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ISSN 1938-4122
Announcements
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2018 12.2
Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet
Editor: Marion Thain
Front Matter
Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age
of the Internet
Marion Thain, King's College London
Abstract
[en]
Our digital gadgets are often blamed for introducing unprecedented levels of
distraction, but how might we recognize and harness the attentional
possibilities such an environment offers? This editorial essay introduces a
special issue of DHQ devoted to thinking about distracted reading, and sets out
an agenda and a context for our exploration of distributed modes of attention.
Articles
How Scholars Read Now: When the Signal
Is the Noise
Jennifer Edmond, Trinity College Dublin
Abstract
[en]
Distraction is not a problem for scholarly reading in the humanities: it is, in
fact, intrinsic to how we work. An openness to distraction facilitates knowledge
creation in conversation with and between sources, bringing together disparate
times and places, authors and forms of source material, frames of reference and
layers of insight, harnessing peripheral vision as much as central focus to
create the conditions for serendipitous discovery. This “loose
hold” on focus results in a knowledgescape with a substantial
tacit dimension, with the result that humanists most certainly know more than we
can tell. This is not to say that the epistemic process of the humanist is all
encompassing, however: administrative work, for example, is viewed as a
“true” distraction, and managed accordingly.
In spite of the wide availability of digital tools to consolidate and organise
the process of extracting information from the reading of sources (be they text,
image, landscape or indeed even the self), the notetaking process of the
humanist remains stubbornly multimodal, harnessing embodied, material, and
spatial dimensions of knowledge. The resulting knowledge environments humanists
create around themselves resemble life-sized realisations in mixed media of a
Prezi stack, a physical manifestation of the fragmented, capricious, haphazard
stream of influences jostling for scholarly attention, and the scholar’s
understanding that their system inter-relationships are complex, sometimes
tenuous, and largely undiscovered.
This article will lay out the evidence for and implications of this understanding
of humanistic reading, and then explore possible future paths for using
technology to explore and indeed celebrate distraction, including: Technology as
blurring the line between the personal and the professional, not so much as a
labour practice, but as an epistemic one opening the way to the validation of
“epistemic emotions” as a valid research input, but also
to the more effective convergence of humanities research with other inputs to
the identity formation process of seemingly distracted undergraduates; and
research infrastructural implications for libraries (where remote storage and
electronic catalogues diminish the likelihood for serendipity, essentially by
reducing distraction) but also for vitual research environments founded upon a
new understanding of what the ideal humanistic work environment might be and how
to get “below the level” of that work.
Distributed reading: Literary reading in diverse
environments
Tully Barnett, Flinders University
Abstract
[en]
Reading has always been a contentious and political practice, but this is heightened
in the contemporary moment both because of the way the environments in which we read
are changing so radically. For Katherine Hayles reading is
“a powerful technology for reconfiguring
activity patterns in the brain”
, a view representative of attempts to connect the new neuroscience of reading
with age old practices of literary endeavour. For Sven Birkerts, however,
“the Internet and the novel are
opposites”
, a view that suggests that a hierarchy of reading that locks digital readers
out of higher order thinking and literary experience. Meanwhile, Anne Mangen finds
that electronic reading environments
“negatively affect emotional aspects of
reading”
. But these approaches tend to understand reading as something static that
occurs in one space or another. However, in practice our reading is increasingly
distributed. Reading can occur in multiple formats, across multiple platforms for the
one text or reading experience. A novel begun in print can be read online in a
born-digital format and concluded in a scanned digital format, for example. These
journeys across platform require deeper investigation.
If we think of the printed book as an interface between two orders of thinking, we
need to consider how the experience of reading a digitized version of a formerly
printed and bound book alters literary reception and student experience. How does the
experience of reading across different technological platforms change the reader’s
relationship to the content? As more and more electronic reading platforms take on
the physical attributes of material reading experiences either by retaining material
traces or by emulating them, we might question what experience How do the material
traces left on digitised works impact the reading process for reading in literary
studies? The lively discourse surrounding Google Books and the human breaches of the
material into the immaterial, as the work crosses the borders of formats and
interfaces, raises valuable questions about the future of the book, reading in the
twenty-first century, and the long and formidable shadow that centuries of material
text production casts over Google Books’ electronic utopia. This paper uses both book
history and new media interface theory to consider the multitude of diverse
experiences that is literary reading across different platforms in and out of the
classroom and to consider whether distracted reading can be better understood as
distributed reading. It considers critical infrastructure studies as a useful
framework through which to think about reading in the digital age.
The Imaginary Museum: Teaching Art History with
Mobile Digital Technology
Martha Hollander, Hofstra University
Abstract
[en]
The advent of handheld digital devices has proved to be revolutionary for the
teaching of art history. They make it possible to supplement, even replace, the
traditional format of lecturing and communal viewing of a single screen. On their
personal screens, students can enter a searchable world of thousands of virtual
images: what the radical art theorist and novelist André Malraux, more than half a
century ago, called “the imaginary museum.” For several years, I
have been experimenting with my art history classes, showing my students how to use
their laptops, tablets and phones to become active viewers and collaborators.
Multiple virtual images transform the content, as well as the environment, of
learning art history. Rather than being restricted to the illustrations in a
textbook, students can use their devices to engage with online image sources such as
museum websites, image databanks, and auction houses. Portable digital technology can
turn the art history classroom into a collaborative and dynamic experience
inconceivable a short time ago. Malraux himself, who believed in the power of art to
transcend time and space, might be amazed at what is now not only possible, but
commonplace.
From Distracted to Distributed Attention:
Expanded Learning through Social Media, Augmented Reality, Remixing, and
Activist Geocaching
Marina Hassapopoulou, New York University
Abstract
[en]
With the increasing proliferation of digital technologies into our daily
routines, long-standing debates have resurfaced on the potential of prosthetic
devices to extend our cognitive capacities and distribute intelligence across
human and non-human agents. This article will propose ways in which we, as
educators, can harness the distractions that new technologies can pose to
teaching and research towards productive models of distributed attention and
collective intelligence.
By reflecting on the relationship between play and pedagogy through critical
theory, as well as on the benefits of hyper-connected and collaborative
learning, this article hopes to expand the branch of Digital Humanities that
Holly Willis terms as the “cinematic
humanities.” Remixing, recontextualization, and the
non-linear/non-sequential reconfiguration of information can provide us with new
modes of distributed attention and critical making in the digital age.
This article focuses on low and no-budget process-oriented collaborative projects
for Cinema, Media Studies, and Digital Humanities courses (adjustable to other
subject matters) that incorporate remixing, social and locative media, and
augmented reality into experimental modes of connected and collaborative
learning. The first assignment is a live film scoring remix, where students
collectively brainstormed on picking sound clips/samples to add new soundtracks
to early silent films. Remixing practices can offer new insights into cinema's
legacy and challenge ocularcentric notions of film spectatorship by, in this
case, reversing the conventional hierarchy of image-sound into sound-image and
reflecting on how our minds attempt to process the impulse of sensory
synchronization in cinema. The second sample assignment proposes new ways of
using easy-to-learn and accessible GIS (Geographic Information System) and AR
(Augmented Reality) tools to create projects related to civic engagement and
local/online activism.
The drifts from pre-determined learning outcomes are meant to be active
disruptions to any prescribed limitations that delimit what digital humanities
should or should not be, and other issues that often undermine the potential
contributions to digital humanities that derive from the intellectual and
material labor that happens in the networked, expanded and distributed
classroom. The remix aesthetic, the “unfinished” and
makeshift nature of these projects is something that I find adds value to this
kind of process-oriented pedagogy because it remains in touch with the
pre-institutionalized experimental ethos that prompted the formation of the
digital humanities and other disciplinary cross-pollinations.
From Distracted to Recursive Reading:
Facilitating Knowledge Transfer through Annotation Software
Sarah E. Kersh, Dickinson College; Chelsea Skalak, Dickinson College
Abstract
[en]
Rather than seeing hypertext as offering only distracted reading, this paper
argues that annotation software provides students with the opportunity to
perform recursive reading: a process that facilitates knowledge transfer and
encourages intersectional critical approaches to texts. As hypertext editions
and online reading communities have proliferated, scholars have theorized that
these layered, interactive modes of reading produce distracted readings of
texts, especially in pedagogical contexts. With annotation software, however,
researchers and students have the opportunity not just to consume these
distracted readings, but to produce them. Within the classroom, annotation
software assignments require a deeper psychological investment from students
than simply consuming a hypertext edition. By choosing how and where to annotate
a particular text, students’ distributed modes of attention are re-focused on
the text itself, pulling disparate threads of thought together.
Reading, Making, and Metacognition: Teaching
Digital Humanities for Transfer
Paul Fyfe, North Carolina State University
Abstract
[en]
This paper argues that digital humanities pedagogy can provide unique forms of
attention and engagement for students at the outset of their college and
university careers. It reports on courses taught at NC State University and
elsewhere which use digital humanities pedagogy under the aegis of studying
transformations in “reading.” With attention to the mediation of attention
itself, these courses can cultivate habits of self-reflection to aid students in
any disciplinary pathway. Furthermore, digital humanities pedagogy can offer a
transferable project-based model of instruction, helping students to develop
metacognitive skills as well as to acculturate to different environments across
campus. Ultimately, this essay underscores the need to articulate strategies of
educational transfer in digital pedagogy.
Laptop Policy: Notes on Boredom
Grant Wythoff, Pennsylvania State University
Abstract
[en]
In this essay, I examine the use of laptops in the classroom
through the lens of boredom. Now that we can carry around an incredibly powerful
little computer in our pockets or bring a lightweight laptop to class, boredom
is a feeling that we almost never have to face anymore. We instantly alleviate
the slightest hint of impatience or aimlessness with a single glance at our
screens. But what introspective capacities do we neglect when we reflexively
give ourselves over to the distractions of the outside world? What might
dwelling within our boredom open up to students? Using my undergraduate
Introduction to Digital Media course as a case study, I argue that a humanistic
approach to digital media provides STEM students in particular with a means of
contextualizing technical detail within larger sociopolitical systems, and that
a focus on individual habits of attention can provide an important hinge between
the granular and the global. Next, I reflect on the pressures produced by the
very devices we studied on the classroom environment, and frame our experiences
within some of the most influential writings on boredom as a historically and
technologically conditioned mood. I then conclude with some speculations on
planning for boredom within a laptop policy that is capable of accounting for a
range of learning styles.
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.
Reconstructing
Brandon (1998-1999): A Cross-disciplinary
Digital Humanities Study of Shu Lea Cheang’s Early Web Artwork
Deena Engel, New York University; Lauren Hinkson, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Joanna Phillips, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Marion Thain, New York University
Abstract
[en]
This paper explores the art history, the digital aesthetics, the technical
anatomy, and the restoration of Shu Lea Cheang’s early web artwork Brandon (1998-1999). Commissioned two decades ago by
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the work is just back on view to the public
after a major restoration. It seems timely to consider Cheang’s artwork: a
collaboration between the artist and a network of programmers, designers,
authors and other contributors that offers a creative platform for remembering
and engaging with histories and issues of identity from the LGBTQ+ community. In
the spirit of the piece, this article is a multi-disciplinary collaboration
between a curator, a media art conservator, a computer scientist, and a scholar
of the digital liberal arts, which brings together these different areas of
expertise to offer an innovative and multi-faceted consideration of one artwork
from a digital humanities perspective.
Using structured text corpora in Parliamentary
Metadata Language for the analysis of legislative
proceedings
Richard Gartner, Warburg Institute, London, UK
Abstract
[en]
This article examines the potential of employing structured texts, encoded in the
Parliamentary Metadata Language XML schema, for the machine-readable analysis of
substantial corpora of legislative proceedings. It demonstrates the potential of
using PML corpora for combining the results of sentiment analysis with
contextual metadata to establish and visualise patterns of divergent attitudes
towards a topic such as immigration as they correlate with such features as
party affiliation or geographic location. This is readily achieved using such
simple techniques as XSLT transformations or XQUERY searches.
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.