Saturday, October 13, 2012

Waiting for the Upload


As anyone who has tried to set up a web site knows, it takes a good while to put the pieces together, so that they look anything like a competent presentation.  My first attempts at a web site really amounted to my ordinary c.v. set on a shocking green background.  Somehow I equated web design with color, the text I kept the same on the site as on the old typed up document.  How to hurry up the production process without falling into old writing systems?

For all the speed in research that digital humanities provides, I find myself falling back onto books when I cannot get what I want.  My favorite site, Stanford’s Republic of Letters https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/ promises a string of material that I just cannot wait to see, and I have a wish list of material I want to see them archive and integrate into their map of European/North American intellectual circuits.  But I have to wait.  It takes time for them to develop their case studies.  They have a nifty map of Franceso Algarotti’s travels through the courts of Europe.  Algarotti was easily one of the brainiest courtiers in the eighteenth century.  Wrote stylish treatises, dispensed clever advice, slept with kings (ok, maybe just one king).  So reading his letters, tracing his thoughts on music and architecture, rhetoric and painting would make any dix-huitiémiste happy.

Helas pour moi, I must wait until the web site is ready to run, for there are scholars assembling the material in a responsible, scholarly way.  Apparently designing a digital humanities site takes time, just like writing a book.  In the meantime, I just interlibrary an old tome with Algarotti’s letters.

In other words, the back catalogue is what makes the book invaluable.
Just as when Sony buys a movie studio or record company, it is not just interested in what stars they have signed up right now, Sony also wants the archive of old movies and studio recordings for its future use.  Black and white scenes of couples dancing, gangsters blasting their way into a speakeasy, Marvin Gaye’s unfinished album—these are just as valuable in the long run.

Libraries are the back catalogue, it’s where you go while you cool your heels waiting for the web site to upload.  Because if you have to satisfy that burning rage inside your head for reading material, then you are back to consuming books.  Instant gratification is the point of the internet.  If you are filled with a lust to read, and it has to be high quality, not the Hershey's candy of tabloid sociability, then you wind up circling back around to the old media.  Heiroglyphs, anyone?

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Devil wears Theory







This wonderful scene displays the fantasy of absolute power that French theory once represented.  It also provides a telling account of how the trickle down theory works in economics, as well as in Hollywood’s star system.  Back when Roland Barthes was a structuralist, he maintained that fluctuations in fashion were determined by a handful of editors—meeting in Paris, of course, not New York City, as the film shows.  These editors’ decisions, just as this scene shows, eventually determine what ordinary women in humble circumstances decide to wrap around their bodies.  Throw in a few key designers and advertisers (the scene gives us a string of product placements) and you have a consumerist version of Lacan’s dictum that the unconscious is structured by the Other.  In the movie's terms, this means that the impulses that drive your intimate consumer decisions are really guided, if not determined, by forces completely outside your control.  Individual identity, the possibility of free will, serves as an illusion that drives the fashion system, or all of society, for that matter, forward.
            French theory back in the day loved this sort of thinking, for it aligned intellectuals who explain the system’s trickle-down operation, with the masters at the social peak.  Lacan and Barthes probably did not want to be overtly connected with the fashion industry, but they surely found the status alluring.
            In other words, the system is as much a construct of intellectual theory building as anything else.  This scene’s dressing down about dressing up asserts totally mastery and control—a reality only if you are committed to the fashion system itself.  You have to believe in the hierarchy for it to work, which means that critical descriptions of the trickle down system have the perhaps unintended effect of reinforcing its operation because they insist—“This is how the world really works.” The argument claims that the theory applies even to people who don't realize that their decisions have been made for them, but by making the argument, by showing how determined ordinary people are, the theory strengthens that control.
            Meryl Streep’s speech gives us a nice summary of how trickle-down economics works, as well.  The elite make the key decisions and the lower classes pick up the remainders.  This alignment of feudal hierarchy and luxury consumption has been theorized for the last three hundred years—Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees is one of the most famous, first versions, but the idea has surely been around much, much longer. 
            Add to this system, the famous actors displaying their prowess as thespians.  At the center, stands the queen of Hollywood quality, attended by a bunch a speechless pretty women and her knowing, New York side-kick.  The young rising star is given a lesson not only in the operation of the fashion/class/star system, but also in how to perform: Streep performs how to perform, Hathaway takes notes. 

Digital Lounge


Flew last week to Madison for a gathering of administrators in Big-Ten German departments, where, aside from exchanging professional information and pleasantries, I made two realizations.  Both were surprises in their own way.  The first came about by accident—as I was flying the many legs from my university to Madison, I happened to sit at an airport gate next to three graduate students on their way to Madison for a conference called NAVSA.  I had never heard of this organization; I could not even spell it, but they were talking loudly in this airport lounge about their papers and who all they were going to see.  Most importantly they were complaining about what it was like to be a graduate student, and since I never get hear graduate students speaking that way anymore, I decided to eavesdrop.  This meant simply sitting there with a zombie look on my face, because these three women were speaking so loudly that the whole lounge was taking in what they were saying.  I simply pretended to be a burnt out, middle aged, pudgy businessman staring blankly off into space—a convincing disguise, and one I could naturally pull off.
            So what did these three young graduate students reveal—well, first that graduate students complain about pretty much the same things we all did.  Dissertation chapters, finishing conference papers, should I go to this other conference, getting a job—nothing surprising there.  But then the conversation took a turn, and these three women started unburdening their souls about---digital humanities.
            What shocked me the most, was that they spoke about digital humanities without the slightest worry about defining what the heck was.  Tenured professors hem and haw as if no one really knows what digital humanities is, and then they all laugh out loud together, nervously.  These graduate students talked about it as if it were just their TA assignment.  Two of them had paying jobs in digital humanities.  One of them apparently had landed some nice post-doc in the field, another was working in some help desk capacity. She complained at length and in detail, as only a grad student can, about clueless, old professors who call her help desk with the simplest problems, one after the other, asking the same stuff—and all she wants to do is yell at them “Read the FAQs page!”  This made me cringe appropriately.  But she continued, “They need someone to hold their hands.  Can’t they read.  I mean they are trained in reading and critical thinking. Can’t they read the help page and figure it out for themselves.  I have to answer the same questions over and over again. I want to shout at them, but I don’t.”  Well in fact, she had just done that, because as I slowly turned to look up, I noticed that the airport lounge was filled with several obvious academics, all of whom had assumed the same blasé attitude while listening in.
            What was most obvious from their continued dialogue was that they all studied software programs as if they were foreign languages.  They knew how to build websites, run complex searches through corpuses of data, and generally treated the entire field of website design as just another part of writing a PhD thesis.  Digital humanities was nothing more than another self-evident part of their training, one that came with the usual institutional complexities.  So while I am a hopeless old professor who has taken seminars on web site design, but who has a better chance in holding a lecture in Latin than posting his own page, the lesson is that graduate students will learn and carry out these tasks directly because everyone they know is doing the same thing.