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.

German at UVA

The uprising in Charlottesville really does represent a shift in university budget politics.  Rather than everyone watching as the small departments get axed, and hoping that they will not be next, the entire university, from the President on down, stood up in favor of preserving a coherent Liberal Arts curriculum.  

The German and Classics departments would have been the usual budget cutting targets.  Venerable and stocked with high grade professors the UVA German department is, yet we would have all been signing online petitions to save the program had it not been for the principles of the university’s president and the fact that everyone else at the University of Virginia defended the larger principle rather than watch the humanities get chopped off like some failing corporation.

Colleges and Nobel Prize Winners: Herta Müller at Dickinson College

     Last week Herta Müller gave a reading at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, about two hours drive from here. So five of us piled into a minivan and set off across the rolling hills, not quite singing songs but definitely in a good mood as our classes were done and our papers corrected. With the semester just behind us, a road trip to see a Nobel laureate seemed like an adventure we could afford.

     Dickinson has wonderful eighteenth-century buildings. The campus is compact and lovely, the old stone buildings set within a few feet of each other. Graduation was about to unfurl and the town was filled with excited parents. Carlisle has a string of classy restaurants and they all seemed to hold cheerful families circled around one beaming youngster. The undergraduates were different than the lot I usually encounter. The women were polished and artsy; the men soft and thoughtful. Not an athlete in sight.

     At Penn State all you ever hear about Dickinson College is that the law school is wandering over to University Park, but after strolling along the historic center of Carlisle, I thought it might be more pleasant if Penn State moved in next to Dickinson College. But to the main event: Herta Müller was visiting Dickinson to receive an honorary degree and to participate in the commencement activities. Her connection to the place reaches back to the 1990s when she was a writer in residence there, at a time when she was by no means expected to win the Nobel prize, when she was known only to a handful of professional critics who included Romanian German writers in their portfolio.

      Now her great novel, Atemschaukel, has appeared in a fine English translation as The Hunger Angel, and the edgy artist who used to bristle easily was on her US tour, Harvard, Chicago, Carlisle, PA. Dickinson College chose well, not just the faculty who invited Herta Müller, but also the administration who sustained the relationship over many years.

     Sitting in a state-of-the art lecture hall, packed with attentive listeners, I was reminded of the other Nobel prize winners that I had heard speak at little, well-endowed colleges. Colleges seem better equipped to handle the delicate relationships inherent to artistic patronage. Back in the late 80s, I listened to Seamus Heaney read from Station Island in another well-built lecture hall at Bucknell College. Ostensibly I was at Bucknell for an academic conference on Romanticism, so I wondered who this wavy haired Irishman was who kept alluding to Wordsworth as if he were a peer—even the grandest English professor does not compare his writing with such a canonical figure. Then as the poems rolled out, my epiphany commenced, and for years thereafter, I would read Heaney and see him speak with an eager desire to relive the wonder of first hearing him speak his own poems. Several times I heard him in New York swaggering in front of a large audience with fellow poets on the stage, my delirium continued, but always with a sense that the Bucknell reading, quiet and elegant, was the most wonderous.

      Hearing Herta Müller at Dickinson brought out that college delight at literature, but almost in reverse. I had heard her before in high-profile events in Berlin where all sorts of luminaries huddled around the bar until late in the evening. Now in Dickinson, the audience was a little more naïve, but it was a real pleasure to hear the nervous undergraduates ask their questions. For well-heeled colleges with their intimate seclusion train students to believe that if they listen and read carefully enough, then they will be able to speak with the smartest people in the world. The close reading techniques that Liberal Arts colleges teach their students build in them a reservoir of confidence, that allows them to tip toe up to a Nobel laureate, unafraid to ask their modest question, so that they may then receive the sharp, swift answer from a foreign writer unfamiliar with privilege.

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?