DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2016
Volume 10 Number 4
Volume 10 Number 4
A Digital Humanist-Informatician Review of Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson, editors, Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities
Abstract
This is a review of Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), a collection of essays by contemporary rhetoricians edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson. These essays are often notable in their thoroughgoing efforts to theorize the work of digital humanities in scholarship and teaching. In addition to serving as an introduction to the digital humanities for rhetoricians, this book is of value to digital humanists residing in informatics programs, as well as those in English studies generally
Rhetoricians can boast working in a more or less unbroken conversation stretching
back to before Corax and Tisias, two millennia before modern English was spoken. Of
course, humans have been speaking, reasoning, and arguing long before that, and all
over the planet. The rhetorical tradition starting in the Mediterranean is generally
considered unique because it both produced and theorized rhetoric at the same time.
And in the present, the teaching and study of rhetoric is consistently theoretically
self-aware. Surveying the methodologies of presenters at the 2015 Indiana Digital
Rhetoric Symposium and also reflecting on the state of the field, Crystal VanKooten
assigns theory more than half of a pie chart and concludes “Most of us are theorizing digital
rhetoric”
[VanKooten 2015].
That is one reason for reading this book. It has been argued (by, for example,
Drucker and Liu in the landmark collection Debates in the
Digital Humanities) that digital humanities is strong on method and
short on self-examination, criticism, and theorizing. Although most of the 23
chapters in this collection are applied studies of one form or another, they are all
theoretically informed. As their authors – who are mostly faculty in rhetoric
programs – join this conversation on the digital humanities, they bring a
thoroughgoing theoretical examination.
Drucker and Liu’s stance toward DH is reinforced when contributors McNely and Teston
assert: “Rhetorically-informed digital
humanists should proceed with caution — doing DH is not as simple as
choosing a digital tool and then combining that tool and tactic with a given
methodological approach; indeed, a given tactic may be at odds with one's
strategy”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 112]. Their observation might seem self-evident, an enthymeme grounded in how
critics have been trained for decades: we always have a theory and some narrative of
literary history in mind when we read. This may not be so self-evident in a time
when it is not surprising to see a digital humanist pick up the latest technology
and run with it just to see what happens. We might throw fifty novels at an
algorithm to see what sticks, and think about interpretation and narrative after we
have some results — and many might argue that this is an entirely valid methodology.
But there is more at stake here. This book is published and I write this review in a
moment when some argue that theory is no longer necessary — see for example Chris
Anderson's essay “The End of Theory” and the cluster of
essays it introduces in Wired Magazine
[Anderson 2008], and the collection of essays published by Microsoft,
The Fourth Paradigm
[Hey et al. 2009]: machines process mountains of data and find patterns and
correlations with more predictive power than our theories can. Beyond truisms, what
we need is an examination of how the use of theory has and is changing. Digital
tools are (or should be – provided one's tools are not a black box) manifestations
of theory, such as Bayes' theorem or other statistical models, along with some basic
structuralist assumptions.
Below I account for some of the contributions to this thoughtful collection.
The positionality of the digital humanities, and how it might disrupt established
disciplinary lines, is much discussed at the moment (for that matter, so is the
institutional status of English studies generally). Chapters take on these
disciplinary issues, and these are all distinguished by self-awareness. Reid argues
that just as digital humanities disrupts the humanities, digital rhetorics are
post-human, post-structuralist disruptions of humanist traditions in rhetoric.
Carter, Jones, and Hamcumpai argue for viewing disciplinary lines like rhetoric and
DH not as territory to be seized and defended but rather as kairos
(situations, occasions of opportunity and need for rhetoric). Walls builds a theory
of interdisciplinarity (a “rhetoric of alliance”), based on
histories of native peoples in North America.
Two theoretically-aware case studies of editing projects demonstrate how we might
proceed on practical projects while trying to maintain theoretical awareness. Eyman
and Ball narrate their efforts to put in place a new online publishing system for
the online journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology
and Pedagogy. This effort at digital production included rhetorical
self-analysis at every step. Along similar lines, Boyle asks what makes an online
archive of Quintilian's works genuinely rhetorical.
Other contributors explore new methods to conduct research in writing and
communication. Johnson suggests ways we might model scholarly influence, beginning
with citation data. These include factor analysis, grouping by institutions, and
geographic mapping. How he would get all the information he plans to model is not
always clear, but his arguments could point to future studies. The primary
counter-argument Johnson sets himself against is that many humanists are skeptical
of numbers and suspicious of reducing their own influence to numbers (particularly
as these numbers could be used for tenure) and he says, “Scholars who are hesitant to adopt
numerical values as a way to bargain for tenure and promotions are giving up
one of the more powerful argumentative rhetorics of the twenty-first century
— the use of mathematics”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 100]. While the data available are far from complete,[1] this does not mean that
studies that map what we can see, like what Johnson suggests, cannot lead to
important results. If, say, we can see a third or half of all citations or some
other fraction, then generalizations we make about influence could still be worth
investigating in the ways that Johnson suggests, even if the rate of recall would be
unacceptable for matters of tenure and promotion.
Kennedy and Long use online interaction to view the writing process. They argue that
sources such as the version histories of wiki pages (where every single edit is
recorded), can be an excellent place to study authorship: “these writerly moves and practices
reveal the authorial life of the writer . . . as well as the life of the
document”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 148]. They provide a short primer on qualitative approaches to online behavior,
and discuss how the data can be collected, managed, and coded — as well as ethical
considerations. This chapter would serve as an excellent starting point for research
projects investigating digital authorship and online behavior more generally, as
would McNely and Teston's chapter.
Hart describes his effort running a commercial program, DICTION, to perform sentiment
analysis of the words in a corpus of texts with predefined genres. The corpus is
described only as “sixteen thousand
contemporary texts spanning the rhetorical universe”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 161] and I wish we were told what the texts were
and how they were assigned to genres. He observes that “DICTION cannot distinguish between a
sentence like ‘the dog bit the man’ and ‘the man bit the
dog’”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 158].
To Hart’s credit, this is the only reference in the collection to the concept of the
“bag of words,” so it was disappointing how quickly he moved past this
important point. In topic modeling, a very popular method of text mining at the
moment, a topic is defined as a distribution of words over a fixed
vocabulary [Blei 2012] and should not be conflated with a rhetorical
topos. Hart says that the software supposes “that audiences depend on human understandings of
proportionality when responding to a text”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 158], that is, simply: the more optimistic words
are contained in a text, the more optimistic a text is. This methodology holds up
and shakes documents so that the words fall into a bag, defining as a text a set of
probabilities of words. This general method, combined with the scale of corpora,
would seem to flatten rhetorical situations and empty individual texts of their
intentional (if we might otherwise be inclined to look for intention) and suasive
content. I hope to hear more speculation by rhetoricians of what happens to
rhetorical texts when they are viewed at the scale at which Franco Morretti and many
other digital humanists prefer to operate. We can argue about whether Hart has
adequately theorized his digital tools here, but this piece deserves credit for
spurring exactly that argument.
Three thoughtful chapters on archives and digitization should be read by the broad
community of researchers concerned with digital archives and libraries. Hoffman and
Waisanen's chapter provides a survey of algorithmic tools for analyzing texts and
corpora. Like Hart, they theorize these methods rhetorically. They bring in the
theory of the “ideograph” as formulated by Michael McGee, referring to specific
words that carry ideological weight in a given historic moment [Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 180]. The idea here is similar to Raymond Williams'
“keywords,” and several other formulations linking words with ideologies.
When in DH we count words and find patterns, we hope that the words will serve as
surrogates for something significant. But so far this is a blunt instrument and we
cannot generalize from one case to another very well. This activity would benefit
from more general theorizing, and contributors to this book offer some points of
entry.
Samra Graban, Ramsey-Tobienne, and Myers do something that should be done more often.
They survey theoretical issues – “invigorating epistemological
dilemmas”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 235] – raised by digital archives: location, access, authorization, digitizations,
publics, and metadata (along with Eyman and Ball’s, this essay stands out for
addressing issues of metadata). This is a starting point, and deeper exploration is
still needed.
Rice and Rice describe efforts at participatory archiving, similar to many projects
in community-based archiving and community informatics (and they would probably
benefit from studying this body of research). The archives Rice and Rice advocate
are bottom-up and not necessarily built to last: “while its longevity may be useful for a number of
reasons, we would not consider this archive a failure if it is erased tomorrow.
The pop-up archive's focus is not in preservation but in the gesture and
performance of archiving moments”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 251]. Like many contributions in this collection,
I would love to take the essay into a seminar in informatics and ask graduate
students to respond to this claim.
For some working in archiving and cultural heritage, this could sound like a shot
across the bow. What I mean is: everything that Barack Obama and John Boehner say is
carefully preserved with the intention of keeping it findable, usable, and
trustworthy for as long as there might be persons to read it — because it is
considered important. Many in the cultural heritage community are doing the same
thing with the texts, artifacts, and stories left behind by members of subaltern
groups which otherwise might be forgotten. On the one hand, building archives not
defined by persistence is wonderfully provocative: it can prompt questions about the
nature of memory and cultural production and narrative. On the other hand, the
longevity of archives from Queen Elizabeth II or Donald Trump is in little doubt. We
preserve what we value.
Potts's essay starts from a withering critique of digital archives: “these systems are clunky at best and irrelevant at
worst”; they “prioritize data over
experience”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 255]. She states “What these archives in practice and
the digital humanities in general desperately need is a sense of audience,
appeal, and interaction”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 255]. In fact, were Potts to walk into an iSchool she would find research and
practitioners in whole subfields like knowledge organization, computer-supported
cooperative work, community informatics, and even wonks in information retrieval who
are constantly asking the same user-centered questions. My point here is not simply
to refute a deficit Potts would fill, but rather to say that there are more people
speaking her language than she seems to expect.
Several contributions cite Matthew Kirschenbaum's argument that students in the
humanities should learn to code, and also Ian Bogost's formulation of “procedural
literacy.” Two of the most interesting pieces, by Stolley and Ballentine,
could be read as responding directly to Potts, arguing “Many of the discussions of making
fetishize the concept of coding”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 257] — and this is another claim I would take into an information science seminar.
This pair of essays by technical communication specialists makes fascinating
arguments in favor of learning to program, and are among the most interesting in the
volume (the editors did place them immediately following Potts' piece, and
rhetoricians do love an argument).
Stolley discusses programming in Rails in an essay that, along with Hart's
contribution, is probably the best read in the book. He argues that coding is an
essentially writerly activity. In observing that Rails is installed and accessed
entirely through the command line with no downloading, dragging, or double-clicking,
he says, “Rails can be installed, invoked, and
developed entirely though writing”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 265]. This is one of the most striking sentences, seeming self-evident once it is
said yet thought-provoking, that I have read in a while.
Ballentine argues that the alternative to procedural literacy is “rapid obsolescence,” and “our future requires...collaboration with computer
science and technical communication in order to not be shut out of important
discussions (and our own interpretive practices) because we do not have the
language to argue in these spaces”
[Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015, 278–279]. He goes on to offer a case study of a
technical writing project, providing documentation integrated into the display of
X-ray, MRI, and CT scans. An intimate understanding of the code controlling how the
documentation displays and interacts with the operation of the system is necessary
for effective writing. Lack of such understanding would render the writing alone
useless.
This volume should be read by digital humanists in their various disciplinary homes.
It is a good introduction for those coming from a rhetoric background, and is of
interest not only to those in English studies generally, but also to digital
humanists in informatics programs. Of course, it is somewhat artificial to segregate
rhetoricians, who swim in the same water as their colleagues in English and
Communications departments, from other scholars with research agendas in digital
humanities. But we can go further. Reading the essays in this book, I often found
myself thinking that if these researchers were to walk into the nearest iSchool, and
compare notes with researchers in informatics, both would benefit from the resulting
conversations.
Notes
[1] The issue of tenure and
bibliometrics is timely and important enough to note the accuracy and recall of
citation counting. There are good reasons to be skeptical of citation numbers
when it comes to the humanities and social sciences: our abilities to extract
citation from databases of journal articles in the humanities and social
sciences is not as reliable as it is in the natural sciences; monographs are
much more important in the humanities and social sciences than they are in the
hard sciences, and citations in books have not been reliably mined at the
moment; and articles in the sciences cite more sources. There is also evidence
that researchers are reading more even as they cite less (see Renear and Palmer
2009; Larivière, Gingras, and Archamboult 2009; Marx and Bornmann 2015; and
Larivière and Macaluso 2011). For that matter, our current ability to gather all
citations in the sciences is less thane ideal.
Works Cited
Anderson 2008 Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method
Obsolete,”
Wired 16.7 (23 June 2008). http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory/
Blei 2012 Blei, David M. “Introduction to Probabilistic Topic Models,”
Communications of the ACM 55.4 (2012): 77-84.
Hey et al. 2009 Hey, Tony; Tansley, Stewart; and
Kristin Tolle. The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive
Scientific Discovery. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Research, 2009.
Larivière and Macaluso 2011 Larivière, Vincent
and Macaluso, Benoit. “Improving the Coverage of Social
Science and Humanities Researchers' Output: The Case of the Érudit Journal
Platform,”
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology 62.12 (2011): 2437-2442.
Larivière, Archambault, Gingras and Vignola-Gagné 2006 Larivière, Vincent; Archambault, Éric; Gingras, Yves; and
Étienne Vignola-Gagné. “The Place of Serials in Referencing
Practices: Comparing Natural Sciences and Engineering with Social Sciences
and Humanities,”
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
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Larivière, Gingras and Archambault 2009
Larivière, Vincent; Gingras, Yves; and Éric Archambault. “The Decline in the Concentration of Citations, 1900-2007,”
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
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Marx and Bornmann 2015 Marx, Werner and Lutz
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in Web of Science,”
Scientometrics 102.2 (2015): 1823-1827.
Renear and Palmer 2009 Renear, Allen H. and
Carole L. Palmer. “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the
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Science 325 (2009): 828-832.
Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015 Ridolfo, Jim and
William Hart-Davidson. Rhetoric and the Digital
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Emerging Field,” presentation at Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium,
Indiana University, April 10, 2015. http://idrs.indiana.edu/program/presentations.shtml