Particularly with the Hayles reading, I found myself examining how the highlighted manners of reading affected my own comprehension and reading style between various modes. Especially with hyperreading, I found myself exhibiting the ‘f pattern’ of reading in real time with the article itself, forcing me to confront how deeply I was actually comprehending the material, subsequently returning and re-reading sections I had not paid attention to. Similarly, the practice of following nested trees of hyperlinks is something I do often, particularly within self-contained communities of short stories that draw upon one another to flesh out and create a consistent world. This practice is at once frustrating as it can lead to forgetting the original text, but can also provide entirely new modes of reading in the digital landscape, similarly to the blocks of text being revealed in Hayles’ example of The Patchwork Girl to simulate a fractured nature. Close reading, meanwhile, is something that never really seems to leave my conception of what it means to read a text, being constantly reinforced as the literary ‘gold standard’ by wider academia. It finds its place as central to the digital sphere too dues to its close synergies with machne reading. This confluence of both machine and close reading can elevate our literary analysis within the modern age to include pattern recognition and highlight trends that may otherwise be entirely missed, representing the fusion of human and digital perspectives that so characterises Digital humanities.
Tag: background
Introductory Aspects, Considerations, and Concerns of the Digital Humanities?
I understand Digital Humanities to be a field where individuals can better understand and analyse the humanities subjects (English, Art History etc.) through the lens of technology and data sets in order to revolutionise the academic field and institutions. It is a subject which does not necessarily aim to find the most ‘correct’ analysis but where discussion can be provoked through the different evaluations produced from data sets. When looking at data sets, it is important to acknowledge the legitimacy, accuracy, and whether the data is skewed as this should be taken into account when evaluating. It is a field that adapts to the evolving world and reimagines its intention and focus to take into account changing topical issues and to challenge the authorities that enforce inequality. With its growing popularity and necessity in the world, there are debates as to what is required to be a Digital Humanist (‘Big Tent’), for example, the debate around the necessity of coding comprehension.
Digital Humanities: An Overview
A precursory definition of Digital Humanities might be the utilisation of technology in order to better understand the humanities, particularly in a time when the digital world is rapidly becoming central to our daily lives, providing the ability to utilise a critical humanities background in analysing the digital world. Paraphrased from today’s seminar; ‘rigidity of computer and epistemological structures in contrast to humanities scholars wider understanding of culture, literature, language etc..’ The Digital Humanities also incorporates ideas around accessibility and responsibly of scholars and institutions to make their work available to the public, particularly publicly funded academic institutions. One end or goal of the field might be keeping the humanities current and promoting flexible types of thinking, particularly in the online world, when cultural or political issues are increasingly presented in bite-sized formats and as ‘black and white,’ often without nuance.
An Initial, Uninformed View on Digital Humanities
Although it is as yet rather surface-level, my understanding of Digital Humanities is the manner in which the intersection of the digital revolution and the tools it affords us can change and assist our studies of the humanities.
I find its chronological scope in particular to be fascinating, as its nature allows for both a refreshing perspective on pre-digital works with entirely new tools (such as computational language analysis), alongside a more integrated philosophy of examining newer works released within digital infrastructure.
I am also appriciative of its meta-analysis capabilities, such as its scrutiny of the accessibility and functionality standards of academic circles. It encourages freer and more accessible knowledge sharing and support for those either in need or without access, and presents a framework through which disciplines can work to deconstruct the ‘ivory tower’ of academic resource and understanding. It also has the potential to provide accomodations for those who are disabled or otherwise require further infrastructure to participate, both widening access and the perspectives entering the field.
As also discussed briefly in the seminar (and relating somewhat to the broad temporality of the field), another point of interest is the incredible speed with which the discipline evolves alongside the medium. Particularly within the last half-decade or so, the conflict between Digital Humanities’ focus on freedom of knowledge and publication and ethical questions around data harvesting and misinformation provide even a possible avenue for philosophical discussion. At the risk of abstracting a legitimately pressing issue of legitimacy versus freedom, the ethical conundrums of implementing academic standards and frameworks within such a free field of study can encourage further questions of value and accessibility from an entirely different lens.
the effects of making choices in digital humanities
There are dimensions in text. They’re inherent to both the text and our interpretations of it. Layers, texture. But those dimensions are usually flattened in the way academics present our insights on our field to the public. Something that feels very vivid–the texture of miasma and contagion theories and the way they apply to Gothic literature–is something boring or flat to engage with as the average person. If you’re particularly lucky as an academic, someone might ask you a question. It’s far more likely that question will be “Why does this matter?” The texture is lost somewhere, in the translation between academics and the public.
Because Digital Humanities (DH) is a responsive field, this is where you can manage to retain some of that texture. In the methods of analyzing text, you can illustrate the texture of your intention. When you digitally map the occurrence of keywords in a piece of Gothic fiction and link those words to contagion and miasma, you begin to convey precisely what you mean to someone else. Your insights become visible and your choices become clearly political. And even beyond what dimensions are added through the additional choices you have to make, the choices you were already making become visible to both you and your audience. The process of translating insights about a piece of text into the digital realm forces a process of understanding the dimensions of that text. The layers stop being an assumption of the insight, and become the centrepiece.
That process of understanding is, in my opinion, the most valuable thing to come from DH. It’s impossible to control how people will respond to and interpret a thing that you make. DH puts you in a much better position to communicate your ideas more clearly, but that too can have flaws or gaps between academics and the public that are difficult to identify except through trial and error (although that process is also enabled through digital humanities in a way that is not possible through traditional methods of publishing academic ideas). However, it is certain that the process of thinking through what choices you are making and what elements you are communicating–what you care about and what you dismiss–is a process that results in a much more comprehensive understanding of what you are trying to say. That is how you understand the textures, dimensions, and layers you are playing with in humanities.
An Initial Reflection on the Digital Humanities
The digital humanities is an intersectional and constantly changing field that looks at the intersection between digital tools and its landscape and the humanities. because of this intersection, the field seems to be inherently political. It is also a field of constant communication and collaboration, differentiating it from many other academic disciplines. The peer review system in contrast to social media platforms such as substack or even the in-between of blogging is an interesting one as it brings out questions about legitimacy and authority within the field. It seems to attempt to be academically inclusive to differing technical levels with digital tools. It is a Humanistic study of digital practices, digitising materials and objects, objects that might not exist outside of a computer and also the methods used perform analysis. It is also to disseminate ideas and present them in conversation with computational methods applied to humanistic study. It might include data bases for intellectual problems. Data structuring is political- Johanna Drucker. It helps us question what is at stake- when we use the rigid boxes of computers to analyse the world, often built by engineers who might not always think of the epistemological structures of these tools. The subject of the digital humanities introduces itself imperatively and through audacity (in a good sense or possibly bad as well- a different word could be used to described what I mean) , but the subject holds an intriguing ethical imperative.
