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Tag: technology

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The readings this week were a lot of fun. Murray’s Charting the Literary Sphere introduced ideas of the twittersphere, hypertext and distant reading. I was especially interested in the author’s concern over interdisciplinary competitiveness in the digital literary sphere – under that umbrella term was the clash of print culture studies versus digital media studies versus digital literature studies… but why is everyone fighting?

I keep coming back to Bourdieu’s formulation of fields which, for me, reads as quite an aggressive culture battleground where social actors are competing for different positions. The whole concept of cultural prestige and intellectual property links back to my original thoughts on public scholarship, which you can find in my first post.

Watch out though, hyperlinks are cognitively loaded. Hayles talks about the information consumption that interacts with how we read, and argues that there should be a disciplinary shift to a broader sense of reading strategies and interpretations. Hypertext reading does not support an enriched reading, as scholars thought it might.

‘I Caught Myself Reading the F-Shape’: Thoughts on Hayles’ Description of Reading Methods

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.

ways of reading

How am I engaging with literature now? Do I take notice of best-of lists, recommendations through newspapers, or influencer “what I read this month” posts? How much can I say I am developing my own taste, led by my own choices and interests?

Partly in response to Izzy’s comment in class about self-conscious reading, and in engaging with the three readings from this week, these questions feel important to keep in mind. Each author, in some way, engages with ideas of literary or scholarly accessibility and democracy. The “canon” is, in some ways, expanding through a widening structure of value, no longer in the sole control of established literary or cultural icons, but perhaps influenced by a self-published author or blogger.

However, as David Wright considers, the endless choice currently faced by people deciding what to read is still mediated by assessments of value. Personally, the ideal of self-directed choice feels out of reach. I know what my interests are, and I engage with media that responds to those interests, but in doing so I seem to create my own echo chamber of creative and political outputs.

Despite these feelings of overwhelm, or self-reproach at my lack of engagement with different literary or cultural spheres, the readings we have looked at encourage me to reintroduce a practice of “deep attention.” Katherine Hayles notes that although our capacity for slow, attentive, and empathetic reading is not lost, there is a need to continually and deliberately engage with literature and other cultural products that challenge what we know and what we believe.

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.

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 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.

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