BIG data. MACRO analysis. Both are hot terms in the digital humanities, and they both point to one of the strengths of the discipline: the ability to take a step back from the text, to look at its underlying and overarching structures from an outside view. To extract ourselves from the inside position of more traditional close readings, where we are more akin to entymologists obtaining a micro view of the segmented nature of the text, dissecting its thorax, abdomen, and head. Instead we can take a step back and more readily say, "This is the pattern underlying the connections among the thorax, abdomen, and head. These are the prominent features that dominate this text's body: the antennae, pincers, and multifaceted eyes."
Such analyses are in many ways refreshing after the many decades throughout which close-reading has held the humanities fiercely in its throes. Not that it's completely let go, of course: grade schools tend to be less contemporaneous regarding humanities scholarship, and are more likely to still rely on older methodologies in the class room. Perhaps, within the next few decades, and as the digital divide hopefully continues to shrink, will we see more of such macro-analytic thought taught to our children, but for now it is more the domain of higher academia. And when it does reach even the humblest grade school classrooms, I hope we do not forget the value of close-readings and displace them too much in favor of big data and the long-distance views digital humanities is bringing to the table.
We must be diligent, for too often dichotomous cultural structures can swing back and forth as a pendulum from generation to generation. In generation A we see it on the left, in generation B it has struck the center, and by generation C it is fully on the right, ready to make a trans-generational journey across its arc again. These new techniques digital humanities has given us are wonderful, they are beautiful and new and shiny, but we most not be blinded to the virtues of our parents' methodologies by their luster. Cultural trends do not have to travel like an arc, we can instead intercede with our arms and minds, striking the pendulum whimsically along its arc, suiting our methodologies as situationally best along its curvature, perhaps even shattering its path into new dimensions it could not reach without our interference of tangential intersections imposed from other intellectual disciplines.
If we are not diligent, if we do not intercede, we will find ourselves and our children eventually at the mirrored disadvantage of what we had before: instead of too much of a focus on close reading, we will focus too much on the analysis from afar. As digital humanists on the vanguard of this weather-change, we are in a unique position to precipitate this possible eventuality, and we should work consciously towards the need for situationally dependent mixtures of micro and macro analysis.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Fandoms and Gamers: Oil Reserves Lurking Just Beneath the Surface of the Web
Most people would probably scoff if I suggested to them that their profession had countless free hands at its disposal, willing to work for the sheer love of it. Most people would probably scoff if I suggested that their are countless people out there willing to work together on complex projects, and they would do so with little more than a set of rules and a command to go play. Yet both can be said truthfully more and more in this digital age, and we have to start paying attention or we'll be missing out on a lot of volunteer labor, including in the digital humanities.
But where, you are probably wondering, can I find such an invaluable pool of people? Where can such a large group be hiding? Many of them in plain sight, really: we tend to call it fandom. These are groups of people severely devoted to a subject, and will spend countless hours collaborating, theorizing, discussing, number-crunching, and otherwise worshiping that subject simply for the love of it. Granted, accepting such droves into the fold would take getting over elitist hurdles about the usefulness of incorporating such lay research. We do like everyone to be properly vetted by exclusionary systems. And yes, there is a lot of dreck out there to wade through. But do not dismiss the products of fandom out-of-hand simply because they lack the proper rubber stamp.
As an example, I will showcase two resources I have used myself as part of a fandom I am proud to partake in: Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. (For those unfamiliar, it's an epic fantasy series that makes most other epic series look short, coming in at nearly 4 and a half million words.) The first of these resources can be found at encyclopaedia-wot.org, a fan-driven site that provides incredibly rich reference for practically any person, place, or what-have-you in the series, as well as very detailed synopses of the works with embedded hyperlinks for reference, and invaluable foot-notes. More specifically, I would like to point to the synopsis page given to each novel in the series, including a chapter breakdown and a map of the points-of-view each chapter is written from in that novel. My favorite is probably that for book 6, Lord of Chaos, which handily visualizes the fragmented structure of the points-of view in this novel, especially in comparison to the preceding novels. In other words, this map gives a macro view of how this novel's structure lives up to the chaos in its title.
The second resource I would like to point to is a wikia site devoted to the series, specifically A Wheel of Time Wiki. If you go to any of the pages for a specific volume in the series (let's use Lord of Chaos again), near the bottom of that page you will find a statistical table with a link above that reads "See also the full statistical analysis for this book." On that page you will then see a statistical analysis of the points of view in this book, including broken down chapter by chapter, done as percentages and as word counts.
With fandoms out there so willing to do such analyses and visualizations simply because they enjoy it, and in fashions that are much in keeping with the goals and methods of the digital humanities, we would be remiss as scholars not to tap into such resources. Granted, some coaxing may be required to get the exact help you're looking for, such as setting up a wiki page of your own and posting to message boards to try and get people to help you out with that wiki page's goals, but fandoms are generally very ready to explore their objects of devotion. And fandoms are hardly limited to contemporary popular culture; if something exists, there will be geeks for it.
And such methods need hardly be kept to more simple enterprises. In addition to fandoms in general, we must not forget that there are more and more gamers online every day, and, as a gamer myself, I will fully attest to how much we like standing up to a challenge if presented as a game. In the past couple years, gamers were used to unlock the structure of an enzyme crucial to our understanding of AIDS. My girlfriend has recently been entranced by a game called EteRNA, which happens to be developed by Carnegie Mellon and Stanford to learn more about folding and synthesizing RNA.
Why pay people to do work they don't want to do, when you can just get people to do it because they love to do it?
But where, you are probably wondering, can I find such an invaluable pool of people? Where can such a large group be hiding? Many of them in plain sight, really: we tend to call it fandom. These are groups of people severely devoted to a subject, and will spend countless hours collaborating, theorizing, discussing, number-crunching, and otherwise worshiping that subject simply for the love of it. Granted, accepting such droves into the fold would take getting over elitist hurdles about the usefulness of incorporating such lay research. We do like everyone to be properly vetted by exclusionary systems. And yes, there is a lot of dreck out there to wade through. But do not dismiss the products of fandom out-of-hand simply because they lack the proper rubber stamp.
As an example, I will showcase two resources I have used myself as part of a fandom I am proud to partake in: Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. (For those unfamiliar, it's an epic fantasy series that makes most other epic series look short, coming in at nearly 4 and a half million words.) The first of these resources can be found at encyclopaedia-wot.org, a fan-driven site that provides incredibly rich reference for practically any person, place, or what-have-you in the series, as well as very detailed synopses of the works with embedded hyperlinks for reference, and invaluable foot-notes. More specifically, I would like to point to the synopsis page given to each novel in the series, including a chapter breakdown and a map of the points-of-view each chapter is written from in that novel. My favorite is probably that for book 6, Lord of Chaos, which handily visualizes the fragmented structure of the points-of view in this novel, especially in comparison to the preceding novels. In other words, this map gives a macro view of how this novel's structure lives up to the chaos in its title.
The second resource I would like to point to is a wikia site devoted to the series, specifically A Wheel of Time Wiki. If you go to any of the pages for a specific volume in the series (let's use Lord of Chaos again), near the bottom of that page you will find a statistical table with a link above that reads "See also the full statistical analysis for this book." On that page you will then see a statistical analysis of the points of view in this book, including broken down chapter by chapter, done as percentages and as word counts.
With fandoms out there so willing to do such analyses and visualizations simply because they enjoy it, and in fashions that are much in keeping with the goals and methods of the digital humanities, we would be remiss as scholars not to tap into such resources. Granted, some coaxing may be required to get the exact help you're looking for, such as setting up a wiki page of your own and posting to message boards to try and get people to help you out with that wiki page's goals, but fandoms are generally very ready to explore their objects of devotion. And fandoms are hardly limited to contemporary popular culture; if something exists, there will be geeks for it.
And such methods need hardly be kept to more simple enterprises. In addition to fandoms in general, we must not forget that there are more and more gamers online every day, and, as a gamer myself, I will fully attest to how much we like standing up to a challenge if presented as a game. In the past couple years, gamers were used to unlock the structure of an enzyme crucial to our understanding of AIDS. My girlfriend has recently been entranced by a game called EteRNA, which happens to be developed by Carnegie Mellon and Stanford to learn more about folding and synthesizing RNA.
Why pay people to do work they don't want to do, when you can just get people to do it because they love to do it?
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Access Equality and the Capitalist Digital Divide
In the past week or so, the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling with potentially great ramifications in Europe (minus Belarus, of course; if you don't understand why that is, please read up on post-Soviet Belarus and Alexander Lukashenko): "For the first time in a judgment on the merits, the European Court of Human Rights has clarified that a conviction based on copyright law for illegally reproducing or publicly communicating copyright protected material can be regarded as an interference with the right of freedom of expression and information under Article 10 of the European Convention." While it does not suddenly make any and all copyright infringement legal by any means, the ruling sets up three requirements that must be proven in court for the case not to be a human rights violation: the case "must be pertinently motivated as being necessary in a democratic society, apart from being prescribed by law and pursuing a legitimate aim." This is a huge step forward for every European citizen's information rights, of course, and is exceedingly pertinent to digital humanities scholars, especially those who wish to work with more contemporaneous materials (the number of which increases when considering that such materials can easily extend back through approximately a hundred years, in terms of copyright being in effect). While it will still take time to see the specifics that this ruling will entail, it has definitely increased the difficulty of bringing a case seeking damages, and it will be easier for academics to form a legal defense around the use of copyrighted digital materials in an academic, non-profit environment.
Now if only we could get such a ruling in America, but unfortunately this country is locked in the control-freak throes of the capitalist digital divide and our slavery to not just the profit, but the ever-increasing profit. Even as digital devices become more affordable and we see the tangible resource-driven aspect of the divide shrinking around us (although many unfortunately assume that it has shrank much more than it has in actuality), we still enforce a digital information divide through the cost of artificial access restraints (e.g. DRM, licensing) beyond the truly unavoidable restraints of infrastructure. Institutions such as libraries have been able to help off-set such access costs in the past more easily, but for now companies are able to exercise information monopolies with practically no restraint, such as in the ridiculous bargaining power publishers are allowed against libraries when selling e-books. Until we address these abuses of copyright in the United States, until we address that information needs to be regarded as something people have a right to and understand that it is not just a capitalist commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, we will not be able to completely escape this divide, and there will always be those unfortunate souls punished simply because they wanted to access information, because they wanted to engender such access, and because they desired to encourage information literacy and education. This not only unfairly impacts digital humanities scholars along capitalist lines (e.g. you can only work with the materials your school can afford to access, putting scholars at more financially endowed institutions at a significant advantage, regardless of merit on the scholar's part, especially considering the increasingly political nature of appointments when more money is involved), it also allows capitalist control over what we study; if a corporation or wealthy individual doesn't want something researched, why not put it in a price range that would turn away academia?
Of course, this doesn't even touch on other problems with the digital divide in America, such as the increasing gap between the upper and lower classes, and the severe defunding of education, leaving better education accessible primarily to those lucky enough to afford it. There is much wrong in America when it comes to information rights, capitalism, and the digital divide, and digital humanities scholars must be aware and help in the fight against these wrongdoings.
Now if only we could get such a ruling in America, but unfortunately this country is locked in the control-freak throes of the capitalist digital divide and our slavery to not just the profit, but the ever-increasing profit. Even as digital devices become more affordable and we see the tangible resource-driven aspect of the divide shrinking around us (although many unfortunately assume that it has shrank much more than it has in actuality), we still enforce a digital information divide through the cost of artificial access restraints (e.g. DRM, licensing) beyond the truly unavoidable restraints of infrastructure. Institutions such as libraries have been able to help off-set such access costs in the past more easily, but for now companies are able to exercise information monopolies with practically no restraint, such as in the ridiculous bargaining power publishers are allowed against libraries when selling e-books. Until we address these abuses of copyright in the United States, until we address that information needs to be regarded as something people have a right to and understand that it is not just a capitalist commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, we will not be able to completely escape this divide, and there will always be those unfortunate souls punished simply because they wanted to access information, because they wanted to engender such access, and because they desired to encourage information literacy and education. This not only unfairly impacts digital humanities scholars along capitalist lines (e.g. you can only work with the materials your school can afford to access, putting scholars at more financially endowed institutions at a significant advantage, regardless of merit on the scholar's part, especially considering the increasingly political nature of appointments when more money is involved), it also allows capitalist control over what we study; if a corporation or wealthy individual doesn't want something researched, why not put it in a price range that would turn away academia?
Of course, this doesn't even touch on other problems with the digital divide in America, such as the increasing gap between the upper and lower classes, and the severe defunding of education, leaving better education accessible primarily to those lucky enough to afford it. There is much wrong in America when it comes to information rights, capitalism, and the digital divide, and digital humanities scholars must be aware and help in the fight against these wrongdoings.
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