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ISSN 1938-4122
Announcements
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2018 12.2
Articles
Manuscript Study in Digital Spaces: The State of
the Field and New Ways Forward
Bridget Almas, The Alpheios Project, Ltd.; Emad Khazraee, School of Information, Kent State University; Matthew Thomas Miller, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland College Park; Joshua Westgard, University Libraries, University of Maryland College Park
Abstract
[en]
In the last decade tremendous advances have been made in the tools and platforms
available for the digital study of manuscripts. Much work, however, remains to
be done in order to address the wide range of pedagogical, cataloging,
preservation, scholarly (individual and collaborative), and citizen science
(crowdsourcing) workflows and use cases in a user-friendly manner. This study
(1) summarizes the feedback of dozens of technologists, manuscript experts, and
curators obtained through survey data and workshop focus groups; (2) provides a
“state of the field” report which assesses the current
tools available and their limitations; and, (3) outlines principles to help
guide future development. The authors in particular emphasize the importance of
producing tool-independent data, fostering intellectual “trading
zones” between technologists, scholars, librarians, and curators,
utilizing a code base with an active community of users, and re-conceptualizing
tool-creation as a collaborative form of humanistic intellectual labor.
BigDIVA and Networked Browsing: A Case for Generous
Interfacing and Joyous Searching
Joel Schneier, North Carolina State University; Timothy Stinson, North Carolina State University; Matthew Davis, McMaster University
Abstract
[en]
This paper examines the potentialities of networked browsing, a form of
faceted searching that visualizes digital archives in the form of a force-directed
network graph. Using BigDIVA.org as an example of networked browsing, this paper
presents the results of a small usability study that compared how participants (N = 8) engaged with BigDIVA’s networked browsing in comparison
to use of a search engine such as Google. In doing so, we situate our study within
performative conceptualizations of human-computer interfaces in order to explore the potential becomings when human and
nonhuman machinic component are entangled together. Based on the observations from
our usability study, we argue that networked browsing is suggestive of Whitelaw’s
(2015) “generous interfacing” that emphasizes browsing as
a tool for exploring relationships between nodes in archives, as well as
Shneiderman’s (1996) “joyous experience” for interfacing
with the web.
Predicting the
Past
Tobias Blanke, King's College London, Department of Digital Humanities
Abstract
[en]
Digital humanities have a long tradition of using advanced computational
techniques and machine learning to aid humanistic enquiry. In this paper, we
concentrate on a specific subfield of machine learning called predictive
analytics and its use in digital humanities. Predictive analytics has evolved
from descriptive analytics, which creates summaries of data, while predictive
analytics predicts relationships within the data that also help to explain new
data. Predictive analytics uses machine learning techniques but also traditional
statistical methods. It uses properties (or features) of the data to predict
another target feature in the data. Machine learning is used by predictive
analytics to establish the rules that given a certain combination of features
make the target more or less likely. Predictive analytics can thus be considered
to be a technique to machine-read data. The paper discusses the background of
predictive analytics, its use for predicting the past and finally presents a
case study in predicting past gender relations in a historical dataset.
Predicting the past is introduced as a method to explore relationships in past
data.
Reverse Engineering the First Humanities
Computing Center
Steven Jones, University of South Florida
Abstract
[en]
The Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, is often called the founder of humanities
computing. In fact, starting as early as 1949, he collaborated with IBM to
perform experiments using suites of punched-card machines. These punched-card
data systems—with their plug-board setups, clacking machinery, and flurries of
perforated rectangular cards—were developed for business accounting and
tabulating, and adapted for government censuses, defense calculations, archival
management, and information processing of all kinds. The first decade of
humanities computing can more accurately be described as an era of humanities
data processing—in the historically specific and contextually rich sense of the
term. This essay describes an ongoing collabroative project that aims to reverse
engineer that center in the attempt to understand better this important site in
the history of technology and humanities computing.
Stealing a Corpus: Appropriating Aesop’s Body in the
Early Age of Print
Alex Mueller, University of Massachusetts Boston
Abstract
[en]
The fate of the medieval Aesop during the early age of print reveals the tensions
that arise between corporeal and proprietary understandings
of artistic production. Building upon the highly accumulative, various, and
expandable Aesopic tradition that thrived in the Middle Ages within scholastic
manuscripts, the fifteenth-century fables of Robert Henryson and William Caxton
confront movements to consolidate and transform Aesop’s sprawling literary corpus
into a singular printable property. At the same time that a single series of Aesop’s
fables, now known as the elegiac Romulus, became
increasingly standardized within printed books, woodcut illustrations and textual
descriptions increasingly beautified Aesop’s body, transforming him from an
inarticulate slave to an eloquent aristocrat. The simultaneous metamorphosis of
Aesop’s poetic and visual corpus reveals the premodern underpinnings for current
efforts by publishing industries to immunize digital work from rogue acts of
appropriation, mashup, and remix, practices which had previously defined Aesopic
textuality. As a response to this textual vulnerability, the collapse of Aesopic work
into a singular entity reimagines the allegorical relationship between the author or
publisher and the work as proprietary, not corporeal. Rather than an extension of a
generative, deeply somatic, and grotesque process of multiple fabular authors and
commentators, the modernized Aesop obtains value as a “property,”
paving the way for the notion that creative corpuses can be
“owned,” effectively stealing away corporeal features from
intellectual production.
Issues in Digital Humanities
Methodological Nearness and the Question of
Computational Literature
Michael Marcinkowski, Bath Spa University
Abstract
[en]
The rise of the use of computational methods in both the study and production of
literature poses questions about how to best read works of electronic literature
which engage a wider sphere of human context beyond the literary text itself.
Taking a cue from modes of “distant reading” that have taken
advantage of computational methods in order to pursue empirical and
sociologically-influenced readings of traditional textual corpora, the liminal
case of “ambient literature” is examined. As a form of
electronic literature developed out of the field of ubiquitous computing,
ambient literature presents a literature which is intimately connected to the
situation of the reader, offering a text whose meaning is both variable and
specific to the conditions of its engagement. Having confronted analogous issues
in other domains, traditions of research in human-computer interaction offer
methodological insight into how such works might be read. Developing an account
of how literary texts may be read from a distance through user studies, an
ethnomethodological analysis of the experience of these hybrid works of
electronic literature is advanced. By drawing connections between literary
studies and human-computer interaction, new methods which focus on the analysis
of the experience of multiple readers as they encounter works of electronic
literature establish opportunities for future research into the contextual,
embodied, and computational nature of literature today.
Author Biographies
URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/preview/index.html
Last updated:
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
Affiliated with: Literary and Linguistic Computing
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Last updated:
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
Affiliated with: Literary and Linguistic Computing
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.