Apr

03

bound vs. unbound: a preface, afterwards

writing

This is an experiment.

It is a thesis, a research project, a survey of Digital Humanities.

Also: a blog, a digital archive of thoughts.

It will be a printed PDF, and a bound book.

What happens when you take something meant to be traditional, something that fits neatly inside of the Academic Box, and execute it on a different platform? What happens when you smash together old-school and new media? Where do you end up when you play with the limitations and possibilities of bound forms of scholarship and unbound mediums of production?

Because I am writing on a field that is intersectional – digital + humanities – it seemed only fitting to work the digital into my humanities project. Working within a medium that we are studying allows us to understand it better, to get a deeper feel for how things play out in practical application. Blogging is only one small aspect of the digital world, but it can shed insight into what differences exist between writing a conventional essay versus writing piecemeal for the public eye.

For ENGL328 last year, where the seeds of this project were born, we read Anne Frances Wysocki’s awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs (2005)*. She starts her essay by asking: “Under what conditions would you accept a [graduate research] paper handwritten in crayon on colored construction paper?” (I rendered a part of the subsequent assignment for that class in crayon, of course.) Wysocki ends, in part, with the following:

As we analyze and produce communications, we need to be asking not only what is expected by a particular audience in a particular context but also what they might not expect, what they might not be prepared to see. It is in the apparently unavailable designs … that we can see what beliefs and constraints are held within readily available, conventional design. (59)

Blogging, of course, has constraints – every method of authorship does. But these constraints are different from a traditional essay. The reading experience, too, is different when we choose alternate platforms. Different is something I’ve sought to highlight throughout the project. Our expectations of a word like “thesis” come apart when we choose these unavailable designs, when we try something new. It is with these ideas in mind that I have presented my thesis on my blog, in hopes that doing something different may lead us to question what we’ve been doing all along.

Enjoy.

*Wysocki’s lack of spacing in her title is intentional and meant to get her reader to question the constraint of word spacing and what effect it has on our reading experience. When I typed this out the first time, I accidentally put the spaces in – apparently my reading of it is “away with words.”

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Mar

24

and how!

writing

As a follow-up to my last post, some quick thoughts on a few ways that programs can incorporate the digital world into their curriculum:

Collaborative Sites: Wikis, Google Docs, etc.

+ : brings new value and ease to the dreaded group work; displays real-time results; better tracking for profs.

Text Analysis: Wordle, etc.

+ : greater understanding of work; adds a new dimension of connection with the material; fun with visualization!

Online Presence: blogs, microblogs, website-building, etc.

+ : students will need a web presence in the future; drive to produce better work when it’s public; potential conversations with people outside of class about coursework.

Social Networking: Facebook, Twitter, etc.

+ : students already know how to use these sites; exploration of different potential for a familiar form; keeping in touch outside of class may spark more connection in class.

- : more time will have to be spent teaching and learning the tools; students may resist putting their work out for the world to see; higher levels of creativity needed by both students and professors when working with new methods.

(then again, these could go in the + column, too.)

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Mar

21

why digitize?

writing

I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of digital work in academic spaces that do not normally lend themselves to  this type of scholarship. There is a reason that Digital Humanities is a field unto itself – because it operates differently than the Humanities traditionally do. The boundaries aren’t necessarily solid and fixed, but there are distinctions that put them into two different camps.

I’m in favor of blurring the line a bit; I believe traditional Humanities programs should embrace the inclusion of digital consumption and production into their coursework.

This is not a statement without controversy. Academia is not quick to change; new ways of doing things can certainly be challenging for those who are perfectly content with old ways. And, of course, new ways do not always equal better ways. There is risk in change. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t, and the value in discovering which is which is not always compelling enough to make us budge.

However.

This is one area where I believe the value exceeds the risk, and where I think we’ll be pleasantly surprised if we give it a shot.

Here’s why:

  • Because that’s just the way the world is going.

We’re living in a digital world. This is a fact. It is a fact that e-readers are selling like hotcakes and that people buy music from iTunes more than the record store. It is a fact that people text and send emails and don’t write letters with pens and paper nearly as often. It is a fact that we’re constantly connected to the cloud and that things we knew previously as nondigital objects now exist in pixels.

These things will not change because some of us are not satisfied with them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a fellow English student lament over the state of the written word and how the Internet is killing literacy, etc. I have lots of opinions about those arguments, but my point here is that, well, that’s just the way it is. The Internet is not going anywhere. Neither are e-readers or iTunes or any number of other digitized versions of things. We have moved into a new arena of navigation with our world, and a big part of that revolves around previously uncharted technologies.

We can lament, or we can take action. That action could be to rally against digitization, and certainly this is a legitimate option. Or that action could consist of trying out these new things and seeing what happens – embracing the facts of our new age and exploring the outcome. If we’re going to live in a digital world, we might as well see what all the fuss is about.

  • Because students can relate to it.

The majority of undergraduate students are in their late teens or early twenties. These kids have grown up digitally connected . They understand this stuff in a way that even I, only a few years older than them, don’t, because they’ve been doing it all of their lives. Sure, not all young people use the same tools, and not all of them are in love with the digital world. But they get it, and for many of them it is simply a way of life. I never questioned television growing up, because there was one in my home as far back as I can remember. There were (and still are) arguments against television, but for me it was just a staple of life. The same goes for kids today with the Internet, with Facebook, with blogs, with texting, etc. For them, there hasn’t ever been anything else.

If these are the people we’re teaching, shouldn’t we be speaking to their experiences? There has got to be value in using tools that students understand intuitively as a means of getting them more engaged with their work. Doing more new media work means that the people who are getting the education will understand it better, because we’ll be speaking their language. More understanding = better education, every time.

Not to mention, if the greater world is moving more and more towards the digital, these are skills students are going to need in the future. For those students who don’t yet have an intuitive understanding of the digital for whatever reason, they’re going to need it eventually. If it’s educators’ jobs to provide students with the skills they’ll need in the workforce, then this necessarily includes some level of competency with digital tools.

  • Because there’s always room for improvement.

The argument for the incorporation of digital tools is not an argument against traditional tools. Incorporation =/= replacement. It shouldn’t, at least, and if it does, there’s a good chance that whatever tool disappears was on its way out to begin with. But the suggestion that “going digital” means completely eradicating anything nondigital simply doesn’t make sense. Sure, I have a Kindle that I love, but I also have a huge bookshelf in my living room that somehow just keeps acquiring new books (some might say “stop buying new books when you already own dozens that you haven’t read,” to which I would say: “pooh-pooh”). They are both important, they both bring me joy, they both serve a purpose in my life. I don’t automatically stop going to Borders because I’ve started shopping at Amazon.

Having a Kindle improves my reading experience. I believe that digital work will improve the classroom experience. We all want our fields of study to get better, even if they’re already good. We want them to be the best they can possibly be.  It’s important to look at all the ways that bettering may be possible, even if some of these ways are far outside of the box that we’re used to.

  • Because if we do what we’ve always done, we’re going to get what we’ve always gotten.

Trying new ways of doing things leads to greater levels of discovery, greater layers of understanding. Certainly there are new revelations that come out of traditional methods – otherwise, we wouldn’t still doing them, right? However, when we continue doing the same thing, we get the same types of results. There are only so many destinations that the same path can lead to. If I always take the highway, I can only end up at places that the highway goes.

When we try something new, when we step off of our usual path, we have no idea what the outcome might be. The possibilities become endless, and the results will be different than they’ve been. They might not be earth-shattering, but they will be different. Different may not equal better, and in some cases it may not even equal valuable, but I’d suspect that in many cases we’ll be quite intrigued by what we discover. At any rate, we’ll be working with new information, and that in itself is valuable.

We gain tremendous insight when we take a step back and question what we’re doing. This goes for all areas of life, not just academia, of course. When we do a thing because that thing is what we’ve always done, we risk missing out on something important. Adding new models of investigating, accessing, and creating information into our studies means that students and professors alike will have more to work with and greater chances of stumbling into uncharted territory. Digital tools can, and will, help make this happen.

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Feb

22

you got your digital in my traditional!

writing

I don’t think I’ve mentioned explicitly that this blog, in its current form, is the substance of my senior thesis project.

Yes, I’m blogging the cumulative work of my undergraduate career.

If that seems a little weird to you, too, then you may be a traditional scholar, like I’ve been.

When I thought “senior thesis” in the past, I thought: 30-40 page paper. I thought: research, write, edit, write, edit, (etc), submit. I thought of one form of writing and one form of publishing only. Traditional or bust, amirite?

Except, no. My project is on Digital Humanities, and if I’m going to be investigating a highly digital, highly experimental, emergent field of study, well then I better be digital and experimental and emergent myself. My background, however, is not in this area. My degree, when I graduate this spring (gulp!), will be in English Language, Literature, and Writing from what is arguably a pretty traditional English program. Branching out from what I’m used to has been exciting, and complicated, and one hell of a learning experience.

I didn’t know it would happen in exactly this way, but I am, as we speak, restructuring my own ideas about what it means to do academic work.

I’ll tell you a little secret: I don’t know what I’m doing. You’re not supposed to admit this in Academia, I don’t think. At least, not all out in the open where anyone can hear you. But I’m pretty sure it’s true more often, and for more of us, than we would have each other believe. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. In fact, not knowing what I’m doing is a big part of the reason I chose to do this project in this particular way from the very beginning. I like things that are new, that are experimental. I like to look underneath rocks and see what I can do with whatever I happen to find. I like to explore.

However. Liking =/= easy.

It’s tricky, this opening up of my assumptions and expectations of scholarship. There are lots of questions that I don’t have answers for. Not fully formed answers, at least.

To wit: how do I measure what I am doing? This is not a traditional paper or project, so what is it supposed to look like? Is there a certain post count that is equivalent to 40 pages of linear argument? Do I count words? Paragraphs? Do I set a goal for a certain number of posts, and when I’ve reached that, I’m done? Do I copy and paste my posts into Word to keep track of length? When do I stop? How do I turn it in? Etc.?

To all of these: yes, no, and maybe, we’ll see. Yes, there are parameters. I couldn’t write three posts and call it a day. There are equivalency expectations put forth by the Honors College, and for good reason. A cumulative project has to have some degree of substance to be worth a damn, after all.

But, no, the measurements are not the same. First of all, plugging everything into word and calling it good when I reach 35 pages just wouldn’t fit in with the point of this project. It also wouldn’t take into account the different aspects of digital writing that traditional papers don’t incorporate. For instance: If I link to, say, 25 outside sources (or 60, or 200), and my readers follow those links, what then? Does that hold the same value as a reader looking up a cited reference in a bibliography? I don’t think so. For one thing, the ease of access to outside sources is sure to change the reading experience. A person could read half of my blog post, follow a link, be gone for half an hour, and come back to read the rest. Authorship and citation are interwoven with one another here on the Interwebs. What does that mean for the substance of my writing?

Then, too, is the publishing method. These posts are not edited by anyone but me. They don’t get reviewed by one or two or five people before I put them out into the blogoverse. With a traditional thesis, there are layers of writing and editing that happen by not only the author, but their advisor(s). Of course, I generally don’t hit “publish” as soon as I’m done writing; I let posts sit for hours or days, and re-read/edit them before I make them public. But no one else is responsible for the quality of my work except for myself, which means that my thesis will never be “polished” in the same way that a traditional paper would be, for the simple fact that there is only one of me.

The most fascinating question that I have yet to answer is that of the end point. This is a blog. More importantly, it’s a blog that I created for purposes other than my thesis. Which is to say, this project is not self-contained. When the time comes that I am “done” with my thesis work, I will still be writing here. There’s a good chance that I will still be writing here about the same subjects that I am writing about currently. I have no intention of abandoning the field of Digital Humanities and the question of traditional-meets-digital once I’m finished with my undergraduate degree. How do I incorporate the ongoing and never-quite-finished aspect of my work into something that I must turn in at the end of the semester?

The more I think and read and write, the more questions arise. None of this is simple, or easy. It’s kind of messy, it’s a little strange, and it’s certainly not going to be resolved in this one post. But these are questions that are important, not only to me, but to the myriad of students and scholars out there who will turn to digital creation more and more as time goes on. It may not be traditional, but it sure is fascinating.

(word count: 1,005 – 3 pages, double spaced)

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Jan

30

questions: the necessity (or not) of a label

writing

In his introductory essay to The New Media Reader, Lev Manovich questions the necessity of identifying New Media Art as a field of its own. He makes an interesting case:

If all artists now, regardless of their preferred media, also routinely use digital computers to create, modify, and produce works, do we need to have a special field of new media art? As digital and network media rapidly become an omnipresent in our society, and as most artists came to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues – a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts. I personally do not think that the existence of a separate new media field now and in the future makes very good sense, but it does require a justification – something that I hope the rest of this text, by taking up more theoretical questions, will help provide. (14-15)

I’ve thought about this same question myself in regards to Digital Humanities. Where do we draw the line between what constitutes DH and what is simply plain old Humanities? Are there specific qualifications one needs in order to add the D before the title of Humanist? If we are moving in the direction of digitization in general, will this eventually be a redundant title? In my own work in the English department of EMU, a non-digital program (or a program not defined by the digital, at least), I’ve had plenty of opportunities to interact digitally within traditional courses. Professors have made blog posts, wiki entries, digital reading, etc. a part of regular course requirements. But these are not labeled DH classes; they are simply taking advantage of what the digital world has to offer. So, do they count? Would they count as DH if they defined themselves as such? How much digital needs to be injected into the scholarship before it earns the title? How do we know when we are practicing upper-case Digital Humanities and when we are only practicing Humanities digitally? And, most importantly, how much does that distinction matter?

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