The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a fascinating description of clinical schizophrenia, or dementia prœcox. The idea for the yellow wallpaper in the room may be related to the fact that some wallpapers were painted with colors which caused deadly fumes. Perhaps some were associated with insanity?
Also: “Association of both green and yellow with the concept of poison has not been fully abandoned until today…”
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What’s Next for Literary Studies? by Stanley Fish. It’s a little late, but it’s an interesting idea.
Ted Underwood’s response to Stanley Fish’s column.
The Research Exchange Index: “designed to recognize local, national, and international writing researchers by periodically collecting and publishing information about the research studies they’ve conducted. REx is also designed to solve a longstanding problem in writing studies: timely access to the information writing researchers are gathering and learning from their research.”
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Selloutyoursoul.com has 35 Jobs for English Majors.
We should be pointing these out to our students.
Especially in light of the Washington Post article which had this (slightly tilted) graphic:
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6 Things Interviewers Are (or Should Be) Looking For
Something to think about.
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It‘s the first I’ve heard of it. But it sounds interesting.
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In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.
Presiding: Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
1. “Steampunk Online: Game Design as Narrative Pedagogy,” Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt Univ.
author and editor of numerous books, including Charles Dickens in Cyberspace
Based on English 115W: Digital Narrative and Virtual Reality
extensive use of social media
worldsofwordcraft.wordpress.com
40,000+ hits
Design and build an online game in the final three weeks of the semester.
2 topics:
Remediation and pedagogy
Active learning, student production of knowledge
Remediation:
Substantial benefit accrued by multiplying number of media used in classroom.
Bolter and Grusin Remediation
“the representation of one medium in another” (45)
Remediation highlights formal features of narrative in unexpected ways.
To move them from “fidelity” issue in adaptations from book to film, toward thinking about formal differences of the media, is a challenge.
Adding three or more media makes the problem disappear for the classroom.
“The Lord of the Rings Online” integrated into course.
Obvious choice. Three media. Novel, movie, online game.
How does juxtaposing 3 media help?
character standing in the game, in a rather well-known spot, 3 stone trolls
Put up moment in game
Put up the text
Show the movie section
Game is quite faithful to Tolkien.
Movie not so much.
Aragon with ringwraiths: Comic in book. Dramatic in movie.
Arwen becomes heroic. Least Tolkienesque.
Talk about Space and Time with students.
In virtual world, seeing virtual word brings home to player (student) control of space. Various 3D control. Took different pictures of the Stone Trolls to use in the classroom.
Question of faithfulness to the book is just exploded by the ability player has to live in the world of the game. Also the sense of controlled space is brought home.
Second half of semester turn to Steampunk.
Steampunk: immensely popular genre of science fiction, remediates Victorian Era and populates it with machines
“the Difference Engine”
Read several Victorian texts: Time Machine, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes stories
Films: Steamboy was first. Wretched.
Moving Castle 2004
One of most popular graphic novels, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Because students have steampunk friends, becomes more intertextual.
Take this Victorian material and create an online game.
Steampunk Online was the name of the game.
Only did this one semester so far.
NeverWinterNights 2 Toolset (included with the game)
quite inexpensive
with it comes a Professional Grade game design platform
Sword and Sorcery game. Fantasy. Derivative of the Tolkien universe. But allows you to customize. Were able to change environments to more Victorian.
Divide class into groups of three. Five groups. Each responsible for an area.
Go through the process of creating the game.
Process:
Storyboarding– spend time in class deciding spatial arrangements of the areas in the game
What you understand when you have to create a narrative game, you have to figure out where it takes place. Where each zone is. Relation. How character moves from one zone to the next.
Spatiality becomes relevant (from first half of semester).
Zones roughed out in drawings by students.
Using the toolset makes their rough drawings very beautiful, because you use already created stuff…
Enter game through a Victorian replica of our classroom.
The door takes you to Soho square. Near Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory (in literature).
Going through the door, you are set upon by a very irritated Mr. Hyde who renders you unconscious. You wake up in Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes’ home.
Advantage: Students have to go back to text again and again to figure out what to include. Chemistry set in Holmes’ rooms.
Students have to write a Game design document which is posted. (30 pages)
In the apt you find there has been a disappearance outside of Richmond. Students speculated The Time Machine takes place. Disappearance is of the time traveler.
There you discover the time machine. (Students created the game narrative.) Then you go to Land of the Eloi. Taken to the Eloi home. Remember, no floor, no ceiling, grass.
Sent on a quest to the ruins of a museum, called the Green Palace. Students designed museum and layout. This is where you first encounter a Morlock, in the story and the game.
In game you must go into caves of Morlock to encounter them, just as in novel.
Game ends when you rush pell mell into the distant future. Find a land populated by monstrous crab-like creatures and things do not end well. (So you can’t have an Epic Win, only an Epic Fail, in this game.)
Designed as a multi-year project. That is the architecture the students have created would be the basis for future classes’ work.
2. “Technologies That Describe: Data Visualization and Contemporary Fiction,” Heather Houser, Univ. of Texas, Austin
Ecosickness: Environment, Disease, and Emotion in Contemporary Fiction, just finished
Intersections of our talks, esp in juxtaposition.
Data visualization is becoming ubiquitous form.
Blogs, art galleries, etc. (Good.is for example)
Network of visualizers is quite vast.
Three very different examples:
Aaron Koblin “flight patterns”
kayser-brill “100 years of world cuisine”
national bldg museum “cost of owning a car”
Often counter-code visualization.
Aaron Koblin says “tells stories about our lives that make us more human”
Data that is a conduit to narrative in affect and not its neutralizer.
I kept it outside of X. Unfortunate.
Visualizers think in affective terms. Critics should consider scientific history and change.
“crucial object through which we understand our data-rich world”
determine what is specific to and shared across forms of cultural production
Data visualization as a …
Chris Jordan’s visualizations and Cormac McCarthy’s X
Data visualization might be in contrast to descriptive practices.
Argument not just about the artists.
Pedagogical implications: show fungible workings of this narrative device
Chris Jordan, series of images, “Running the Numbers” (her title?)
2.2M pounds of plastic every hour…
Through Jordan’s lens and computer, undergoes a transformation.
Consumption pattern, collects individual examples, digitally manipulates them
gyre, 2009 depicts plastic waste
ben franklin, 2007 shows $ spent on Iraq War
Sebastien Pierre “What is data visualitzation?” wordle
depends on referentiality and affectivity. Ethical dimensions.
Coming at this as a scholar of environmental literature.
Jordan’s TED talk, Feb. 2008, “take these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt”
Gathering, collating, and X the work.
Most important to Apprehension in narrative theory of mastery and control.
what description is and how it works
extensive description betrays impulse to control what is external
Fleissner: “compulsion to describe”
“endless excessive attempt to gain control over one’s surroundings that reveals one’s actual control”
Who commands the control of information?
Answering this loosens distinction between two forms and proves centrality of words(?) to both.
“[Novelistic description] seeks to capture, to arrest within the moment”
Banfield “Describing the Unobserved”
Note: Capitalization limited to start of sentences. Why? Grammatical change of projection. Issue noticed at college and churches overhead/projection.
Drucker Speclab “always located in a perceiving entity”
How do descriptive practices either reinforce human mastery or inculcate a sense of self-restraint?
What can reading across media and for both form and ethics show us about the pathways between representation, knowledge, and ethics?
Jordan’s work crosses disciplines and ethical issues.
plastic cups, 2008
1M cups used on flights in US every 6 hours
from afar appears to be pipes
But composed of stacks of cups. You have to focus in or see it at the museum.
Viewing in is meant to force viewers to see relationship between the one and the many.
Art is meaning to kindle awareness, but brings awareness to the art as well. ?
potentially empower the viewer
help isolate patterns of data
positive control of awareness
on the other hand
control over data is a totalizing impulse
gives impression that describing problems is tantamount to the problems
minimizes the task’s size (to mitigate waste)
power accumulates to Jordan
values objectivity
rarely includes humans
artist’s power always clear
viewer kept outside of control
Compare to:
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness in the West (novel)
Judge is a violent polymath who thinks he can escape from strictures.
Judge not a tree hugger. Botanizes in response to threat to human control.
quote from page 199 “No man can acquaint… insult to me.”
Do the judge’s beliefs account for novel’s experience?
Travelers take in view. View consumes the writer.
“Dawn saw them deployed in a long file over the plain…” (42)
“The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army…” (46)
Non-human subject diminishes appropriative drive of the judge’s program of knowledge-creation as domination and overcomes it.
What claims to knowledge do different media technologies make through their form?
Drucker “neutralization as…”
Students read literature for knowledge.
How do formal practices slip out of alignment with social and environmental projects?
3. “Better Looking, Close Reading: How Online Fiction Builds Literary-Critical Skills,” John David Zuern, Univ. of Hawai’i, Mānoa
“Mind Your Own Business: Cisco Systems…”
“My name is Alice. I’m 13 years old.”
I must have been dozing… “Better Looking, Closer Reading”
appeal to broader spot of human sensorium
as students read online enhance their ability to read at all
better reader overall
Can it help us become better people?
One that might be worth making in an institutional environment in which literary studies is having to argue for its worth/contribution.
Recent reforms led to focus requirement of critical ethics. Depts are expected to run ethical courses. Profs have to explain how course meets hallmark of ethical judgment.
Served for 3 years on review board. Having to advocate on behalf of humanities. Seemed unacceptedly vague.
For folks largely focused on ethics of/in work experience, literary ethics seemed too removed.
what might lit crit have to say about moral question as posed in a literary text?
ethical turn in lit theory
sophisticated accounts of ethical imagination of reader in theory
Steve Akbockers? who? discussion of Coetz’s Disgrace
“taste impossible status”
“reading in this special sense is sacred”
reading is not only an event but a task
Task provides bridge of online and print reading.
taught a course for introduction of English majors
text intended to introduce readers to digital
“high quality robust text” “quality suited to reading and re-reading… academic …”
Inanimate Alice, online text
first-person narrators in both texts
both child narrators markedly vulnerable
both are worriers and focus is on fate of fathers
novel even uses flipbook (reverses person falling from World Trade Center)
Jonathan Safran’s work: adverbs extremely and incredibly crop up in the text
(5) limousines were extremely long they wouldn’t need drivers
“stuff that happens to me”
Can I stimulate experience of “implied author”?
para-text of the novel’s title and notable features of the narrator’s ideograph
analytical task of gathering up the adverbs…
meaning fullness that can’t be exhausted by a summary of the plot
In Inanimate Alice, doll becomes connected with narrator.
Also the doll is strewn throughout the reading.
in pocket of a mafioso –clicking on the doll invokes Alice’s game
Adds kinesthetic and urgent element to the plot.
Unless you have rescued all the dolls before you get to the end, Alice and her parents won’t be able to escape through the checkpoints.
To get them through, you have to re-read and rescue all the dolls you missed the first time.
Makes reader responsible for the “event and task of fiction.”
Would I have ever thought of clicking on the dolls? I am not sure.
engage moral empathy and sympathy
ethical agency of narrative empathy –new study in lit theory
but meta-empathy, affective insight, felt before known or articulated, but something you can discuss after it has happened and trace it back and explain it based on what spurred it
meta-narrative can help recognize rhetorical dynamics that are intended to be affective (and succeed in being affective often)
Being able to identify how the narrative are set up to create affective responses helps us to avoid the authorial attempts to control us as readers.
Pedagogical payoff for online readings… not a matter of staying up to date nor a pandering to interests of students” but to multiply structured opportunities to reason about our essentially irrational responses to the world.
before reform= 2 English classes required
after reform= students may elect to take 1 English class
Have to find authentic, not cynical, ways to connect the close reading experience. will help save our discipline
Questions:
Is the creation objective?
Avoids aesthetic question by choosing works that are clearly aesthetic.
Visualizing feelings… subjectivity is necessarily embedded
Do need to study how the subjectivity is embedding in the works…
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In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.
Presiding: Sara Steger, Univ. of Georgia
Speakers: Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Julia H. Flanders, Brown Univ.; Matthew Jockers, Stanford Univ.; Shana Kimball, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia; Lisa Spiro, National Inst. for Tech. in Liberal Education
Session Description:
This roundtable brings together various perspectives on alternative academic careers from professionals in digital humanities centers, libraries, publishing, and humanities labs. Speakers will discuss how and whether digital humanities is especially suited to fostering non-tenure-track positions and how that translates to the role of alt-ac in digital humanities and the academy.
And the computer goes down. Okay, projector on the fritz…
5 Qs and 3 As about Alt-Ac
Brian Croxall, Emory University
received rejection notice: “We received more than 900 applications for the positions…”
Taught a class in Digital Humanities.
What’s the relationship between digital humanities and alt-ac?
Stanley Fish wrote for NYT
tedunderwood.wordpress.com responded on December 27, 2011
isn’t actually “the next thing in literary studies”
Is alt-ac the future of digital humanities?
No. Not really. There are tt positions for DH.
pursuit of tenure will not be the same, will be alt, even when on tt
Alt-ac is most likely track for Digital Humanities.
Cannot be shorthand for contract labor, casualized labor. We need to be looking to other portions of the university for helping us think about these career paths.
Is digital humanities the future of alt-ac?
No.
Many ways to get your alt on that don’t require university…
Key lesson: Intellectual labor in getting things done. In accomplishing real work of university.
How should the MLA deal with the rise of alt-ac?
Can the MLA shift its purpose from representing those who teach and research modern languages to those who study or studied the modern languages?
The digital is something that is happening to the humanities.
The alt-ac is something that is happening to the university.
www.briancroxall.net
Talk is live at his website.
Julia H. Flanders, Brown University
Funding sources
DH
grant-based funding model means strategic hiring
Conceptualizing staff as oriented around and created for some projects works for the DH funding, but not so well for the security of the staff.
Necessity of framing as “projects” with outcomes that must be framed as separate units.
Makes the background research harder to fund.
Early investment in expertise is much harder to fund as project.
Distinctive about my job at Women Writers’ Project. Externally funded for two decades. Unusual length of funding. But jobs are more likely to be funded by grants.
Is alt-ac future of DH?
To some extent it is, from an institutional aspect. University likes it.
“Affordable” is code for young.
Is DH particularly suited to alt-ac careers?
Yes. Dovetails with other work that is hospitable in these ways: library, museum, etc. Jobs reinforced by collaborative work between universities and para-academic organizations.
Is this a good thing?
Good for institutions– cheap, flexible labor force.
Not so good for that labor force all the time.
Where the value of alt-ac lies and for whom is worth unpacking in more detail.
Matthew Jockers, Stanford University
“My name is Matt and I’ve been in Digital Humanities for 14 years.” (AA joke)
not one of the more senior member of our community
macro-scale observations, though
evolving role of alt-ac DH specialist
As a grad student, I did not aspire to a position as an alt-ac. Trained as a lit scholar. There was not an obvious alternative career path–except barista. Graduation: 1 tt job for every 3 applicants.
Because of my technical skills, I found a job that meant teaching a few classes and heading a group to help students. Along the way I was given the opportunity for professional development, paid for by my university. Had a decent salary.
Moved to a far more exciting alt-ac position, after 3 years. Allowed me to continue teaching, do research. Best part was I could introduce the rest of the faculty to Digital Humanities. An exciting thing to be part of this evolution.
alt-ac role as agent of change. Straddle lines between faculty and staff. Often bilingual translators. In unique position to advocate for institution change.
As the English department’s DH guy, I had a unique position. In early part of the century, I was doing a lot of teaching. … Workshops for our faculty.
Text analysis, HTML, etc.
Fruits of this labor can be found most prominently in the Literary Lab I co-direct. My job was to bring DH to the Stanford English Department.
Foundation of the lab is not an end point. Inundated with requests to get involved. Work of the lab has come to dominate my alt-ac position.
Eleven years of alt-ac’ing at Stanford, I have never once gotten up dreading going to work.
!!!
What is exciting right now is the abundance of opportunities.
This is a good time to be involved in humanities computing. Dark days of marginalization are over. Seeds bloomed into “thousand flowers of our DH conference last year, where we had a flower theme.”
Shana Kimball
working in the publishing division of the University of Michigan library
Now MPublishing.
intended to build mode of digital publishing
4-person shop in early 2000s but now includes UMPress and copy center.
Work involves digital humanities
Academic book publisher, preserver of scholarly works, convener of campus communications about scholarly communication…
co-director of MPublishing
Days when I am more engaged:
recruiting scholars
nurturing collaborations
raising awareness of MPublishing on campus
planning outreach programs
developing new publishing initiatives
writing proposals for funding
How fortunate I feel to be involved in this job.
Work with people committed to re-creating meaning of scholarly publishing.
We have degrees in library science, law, foreign languages, etc…
Many of us are not PhDs. Think of alternative academic career paths as well.
Had you asked me six years ago, I would not have thought of this job.
Stumbled off the tt after graduate school experience; quit grad school before graduation.
HS prof suggested “feminist literary theorist”
“Can only see as far as your headlights, but can make the whole trip that way.” –Doctorow
Read CHE “Beyond the Ivory Tower.”
Thought about publishing more and more.
Started setting up informational interviews with folks in scholarly publishing.
Landed a ft position in the library’s publishing division.
Filling in for a colleague who got a Fullbright. Kind of an internship.
Boss let me take classes and go to conferences and learn a new field. All these experiences that were helping me make my way. My exp as a PhD grad student, I was uniquely situated to translate from one side (faculty) to the other (publishing).
This is not how one does alt-ac. It’s just how I did it.
Can we imagine how these skills can be nurtured in graduate studies?
How can we better prepare grad students?
Incentives for grad students to learn digital making or doing
Have them run grad journals
Requiring education about contemporary scholarly communication
Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence should be required reading.
Want to see more internships and professional mentoring.
Due to human difficulties, I was not able to finish blogging this session.
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In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.
Presiding: Janice Fernheimer, Univ. of Kentucky
1. “Touch Memory Death Technology Argument: Reading Onscreen,” Anne Frances Wysocki, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Title changed. “Spacing Out: Rhetoric, Digitality, Memory”
building book-length digital piece
juxtapose memory with 20th and 21st C architecture of memory technologies
Audience will maneuver among choose and X
Plan: Background to focus and then suggest (3 short juxtapositions) a quick take on rhetorical memory, contrasted with current memory technologies and X.
How am I obligated to have memory in 21st C?
What am I obligated to remember in a century of external memory?
2 grammatical aspects: use of I and active verbs
Use of I:
Interested in –Individual construction of memory through texts. (hypermedia)
External texts don’t flow free from us. What do we remember internally as result of creation? How might creation of online text reverberate back onto us? esp if we think of textual production as a work of memory.
Arts and Memory
1. routine based, background
2. narrative, affective, situated in present
3. traumatic
“actively narrated as drama” or “b/c it remains outside subject”
focus on indiv memory but not ignoring social or cultural memory
notions of cultural memory, esp in relation to indiv memory, surface critically
Use of active voice:
Hard not to feel prodded into active voice.
Production of digital texts, how now because of networking abilities, productions which required corporate resources can now be produced by individuals.
Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler (book)
Mashed-up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable
Active audience participation in production.
Electronic music product… visited… part of an exhibit “Nirvana: Bringing Punk to the Masses”
Production of texts together now.
ref. another call to active digital production– xxrnard Stiegler (and Irit Rogolf?)
mass media creates audience’s memories for them
by creating can network, control, formalize, and perhaps destroy them
indiv who only have external memories cannot participate in what holds culture together, the co-constitution of the I and the we
Only those who both produce and consume can participate in such co-constitution.
History of rhetorical memory:
architectural and spatial memories, 5-6th C
dissolved with print, 15th C
Mayan calendar, ex.
Such systems helped folks memorize, things they composed and others’ works as well.
Throughout their use, broke what was chosen to be remembered into chunks, to make them memorable/visceral.
Placing those chunks into a first architectural structure. (memory palaces)
move among these chunks
neo-platonists turned architectural support for memory into abstract pictures, thinking this allowed them to understand the cosmos
Creating an architectural system. Working on it. How to find it again later.
Systems for invention and memory.
Against that background, 3 perspectives to take on current memory practices:
21st C tech allows us to label “life-caching”
put them in, tag them, organize them, chronological order
1980s folks have been working on ways to remember everything
camera worn all day every day, etc
Could show us that we do indeed have memories.
Took photographs and was photographed: “I wouldn’t have memories if I hadn’t written letters.” Abu Ghraib
Thought “cyborgian savants” mylifebits, but now can’t find anything
2nd perspective: free-floating memories, memories without landscapes
computer games
impossible to succeed without a map, but don’t have to narrativize (conceptual elements–think on this)
Gaming experiences can be expanded and narrativized, but they rarely are. Re-enacted as drama.
Video game architecture can be seen as memory spaces.
3rd perspective: 2001 Jewish museum in Berlin
requires you to enter through an 18th C museum
cross a long hallway
climb a three story concrete steps (which continue into a wall), which you must get off to go to the exhibits
passageways that are almost impossible
Museum uses body-addressing strategies.
like Eisenem’s Holocaust Memorial
memorial structures from last 50 years
These sites envelop visitors within affective intent.
Given how the events commemorated are already so emotionally weighted, spaces can be understood as structures for narrativizing trauma. Attach my bits of pieces of memory within it. Thus creating I and cultural memories.
This is the sense of the project starting.
Kinds of connections hoping to make. Possibilities of digital construction to make possible connections between our own and others’ memories.
2. “Digital Archives as Rhetoric: Emerging Opportunities for Research and Design,” William Hart-Davidson, Michigan State Univ.; Jim Ridolfo, Univ. of Cincinnati
Talk on 4 years of work: Archive 2.0
Could we do something with the collection?
Samaritans exist. Living people. Despite 1922 National Geographic article saying they would not exist.
Only 720 now though. (Up from low of 120) 5 families. Intermarry.
Half community lives in Palestinian and Arabic speakers.
Half community lives in X and Hebrew speakers.
Maintain two liturgical languages: Samaritan Hebrew and Aramaic
Did not have a large diaspora, but their texts did. (Europe, North America)
2008-2009 was start-up. Doing project as rhetoricians.
Goals:
1. Provide access to digital versions of the codices/scrolls at MSU
2. Create a working model of a culturally-sensitive repository of Samaritan texts
3. Support a variety of learning activities including online teaching, learning, and research
4. Follow a model of system development consistent with best practices of user-centered design
Project Phases:
1. Stakeholder interviews
Asked them to draw things for us. Meta data, architecture
2. High-fidelity mockups, interactive prototype
turned the drawings into this
3. Field research
Brought them to Samaritans.
Received considerable amount of feedback and how to make them better.
Wanted to see all Samaritan mss digitized, b/c would have geo-political repercussions.
4. Prototype
Scanned selections of 40 pages.
Joint decision by Samaritan stakeholders and professor stakeholder
What people do with texts…
We’ve found that the iterative design process and the tools we create… find communicative value/provided a rhetorical perspective to the other.
Biblical Samaritan scholars were interested in how Samaritans used them.
Samaritans were interested in knowing how scholars used them.
Jim Rodolfo speaks:
Anne’s presentation was fortuitous.
Way we came to think about how our approach in this and our positionality (rhetoric and writing studies) working with other stakeholders, now think of it as three groups of stakeholders.
Samaritans, scholars, and our institutional stakeholders (archivists and librarians)
One of strange things of project, primary players who we were interacting with were always asking who we were. We were studying them. But they wanted to know who we were and what others were doing.
What I brought to talk to you is an anecdote of that.
Thrilling discovery, revealing about writing studies and what they can do
Given that preservation and access… not oppositional missions… if digital… important for us to see that they become spaces for enacting cultural practices…
This is imperative for Samaritan people. Where their culture will survive.
By studying the way these texts are
made
circulated
and used in particular cultures (Bazerman “The Case for Writing Studies” 2002)
Scholar profess left a note on left hand side of codex, knowing that the Samaritan person was coming, for Benni.
Wanted the Samaritan to see it, but he was curious and embarrassed because it looks like a stain. Archivists and professor thought the stain was an artifact of the poor storage (under football stadium). Thought it was a water stain.
Samaritan flipped open, passage from Leviticus, name of God appears a few times. But as is common in liturgical position of Samaritans, they chant a portion of Scripture every day.
The movement the celebrant makes, to be humble, is as you read, you touch the face and then you touch the text. The stain was a mark from 1500 years of use.
So these marks showed what the celebrants read the most.
OH WOW!
Interesting thing about that:
will tweet about this, with hashtag of this session (which is what?)
Transforming archives into digital requires knowing how cultural stakeholders and scholars use or would use.
Samaritans exist, but only 722 of them.
If their cultural tradition is going to survive, these are the cultural interactions that need to happen.
Writing Studies, and English studies
showed us what a visual archive can do
maintain a visual of the usage in the past
mark these stains with a video of Benni doing the movement
teaches us a broader idea
Location of Culture Baba
texts live in culture
attempting to isolate texts from cultures, this is cultural violence
locating it in a location that makes sense to scholar and archivist violently separates it from the cultural stakeholders and their use/location of texts.
With a physical text, perhaps necessary. but digital text allows us to undo the violence and re-connect the work to the cultural users.
3. “Feminist Historiography and the Digital Humanities,” Jessica Enoch, Univ. of Pittsburgh
My discussion will be less detailed and more broad strokes.
Digital Humanities is new to me. Feminist Historiography is my field. Spent last year to study DH and see what lengths feminists might have with it.
Kenneth Burke’s identification A Rhetoric of Motives
identification (connecting A and B) v. division (separating A from B)
survey both fields, investigating reasons for division, ways to re-connect–identification
Open lines of digital humanists and feminist historians
stakes are high
DH generated a great deal of excitement: journals, DH division in grant work
compounding this are major scholars, Perry, Stanley Fish
“should completely change what it means to be a humanities scholar” (Perry)
One estimate suggests $6M for DH funding this year.
Detailed review of feminist historiography shows more division than identification.
No mention by any FH about DH.
Her article was 180-article review.
Few points of identification between the two.
Don’t make this just because it is hip and funded.
Instead, look for meaningful modes of identification. So Fem Historians can enrich DH.
Articles by Alexis Ramsey and Patricia Sullivan and X talk about feminist historians and digital
Reasons for division:
FH- recover forgotten women
DH– archive and mine canonical figures
FH– work in local archives, comm. libraries, and grandparents’ attics
DH– build robust archive that hold “Big Data” (30M searchable words in Lincoln Project)
HOWEVER, there is one word that should bring us together.
The word is methodology.
Every FH worth salt, methodology is a key term for the work.
Scholarly history defined by methodology.
Barbara Biesecker “Coming to Terms”
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell “Biesecker Can’t”
Xin Lu Gale “Historical Studies”
Cheryl Glenn “Truth, Lies, and Method”
Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Special issue of Thetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002).
Identification #1: Digital Archivization
FH might collaborate with DH for how to build archives.
But concerns based on archives for FH (and others) that are already out there.
Many archives allow FH searches.
While FH used to have dearth, now digital recovery opportunities are everywhere.
DH scholars now have a “sea of databases.” How do you make sense of that?
Concern “proactive, not a reactive archival methodology.”
Methodological management is imp.
Archival and digital searching: what does it allow for and preclude?
How might we recognize digital archives as problematic?
How might we get to archives that don’t have finances for digitalization?
FH should collaborate with DH because they share their concerns.
Identification #2: Digital Tools and Data Mining
terminological and methodological division– FH don’t use same words.
FH seem opposed to DH language. Bulk between vocabularies.
Methodology could re-connect.
Ngram Viewer…
tool that allows searching of digital archives by Google
Aspasia (historical female very important)
1880s and 1890s came up and was strong, high
“Pericles and Aspasia”
also shows texts that she was mentioned in
Tool is fun and addictive.
Whole-heartedly concur that it is “gateway drug to DH”
Allows FH to do something they haven’t been able to do before.
Supports exigency that female rhetors have been forgotten.
Forgetting is not erasure. It is remembering differently.
Offers methodology for seeing how female rhetors were remembered differently in the past, when they were not forgotten.
All tools are gender, race, and class cultured.
Use tools “with a renewed investment in feminist theory.”
How did digital tools come into purpose and why did they make them? What were their goals?
Identification #3: Multimodal Scholarship
Digital scholars may say that DH should do work DIFFERENTLY.
Make full use of visual, aural, and dynamic media.
Multimodal scholarship is more public, activist, and accessible.
Pull readers in by full emersion.
Sharon Daniel “Public Secrets”
Amazing. Don’t do it justice.
Even though feminist historiographers would find it interesting, would prefer to leave it up to DH because the learning curve for using this tech is too high.
However, can engage in a different way.
FH have analyzed and written about women’s non-traditional rhetorics, but have rarely engaged in them ourselves. Engaging with DH would shift our focus to methods through which we offer it.
Multimodal scholarship pulling users in, engaging them emotionally.
Identification for FH, necessity to “interrogate emotional attachments to research subjects”
What are the responsibilities for FH to interrogate attachment to both studies and audiences?
Questions:
for Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson:
How did these archives arrive?
Great-grandson of original donator to Michigan State University came to join the archive experience.
Unusual because scholars traditionally lied and tricked folks out of their collections.
for Wysocki:
Land-based connection, geography connection? You didn’t talk about it. Are you looking at it?
No one in museum studies that I have found references the geography connection.
But I am studying this.
Navajo in New Mexico, for example.
Moving through and connections between movement, also in terms of the gesture of Benni in the reading.
Game architecture, spaces for movement and spaces where stop and do something.
for Enoch:
New tech that often benefits women, because can give cheaper access.
You seem to be talking about a way that DH is good. But the archives are expensive to get access to. So isn’t that going to short-change FH again?
obscure Chicago newsletter
are expensive
but issue is the lack of identification
FH has said: “You don’t write history through multimodal corridor and we don’t do research this way.”
How are people using databases to do FH?
We need to be looking at the possibilities of using and engaging with the DH tools and archives.
We haven’t been engaging with these.
Learn methods better -> including digital archives
for Enoch:
also depth of gendering to approaches
Need to say “I’m going to learn it.” cyber-feminists argument
Need to discuss, examine gendering of these archives. What would a feminist creation of these archives look like? including scripting languages, building of tools, etc.
Have to be at the table. How is “sentimentality” being described in this emotional search of the archive?
Need to learn the tools and the languages…
for Enoch:
Camera showing how the archive is searched, examined, and created.
Show the process?
When applying for grants, do theirs look better because they are doing digital and I’m looking at attics?
from H-D: big implication is that these are projects that require infrastructure and how we deal with…
Haven’t published a single-author work in 4 years. Because the DH collaborative is essential. Epidemiologist and computer programmer…
from Wysocki: Don’t want to lose those small scale projects.
Need to get the taste for “not the grand projects,” but show the labor that goes into them. Keep the room for “I only know how to do X.” (like HTML)
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We watch commercials for analysis and evaluation. One of the favorite commercials to use around campus is Chrysler’s commercial with Eminem. There are some funny things… The mural was commissioned by the Ford Company and is about Ford, but Chrysler shows it. I guess most people don’t know.
The commercial does a good job of showing the best about Detroit and it leaves a very different impression. But then there is the news.
Next time I teach it we will watch the dueling video.
Chrysler Imported from Detroit commercial
Versus
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