Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 340.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-01-13 12:34:40+00:00
From: Tanner Durant <kekpenyo@syr.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.339: advice?
“Let us say for the purposes of discussion that someone with the power
and money to set up a department/centre for digital humanities, having
looked through this Handbook, were to ask you where to begin. What
would you say?”
Looks fascinating! Glancing through the contribution names from the anthology, I
see several familiar ones whose writing I’ve enjoyed reading before in my DH
studies: Drucker, Risam, Dombrowski, Croxall. Eager to develop more familiarity
with the other contributors too.
In terms of the question you posed regarding discontent with the present of
DH—“we should strive for something different to its present," I think the
different future I envision is just a cultural context where humanities
undergraduates are exposed to coding and to DH methods and thinking as more of
the rule and not the exception.
About ten years ago, when I was an undergrad, one of the best papers I had ever
written in my BA art history program randomly involved engagement with Lev
Manovich’s "Selfie City" data visualization project, where he and his team
analyzed mass quantities of online selfies and developed a fascinating taxonomy
of selfie visual language. (https://selfiecity.net/ )
He compared major global cities in terms of the extent to which selfies in those
various cities invoked certain lexica of body language, like the angle to which
the head was tilted in the selfie or the extent to which the smile was baring
teeth vs not baring teeth. I used the insights from his project to enhance my
analysis of 1920s Berlin newspapers (e.g. Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung), which
at the time routinely commented on current motifs and patterns in Berlin
residents’ fashion choices and urban visual identities, reinforcing their
analysis with the 1920s equivalents of photographic selfie-like portraits of
certain models, where the models’ poses and body language exemplified the
writers’ points.
[images that unfortunately Humanist cannot pass on--WM]
I had no idea as an undergrad who Manovich was as a scholar; I just knew that I
had stumbled upon something very cool in him, and ten years later I now
understand that that coolness was DH. Now, working on my 2nd masters, I’m in a
place where I’m probably able to not just cite someone like Manovich but also
create a project like his Selfie City myself.
The paper got an A, but the professor didn’t reinforce or probably wasn’t aware
of the relevance of continuing to include DH in art history studies. I and most
of my colleagues in the major graduated without any exposure to coding or DH
thinking really, besides any situations where other students may have randomly
stumbled upon it. I know at my undergrad university there’s a great DH minor,
which which Croxall is involved, and it’s mostly history students and English
students who are exposed to the idea of learning how to code and using the power
of code in their research. I would love to see that DH exposure expand to
include art history students and others—and maybe those changes have already
begun to spread in the 8-10 years since I finished my BA.
Anyway, excited to order a copy of this Handbook from my graduate campus
library.
Tanner
Envoyé de mon iPhone
Le 13 janv. 2023 à 02:29, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> a écrit :
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 339.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-01-13 07:11:28+00:00
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: advice to those starting out?
Looking through the recently published Bloomsbury Handbook to the
Digital Humanities (ed. James O'Sullivan) raises for some, I suspect,
the question of choice. Consider its Table of Contents, at
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury-handbook-to-the-digital-
humanities-9781350232129/>. Where to begin?
Once upon a time, in the antediluvian period from the mid 1960s to the
1990s, the question that wouldn't go away concerned 'evidence of value'
and was mostly focused on text-analysis for literary studies. The
editor of the Handbook suggests that the question now is, "to what end?"
He also suggests a deep discontent with the digital humanities:
"we should strive for something different to its present."
Let us say for the purposes of discussion that someone with the power
and money to set up a department/centre for digital humanities, having
looked through this Handbook, were to ask you where to begin. What
would you say?
For my answer, I'd start by paraphrasing a remark Northrop Frye made
somewhere about one's discipline of origin: it doesn't matter where you
begin as long as you begin with a question that can expand into all
other questions. And then I'd ask in turn, what kind of a setup would
foster such pursuits?
Comments?
Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk
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