Week Ten!: Distant Reading

In “Conjectures on World Literature”, Franco Moretti advocates “distant reading” which is the analysis of literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data. The analysis uses a computer to quantify text in order to see trends on a global scale that are not visible through close reading enabling scholars to trace global sweeps of forms and influences in literature.  For Moretti, distance “is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devises, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. “  The Conjunctures article spawned many conversations and counter arguments, some of which were addressed by Moretti in “More Conjectures”.

As mentioned in class, Paige Morgan’s Visible Prices project appears to be “distant reading” in action. “Visible Prices (VP) is a searchable database of literary and historical economic information compiled from novels, poetry, newspaper advertisements, ledgers, trade periodicals, and other literary or historical records. It’s designed to take advantage of the massive influx of historical material coming onto the web, and make it more useful. If you’re reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and you see that Jane is offered £30 annually as salary to become Adele’s governess, the sum of £30 is basically meaningless. But what if you could search, and find out everything else from around 1847 that cost £30? This type of search would also allow you to start seeing how literary authors were using prices in their works — whether novels, poems, or plays.”

While looking for an illustration for this post I found many literature and intro to DH syllabi with “distant reading” projects built into the curriculum using tools such as Voyant Tools, which displays results through text and displays statistical information for a text  and  ManyEyes, which provides numerous visualization options to best highlight the important trends in a work.  I was thinking of “distant reading” as a new concept but since its inception in 2000, has “distant reading” become part of the standard literature pedagogy? I’m wondering if you have used it in your own studies or are currently introducing undergraduates to the practice—or is it still considered a theory without practical tools?

Visualizing video game data

Today's discussion reminded me of this visualization that brings together a couple different elements from the course: Huber and Manovich's visualization of a Kingdom Hearts "playthrough": http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/4038975476/in/set-72157624959121129/

Multimodal Scholarship: Blogging, Pedagogy...

...and-so-on, etc.

It's my turn to engender discussion.

From our post-hypertext vantage points (which position we've decorously earned having traversed the vast regions of post-print data-dump poetry, ludology, fanfic, digital archives -- oh, and not to forget Angry Birds), I wonder if we feel like we've already been there when it comes to LFYT.  YouTube is a mess?  Absolutely.  User-produced content/ratings and view counts facilitates convergence?  Of course: it was only a matter of time (speaking of which, we shouldn't forget niconico dōga).  Comparatively speaking, as a database it doesn't come to close to more heavily "curated" sites like WWP and Project Gutenberg (nor, if you're interested, Aozora bunko; check out the English-language Wikipedia page here); although, a YouTube plunge certainly feels like Caren Kaplan's Precision Targets, and it certainly brings one into the sort of corporate synergy that we saw at thisibelieve.org and poets.org.  Ultimately, following a link at the latter to Amazon.com breeds no less irony than watching a Fox Friends interview with Juhasz about LFYT on YouTube.

If we hadn't yet thought of ourselves so, I suppose we should now pose the question: have we become Digital Humanists? Maybe it could be argued that one's fate was sealed with Duck Hunt (or, duly replace with alternative canonical game), but whatever the case the issue no longer seems to me to lie with "Yes/No" but somewhere between "Yes, I have a Blogger account" and "Yes, I'm fluent in TEI, I write fanfic, and my next course will feature a Vectors-funded online project."  Reading Hartley's article (among others we've read together), I understand the urgency implicit in such a response as the manic latter to stem from a perceived need to prove one's academic mettle through pedagogy.  This pressure is no doubt felt in the sciences -- I dare you to read Thomas Friedman's latest editorial in the latest NYT Sunday Review (BTW: I'd be remiss not to mention here the latest front-page email scandal and the article announcing Machinima's freakish success with young, web-savvy male consumers) -- and, as in the sciences, implies Hartley, so marches the humanities: "For good or ill, the representation of the human condition migrated decisively from art to science, even as knowledge itself was re-embodied and audiovisualized."  What do we think?  Is Friedman right, for example, to expect academics to fall into step with 21st-century nation-building lest they relinquish, in Fitzpatrick's words, the "prestige and power" that are (supposedly) the trappings of academia in the West?

Perhaps a secondary issue is the perceived Humanities/Science antithesis.  McPherson calls for "a deep engagement with databases and algorithms" -- and in doing so she resonates, seemingly, with many of our readings this quarter that have evoked just such a marriage of math, code and culture.  Is Hartley's "Culture Science" our panacea?  Will it convince UW computer science students to collaborate with us newly-minted Digital Humanists?

Arcade Fire's "The Wilderness Downtown" Project

Incorporating HTML5 (with the aid of Google Labs), the Canadian indie-rock band, The Arcade Fire, released this short interactive "film" ahead of their 2010 album.  When you enter your (childhood) address into the search bar on the main page, you're treated to a music video that uses your childhood home to illustrate the track's nostalgia and sense of loss/change.  Listeners were encouraged to submit letters to their youthful selves and those heartfelt postcards were sent across the country in addition to being incorporated in the band's live show via video projection.

I highly encourage all of you to check out the site/film for yourself.  I was just exploring the Walt Whitman archive which, for whatever reason, called to mind this project and I knew I had to share it right away.

High standards and vast opportunities

The readings this week express a tension in the academic community between a traditional commitment to high standards in editorial practice and an acknowledgement of the unprecedented diversity of opportunities provided by the digital landscape. McGann describes the web as a “petrie dish for humanities sites” and reminds us that by comparison, “scholars commit themselves to developing and maintaining rigorous standards for critical procedures and critical outcomes.” Flanders echoes this hierarchizing sentiment when she situates the WWP “among a group of digital anthologies that have adopted the most rigorous practices.” Yet, McGann argues that “texts remain, in the last analysis, ambiguous,” and Flanders concludes with an argument for “capturing editorial decisions not as finalities but as contingencies, with important effects.” Fraistat and Jones are interested in the potential for “interactions between the poem and the network,” and envision “potentially infinite expansion of the traditional editorial apparatus.” But Rosenberg holds back; perhaps the most clearly articulated statement on this tension is found in the protective tone of his introduction:

The most important point to be made about any digital documentary edition is that the editors' fundamental intellectual work is unchanged. Editors must devote the profession's characteristic, meticulous attention to selection, transcription, and annotation if the resulting electronic publication is to deserve the respect given to modern microfilm and print publications. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that a digital edition presents opportunities well beyond the possibilities of film and paper.

Do you share Rosenberg’s metrics for “respect” in your scholarly and/or online reading and research practices? Do you find the arguments for shared, rigorous editing practices to be persuasive? Do you find the web exciting in its haphazard connections and sprawl and/or did you feel at home in this discourse of critical procedures and critical outcomes? Finally, what were your observations on the digital projects we viewed?

Does the post-apocalyptic blogosphere = reddit? oh god...

I am 85% sure that this is my blogging week...so here we go! First off, I hope Angry Birds is going really well for everyone.  I, for one, repeatedly threw my phone into my pillow in frustration last night but I like to think that means I was just having a really great time.

Like Robert last week, I've been almost entirely incapacitated this weekend due to flu so I hope this post makes a certain kind of sense.

Wanted to link you all to a fine piece over at Salon re: Wikipedia and the burgeoning practice of paid content.  The piece starts out with some high praise for Wikipedia and its inception as a kind of "utopian ideal" of open/crowd-sourced knowledge for all.  Anyone who grew up with Wikipedia probably has a more complex relationship with it than that--as the citation of last resort or as a site more valuable for its footnotes than its actual content.

Regardless, Salon seems to think that the commercialization of Wikipedia will lead to certain doom indicative of Web 2.0 as a whole--that this entire internet project of open source knowledge production is in jeopardy. I tend to be more critical of that assessment of the situation, particularly in light of the subjects the article highlights: paid editors who publicly acknowledge their status as such.

However, the piece gets at a problem discussed in Henry Jenkins' "Cultural Logic of Media Convergence" piece from last week.  Namely, how will the web change if its economy transitions from a gift economy to a commercial economy mirroring our IRL economics; furthermore, if that transition has already largely occurred, what (if any) are consumer alternatives? 

Will we, the consumers, suffer from "higher barriers of entry to the cultural marketplace" or will another system rise up to replace it?  What will web 3.0 look like and are we gradually getting further and further away from some initial, lawless cyberspace utopia or is that just cynicism typical of an aging first-generation of web users??  Do we really want Reddit to be the arbiters of consumption on the internet or will we retreat to a familiar economy of regulation that we understand?