http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-1/

Hi all,

I was at an activist meeting this weekend to plan for a Dec. 9 city-wide march and rally on the Ebola crisis (NYC: Fight Ebola without Stigma & Racism), when one of my colleagues from that world asked me how grad school was going. We discussed the difficulty of getting tenure in the academy, at which point the colleague said, “Well, just don’t tweet anything.” He was referring, of course, to indigenous studies professor Steven Salaita’s de-hiring from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after he posted a series of tweets critical of Israel during its bombing of the Gaza Strip this year. (Steven Salaita: U. of I. destroyed my career)

I thought about Salaita as I was reading Matthew Kirschenbaum’s depiction of Twitter usage at the Digital Humanities and MLA conventions in “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” and then Tara McPherson’s article on the whiteness of digital humanities. McPherson writes that “if scholars of race have highlighted how certain tendencies within poststructuralist theory simultaneously respond to and marginalize race, this maneuver is at least partially possible because of a parallel and increasing dispersion of electronic forms across culture, forms that simultaneously enact and shape these new modes of thinking.” However, it seems to me that the Salaita case is a prime example of the complexities of the concept of “access” in terms of technology – Salaita, a Palestinian American, may have had access to the internet and to social media sites like Twitter, but he was severely punished for his presence there.

I think McPherson raises some interesting parallels between the segregation of movements by the repressive state apparatus, in academia, and through the modularity in software design (although I’m not sure I really understand a lot of the technical stuff on modularity). I’m wondering, however, if at this moment we as an academic community should be thinking hard about the ways that people of color and other marginalized groups are systematically denied the kinds of access that Salaita’s case represents – the access to academic freedom in general, including and maybe especially in terms of technology. We’ve talked some in class about what’s in/appropriate to post on our social media sites in terms of professionalization; I’d like to think more about this in terms of UIUC’s calling Salaita’s political speech “uncivil” – such a loaded, racialized term. I think that this has a lot to do with the work Fred Moten is doing around the undercommons, which we’re reading for next week so I won’t get into too deeply right now. But I will say that I’m interested in how digital humanities supports and/or disrupts subversive academic thought and praxis.

Has the digital humanities community (broadly speaking) taken up Salaita’s case? What do you all think about this issue?

All best,
LeILani

One topic I’ve been hoping we’d eventually discuss in class is that of collaboration… which I feel might be particularly pertinent to discussions of DH; although it also pervades many (most?) subfields of literary studies. Many of the articles from Debates in the Digital Humanities seem concerned with the idea of defining DH. The definitions that struck me as most innovative or interesting had to do with the necessarily interdisciplinary (as Christina mentioned) and collaborative nature of the field. In “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” Matthew Kirschenbaum writes that the “digital humanities is also a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years.” Meanwhile, Alan Liu writes in “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” that “Ultimately, the greatest service that the digital humanities can contribute to the humanities is to practice instrumentalism in a way that demonstrates the necessity of breaking down the artificial divide of the ‘two cultures’ to show that the humanities are needed alongside the sciences to solve the intricately interwoven natural, technological, economic, social, political, and cultural problems of the global age.” Both of these scholars define DH and its potential for success as being based on the foundations of social networking and an open flow of information unbounded by disciplinary borders. It strikes me that, while the term “interdisciplinary” has become somewhat of a catchphrase within English departments – likely in an attempt to further justify the value of our work and make it more meaningful to the “real” world – very few of these allegedly interdisciplinary projects actually go so far as to collaborate with scholars outside the home field. It seems most literary scholars are often discouraged from even working with each other, let alone colleagues from other departments. True interdisciplinary collaborations are often avoided, even when doing so clearly has a negative impact on scholarly progress. This issue seems particularly resonant in Ecocriticism, which, although rooted in science and environmental studies, fails to directly interact with those scholars even as that refusal threatens to delegitimize it (after all – what do a bunch of English majors know about environmental management?).

It then seems ironic to me that some of the resistance towards DH seems to stem from the fact that it actually does incorporate collaborative processes of becoming – a discussion of which would certainly regress back to our previous conversations on the touchy subject of “evaluating” scholarly work, especially as a means to tenure-track promotion. It seems clear to me that we need to be rethinking these standards, and figuring out how to assign greater value to collaborative projects – probably starting at the level of the graduate school (collaborative seminar papers? Collaborative dissertations?) and working our way up into the administration of the universities. Does anyone have thoughts on how we could better assign credit/prestige to scholars who take part in collaborative works? Or on what we could do as graduate students to encourage the department to foster a more collaborative environment?

This week, I especially enjoyed Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay “The Humanities, Done Digitally” and its suggestion that the most pivotal and useful trait of the digital humanities is its capacity to encourage interdisciplinary work, both within the specific field of DH itself and within the larger realm of the academy. Fitzpatrick emphasizes the need to keep DH ‘plural,’ and to permit for overlap between the disciplines, even if said overlap appears somewhat messy at first. As she points out, “Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally,” which therefore implies that all academics are, in some way, affected by the digital humanities, even if they are not ‘proper’ or ‘official’ scholars of the field. It was nice to follow up Fitzpatrick’s essay and her call for interdisciplinary work with Tara McPherson’s “Why are the Digital Humanities So White?” which demonstrates, I believe, the sort of cross-disciplinary scholarship that DH encourages and promotes. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that McPherson’s essay is something of an anomaly—although I freely admit that my familiarity with DH prior to this course was minimal at best, I can’t say that I’ve encountered a tremendous amount of work within DH that actively addresses issues of race, gender, class, etc., or other humanities sub-disciplines. That is to say, the interdisciplinary work that Fitzpatrick and many other DH scholars speak of and endorse is still largely absent within the field (at least as far as I can see; as I said, my experience with DH is limited and I fully welcome anyone to challenge me on this point). Instead, the majority of texts seem to be more preoccupied with defending the merit of the field itself. I wonder if this is due to the newness of the field and the need to first establish the contours, so to speak, of DH before more critical work can be performed. Thoughts?

(Again, I acknowledge that I could very well be speaking out of ignorance here, and simply have not researched DH enough to uncover texts that do engage proactively with other disciplines! So this is not so much a criticism as it is an inquiry)

I just watched the “run” of William Gibson’s poem “Agrippa” on The Agrippa Files website. I found it totally mesmerizing and a little bit haunting–I definitely recommend taking a look if you haven’t already.  The experience of seeing a 1992-era Mac desktop and watching the poem disappear made me think of Fitzpatrick’s comment that “digital forms may be more prone to material obsolescence than is print.” In Planned Obsolescence, she says:

Technologies move on, and technological formats degrade, posing a set of dangers to digital textual figures that the Electronic Literature Organization has been working to bring into public view, both through its “acid-free bits” campaign and through its more recent work with the Library of Congress to archive digital literary texts. (see, e.g., Liu et al. 2005; Montfort adn Wardrip-Fruin 2004). Without such active work to preserve electronic texts, and without the ongoing interest of and commitment by publishers, many digital texts face an obsolescence that is not at all theoretical, but very material.

Personally, the stack of CDs sitting in my closet is an example of so much data that, if I don’t convert soon, will become obsolescent. In any case, this has got me thinking about the urgency of preservation efforts, both private and public. Hopefully we’ll get to talk about this in class.

On Friday, I attended the faculty membership talk by Dr. Siraj Ahmed. To summarize a portion of his thesis, (and, those of you who were also there, please pitch in and tell me what I’ve missed, because honestly, I felt a bit out of my depth!), Dr. Ahmed argues that our Western insistence on reducing and confining all literate practice into the medium of a “cohesive,” historicized text is a colonial impulse that has forced us to erase the richer, non-textual, non-recordable (or not as easily recorded) set of practices that have accompanied a text over the course of time. So, as one example of what he means, he talks about the idea of hafiz, which is not so much the text of the Koran, but rather, the act of memorization and the identity of a person who has completely memorized all of the verses in all of the various versions of it. As Jennifer brought up in last week’s class, the Western academy’s dominant ways of knowing and validating knowledge tend to overlook ways of producing it that are not, in some way, textual. I think this is what Dr. Ahmed was acknowledging in his talk: there are literacy practices that resist textual codification, but that are still “valid” ways of making sense of the world. And there are also ways of interacting with or experiencing a text that are not for the purpose of “knowing” it or “decoding” it, but rather (as we’ve been discussing in Kandice Chuh’s class today), for the purpose of changing our own subjectivity as a result of having been exposed to it. The boundaries of our ontological positions shift because we read things — not (only) because we use them as evidence to make larger arguments. This feels true to my experience, anyway.

So, what does this have to do with Agrippa? For me, Agrippa enacts a resistance of codified reading practices by allowing us to see the text, and then refusing the option to return to it. As a type of performance, the text invokes an experience and, potentially, it frustrates our normative reading practices. However, there’s also this impulse to document the project — to videotape the scrolling poem transforming into code, to create this archival website dedicated to explaining its materiality, and to craft a digital emulation. For me, then, “hacks” described in Kirschenbaum’s article were somewhat complicated (and potentially problematic). What does it mean that people at this conference wanted to record the performance, to disseminate it, and to make the text of the poem available to a wider public? What does it mean that the response to this project is to copy it, to share it, to “preserve” it as a historical artifact? I’m not saying that these are bad or good outcomes, but I do think that considering what this process affords and prevents. On one hand, archiving Agrippa resignifies it, and archiving this text specifically through the process of emulation potentially changes the original, if we’re thinking of the copies as the Lyotardian concept of simulacra (where what is real gets replaced by a copy so that everything becomes either a copy or a copy of a copy). On the other hand, digital archiving helps us to share the poem and the performance with others, and to (more cynically) make a commodifiable product that we can write / think / publish on. Archiving resists what seems like a will to self-destruct, but then again, maybe this is Barthes death of the author at work….we can’t know, and it doesn’t matter, what the authors of Agrippa originally intended, so attempting to document it is just as valid a response as letting it “disappear” forever. And, yet again, Kirschenbaum mentions, at one point, that the museums “expected to receive copies of the disk that would not self-destruct, but [the collaborators] ‘stuck to their guns’” by not producing copies that wouldn’t eventually encrypt, suggesting (to me, anyway), that the original collaborators felt that there was something potentially important or worthwhile about allowing for that self-destruction to happen. I obviously have very conflicted feelings about this project! I know we have a visitor in class today, so we might not have time to raise some of these questions, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about your experience of the archival project.

Hi all,

I realize this is a little belated, but our discussion on Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence really got the gears a-grinding, so to speak. Perhaps this is woefully ignorant of me to admit, but I was unaware that peer review forms such a cornerstone of modern scholarly publishing. As far as Fitzpatrick’s historicization of peer review, I am interested in the ways in which she locates it within systems of authority, but remain leery of much historical postulation about the history of the discipline, especially after reading Graff’s tome which completely neglects to locate any historicity within colonial England’s cultural imperialism of India. Furthermore, I am concerned by the larger implications of laziness within the academy, as peer review seems to be a sort of outsourcing of the evaluation of tenure candidates and doctoral students. If evaluation of my merit is to be outsourced to the system of peer review, I am deeply troubled by the flaws inherent in this system.

I was interested in the points brought up in class discussion about the concept of “blind review” regarding the construction of peer relationships — who are our peers, really? And could a misunderstanding of peer relationships, especially when conducted anonymously, lead to a biased review of an article, resulting in a rejection of material because your review operates under different theoretical methodologies than the ones which frame your work? Fitzpatrick notes that “blind review,” rather than rectifying these issues, “cannot compensate for the reviewer who operates within a cloud of intellectual bias, dismissing any arguments or conclusions that disagree with his or her own” (29). It reminds me of a Louis C.K. interview in which he discusses children text messaging each other — the layer of anonymity, though slight, enables harshness due to the lack of profoundly human interaction. These concerns gendered by blind review, however, seem to be echoed in the systems of online peer-to-peer review, causing Fitzpatrick to appeal to “consider[ing] the ways that network effects bring out both the best and the worst in the communities they connect, and the kinds of vigilance that we must bring to bear in guarding against the potential reproduction of the dominant, often exclusionary ideological structures of the Internet within the engagements between scholars and readers online” (36).

That being said, it is quite exciting to consider the opportunities opened by peer-to-peer review in the facilitating of discussions of scholarly work in real-time. I appreciate the way that Fitzpatrick consistently circles back to the idea of academia as a community, and her solutions seem to work against what Graff calls “patterned isolation.” I also appreciate the way in which she calls attention to authorship as a dialogic process, in which no text is an island, so to speak, and locates texts in their connection to and conversation with other texts. I am excited by the potential inherent in a system of peer-to-peer in which more people have access to the conversation taking place (which – imagine!- takes the form of an actual conversation where the text is not an uninterrogable lump of paper that shouts “I am authoritative,” but rather a space of conversation where the author can literally be held accountable in real-time for disjunctions in clarity as well as questions engendered by ideas and their implications – yes, I’m thinking of Homi Bhabha) and in which the digital world can mediate between spaces of exclusivity and inclusivity, thus perhaps unprivileging the position of the traditional scholar, which I think can only be a good thing as far as the project of humanizing the academy is concerned. I am also drawn to the ways in which such a system might be useful in expanding our notions of who our peers are, as reviewing across disciplines could be intensely helpful in certain kinds of work. I know my own work could potentially benefit in ways I probably can’t imagine from the comments of anthropologists or sociologists who would be capable of dispelling ignorances I am not even aware of. I am further thrilled by the thought of submitting work for review at earlier stages and hope to find an environment in which I can do so — it seems a low-stakes and less anxiety-ridden alternative to only submitting finished work in a make-or-break sort of setting. This kind of work could also help younger scholars be rid of the notion that scholarly works spring fully formed from the forehead of the author. As far as my own scholarship is concerned, I envision a technological utopia in which I am able to connect immediately to the texts which the text I am reading cite and/or obliquely refer to, however such a vision seems too labor intensive to be economically viable.

The labor question is one that holds a few contradictions for me: shouldn’t scholars be excited to participate in such seemingly vibrant intellectual communities that the digital world seems capable of producing and maintaining? Shouldn’t we be interested in peer-to-peer review for the simple sake of furthering our own work and nurturing the work of others, work that could potentially become viable to our own questions? That being said, I’m sure there are many (probably including Fitzpatrick herself) that would call me naive for having such an idealistic vision of the academic community. I appreciate that we are economically in a bit of a bad state, and scholars who are underfunded and overworked already (adjuncts, anyone?) need incentive to pour their labor into other people’s projects. While I understand the need to incentivize the peer-to-peer review process, I find the necessity disturbing in and of itself, finding it yet another instance of such isolation that prevents us from doing the best, most collaborative, interdisciplinary work possible.

Like Christina mentioned, the technical and jargon-laden passages, especially those in her “Texts” chapter, failed to resonate with me as well, however I am appreciative to at least have a reference point to start if I ever become interested in digital publishing (which I imagine I might, if Fitzgerald’s predictions about the future of scholarly publishing are correct).

Best,

Chelsea

Two concerns of Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence interested me most:

1. Quality Control and Risk-Taking in a “Like-Aggregate” Online Culture
My roommate is a web content writer. In particular, he ghost-blogs for doctors to make sure their names appear atop Google results. This has resulted in both a work-at-home income stream that provides him with flexible hours to write fiction and in daily conversations between us (we share an at-home office) that go something like [Seth: “What are you working on?” Roommate: “Five articles on vasectomies, then I go back to that Calvino Prize piece”].

Similarly, my class often talks about how media consumption, cultural literacy, taste in general is attained, to which I generally ask, “How do you learn about the existence of media that someone you know has not already consumed?” This year, I’m one for three on the class bringing up journalism (career-wise, about four for twenty-five). Students seem to be aware of the mass-approval/view count/”like”-aggregated model of media priority, but they rarely seem to take issue with it. When I press the issue, they often press back. To them, this is a question about the tree in the abandoned forest.

So Fitzpatrick responds here to the concerns of quality control and “significance” determination within new academic models (page 139: “the mushiness of popularity as an arbiter of relevance”), but I’m not sure if she proposes any clear way to conquer what seems to be a very steep hill of this, and increasingly engrained way of looking at all media, if some of the models she suggests become the U-Publishing MO.

2. The University and In-House Scholarship
Fitzpatrick also discusses a need to reconsider the audience and distributor for academic scholarship, as she addresses the value of considering one’s own school contingency in writing and publishing. I’m concerned about a potential side effect of “bringing it home,” which is that it could homogenize departments around specific writing cultures and attitudes in scholarship. Is the idea of “dissensus” enough to combat this potential problem? To a certain degree, schools maintain specific scholarly identities related to the faculty, research, initiatives, etc. of the school, but to what degree does the suggestion to keep work within a institutional system from which it is made (and then move it into the global foray) serve as a limiter as much as it does an enabler? Fitzpatrick suggests that such in-house behaviors could provide a publicity role to publishing practices (173).

Some thoughts,

Seth

Planned Obsolecence articulates much of the anxiety about the various shifts from print to digital culture that I’ve felt for years, but not really been able to put my finger on. In reading the chapters on Authorship (2) and the nature of Texts (3), I found myself really excited about Fitzpatrick’s readings of poststructuralism, the ways authors have been constructed historically, and the various ways that readers engage with texts; specifically, I am curious about how the ideas that she posits here for academic communities play out in contemporary poetry communities (with which I am much more familiar). Fitzpatrick’s examination of “the cultural significance of the ways in which we use [our tools]” (p. 60) —we being academic scholars and the tools being the spectrum of print and digital–helps me think in a larger sense about the nature of the interactions that shape the poetry communities I’ve studied and participated in. This is pretty wonderful for me, because the formation of literary community is something that I know I want to focus on in-depth during the course of my studies here.

There were a few particular instances of resonance between Fitzpatrick’s ideas about  publishing (print or digital) and knowledge production, and my own experiences as a maker and participant in the reading, writing and publishing of poetry and its attendant discourses. One was on page 57, where she talks about “the fear of loss of community” that online publishing engenders. She suggests that this fear may not be one of a loss of community, but rather “the loss of individuality, revealed in the assumption that ‘coherent imagined selves’ require separation rather than interconnection to be thought coherent…” This put me in mind of the intense interdependence between reader and writer that I see happening in most poetry communities, and, I would argue, in New York in particular, where people are already very interdependent with each other when it comes to social, economic, and municipal needs. There is a sort of necessary blurring that happens between poets and readers, poets and editors/publishers, even poets and institutions; often the same people play all of the different roles, and one’s identity (or individuality) is intimately linked to this multiplicity. I wondered, how are scholarly communities different from this (roughly-described) model? What are the ways in which the rise of digital culture has transformed poetry communities?

Another instance: in the chapter on Texts, Fitzpatrick writes about the various ways in which people encounter texts, as readers and as commenters/reviewers/editors, and advocates for “a more communicative sense of interaction across texts.” This got me thinking about all of the various ways, as a poet and thinker, that I interact with texts; I suppose I take them for granted. The question of “generativity”–how reading a text generates writing by making you want to write–is one that I think carries over between “creative” and “academic” writing. This chapter got me interested in being more attentive to the ways that different modes (print, digital, audio, etc.) enact generativity for myself and others. For example, I have listened to audio recordings of poetry readings for years and found them amazingly generative; could the same be true of audio recordings of (really juicy, intellectually exciting) academic prose? What are the various ways in which this generativity is shared? Rather than “keeping” the writing I generate after reading something, how could I have this writing be more in-dialouge with what I’ve been reading?  I am grateful to Kathleen Fitzpatrick for giving me access to these questions. I found her book itself pretty damn generative.