D model of a decorative mini guitar in high school, we had to create our design on the computer before we made it in the work shop. I remember enjoying the designing part of class better than any of the stuff I did by hand
A Historical 3D Model: Digital Magnesia
to be able to take this into VR would be a really cool experience, being able to walk around in a historical city and be completely immersed in it
Google Fusion Tables
I tried to look up the google fusion tables but I couldn't actually open it or get access to it. I kept ending up at 404 errors
kinds of tools and technologies available for you to use
I have liked this part of DH, making this website and using different tools is a like a little behind the scenes moment for scholars who use the same tools. You get to know what their limitations might have been using that application as well as what their process was like.
and a vast array of non-Westernalphabets
This has come to my mind a few times, but I think technology was developed in a very western view and I wonder how that might alter DH from regular humanities.
When text material is incorporated into scholarlyresearch
This is what the video from this week talked a bit about. When inputting information into a computer, if you want it to be analyzed/ organized you have to make it readable to the the computer. Thought it was interesting that they mentioned how this could potentially alter the data either by omitting or adding details.
check spelling and grammar
I'm not sure if my spelling has gotten worse as I've gotten older because I no longer take spelling quizzes once a week in school or if it's the fact that I rarely hand write anymore and when I type I don't have to pay attention to my spelling because I have a spell checker to do that for me. Probably both
Many a tool was developed and made freely avail-able in the hopes that it would be monetized once adopted by a largenumber of users and then acquired by a large developer
Adding on a bit to what others were saying previously. Part of why these technologies may have had a hard time sticking around is just how fast technology was progressing for a while. Within a generation, we went from using those dial up phones to having smart phones. Compared to the rest of history I think this was quite a fast progression and hard to make tools that wouldn't become obsolete quickly with how fast innovation was moving along at that point.
However, Bush envisioned that all thiswould be accomplished through microfilm
It's interesting how often in human invention the imagination or vision of people out shone the current technological capacities. Or how as a vision came to fruition technology had also been advanced so that it might support that vision even better. Humans have always been great at coming up with the end results they want to see without an easy way to get there (or sometimes any way at all). It's a cool aspect of humanity and I think it often gets talked about in sciences.
The Apple Macintosh was attractive for humanities users for two reasons
It's interesting to read about the development of PCs from the perspective of DH students and scholars. PCs had such a global impact but specifically focusing on the Dh perspective on it makes me wonder how other disciplines experienced the PC boom.
T. C. Mendenhal
Hey, this guy is also a physicist.
he would notcompromise on any levels of scholarship in order to get the work done faster
It seems Busa had a similar view of his work that a scientist might have. That there is a right way to do it and that is the only way. Not to say humanities scholars have no method, it just reminded my of the statement made earlier by the text about computing being unambiguous in it's approach.
embrace "the two cultures", to bring the rigor and systematic unambiguous proceduralmethodologies characteristic of the sciences to address problems within the humanities that hadhitherto been most often treated in a serendipitous fashion
this was an interesting sentence, I don't think any of the other articles talked about the difference in how the sciences and the arts view answers; science often being black and white while in the arts thing are more up for interpretation. As much as digital humanities isn't trying to unite all the sciences, it is using the computing sciences, a topic that also has binary view of right and wrong. Those two ideologies must clash in some places and perhaps it is part of why DH is so hard to give definite meaning to.
debates can be most productive if we understand them as a means of opening ourselves to the kinds of conversations that true interdisciplinarity can support.
I think this is one of the best takeaways from all these articles on asking what is and isn't DH. That when there is disagreement about what to include under the DH label it shouldn't be an attempt to exclude content and/or scholars from the discipline. But rather it can ask the question 'how can this work be considered DH?'. This allows interdisciplinary work to be a part of the conversations and research that happens in multiple disciplines rather than being sequestered into the most broad or accepting category when it can provide valuable information to multiple disciplines.
However, when many of us hear the term digital humanities today, we take the referent to be not the specific subfield that grew out of humanities computing but rather the changes that digital technologies are producing across the many fields of humanist inquiry.
This is an interesting way of looking at how DH came to be. Did it spring from computer scientists becoming interested in humanities or did the humanities researchers start to incorporate digital technology into their work. I am confused a bit by the wording that DH is a subfield of humanities computing because in an earlier paragraph they seem to use those terms interchangeably when coming up with title for a publication.
This is manifested in the intensity of debates around open-access publishing, where faculty members increasingly demand the right to retain ownership of their own scholarship—meaning their own labor
This made me think of the infographics Annelise showed us in her youtube video from this week. They are the result of lots of work and research just like a paper or journal article would be but they can't be exactly replicated in a print journal. Their presentation is meant to be online which allows it to be public while still maintaining the author's right to have unique access to their own work, i.e. having login credentials that lets them edit or share their product as they like.
Yet digital humanities is also a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years
I wonder why DH made the shift to collaborative projects. Is it because the medium they work in can become so vast so quickly? Or maybe because many different experts are needed to master the digital world? Are there any/ many DH projects that are credited to just one scholar?
Given the speed with which the digital humanities is grow-ing, such a dynamic resource is necessary
I wonder how much other disciplines would benefit from such a resource because as this chapter notes, DH moves so quickly. Is this something that other disciplines don't need (or wouldn't make good use of) or just don't know that they are missing it?
Whether measured quantitatively or qualitatively, the peer-to-peer review pro-cess was effective
I assume papers aren't usually peer reviewed in this way? I'm curious how each feature could change how a paper turned out, blind vs nonblind, public vs semi-public vs private.
impossible to reconsti-tute only a few months after they have taken place
Wait, why is it hard to catalogue arguments made on Twitter? (I don't have twitter so maybe I'm missing something)
Where, forinstance, does new media studies leave off and digital humanities begin?
This question seems similar to one found in the sciences; where does physics end and chemistry begin? where does chemistry end and biology begin? I don't think this question has or needs a definitive answer.