Yeah. Good afternoon. Thank you all for being
here with us today. We are so excited to
see you. And so excited to see such a
great turnout. Especially so many students here with us
today. Whether you were bribed or threatened, we
don't care. You're here. And that's what matters
. Were happy to see you with us today.
This is one of our digital discussions in the humanities
and social sciences. We're very fortunate to have with
us Dr Brian Croxall of Emory University today
. Let me tell you a little bit about him
after I take care of one quick item of housekeeping
business. And that's if you're faculty and would like
to receive NL. I credit for attending this session
. Just make sure that your, um name in
Virginia Tech P i d. Get on this clipboard
as it comes around and, well, put it
back by the refreshments toward the end, so I'll
start out with Brian. Uh, Brian Crock saw
this digital humanities strategist and lecturer of English at Emory
University. Along with developing and maintaining digital scholarship projects
in the Memory Center for Digital Scholarship, he teaches
courses on digital humanities, media studies and American literature
. He has co edited an issue of neo Victorian
studies on steampunk. He's co editing a book on
the same subject. He's a cluster editor at hashtag
Academy, serves on the executive councils of both the
Modern Language Association and the Association for Computers and the
Humanities. And he's a writer for the group blog
Hacker um, onto some more important information. He
has a collection of 200 board games catalogued on board
game geek dot com. Um, and his Twitter
profile as of this morning had 50,356 tweets. Um
, my one regret about this event is that we
will not have Dr Crocs all available to live,
tweet his own talk because he is the best live
tweeter in the history of the world. If you
ever can't attend a conference, just find out if
he's there, follow his Twitter stream, and it's
as if you were at the conference. So without
further ado, I'll turn the time over to Dr
Crocodile. Let's give him a warm welcome. Okay
, so thanks. Uh, Quinn, Dr.
Warnicke, for that kind introduction A big thank you
to all of you. Um, for coming out
today. Not such a ridiculously cold day. I
was told that Virginia is in the south. I
have yet to see evidence of it. So I'm
glad that you're here. Uh, as you saw
. And as you might have heard, my title
today is, uh is speaking in code. Um
, I thought that seemed this sort of nice,
appropriate title for a place that put the tech in
Virginia. Um, it's also the title of a
workshop that was given last year by my friend colleague
and your neighborhood. You ve Bethany Nowitzki? They
did is speaking a workshop for software developers, and
so they have to give her credit for that sort
of idea. But before we get to the idea
about speaking in code, I want to talk about
speaking about it. So code as a term,
of course, has a lot of different definitions.
If you go to the e. D, where
all English professors want you to start on such things
, um, we find three major definitions. The
first point is two point is the sort of legalistic
definition of the word code. A systematic collection of
statutes here. We might think about the code if
you've taken Western Civ recently. The Code of Hammurabi
, which consists of 282 laws. This document from
Babylon dates back to about 17 54 B. C
E. And is one of the oldest deciphered writings
of any length in the world. It's come down
to us on clay tablets and a massive stone stela
, which is about as tall as I am and
shaped like an index finger. And that's the nail
on the finger right at the head of it.
And it's covered in uniform. Uh, the Babylonian
writing, the code governing behavior, wages and punishments
. Essentially, it made Babylonian society run. That's
what the code that everything ran on the second definition
in the o. E. D. Points to
a broader interpretation of the first. It's a collection
of rules and regulations on any subject, so in
this case, you might think about say something like
an honor code at an institution. If we pick
it at random, like Virginia Tech, that governs
how you do your academic work while you're in school
here, it could also govern, for example,
the rules of boxing. Uh, the Marquess of
Queensberry in the 19th century sort of codified the rules
for boxing that we still use today. So the
difference between an honor code and the rules of boxing
, or perhaps not quite so dissimilar as you might
think that the first is, uh, is a
set of rules to keep your nose clean. And
the second one is a set of rules to make
sure you get it bloodied in as clean away as
possible. Um, so finally, well, the
third definition the O E. D. For the
word code, it's a system of military or naval
signals. So here we finally get to the type
of code that perhaps fascinated you as a child as
much as it did me the secrets that could be
revealed with something you found in your cereal box a
code. In this sense, it's something that's clearly
legible to its intended audience. If I'm sending you
a code, uh, it's presumed that you have
a way to translate that, to figure out what
it means, and it should be completely opaque to
anyone else who is listening in on or attempting to
join that conversation. This is why the military is
interested in this sort of code codes in this sense
carry information, and the importance of its message is
always proportional to its ability to be mis read or
misunderstood by the majority who hear it code is not
supposed to be understood. Otherwise, you would say
it in plain text code is also what for,
uh, the English professors in the room jail.
Austin would have called performative language. Uh, it's
language that does something that leads directly to action code
in this last military sense is normally understood as a
noun. But of course, these days it's used
equally as frequently as a verb, especially in the
context of computer programs. Code is both the thing
that is produced and the action by which that thing
is ultimately produced, and it looks remarkably similar to
uniform, uh, would have been better if I
could have found the pictures from The Matrix where the
code is running sort of vertically. But it was
late last night. I couldn't find them, um
, but code in the way that Babylonian society ran
on the code of Hammurabi. Much of our society
today runs on code. In the background of all
of our devices. The supercomputers that we carry in
our pockets and that allow us to talk to satellites
wherever we are run on code in the same way
that our society does so in our current information age
code is both a noun, and the verb are
sort of highly affected, their sort of really important
subjects. We don't just use the products of the
people who code. We read books about them,
and we watch movies about we. Also, most
of us, I'm going to ask most of us
in the room. Maybe not all of us worry
about our inability to code the lack of facility we
have in this. We wonder whether we need to
learn to code in order to get a job in
order to stay relevant in a particular field. Indeed
, it turns out the only thing that Google thinks
we want to learn more than coding is too tight
. Type this and Google knows I want to learn
to type. And of course, learning the type
is in most cases a prerequisite to being able to
code unless you're using a really arcane system. So
we have, as we're worried about code, something
that the kids today might call fear of missing out
. We're worried, uh, that we are going
to be in trouble if we don't have a code
. This is a sort of reasonable fear. Right
Code is, after all, something that is developed
to do something or communicate something without other people understanding
what you're doing. And so if you don't know
how to code, you're in danger of being left
out of a conversation. And here, at last
, perhaps we get to the digital humanities as a
subject. So for the last five years, and
I'm recognizing that many of you again, our undergrads
who have been compelled to be here, and I
recognize that I'll try and be entertaining. But sadly
, I'm not. You know, I got a
PhD in English literature. There's only so much I
can do. I wore an entertaining coat, so
fixate on that when I get boring, so many
of you probably don't know. But in academic circles
, there has been a sort of tremendous for and
excitement over digital humanities in the last five years.
Now, if you can imagine a bunch of academics
getting excited, it's not actually all that exciting,
but for us, it's been a sort of thing
that we do. Uh, this idea about the
digital humanities. Um, where does this come from
? I've got a few ideas. We'll go through
sort of quickly. We could blame this on academic
journalism. Those of you who read the Chronicle for
those of you again who are undergrads. Remember in
Harry Potter. Who? Right, Who remembers Harry
Potter? Yeah, really? Who remembers Twilight?
Did you guys read? Yeah. Okay, so
in Harry Potter, they've got this newspaper, the
Daily Prophet, right? Yeah, it's the newspaper
of the wizarding world. And then there's all the
Muggle papers. Academia has a daily profit. There's
a There's a newspaper of the academic world and it's
called The Chronicle of Higher Education Again. Not all
that exciting unless you're one of us. Um,
so any case William Panna Packer, who writes for
The Chronicle suggest in the middle of the 2009 ml
a convention, uh, in the Chronicle of higher
education that the digital humanities quote seems like the neck
the first next big thing in a long time.
Uh and then he followed that up a year later
with a post titled Digital Humanities Triumphant So it's important
to show to know that there was a question mark
at the end of that title. He wasn't totally
convinced. Uh, but so these articles are coming
at the height of the academic job season at the
moment of the convention, where you know, the
M L. A. The thing you have to
cite your papers in where all the people get together
9000 of us, and talk about that for three
days about how to cite things. It's more or
less what we do there, Um, and like
this is what comes out of is everyone's excited about
this. This thing. Digital humanities. There's been
another journalistic coverage as well, apart from Pana Packer
in The Chronicle and inside Higher Ed. Uh,
most notably, Patricia Cohen in The New York Times
ran a series with six stories from November 2010 to
July 2011 about the digital humanities. And so this
is kind of a big deal. Uh, and
it she covers many of the tropes. Many of
the things we do in the digital humanities maps,
text analysis and, of course, big data now
by virtue of the New York Times, typically takes
the M L A convention and makes fun of the
paper titles that are offered there because academics think they're
funny and come up with terrible puns or things that
try and get you into a room, because we're
not getting extra credit for being there. So you
have to come up with a sort of sexy title
, and most of the time they are bad puns
about sex. Um, so normally, the paper
is making fun of the M l. A.
And here suddenly, Patricia Cohen is writing a six
big story series about this new way of doing research
in the humanities. And so it sort of suggests
that maybe digital humanities, not just something that academics
care about but is maybe something that the general public
might be interested in for the first time in a
long time about work in the humanities, of course
, um, again, for for our academic friends
here in the audience Stanley Fish. They then sort
of ways in in the New York Times, declares
the digital humanities dead on arrival and says quote,
it will have little place for the likes of me
and for the kind of criticism my practice and then
he sort of sniffs and and ends. So if
you if you side with people like Bill Panna Packer
in The Chronicle, this idea of this thing,
the digital humanities was a sort of savior. This
thing that was going to save all of humanity is
, if you're on the side of Stanley Fish,
on the other hand, is more of this sort
of devil sort of object that's going to ruin everything
that he stands for. So, along with all
of the news coverage, there have been a couple
other things driving interest in the idea of the digital
humanities. In 2000 and eight, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the any H created an office
of digital humanities that's set up to, uh,
fund projects and, you know, actually provide money
for humanities research. And, you know, turns
out when you have money for things like the humanities
, um, it's sort of interesting to people.
Another change was the creation of jobs for digital humanists
. Uh, believe it or not, when you
get your PhD in something like English literature, there's
not necessarily a job for you at the other end
of it. In fact, don't don't Don't get
your PhD in English lit, Okay? It's not
always a smart thing to do. You want to
. We can talk about ways to be smart about
it. But there were suddenly jobs being created after
the financial crisis when all jobs in academia sort of
disappeared jobs for digital humanists. So suddenly, digital
humanities had the thing that made everyone interested, had
attention in newspapers. It had money, and it
had jobs, anything a young scholar or a department
would actually want. But unfortunately, very likely people
weren't sure how to get involved in digital humanities.
It seems very much again, like a code phrase
, um, which I just dropped the slide there
. So there we go, code phrase. That's
the enigma. That's what the Germans used in World
War Two to keep everything secret until, um,
they crashed a sub. We stole one out,
and then we, uh, could translate everything they
said, and they didn't know it. And they
actually to come up with an entire branch of an
office in the military to come up with maneuvers to
pretend that we didn't know what the Germans were doing
, so they didn't know we were cracking their codes
. Uh, if you want to read a novel
about it. Krypton Amikam by Neal Stephenson is amazing
. Any case, uh, digital humanities seems perhaps
like something that not everyone had access to. It
was this thing about code. And as I said
, digital humanities is perhaps a sort of code phrase
. It's essentially code about code. To make matters
worse, Steve Ramsey, who's at the University Nebraska
Lincoln, gave a talk at the 2011 M L
a. Talking about, as the title put it
, Who's in and who's out in the digital humanities
. In two sentences that were heard around the world
via Twitter, Ramsey said, Do you have to
know how to code? I'm a tenured professor of
digital humanities, and I say Yes. So this
is like the ultimate sort of faux mo moment where
, uh, it's the person who is the tenured
professor says. If you don't know how to code
, you're not really doing digital humanities. If Freud
was alive, he might call us paranoid about this
whole worry about code. But he's not, and
it's probably because he didn't know how to code.
Um, that's otherwise he'd still be with us,
so learn to code. Don't be like Freud.
Okay, Mhm. So for all the interest in
the digital humanities, it seems there are some serious
barriers to participating, not the least of which is
figuring out actually what the digital humanities is. Indeed
, the unspoken debate at the center of Matt Gold's
really excellent 2012 collection, which is called Debates in
the Digital Humanities, is precisely the question of what
is it? What is the digital humanities? This
question is also a sort of animating feature of this
thing called The Day of D. H, which
asked those in the digital humanities community for one day
to sort of record what they do. So wow
, you want to be really bored? Tune into
the day of D. H, where the academics
just write blog posts about. Here's what I did
this morning, and here's what I'm doing this afternoon
, and then we just publish them, You know
, hundreds of us, and then that's what we
do for a day. It's amazing. Um,
the one requirement when you sign up for the day
of DHS, you have to answer one question.
That question is, what is digital humanities. You
can't skip it. You have to sort of put
a definition on it. There's this sort of intense
desire on the part of the community. Decide what
it is we're doing. In fact, uh huh
. There have been so many definitions generated that one
enterprising scholar, Jason Hepler, created a website.
What is digital humanities dot com that pulls individual definitions
from past day of d. H datasets. So
in other words, he wrote code to expose the
code words that the code writers are using that we
don't understand. And I played with having a little
exhibit mean in here, but I think so.
Just pretended everything. So we can obviously go on
for days like this, talking about what is digital
humanities. But in large ways, I think this
question is a sort of red herring and suggest that
there is, in fact, an answer that there
is a signifier behind this. You know, there's
a signified behind the signifier. Almost got that backwards
. So we've been embarrassing. Instead of asking just
what digital humanities is, then I'd like to suggest
that maybe we bend the question a little bit and
instead talk about what digital humanities means now. I'm
not actually trying to pull the wool over your eyes
in this moment. While these questions are closely related
, the difference between is and means there is an
important difference. So the first question, What is
digital humanities suggests again? There's something out there that
is digital humanities and something that that is not digital
humanities, and we can tell the difference. So
that is, in this case, becomes a sort
of equal sign. Uh, and like all that
equal science, it's axiomatic. It is because it
is, and those of you who are just really
regretting that your choice to be here. Eventually,
I get to real examples of things. It's okay
. It's okay. There's cookies back there, too
. The second question, What does digital humanities mean
? Points us to something else entirely different? Because
meaning, it turns out, is constructed and it's
constructed by people. We decide what things mean.
Now. It's important to know that mean meaning.
While it's constructed of people, it is not made
of people. It depends on our context. It
has a history depends on the people that are doing
the talking. In other words, meaning is in
a sense a certain sort of code. But but
meaning is the sort of code that humanists are actually
really prepared to deal with. Figuring out what things
mean is what you do in an English department or
in art history department. You say, like,
What does this painting mean? Here's okay for the
undergrads in the room. Here's the best thing I'm
going to say It's totally not related to my slides
. Do you know what your English professors want you
to do when you're writing about poems, they want
you to say what it means. Like the poem
means this and then they want to tell you to
tell them how you know it. That's it.
Poem means this and I know it because of these
things. These a sentence, rest of the paper
, that's it. That's all we really want you
to do. And so meaning is a thing that
we think we know something about. I lost my
spot. Well, Oh, we know how to
break this sort of code about meaning. So when
we focus our attention on meaning, we get to
the point where Matt Kirshenbaum who in the, uh
, debates and th suggests that digital humanities is a
tactical term. It's one of convenience. In a
certain sense, the convenient term has become a code
for a number of different practices that get lumped together
into the concept of digital humanities. It's a code
word in so far that a code like S.
O. S helps us speak quicker and more efficiently
. But it's not a code that's really meant to
be secretive. Like when you're sending an S O
s. You're not trying to be, you know
, coy in what you're letting the world know you're
sending a code because it's faster than typing out.
Save our ships. So, in other words,
what digital humanists have been speaking in code? It's
not a code of exclusion so much as it is
one of convenience. So that said, we digital
humanists, I'll include myself in there probably need to
speak in code a little less frequently, and for
that reason that I'm going to clarify what we mean
. What I think at least people mean when they
tend to say, digital humanities. As best as
I've been able to tell, there's five different things
that we mean when we say digital humanities. Unsurprisingly
, these things sort of overlap, a sort of
then diagram with each other. And many people mean
more than one when they use the phrase digital humanities
. But something that I think is surprising is that
when we break down what the code phrase digital humanities
means, you'll discover that you you might already be
engaged in a certain way with the digital humanities that
you had considered. Indeed, you might find that
you speak a little bit of code yourself. That's
a statue on campus. But yeah, you were
all supposed to cheer something with. Oh, we
know that guy. Okay, so what does digital
humanities mean? First thing, five of them.
The humanistic examination of digital objects. This might be
one thing that people mean How, in other words
, do we use our humanist toolbox to understand an
object like the personal computer or the networks that it
uses to run on or even the code it runs
? This sort of work can take on many different
characteristics. The philosophy of Bruno Latour. You could
look at and perhaps call that digital humanities. Uh
, Friedrich Hitler, who's a German media theorist,
wrote a book an entire book about the record player
. You know, you could look at that and
say this Is this a certain sort of digital humanities
? Nick Montfort, Andean Bo Ghost, Uh,
did an entire book on the Atari 2600 called Racing
the Beam? This could be thought of as a
digital humanities. I have a friend who wrote an
entire book on one line of Commodore 64 code 328
pages. Uh, so that perhaps could be a
certain sort of digital humanities. But scholars who work
in these sorts of fields are probably more likely to
call it media studies. And I think there the
problem of using digital humanities for this is it tends
to erase the work that media studies scholars have done
over the years. And so it's not the best
definition, but it's something that people might mean when
they say digital humanities. So the second thing that
digital humanities mean is digital scholarly communication. Now,
this is the part where the undergrads really just tuned
out for a minute, cause I'm talking to your
to your faculty members here, so scholarly communication is
a sort of academic code word, Of course,
more or less, but it means what it says
. It's the way we talk to each other as
scholars. There's, of course, a lot of
different ways. This can happen the main way for
many of his his books and articles that we write
and then send to each other and then fret about
because we never read them and needed to our friends
. So this is traditionally where we discuss the work
that we're doing. We also like to talk about
the scholarship that we're currently working on. This is
why we go to conferences. We get feedback on
our ideas and make important course corrections. But in
the age of the Internet, scholarly communication is changing
pretty rapidly. Books and articles, which tend to
require dead trees, can now be distributed easily over
the Web. The most important currency for a scholar
in the 19 eighties and 19 nineties was publication.
All right, that was the most important thing is
the way you get promoted, the way you get
to keep your job. If you're a faculty member
, publication is easy. These days, you can
publish anything anywhere on the Web. You can pay
Amazon to print your book for you publication isn't what
matters anymore. What matters now is attention. There's
only so much attention, as you all know,
to go around in a day. You're you're regretting
the fact you decided to spend your attention here.
But so it goes, Um, so it's very
easy to distribute things to each other, and the
costs are almost zero. And this means we can
have things like open access publications looking beyond books.
We can share our conference papers immediately. As we
deliver them. We can post on blogs, and
we can even have sort of the communication of the
quotidian kind among scholars. This is one of the
things, um, that the lowly Twitter is good
for. It's why I've tweeted over 50,000 times in
six years, as I tend to be talking to
other people working the same field as I do,
and it's easy to keep up a regular sort of
communication with them. So in short, when people
say digital humanities, sometimes they mean what happens when
the process of scholarship becomes digital and again, believe
it or not, this is kind of weird.
Uh, it's been going this way in the sciences
for a lot longer, but humanists tend to like
their dead trees, and so we're a little bit
slower. And so this idea of talking to each
other and how it changes in the moment of the
Internet is one other things that digital humanities sometimes means
. So that's two out of three out of five
. Sorry, you're not getting off that easy.
Okay, the third thing that people can sometimes mean
when they say digital humanities, this digital pedagogy.
So if the Internet and digital circuits are changing how
we talk to each other, they also perhaps change
how we teach our students. So let me now
take it out of the abstract and actually show you
a project I did in my digital humanities introduction class
this last spring. Um, in that class,
we read Mark see Daniel Levski's novel House of Leaves
, so published. Has anyone read this? Okay
, so this is my favorite book was published in
2000. It's the story of a piece of architecture
, a house that's bigger on the inside than it
is on the outside or more properly. It's the
story of the discovery by a 20 year old tattoo
artist, an L a club kid whose name is
Johnny, Truant of the manuscript of an academic treatise
with copious footnotes and appendices. And everything else would
go along with that written by a blind man named
Zampano, about a documentary film about a house that's
bigger on the inside than the outside, and how
the blind man ever saw a film to write a
book about it. I'm not sure, Uh,
so that's what the books about kind of. And
if that's not complicated enough for you, this is
the dedication page. It tells you straight up you
shouldn't be reading this book. Um, here's what
some of the pages look like in this novel.
It's literally a text that's too difficult to read on
your own. It wants you to read it with
a group, in part because it is a text
full of codes. There are codes in the novel
. Did you have to break in order to get
all of the all of the points of what's happened
? So since the books too hard to read by
yourself, that works great for an interesting or perhaps
weird assignment. I partnered with people at five other
, not five other classes five other universities on a
project related to House of Leaves. Mhm. The
book is trying to basically prove that books are still
important and life changing in the moment of the Internet
. And so we decided the best thing to do
is then, to sort of explode the book back
out into the Internet. We were inspired by another
book called Here's the Title Pictures, showing what happens
on each page of Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow.
So this guy read this novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas
Penchant, arguably one of the most important books written
in the 20th century. Completely pornographic and sort of
obscene. Um, in many places, he drew
a picture of what happens on every page. We
thought, That's cool. We can do that.
So we we made a platform that we called a
Million Blue Pages, which is a line taken from
the book. A Million Blue Pages collects the media
responses of our students to individual pages. On the
novel, all the students had to do was post
to one of four social media platforms tumbler, twitter
, vine or instagram and include two hashtags. The
first one is the hashtag for the project House of
leaves 14 and the other one was a hashtag with
the page number. It was listed on, uh
, the platform that we built trawled the different services
and found new posts and they got pulled into our
platform. They're organized by page numbers. You can
actually see individual responses to different pages. And it
goes from the beginning the cover of the novel all
the way down through their 709 pages in the book
. And we didn't get them all done. Uh
, we assign students to work in groups on and
to produce something for each for a page from each
chapter, so we didn't have enough to actually get
it done. But then they also had to write
about why they made the choices they did, why
they use the different media platforms. So working together
in groups and in a sort of big team across
the six institutions, we made a significant effort towards
getting something produced for every page in the book.
And what's more, the work that students produced was
fun and sort of amazing. So here's something that
, uh, my students did trees, um,
show up quite a bit and So does Ash.
And so my students, uh, drew one with
a match. I try to get them to give
me the original, and they've thrown it away.
Made me sad. Um, here is a sort
of book artist project that a student did, actually
, you know, cutting up the book and the
pieces from it, the animals in the house run
away. At a certain point, you can sort
of see if you're close enough cat and a dog
that are scattered in here. Here's another one.
Mm. Where a student cut up carved parts of
the book to mimic what's actually happening in the story
. And then we even had Oops. See if
I can get the vine to show up for you
guys. So mhm. Hold on. It's a
vines grade. It's just I'm reading. What are
you doing? I'm reading. What are you doing
? So as you actually have to turn the book
around different parts, the text spins all around.
Uh, and this was this particular students way talking
about that weirdness. So when we talk about digital
humanities as digital pedagogy, we pointed in part to
the fact that our classroom walls are really sort of
porous. Now we don't have to be the only
person in the country teaching a book. And in
fact, why do we pretend it? Because we
there is somebody else teaching. You're the same subject
of teaching the same book so we can collaborate with
them as instructors, and we can get our students
to collaborate with each other. So again, digital
humanities. When we say that, sometimes we mean
these efforts to teach these subjects differently. Okay,
four thing. Creation of digital primary source materials or
archives. So for many people were in a library
, this might be a familiar form of digital humanities
work. It's been happening for decades. Brown University
, uh, in the nineties started what's called the
Browns Women Riders Project, and they started taking these
books written by women authors in the 19th 18th century
, that were not widely available and sort of exploding
and started digitizing them, putting them online to sort
of explode. The general assumption that the only people
who wrote books were dead white guys, right?
There are plenty of women writing books. We just
don't tend to read them very often, in part
because they're not available in part because we've all decided
dead white guys are the people that are worth talking
about. Um, so the Brown Women Writers Project
started taking these novels and making them available, typing
them up, making digital editions. We can also
look closer to home here at Virginia Tech. Look
at the many different projects that the Center for Applied
Technology and Humanities have done. Uh, there's the
Thomas L. Gravel Watermark Archive. There's a Virginia
Tech online speculative fiction project. If you want to
read, you know, sci fi from the archives
that's online here. There's even an English poetry,
uh, database. So in some ways, digital
humanities as archives as this work that happens in libraries
could be seen as a way to see the ground
for scholarship. That's why the any age the MLS
, which is a library funding group, melon,
another foundation that gives money to these sorts of things
. Um, it's why they've been willing to fund
digitization and archives throughout the years. A good example
of this is the New York Public Library, which
we all, of course, know from Ghostbusters.
Right? Um, they have a sort of amazing
digitization program. They've been crowdsourcing menus from New York
City for 150 years. They have an archive of
menus, and they're getting crowds to all of us
to type up. Digitize these, and then you
can access all of these records through an API an
application programming interface and then take the data that's in
there and start crunching it. You can figure out
, for example, how much a steak cost in
the five different boroughs in New York by searching across
different menus from different parts of the city. A
team that I worked on last year built something called
sarin diplomatic, which basically you can put an entire
bibliography or a paper in, and it will.
We use some natural language processing to find keywords in
your text and then return you primary sources. So
next time you're trying to find another source for your
paper, you can maybe come through seven diplomatic to
find historical documents, photos, things like that.
So because I'm sure I don't need to tell you
, especially the sort of librarians in the room,
the creation of archives and, uh, the responsible
digitization and curation of the same is not simply a
groundwork for scholarship. It is a scholar thing in
its own right. So the fifth and final,
yes, we're getting close. You can taste the
cookies. The fifth and final thing we mean when
we talk about digital humanities is the digital examination of
humanistic objects. So if you look between the fifth
and the first, you'll see that was sort of
clever there. But I resisted pointing it out to
you because I'm subtle. So what does it mean
here? What? What if the first one is
used looking at a computer and sort of thinking about
the meaning of computer, the meaning of code and
reading it like you would read a poem here?
We're asking, What does it mean to take the
computer and use a computer to read a poem or
to read an archaeological dig. So, essentially,
no matter what sort of scholarship, you do what
you were doing. Whether you're a chemist or a
historian or social scientists, you're looking for patterns.
You're looking to see something happening. It's a chemistry
experiment. What patterns of patterns am I seeing as
I repeat this chemistry experiment? And what will it
teach me about the properties of chemicals? I'm working
with. It's the same thing. If you're reading
a bunch of poetry, you're looking for patterns,
things that happen over and over again. And then
you're gonna say something about what it means. Why
it's important. We do the same sort of thing
in digital humanities. We just use digital tools to
help us find the patterns. So think about this
. In some cases, you have things that are
simply too large to be read. You cannot read
. Every book in this building can't be done.
You would die of boredom. Um, so and
you just don't have time. Um, but then
there's other sorts of data sets that are simply they
don't stick in our heads Well, right, like
human minds work in a particular way. We're really
good at pattern recognition. We're not really good at
holding entire relational database tables in our head. That's
not how we evolved. It's not what we do
, but that's why we use computers to help find
those patents. Computers work well that way. Essentially
, we're becoming centres right, like we can work
with computer to do things that we can't. This
is how world class chess players work. These days
. They train with computers. They play sometimes using
a computer as an assistant, Um, but once
you find the patterns, what's the computer finds them
. It's still up to us as humans to interpret
them. Computers are not good at interpreting patterns.
This is why, when you go get a sonogram
or an M R, I, there's a human
on the other end of it, looking at what
comes out of that machine machine can read your body
, but it can't tell you what it means.
It takes a human who's been trained to know what
what matters there. So this means no matter how
much code we speak, no matter how digital we
are, the digital humanity still depends on the humanities
as much as it does on the digital. Because
where computers are counting machines, humans are meaning making
machines. So for a quick example of this final
meaning of digital humanities, I want to show you
a different project I did with my undergrads this past
spring semester in intro to digital humanities. We wanted
to know if we could read everything that Ernest Hemingway
had ever written. That's probably an impractical question.
His complete short stories is 650 pages long, and
he published seven novels during his lifetime. A book
of poems plays. Oh, and then I was
asking my students to do this in the last two
weeks of the semester. So you know, this
is simply impossible. You can't do it. You
can't get to it all. Fortunately for my students
, I decided to call the project How not to
read Hemingway. It was the best thing ever,
right? Like we're not going to read Hemingway.
Welcome to English, because no matter how little time
you have, there's always time to not read something
. Um, so we did actually read some Hemingway
short stories. I picked a couple of classics,
so they the students got a sense for his style
, Some of the subject he writes about I Then
, too, because, you know, it's a
sort of digital quantitative class. Allowed them to pick
some stories. Um, just by titles alone.
They voted so sort of random sampling. Um,
unsurprisingly, they picked to read the title called a
Very Short Story. Um, so it turns out
that they're they're pretty predictable. Um, And then
then we did. We wanted to know how can
we read the rest? So we did something sort
of horrible that Here's one more vine for me to
pull up. I don't know. This will be
horrible for some of you in the room. Others
of you, it's okay to cheer. Oh.
Oh, that's a bookie. A team. Did
you know your library has a bookie? A team
? You can take your books and cut them in
half. Here, people. Why aren't you doing
it? Yeah, die. I'm gonna chapter my
dissertation on Hemingway. This felt so good, Di
Papa. Okay, so it was sort of,
you know, this is the sort of aftermath after
the heads should roll. Okay, Cut the bindings
off the books. Each of my students was given
200 pages of the books. Then they ran the
pages through a high speed scanner that you can find
in any business office. They used an OCR tool
called Pres mo that would look at the PDS that
we've created. It can see what's written there,
and it can turn that into text. The reason
these black dots are here is because I did the
screenshot with the trial version of the software. I
need to do it with the real version. It
puts on the dots so it compels you to pay
. But the students can then, uh, with
these pages, they can then type right here and
make any corrections if they're spelling errors. If the
computer doesn't read things by right, they can make
those changes go to the next page. So the
students took their 200 pages and created a full corpus
of everything Hemingway had written, which was great because
Hemingway's works during copyright. You can't go to the
Gutenberg, Yeah, the digital Gutenberg collection or anywhere
, really, and get good copies of Hemingway stuff
because it's not supposed to be out there. So
then, for the final exam, what my students
were asked to do was to take the output of
all of these novels and all of the short stories
, and we used a text analysis tool called Buoyant
to start processing them and asking questions about what happens
. And so I'll show you. I was supposed
to click that earlier. It was amazing. Here's
some of what we found, So I had one
group of students that said, We're sort of curious
about the words Hemingway uses in dialogue and communicating dialogue
, and so they use this tool. They took
the term, said exclaimed. Scream whispered Answer.
Across all of Hemingway's novels, the words said,
shows up repeatedly. This one is This is answered
. We don't exclaimed, Nobody ever exclaims. There's
a little bit of whispering in Hemingway, but over
and over again, Hemingway just uses the word set
sort of a terrible pro style, but it's what
he does. So they're able to show this.
Then they did the next sort of interesting thing,
which was okay. We see it there a lot
. But what happens if we look at it in
relative terms across the same across novels? So this
is the sun also rises. This is the old
man in the sea. Pretty. These first three
novels and short stories very consistent. Number of I'm
out of the camera, uh, pretty consistent.
No matter how long they are, the same number
of said's per 1000 words shows up. Suddenly you
hit old man in the sea and it drops by
half. And then one other book, a late
period book shows, is also in the same general
area. What happens here? This is style change
radically. The old man of the sea. If
any of you have read it, there's not a
lot of talking because guess what? There's an old
man and there's the sea, and it doesn't talk
to it. Um, that's about it. Uh
, but the last one is a record of Hemingway's
trip to after it's actually a posthumously published book.
Um, so does his riding style change. Is
it a case of bad editing or the person who
compiled this posthumously published book? What's happening here and
this is this is a real inside that we could
not have known without counting the words. Here's something
else. My students. We'd read Big Two Hearted
River, so they knew heavenly, liked fishing and
camping. They took some of the different words sea
ocean fish, water hunt, hunting river Camp and
looking across all of his short stories to see how
often these words show up. Now, words like
river camping, uh, show up pretty frequently.
Water, however, is this sort of constant thing
in Hemingway now water, as opposed to, say
, camping water can be multiple things right, you
water can be can be a verb can be announced
a lot of different contexts. Camping is almost always
going to be one thing, but here again,
we're starting to see a pattern of water imagery playing
out in Hemingway's stories that we wouldn't have been able
to pick up on otherwise. Uh, and finally
another group proved something that, if you spent any
time with Hemingway's very clear. Hemingway loves men and
girls and hates women. These are the pronouns Hemingway
uses. Hemingway doesn't like using character names like he
gives his character names, but then he will refer
to them in just gendered pronouns. The Man and
the Girl. Hemingway doesn't talk about women. If
it's a man in a relationship with someone for Hemingway
, it's a girl. It's not a woman,
they're not. They're never on equal footing. You
know, all sorts of things we could say about
Hemingway, and you know all sorts of things.
But here you've got really clear of this teal down
here as women. Uh, boy shows up a
little bit more often. In this case, this
is These are the novels. This is, um
okay. This is girl boy here. This is
Old Man of the sea. There is a character
who is a boy. And so he shows up
pretty frequently. But over and over again. These
are in the short stories. It's about men and
girls, and women are just flat out ignored by
Hemingway. It's a text choice that he makes over
and over again throughout his career. Now it's worth
saying that these patterns that we're finding in Hemingway or
maybe not the most interesting things to say about him
, you know, that's okay. They are certainly
not the last word, and nor are they necessarily
the best thing. But the patterns are there,
and you can only see them with when you start
to bring a computer to bear on the text.
Okay, I've just hit the point that says conclusion
on here. Okay, Where want to? There's
, like, seven more slides. We're gonna make
it. Thanks for coming. You're good. No
, go. It's fine. That didn't sound like
a minute, but I did actually mean it.
Okay, so here we have. We've sort of
broken the code of what digital humanities means. There's
five different things, right? Humanist examination of digital
objects, digital scholarly communication, digital pedagogy, digital
archives, and then using computers to look at the
sort of Normal Humanities Center. But hold on,
wait a minute. Let's go back to Steve Ramsey
for a second. Remember this, he says.
Do you have to know how to code? I
say yes. Didn't he say we have to know
code? And I've just been telling you it's all
. It's all sort of a flim flam, this
code word. So was this a smoke screen on
my part? Am I really trying to sort of
, um, thank you out here a coded message
couch, the claim of lack of code I wrote
here very nicely. Critically. Um, no,
because it turns out that this the sentence of Steve
Ramsey's was just a single sentence in a talk.
If you read the whole thing, it turns out
, for Ramsey, at least, the coding becomes
a proxy for building. And he says, I
have a quote, highly expansive definition of what it
means to build something. So when we build new
structures for scholarly communication, when we build new archives
, when we build tools to find new patterns in
our data, and when we ask our students to
build collaboratively rather than to write to an audience of
one have terrible as this, right? We ask
you to just write me a paper. I give
it back to you. You don't read the comments
, you throw it away. It's kind of a
waste of time when we ask you to work together
and find new things and do real research questions.
Then we're engaged in the digital humanities. Does this
mean that anything goes in digital humanities? Of course
not. But I'm hoping that I've given you a
way to start seeing how to begin building yourself or
two. Perhaps recognize that you've already been there and
been doing so long long. So let me speak
here. Finally, at the end, not in
code, but in plain text you already All of
you in this room possess most of the basic tools
that you need to do digital humanities work. It's
not code. It's your humanity's training that will eventually
help you understand the meaning that the code reveals.
Thanks. Thank you so much for being here for
those who can stay and some have a class to
get to in the next few minutes or another meeting
to go to. If you can stay, we'd
love to have some time for questions and answers.
So I'll let Brian kind of moderate his own questions
rather than having me stand up here the whole time
. And, uh, we would like to invite
graduate students in particular to stick around after we're done
here in about 15 20 minutes for a smaller conversation
about all attack careers, alternative academic careers, nontraditional
career paths in the academy. I think that would
be helpful for many people. Questions for Brian.
Thank you. Go get a cookie if you need
to. Yeah, I'll start, actually. So
my first question is, for those who are here
who heard your encouragement at the end, Uh,
what is a starting place? The first thing,
the tool, the approach What should someone do?
Who wants to get started? You know, dip
their toe in to digital humanities work. Where should
we start? Yeah, it really depends on,
I guess. What What you want to do,
right? If you're if you're If you're teaching a
class, you know, experimenting with something in the
classroom could be it. I think for people that
work in history or literature Excuse me. Text analysis
is a gateway drug. A lot of times buoyant
is a super easy tool. It's Web based.
It doesn't require any specialized knowledge. And you can
get pretty interesting results really quickly. Um, for
myself, it was actually maps. I started mapping
novels and stories. And mapping tools are actually pretty
easy to use as well. A lot of so
anything that helps you see patterns in work you're already
doing could be a great way to help. Think
about how that could change what you're doing. Uh
, yeah. That's probably what I suggest, sir
, Can you go back to the A slide where
you discovered that Hemingway was? I didn't discover that
we all knew that. Yes, but here we
go. Ask a question. You can't see me
because there's a computer scientist sitting here. So his
response to this you're going to be completely fine.
Um, how hard would it be? A teacher
humanist to code to make that happen. I don't
know. I can't do it. Uh huh.
I mean, this is the nice thing about the
moment we're at where the tools are actually democratic enough
that people can use them. If you are a
computer scientist and you can partner with a computer scientist
, you'll be able to do a whole lot more
than you can on your own. But a tool
like buoyant. I take a plain text file.
It even takes P s. I can upload it
, and I tell him what to look for.
So it's not hard, the more sophisticated you want
to get. Maybe you have to partner with somebody
who knows more. So you're Hawaii at this point
on, especially other people's. True. Absolutely.
I do not forge my own hammers. Yeah,
but you know this part? Another thing that happens
in digital humanities is the creation of tools. There
are tool builders, and there are people who use
tools. And it'd be great if I knew how
to code and make those tools. But I partner
with other people. How do you spell the software
? Um voi a vo y a N T.
The French were so on the note of tools for
the digital communities. Have you in any of your
projects or products and helps I work with. Have
you come across projects that are analysis that you want
to do that? There is no tool out there
yet. I mean, do you see areas where
there is a need for tools that haven't well,
this is This is where we look with great interest
towards our friends and computer science who are doing interesting
things in like natural language processing. Or, you
know, a big thing. For the last few
years in digital, humanities has been topic modeling,
in part because topic modeling is now a thing that
David Bligh and company over Princeton came up with algorithms
to actually do this sort of work. So it's
a bit like going to Supercuts, right? If
you go to Supercuts, and if you have more
hair than me or Quinn, um, you might
sit down with those books where they have, like
, beautiful Italian men and sort of flip through and
say like, I'll try this this week. Um
, it's a whole lot easier to imagine the possibilities
when you have something to sort of build on.
This is another thing To get started in digital Humanities
is frequently to just sit down when I'm working with
another scholars to show him or her stuff that's already
happening in their field to just sort of get them
thinking about what they could do So you know,
a better tool for topic modeling than using mallets on
the command line. That would be interesting. I
think people are working on it. Um, have
to think about that. That's a good question.
But right now it's, You know, what you're
seeing is basically as digital humanists or as humanists.
We're sort of waiting for computer programmers and computer scientists
is sort of come up with stuff. The basic
will be cool that we use that. And you
were saying this was not designed by a computer scientist
. This was designed by an English professor who wrote
all the code, right? So because this talk
is all about me and my anxieties, right,
like I don't code right? I wrote some I
wrote basic in my Commodore 64 1987. I took
my like programming magazine. I spent two hours typing
up the code, and then I tried to run
it and it didn't run, and I was like
, Oh, there was no good way to debug
it. And so, like, they're ended my
career in computer science. Um, just because I
don't doesn't mean other people don't, and it's we
don't need to wait around for other people to do
things. Um, but it's important to realize when
we're looking to people in, say, quantitative social
sciences or computer science, but they're not. They're
just to build us tools. You know, a
computer scientist needs to have research outcomes, uh,
needs to publish and needs to, you know,
ask. You know, I have friends who partnered
with people whose research in computer sciences on computer vision
and optical character recognition. So they are. They
are making advances in that while also partnering on the
messiness of 19th century newspapers. So that's the sort
of idea where you're looking for, hopefully a project
, you know, it's got to benefit both of
you. Otherwise you'll do what I do and sort
of fall back on tools that are easy to use
. And this works great in the classroom. I
can use more intensive tools when I'm in my lab
, sir, just to publicly advertise a little bit
in computer science. There are many of us who
do this kind of work. We like to have
people from other disciplines. The competition was exposed this
tonight like I'm getting with outside of computing and Russian
engineer. Thank you. So let me. There's
no Kurt over here is doing. You mean the
interaction with this Announce that we have a large corpora
. We have tools, we have labs. We
have other students working on these things. So please
let us. Yeah, this is what I heard
. David. Well, I say that a workshop
on topic modeling is computer scientists are getting bored of
doing everything on their same data set, so they
always use. And humanities data tends to be pretty
messy. It's not nice and neat. It's not
discrete chunks. So there's a good chance that you
have partners on your campus that are looking for opportunities
or have interesting questions, not also pure scientists tools
. And you mentioned that that's the stereotype that their
programming and I mean, I have friends in English
program more than some of my friends of science.
I was going to be a similar comment. It's
really interesting to hear the humanities about whether we need
to code because we actually have the same computer science
. That's great. The answer is increasingly, we
don't need to decode a field of computer science.
Just as an example, I think of all the
professionals that the user experience interaction, design, user
research, plenty of other specialists you can think of
. We were sort of moving away from this idea
that their programming is what makes computer science or computer
scientists. I mean visual unity. At least those
cookies at the end of this one. When does
so when you when you use this information here and
then perhaps it goes into one of your slides was
about how you built around the pages like the students
did different interpretations or illustration of the book. And
then you put that into a website, and I
guess that's some sort of resource, and you can
go in and search and find different things. Okay
, so what's the difference? Is this a tool
? It's like, What's the Where's the fire line
between something being a resource and then something being a
tool after you have pretty much taking all of these
all that information and put it into something where you're
beginning to see some patterns? Does that become?
We'll see in this one? I'm not actually worried
about patterns. This is about me stretching an English
class to do something that it normally doesn't do like
I have the luxury. I teach one class a
year, Um, so I can be as crazy
as I want. Um, and I want in
in at least one class, we have a very
traditional literature based department. I want them to do
something besides right. Three papers in a semester.
So I want the students to learn about thinking about
composing for the web and how to make, you
know, in the strictures of these different media,
different media objects. I want them to become familiar
with buying and what it means to make something that
loops over and over again. So here I'm not
looking for patterns. You know, this is a
tool in so far, it's a platform. The
code is available on git hub. You know,
it's essentially it scrapes a p i s. And
there's some CSS on top of it. Um,
so you could take this and do it with another
book like the software tools now exist. Uh,
we might do it on a different book this coming
semester. Um, but this is really about helping
students think differently about literature and about how you respond
to literature. It doesn't have to be a response
that comes out of Microsoft Word in 12.5. So
is okay. So if you take artifacts and you
do some sort of analysis of those artifacts and you
find patterns and then from those patterns you put together
another platform where those patterns are available to particular audience
, does that platform then become a tool? Do
you understand my question? I'm trying to understand the
language. Well, I think, um uh huh
. I don't think that I would think of that
as a tool. That's that's the interpretation, right
? Is the tool is what helps us see the
patterns. And in this case again, in this
case, I'm not out for patterns. We could
we could actually take all the instagram photos and do
like Loveman a bitch who's a bikini graduate center.
And he works with a million million photo data sets
out of the Instagram p I and we could arrange
them based on color hue, saturation density, things
like that. And take a look at how students
assigned to read this book are using instagram for its
visual characteristics. So we could do that. Um
, but again, you know what? I don't
want you to, um, go away. Thinking
tools don't matter. In the end, right?
Like people will often say, What tools should I
want to do? Digital humanities? What tools do
I need to learn? That doesn't matter. What
matters is what you know. It's what your research
question. Is this the same thing we always do
? Like, What do you want to know?
Are you trying to figure out like something about Hemingway's
language? Okay, well, then, you know
we could use this tool. But in the end
, you really care about Hemingway's language still, and
that's what really matters and is finding What's your research
question and how can we? People at Cathay we're
here in the library help you figure out the right
approach to find the thing you're trying to do.
Sir, I wanted to give you the opportunity to
pull some students back at this. He said that
you should get PhDs in English literature we don't offer
. We'll get your responses to suicide. I was
only talking to you, and I know you wanted
to say something about what you might do to make
that more attractive to potential employers or something down the
road rather than just say English literature is studying that
level, right? So, um, so there
I was trying to play a bit to my crowd
. Um, those undergrads were kind of stony faced
. So, you know, the more education you
can get did better. You're going to be as
a person like that's why we're all here. That's
why we care about the educational enterprise. Um,
you know, a PhD in literature in the humanities
has a wide range of applicability. Um, it
prepares you to do all sorts of things, the
more outside experiences. But a strictly focused literary PhD
program like mine is a much more narrow thing than
if you're trying to have a lot of different experiences
while doing it. So if you do feel the
need to pursue a PhD or a master's degree,
um, you know, godspeed. But I would
encourage you and we'll be talking about this. I
think in the next conversation has many diverse experiences as
possible. Uh, the worst thing that I did
not the worst thing that I won't tell you what
that was. Um, but a dumb thing that
I did in grad school is I got a part
time job working on the letters of Samuel Beckett,
Uh, this 30 year project, taking his letters
, annotating them. They're being published by Cambridge.
Amazing amount of work. Um, so I got
a job that taught me how to research in a
library while I was doing a PhD that more or
less time to do the same thing at other friends
that wouldn't work in the office of Campus life.
And they had a totally different experience. And they
learned something that they weren't learning in grad school.
And so the more diverse experiences you can have,
the wider range your options are after completing a program
. This is, of course, true. No
matter what you do in life that you know,
the more experiences you have, um, prepare you
to go in different directions. What I find what
I think is really exciting about this moment is with
not everyone should do digital humanities that let's get that
out there. But there are new tools or new
approaches for encountering some of the same texts that we've
been working with for decades or centuries. And there
are new things to find in a way. That
wouldn't have been as easy in the 19 eighties if
you were trying to write about Shakespeare. Bactine says
. Everything has already been said before. And in
the case of Shakespeare studies, he was kind of
right for a couple of decades. So did I
pull us back far enough to apologize for that man
? Um So my question is, you talked a
little bit about using these tools to approach right literature
yourself or issues primary sources. But uh huh have
people and anybody done done a project sort of similar
to something like this in ages or something? Something
else but on on, like criticism on this location
. Yes, A really good example of this,
uh, published, I think. Two years ago
, notably on a blog post. And then I
think, got pulled into a major journal. Ted
Underwood, whose is, uh, Urbana Champagne and
Goldstone at Rutgers got access to, um, the
entire print run of PML A, which is the
major journal for the Modern Language Association. Essentially,
it's a record of literary studies over 125 years,
and they did topic modeling and took a look at
the major topics that show up over time and were
able to chase trace changes in those over time.
Andrew then went on to look at the M l
. A bibliography looking specifically at modernism. Uh,
and the number of articles that are published, uh
, you know, every year on particular individuals in
modernism James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and looked at what's
driving the wolf is in an ascendant moment at the
Joyce is always up high. But Wolf has been
outpacing all the other, um, modernist for the
last 10 years. And I cannot for the life
of me remember his conclusion. So I won't.
Don't try and won't tell you what the punch line
was. But yes, this is You can certainly
do this sort of historia graphic work on one's own
field with the same tools, I guess. Well
, that's really interesting. Also sort of not just
in terms of using this kind of tools as a
tool for your own personal research. Like, for
example, I'm in a somehow this semester on montane
French philosopher, and people have been studying for five
centuries, right, So, like it's just insane
how much there is to be not just his own
work interpretation. So is there any is there any
kind of? And I know there are databases where
you can search. Obviously, that's probably something that
has really helped. But other than that, like
, do you know any, like, more creative
approaches in terms of times in that, Yeah,
yeah, subject matter in terms of, like one
. I mean, it's such the methodology that answers
that sort of question is topic modeling, which I
won't hazard to explain at this moment. But it's
essentially a way of getting a computer to read lots
of documents and tell you what the key things are
, even though the computer doesn't know, doesn't have
to know English to do it, so it could
identify the terms that come up most frequently, in
which documents have the highest concentration of those terms.
So, yeah, you could you could use that
to explore your own research. And a lot of
you know, for most of most of most of
these projects, in the end, what comes out
of it as an article, you know, or
a book, um, so these really are methods
for helping you figure out the arguments you want to
make, and it works just as well, for
you know, that person is sort of research,
you know, that's what that's ever note, right
? Or, um, there's a Mac software called
Devin. Think that is essentially an AI for all
of your PDFs, and they can sort of help
you focus in on things that exist in your collections
. You have one last question. The last one
I wouldn't play. Devil's Advocate, please. What
? You will respond. So I'm skeptical about digital
stuff where digital just seem to be yes. So
, for example, with the, uh, insinuate
work count, I'm not an expert in any way
, But this is pretty obvious findings. And so
my question is, what do you see is kind
of outcomes from an assignment like that woman, the
skills gang through doing it in that digital way versus
a sample analysis text. So this is one of
the reasons why in that particular class, we read
the things we do the normal sort of humanity's stuff
for a while. And then we take the data
approach and we do that throughout the class. We
do some mapping, we do some stuff. Poetry
did a million pages, in part because It just
gives us an opportunity to ask different questions, right
? Like, Yeah, it's not surprising you read
hills like white elephants. And you know that Hemingway
hates women. It's not hard, um, but
when you're able to see it mhm across all the
books, that makes a difference. But you're absolutely
right. Digital, for the digital sake is barking
up the wrong tree. You need to have a
real research question. Uh, that's steering what you
need to do for all of my assignments. This
is something. Institute. This year, before I
could give them to my students, I had to
write a rationale. I had to explain to them
. This is why we're doing this. Because otherwise
it's not okay for me to give them assignment to
tranquilize them, that I'm cool, right? Like
so the rationale for this is Mark Sample, who's
at Davidson College? Wrote an essay a couple years
ago that digital humanities is about sharing. And so
the rationale here is, uh, we have these
digital networks. They allow us to connect with other
people in a way that we previously could not.
We're going to do that. So the really important
thing here is the fact that my classes doing an
assignment with several other classes. Um, then the
fact that we are playing with different modes of media
production is interesting, Um, and responds well for
this particular book. But the real reason for a
class about digital humanities is this idea of collaboration and
sharing, Um, so that that's what happens here
. But so I have to for myself to feel
okay, I've got to have a reason why I'm
doing things. Because I've done the other thing before
and, uh, actually had an article come out
this year about a way in which I broke a
class by coming up with 66 different technology assignments and
some of them not having a point besides the fact
that I wanted my students to play with Google Wave
. Um, so So yes, there. But
there are. I'm a simple man, and I've
shown you some simple projects. There are real amazing
projects, you know, Stanford's mapping, mapping,
mapping, the republic of letters, you know,
takes all 50,000 Some odd letters. 15, 15,000
that Oh, that one guy who's famous and that
I just forgot his name. Uh, all the
letters sent back and forth during the Enlightenment and can
sort of look at networks of relationships. You know
, there are big projects and small projects that are
really valuable and adding to what we do. It's
important to realize that we don't all have to do
it, and that at the end you're still trying
to figure out what it all means. That's the
point. Thank you all on that Nice. No
, thank you.