Can Digital Humanities Visualize Absence?

Many contemporary DH visualizations of historical networks are built on the data amassed in traditional nineteenth-century collections.  One obvious ideological trait shared by existing data sets and the first wave of positivist research is their concentration on the “great man,” a  vestige of the nineteenth century efforts at building a literary canon around certain writers.  In German, a great deal of information is centered around Goethe which makes him seem more important than he already was at the time.  We can easily access minute details about the social life of Frankfurt during the time that he grew up there, however similar information about daily life in Stuttgart or Hamburg is less readily available.  Stanford’s Republic of Letters case study of Voltaire states that its visual map shows that only about 10% of Voltaire’s correspondence, because many of the 19,000 letters collected do not have precise location references. 

http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/casestudies/voltaire.html

The expectation then is that the network shown is representative of the overall grid.  However, European collection building has always been a tenuous process, often disfigured by war and politics.  To what extent can DH projects incorporate the history of data collection into its own presentations?

When existing visualizations of the Republic of letters are centered around canonical individuals, they do not consider the wider European network except as it intersected with Voltaire.  More importantly the history of archiving is not represented in the map of Voltaire’s correspondences. The visualization does not show the gaps in the archive the same way that a temporal organization does.  For example, if there are no letters between certain time periods, this is does not appear in the visualization.  If there are letters missing—something which a close reading would perhaps more clearly show by the fact that the collected letters would refer to lost letters, the visualization, as it now stands, does not.  The visualization does not represent the ideologies of collecting, the influence of celebrity, personal whim, war, funding, etc. on the accumulation of the archive.  Goethe, not so famously, burned most his correspondence and diaries related to his father.  We can interpret this destruction, but how do we show it on a map?

What we need is an historical understanding of meta-data’s compilation.  How and why were the letters of Voltaire and Goethe organized into national archives?  How can we visualize that which was lost, forgotten, destroyed?  How does digital humanities examine absence?

Free time is no longer available

Freedom is no longer available, or at least the video in which Adorno discusses the lack of freedom is no longer freely available.

Why? because of copyright.

The critique of freedom is itself property that is not freely available to anyone.

Bad Handwriting: Cold, Leaky, Drunk

Three factors that can alter handwriting: weather (cold), the functionality of writing implement, and the influence of alcohol.  

This was my favorite fun fact from the Conference on Automatic Pattern Recognition and Historical Handwriting Analysis

A sloppy pen, no heat and booze, surely more than a few intellectuals have had to grapple these three.  In addition to needing Hemingway's (phallically) clean, well-lit place, writers have always needed heat, smoothly flowing ink and more coffee. Bad or just old handwriting can be a problem.

Have you ever dragged yourself to some hidden away Eastern European castle only to discover that you could not read the handwriting in the archive.  Yes, you could spend the next six months deciphering the script, or you could stroll down to the town below the castle and order a schnitzel, no beer because then you'll only end up napping in over an ancient manuscript.  Now there is a brave new digital future that will allow those of us who never took the summer seminar on handwriting analysis to poke around the left-over manuscripts of the past.  Software that recognizes patterns in handwriting so that a legible modern text can be produced.  

This would be a great relief to those of us not trained in the history of handwriting.  The possibilities were discussed at Automatic Pattern Recognition and Historical Handwriting Analysis Seminar.  If you weren't there but want to know what was said, the conference organizers filed a nifty report in German.  They have this nice tradition of writing up a summary of the papers given at a conference, so that if you never made it near the place, you can still learn what was going on during the question and answer period.

 A swift translation of the conclusion:

The increasingly sophisticated digitalization of primary texts will do more than create a significant change in the reception and methodologies used to read manuscripts, it offers new approaches to digital analysis and indexing, that should result in new interpretations.  The most important questions discussed at the conference concerned the segmentation and extraction of graphic elements and markings in digitalized manuscript sources.  It also became clear that the layout design of digital documents needs to be developed further.  Word Spotting was mentioned frequently, yet scholars also work with other systems such as Text Retrieval, Clustering and Similarity Computation which run on algorithms.  Multispectral Imaging as a form of Image Enhancement offers other possibilities.

For all the exciting information, click hier 

The archive of today in the future

The question of how to archive the present is already a political concern in the present. Archiving, in other words, is no longer a matter of looking back after an event is complete.  So much material is now being stored for analysis, to be carried out either in the very near term or later when the current massive corpus has grown even larger. 

The current debate over privacy entails a discussion about archiving data more than it concerns any measurable intrusion into the immediate private lives of individuals.  We object to privacy policies of social media or financial institutions because they may use our information later, once it has been stored.  The struggle for privacy entails a conflict about how present data will be used in the future.  Privacy today concerns controlling the historical archive of the future.  Should there even be an archive about us?  How can we shape its content and operation?

The eighteenth century understanding of privacy, from whence our laws originated, was more immediate; it often involved the bodily intrusion into domestic space.  The private property that privacy rights protected consisted of land and material objects, whereas today the debate centers on the potential use of information about these things.  The body of the individual with rights was implicitly included in the notion of privacy.  Habeas corpus was the right of family members to see the body of their (living) relatives even if they were under government custody. 

Now the debate has moved further to include the virtual existence of bodies, properties and spaces, i.e. information about these entities. The threat to privacy is indirectly aimed at these material objects through the control of information about them.  Because we don’t know what that threat yet is, the debate centers on the archive, on the collection of data in anticipation of it being used someday against us.

Libraries as the Future of Media Technology

Why libraries will continue to develop their IT operations:  because they are organized as research facilities, libraries are dedicated to bringing texts and readers together.  While they do limit access to certain hours of the day and they do put controls on how rare materials are handled, libraries generally are not concerned with restrictions as a first order of business. 

After 9/11 there were hefty debates about libraries role in surveilling their users—Were they going to pass user information on to government intelligence organizations?  The strong resistance librarians displayed, and who knows if it really preserved the privacy of users, shows that libraries are more concerned with the intellectual freedom of users than computer security. 

This is one central difference between the library and the centralized IT units of most universities.  Libraries recognize that there are many different routes to knowledge and that curiosity is always to be encouraged, whereas IT units seek much more to funnel users into specific software platforms, to the exclusion of all others. 

Never would a librarian say “We don’t support that publisher” and increasingly they support most media technologies as well.  If a book is not in the collection, then it can be ordered from another.  Librarians, especially in their newest digitalized incarnation strive to increase access, where IT units try to define the parameters within which access occurs.  Both functions are inevitably required in any large university, but it should be clear that the librarians are much more capable of fostering intellectual accomplishment by finding the texts and media routes readers need.

Germans Beyond Europe-New Book Series

Germans Beyond Europe

The Penn State Press announces the expanded scope of its Max Kade Research Institute Series, edited by A. Gregg Roeber and Daniel Purdy. This series is an outlet for scholarship that examines the history and culture of German-speaking communities across the globe, from the early modern period to the start of the First World War. The series remains dedicated to publishing scholarship with a focus on German-American networks, and it welcomes the addition of scholarship on German speakers out- side of Europe, whose movements were influenced by migration trends, colonization, war, research, religious missions, trade, and other forces. Editors seek scholarship that explores the historical and cultural depictions of the international networks that connected these communities and the linguistic relations between German and other languages. Books in this series will expand our understanding of the German-speaking diaspora and the worldwide influence of these historic global networks.

Series editors seek manuscripts that examine topics such as German participation in international trade and exploration; the history of German Orientalism; the history of nineteenth-century German colonialism; the transplantation of German culture outside of Europe—to the Americas and elsewhere; anthropological accounts of non-European cultures; Northern European involvement in the slave trade; and the intellectual history of cosmopolitan theory.

Submissions should take the form of a 3–5 page proposal outlining the intent of the project, its scope, its relation to other work on the topic, and the audiences you have in mind. Please include 1–2 sample chapters, if possible, and your current C.V.

Please send proposals to

Daniel Purdy 
Department of German 
406 Burrowes Building 
Penn State University, 
University Park, PA 16802 dlp14@psu.edu