ThE final frontIer

Stay with me, I promise I'll make it relevant (Source)

TEI is one of those things you really want to get behind, an ideal that makes sense in every way: let's make a system of text encoding that everyone can use and share so that we can all engage with each other's work.

In some ways this seems only natural: academia has standardized almost all (if not all) methods of scholarly communication in different disciplines, whether it be the chemical formulas of scientists or the Modern Language Association's guidelines for writing essays. 

The weird (but, perhaps, predictable) thing about TEI is that it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries much in the same way DH does. This is problematic. TEI is a good starting point but if it acts as the standard for all textual encoding it threatens to be far too complex. As Barbara mentioned and we have seen in our other classes, the more versatile and flexible a system is, the more complicated it has to be and, therefore, the harder it is to understand. TEI is performing its task for multiple disciplines, many of which have had their own standards of academic work for over a century. Take The Chicago Manual of Style: the University of Chicago Press needed a system to deal with the scientific and humanist texts it was publishing.

But this was for academic work specifically. So, although this prescriptive manual of academic communication strictly forbid the use of split infinitives  until 1983, it was fine for the U.S.S. Enterprise 'To Boldly Go' because it wasn't operating under the rigours of the academic discipline (It was surprisingly difficult to work that Trek reference in).

What's my point? The Digital Humanities has been declared as a place where scholarship flirts with entertainment. If that's the case, we need to be careful about how we structure our work, including our encoding, so as to incorporate this new aspect of our work.

So what's the best way to go about this? 

I would argue for sub-classes of the TEI for scholars in similar fields. In fact, some groups working on specific material have already made their own sub-standards based on TEI. This is great, but, as with all things on the internet, we need the discipline to know when too much is enough. If everybody creates their own sub-standards the whole point of a standard is lost. Still, I love that this process allows the 'builders' to develop the systems of notation. If digital humanists can take advantage of the solid foundation TEI has laid down and communicate among different sub-classes about how to adapt, which seems to be the case already, the collaborative ideals so integral to DH can be used to best effect while a structure conducive to academia can be maintained.

To Caunterbury They Wende,

Photo courtesy of Google Street View

We've been trying to define Digital Humanities to no real avail, and our conversation on methodologies carried a similar inconclusive feel this week. So I thought we could try something different. Willard McCarty explores how one might define 'modeling' in the assigned reading from this week but, perhaps even more importantly, he poses a reason for doing so that may just as well be applied to that futile quest for a firm definition of the nebulous term, DH:

Why do we need an answer to this question? Because, I have argued, ours is an experimental practice, using equipment and instantiating definite methods, for the skilled application of which we need to know what we are doing as well as it can be known.

This week, I'm going to describe a scenario of sorts and posit a few questions, one being "who's in and who's out?"

So:

Two PhDs walk into a bar (that's too much like a bad joke I heard)

A Classical numismatist and a scholar of Renaissance literature walk into a bar.

More precisely, they walk into the Unicorn Inn in Canterbury (best Kentish bar billiards in town, possibly the only Kentish bar billiards in town, come to think of it) and sit down with 9 students. You see, they are a group of study abroad students participating in a course that has them acting as a research team. Before they had embarked for England they transcribed a hand-written Renaissance coin-catalogue into a database using TEI tagging. Their primary task while in England is the identification and subsequent data entry of coins that were part of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosity. This coin catalogue is stored in a database associated with a particular collector. That database is part of a larger project aimed at exploring the 17th-century 'culture of curiosity' by creating "a database of artifacts and natural specimens as represented by surviving records of early modern collections, museum databases, contemporary drawings and engravings, as well as images of extant remnants of these collections." 

So, what’s the deal? Is this a DH project? It has so many of the markers we’ve been associating with DH: interdisciplinarity, project work, digital tools, etc.

More interesting to me: Are these digital humanists? We talk about digital humanism being a state of being, but that’s pretty hard to determine from the outside looking in, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s a good thing, a guard against some (but by no means all) of the exclusivity that we've been talking about.

Does it have to be conscious? Quick note, I was one of those students studying abroad (if that wasn’t fairly obvious before). Am I a digital humanist even if I don’t think of myself as one? What if somebody is in denial and refuses to be defined as such out of principle, even if he or she is engaged in all the kinds of things DH is about.

The uncertainty of all this scares me, especially since academia is already plagued with impostor syndrome (check out this one too)

I think the potential danger in this exercise of defining DH or digital humanists is that it forces us to create division even among projects. In the strictest sense, we could end up limiting the title to only those people who lead projects, those who engage with the material at a structural and theoretical level.

On the other hand, I don't think we should relegate digital humanism to something one catches without knowing about it while studying abroad in England either. Nor is it something one should easily lose, it isn't a very useful term that way.

What do you all think? Is it a valuable point to discuss? Or is it just as futile an exercise as the other definitions we’ve been seeking?

(Another) Blog for the Digital Humanities!! [Intro to DH]

   Welcome to Cid's Directive, a blog with a name inspired by the iconic characters that have been an integral part of the Final Fantasy canon since 1988. Cid is a staple character of the series but appears in diverse incarnations that include different species, characters of diverse race, and finally, as of the release of Final Fantasy XV, a female character (though her character model is problematic at best and she is the daughter of another, male Cid in the game). 
    Every incarnation of Cid is representative of humankind's relationship to technology in that world and acts as a mechanic, scientist, or inventor that (with the exception of two FF games where Cid plays the villain) champions technology as a way for humankind to reach new heights. Indeed, many Cids are obsessed with the dream of flight or even space travel and realize that dream through the course of their respective games (for an exploration of Cid's character and the power of this metaphor in Final Fantasy, see here). Cid incarnations are frequently at odds with characters of authority in the Final Fantasy universes and provide a moral and ethical point of view concerning the use of technology to benefit human beings. Even in those rare games where Cids act as villains, they are narrative devices employed to help us better understand the nature of the relationship between humans and technology.  Thus the title of this blog: Cid's Directive is about exploring the relationship between 'technology' and the 'humanities,' and how technology can be used to further the goals of the 'humanities'  in general.

    This blog has been created to facilitate engagement with the discourse taking place in KU Leuven's Introduction to Digital Humanities course. As such, these posts represent a developing perception of the Digital Humanities. My conclusions in posts made at the end of the course may be (and indeed, I hope will be) radically different from the comparatively undeveloped understanding of DH that I am posting now.

    I want to talk about something we didn’t get to in class, namely the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 from UCLA and, to a lesser extent, Digital Humanities Manifestos more broadly. More specifically, I want to talk about the complications of hailing in an age of neo- or post-print with a work that is, more or less, a print document on the web with limited hypertext. Finally, I wish to explore the notion of entertainment and scholarship, the possible dangers of such a proposal, and my own biases towards print that I hope to work through a little more thoroughly over the course of the class.

    I understand that media such as audio and video are just as conducive to the communication and interpretation of ideas. I am just not sure about some of these more complex forms. Clearly, data visualizations such as GIS mapping and text plots can reveal patterns that would take a lifetime to uncover in text. I am also aware that nobody is saying that we should only read books as text plots from now on.

 
    My primary concern is with the expression of analysis. If we are truly moving into a neo or post-print age, what medium do we use to communicate the ideas retrieved from these methods of analysing a text? If, for example, scholarship  is presented in the form of a game that requires a certain level of interpretation and ‘decoding,’ is it an effective medium through which to express scholarship? Are some media inherently more practical for the communication and interpretation of ideas than others? My instinct tells me no, but my mind still needs to work out some of the biases I carry with me. Part of the issue is negotiated in part 9 of UCLA's DH Manifesto 2.0:

        Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which: a) print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences. 

Perhaps the problem is that print has been the normalized standard for centuries. I have to keep reminding myself that I have been trained to decode the normative medium of print from infancy. Perhaps the next generation will be able to critically read data visualizations and games as easily as I can read a paragraph.
    
    Video games and other digital media such as interactive fiction have already been deployed as teaching tools and a legitimate way of treating mental health issues, so why not use it as a means of expressing scholarship? We have only relatively recently accepted games and interactive fiction as content worth critically engaging with and it will take longer still to accept such media as a legitimate way to communicate scholarship on par with print.
methodology. 
    
    When you change media you necessarily change the way information is encoded. This is clear in simple examples: whether considering a description of the Sistine Chapel or a virtual representation of Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, either of these things will require a different approach to decoding information stored in them than the artifacts they are based on because they  exist in different media than the originals. A traditional print-based description of the Sistine chapel will be linear and that linearity will force the writer to prioritize certain features of the chapel. A representation of Borges's concept within his short story will lose the linearity in which it is originally presented.  The change in medium promotes a change in methodology because the information is encoded differently. A change in methodology invariably leads to new research questions and, more often than not, a fuller understanding of a subject.

    Some might argue that print has advantages over other forms of media to communicate scholarship. In some cases, print can be the best way to express a concept. But it is overused because it has become normative. Some might argue that there are media that should not be connected to scholarship, forms that should be expressly saved for entertainment or art. On this point I wholeheartedly disagree:

Any medium can communicate scholarship.

Any medium can communicate art.

The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 is navigating dangerous waters when they state "Digital Humanities... gladly flirts with the scandal of entertainment as scholarship, scholarship as entertainment."

It is imperative that we be careful of the notion of scholarship as entertainment. This is not to state that scholarship cannot be entertaining, however, scholarship has as its core concern the clear communication of academic analysis. 
    
    Finally, for all the content within the DH Manifesto 2.0, even the pdf version, its authors use their neo-print age tools to little effect beyond snarky images and scarce hyperlinks of contemporary news. Their point might be taken more effectively if they had included substantial portions of their argument in any of the media that they purport to be defending.

These are my opening thoughts on DH, I hope to explore these ideas as the course continues. Feel free to comment!