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: field of digital humanities
An array and flow of questions on the practice of reading in the digital
These readings were all really interesting in the way they consider and focus on the commercial and marketing aspect of the subjects of critical reading. Murray highlights the audience and author relationship that needs be fostered into the creation of novels and works in today’s overly consumerist western world. This makes me wonder the extent to which authors tied to publishing full length novels and books that end up physically printed and sold in bookstores, are Would this shift mean that traditional publishing houses and means will become more redundant? What can publishing houses do to move away from this road to pure commercial redundancy? (I liked the mention in class of the minimalist book cover with the text from the book written on the cover discussed in class as this specific marketing decision ties into the shift that commercial publishing practices are doing to cater to these changes) This discussion also made me consider how more ‘authentic’ pieces of writing have shifted to digital platforms such as substack, Goodreads reviews (including ‘para-text’), platforms that are ‘open-access’ and that allow for writings that look to generate peer-read opinions and discussions rather than commercially motivated writings. (what I mean by the term ‘authentic’ is that the writing might not have a commercial motivation behind it)
neuroscience cognitive aspect of reading, the connections we make. In particular, Hayes reading made me think of the scholarly concept of ‘chrononormativity’ how society is arranged in a way to direct us towards maximum productivity. I think this idea links quite well with the concept of ‘hyperreading’ as hyperlinks and endless streams of information brought by digital media in our reading practices of these include a sense of urgency in the process. And I agree with the article in the way it argues that we no longer read ‘deeply’ in the digital media landscape, but rather inside the endless array of information (whether it is info that contradicts or links with one another).
The Digital Literary Sphere and The Death of The Author
This week’s readings put me in the mind of Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” concept, which argues that meaning does not originate in authorial intention and is instead found entirely through reader reception and interpretation. And where else could you possibly find more readerly intervention than the Internet? Murray’s account in particular extends Barthes’ implication for me through her discussion of the digital literary sphere, where authorship is increasingly mediated by social platforms (both reader review sites such as Goodreads and the development of algorithmic systems which tailor what you watch and read according to your so-called ‘preferences’). I confess that I count myself guilty of reading a book or watching a film largely for the satisfaction of either singing its praises or tearing it to shreds in online reviews – an exercise that might solely achieve me a like from one of my three Goodreads followers (and only then if it’s a book they’ve actually heard of before).
But it is in this way that Murray proves how the contemporary author functions less as a sovereign source of meaning than as a performative and marketable identity which is shaped by social media visibility. I like her discussion of what Jodi Dean refers to as “communicative capitalism”, because it implies that not only does the author lose their literary identity by maintaining a public, online persona but it also implicates the reader whose “participation” in offering criticism, reviews and interpretations often benefit big corporations such as Amazon. It allows readers to feel empowered by seeing themselves as the ultimate arbiter of meaning in a text, which leaves the author effectively “dead” to their own work and simultaneously benefits corporations who can extract value from the readers unpaid work without them even being aware of doing so.
The idea of authorship operating as an institutional construct rather than the natural origin of textual meaning also put me in the mind of the Hayles article, which similarly destabilises the author by shifting attention away from the writer and towards the way we read texts, arguing that textual meaning emerges through practices of close reading, hyper reading and machine reading. At the same time, these readings expose a tension between humanistic values of interpretation and subjectivity, as I understand them through Drucker, and the logic of digital platforms that increasingly govern literary circulation (where ‘worth’ is increasingly determined by metrics and popularity rather than critical interpretation). And this online popularity contest has, ironically, the ability to ‘go-offline’. If you walk into a real-life bookstore, you will see rows and rows dedicated to ‘Book-Tok’ favourites. And as a bookshop enthusiast myself, I can attest that as much as I enjoyed The Song of Achilles five years ago when I first saw it on a ‘Book-Tok’ shelf, it would be nice to switch things up a little. The real risk here is reducing both authorship and reading to quantifiable forms of engagement, as it raises the question of what becomes of meaning, value and critique when interpretation is subsumed by an economy driven by platforms.
A (briefer than normal) Introduction to Digital Humanities
As with many critical fields in the humanities, Digital Humanities really wants to define itself yet also hates being pinned down. Infact, it is a debate within the DH about whether or not the field should even have a strict definition at all. The positives of keeping it ill-defined keep it largely accessible and open, free from being pidgeon-holed into one specific field, allowing colloboration from a variety of actors. However, proponents of the view that it should have a closed definition argue on the same metric. They believe that once you have a definition, that is actually the point at which you can branch off of the initial concept, while still retaining a level of specificity that necessitates critical discussion.The closest I have gotten to understanding an ethos in Digital Humanities is the idea of “construction” rather than just “critique”. What is “construction” itself was controversial, with some people arguing that in order to be a “real” Digital Humanist you needed to know how to code. However because humanities student don’t enjoy learning anything difficult, the definition became much broader, utilising any method of digital construction or “meaning making” to take part. Part of this ethos also has an emphasis on accessibility, bridging the gap between academic and reader, utilising digital tools and the digital space to “democratise” information and knowledge. Interestingly it does (in my view) end up creating a clash between the nature of scholarship and the project itself, which I suppose is one of the very things Digital Humanities attempts to uncover.
It is also not fair to say “critique” does not hold an important place in DH. DH’s love critiquing, they love externally critiquing, internally critiquing, constantly self critiquing. Like most humanist fields they stay committed to being quite intersectional and deconstructionist in their approach, attempting to challenge hegemonies of thoughts that pervase themselves socially, but quite often academically aswell within digital fields. The critique can be showcased through the projects themselves, or it can be a much wider critique of any digital projects or data collection. All this is to help us better understand our purpose and role (moral or otherwise) on digital spaces, what exactly is at stake, and what contributions need to be made. Perhaps I’ve missed something, but there’s a lot of accessible web blogs who attempt to define the same (with a lot more construction, ethos, and critique than I).
My Reflections on Digital Humanities
I have always understood digital humanities to be an interdisciplinary field, one in which we witness an intersection between digital technologies and the broader field of humanities disciplines in an effort to explore human society and culture. What this point of intersection actually looks like to me, however, has always appeared somewhat vague. Indeed, my understanding of humanities disciplines as a standalone concept has remained fairly black and white, having largely taken place within the frameworks of textual analysis and interpretation (the result of being an English Literature student). As such, I had primarily associated digital humanities with the use of digital tools within this existing framework, often to study literary texts through databases, digitised archives or computational methods of analysis.
Only recently, through a developing engagement with critical theory, has my understanding of humanities begun to feel more interdisciplinary, extending toward other fields of study and expression – this, of course, includes the digital world. As such, what is already becoming apparent to me is how strongly the field of digital humanities is shaped by ethical concerns and political realities. From my initial engagement with Debates in the Digital Humanities, DH appears less like a fixed discipline, and more like a set of ongoing conversations about the way that knowledge is acquired, the way it is shared and the way it is valued. In this way, DH feels inherently attuned to the present moment, constantly redefining itself through responsiveness (particularly to social and political pressures).
This reframing has complicated my earlier, more technical understanding of the field. What has stood out the most to me through the readings is how DH repeatedly returns to questions of accessibility and public engagement, which consequently opens up tensions surrounding authority and legitimacy. An example of this can be public writings, such as blog posts, which exist alongside traditional peer-reviewed scholarship, which caught my attention due to it’s particular relevence to my own field of academic study. Thus, the field of DH foregrounds responsibility above all; decisions about data organisation, access and privacy reflect underlying assumptions about whose knowledge matters and how it should circulate, meaning that engaging with humanities digitally also involves engaging with it politically. This is what I now consider to be an intersection point.
At this early stage, my understanding of digital humanities remains provisional. However, I now understand DH as a field with two distinct sides; one that uses digital tools and computational methods to ask humanities questions, and another side which involves the humanistic critique of the tools, technologies and platforms that make such work possible.
Thinking About The Digital Humanities Field
Digital Humanities describes a distinct approach to the humanities field, routed in technology but also the principles of public scholarship. It is a malleable term encompassing a broad range of methods and practices, with voices in the field often keenly describing it more in terms of ‘doing’ than ‘thinking’ (as is the language more generally used in the more traditional humanities). Emphasis in the digital humanities is often the medium: from studying and critiquing the material of the digital humanities, using digital tools and applying computational methods to humanistic study. The importance of this work is in recognising data structuring is political and its central intellectual problem then becomes how we algorthimise or digitalise a world that is infinitely human – fluid, evolving and subjective.
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.
I Canny Keep Up: What is Digital Humanities?
The introductory articles were interesting in that they identified DH as quite a fast-moving and responsive discipline, so it’s maybe not that easy to pin down an exact definition.
One theme that came up through the readings was accessibility, how can scholarly critical thinking be open to more people, and how can what is published or created through this scholarship be available for a wide range of people to read? There is of course a link to technology, although exactly what platforms are used can vary. Overall the discipline appears to be an intersection between newer technologies and forms of literary criticism that we might think of as more traditional or conventional.
Regarding the fast-moving and responsive nature of the discipline, the first article in particular did make me think about how quickly the functionality and context surrounding particular platforms (like twitter which was referenced in the first introduction and is now x and a very different platform to 10 years ago… grok!) can change, and how might this affect their relationship with scholarship?
This area came up during the class discussion, we talked about the legitimacy of different platforms like Substack or how the cultures around open-access journals compare to publications which are behind a paywall. Particularly in a ‘post-truth’ age, a couple of the Debates in Digital Humanities introductions emphasised the importance of accessibility, but this also intersects with peer-review systems which are kind of obstacles to publication or dissemination but are valuable too.
Thinking of DH as the ‘analysis of a complex problem into a data model’ (from the extract on the board in class) kind of echoes this sentiment, forming a multifaceted, slippery idea into a more rigid structure will really index the ways in which the politics and materiality of particular platforms affect how scholarship is constructed and disseminated.
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.
