I’ve been thinking a lot about how theory and DH speak to each other, particularly as this course is the theory seminar this semester. We’ve read a range of different kinds of theories in Digital Humanities, but I keep coming back to questions about identity, praxis, and DH.

I came across  “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities” by Roopika Risam in Digital Humanities Quarterly, which I think outlines a lot of the different debates and critiques going on in DH. We’ve read a lot of the different theorists/critics, discussions, and specific articles she mentions throughout her piece. I like her article in particular because of how she’s outlining these debates as well as situating her own critique of DH through intersectionality by drawing heavily from critical race studies and feminist theory. Risam is also thinking here about how theory and praxis work together, which is something that DH is (or at least should be) thinking about consistently.

Risam’s article focuses strongly on theory and debates within DH, but then I also wanted to find an article that puts some of these theories into practice through a specific DH project, so I found “Speculative Praxis Toward a Queer Feminist Digital Archive: A Collaborative Research-Creation Project” by Dayna McLeod, Jasmine Rault, and T.L. Cowen in A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.  The three authors discuss their theoretical and political investments in DH and queer cultures, as well as their experiences of creating a collaborative DH project called “The Cabaret Commons.” They used the Scalar platform to archive queer and feminist performances from a cabaret in Montreal. I love how they are approaching the project with a queer feminist theoretical underpinning and putting it into practice through DH. I also really appreciate all of the questions they are asking about the process of creating the project itself.

Thanks, Taylor & Sarah, for your suggestions.  A few I had:

Collaboration
The following readings take up the concept and practices of “collaboration,” which — as Taylor notes below — is one of the principles that, according to Spiro and others, defines  dh.

• Lynne Siemens et al., “’It challenges members to think of their work through another kind of specialist’s eyes’: Exploration of the Benefits and Challenges of Diversity in Digital Project Teams”
• Bethany Nowviskie, “On Compensation”
• Bethany Nowviskie, “Monopolies of Invention”

Participatory Culture & The Social Life of Information
These two readings are not about digital humanities as such.  But they both help map the critical landscape that surrounds our term, “digital humanities community.”   Jenkins — an incredibly influential and well-known scholar — can help us think about the ways in which digital humanities projects engage such participatory experiences (e.g., the crowdsourcing projects we have discussed).  Brown & Duguid write about the social contexts that shape “information.”  Although they focus mainly on corporate culture, their insights about the structures of/for information would help us map similarities and differences in the academic context.

• Henry Jenkins, “Democratizing Television? The Politics of Participation” from Convergence Culture
• John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, from The Social Life of Information (“Introduction, “Limits to Information,” and “Learning — in Theory and in Practice”).  I’ll post the pdfs on Monday [update: the pdf is now linked]. In the meantime, you can review the work overall here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Information

Along these lines, it could be interesting to experiment with Scripto or From the Page, CommentPress, Commons in a Box, or other tools.

I found a program called Twine (http://twinery.org/)—it’s a hypertext story creator that lets you create a basic furcating story structure quickly and easily. You just start a new project, start typing a situation, then by adding double-bracketed options ([[ ]]) it creates new user options for progressing the narrative. Here’s a picture to show you kind of what I mean:

 

 

Each of those boxes is created just by putting the [[ ]] around a new option. So it’s super easy. And you can test your story at any point and ultimately export it as an .html file.

 

I’m teaching a fiction workshop next semester focusing on developing a writing process and learning the basics of technique, craft, whatever you want to call it. One of my class texts will be John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, which, aside from being a great overview of what fiction is and how it works, provides a lot of exercises for developing writing skills. One area I’m going to focus on early in the semester is plotting. I’m strongly considering using this tool as an easy way to learn the possible intricacies of plotting. It’s also designed to force you to think about what comes next. Instead of getting caught up in sensual details, every text box sort of demands brevity and progress to the next step. I think it would be an excellent way to focus students on thinking about the possibility of plot as opposed to getting bogged down too early in matters of style.

 

Below is a link to download the test story I was working on. There are a lot of dead ends—it turns out it takes a lot of time to account for a geometrically increasing # of plot options—but it gives a good idea of how the thing works. (The pub story line is the least fleshed out, but as you progress you can always use the convenient back option to go choose the other options.)

 

http://www.filedropper.com/twinetest2

 

 

This week’s readings got me thinking about the way that undergrad students might perceive the value of Digital Humanities, and how that is bound to effect the progress of DH in the future. I think that, given Cordell’s claim that “their disinterest is right and even salutary”, the most important underlying issue of pedagogical strategy for DH instructors would be to lessen the obfuscation about what DH is, or about who does it. Cordell goes on to delineate a few helpful criteria for how to communicate the essence of it, including the cloudiness of even the name “digital humanities” (in favor of a more focalized course title like “Texts, Maps, and Networks”). I am especially drawn to Cordell’s insistence that “Humanities” can mean a lot of things, and it shouldn’t be limited to just texts or just social science, etc. when teaching a prospective batch of future DHers about the tools and methods involved.

This idea that getting students acquainted with the accessibility, and the universality, of DH lead me to the Zotero group “DH Education” in search of syllabi geared more towards other disciplines in the Humanities, like history and anthropology. I found one interesting exercise called digital ethnography, which is basically a digitally immersive style of relaying the events in a culture, via the individual (yeah… digital ethnography). I found one syllabus assignment: (http://blogs.uoregon.edu/digitalethnography/2014/05/12/concept-paper-guidelines-2/) of a course devoted entirely to digital ethnography. I think that nominal specification, though it seems a little petty, is a simple way to enhance or specify student interest/enrollment in DH courses. While this digital ethnography assignment was still flexible (both in terms of subject and  digital tools used), the category of “Humanities” being replaced by “Ethnography” allows for a more guided focus, as opposed to what some undergraduate students int he humanities might consider a daunting amount of possibilities.

Here’s a salient portion of the ethnography assignment: “Recall from class discussion so far that there is much flexibility in this assignment, in that it should fit within a larger research context for each of you. As such, the above guidelines can (and should) mold to what you are actually working on; please do consult with me in order to tailor the assignment to your specific situations.”- still an overarching degree of flexibility, in the legacy of creativity provided by DH, but here with a guiding content, ethnography.  I think that narrowing what certain courses mean by “Humanities” might actually broaden student interest and pedagogical possibilities.

 

As I looked through the different DH assignments, I was searching for something that might be applicable in my pedagogical conversations about poetry. And, I found an interesting list, related to our article on Interface, which I could see having potential relevance in my classroom:

https://github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master/keywords/poetry.md

One resource which struck my eye was the “for better or for verse” tool:

http://prosody.lib.virginia.edu/instructions/

I taught a Shakespeare class last semester, and I know right now, other TAs are working with Chris Barrett in her class Top 40 Shakespeare, which explicitly focuses on the sonic, metrical qualities of the Shakespearean text. And, since I work in different sonic poetics, to me, the rhythm and movement of a poem is incredibly important to its overall composition. But, it’s hard to spend an entire lesson focusing on meter, or rhythm, in a focused manner, or in a way which engages students while still focusing on the text at hand. I know Chris Barrett deals with this by using pop songs to analyze their different metrical qualities. “For Better or For Verse”, I perceive, could be another helpful tool, to get students thinking about meter outside the classroom and make them feel like they are engaged with the material.

In terms of our reading, I appreciated the specificity of this resource, and how I could see myself implementing it in a succinct, straightforward manner. This tool hinges on the practicality of these ideas, instead of broader concepts that might be unapproachable, especially in the undergraduate classroom. For example, I could see myself giving a homework assignment somewhere on the lines: “For tonight, pick such and such poem, listen to the recording and go through to implement your suspected meter. Check your work, and be prepared to be write out the meter for such and such text for a quiz in class tomorrow.” And then, to get them to think critically about these ideas, a potential in class writing assignment: “Write about your experience using the tool, and how you see the different ways we use sound, or speak a poem, as important to its overall workings. Why is the sound important? Why does it matter, and how do you see the meter as a part of that?” To me, “For Better or For Verse” is a potential study tool, giving students skills to replicate as well as better understand these formal poetic elements.
There are also many other resources linked through this article that could be potentially useful, such as the e-poetry site, and “Prism”, the image tracker. I look forward to exploring more in my future pedagogical practice.