Kristen Johnson

Kristen,
I feel the debate will never stop with new technologies and innovations. In the one article it brought up the hushed research of computers and how not everything could be revealed for fear of disturbing the population (my interpretation of course). Ironically I watched two movies this weekend that deal with these topics of acceptance and development. The first one that applies more directly to this readings is “Ex Machina”. It is up for an oscar and is one of those movies that leaves you shocked. I can’t stop thinking about how it ended. I won’t spoil it, but it deals with a lot of historic and contemporary themes related to ethics of creation and existence (again my opinion). I think the premise of this movie allows for us to rethink and maybe empathize with topics that are neglected or under appreciated. Unfortunately we must walk on egg shells if we don’t want to disturb the population.

The second movie I watched was “Steve Jobs”. Whether completely true or not, it made me think about the humanities portion of technological innovations. Those same themes continue today.

Another thing that kept popping up as I read all the articles was the struggle between quantitative and qualitative. This has to be the most wore out debate related to academia. The connections between this research and DH opens up a whole new can of worms.

Good points, all. One issue that various professional academic organizations have been trying to solve, including the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Historical Association (AHA), and individual academic units in colleges and universities have also struggled with, is not necessarily whether DH activities constitute scholarship, but rather how to evaluate that scholarship. For funded DH projects, the grant process provides at least some evaluation (people get credit for winning grants), but that’s at the point of the proposal, rather than necessarily an evaluation of the finished product. There are a number of obstacles here, some of which are detailed in the introduction to our own Evaluating DH assignment. Just as problematic as the lack of criteria are the lack of practitioners with enough expertise to provide an informed evaluation, a lack of standards in terms of how projects are documented, and the difficulty in evaluating the individual contributions of projects that can involve many collaborators. So it’s going to be a challenge for a long time.

Kristen:

Before I read this week’s assignment, I paged through your post. I won’t lie, my first reaction was “Uh, no, writing code is NOT like literary theory!” I mean, how can DOING something – as a skill – be the same as ANALYZING IT – like the result of that skill? But after reading, especially Ramsay’s portion, I have softened on that stance. While I think that performing skills and analyzing results have their separate place in humanities, I do see how DH can be a kind of theoretical practice. I especially liked the comparison of theory to prototypes. He’s totally right: prototypes are, in essence, the physical manifestation of theory. A prototype may be right the first time, but it most likely won’t be, and will require several alterations and new attempts at forward movement – just like a theory under scrutiny of the scientific method.

Later on in your post, you ask “Is DH like the STEM of literature, comprehension, and theory?” Here I would argue no, it is not, but rather the opposite: DH is to STEM as literature, theory, and comprehension are to the general humanities. Think about it for a moment … when explaining to someone your studies of literary theory and various literatures, is the practical application/benefit of those studies likely to be immediately apparent to the listener when that audience isn’t already familiar with the ins and outs of English study? Might they assume (at first, anyway) that such studies are useless when the arguments and hypotheses (so to speak) of those areas have already been long established? That’s how I feel DH is viewed in the eyes of the STEM community: why see coding, building, or the development of any technical skill as something to be rehashed or theorized – why not just DO it? That’s why I think DH gets a bad rap of sorts – it doesn’t immediately imply any form of value; it is only over time that the benefit of revisiting theory, expanding it, and performing trial and error on those expansions can really come to light.

In most things in life, “good things come to those who wait” – or, in this case, those who look back and ask “what if?” Problem is, in this day in age, nobody seems to have time for that. And if there’s no time for it, it’s not valuable – forward is the only practical movement.

Kristen,

One of the parts of Gary Hall’s Critical Theory article that interested me was his discussion of critical theory in the context of Scheinfeldt’s claim that theory’s problem is a matter of scale and timing. The argument is that the theory of DH is being compared to humanities scholarship as a whole, which is to expect every scholar to contribute a theoretical advancement to the field. Indeed, it is seen in the historical field, as well. New books, articles, essays, and presentations are all looking to produce a new idea or new way of looking at an old idea. There is, seemingly, little to no benefit for rehashing the ideas that had already been produced, albeit with a slight tweak. However, it seems that DH is new enough that there is still much to learn in terms of theory. In this sense, it seems much more common to see someone produce a work that is built upon rather than having a new work constructed that refutes the original.

I guess for me, I need DH to be black and white. Even after a few weeks in the class, I am still very confused as to what DH is, and what falls into the category of DH. The coding activity last week was like asking me to speak a whole different language, that I knew nothing about. It was very confusing, and frustrating. So I am reaching out for help to all of you to help me in better understanding what DH actually is.

I liked Sara’s post about having standards. As a middle school teacher we not only have state and national standards but we have standards set by the company that owns our charter school. I think if DH had standards and could break it down into categories that people would better understand it would help some, but also confuse some. For me, seeing what I need to teach, and the time frame I need to teach it in is way more helpful than sending me in to teach something with no guidelines or deadlines.

Right now I feel that DH is a huge category, with all these little sub categories because no one really knows that to include in DH and what not to which is even more confusing for me…
From the Debates Part II, I basically took away that research is core to understanding what DH really is, and that technology will just continue to improve. Because of that we have to stay up to date on the latest trends.

Kristen,

Just getting caught up here. In your first paragraph you say that your question “was simple compared to the questions posed by Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell and the questions being asked to DH scholars.” I taught first-year writing for two years, and I’ve always looked for ways to integrate technology into my students’ practices – not for the sake of doing so, but with an eye toward using the technologies’ affordances to accomplish things that traditional assignments can’t. That said, your statement resonated with me in that before this class began, I felt that I could answer the question, “What is DH?” for the sheer fact that I have been immersed in DH all this time – but the questions raised by the readings have troubled my understanding (in a good way) of what “digital humanities” means. I think, as Dr. Schocket said prior to the beginning of the class, that answering that question will be an ongoing journey versus a final destination.

Kristen, thanks for the thoughtful post. Two particular observations caught my eye here.

One is how students may now communicate with authors through social media. It’s a wonderful development, and I’m glad you pointed it out. That said, I wonder to what extent we would call that DH. For example, I could tweet a politician asking about a position, or a physicist asking about a particular experiment result. In other words, you’re talking about communication with humanities, but does that make it digital humanities? Or is there something qualitatively different about the interaction that makes this a new animal that’s different from the previously-mentioned ones.

Also, something to be clarified. The post notes that “I see that the longer I teach, the more the explanatory essay develops into a more descriptive and detailed essay, still giving fact but in an entertaining way.” There’s no question that students have much easier access to information — although, as someone who teaches history, I find that sometimes this also allows students to avoid going to that big building with all the books and old papers in it (in the old days, we used to call it a “library”!). In any case, do you mean that the explanatory essays do the same intellectual work, and in more detailed ways, or that they have exchanged analysis for description?

Kristen,

It’s interesting that you mention plagiarism in your post. As a high school English teacher myself, plagiarism has always been kind of the elephant in the room. I haven’t been able to get my students to fully understand it, much less avoid it. I hadn’t really considered how DH would affect that idea. Would the lines start to get blurry?

I’ve also been considering this plagiarism idea in light of something I have started with my students. I took a teaching grammar and writing class last semester and started using some of the ideas from one of the books, Image Grammar, Second Edition: Teaching Grammar as Part of the Writing Process by Harry Noden. Part of the book, and actually most of the books used in the course, began with imitating the work of other writers. For example, take a passage you like from a writer and change the topic and the words, but follow the sentence structure. I was under the impression that plagiarism was copying anything, including sentence structure, but I remember doing similar exercises when I was in school. Would that be considered plagiarism? And furthermore, would it be considered plagiarism if students only used imitation as a kind of warm-up and never intended to publish their results?

Kristen, thank you for your post. I think it echoes some sentiments I’ve had for some time in my master’s studies that the study and teaching of composition needs to have flexibility. Times change, people change, etc. – and we need to adapt ourselves to that fact. Digital humanities are not a replacement for traditional writing practices, but rather a supplement to what we already learn and know. I think embracing DH as a PART of those practices will not only let students have a multidisciplinary view of writing, but will also let them view writing study with an open mind, allowing them to adapt their writing to various situations and necessities. That would be invaluable!

Kristen, I too drew a connection to the world of education and DH. Like your thoughts on students interacting with authors and other students who are engaging in texts, I was thinking about how much DH has shaped my classroom from accessing texts online, chatting with authors through Twitter, or blogging with students from neighboring schools. I also had never encountered a book on this particular open format and was very intrigued about how more texts in this fashion would be so beneficial for public schools!