Sarah Hummel

Sarah, something that I might make this project even better might be a comparison/contrast tool to other similar battles from the war? I’m not super familiar with this particular battle or war, but could there be interactive tidbits added that show differences and similarities with others? Or maybe even built-in assessment tools and lesson plans to help other teachers?

Sarah, thanks for getting the discussion started. A few clarifications I’d like to add in. One is that while Jockers’s Macroanalysis certainly advocates for using DH methods, it’s not a treatise on DH per se. Maybe it’s too much to ask for it to be defining the field at large, rather than demonstrating a few methods that some DHers use, especially those who do literary analysis. Another is how we draw the distinction about what DHers might use, versus what DHers make. For example. the piece mentioned Google search, Google books and Microsoft word. You’re absolutely correct that many DH practitioners find ways to use these tools. That said, these are all products made by corporate software engineers to sell, rather than by humanists to further humanistic inquiry.

Incidentally, though, I do agree with you in another way. I’m probably more open to the use of commercial tools for DH purposes than many DH practitioners. I was once part of a project of humanists, librarians, and technologists that came up with functional requirements that users would want for digital repositories. It seemed like almost all the features users wanted were already in some way implemented on commercial sites or software, and many of the features were ones that could be purchased or rented for a lot less money that it would take for DH practitioners to develop or university IT departments to maintain. So I’m a believer in what works, with of course the caveat that we must be wary of issues like who owns what, long-term sustainability, and other hazards when it comes to working with for-profit entities rather than scholars, libraries, and universities.

Sarah I feel your pain on being dazed after reading that book. I am not what some people call a “numbers guy”. Statistical data, charts, and numbers tend to bore me, so this read was very challenging for me. The book did bring up certain correlations between what we have already read and new material. I particularly connected with the part when they talk about using macroanalysis to see the bigger picture of Digital Humanities. This reminded me of the tool or instrument theory that we previously learned about. Like a telescope is used to see the universe, Digital Humanities is a lens to see the wider world of the study of humanities and I think this same principle applies to macroanalysis. I was also fascinated by the statistics that you listed, particularly the one about historical documents. As a history grad student one of the hardest parts of my job is knowing a particular document exist but having no way to access it. It’s the most annoying and frustrating feeling in the world, so I fully agree with on needing to digitize more historical documents.

I agree with you, Katie. Perhaps I am a product of my generation or the data-hungry institutional environment I work in, but I found Jockers’ book refreshing and exciting. I would never (ever) call myself a numbers person, but to me macroanalysis is about so much more than numbers. I was heavily annotating Jockers as I read him, and this had as much to do with my ineptitude in the face of abstraction as it did with my excitement.

My teaching philosophy has always been one of continuous improvement, always striving to find better ways of doing things. My philosophy on scholarship is really no different, and maybe this is why macroanalysis is so exciting to me. I feel like macroanalysis allows us access to the next phase of literary studies, a phase into which we necessarily need to move. Along with close reading, macroanalysis lends legitimacy to what we do and the claims we make. What’s more, it brings us into rank with other disciplines that have been working at this level for years.

I love and agree with Jockers when he says that his work “does more to open doors than it does to close them” (32). Yes. So much yes.

Thank you for your post! Definitely helps clarify some of his points. As someone who has never taken an economics or statistics class in her life, trying to wrap my head around Jockers’ ideas about data and macroanalysis was a scary situation. But I get where he’s coming from – data serves a strong purpose in providing a foundation for theoretical work in DH studies. Almost all theoretical fields rely on evidence and support to back up any claims made, and macroanalysis is a great way to delve into how to provide hard evidence of literary or DH theories that emerge now and in the future.

Something that came to mind as I was reading the text was that DH is its own entity, but DH is also starting to infiltrate into other areas of academia. In the introduction, DH, to me, was portrayed as a result of change; some scholars are embracing the change, and some are turning the other way, leaving DH to exist on its own. I liked the idea Ramsey presented in the introduction, and later Fitzpatrick in her article, when he declared that DH was about building and creating, and scholars can’t just study it and critique it. I thought this brought about an interesting perspective on DH that I had not considered. What most interested me in DH was the description of the speed. I always associate academia with long-term research and data collected over time; however, DH is unique in that it is a speedy process because the digital world is constantly changing and being reinvented. In Part 1, Matthew Kirschenbaum touches on social media, and I can’t help but admit that my students’ lives revolve around the concept. (The sooner I embrace this…the better). In fact, I find myself relating discussions, characters, and concepts to social media in one way or another to make ideas interesting to them. Connecting these ideas made me realize that DH is very important, and, as Sarah said, it has been a part of my life for a very long time with me even realizing it.

Sarah, I like your point about DH being capacious and sprawling, which it certainly is. That said, if I were reading this post, I’m not sure that I’d get a sense of what the boundaries are. And I definitely agree that Dh can be practiced in many fields, as you noted.

That is, is anything computerized necessarily DH? For example, would a database of DNA sequences qualify as DH? Or a facebook post? Or is there something about what questions are asked and how? This is a difficult question that we struggle with, and I’m more of the “big-tent” camp than the “it-must-involve-lots-of-coding-by-specialists” camp, but are there, say, criteria you would use to give us a sense of what DH is? In other words, if your cousin asked you what DH is and isn’t, how would we answer that?