Thursday, April 21, 2011

Direction?

Idea.

So I'm trying to find some way to connect orality, literacy, and the Digital Humanities. Up until this point, I've been thinking from a literate point of view and treating the orality as something separate. If not separate then only connected to literacy and then literacy is only connected to the DH. But check this out:
This video is done by the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Apparently the British made up the rules for acronyms, because they're obviously allowed to break them. Anyway, I've been watching these videos for awhile now (God bless StumbleUpon) and I'm always completely engaged by them.

Before I talk about the content, I want to give some direction for future posts... This is a perfect example of exactly what the Digital Humanities can offer. The way RSA handles their videos is brilliant. It is combining a great combination of audio and visual stimuli to keep the reader engaged. But instead of just a video of someone talking about certain topics (interesting in its own right), they have utilized the ability that art has to grab people. It is almost like watching a story unfold before your eyes and it makes me wonder just how effective entire conferences would be if all the speakers doodled their ideas while they spoke.

My point is that this clip has captured oral, literate, visual, and (through the power of Youtube) digital aspects all in one fell swoop. Now I've been able to replace my view that orality, literacy and the Digital Humanities are connected by a one way street with the idea that there is a highway connecting them all and wrapping back around again.

The video is a portion of a longer presentation by Steven Pinker at a RSA conference. He is discussing his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, and I think what he says here about innuendos ties into my previous post about the signifier and the signified.

In the same way that the word "tree" evokes a mental image of, not ONE particular tree but the embodiment of "tree" as it manifests itself through your memories, so do certain innuendos work to create his definition of mutual knowledge. The fact that I can say/write "tree" and you immediately have an image of a tree in your head while I have a tree in my head is a form of mutual knowledge. However, the fact that we are not picturing the same tree leaves the entire definition of "tree" to some arguable degree of subjectivity.

The presentation doesn't deal with semiotics as much as it does the infinite nature of language. Depending on the language used (Pinker's direct or indirect language) there could be a limitless number of translations that a person could come up in reaction to a certain statement, question, or phrase. This is a beautiful part of language in the same way that it can lead to that sort of awkward situation when you ask your boss to have a beer or as that scene Pinker discusses in When Harry Met Sally.

Connection. In the oral tradition-- that is in a culture that relies entirely on oral communication for history, stories, etc.-- there is a transfer of that subjectivity from generation to generation. By that I mean that the same story is never told twice because the listeners hear the story and reinterpret it in their own ways. There is a good example of this in the Anansi stories that originated in Africa and traveled to the Caribbean. Variations of the stories already existed in Africa, but they changed even more once they arrived in the Caribbean. It's like playing the game where someone in the room whispers a sentence in the next person's ear and it travels around the room. Once the sentence goes all the way around, it often doesn't even resemble the original sentence.

More to come later. I'm trying to go somewhere with this.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Language

To start off the exploration of orality, I want to play a clip from the movie Waking Life. Check it out:

The speaker touches on a few different topics in the video that are relevant to the discussion on orality and how it ties to literacy. One big one is the discussion on semiotics and the idea of the linguistic sign.
This term developed by Ferdinand de Saussure deals with the idea of language being broken up into the signifier and signified. Another name for these terms would be sound image (signifier) and the concept (signified). The Sign is then made up by an interplay between the signifier and the signified.

This idea is what the woman in the video is referring too when she talks about "love," or "saber-toothed tiger right behind you!" It's the idea that we assign certain concepts to the way our brain processes sound. The problem, as she says, is when we start to explain all the abstractions in our lives through the use of these terms that are just as abstract. Because the terms by which we define the abstractions (such as love or fear or thought) are just as abstract, the entire notion of understanding someone, while still relevant, has been made completely subjective.

This leads to frustration and getting lost in translation, but without that frustration, humans would have no desire to communicate. We naturally have a need to express emotions or thoughts, and the only way to do that is through our uses of language in all of it's confusing, entwining, convoluted glory.

Monday, April 4, 2011

The Digital Elite

One big fear every college student should have in this floundering economy is the fear of not finding a job in his or her field after graduating. More than that, the fear of being left behind in all the aspects that would get that student a job. Whether that be not up to date with the news, culture, technology, or whatever else; like sleep, it feels like it's impossible to catch up on once you've fallen behind.

So it is with the digital humanities. I just read this article by William Pannapacker from The Chronicle. He's discussing the digital humanities as a whole as he saw them represented at last years MLA conference. He touches on what I talked about in my last entry about being a purist and having older standards of what academia "should be."
...one panelist noted that there has been some defensiveness about the field, partly because it has included so many alt-academics who felt disrespected by the traditional academy: “Harrumph … Playing with electronic toys is not scholarship.  Where are your peer-reviewed articles?” I know from experience that there are plenty of people in the profession who know little about this established field and even regard it with disdain as something disturbingly outrĂ© and dangerous to the mission of the humanities.
He also goes on to say, "At this point, the digital humanities are The Thing.  There’s no Next about it. And it won’t be long until the digital humanities are, quite simply, 'the humanities... The grassroots days seem to be ending."

When I read this, my initial reaction is to fight tooth and nail. But by doing that, I give an answer to a theory he poses at the end of the article.

At the end, he is discussing how the digital humanities have pretty much exploded onto the scene from something that was completely reviled and feared to something that is "The Thing." He says that the DH could create a split similar to the Big Bang Theory. Those who are opposed or uneducated on the digital humanities will get left behind by some kind of "elite society" that is formed from complete digitization of the humanities. Would the uneducated ever be invited to, as Pannapacker puts it, "the cool-kid's table?" Could they? If not, then what would this do? Would that be an improvement on the humanities at all?
The growing tendency of the digital humanities to become an elite community—always pursuing the cutting edge—may leave most of us behind, struggling to catch up with limited support, and humanities education, in general, will be unchanged by the innovation and excitement promised by the digital humanities at this year’s MLA convention
It could take several generations to be completely caught up. I'm twenty years old right now and I'm just now getting acquainted with the digital humanities and they've been around at least twenty years. I don't have a smartphone. I don't have an iPad. I barely use Twitter. This is my first blog. I have a Facebook like everyone and (literally) their mothers, and that is it. Am I out of the loop? How fast will I have to run to be caught up with this digital society? Or do you even have to run? It may just be possible to log in.

One last point. He makes a very slight mention of a very big thing: money. It's a very small reference, but he says, "And maybe most important of all: There’s money, most obviously represented by Brett Bobley from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities..." Bobley is the guy that I referenced in my first entry. It's interesting to add this very tiny perspective to the mix, and it gives a greater sense of gravity to the possibility of being "left out." Now if you're left out of the digital humanities circle, it may be the case that, not only will it be increasingly difficult to find a job, the ones you find in your field may not pay very much at all. Therein, the elites become stronger.

Digitization?

First real post has been a long time coming.

When I first heard about the Digital Humanities, I have to say I was a little frightened. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a purist: The Beatles' "Come Together" will always be better than Aerosmith's. Don't even get me started on Guns n' Roses covering "Knocking on Heaven's Door." And yes, the Black Eyed Peas completely destroyed "Miserlou." When I start reading about books being entirely digitalized in the future, classes taking place entirely online via web cam, or, as my Literature Criticism professor put it:
All the business and the way we conduct our lives (i.e. expression, education, humanities, trade, communication, and consciousness) will be brought to you by companies that don't exist yet through a continuous digital exchange.

I tend to get a little defensive.

Does that mean I'm against progress? Maybe, at first glance, but I don't think so. The thought is just so huge and so immediate on the horizon it kind of makes you want to go back in your shell for just a minute to sort it out.

But after reading this article I feel like I have a more positive jumping off point for exploring the Digital Humanities.

The article is taken from a presentation given by Brett Bobley, the Director of the Office of Digital Humanities in the National Endowment for the Humanities. He describes how technology is "game-changing" in terms of scholarship and education in general. He also gives a more concrete description of the digital humanities for all the noobs out there (such as myself):
 We use “digital humanities” as an umbrella term for a number of different activities that surround technology and humanities scholarship. Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others.
In a sense, the digital humanities include everything needed to practice any sort of scholarship. He also talks about "the stereotype of the “lone scholar,” toiling away in a library studying these cultural heritage materials." This is where my nostalgia kicks in. I love to see the images of the scholar in dim, dusty, candle-lit libraries, poring over volumes of history or literature or science all written on brittle parchment with a quill. That is, of course, my personal poetic view. But even though I know that image has been dead for some time, I still hold on to it as a metaphor for the trouble and torment that is the learning process and the acquiring of knowledge.

I suppose the metaphor and meaning stay the same, but now the image has changed.

Now you get another image: a red-eyed college student staring at a computer screen with a minimum of nine windows open (eleven tabs on each window and at least one on each window is Facebook), an empty bowl of Ramen sitting next to a dirty microwave, a pack of Camels with one left, and a few empty beer cans under the computer chair. Somehow the first image seems so much more admirable. Even if the scholar likely got tuberculosis from all the dust and died a young death, the pain felt in the pursuit of knowledge can be felt (and no it doesn't start with a slight cough... hopefully you've had your shots). The second image (if you identify with all of the psychological side-effects of sleep deprivation) leaves you feeling disgusted and numb.

But this new image carries a lot of deeper implications as far as what the digital humanities are and can do. Bobley says:
 Never before have scholars had access to such a huge volume of materials. This kind of scale adds new challenges and new opportunities. A scholar of 19th century literature could never hope to read every book published in the 1800’s – but a computer can. A historian who is studying World War II could never hope to read every newspaper editorial about the war – but a computer can... We have only begun to scratch the surface on how this mountain of data might be used to advance humanities research. But now that millions of books and newspapers are right at our fingertips, we must ask: What new knowledge can we acquire? What new questions might the data drive us to ask? How might it help the scholar locate new materials ripe for close reading? How might old theories be questioned and new ones posed?
It's these questions that the digital humanities want to answer. If not answer, then, at the very least, explore. The possibilities of having all the known information in all of human history at your fingertips is an incredible idea. We've already accomplished so much, but, as it is with knowledge, the more you know, the more you realize you don't.

As I said, I am still hesitant about what total digitization could mean. I love the feel of a book in my hands and the feeling that I get when I turn the last page over and set it down with a soft thud on my nightstand. No iPad, Kindle, Nook or cranny, will ever replace that feeling. But the future is here, and it is better to face it head on then to let it catch me looking backwards.