Big-Tent Digital Humanities

Big -tent Digital Humanities.

Opening line sums up a lot of the problem. People don’t know a lot about it. 

“The academic tendency to value individuality over team work”, this is not just an academic tendency but something much farther reaching. Has any collective endeavour been truly equally rewarded. Every team has its leading figures that generally reap a greater percentage credit or financial reward.

The next paragraph talks about the increasing transformation of higher education into a system of casual labour off the tenure track, continues to make it much harder for young scholars to get established, but is this not a system that fits better with the idea of collaboration or does the human spirit really ever welcome the idea of equality without the prospect of climbing the hierarchical ladder.

The old order is changing in terms of tenure and promotion. In the ever increasing layers of ever more qualified graduates , postgraduates and PhD’s,  itself a product of a self perpetuating education system, the retirement  or attrition rate fall s vastly short of  the qualified, or over-qualified but unemployed  next generation of professors  knocking on the doors of academia.  

There is interesting discussion about how DH is changing the nature of education, where the work being undertaken in faculty-student collaboration towards projects are not just going to be graded and forgotten but can lead to something much more meaningful. This is again to be applauded but how will these collaborations can be graded and how those grades are are going to fare in a very competitive employment market.

“Alternative academics” those who stay –“often as second class citizens” may have an upside to their somewhat tenuous status in higher education “is that many of the rules of professional advancement no longer apply”. I guess this can be liberating, to a point, though I’m sure not without a measure of resentment towards the creators of the system.

The system that exists where there are vast numbers of highly qualified graduates but very few opportunities except short term, part time and fragmentary positions. This is again a fault with a system that benefits from a workforce expected produce more and work longer than their tenured colleagues in order to stand any chance of advancement.

In the final sentence “we need to find new ways to be humanists, while recognising that alternative academic careers must coincide with substantial resistance  to the deprofessionalization  and adjunctification  or the humanities” Surely this is the nub of the problem. How in a culture, or maybe a species that values hierarchical structures as something to aspire to, in order to feel successful, do we  create the seismic shift  necessary to avoid this impression of deprofessionalization  and lowering of standards?

Continuing with the Alan Liu article I find the passage at the end of his introduction to the various sub headings very interesting. He is basically saying the digital humanities are not yet ready to fully respond to the various demands being made of it. He sites a "lack of adequate critical awareness of  the larger social, economic and cultural issues at stake", On one side of the field descending from humanities computing, a lack of "almost all cultural-critical awareness" whilst on the side descending from new media studies are "indiscriminately critical of society and global information 'empire' without sufficient focus on specifically institutional, higher education issues at stake".This amounts to a lack of protection against "postindustrial takeovers of the digital idea along the lines of fantasied 'eleventh campuses that merge educational, social and for-profit motives without weighing the need for the evolution of differences, and not just similarities between higher education and other stakeholder institutions in today's knowledge economy". Maybe a lot of the issues stem from the fact that the terms of reference of digital humanities are so broad and lacking definition. As  in every emerging field positions are polarised. I refer to the passage from 'a report on the state of the digital humanities', where Liu talks about text encoding and code work(p14) , code being increasingly linked to the ideas of technology and media.Thus  for example, digital humanists and new media scholars have begun conceptualising protocols and databases as fused constructs of encoded information, technology and media". This is somewhat offset against Lev Manovich's declaration that the two are "natural enemies".

The description of early shortcomings of digital humanities in 'Integration with the past' (p15) describes scholars as "historically schizophrenic operating "Presentist issues or practises of technology-media-information from the mid-twentieth century onwards" whilst focusing on "historical objects of study to which the new technological ,media and informational approaches were applied".This is highlighted in the example of the 3D interactive overlay of Dante Gabriel Rossettti's studio. It would appear that the effect was to draw the attention away from the intent of the exhibit and to focus attention on the cutting edge technology. This is an example I can readily relate to. I have been to several museums where the power of the material on view has been so compromised in an attempt to make it interactive. This trend seems to be applied to exhibits indiscriminately at museums and galleries where curater's seem incapable balancing the need to use technology with the strength of the material on display. Too often the exhibit is dumbed down to facilitate interactive technology.

In 'Rejoining the social' (p17) I particularly like the passage describing "Generations of literary scholars following the lead of the New Critics in de-emphasizing the communicative function of discourse. This was the price that had to be paid to stand up to what the New Critics saw as the hegemony of referential meaning in the age of science (and secondarily, of mass media)". The idea the a poem has something to say that could somehow be formulated into some kind of "science like proposition"And yet these critics are influencing generations of literary scholars and turning attention to "linguistic structures so ambiguous or 'paradoxical' that they were not communicative". This suggests to me the constant 'rejection of what has gone before',  in order to promote or and defend ones own position. Throughout history new ideas have been rejected by the established view while the establishment must be rejected in order to justify the new.
In the final part 'A critique of the digital humanities' I am drawn to the passage dealing with "data aesthetics. Liu suggests that there is much work to do in the "attention to the aesthetic and affective experience of processing and harvesting data". Again "One has only to view any typical data visualisation from the text-oriented side of the digital humanities, to recognise the near -total imaginative poverty of the field in crafting an aesthetics of data.
So it seems there are very significant challenges ahead. There are a so many facets to this field of study, and a lot of this document that I don't have enough understand of at this time, to feel able to make more in depth comment on. So I will close here and go back and re read the paper.

Response to Alan Liu article

I have been struggling with the Alan Liu piece for a few days now, trying to get to grips with the essence of the article. It is in depth and quite wide ranging. I will attempt to pick out a number of points he makes and respond to them. I am only beginning to get my head around the various parameters of what constitutes the digital humanities. He initially talks about how this field is overlapping older more established fields like "Humanities computing an d new media studies" and quotes William Pannapacker describing digital humanities as "the next big thing". This is followed with a description of how this "new brand " is being marketed to particularly "higher education rather than is customers,the students," and with emphasis on perceptions of "cool". This notion of cool, is repeated again a few lines later when discussing the distribution of ipads and other digital devices by universities as a means of promoting knowledge as "cool". I find this interesting as it seems that in true marketing fashion the image is all important, even before the substance is defined. He outlines how the perceptions of the role of "digital delivery" shifts with economic downturn and how this becomes an "allegory of needs beyond desire", referenced in the example of the University of California and the "Virtual "eleventh campus". For me this highlights a major problem with not just this particular technology but with any major leaps in technological advancement, and that is its aims and purposes can so easily be re channelled and subverted to perform a different set of objectives. I firmly believe a university to be about much more than knowledge, or at least more about how knowledge is delivered and received and from whom. A face to face discussion  or chat over coffee is in a group is every bit as valid as a learning or sharing tool as any lecture or on line tutorial. The links between industry and education seems to be pushing towards far greater control by industry,  with Bill Gates quoted as calling traditional facilities "obsolete place-based campuses". Maybe in purely economic terms this is understandable but human interaction can not or should not ever be measured in this way. I guess my general take on all technology is that its brilliant when used to enrich and expand our potential for understanding  ourselves and the world around us but to be resisted when used to isolate or marginalise us as humans. Just as an aside, I rushed back to limerick last night after a day session on research methodology as we had tickets for the Russian ballet,Swan Lake at UL concert hall. Wouldn't be a huge follower of ballet but this doesn't come around too often. The 8, or so, year old boy sitting, or rather hopping about beside me, played a computer game on his phone throughout the entire performance, glancing up every now and then to report his score or receive some commentary on what he was missing from his mother. Maybe this particular piece of technology was enriching his life though I  have doubts, but it sure as hell wasn't enriching mine!To be continued shortly.

MADAH response to first week discussion

Ok so this is my first attempt a a blog type communication.As a group we were asked to formulate our thoughts on the first weeks reading and subsequent discussion. I found the discussion on the humanities manifesto piece interesting as there were several elements to this that were totally new to me. For example I did not know who Shepard Fairey was and therefore did not get the refference. It was good to hear from someone (Olivia I think) who did. Even though a lot of people, myself included, had issues with this piece, I have since looked at it again and do find it informative in its aspirations and definitions. I did take issue with its somewhat eliteist terminology aimed at higher accademia whilst preaching of a very socialist ethos.It talks of various pathways although with the ever increasing accademic standards of applicants for all levels of employment, especially in education and research it is nigh on impossible for anyone without a masters degree to even get an interview for most positions.
The article on Hastac also I laerned a great deal from, not least what Hastac is.This article did not generate a lot of discussion but time was short. Again I was struck by the collaborative tone of the ethos and thinking behind this organisation, and will follow a number of threads mentioned.
The Cronicle piece resonates with me as I feel it is important to develop an idea for any visual piece of work through the process of try and try again. I dont consider any stage of the process a failure it is simply a step along the way towards a conclusion. Then we got on to blogs and tweets. This caused me to evaluate the processes in far greater detail than I have done to date. Some of the points raised I had no problem aggreeing with and seeing the potential for communication and developing thought process. I do however have some issues with Mike's analogy of a present day blog being equivalent to the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci's sketch books/note books. Ì feel there is a definate distinction between the way an artist uses a sketch book and the way anyone uses a blog. Firstly an artist sketch book is produced first and foremost for their own reflection, and idea development. It is not generally for anybody elses benefit. It is a place where ideas develop over time as the process of critical analysis and reflection is engaged in by the artist. It doesn't look for outside opinion or comment untill the work has developed to a point where the ideas have substance.
A blog to my mind at least is quite different. It is composed to communicate with the wider community even if that is quite a limited community. Because it is aimed at an audience it has a different voice and a different intent. It is communicating something to someone out side of yourself.
In many areas of the arts I feel the process of independent reflection of ideas through shetch/note books is essential. Outside voices responding to this stream of thoughts may only serve to dilute and certainly alter the eventual outcome. When we use a figure an universally recognised as Da Vinci I think it raises other issues too. We only have the evidence of the work Da Vinci and many other masters of their arts produced in sketch books because they were produced on a material that is able to stand the test of time. Hundreds of years in fact. And we are able to marvel at the specific strokes laid down by their unique hand. I dont feel that yet applies to anything produced via digital media. The modes of recording change that fast that everything has to be constantly re formatted. Only 10 years ago floppy discs were a common means of storeing data, today you can't even get a computer to read one. In 100 years how much of todays data will still exist? Leonardos sketch books will.