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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Feb

07

this is dh: part 1, an introduction

writing

In my last post, I asked the question, “Where do we draw the line between what constitutes DH and what is simply plain old Humanities?” I thought I’d take a stab at answering that question, specifically by looking at the people and institutions that very clearly claim the title Digital Humanities. What better place to start, then, but the programs that are training the DHers of the future?

I picked three programs to dissect and compare: Loyola University Chicago, University College London, and the University of Alberta. All three offer an MA in Digital Humanities, or in the case of Alberta, Humanities Computing. Certainly, these are not the only Masters programs in the field (and there are plenty of PhD programs, as well), but they do have the distinction of being part of a select few that specifically use the DH title. They’re also in three different countries, which I thought would lend itself nicely to getting a broader view of how DH works.

My questions are these: How does each program define what they’re doing? What does their coursework and research look like? Are they professional degrees, or do they expect their students to continue further in Academia? What about the three programs is similar? Different? Are there contradictions?  How do all of these things differ from what I know about traditional Humanities programs?

 

A General Overview:

Loyola’s program resides in the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. The program is brand spanking new, in fact the very first set of students will not start until this coming fall. They describe this degree as professional:

The Digital Humanities program combines theoretical and practical courses, but its aims are ultimately practical and professional, training new digital specialists for the growing knowledge and information economy. Because the nature of Digital Humanities work is applied and project-based, students in the M.A. program will be given hands-on training in workshop or seminar-based classes, training in text editing and text encoding, electronic publishing, programming, interface design, and archive construction.

The program requires 30 hours of work, and has two separate tracks, depending on if the student’s background is in Computer Science or the Humanities. Students’ work culminates in a final electronic thesis.

The Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL has also only just started offering their MA/MSc program as of this coming fall. Their website states that there is an incredible amount of interest in the program, and encourages students to apply ASAP. Again, the coursework leads up to a dissertation. Although they don’t use the phrase “professional degree”, they do note that “…students will work on a practical application of digital humanities… ,” and that during the writing of their dissertation they will “…undertake a placement at a related institution where they can apply taught aspects of the programme.”

Alberta’s MA in Humanities Computing is offered through the Faculty of Arts. Again, this is effectively a professional program, although they note that their students will also be prepared to continue on to a PhD program, if they so choose:

Graduates of the program are well positioned for leadership in important emerging areas such as digital libraries, electronic publishing, electronic museum archives, and distance learning. … Through its emphasis on graduate-level study in one of the participating humanities departments, the program also prepares students for the option of continuing graduate work at the Ph.D. level in their field of specialization.

From poking around on Google, it appears as though this program started all the way back in 2001 (see Sean Gouglas’s description here), which makes it incredibly established compared to the other two (and quite possibly ahead of its time, back then).

 

Up Next: A closer look at each of the programs’ coursework, faculty, and research.

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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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