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?
Here's a post that takes up some of the problems you've discussed:
ReplyDeletehttp://teachingthursday.org/2011/01/27/on-becoming-a-digital-humanist/
I'm wondering about "building" as a conversation that is happening in DH, as a connection to the STEM fields you've brought up here, and as a way of defining our own goals if we are now digital humanists. After reading Nowviskie's humbling post on "the eternal September" of DH, I've tried to be quiet about calling myself such a thing:
http://nowviskie.org/2010/eternal-september-of-the-digital-humanities/
Then again, it's ok to be new to something. I do wonder whether the STEM trend is working to emphasize the building more than the interpreting aspects of DH.
"Have we become Digital Humanists?" I think it’s ok to call yourself a digital humanists when you’re ready. Who gets to decide the titles? It’s sort of like calling yourself a poet—what are the official external recognitions that make you a “real” poet. I suspect many people feel like a fraud in some respects in their own field. The issue of “building” has been on my mind this quarter too. Do we need to be fluent in code to do DH? I really thought yes you need to know how to code and build in order to be “real” but the article Rachel posted above (On Becoming a Digital Humanist) has completely changed by mind, thank you Rachel! Caraher points out that we can do literary theory without being expected to write a novel or a poem, and novelists and poets are not expected to be practicing literary critics. An eye opener for me.
ReplyDeleteHmmm... I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by the analogy between knowing how to write code and knowing how to write a poem or novel. What does a literary critic *not* need to know about the writing of poetry in order to analyze a poem? They may not need to know the various idiosyncratic tricks the poet uses to stimulate their creativity, but surely the critic needs to be able to point to the "basics" of poetic language--alliteration, meter, etc. Doesn't the critic of digital texts need the ability to speak to code in the same way, at least in a general sense? They may not need to be able to *design* a program, but shouldn't they be able to look at a program after the fact and describe the ways in which particular parts of code build toward a larger entity?
ReplyDelete