Expanding Debates in the Digital Humanities

Debates in DH, Digital Scholarship

Jen Howard has a review in the Times Literary Supplement on Matthew Gold’s edited volume, Debates in the Digital Humanities. Gold is an assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology, an advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives at the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the director of the CUNY Academic Commons. Earlier this year, I posted some of my reflections on the book in a post entitled, A Boundless Domain of Culture.

The arrival of the volume in the UK (and the upcoming launch of its online platform) comes on the heels of extensive coverage in North America and raises some important questions concerning the current monolingual nature of such debates (at least in print) and the dilemmas of digital humanists whose geographical and digital presence on the hub and spoke system of the map above continues to be dependent upon economic and political factors. It is, in fact, not such a boundless domain of culture after all.

This Global Internet Map, by Telegeography, illustrates the Internet’s highest capacity routes and its global hub cities. We could easily compare this map to centerNet’s map of their international network of digital humanities centers and see a general convergence of the two. Yet,  Telegeography’s assessment of future functionality of the Internet, a prerequisite for the growth and diffusion of the digital humanities as a scholarly practice,  signals future challenges to scholarship not just for the digital humanities, but to all  scholars working in the digital age.

“For the Internet to function, the world’s internet service providers and content distributors must interconnect their networks. While some providers freely exchange traffic between themselves, a practice called “peering,” most providers must purchase upstream “transit.” In a transit agreement, the customer network pays to have its traffic carried by the transit provider to the rest of the Internet. Transit prices are cheapest in cities where major IP backbone operators have presence and competition is strong. As such, the price of a transit port can serve as a proxy for how close a city is to the economic “center” of the Internet. The cheaper the transit, the closer the city is to the Internet core.”

The essays in Gold’s volume touch on debates among those who inhabit cities proximate to that “Internet core.” Lisa Spiro, director of the US National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education Labs, indicates in her essay that the digital humanities converge around something called “Internet values.” These may include collaboration, the open sharing of information, and experimentation, but I would argue that they also should extend beyond what Howard Rheingold has dubbed netsmarts  to questions of digital hegemony that are raised  by the Internet’s physical infrastructure, explored recently in a book by Andrew Blum. Expanding these debates in the digital humanities to reimagine our notions about culture, knowledge, or communication could be, in the words of Andrew Prescott, the challenge of making the digital human.

Cross posted at HASTAC and at [archive]

Ahead in the Clouds

Research and Teaching Tools, Site Reviews, , , , , , , ,

The Chronicle published a lengthy review article last week on the science of brain mapping. The article focuses on Ken Hayworth, a researcher at Harvard who specializes in the study of neural networks (called connectomes). Hayworth believes, among other things, that we will one day be able to upload and replicate an individual human consciousness on a computer. It sounds like a great film plot. Certainly, it speaks to our ever-evolving obsession with our own mortality. Whatever the value of Hayworth’s prediction, many of us are already storing our consciousness on our computers. We take notes, download source material, write drafts, save bookmarks, edit content, post blogs and tweets and status updates. No doubt the amount of our intellectual life that unfolds in front of a screen varies greatly from person to person. But there are probably not too many modern writers like David McCullough, who spends most of his time clacking away on an antique typewriter in his backyard shed.

Although I still wade through stacks of papers and books and handwritten notes, the vast majority of my academic work lives on my computer, and that can be a scary prospect. I have heard horror stories of researchers who lose years of diligent work in the blink of an eye. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror all of my data to an external hard drive next to my desk. Others might prefer Time Machine (for Macs) or Backup and Restore (for Windows). But what if I lose both my computer and my backup? Enter the wide world of cloud storage. Although it may be some time before we can backup our entire neural net on the cloud, it is now fairly easy to mirror the complicated webs of source material, notes, and drafts that live on our computers. Services like Dropbox, Google Drive, SpiderOak, and SugarSync offer between 2 and 5 GB of free space and various options for syncing local files to the cloud and across multiple computers and mobile devices. Most include the ability to share and collaborate on documents, which can be useful in classroom and research environments.

These free services work great for everyday purposes, but longer research projects require more space and organizational sophistication. The collection of over 10,000 manuscript letters at the heart of my dissertation, which I spent three years digitizing, organizing, categorizing, and annotating, consume about 30 GB. Not to mention the reams of digital photos, pdfs, and tiffs spread across dozens of project folders. It is not uncommon these days to pop into a library or an archive and snap several gigs of photos in a few hours. Whether this kind of speed-research is a boon or a curse is subject to debate. In any event, although they impose certain limits, ADrive, MediaFire, and Box (under a special promotion) offer 50 GB of free space in the cloud. Symform offers up to 200 GB if you contribute to their peer-to-peer network, but their interface is not ideal and when I gave the program a test drive it ate up almost 90% of my bandwidth. If you are willing to pay an ongoing monthly fee, there are countless options, including JustCloud‘s unlimited backup. I decided to take advantage of the Box deal to backup my various research projects, and since the process was far from straightforward, I thought I would share my solution with the world (or add it to the universal hive mind).

Below are the steps I used to hack together a free, cloud-synced backup of my research.  Although this process is designed to sync academic work, it could be modified to mirror other material or even your entire operating system (more or less). While these instructions are aimed at Mac users, the general principles should remain the same across platforms. I can make no promises regarding the security or longevity of material stored in the cloud. Although most services tout 256 bit SSL encryption, vulnerabilities are inevitable and the ephemeral nature of the online market makes it difficult to predict how long you will have access to your files. The proprietary structure of the cloud and government policing efforts are critical issues that deserve more attention. Finally, I want to reiterate that this process is for those looking to backup a fairly large amount of material. For backups under 5 GB, it is far easier to use one of the free synching services mentioned above.

Step 1: Signup for Box (or another service that offers more than a few GB of cloud storage). I took advantage of a limited-time promotion for Android users and scored 50 GB of free space.

Step 2: Make sure you can WebDAV into your account. From the Mac Finder, click Go –> Connect to Sever (or hit command-k). Enter “https://www.box.com/dav” as the server address. When prompted, enter the e-mail address and password that you chose when you setup your Box account. Your root directory should mount on the desktop as a network drive. Not all services offer WebDAV access, so your mileage may vary.

Step 3: Install Transmit (or a similar client that allows synced uploads). The full version costs $34, which may be worth it if you decide you want to continue using this method. Create a favorite for your account and make sure it works. The protocol should be WebDAV HTTPS (port 443), the server should be www.box.com, and the remote path should be /dav. Since Box imposes a 100 MB limit for a single file, I also created a rule that excludes all files larger than 100 MB. Click Transmit –> Preferences –> Rules to establish what files to skip. Since only a few of my research documents exceeded 100 MB, I was fine depositing these with another free cloud server. I realize not everyone will be comfortable with this.

Step 4: Launch Automator and compile a script to run an upload through Transmit. Select “iCal Alarm” as your template and find the Transmit actions. Select the action named “Synchronize” and drag it to the right. You should now be able to enter your upload parameters. Select the favorite you created in Step 3 and add any rules that are necessary. Select “delete orphaned destination items” to ensure an accurate mirror of your local file structure, but make sure the Local Path and the Remote Path point to the same place. Otherwise, the script will overwrite the remote folder to match the local folder and create a mess. I also recommend disabling the option to “determine server time offset automatically.”

Step 5: Save your alarm. This will generate a new event in iCal, in your Automator calendar (if you don’t have a calendar for automated tasks, the system should create one for you). Double-click the event to modify the timing. Set repeat to “every day” and adjust the alarm time to something innocuous, like 4am. Click “Done” and you should be all set.

Automator will launch Transmit every day at your appointed time and run a synchronization on the folder containing your research. The first time it runs, it should replicate the entire structure and contents of your folder. On subsequent occasions, it should only update those files that have been modified since the last sync. There is a lot that can go wrong with this particular workflow, and I did not include every contingency here, so please feel free to chime in if you think I’ve left out something important.

If, like me, you are a Unix nerd at heart, you can write a shell script to replicate most of this using something like cadaver or mount_webdav,  rsync, and cron. I might post some more technical instructions later, but I thought I should start out with basic point-and-click. If you have any comments or suggestions – other cloud servers, different process, different outcomes – please feel free to share them.

UPDATE: Konrad Lawson over at ProfHacker has posted a succinct guide to scripting rsync on Mac OS X. It’s probably better than anything I could come up with, so if you’re looking for a more robust solution and you’re not afraid of the command line, you should check it out.

Cross-posted at HASTAC

Modlab at Yale and a voyage to Italy

Research and Teaching Tools, Yale Projects

It’s day 1 of the ModLab Workshop at Yale with Dean Irvine, Matt Huculak, Kirsta Stapelfeldt, and Alan Stanley.  We have great group of participants from across the disciplines – from anthropology to East Asian studies and from English to film studies. Several participants have DH projects under their belts, but many are just starting out.

I handed over my files to Dean yesterday, newly digitized reproductions of glass lantern slides from the early 20th century. They gathered dust for decades in a black box forgotten in the corner of a campus office, their technology obsolete.  I took this photowhile I was still trying to find someone to fund digitizing the box’s fragile contents. Fortunately, the Instructional Technology Group stepped in with the necessary funds and ITS Academic Technologies provided the expertise.

The collection is a valuable visual archive in multiple respects. The photographs were taken during several grand tours of Italy between 1904 and 1912 and provide a unique perspective on the history of Anglophone tourism in Italy. They also provide precious historical documentation of cultural heritage sites in cities such as Florence, Venice, Assisi and Rome. Finally, the technology employed to reproduce these photographs indicates that their use was a public one: whether in the classroom for the undergraduates of Yale College or at public lectures, the lantern slide was the technology of choice for projecting images for a large audience.

In 1903, at a meeting of the New Haven Medical Association at the medical school, Dr. Robert Osgoode, greatly impressed his audience with a splendidly illustrated lecture on “The Interpretation of X-ray findings in suspected diseases of the bone or soft parts” with an assortment of lantern slides.   Their extensive use in education at the turn of the 19th century is also evinced by the large number of lantern slides found in a number of repositories at Yale.

Beyond those found in the Harvey Cushing/ John Hay Whitney Medical Historical Library (including Dr. Osgoode’s), the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses William McClintock’s 1500 hand colored lantern slides of the Blackfoot Indians in the Yale Collection of Western Americana. The Yale Peabody Museum’s Division of Historical Scientific Instruments also has over 800 lantern slides, many of which contain material for physics lectures.

While I still don’t know exactly in what context these slides were used, I could turn to the  extensive William Inglis Morse lantern slide collection found  in the Visual Resource Collection at the Robert B. Haas Family Library. While not as meticulously annotated as our mysterious black box, this collection also documents the Grand Tour in Italy and was probably used as an instructional technology tool for Yale College courses.  The images collected by Morse, a philanthropist, historian, and clergyman are a particularly appropriate point of reference in this case given that Morse, like our instructors, came to Yale from Nova Scotia. In fact, Dalhousie University also houses Morse’s  ‘scholar’s library‘ which, as he noted, “if properly selected and studied, is one’s best monument.” (from his Preface, Catalogue of the William Inglis Morse Collection at Dalhousie University Library (London: Curwen Press, 1938).

Let’s hope Day 2 provides some valuable digital tools to better understanding and disseminating this unique visual archive which also serves as a valuable reminder of technological obsolescence.

cross posted at [archive]

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Draft

Digital Scholarship, Random Thoughts, , , , ,

I am an inveterate Mac user. Some might say I’m a fanboy. Although I like to think that my brand loyalty is due to a cleaner, easier, more pleasing operating experience, there are other factors. Part of my attraction stems from the “Think Different” ad campaign of my youth – flattering for any impulsive iconoclast. Or maybe it’s that soothing chime. I don’t agree with everything Apple has ever done, especially now that they’ve thundered into the mainstream, but I still think that, when all is said and done, they can produce a better quality product than the competition (now if only they could do it humanely). Apple devices are marketed as polished, eloquent, intuitive. A common complaint about Microsoft, on the other hand, is that they have trouble releasing a finished product. Windows is notorious for being incomplete, buggy, awkward, in need of an endless cascade of updates and service packs. Of course, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and every other decent piece of software does exactly the same thing. OS X has endured at least seven major revisions in the past decade, while Windows has suffered maybe three (it all depends on your definition of “major revision”). This endless turnover used to bother me. Does Firefox really need to release a new version every other day? How much useless bloat can software designers cram into MS Word before it finally explodes? Lately, however, I’ve come to accept and even embrace this radical incompleteness.

The age of static print was defined by permanence. Authors and editors had to work for a long time on multiple drafts, revisions, and proofs. The result was a clay tablet, or a scroll, or a codex book. With the onset of the printing press, it was easier to make corrections. Movable type could be reset and rearranged to create appended, expanded, and revised editions. Still, the emphasis was on stability. The paperback book I have on my desk right now looks pretty much exactly the same as it did when it was first published in 1987. And it will always look that way. A lot of effort went into its publication because it would be extremely difficult to revise it. It is a stable artifact. Digital culture, on the other hand, is a permanent palimpsest. What is here today is gone tomorrow, all that is solid melts into air. Digital publications do not have to be fully polished artifacts because they can be endlessly revised. There are benefits and drawbacks to this state of almost limitless transition. But now that the Encyclopedia Britannica has thrown up its hands and shuttered its print division, perhaps it is worth asking: what do we have to gain from adhering to a culture of permanence?

In the world of static print, errors or inaccuracies are irreversible. Filtration systems, such as line editing or peer review, help to mitigate against this problem, but even the most perfectionist among us are not immune from good faith mistakes. We have all had those moments when we come across a typo or an inelegant phrase that makes us cringe with regret. How wonderful would it be to correct it in an instant? And why stop at typos? Less than a year after I published an article on abolitionist convict George Thompson, I was wandering around in the vast annex where my school’s library dumps all of its old reference books. Here were hoary relics like the National Union Catalog or the Encyclopedia of the Papacy. I picked up a dusty tome and, by dumb luck, found an allusion to Thompson’s long-lost manuscript autobiography. When I wrote the article I had scoured every database known to man over the course of two years, including WorldCat and ArchiveGrid. But the manuscript, which was filed away in some godforsaken corner of the Chicago History Museum, had no corresponding  entry in any online catalog. I had to e-mail the museum staff and wait while a kindly librarian checked an old-school physical card catalog for the entry (so much for the vaunted age of digital research). Although it was too late to include the document in my article, at least I had time to include it in my dissertation. But what if I could include it in the article?

The perfectionist temptation can be disastrous. No doubt this impulse to continually revise is what led George Lucas to update the first three Star Wars films with new scenes and special effects. Many fans thought that the changes ruined the experience of the original artifacts. It may be better in some cases to leave well enough alone. Yet there is something to be said for revision. One of the things I love about the Slavery Portal is that it is constantly evolving. I am always adding new material or tweaking the interface. When I find a mistake, I fix it. When new data makes an older entry obsolete, I update it. Writing History in the Digital Age, a serious work of scholarship that is also technologically sophisticated and experimental, uses Commentpress to enable paragraph-by-paragraph annotation of its content. Thus a peer review process that is usually conducted in private among a small group of people over a long period of time becomes something that is open, immediate, collaborative, and democratic. Projects like this have landmarks, qualitative leaps, or nodal points, just like software that jumps from alpha stage to beta release or version 10.4.11 to 10.5. But they are always in process. For every George Lucas, there is a Leonardo da Vinci. The Florentine Master only completed around fifteen paintings in his lifetime and was a consummate procrastinator. His extensive manuscript collection remained unpublished at the time of his death and largely unavailable for a long time thereafter. What if da Vinci had a blog? (I can just imagine the comment thread on Vitruvian Man: “stevexxx37:  wuz up wit teh hair? get a cut yo hippie lolz!”)

Although I sometimes still agonize about fixes or changes I could make to older work, I have found that dispensing with the whole pretense of permanency can be tremendously therapeutic. Rather than obsess over writing a flawless dissertation, I have come to embrace imperfection. I have come to view my thesis or my scholarly articles not as end products, but as steps in a larger progression. In a sense, they are still drafts. In the sense that we are always revising and refining our understanding of the past, all history is draft. Static books and articles are essential building blocks of our historical consciousness. It is hard to imagine a world where the book I cite today might not be the same book tomorrow. And yet, to a certain extent, we live in that world. When Apple finds a security loophole or a backwards compatibility issue in its software, it releases a patch. If I find a typo or an inaccuracy in this post three days from now, I can fix it immediately. If I come across new information a year later, I can make a revision or post a follow-up. Everything is process. The other day, I updated the firmware on a picture frame.

I will, of course, continue to aim for the most polished, the most perfect work of which I am capable. As much as I would like, I cannot write my dissertation as a blog post. I will edit and revise, edit and revise. Sometimes you do not know what you need to revise until you make it permanent. At the end, maybe, I will have a landmark. And I will welcome its insufficiency. There is something liberating about being incompl…

De nostri temporis studiorum ratione: Giambattista Vico and digital ecosystems

Debates in DH, Study Methods

It might seem anachronistic to call on the work of an eighteenth century philosopher to elucidate some of the issues at play in the debates swirling around the digital humanities, but Giambattista Vico has been on my mind lately as we prepare for a conference on his work today and tomorrow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Vico (1668-1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician and jurist. He worked in relative obscurity during his lifetime teaching rhetoric at the University of Naples. His succinct De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709) provides a useful lens through which we might consider the digital humanities.  The work, known in the English translation as On the Study Methods of Our Time, was Vico’s first foray into philosophy, and was the seventh in a series of inaugural lectures given at the University of Naples in his position as professor of rhetoric.

In his lecture, Vico took aim at the inadequacy of the critical and pedagogical methods of his contemporaries while weighing the comparative merits of classical and modern culture. In order to discern just how current “study methods” might be superior or inferior to the Ancients, Vico sets up a distinction between the new arts, sciences and inventions – the constituent material of learning – and and the new instruments and aids to knowledge – the ways and means of learning.

Vico’s critique of the Moderns took issue with the logicians of Port-Royal, and their Cartesian method of compartmentalizing knowledge. For Vico, this reductive method of study precludes the human, and is inferior to that of the Ancients: “We devote all of our efforts to the investigation of physical phenomena, because their nature seems unambiguous; but we fail to inquire into human nature which, because of the freedom of man’s will, is difficult to determine.” The result, Vico warns, is that students “because of their training, which is focused on these studies, are unable to engage in the life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence.” By reducing what there is to know, he argues, we limit our ability to engage with the world on a broader scale. Diminished by our learning, we will be incapable of dealing practically with issues of change or transformation, which require the ability to recognize and follow the most suitable or sensible course of action.

For Vico, the methods of logicians such as Antoine Arnaud and Pierre Nicole and their followers established the constituent material of learning through a process of narrowing the domain of knowledge. Much in the same way that Francis Bacon took issue with the syllogisms of the scholastics to argue that knowledge of the world should be grounded in carefully verified facts, Vico doesn’t limit himself to providing a new method to achieve old-fashioned knowledge. He redefines what it means to know.  And, since the instruments (including logic) used by his contemporaries, those ways and means to that material which constitutes knowledge, were antecedent to the task of learning, the knowledge they yielded was determined by their premisses for their creation. In the technology they harnessed, and in the aims they fulfilled, these instruments were restricted by the discourses which produced them. In reducing knowledge to the unambiguous, the logicians of Port Royal reduced knowledge to what their brains and their technology enabled them to master.

For the digital humanities, it is this category — the ways and means of learning — that carries within it a transformative potential for the constituent material of learning, but in a radically different way from that to which Vico directed his critique. In a scribal or a print environment, the constituent material of learning is often shaped and transformed by its means of transmission (see for example the work of Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass); that which is yielded instrumentally, will “speak” a language inherent in the design of the instrument. The critique Vico levelled at Cartesian method, that critics had placed “their fundamental truths before, outside, and above every bodily image of reality” illustrates an extreme case of how the instrument of logic could override the countenance of real life.  In other words, if the only instrument available to us is a hammer, by constraint of  circumstances, everything looks like a nail.

In our current digital environment, we are only beginning to see how the consituent material of learning is radically transformed by the ways and means in which it is transmitted. Rather than dealing with a reduction of knowledge, this time technology has allowed us to expand knowledge into a boundless domain, one whose complexity trumps theory and whose scale defies our individual and physiological capacity to grasp it. The digital humanities is currently grappling with this conundrum: by transforming what it means to know something, particularly in a boundless domain of culture, a discipline is emerging which attempts to come to terms with current interaction of millions of different pieces of human culture, past and present, digital and analog, while critically reflecting on the very nature of human knowledge itself.

David Weinberger has addressed this very problem in his book Too Big to Know.  Weinberger makes a pithy call for a “rethinking of knowledge now that the facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room.” One wonders what Giambattista Vico would have made of such a room. . .

Cross posted at HASTAC