class: middle # Digital Humanities Approaches to Textual Objects, Fall 2018 ### Major Course Themes
Matthew J. Lavin Clinical Assistant Professor of English and Director of Digital Media Lab University of Pittsburgh August 2018 --- class: middle # Topics to Cover
#### 1. Definitions of Digital Humanities #### 2. Text Analysis Methods in DH #### 3. Two Recent Perspectives on Digital Humanities --- class: middle # Definitions of Digital Humanities
#### - Numerous definitions. See especially ... -
Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader
(2013) -
Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
-
https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/
-
Big Tent Digital Humanities
#### - Hotly contested #### - Literally whole books about it --- class: middle # A Few Examples
"Reluctantly, DH describes a collection of activities that bring together humanistic and digital approaches to learning, knowing, exploring, sharing, and publishing"
--Laurie Allen --- class: middle # A Few Examples
"DH is a cover term for a wide variety of activities that attempt to explore and expand areas of knowledge typically examined in the Humanities by developing and/or applying computational tools or methods in ways best suited for these areas. DH is also a cover term for a supporting community of practitioners who share a common interest in the tools and methods--and challenges--generated by the activities DH scholars, as well as potentially useful activities in fields outside the traditional Humanities."
--Scott Kleinman --- class: middle # A Few Examples
"How do I define DH? Reluctantly."
--Bethany Nowviskie --- class: middle # A Few Examples
"The Digital Humanities is both a field with a discernable set of academic lineages, practices, and methodologies, and a vague umbrella term used to describe the application of digital technology to traditional humanistic inquiry. Ultimately, what sets DH apart from many other humanities fields is its methodological commitment to building things as a way of knowing."
--Matthew K. Gold --- class: middle # One Controversy
#### - Do you have to learn to code?
#### Read, for example, Miriam Posner's
Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code
--- class: middle # What is Code?
#### I like this definition by Matt Burton (from a forthcoming publication):
#### The symbolic representation of computer instructions. See also
What is Code?
by Paul Ford --- class: middle # For this class:
#### You don't have to learn to code, but various assignments ask you to look at code, think about code, and engage with code. My workshops will use Python, but you can do your final paper using code or software of your choice, with the caveat that I may not know how to use the tool you want to use. --- class: middle # Text Analysis Methods in DH
#### Primarily make computational interventions (though early quantitative analysis was done by hand) --- class: middle # Text Analysis Methods in DH
#### Sometimes use interface as a way to augment purely hermeneutic or qualitative analysis --- class: middle # Text Analysis Methods in DH
#### Sometimes called "Distant Reading," a label popularized by Franco Moretti --- class: middle # Text Analysis Methods in DH
#### More recently, some have pivoted to the label "Cultural Analytics" --- class: middle # Text Analysis Methods in DH
#### Often involve quantitative analysis (with all the baggage that implies) --- class: middle # Text Analysis Methods in DH
#### Are informed by computational linguistics, informational retrieval, natural language processing, and stylometry but brings distinct concerns to its deployment of computational methods. --- class: middle # A Simple Question:
### What Are Computers Good At? --- class: middle # A Related Question:
### What Are Humans Not So Good At? --- class: middle # Two Recent Perspectives on Digital Humanities
What the social sciences lack are courses in literary history. And that’s important, because distant readers set out to answer concrete historical questions. So the unfortunate reality is, this project cannot be contained in one discipline.
The questions we try to answer are taught in the humanities. But the methods we use are taught, right now, in the social sciences and data science.
Even if it frightens some students off, we have to acknowledge that cultural analytics is a multi-disciplinary project—a bridge between the humanities and quantitative social science, belonging equally to both.
Ted Underwood, “A Broader Purpose,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # Two Recent Perspectives on Digital Humanities
It’s not a coincidence that
distant reading does not deal well with gender, or with sexuality, or with race.
Gender and sexuality and race are precisely the sorts of concepts that have been exposed and interrogated by attending to non-dominant subject positions. And like literary world systems, or ‘the great unread,’ the problems associated with these concepts, like sexism or racism, are also problems of scale, but
they require an increased attention to, rather than a passing over, of the subject positions that are too easily (if at times unwittingly) occluded when taking a distant view.
Lauren F. Klein, “Distant Reading after Moretti,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # Question:
### Are these positions actually at odds? --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
Our existing tradition of critical theory teaches students to ask indispensable questions—about power, for instance, and the material basis of ideology. But persuasive answers to those questions will often require a lot of evidence, and the art of extracting meaningful patterns from evidence is taught by a different theoretical tradition, called 'statistics.'
Ted Underwood, “A Broader Purpose,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
I think we need to start with our corpora. We need to assemble more corpora—more accessible corpora—that perform the work of recovery or resistance. An example: the corpus created by the Colored Conventions Project, which seeks to recover and aggregate evidence that documents the Colored Conventions of the nineteenth-century United States; these were organizing meetings in which Black Americans, both fugitive and free, came together to strategize about how to achieve social and legal justice.
Lauren F. Klein, “Distant Reading after Moretti,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
But the metaphor of a welcome mat may be too optimistic. This field doesn’t have a door yet. I mean, there is no curriculum. So of course the field tends to attract people who already have an extracurricular background—which, of course, is not equally distributed. It shouldn’t surprise us that access is a problem when this field only exists as a social network.
Ted Underwood, “A Broader Purpose,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
So it’s here that I want to try to apply Ahmed’s lessons of structural power to the problems of power we face—still—with respect to lowercase-d lowercase-r distant reading in DH. Because as surprising as it might have been to some, when the allegations against Moretti surfaced, I don’t think it would be surprising to anyone in this room to bring up the many critiques that have been levied over the years at distant reading, and about how that particular field is, we might say, unwelcoming to women.
Lauren F. Klein, “Distant Reading after Moretti,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
What the social sciences lack are courses in literary history. And that’s important, because distant readers set out to answer concrete historical questions. So the unfortunate reality is, this project cannot be contained in one discipline. The questions we try to answer are taught in the humanities. But the methods we use are taught, right now, in the social sciences and data science. Even if it frightens some students off, we have to acknowledge that cultural analytics is a multi-disciplinary project—a bridge between the humanities and quantitative social science, belonging equally to both.
Ted Underwood, “A Broader Purpose,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
We also need to rethink how we formulate our models. Instead of first asking what can be modeled—what phenomena we can track at scale—we might instead ask: what might be hidden in this corpus? And are there methods we might use to bring out significant texts, or clusters of words, that the eye cannot see?
Lauren F. Klein, “Distant Reading after Moretti,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
Instead of imagining cultural analytics as a subfield of DH, I would almost call it an emerging way to integrate the different aspects of a liberal education. People who want to tackle that challenge are going to have to work across departments to some extent: it’s not a project that an English department could contain. But it is nevertheless an important opportunity for literary scholars, since it’s a place where our work becomes central to the broader purposes of the university as a whole.
Ted Underwood, “A Broader Purpose,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018 --- class: middle # A Few More From Underwood and Klein
Tt’s not that distant reading can’t do this work—it’s that it’s yet to sufficiently do so. But if we re-commit ourselves to the project of exposing and interrogating power, we could arrive at a form of distant reading that is much more capacious, and much more inclusive, than what we have at the present. Because the view from a distance, is, of course, as much of a view from a particular place as a view from up close.
Lauren F. Klein, “Distant Reading after Moretti,” Varieties of Digital Humanities panel, MLA, Jan 5, 2018