Author: William Thomas (page 10 of 21)

William G. Thomas III is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities. He teaches digital humanities and digital history, 19th century U.S. history, the Civil War, and the history of slavery.

September 16, 2011

What makes a digital project?

Jerome Mcgann offers a rather startling summation at one point in Radiant Textuality, his great retrospective analysis of the building of the Rossetti Archive: “the computer continually disappointed.” For Mcgann, the computer could perform elementary linkages and sorting functions, “if elaborate and complex,” but at times proved frustratingly limited. Anyone doing digital scholarship will understand. We have high ambitions and expectations for the machine–as revelatory–and yet so much depends on pure 0-1 binary distinctions. Still, Mcgann never loses sight of the tremendous possibilities in front of the digital humanities, and his deep self-awareness of the choices he made continually inspires.

Reading Jerome Mcgann again for me was a powerful experience, like traveling backward and forward in time at the same time. This is partly true because I was at IATH and UVA in the period Mcgann describes, but mostly because Mcgann understands so clearly the work of the digital humanist and guides us so well into the pasts and futures of texts.

As a historian, rather than a literary scholar, I look at texts sometimes purely for their historical meaning and context, even if we know that they were manipulated by their creators and continue to be changed by their interpreters. We have very few critical editions in history, mostly of presidential papers and other editing projects, although a few texts have received extensive critical treatment, such as the Gettysburg Address. But the bulk of our texts are fragmentary individual records or pieces of evidence from larger bureaucratic organizations–government, railroads companies, the army, the courts. The pieces of evidence often stand alone, but they too are inherently perspectival, biased, warped, and, as Mcgann so beautifully explains, “n-dimensional.” In fact, it is this last Mcgann characteristic that digital historians perhaps should pay attention to more. We read texts for information, “mine” them for dates, people, concepts, discourse. And in a way discard the rest. Yet, our sources too are “quantum” and “multivariate.” (p. 185) And we too run head on into the problem of SGML/TEI encoding these texts–it proves full of “impasses, contradictions, and strange diagonal wanderings.” (p. 83) More on this in the next post.

For students in our Digital Humanities seminar, it was Mcgann’s wisdom as a practicing digital scholar, that seemed so deeply relevant. I would point to three ways that Mcgann’s experience helps us understand what makes a digital project a digital project.

1. Mcgann provides a praxis of theory of digital research and scholarship, one that is unfamiliar in the broader analog humanities: testing, scaling, modifying, reimagining, repeating, modifying, and all over again. The process in digital humanities is perhaps something like printmaking. One works in reverse perspective, running prints serially, recursively to examine the representation in detail. Over and over again. At the center of the digital project, then, is a regimen of testing, of checking error messages in the logs so to speak, of using the -tail command in Unix . . . often.

2. When we produce a work of scholarship in whatever form, Mcgann reminds us that “to make anything is also to make a speculative foray into a concealed but wished for unknown.” (p. 15) The work that we make “is not the achievement of one’s desire: it is the shadow of that desire. . . ” As we create digital works, we would do well to follow Mcgann’s deep sense of self-reflection on the process and his awareness that with which we conclude is only a shadow of the desired object. This is as true of a book, a poem, a painting, or a symphony as it is of a digital work. But right now, at this moment in the development of the digital medium, we face this central truth in a deeply acute way. The distance between our wish and our object is often so great because the forms and practices and procedures of creation in the digital medium remain profoundly unstable. If you have produced what you thought you would, perhaps you’ve not created anything. A digital project that becomes what was specified might not be able to claim to be a digital project in the digital humanities at all.

3. Mcgann calls his work in the Rossetti Archive “a thought experiment in the theory of texts as an editorial project.” (p. 15) The digital project is a “theoretical instrument for investigating the nature of textuality.” Put another way, Mcgann reveals that “translating paper based texts into electronic forms alters one’s view of the original materials.” (p. 82) The digitization of historical texts, then, is only a step in a deeper investigation into the nature of the material object and its relation to the digital facsimile. We cannot do this work without recognizing it as such.

We hesitate to define what makes a digital project, but by looking backward, as Mcgann does, on the process of his work, on what he thought he was doing and how to “begin again,” we come much closer than if we lose ourselves in hyperbole of the digital revolution.

It was exciting in class to see these students reflect right away on how these concepts shape their understanding of their iPad iOS team project. And as we walked through in Xcode the Apple SDK 4.3 for iOS “integrated development environment,” as we looked at how to build code in Objective-C, run the script, test, test, test, and modify, modify, modify, we began to recognize the relevance of Mcgann’s retrospective analysis in a new, bright light.

September 9, 2011

The Railroad’s “Green Pasture”, New Media, and Digital Humanities

This week’s reading for our Digital Humanities seminar included Marshall McLuhan and Quinten Fore’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects and Helen J. Burgess and Jeanne Hamming’s new piece in Digital Humanities Quarterly, “New Media in the Academy: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in Scholarly Multimedia.”

Marshall McLuhan undertakes among other things a brief discussion of the railway and its social effects in almost the exact center of what one student called his “non-book book.” The railroad, McLuhan explains, “radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence.” He predicts that the “electronic” media in post-war America will have different effects however. The electronic age will produce not suburban worlds but a “circuited city,” an “information megalopolis.”

The railroad, according to McLuhan, created a mythic past even as it transformed society. Clearly drawing on Leo Marx’s 1964 classic The Machine in the Garden, McLuhan calls this effect “the myth of a green pasture world of innocence.” But, my students were interested in the way McLuhan’s polemical piece “runs into the other end of his own ideas.” One student suggested that McLuhan calls for a return to a childlike perception, exemplified in the aural not visual and in the non-linear not linear. Is this not also a green pasture? Does the way media “work us over” circularly create a green pasture?

So, much of McLuhan’s text and presentation rings true forty years later of course. These quotations elicited the most discussion not surprisingly:

“societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”

“all media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”

“in the name of progress our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.”

The Age of Anxiety is “in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools–with yesterday’s concepts.”

To many of these students, we are currently in academe forcing the new media to do the work of the old. In fact, this is what so disturbed them about McNeely and Wolverton’s apparent disregard for blogs, wikis, and other forms of scholarly creativity. Pointing out that McLuhan’s celebration of the amateur had special relevance in this context, one student cautioned, “digital humanists ought not overly professionalize. Creativity, especially the creativity that sounds outlandish to professionals, is key to innovation.”

Although we did not have time to discuss the recent Digital Humanities Quarterly article in detail, students focused on the apparent paradox of digital humanities in tenure and promotion. How it is that Deborah Lines Anderson might argue ostensibly for counting digital work toward tenure in Digital Scholarship in the Tenure, Promotion, and Review Process, but at the same time define digital scholarship “as independent from the medium by which it is produced.” In other words, seeing tools only as a “means to an end” and privileging the “act of creation” misses an important series of instantiations or practices worthy of consideration. Using Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘hybrids’, Burgess and Hamming get us closer to understanding why we must reconsider what we mean by new media or digital humanities and how they relate to “the problem of genre and tenure.”

I found myself thinking anew about the railroad as a hybrid agent–something I’d been writing about and considering for the better part of five years. And further what constitutes a scholarly work and how to present that work, and how we need more examples of non-linear digital scholarship to break free of forcing the new media to do the work of the old.

So much scholarly media “relies heavily on graphical interfaces, navigational schemas, and visual layout,” Burgess and Hamming point out. We are building, in digital humanities, new interfaces to knowledge and information, just at the interfaces railroads produced shaped conceptions of time, space, and society–and were represented through Charles Joseph Minard with his railroad-inspired cartes figuratives. Railroads too changed the way we thought of the body and became an extension of the body. Burgess and Hamming call for a radical act of “performing scholarship” but their great insight here is that digital humanities and new media represent a significant watershed in the “materiality of knowledge production.”

We should look out for our own “green pastures” that come with the new media.

(A good part of our class time was dedicated to discussion about our iPad app challenge and this will be included in a later post.)

September 6, 2011

Book Arrives

Today at 10:00 a.m. the UPS man showed up in my office with a manila envelope from Yale University Press, and in it was The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America, printed and bound and delivered. In three dimensions. The object. A book. On my desk. Along with the book came a very nice letter from Christopher Rogers, my editor at Yale. What a day!

When the UPS man arrived, I happen to be reading Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fore’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects for my class, which we’ll discuss on Thursday. And also on my desk there is Edward L. Ayers, an oldie but a goodie, Vengeance and Justice, for a graduate student discussion.

September 3, 2011

Building an iPad App for the Humanities?

In our second meeting of the Digital Humanities seminar at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we tackled the class’s challenge project–to design and develop an iPad/iPhone app to enhance the humanities. The energy in the room was palpable. The class had already met for an hour before class to hash out benchmarks, objectives, follow up meetings, and plans. When I arrived, they were more than ready to go over where they were with the project.

They had settled on three options:
1. an RSS feed/aggregator for humanities content.
2. creating an app for user generated content.
3. developing a showcase of fixed content.

Overwhelmingly, they voted outside of class to develop option #1. They wanted a “living” app, one that refreshed regularly as new material came online. And they were already working on what to pull, aggregate, organize, and categorize. Key questions focused on what would be the standards or parameters for aggregation, and how would they structure the information for the app. Simple questions drove some of the discussion: like what category of iTunes (News or Education?) would best suit their app.

One of the most interesting parts of the class discussion revolved around the process for organizing themselves over the previous week. How did this occur, I asked. And clearly Blackboard was no help. They began with posts on the discussion threads in Blackboard, but after over 150 posts, it was clear that this technology was full of problems. One could not follow posts clearly or easily, the hierarchies in Blackboard only made matters worse. It was tough to see who wrote what about a new topic. They turned to Doodle to poll one another about times to meet and groups to form. And it was also clear that different students could participate in different ways, that leadership would have to emerge from within and among the group.

The students wanted an app that allowed them as graduate students in the humanities to browse through grants, calls for proposals, conference paper calls, and other difficult to locate information. They wanted the app to enable them to consume more information more easily, to see the ways their fields interconnect and overlap, and to make them aware of opportunities they would never otherwise encounter. The group still is working on whether the app will apply to all humanities fields or use largely the digital humanities. In either case, these students are planning to develop a tool with wide applicability, one that enables them to see the field’s activities, key people, and organizations more clearly.

For next week they will undertake an environmental scan of Digital Humanities and Humanities aggregation services that are already in place. And they will also plan further to identify their users.

We discussed both Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” and Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, “Reinventing Knowledge”. Of these Bush had the upper hand. McNeely and Wolverton came in for much criticism. “Myopic,” “afraid,” and “missed the mark” were phrases that came up. “McNeely fails to understand the ways in which the connectivity, accessibility, and technological capabilities of the Internet enhance scholarship, communication, and knowledge creation,” one student explained. Another said, “I find their criticism of the Internet to be unfounded and shortsighted.” One of the undercurrents in McNeely and Wolverton suggests that humanities scholars are not as technologically advanced as other disciplines. These students were “unconvinced” that humanities scholars are playing “technological catch-up.”

A deeper criticism of Western-centrism in McNeely and Wolverton came up. One student considered their treatment of modes of knowledge production in the East as “an afterthought . . . clearly positioning the West in opposition to the ‘other.'” The Western civilization approach seemed especially discordant.

But the students’ fundamental disagreement with McNeely and Wolverton is that they see the Internet as opening a new epoch, that it is not part of, or merely an extension of, the laboratory epoch. Whereas McNeely and Wolverton seem to be most concerned about how the Internet will promote “our culture,” and suggest that scholars will lose their bearings online, the students seemed convinced that Borgman was right to draw our attention to the infrastructure changes underway with the Internet and World Wide Web. “Anyone how has worked in digital humanities will tell you,” one student wrote in reflection, “the process of creation opens up a new hermeneutic quite different from traditional inquiry–whether you are marking up texts, . . . or building software.”

One question we discussed at some length was whether the Internet constituted an institution, like the university, the laboratory, the disciplines, or the library. Does the Internet have a “culture”? Or is the Internet not culture-specific. Certainly, there is unevenness of access, world-wide, and there are different experiences based on software, hardware, networks, and even energy (electricity). Borgman’s description of the W3C and other organizations, however, that “make” the Internet give us a different picture of the Internet as an institution, something that is indeed structured, controlled, and determined in important ways.

As it turns out, media and content and the relationship between them, will be our subject next week, when we read Marshall McCluhan, The Medium is the Massage. Stay tuned.

August 26, 2011

Digital Humanities Seminar Discussion–What is Scholarship?

The first class meeting of our digital humanities seminar at the University of Nebraska on Thursday, August 25th, included thirteen Ph.D. and Master’s students from English, History, and Geography. Although half of the students had taken several of our Digital History courses or worked on digital projects at CDRH, half were either new to Nebraska or new to Digital Humanities. I was struck by the diversity of backgrounds and research interests in the class–we had students working on Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, William F. Cody, early modern English texts, Civil War diaries, Native American documents, 20th century Russia, and the Burlington Railroad. This seminar, we decided, would be truly interdisciplinary in its approach, bringing together students working from different perspectives, backgrounds, and disciplinary approaches. And the common ground would be the digital medium, the methods of digital humanities, the quest to explore the changing terrain of scholarly communication and knowledge creation.

As we went around the room and introduced ourselves, it was clear too that some of us maintained a healthy skepticism about the technology. One student explained that she wanted to see what digital humanities had to offer beyond tools to conduct research. She wanted to understand how digital humanities might “develop research” for her work, not just make it faster or easier. She was “still trying to see the value” of the digital humanities, especially its theoretical contribution.

The reading this week focused on Christine Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. But before we discussed Borgman’s book, the class took some time to discuss the iPad/iPhone class project challenge. Not surprisingly, there were numerous questions. The syllabus asked students to do the following:

“The Challenge: As a team the class will design, program, and prototype an iPad/iPhone app (IOS 5) to advance the field of digital humanities for 4Humanities–i.e. suggestions from 4Humanities scholars

–to digest “daily all news articles related to humanities and digital humanities from state and local sources in an easily accessible and manipulable way”
–to create “infrastructure (tools, apps, platforms, etc.) for allowing humanists to bring their work more naturally to the attention of the public. As an example, . . . an idea for mashing up such tools as Open Journal Systems, Omeka, the Simile widgets, etc., to create effective exhibition platforms or feeds.”
–to create a tool for accessing, perhaps mobile-aware, “harvesting, packaging, and channeling a ‘showcase’ or ‘gallery’ of public-oriented humanities research and teaching.”
–to imagine and execute a program to showcase “what might be done to promote the value of the humanities in K-12. In particular, . . . having students go into schools and present or partner wit h students . . . figure out what a fun humanities fair might look like, modeled on science fairs.”

The Resources: University wide campus resources, including CDRH, New Media Center, Computing Innovation Group, Renaissance Computing Initiative, and global network of Digital Humanities scholars . . .

The Deadline: One month.”

The wheels started turning right away. One student had already assessed Apple’s developer site and asked about the cost of the iOS 5 SDK beta kit and membership. I agreed to pay the $99 fee . . . ask and ye shall receive. Others began assessing what benchmarks the class should have by the next week. And we started talking about what is needed in the field and what would be useful for Digital Humanities. Several students began to sketch out concepts aimed at particular audiences, such as K-6 students or college-level students. Then, the conversation shifted to what would kind of App would be useful–should we select content and build it into a demonstration of digital humanities for students? If so, what should we say about the subject and what subjects would we want to include? Perhaps unsurprisingly, a class of humanities students was talking immediately about creating “content.” And yet, they quickly concluded that we needed to do the opposite for this project. Not build content but harvest or collect. Create a tool to see digital humanities content differently or arrange it more usefully. This short session of planning, dreaming, and sketching was not only thrilling, it was chock full of the very questions we would discuss in Borgman’s book.

At each point my response was to ask the students what they thought the decision points needed to be for this project, what needed to happen when, and where they thought they needed to go for further information. Stay tuned next week for the students first “benchmarks.” I will post them on this blog with comments on why they did what they did.

The discussion of Borgman’s book centered on “what is scholarship”? And this was exceedingly useful in light of our preceding, freewheeling thoughts about an iPad App. Borgman usefully defines all sorts of terms for students: “open access” (p. 102), “e-Science” and “big science” (p. 29-30), and “peer review” (p. 60). She calls attention to scholarly practice, in particularly perceptive ways. Her discussion of “authors” and the decisions they make and do not make reveals the complexity of what she calls “the social aspects of the system.” Indeed, Borgman never loses sight of the ways that the scholarly communication infrastructure, or cyberinfrastructure, is both socially and technologically constructed. Our students found this particularly striking and illuminating–to consider the process of scholarly production and communication as fully interrelated with its infrastructures, in effect to see it whole. Although many humanities scholars might wince, Borgman notes that “gathering and generating data is often the simplest part of the research process.” (p. 128) The problem, she points out, is how to document their use for others, a considerably more difficult task for scholars.

I think students appreciated her perspective. They know that the tools for documenting their work are more robust than any previous generation has possessed. They also know that there are terrible gaps in the structures of these technologies and scholarly practice, ones that run to the very foundations of their research enterprises and career trajectories. Daily, they skip over these gaps, looking straight ahead, knowing that if they glance down into the chasm they might wobble and lose their confidence. We all do, in fact. They also know, therefore, that Borgman is right to draw our attention to the ways our technologies and our practices produce discontinuities and, we might say, broken links. They know too that we need to work on what she calls “the devil . . . in the details.” (p. 262) One student summarized, “Scholars need to pay attention to infrastructure NOW.”

Interestingly, these students saw scholarship far more broadly in definition than it has been traditionally understood in the humanities. They saw a wide range of scholarly activities in building the infrastructure and systems to document their work, to link it to others, and to interpret their materials. Knowing as one student put it that “publication is the coin of the realm,” they wondered after reading Borgman if the humanities would ever “value infrastructure.” This was what seemed to concern them most: how can we value different understandings of scholarship?