For this week’s assignment to participate in a dh project or platform, I went broad rather than deep. I did three things (or more, depending on how you count them):

First, I created a Zooniverse account and participated in three Zooniverse projects. Zooniverse is a platform for “people-powered research.” In practice, that means it’s a collection of disparate projects in the humanities and sciences that invite non-experts to participate. The web interfaces for the projects vary. For instance, some require brief training sessions before participation, while others do not, and all three that I looked at required different kinds of participation and input modalities.

Old Weather prompts participants to “help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations made by United States ships since the mid-19th century by transcribing ships’ logs.” Logs must be annotated before they are transcribed. The interface presents the user with a series of simple questions (such as “do you see a date on this page?”). If the user indicates that he sees tabular weather data, he is prompted to outline the shape of the table and transcribe the data. I also contributed to two non-humanities projects, Condor Watch and Plankton Portal.

Condor Watch allows users to participate by marking condors and answering questions about photos from camera traps, while Plankton Portal similarly prompts users to mark and categorize plankton in images from two different regions.

Second, I created the “Digital Humanities at LSU” Facebook group. I added most of the class to the group; if I missed you, please request to join. Hopefully this group will lower the barriers to communication among students in this class, as well as (eventually) other interested scholars at LSU.

Third, I created a personal WordPress site called Fleetmeat. I intend to use it to communicate my ideas in an informal but still “published” form through the blog, as well as to provide information about myself (such as my CV). I haven’t done much with it yet but hopefully its existence will spur me to build it up.

When products “go digital”, when resources or knowledge become part of the digital space, they’re supposed to undergo a process of democratization (at least according to the ideals of DH studies). But, if anything, the articles we read for today highlight the falsity inherent to this viewpoint, putting accessibility values in juxtaposition to real practice. In the beginning of the McPherson article, she discusses how much of what’s archived today moves away from association with larger, conglomerate powers, onto more public, distributed use: “Less and less does it signal rigorous institutional practices, dedicated spaces, or a devotion to physical (let alone dusty) object”(483). And yet, the forces which shape access, resources, and the creation of knowledge hierarchies are deeply saturated in normative structures, which rely on stratified discourse and literacy disparities in order to retain power. McPherson acknowledges this, and goes into its structure, later on in the article, having us (the reader) look at these imbued power dynamics.

Questions we need to be asking: What is accessed by large groups of people online? How do websites, and DH projects, get promoted? What determines the shape of these projects? Cohen talks about his participation in the Whitman archive, and how the choices made around that endeavour had much to do with institutional constraints. Whitman was chosen for his already elevated position in the academy, because it was easier to generate funding for this type of work. This is what get’s money, what get’s the resources to go digital: an expensive and time-consuming process. Although getting information online isn’t necessarily difficult, the ways in which knowledge spreads, becomes advertised, and is categorized in larger discourse is highly controlled. And so, democratization can exist as veiled outer layer to the more subversive dynamics at play.
What I did like about the transition to digital space, discussed in the Gitelman article, was the creation of various digital universes, where process (as opposed to polished product) becomes apparent: “Even the most exactingly self conscious, intensively authored and attended publication on the web, those scholarly electronic editions and archives, tend to exist in a sea of installment, versions, and revisions, works continuously present and yet constantly subject to change”(145). Transitions, and change, as part of the process towards creative, epistemological work, can be seen.

Representation stood out as a thread throughout the readings for me, and particularly how scholars can reassess representation during the turn to digital archiving. One enabling opportunity of digitalizing archival material is reinvigorating the political meanings and representations of archival work as Matt Cohen addresses in “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” “we encode protocols of power in the systems by which our literary past is circulated and accessed” (231). Scholars working on archival projects are able to ask questions of who and what get represented within archival collections, or better yet, who is not represented in these collections and why. The positionality of researchers and scholars should come into question as archives are becoming, as Tara McPherson refers to it, “post-archives.” As material objects are transferred into data, this restructuring of access and approach to how scholars interact with their research materials creates the opportunity for scholars to address the archival absences of representation beyond predominantly white men. McPherson points out that “scholars might alternatively track the silences and absences of the archive” (497). And what better time for this than during the transference from material object to digital data to reassess the foundations of power and representations in archives themselves?

If scholars move in the direction of digital archiving, then there is a humbling opportunity to reassess the privileged platform of scholar through unknowing and loss. Taking the suggestion from Jerome McGann, digital archiving allows the opportunity to “imagine what you don’t know.” He describes digital archives as “fashioned to reveal its various (and reciprocal) processes of knowing and unknowing.” This self-awareness that McGann addresses could potentially be a way of deconstructing the epistemological formations of archives by embracing loss and unknowing. McPherson addresses loss in her formulation of the digital archive without objects, “the database depends on the loss of the thing itself” (487). McPherson’s description of the “post-archival moment” is a moment of “dialectical possibility” where “it is up to us as the theorists of the (post-)archive and practitioners of the digital to seize this possibility” (486-87). So what exactly is lost? Is it just the material objects themselves or the representations (or lack of representation) in archives? Cohen addresses the potentiality of digital archives by theorizing the possibilities of different linguistic protocols for generating data and research within archives by asking, “what would interfaces informed by indigenous information protocols look like, and might American literature read differently through them?” (238). This fear of loss signifies to me more of a political investment in structures of power and imperial logics, while the post-archival moment allows for the possibility of reimagining and even reconstructing representation in digital data.