“Foundational” Texts in the Digital Humanities

Recently, Matt Kirschenbaum, English Professor at Maryland, Associate Director of the Maryland Inistitute for Technology in the Humanities, and author of Mechanisms, tweeted a request for “absolutely foundational” articles or chapters for “an introduction to the digital humanities.” The following is my list, in chronological order.

1. Vannevar Bush, 1945, “As We May Think.”
2. Claude Shannon, 1948, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
3. Norbert Wiener, 1954, “Organization is the Message.”
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955, “The Structural Study of Myth.”
5. Benjamin Colby, 1966, “Culture Patterns in Narrative.”
6. Gregory Bateson, 1967, “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.”
7. Rodney Needham, 1975, “Polythetic Classification.” *
8. Jean-François Lyotard, 1979, The Postmdern Condition.
9. Ted Nelson, 1980, Literary Machines.
10. Walter Ong, 1982, Orality and Literacy.
11. Lucy Suchman, 1988, “Representing Practice in Cognitive Science.” *
12. Douglas Adams, 1990. Hyperland. *
13. Diana Forsythe, 1993, “The Construction of Work in Artificial Intelligence.” *
14. Steven Bird and Mark Liberman, 1999, “Annotation graphs as a framework for multidimensional linguistic data analysis.”
15. Lev Manovich, 2001, “Database as Symbolic Form.”
16. John Unsworth, 2001, “Knowledge Representation in Humanities Computing.”
17. Stephen Ramsey, 2005, “In Praise of Pattern.”
18. Tim Berners-Lee, 2006, “Linked Data-Design Issues.”

* These were added after the original post. I reserve the write to amend and annotate this list at any time …

Here are a few qualifiers.

Number one, I don’t think there are, strictly speaking, any foundational texts in the digital humanities. Not in the way that physics can claim Newton’s Principia or biology Darwin’s Origin. I am not sure if this situation is due to the (perennial) infancy of the field-if, indeed, it is a field. (I think of it more as a cross-displinary methodology.) Moreover, my saying so certainly isn’t due to any distaste on my part for the concept of a canon. Instead, there are, roughly corresponding to the pre- and post-war era of the previous century, a number of loosely related essays that adumbrate a set of ideas which subsequent generations of people who call themselves digital humanists have been unpacking. The latter have produced a number of essays which the majoritoy of digital humanists will have read, and these may be called foundational, in the sense of a shared discourse. Fair enough. But none of these texts can claim the status of having defined a method or a domain that we can, in retrospect, claim as distinctly concerning the digital humanities. Also-and here I will be controversial-I believe that this particular corpus has had the effect of producing, though the hyercoherence that can affect small “thought collectives” (Fleck), a rather narrow set of concerns which have put the field into a groove from which it would do well to extricate itself.

Number two, since I consider the digital humanities to be at once critical and practical, these texts come from both angles, one set concerned with method, the other with historical context.

Number three, parts of this list are, as you’ll quickly see, pretty specific to me, and my background as an American cultural anthropologist with strong English and French influences. These are texts that have been foundational to my conception of the digital humanities, and which have made a difference to my way of thinking about textuality, digital textuality, and what happens to text when it becomes digital. But it is not entirely idiosyncratic. In its defense, I would argue that the digital humanities is more closely tied with the structuralism of the 1950s and 60s than is usually recognized-and indeed, more than structuralists are prepared to admit. (There is an important chapter of intellectual history that needs to be written here, concerning the close but relatively hidden relationship between structuralism and the “cybernetic moment.”) Moreover, the anthropological angle is always worth pushing, insofar as the discipline, before its reflexive self-implosion in the 1980s and 90s, bequeathed the culture concept on which the realignment of the humanities and itnerpretive social sciences has been constructed. From an anthropologist’s view, the wild success of cultural studies and cultural history has the sad sweetness, the tristes tropiques, that attends the simultaneous death and birth of cultures.

* * *

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Stories, Games, Databases and Film: The Aristotle-McLuhan Field

My previous musings on the opposition between McLuhan and Aristotle imply a two-dimensional continuum for locating various forms of media. If we let the term “narrative” cover what Butcher translates as “plot” in Aristotle, and we classify the four kinds of media discussed by Manovich, then he have the following structural table:

This table is an example of the classic structuralist device, made famous by Lévi-Strauss, where all possible variations of an opposition are laid out in a kind of truth table. A plus sign (+) means that the category is present in the item, while a minus sign (-) indicates its absence. These tables are useful for generating ideas about how elements in a given field — in this case, media forms — are related to each other, generating further questions. For example, it emerges that databases are the strong opposite of films, while stories and games are weak opposites.

The table above can also be expressed as a two-dimensional field, where the named column headers become the X and Y axes of a discrete Cartesian plane, and the values in the first column become values in the field. This is the sort of device made famous by Bourdieu (see Distinction). The advantage of this device is that it allows us locate media forms with more precision. Here’s what I have in mind:

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Tech, People, Capital

Jim Groom writes another excellent piece in his blog, Bavatuesdays. In the post he makes the very important point that edutech poeple need to be aware, constantly aware, of the fact that technology, especially educational technology products like Blackboard, are bound up with corporate interests that are not our own. That technology does not always have the interest of teaching and learning to heart. I would add two things to this.

First, it’s not just corporations and capitalism that we need to be wary of, it’s governments too. Power is power, and educational technology can be the handmaiden of any institution willing to control it. What freaks me out about Blackboard most — and Angel too for that matter — is the way in which they push the assessment angle. In these systems the course becomes a conduit of information from the pedagogic periphery to the administrative core (and not between professor and student, the core relation). At some point, grade books — proffered as a convenience — will eventually frame how courses are taught and students graded, as they morph into devices for projecting standards and guidelines for teaching. The tail wags the dog.

Second, it’s not just Blackboard, but Web 2.0 as well. Facebook, for example, is about generating consumer data. It’s not, at root, about friends. So is Google. They’ve connected the web, but they’ve also helped transform the academic internet into a corporate web. The web is essentially a vast market mechanism which is quickly transforming and replacing the old, currency-based “system of the world” (if it has not done so already. The fact that banks and car makers are collapsing perhaps signifies this shift.) At least Blackboard is a knowable enemy, and therefore manageable to some extent. With Web 2.0, we have entered a matrix of surveillance the likes of which no dystopian novel I have read anticipated, since it is a matrix that we voluntary participate in. The degree of trust that we have given over to the web is amazing.

This is why I think edutech needs to do two things. We need to activate faculty as critics of technology, not simply users. By critic I mean one who understands technology for what it is, a cultural form with cognitive, pedagogical and social consequences, for good and for bad, and not merely a convenience. This is an important dimension of media fluency. And we need to encourage the development of what I call academia’s “indigenous” technologies, the true source of open source. Academia created contributed heavily to the creation of the internet and the web, and we have traditions of digital scholarship and e-science that provide alteranate frameworks for doing edutech than the Web 2.0 world of tags, life streaming, and network effects. These things are great — I am for them — but they can’t be our refuge from Blackboard.

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An example of genuine Open Source Scholarship

To echo and inflect Dot Porter’s emarks on the release of Archimedes Palimpsest project, the value of the project goes beyond its rich content and technical accomplishments — because of its mode of distribution, the project stands as an exemplar of genuine Open Source Scholarship. So often, as for example in the case of the Open Knowledge Initiative and the Open Archives Initiative, the will to openness is directed toward the finished products of scholarship — e-prints and syllabi — and not to the raw materials that make such research possible. (Not to diminsh the efforts of the two organizations!)

Beyond scholarly communication there are two less overt resources that make scholarship possible, and which for the most part remain closed to those who do not belong to elite research organizations (e.g. universities): (1) direct access to experts in the field, and (2) access to raw data and primary sources. The former may perhaps be opened by new forms of collaboration mediated by social software; the latter, however, have remained jealously guarded by the scholars who acquired them, or whose institutions own them. Archaelogists and art historians are familiar with this situation — real research requires keys to collections, keys which are not given to just anyone. These resources are the “Intel inside” for humanistic research, the capital that drives the production of scholarly communication.

Perhaps the Archimedes Palimpsest project will show the way to a different model for providing access to the scholarly capital.

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