Author: jannellelegg

Is digital history fundamentally different from history as we know it? Dougherty suggests “By definition, digital history utilizes different tools, differently, than most historians are used to. It has its own vocabulary and requires different skills sets (emphasizing, for example, curation as opposed to detective work)” (Dougherty, Jack, ed. “Writing History in the Digital Age.” Writing History in the Digital Age, May 22, 2011.) So what are these tools, vocabularies, and skills? And how have historians begun to embrace them?

The study, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians,” which included interviews with historians, suggests that underlying research methods remain the same, despite new tools and technologies. The one area that respondents were comfortable incorporating into their research practices was Searching.  Tools that aided in analysis or information organization were not. It would seem that there is a gap between the historian and the digital. Though historians (myself included, of course) embrace searching as a change to our day-to-day research practices, Putnam complicates it’s uncritical usage.

Putnam’s article offers an interesting critique of our use of text searches. She highlights the way in which searching releasing text from it’s anchors, encourages scholars to consider the effects of searching more broadly, taking into account the macro and the micro, geographic scope and the scale of observation.  Together, Rutner, Schonfeld and Putnam make me think more critically about research processes. Term-fishing and side-glancing have been added to our methodology, but perhaps we need to be more considerate about what those processes mean. Are there digital footprints akin to the footnotes we use in our texts, do we track our searches and maintain the links we followed? What doesn’t appear? What exists in the shadows, as Putnam writes? If we only search digitized projects- how do we privilege time periods? Languages?

In what ways does text-searching reinforce the linguistic turn? Jones’s work makes a strong argument that the field has placed a great deal of emphasis on words. ““from the utterance there is, supposedly, everything!” (Jones 536). In emphasizing words we decontextualize word from deed and person from society. “History must find ways to relate words to deeds to overcome this renewed bout of tunnel vision…history still needs to find ways of aggregating, not just particularizing, its subjects.” (522) Thinking about Jones’s arguments in the context of Putnam – we need to be considerate of these issues in as we tackle large-scale text mining projects- what isn’t in the word? What deeds, actions and groups are missing? How can words be more directly linked to deed using digital tools? (My initial reaction would be to think of digital mapping projects that have begun to do just that, but I’ll reserve comments on those projects until next week).

Outside of searching- what can historians use digital tools to do? As we’ve read in the weeks prior, the digital humanities offers several interesting and important avenues for collecting, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting the historical record. The digital turn offers new tools coupled with new questions. One of the most meaningful changes as we address the digital must be the subject of scale. As Price writes, “A theoretical possibility of digital scholarship — the indefinite expansibility — has become a lived reality in our case.” (Price 17)

Perhaps the shift in scale offered by the digital enables us to take a longer view of history, while still being responsive to the critiques and concerns raised in the field since the 1970s. Armitage and Guldi explore the ‘Return of the Long Duree”  in their article and make a convincing case for taking a “macroscope” lens to the evidence and evaluating larger time periods and long term trends.

An additional shift in historical research is the changing role of visualization. Staley and Moss examine the way in which the digital turn enables historians to harness visualization in meaningful ways. Staley defines visualization as “any graphic that organizes meaningful information in multidimensional spatial form.” (xi) This is, of course, juxtaposed with narrative, or prose, “a one-dimensional medium” (Staley xi).

The thrust of an argument for the visualization of history seems to be that creating visualizations enables the reader to access multiple levels of information simultaneously. I was most excited to read Moss and Staley, and while they offered a compelling discussion of visualization in historical study – the same question still floats around my mind- can history be done with visual tools or are we restricted to prose- can visualization make an argument? 

Staley places this question at the center of his text and while he examines exciting and interesting visual presentations of history, I’m not sure he’s answered it.  Moss, on the other hand, traces the rise of the visual and argues (like Hayles) that today’s learners are conditioned to appreciate the visual. (“In harmony with mass culture, the visualized emphasis of society becomes the currency by which to express thought.” Moss 3)  It is important to note that while visuals, like photographs and maps, may be seen as communicating information about an historical time period and also as evidence from within that time period- these are not the types of visualization that Moss and Staley describe.

Rather we should be thinking about those visualizations that are generated to describe evidence.  “Data-rich” visualizations, as Staley describes them, are complicated, work on multiple levels, while also clear and concise.

It is hard, given that we’ve so few concrete examples of what this type of project looks like that I’m not able to judge it’s effectiveness. We’ll see how the next grouping of readings on mapping will shape my thinking.

 

 

This collection of readings grappled with making sense of the changes brought on by emerging digital technologies, tools and approaches. The works included in this grouping, though clearly written for different audiences, with different questions, and highlighting different concerns, provide a look at how ‘the digital turn’ may be shaping the way in which we think, read and access information.

I’m consistently assessing these readings in the context of my dissertation topic – thinking not only about the arguments they pose in relation to one another, but also how these arguments will shape the direction of my own project. Looking across the texts there are several main subjects and themes that are useful to consider. I paid particular attention to hypertext, scale, linearity (and nonlinearity), authorship, and participation.

These areas, consistently linked to digital work, are also useful in forming/building/answering my own questions.

The subject of participation is particularly meaningful for my work. One of the draws of digital work is the presentation of historical work that is both accessible and appropriate for members of the American deaf community. I anticipate that the use of video/visualizations (primarily for the purpose of communicating content in American Sign Language) may be disruptive to the dissertation in a conventional sense. It is in this sense that I read Katherine Hayle’s argument in How We Think, “The Age of Print is passing, and the assumptions, presuppositions, and practices associated with it are becoming visible as media-specific practices rather than the largely invisible status quo.” (pg 2)  Print traditions that draw a distinctive line between the oral traditions used within communities (like the American deaf community) and written text can take new digital forms.

Further, as Hayles indicates, the assumptions about how information can/should be shared are becoming revealed. In addition to defending a dissertation that may or may not be linear, uses a database and draws a large dataset- I anticipate having to discuss the rationality behind using digital media to convey historical information to a bilingual audience. The assumption that academic research should take a written form is not a new one. However, digital technologies offer a new challenge and new solutions. (The creation of a diglossic, blended presentation that utilizes both ASL and written English, for instance.)

There is some indication that choosing digital tools and presentations is participatory in another sense. Gee states “Digital media – themselves tools for meaning making, like writing – do not lend themselves strongly to a purely mental view in the way that reading and writing do… there is something more apparently social and institutional about digital media.” (pg 8). Gee’s work emphasizes the nature of learning in the context of digital media. Here, he argues that while writing also serves to “make meaning”, there’s something different about how digital media produces learning.

In Hyper/Text/Theory, Ess gets at a similar topic. He argues for the democratizing nature of hypertext believing that it “would facilitate discourse among a diversity of grass-roots communities that might agree, by way of the same form of discourse, upon different norms, and thereby preserve individual and cultural differences.” (251) Though the success of hypertext in creating a diversity of discourse is critiqued in more recent scholarship, I’d like to consider both Gee’s and Ess’ arguments. In what ways is digital work more or less “social”? Does that make it any less scholarly? Looking at contemporary practices, Web 2.0 is definitely built on the idea of participation. But I think Gee and Ess are speaking more broadly to the subject of linear/nonlinear narratives.

The audience participates in navigating the information provided. Though authorship is reserved for the creator of the site, users are given freedom to experiment and choose the way in which they move through the data. As we discussed in our meeting (and as is argued by Liu) the idea of a linear tradition is critiqued. Regardless, the form of my dissertation will likely include a participatory element but the shape of this requires a better idea of the scope of my project. I’d like users to access and/or manipulate data, I’d like to make arguments that support data, but I’d also like visitors to draw conclusions as well.

Thinking about the audience further even more questions jump to mind: What is a deaf digital discourse? What form would it take and how might that differ from conventional digital discourse? Given my research – there has been very little work done to answer these questions.

Deaf community members have embraced digital technologies, particularly those of video conferencing, recording and presentation. (Reinforcing Gee’s point that “digital tools have allowed ‘everyday people’ to produce and not just consume media” producing a “participatory culture” (pg 12)) But I’ve no real sense of how these technologies may or may not be included in my digital work.

In general, I’ve a vague sense of what the final project will look like – readings are often raising more questions than they are answering – but that’s the point.

For the remainder of the summer, I’ll be using this space to document and discuss my reactions to the readings we’ll be doing in our Digital History minor field reading at GMU. Given that the readings are meant to prepare us for our work in DH, I’ll be focusing many of my comments on wrestling with and formulating my own arguments and sensibilities regarding work in the field and looking ahead to my research and dissertation work. This should not be taken as a complete or comprehensive encounter with these works but rather my own process of coming to terms with DH as a field and situating myself within it. Generally, the goal is to create a post prior to each meeting as a means of organizing my thoughts and preparing for a fruitful discussion.

That minor caveat aside, the works we examined this week were clustered around the subject of Digital Humanities, Past, Present and Future.  The title seems a bit ambitious, but overall the readings were rather timely given the recent posts by Stephen Robertson and Scott Paul McGinnis on DH Now. It would seem that this week we are naming the elephant in the room: What does it mean to practice Digital Humanities and how does Digital History fit within (or outside of) Digital Humanities?

After reading these works I find myself with largely the same questions in mind.

This week we’ve focused on several broad texts; Understanding Digital Humanities by Barry et al, Digital­­_Humanities by Burdick, Drucker, Lunenfeld, Presner and Schnapp, and Debates in the Digital Humanities by Matthew Gold, et al as well as smaller, more focused works by Fred Gibbs and Trevor Owens (“Building Better Digital Humanities Tools”), Stephen Ramsey (Reading Machines), John Unsworth, (“Scholarly Primitives”), G. Hall (“Toward a Post-Digital Humanities”), and Andrew Prescott (“Consumers, Creators or Commentators?”).

Putting these texts in conversation really highlighted the subjects that receive significant emphasis in DH discourse. Generally each of the works offered a definition of Digital Humanities that placed it in the context of a larger history of humanities computing and struggled to articulate the role of DH in generating scholarship. Many demonstrated an anxiety about digital publishing. They demonstrated concern with getting ‘credit’ for digital work and contended with the notion of ‘publish or perish’ that is enacted in the academic workplace.

I found each of these subjects interesting, but given my current concerns (the structure and direction of my dissertation) I find myself still struggling to articulate or conceptualize my place within the field (and leaning closer to Prescott’s critique- that we focus our energy on internal debates when we should be informing theory). The central question, the one that will underlie my thinking on the readings in this course, is the same question I’ve been asked, repeatedly, by former advisors and historians: why digital history? With the option of going down a traditional history path, why have I thrown myself into the digital?

Climbing into the “big tent” of DH for my answer, I’m finding myself attracted to work by McPherson, Losh, Edwards, and Williams (in Gold, et al) which highlight for me the multiple communities within which my work will operate. The transformative, iterative and accessible nature of DH work provides for new and innovative activities regarding production and presentation of scholarship- methods which could transform the way in which deaf history is envisioned. In many ways, I’m inspired by Parry’s assertion that DH represents an understanding of new modes of scholarship, as a field that represents change, not only in tools but in the nature of scholarship itself. Burdick, et al make a similar point, “…Digital Humanties activity seeks to revitalize liberal arts traditions in the electronically inflected language of the 21^st century: a language in which… text is increasingly wedded to still and moving images as well as to sound …” (122).

Deaf Studies scholars have posited a similar shift in literary theory and analysis regarding American Sign Language literature (Bauman, et al). The emergence of video technologies that record and preserve signed performances has resulted in significant shift in the discussion and analysis of ASL literature and poetry and furthered exploration in new and innovation means of performing and documenting these works. To what degree will Digital History effect change on the collection, distribution, analysis, interpretation, of deaf history?

As Robertson’s article suggested, answers regarding the issues significant to Digital History are more often found outside of the texts we’ve read this week. Few works dealt with the subject of Digital History directly. Approaching these texts, I hoped for a discussion of Digital History on par with the approach to literary text analysis offered by Ramsay. But there was no text that suggested a major shift in the theory and process of historical scholarship. In fact, Gibbs and Owens, demonstrated that historians using digital tools are yet to fully embrace new tools and methodologies – rather, they are more likely to utilize digital tools on traditional projects in traditional ways. Scheinfeldt suggests that time is needed, as is the understanding that sometimes tools are built to answer questions and sometimes tools produce their own questions.

As a newcomer to the field, I’m yet to articulate my point of view. Reading this week indicates that the field, particularly digital history, has yet to do the same.  But discussion at work and in class leads me to believe that the places where the Digital History is realized are centers like CHNM. Looking forward to more discussion next week.