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Self-Consciously Critical

Posted on by Heather Buzbee

Heather Buzbee

When reflecting on what is lost or gained in these articles, I was drawn to the ideas of production, self-awareness, and tendentiousness, particularly in terms of how we consume things as a culture.
When I first began to read about archives and databases, I did not think of them as Ann Stoler claims in Matt Cohen’s piece: “that we should regard archives as places where knowledge is produced, not just stored or displayed…shaping the imagination of those who use an archive” (231). I viewed databases and archives as another resource for research. But something that shapes how I think or research? Not so much. I felt that I was working the database, not the other way around.
I think in these digital archives and databases, scholars and students gain a large amount of materials that are (somewhat) accessible, depending on the resource, to help with particular projects. And, these digital spaces even sometimes enhance the texts in ways that can only be digital, like the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project or even as a place to experiment like in McGann’s example of playing and deforming images of Rossetti’s famous painting The Blessed Damozel.
And, while I do think that this is a gain and that there are huge potentials in these archives and databases to stretch what we think of as scholarship and knowledge, I mainly saw these spaces as a consumer, ie what can I get out of these and what can they do for me? But, I think what these pieces touch on, that maybe most people don’t think about, is how these spaces are affecting us as Cohen states first quoting Hayles, “’the prostheses joining humans and machines’—profoundly shape our identities, not just our representations,…The challenge then becomes to shape editorial policy with a kind of self-consciousness particular to digital storage and delivery.” I think what Cohen touches on here and what McPherson also emphasizes in her piece is a loss of self-consciousness. In McPherson’s piece, there is also a fear of “normalization” and of losing things in the categories. By putting everything in neat boxes, we may forget to question what the boxes are made of, who made them, and why they are there.
And, I think this is a real fear, especially as research in digital archives and databases becomes a “normal” practice. As I said before, I never stopped to question the databases and archives as long as they served their function and I could consume what I needed. And while efficiency is gained, something human, imperfect, illogical, and curious seems lost. Perhaps this is why I’m drawn to McGann’s experimentation and optimistic ending: “So it’s extremely important that traditional scholars and critics experiment with the study of digital images, and–perhaps even more useful–set their students to play and experiment with these materials. If there ever was a situation calling us to imagine what we don’t know, this is one.” But I think McGann’s statement and Ann Stoler’s idea of archives as a place where knowledge is produced should apply to everything we do in humanities, especially digital humanities in order to challenge our tendentiousness and our every day practices as well as constantly produce rather than consume. In doing so, we can gain a new way of looking at things and not to lose our self-awareness of how and why we look at things in these ways.

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Andrew

Posted on by Andrew Zolot

I’m not sure what to make of the McGann and Price pieces. They seem to be addressing a crisis that is not really there. Or maybe what the writers are addressing does not seem as radical as they suggest. The break from print to digital is important, but a lot of this rhetoric seems to come more from professional discomfort than actual theoretical necessity. Jerome McGann’s piece about “imagining what you don’t know,” is, in one sense, an ode to the creative potential of building and using digital texts. But I don’t buy his differentiation between speculative projects and specific constructions. Every act of theorizing is both. The fact that he had a hand in crafting a set of programs that enabled Rossetti’s works to be digitized does not privilege the medium or the new viewpoint. From our perspective, where all of the problems he encountered have been rectified by advances in pixilation, User Interfaces, scanning technology, etc., the borders of textual and digital scholarship seem roughly coterminous. What we can do with archives and annotation do not, as far as I can tell, change the fundamental nature of either archiving or annotating, other than to point out that digital = way faster. Much of this essay reads, to me, like a 1st millennium monk musing on the possibilities of paper. Yes, the medium has a profound effect on one’s ability to record and reflect, but, ultimately, analyzing the medium is not a replacement for analyzing content. Now, the possibilities of photo analyses like the filtered images of The Blessed Damozel certainly do seem to signal a change in the nature of this particular scholarship, but that’s something entirely different from digital archiving.

Kenneth Price’s piece comes from this same sort of urge: what do we call what we are doing? His exhaustive explorations of the terms “edition,” “project,” “database,” etc., are certainly valid, thorough, and informative—but I still can’t help feeling that this crisis of naming is somewhat contrived and/or self-interested. Yes: names and definitions are important. But Price tips his hand in the last line of his intro: “In the fraught circumstance of the academy, driven by a prestige economy, humanities scholars are well advised to be highly self-conscious about what we do and how we describe it.” How am I to take this? It’s an arrow aimed at the job-insecure academic’s heart. But this cannot be what impels scholarship—I refuse to believe that. Price’s piece is a glorified exercise in definition and naming. I am currently teaching this kind of writing to my sophomores, so I am about as well primed as a person possibly could be to revel in an act of definition. What Price seems to lack is an occasion. My students write definitions because I tell them to. That is there occasion. This piece attempts to control the discourse around something in the process of emerging—or something that might never emerge. To suggest the term arsenal for these undertakings strikes me as tone deaf. Create something people talk about and they’ll name it for you. The Walt Whitman Archive works fine as a name because there already is a category encompassing it: it’s a website. It is not qualitatively different from a website about baseball or Seinfeld episodes. This seems to be a prime culprit for digital humanists’ crisis: it’s not that the humanities are absorbing new techniques, it’s that the digital complex is absorbing the humanities. Is that scary? Not to me. Maybe it is to these folks.

I know this all sounds resoundingly anti-scholarship and maybe even anti-academic. But I have always felt the horizon for self-reflection lies far past the endpoint of any work’s creative emergence. I feel that one must contribute something before one starts analyzing what they’ve contributed. My imagination is not captured by criticism of something that has not happened yet (especially when it isn’t clear that the something ever will happen).

As far as the implications of digital archiving… that’s a pretty big subject. One of the largest areas of impact seems to be the economic spaces that literature and scholarship have traditionally occupied. The internet undermines a capitalist dynamic whenever a physical commodity can be digitized without loss of utility (use value). This happened with music, and music profits from record sales plummeted. The publishing industry is facing similar pressures. You could once sell Whitman’s collected works in 22 volumes and make a profit. I imagine it is harder to do so when his collected works are on a website. This is, of course, assuming people have the right information. Case in point: I bought an edition of selected Whitman works just last year. Had I known this archive existed, I wouldn’t have. This effectively shifts scholarship funding from private interest to public grants. I’ve barely set foot in that world—and don’t necessarily plan to—but I think the pressure exerted is pretty apparent in scholarship like Price’s piece—scholarship that is, as far as I can tell, pretty unique to the digital age—that presents as essentially high-end PR for the writer’s professional enterprise.

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Grace’s Response (Week of 1/28)

Posted on by Grace Liew

Referencing at least three of this week’s readings, discuss what is lost and gained, or what is enabled and disabled, when the archive/collection/edition is or goes digital.  In other words, what are the implications — conceptual, epistemological, politically, cultural, or otherwise — of the fabrication of these (groups of) artefacts — or the databases that drive them?  Note: you may choose to focus your response on a single theme or area of interest, or more exhaustively catalog the implications. Length: about 350 words.

 

“What would literary history look like if the field was divided not into discrete periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literature?” The question posed by Wai Chee Dimock in Ed Folsom’s article surrounding literary categorization sparks discussion about where databases belong on the trajectory of discretely divided methods of analyzing literature.

 

One of Folsom’s biggest claim is that, juxtaposed against narrative-centric organizations, the database is non-linear, non-discrete, “do not tell stories…do not have a beginning or end…do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence” (Folsom). Using his Walt Whitman Archive as an example, Folsom hails the database’s many revolutionary qualities and its categorically different capacities from methods of organization of the past.

 

McGann, attempting a bit more nuance regarding the dichotomy, disagrees: while the structure of a database may not be narrativized, it is nonetheless still “severely constrained and organized,” since databases still rely on user interfaces, which embed, “implicitly and explicitly, many kinds of hierarchical and narrativized organizations” (McGann).

 

McGill similarly notes the “conceptual and structural horizon” of database projects such as the Walt Whitman Project that restrains such projects in ways that are “surprisingly close to normative ideas” (McGill).

 

It was interesting to note Folsom’s references that juxtaposes the database against the narrative–positing database as a non-linear, non-discrete, non-ordered collection of items (“Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence”), Folsom writes that this departure from narrativity is in and of itself radical (Folsom).

 

But this divide seems slightly arbitrary and unmindful of the fact that narrativity is itself an inheritance of Greek/Aristotelian/Western-centric methods of organization, and that alternatives to narrative have been and are around independent of the advent of digital technologies. Claims to radicality that do not acknowledge a lineage feels slightly suspect to me.

 

On immediacy, Bolter and Grusin write about the logic of the vanishing medium, ie, a medium that disappears in order to leave the audience/viewer in the direct presence of the thing represented, eg, through a webcam recording of a birdfeeder, in a race car, etc. In terms of what is lost or gained, enabled or disabled, I echo Sarah’s observation that visibility and invisibility are highly intertwined with claims of “universality,” a political position that inscribes normativity/whiteness and often masquerades as apolitical.

 

Tara McPherson’s article feels, to me, the most salient in terms of positioning and acknowledging the archives’ “privileged role in ordering memory and history.” Her article pries apart a bit more the complexity behind what might be lost or gained through digitalization–short answer is that the onus still falls on the human end of digitalization. McPherson emphasizes that digital humanists need to do more and continually reexamine colonial and imperialist methods of organization, to ensure that “digitization does not simply reinstall the absences and imbalances of our physical archives within digital realms.” This rings home. While many of the other writers refer to the transformational prowess of the database as potentially radical, yet, since medium is always relational to human use, to fail to acknowledge positionality is to replicate the gap in acknowledging that the “politics of selection and interpretation…are always implicit in our technologies of memory and storage.”
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(So-called?) Accessibility and (So-called?) Originals

Posted on by Taylor Orgeron

Though many would view accessibility as as clearly positive aspect of digitization, Shillingburg (in this case, via Price) argues that digitization threatens to separate “‘the archive user from insights into the critical significance of textual histories'” and notes “information overload” as a potential issue in digital scholarship. Price, however, reminds us that it is not the form that causes this feature, but rather the creators and their values. I do not necessarily agree with Price’s assertion that English academics are better suited for digital humanities work than librarians and system engineers. However, I feel quite differently about the English academic’s place in the field of so-called “material “objects, which does point us toward an intrinsic difference between the two media, even though I struggle to articulate that difference.

Cohen illuminates a similar point in his article, as he laments the possibility of those untrained in the theory of editing gaining access to its resources without recognizing its power. I find Cohen’s assertion that digitized items require maintenance interesting, since “material” objects clearly require maintaining as well. In fact, the maintenance level of digitized archives are less dramatically necessary than that of non-digitized archives: copies can be produced and stored for digital archives, yet you can never have two originals. (And in the case of digitized forms, as Gitelman argues, “the original as such does not exist”, pointing out an important distinction between the two forms.) Because of this, what is lost in the experience of digitization is the affect which comes with holding a page that your favorite author touched. This tactile experience cannot be replicated with our current technology. (Could it ever?) To level the playing field of this discussion, I believe a discussion of digitized and non-digitized copies needs examination. Is anything lost or gained between viewing a digitized copy of a letter and viewing a printed copy of a letter? Well, to view the printed copy, I presumably had to leave the comfort of my home, which brings us back to accessibility, and its various pros and cons….

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A Call For oPaCiTy (or transparency?), Or SQL = Status Quo Language

Posted on by Sarah Webb

In thinking about “what is lost and gained, or what is enabled and disabled, when the archive/collection/edition is or goes digital,” in light of this week’s readings, I’m most struck by how many things actually remain the same. In particular I’m talking about the apparent transparency of whiteness.

All of the readings this week embody this cultural lens, but I think McPherson, Cohen, and Bolter and Grusin are particularly interesting in considering this, and I might also refer to the Folsom et al debate. In just 350 words, I will not be elaborating on any of the claims or observations I’m about to make, but I’m happy to discuss more if you’re interested.

I read Cohen first since it was the first hyperlinked reading. I had high hopes for a piece titled “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” but I was ultimately disappointed. Cohen asks that we “engage with these politics consciously and explicitly” and admits that “as both editors and designers, we encode protocols of power in the systems by which our literary past is circulated and accessed.” I find it problematic that he would say all of that yet still skirt around issues of race, his race and the race of his collaborators, even when bragging about the “heterogeneity” of the team. Even his nods at language diversity and representations of indigenous populations are presented in a way that allows whiteness to remain transparent.

McPherson’s piece was more interesting for the simple fact that Vectors is about creating new content using the technology to innovate research and the communication of research in innovative ways. I think this inclination to look at how technology allows us to create new work rather than just viewing it and using it as a way to preserve old work and the explicit investment in race, gender, and social justice is why this article and the projects discussed within it give me more hope than any of the others for the possibilities of DH. Yet even in this article, McPherson takes her own whiteness for granted, leaves no space for a discussion or reflection of how the racial position of those creating these projects matters regardless of their good intentions.

Finally, when Bolter and Grusin discuss the idea of transparency and immediacy by explaining that it’s “ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation” and that there’s a “tension between looking at and looking through,” I really picked up on the whiteness continuity in all of these texts. The authors are all looking through whiteness and, more significantly, see no need to look at it. For racial bodies coded as “other,” however, race is not transparent, but quite opaque, readily apparent to look at and seemingly impossible to see through. There’s the idea that “colored” lenses are more obviously mediated, more obviously lenses, but that white lenses are actually transparent and thus taken for granted as “unmediated” reality or “immediacy,” as Bolter and Grusin explain it.

Paradoxically, when DHers become transparent about their racial positioning, their race is no longer transparent.

As I look at the Janus face of DH, it’s “Archival Histories and Digital Futures,” to take from McPherson, I see no loss of white supremacy.

In the spirit of transparency, I really debated about whether to post on this topic instead of something more “techy” or “literary,” and I know my interpretation of the prompt might be a bit idiosyncratic, but I’m interested in how the “metadata” or “coding” of race is transmitted from more analogue eras and spaces into digital eras and spaces and gets translated into and through digital media.

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Prompt for Week of 1/28

Posted on by lcoats

Referencing at least three of this week’s readings, discuss what is lost and gained, or what is enabled and disabled, when the archive/collection/edition is or goes digital.  In other words, what are the implications — conceptual, epistemological, politically, cultural, or otherwise — of the fabrication of these (groups of) artefacts — or the databases that drive them?  Note: you may choose to focus your response on a single theme or area of interest, or more exhaustively catalog the implications. Length: about 350 words.

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Prompt for Week of 1/21

Posted on by lcoats

As a group, write and post a review (750-1500 words) of your selected dh project. Areas, with guiding questions, to address:

CONTENT, AUDIENCE, and USE
• Describe and evaluate the significance of the project for the humanities (I would recommend that you focus on a more specific field like literary studies). How does the project advance–or fail to advance, or maintain the status quo of–the state of knowledge of the field?
• Is there a clear audience? Who could use this resource? Could it be applied to research or teaching, or both?

FORM & TECHNOLOGY
• Describe and evaluate the project’s design and interface (aesthetics, interactivity, navigation, accessibility or representation of core materials, etc.).
• What technologies does the project employ (both front-end and back-end) and how does the scholarship make use of these technologies? (Note: complete to the extent possible. If the project does not make clear what technologies it uses, state as much.)

CRITIQUE
• What do you consider to be the successes and failures of the project?
• How does it resonate with one or more of the readings for the week?

**Assignment adapted from Todd Pressner, http://introdh.blogspot.com/

You’re welcome to select a digital humanities project of your choice (just email me about it first), or from the following list:
Looking for Whitman http://lookingforwhitman.org/
Shelley Godwin Archive http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/
Viral Texts http://viraltexts.org/
EEBO-TCP http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-eebo/
What’s on the Menu http://menus.nypl.org/
Mapping the Republic of Letters http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/
Transcribe Bentham http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/
HathiTrust Digital Library, Research Center http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc
Walt Whitman Archive http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
Romantic Circles http://www.rc.umd.edu/
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
NINES http://www.nines.org/
Rewriting Wikipedia Projects ttp://dhpoco.org/rewriting-wikipedia/
Women Writers Project http://www.wwp.brown.edu/
The Knotted Line http://knottedline.com/
MIRA http://mira.canningstockrouteproject.com/

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melbet зеркало 157

Posted on by Grace Liew

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