Category: Post

Bethany Nowviskie has written a post outlining the history of the familiar digital humanities phrase, “more hack; less yack.” She provides essential context behind the much-debated term:

In other words, isn’t “more hack; less yack” really just a strawman? I only find it being used in earnest beyond the academic DH community—and, when pressed, even critics who continue to offer it up for ridicule are becoming more quick to modulate, clarify, and step away. Maybe it’s satire, now. In my view, to pretend or believe that “more hack; less yack” represents a fundamental opposition in thinking between humanities theorists and deliberately anti-theoretical DH “builders” is to ignore the specific history and different resonances of the phrase, and to fall into precisely the sort of zero-sum logic it seems to imply.  Humanities disciplines and methods themselves are not either/or affairs. The humanities is both/and. We require fewer slogans – and more talk and grok, hack and yack.

Johanna Drucker has written an article for the Los Angles Review of Books discussing the misconception that digital technology will “cure” academic publishing:

To make sure humanities scholarship thrives, it is crucial that we cut through the fog of pixel dust–induced illusion to the practical realities of what digital technology offers to scholarship. Among the prevailing misconceptions about digital production of any kind is that it is cheap, permanent yet somehow immaterial, and that it is done by “machines” — that is, with little human labor.

Drucker asserts that “hard, serious, life-long dedication to scholarship, the actual professional work of experts in a field, will remain at the center of knowledge production” and that “we can’t design ourselves out of the responsibility for supporting the humanities, or for making clear the importance of their forms of knowledge to our evolving culture.”

Ashley Maynard has written an introduction to digital humanities for librarians. The post is part of a series published for Hack Library School’s Digital Humanities Week. Reflecting on her new role as Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Tennessee Libraries, Maynard offers suggestions and resources for getting started in digital humanities.  Maynard also remarks what many of us feel working on digital humanities initiatives in libraries:

Because Digital Humanities is an evolving field, I’m expected to adapt work practices to changes occurring in the discipline. That means, ultimately, my job is about adaption, flexibility, and staying on top of new ideas, technology, and trends. In other words, I am paid to be a nerd—it doesn’t get any cooler than that.

John Drabinski has written a post reflecting on memory, property, and digitized materials responding to Readex’s announcement of the availability of a trove of newly digitized materials documenting slavery and abolition between 1820-1922. While Drabinski is excited about the availability of this material on his desktop, he also raises concerns about the paywall and the politics of ownership around this material, which is in the public domain:

Readex is making something really amazing available. And they are making it a commodity. To ask it plainly: what does it mean to make the archive of African-American history and memory into a commodity, and to put it behind a paywall? That has to be a real question. It has no simple answer, but most tentative and partial answers, I suspect, go to really troubling places.

Chris Bourg (Standford University) writes about the role of the library in the neoliberal university, based on a talk she gave at Duke University on January 14, 2014. Several aspects of neoliberalism are defined, such as “the extension of market logic into previously non-economic realms,” and examples of this mentality in libraries are provided. For instance, it is seen in the emphasis on Return on Investment or in collection development, which has been turned over to the “market by signing on to Patron Driven Acquisitions programs that essentially signal that we trust the free market to build our collections.”

Bourg’s piece, while focused on libraries in general, has ties to other conversations  that address the role of cultural criticism in DH. Concerning libraries, Bourg asks that we “reconceive of our clients as not simply the undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty around us. Let’s start thinking about social justice as our client, or democracy, or an informed citizenry; and then let’s consider how our priorities and way of working might change as a result of that kind of thinking.”

Wendy Hsu (City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs) asks in the final post of a four-part On Digital Ethnography series for Ethnography Matters, “If ethnography is an investigation of how a group of people sense and know their world, then how do we express that while staying true to its structure of epistemology?”

Hsu argues that, depending on what is being studied, the use of multimedia components is essential to understanding the experience of a particular person or group. Among the examples provided is the Hi-Fi Collection, “a place-based multimedia story about Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown” that illustrates how a mapping platform (Hypercities) can be used to provide a richer sense of how Filipino immigrants moved across the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area over time.

Historian Tim Hitchcock has posted the text and images from his recent keynote at the CVCE (Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe) Conference on “Reading Historical Sources in the Digital Age,” which took place on December 5-6 in Luxembourg. The talk, “Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism,” explores the methods and implications of digital history and a big data approach. As Hitchcock summarizes it:

This talk forms a quiet reflection on how the creation of new digital resources has changed the ways in which we read the past; and an attempt to worry at the substantial impact it is having on the project of the humanities and history more broadly. In the process it asks if the collapse of the boundaries between types of data – inherent in the creation of digital simulcra – is not also challenging us to rethink the ‘humanities’ and all the sub-disciplines of which it is comprised. I really just want to ask, if new readings have resulted in new thinking? And if so, whether that new thinking is of the sort we actually want?

Hitchcock looks at what happens to the historical imagination when faced with distant reading, and how those approaches are grounded in the history of bibliographic technology:

In part, I suspect the banal character of most ngrams and network analyses is a reflection of the extent to which books, indexes, and text, have themselves been a very effective technology for thinking about words. And that as long as we are using digital technology to re-examine text, we are going to have a hard time competing with two hundred years of library science, and humanist enquiry. Our questions are still largely determined by the technology of books and library science, so it is little wonder that our answers look like those found through an older technology.

Adeline Koh has posted the text of and slides from her talk at the recent HumLab workshop in Umeå, Sweden (“Sorting the Digital Humanities Out“).  Koh frames the talk as a “provocation” to the field of postcolonial studies: “a discussion of some of the potential opportunities that digital forms of publication offer to postcolonial studies, by studying the possibilities that result from the move from print to digital.”

One of the central concepts within postcolonial studies is to rewrite the colonial library. The colonial library, as V.Y. Mudimbe defines it in The Invention of Africa, is a fixed set of texts and representations that have been used to defined colonized people around the world. Its common tropes include the “evil Arab,” the “inscrutable Oriental”, the “noble savage,” and the “primitive,” among others. The same sentiment is echoed by Edward Said’s notion of “Orientalism,” in which limited, essentialist tropes were used to define immensely diverse groups of people throughout Asia as corrupt, evil and unchanging. Postcolonial theorists have argued that attacking this library is the root of our mission; meaning, in other words, that to changing the hegemonic discourses around race and culture should be one of our core goals.What has not been discussed as often, however, is the idea this colonial library has for centuries existed in print form. The rapidly changing field of digital and Internet publications offer postcolonial writers and scholars fundamentally new challenges and opportunities to rethink some of the modes and strategies of rewriting the colonial library.

Scott Weingart has compiled a collection of statements from digital humanities scholars in an attempt to come to “A Working Definition of Digital Humanities.” Spurred by a conversation on Twitter, Weingart sought out recommendations for courses that an aspiring (undergraduate) digital humanist should take. Responses from Ted Underwood, Johanna Drucker, Melissa Terras, John Walsh, and Matt Jockers are included. Weingart’s original request is reproduced below:

Dear all,

Some of you may have seen this tweet by Paige Morgan this morning, asking about what classes an undergraduate student should take hoping to pursue DH. I’ve emailed you, a random and diverse smattering of highly recognizable names associated with DH, in the hopes of getting a broader answer than we were able to generate through twitter alone.

I know you’re all extremely busy, so please excuse my unsolicited semi-mass email and no worries if you don’t get around to replying.

If you do reply, however, I’d love to get a list of undergraduate courses (traditional humanities or otherwise) that you believe was or would be instrumental to the research you do. My list, for example, would include historical methods, philosophy of science, linear algebra, statistics, programming, and web development. I’ll take the list of lists and write up a short blog post about them, because I believe it would be beneficial for many new students who are interested in pursuing DH in all its guises. I’d also welcome suggestions for other people and “schools of DH” I’m sure to have missed.

Many thanks,
Scott