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?

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.    

Complexity in Digital Humanities

The important quality that digital humanities needs to have is complexity.  In studying my favorite sites, such as time lapsed maps in which borders, cities, battles, concentration camps are shown to emerge and disappear over time, there are only a handful of pieces of new data that initially emerge.  In studying a map of concentration camps put out on Stanford's Holocaust Geographies site, I learned that there were camps prior to Dachau, which is generally said to be the first camp.  That was a serious bit of information, I thought.  

http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=379&project_id=0

Having seen the dots on the map denoting camps appear and then flicker away, one would want to click on them to get the more detailed history.  I can look at the map of concentration camps, examine their patterns, compare them to other web sites with large maps, develop spatial ideas about where Jews and others were rounded up, imprisoned and killed. There is lots of unspecified information to be gleaned from looking at a map. The visualization of spatial relations is invaluable, yet having studied the map, one would need texts to elaborate on the emergence, operation and disappearance of the dots on the map.  And indeed, “emergence” and “disappearance” are problematic terms, because they dispel the notion of agency.  A map does not explain what and who caused the places it names to come into existence.  The map distributes places, and implicitly distributes responsibility, but it does not claim to spell out a causal sequence. 

A successful DH map would then have to have links to texts about the locations it displays. As an old-fashioned reader, books are still the standard that I would use to organize my thoughts about DH.  A map begs for a text.  Historical atlases, which contain only maps, are wonders for viewers who have already a reasonable understanding of historical narratives, otherwise a time-lapsed map is a tease, at best.  How many visualizations of knowledge are just that, a tantalizing display that compels you to look elsewhere for further information?  This need not be a problem, no one source of historical information need be definitive, yet it would be great to see more information wrapped into visual displays, more background, hypertext. 

Digital humanities sites appear online as works in progress.  What seems like a first layer of information now, will no doubt be more complex in six months.  Web sites can appear in draft form, as presentable but not yet complete, thereby allowing for public commentary and re-evaluation in the process of putting them together.  In this sense DH sites are like ordinary blogs. 

The Holocaust Geographies site raises many of these questions about historical narrative as well, and the key research task for the site and its users is to answer them, otherwise the project will hover incompletely with a set of questions waiting for someone else to answer them.  How many DH sites are there which are half-finished because their progenitors have run out of money and time?  In this sense, DH sites can turn into fragmentary movies by aspiring directors who have run out of financing.  The complexity that a web site requires to provide anywhere near the nuance and information of a book requires time and money that stretches out for years.  In that sense, high-quality DH may not be any faster than writing a book manuscript.  The key difference is that it won't take a year to get out into the public.  A click of the return key suffices--just like this.

What gets left out of digital humanities?

Digital Humanities is taking off and well it should.  The potential is tremendous and there seem to more new, wonderful resources to be discovered everyday.  Documents and books that were once locked away in a remote castle under Communist rule are now readily accessible through the internet.  You can access the info without having to travel to a specific site, that reduces the adventure but it improves the ability to mull over the info.  Here is today’s find:  http://www.dariah.eu/index.php

As the digital networks expand, we might bear a few limitations in mind:

Starting off on an epistemological scale, we can point out that there are limits to digital humanities in terms of the interface between the digital network and our sensory perception. The two systems do not directly align, thus there are many bodily perceptions that cannot be replicated digitally, for example the haptic experience of other bodies and space.  Digital reinforces sight and sound over touch, smell and taste. 

How the information is indexed will shape its use, the example of montage and editing in film show clearly that the arrangement of images alters our understanding: chop info up into small units that alternate or deliver info in long theme related streams and you will alter how the info is understood.  Does digital humanities want to deliver fragments or an epic narrative?   

What will become of culture that does not have a digital platform?  Well-endowed nations will replicate their culture digitally, others will not.  Certain art forms—music will quickly adapt, others not.  Will cultural info be processed into a similar format, so, for example, will all north African music be produced to sound appealing to Western consumers sitting at a screen?

Already back in the 1980s, switching to digital meant losing certain sounds,  you don’t have to be a music snob to know that Jimi Hendrix sounds better on vinyl than on CD

Will digital humanities respond and transmit those cultural artefacts that fit its format while neglecting those that cannot be transmitted?

Will digital humanities networks allow a mixture of institutions to participate so that not just nation states or elite universities are involved, but that smaller scale organizations without the same internal controls and restraints will also be able to join, will an avant-garde theater group be able to participate as well as the government cultural institute?

Evening reading at the end of the semester

Found a wonderful web site put out by the Morgan Library of its holdings, a nice digital resource.  They give ordinary websters the opportunity to leaf through rare Flemish art works.  Tonight I am perusing a Book of Hours by Simon Bening, an early sixteenth century miniaturist from Ghent-Brugges.

http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com/links.html

For those of us unschooled in Flemish art history, it is easy to spot the connection to Vermeer through the way in which domestic spaces are depicted.  One main room is shown with people engaged in ordinary household activities and in the background there is a doorway opening into another lighted room in the back.  The eyes movement from this room to the one in the back uses perspective without relying on a natural landscape.

Then another page shows the connection between Flemish painting and Albrecht Dürer.  Bening’s sad-faced Salvator Mundi reminds me of Dürer’s intense self portrait.  From one face to another the internet lets you slide, and as more archival and rare book material becomes available on the web, the easier it becomes to more from one visual memory to the other.  The connection between Dürer and Salvator Mundi is of course a familiar one, but how easily we can confirm it now.

In the midst of this late night contemplation comes an email announcing the death of Richard Sheirich, a German professor at Pomona, 84 years old, did not know him but he looks a bit like Ben Kingsley in Hugo.

http://www.pomona.edu/news/2011/12/13-richard-sheirich.aspx

All this hangs together as the internet brings us the private views from devotional pages to the news of a colleague's death, someone we have never met before tonight.