I like the idea of public scholarship — a responsibility to share knowledge gained from being in a university institution with those who may not have as an immediate access as we do. I’m interested in how content, which may demand prior knowledge, can be democratised and made accessible to a wider community.
I also think digital humanities offers new opportunities to be creative in analysis and text interpretation. Especially when displaying research in unconventional ways for Literature studies. Mapping texts visually or using computational methods to create academic content besides an essay is very exciting to me. I’m thinking about how we normally model interpretation though standardised essay style… we are only allowed to have an analysis within this framework at university level. It seems liberating that different digital frameworks can create new ways of interpretation.
The question of legitimacy is something that strikes me about DH too. Our discussion about Substack, paywalls, peer reviews and social media lends itself to an age old debate about who decides what is intellectual or academic. I don’t think this is anything new. What is new, for me, is the democratising approach of DH. After exploring the Viral Texts DH Project I still find it is not totally accessible. The density of the data, and lack of immediate explanation to a user in this particular project is intimidating. Although aesthetically and visually stimulating, the graph is difficult to decipher without additional research.
I hadn’t considered the continued inaccessibility of DH work in terms of a knowledge barrier–the need to understand how to engage with academic work in order to benefit from many DH projects.
I wonder if there’s a certain point at which increasing accessibility is no longer worthwhile. Maybe there is a certain amount of preexisting knowledge or additional work and research that readers just need to do in order to engage with some academic insights, and that is a reasonable expectation.
But at the same time, I struggle with that idea. I tend to believe that theoretically, an ideal academic insight is one that can be understood by anyone given a basic overview of the background. I value accessibility quite highly in academia, and one of the things that most draws me towards DH is its potential to make academia not just literally accessible (online instead of in card-protected libraries) but also more comprehensible (due to the visual format that is oftentimes less difficult to parse with little background information).
Yes! This is a great point
I can hear the excitement in your post about the new interpretive avenues DH opens up for literary texts via things like data visualisations and the use of digital platforms, Daisy 🙂 And, while I’m still attached to longform writing as an important tool for developing critical thinking, I do also really like giving students the chance to use alternative digital modes of making arguments and representing analysis. You’ll have the chance to do that sort of thing yourself during the semester.
Also, thanks for putting in a link to Viral Texts – very helpful for others reading your post to be able to quickly click through to it. Network diagrams of the ‘hairball’ variety you’ve given in that image are notorious for being unhelpfully opaque. They’re comparatively easy to generate once you’ve got a handle on the software or the coding library, but rarely easy to interpret. One sign of a good DH project is that it will accompany its digital artefacts with information explaining what you are looking at, decisions about methodology and data collection, historical/cultural/other contextual background, etc. Keeping that stuff sufficiently short and (to pick up Eli’s points about accessibility) comprehensible to a non-specialist audience so as not to drive away readers is the challenge. The Viral Texts project has a lot of different moving parts by a lot of different scholars, and many different branches to its website, and it would have been impossible to take all of those in during the short period of time you had to look over it in class, but if you’re interested in reading further, here’s the article I mentioned in class where one of the project’s PIs, Ryan Cordell, thinks about the reprinting and recirculation of a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in C19th America in terms of what we now think of as ‘virality’: Ryan Cordell, ‘”Taken Possession Of”: The Reprinting and Reauthorship of Hawthorne’s “Celestial Railroad” in the Antebellum Religious Press’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013.
Thank you, I’ll check out this article!