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?

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.    

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.

China after Comparison

The school year is swinging back into action.  With the arrival of the students, the academic myths revive, and the blight of last year recedes just enough to allow us a little sun on the facade of the university’s library. 

My colleagues Andrea Bachner and Eric Hayot put together a swell workshop called, “China after Comparison."  The presentations were short, 15 minutes, so everyone had to speed along as they talked.  Some folks like to rush, other scholars need a more leisurely pace, especially if they did not go to high school in the US.

I went last in the program, which is to say I gave the postscript, the non-China scholar hanging out with the experts.  It was a delight to be a novice once again.

Ideas were battered around, positions were assumed and then denied again, some posturing did take place, some young males were trying to impress with their alpha-ness, and certain women did look on with cool interest.  But if you don’t expect every sentence uttered to sound like Foucault, if you like to toss around ideas before they are fully formed, the talk was inspirational.

So here is excellent web site that Richard So from the University of Chicago described. His talk built on the theoretical survey provided by Jack Chen of UCLA.  Together their presentations were chock full of material you probably have heard about but now get to visualize.

Check out "Poetic Networks: New Computational Methods in the Sociology of Culture"  http://home.uchicago.edu/hoytlong/

A Season of Penance

If you have ever said, thought, shouted or even denied that “We are Penn State,” then this statement is for you.  Regardless of how you judge the coach or the university administrators involved, there is no question that terrible things were done in the name of Penn State football to young boys who did not know what was coming to them.  Great wrongs were committed, and we don’t even know truly to how many or for how long.  But you can know for sure that there are boys out there angry and in denial, confused and alone because of the abuse they received when all they wanted was a father who loved them to showed them a game they wanted to play.

A season of penance is required.--a season in which we do not indulge in the euphoria, the rush, the unified cheer of football.   The great wrong must be righted.  We cannot go back to cheering and partying as if nothing had happened.  We cannot push all that aside and carry on as if it were all just the same as before.  We must make a statement of disavowal—that we refuse to accept the sins that were committed against innocent fans. As fans we speak out for the youngest and most vulnerable among us who were abused. 

An act of penance: so for the next season we refrain from celebrating, from giving ourselves over to the euphoria and excitement of cheering Penn State football, and we do it in a disciplined, orderly manner so as to make our moral statement clear—that we abhor what was done in the name of Penn State football. 

No matter what your religion, no matter what your commitment to Penn State football, you know that we cannot continue as if nothing happened.  We must make show our moral fortitude, we must purge ourselves of this crime.  Disavow the spectacle for one season.