Sunday, September 22, 2013

The TEI and the Study of Literature - Cummings

There are two main ideas which captured me from Cummings' article, The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature.  The first was that TEI and many of its controversies/questions seem to revolve around it being a scholarly primitive and just how primitive is should be.  I found it interesting that originally TEI was an initiative designed for the humanities, but as the years have progressed other disciplines have adopted it.  Cummings talks about the ways in which its original purpose - he uses the example of the TEI creating recommendations for the creation of the speech corpa - was taken by other disciplines and morphed so that it could be used for their purposes.  How much can a primitive tool be changed before it can no longer be used on a general basis because it is too specialized, and then therefore is no longer a primitive?

The second, and far more interesting, tidbit that caught my attention was how much TEI has become intertwined with literary criticism.  I took the literary criticism class last fall at UNE for my English major and quickly formed the opinion that wherever literature or even the faintest hint of prose may be found, literary criticism can be found lurking not far behind.  With TEI, it appears as though one of the huge topics of debate is the controversy over what makes up a text.  The TEI is based on the principle that literature is simply a text which is the combination of the same characters being used over and over again, simply in new ways.  To some literary critics, that is a shock-and-awe sin; to say a text is just a novel combination of characters eliminates the notion that Literature (with a capital L, mind you) is a specific category set aside for only a limited number of texts which mean some set of enlightened-thinking, human-condition encompassing standards.

TEI is confusing.  Cummings' article was no cake walk.  However, I was interested to make connections with his article and others that we have discussed in class so far, and with information I learned in previous classes.  I do look forward to seeing how the TEI will take form in our Walden project.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Computing for Archaeologists - Eiteljorg

Outline for Computing for Archaeologists

I History of Archaeologists and Computing

  1. Job
    1. Find material remains - DISCOVERY
    2. Unearth them in  away that maximizes the info they can convey
    3. Interpret the evidence
    4. *Record-keeping - "It can be argued that record-keeping is the real occupation of archaeologists" (p.20).
  2. Record-Keeping as Key
    1. Must keep records of both archaeological context AND the artifacts
    2. Archaeologist saw responsibility for record-keeping and first started using computers in '50's. 
      1. Computers stilled viewed as "arcane and foreign" (p. 21)
      2. Cost and access limits made use of computers very difficult and date stored nearly impossible to retrieve
      3. Used by archaeologists mainly for statistical processing - COMPARING
    3. By 60's databanks were being used (archaeologists were increasing aware of their vast storage power)
    4. By 70's new database software made more efficient record-keeping
      1. Necessary due to vast amount of materials collected
      2. Saw that "more careful and conscientious attention to small finds and fragmentary evidence could only become common with the advent of better recording techniques" (p. 21). 
      3. Just in time came the arrival of micro-computers which made retrieval of this data efficient, flexible, and possible for scholars
      4. *Talks about archaeologists' issue with not being willing to choose what info is and isn't useful, and the necessity for SAMPLING
II Tools as a Mode (Svensson)
  1. Databases
    1. "Original interest stemmed from hope that data storehouses could be used to retrieve and analyze info from related excavations, thus permitting broader syntheses" (p. 22) - COMPARING
    2. Long-term dataset preservation for future access is another goal and self-realized responsibility of archaeologists
      1. *Because neither recovered artifacts and the data about them is complete without the other
  2. GIS Programs (Geographic Information System)
    1.  GIS as a TOOL but also a PRIMITIVE
      1.    ** The usefulness of GIS is that it can be created for one discipline and used for another
      2.  Used for graphical mapping
  3.  CAD (Computer-assisted design) software
    1. Used for record-keeping drawings OR reconstruction
    2. Archaeologists tend to use for record-keeping
  4. Other useful tools
    1. Commercial software allows for broader access to files, thus encourages collaboration
    2. Internet communication (i.e. email and websites) are an important facet of collaboration for researchers living on separate continents
    3. Coloration of photos - too expensive in print journals but possible when digitized
    4. 3-D modeling of artifacts
  5. Conclusion for TOOLS: a.) the ability to manage more date more efficiently is the most important benefit computers have brought to archaeology b.) Also provides many ways to retrieve info, analyze, ask questions of data, and to understand and COMPARE data
III Cons and Limitations of Humanities Computing in Archaeology
  1. Archaeologists spend more time with computers than the actual artifacts - run risk of losing familiarity with them
  2. Use of computers is limited to scholars' knowledge of them
  3. Absence of formal training in computing
IV State of Computing in Archaeology
  1. Not a universally understood responsibility on the part of archaeologists to prepare digital materials for online repositories for future generations
  2. Electronic publication still has not achieved the validity and permanence of print publication
** Conclusion: "The transformation for paper-based to digital recording is still incomplete" (Eiteljorg).

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Unsworth and Svensson - Making Sense of Scholarly Primitives and DH Landscapes

It is not easy to break down all of what I have just read into a tiny itty bitty blog post, because that would mean that I not only completely understand scholarly primitives and the landscape of the DH, but can state these understandings as concise facts.  And because not even Svensson or Unsworth, scholars in the field of DH, can concisely explain the broad world of digital humanities and all it entails, I won't pretend that I can.  However, I will organize some of my thoughts here.

Here are some of the take-aways I got from Unsworth's "Scholarly Primitives" article:

a.) Scholarly primitives are "activities basic to scholarship across eras and across media" (Unsworth, p. 1).  He classified scholarly primitives as actions, changing my initial understanding that scholarly primitives are understandings which scholars across all fields hold to be true.  Some of the actions he characterized as scholarly primitives were discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating, and representing.
b.) Digital tools that function on the foundation of scholarly primitives (i.e. Babble using the scholarly primitive of comparison) can not be customized to work better for a specific project.  If they are, they are no longer functional primitives which can be used across a broad spectrum of fields and/or medias.
c.) Unsworth concluded his article with a side-by-side view of a discussion of the Human Genome Project on one side, and a discussion of the Humanities Genres Project on the other, with 'humanist' substituted for 'biologist' and 'library' for 'laboratory.'  He uses this as an example of representation and deformation, two other scholarly primitives he adds to his list.  It is interesting that minus the slight change in the words he substitutes, the text remains the same and works for both discussions, although they are of completely different subjects.  I think that this further verifies his point that a scholarly primitive must be something which is blind to a field or study and can be used in all forms of scholarship.

"The Landscape of Digital Humanities" I found, as I suspect many of us did, to be much weightier, with a whole lot of definitions and theories and opinions to wade through.  I came to understand that:

a.) DH has not yet been completely defined as a field or rather just "an array of convergent practices" (Svensson, p. 5).
b.) One of the reasons DH is so important is that it has redefined scholarly inquiry itself - it has created knew ways to communicate and evaluate and organize scholarly thought and humanities work (Svensson, p.6).
c.) Out of DH has arisen critical cyberculture studies.  It seems that with the creation of anything in academia comes a critical study of it, in turn creating a NEW field of thought.

Much that Svensson discussed rang true with what we have already talked about in our class discussions, including how creating a DH center proves legitimacy of the study, the various tools available for use in the DH, and some of the pros and cons and areas of contention among scholars that come with opening academia up to the general public.

This was a lot of information for my brain to digest, and I predict that it will be having cramps periodically throughout the semester.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

What is this thing we call digital humanities?

The question of the evening is this: what is this thing we call "digital humanities?" We know the definition of "digital," and have long debated the definition of "humanities" in English classes (and may or may not have a good grasp on that one still), but when the words are put together, something new is created. And this something new is, at least to me, slightly puzzling.  But, from the knowledge I have gained from reading the three NY Times articles by Patricia Cohen and from our class discussion on August 28, I have formulated my own definition of the "digital humanities."  Digital humanities are (go ahead, you can quote me on this): the acceleration of the study of the humanities (i.e. literature, history) with the aid of new digital technologies.

The acceleration of the study of the humanities through these new digitized methods does not occur in just one way, so it can not be pinned down as one, single practice.  Instead, as Cohen mentions in her articles, it can occur through the use of statistics, crowd-sourcing, and digital maps to recreate, restudy, and realize different factions of the humanities.  Cohen references the Bentham Project as one such example of recreating, restudying, and realizing literature through crowd-sourcing, where it is an open offer to the public to transcribe Bentham's unpublished manuscripts. By sharing these manuscripts digitally, University College London (which has spearheaded this project) creates an opportunity for the public to read and work with literature which would not otherwise be available to them and accelerates the process of transcription, which will in turn help scholars to study and discover ideas within the manuscripts much sooner than would have been otherwise possible.

The idea behind the Bentham Project is the same which forms the backbone of our project with digital humanities, where we will be poring over pages of Thoreau's manuscripts of Walden. This example of crowd-sourcing is just one of many ways digital humanities is allowing the traditional method of studying the humanities meet technology, and therefore be quickened, expanded, and evolved.