Identity Crisis

As I've alluded to in the past couple of posts, what I will be doing with this blog is delving into the purpose and usefulness of the digital humanities as I see it. This isn't an easy question to answer -- it's not really an easy question to ask either.

To broach the topic and provide a sounding board, I think it's necessary to reference the essay by Paul Jay and Gerald Graff entitled "Fear of Being Useful." The essay is an attempt to dispel the attitudes many have about the achieving a humanities degree in a world run by corporations and an overarching business-oriented mindset. As published on Harriet, The Poetry Foundation's blog, "Who cares if you can recite the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English when we’re in the middle of a recession?" In the same article, Staff actually offers a very good summary of Jay and Graff's essay. You can find it here.

Jay and Graff begin by dividing the defenders of the humanities into two broad categories:

"Traditionalists argue that emphasizing professional skills would betray the humanities' responsibility to honor the great monuments of culture for their own sake. Revisionists, on the other hand, argue that emphasizing the practical skills of analysis and communication that the humanities develop would represent a sellout, making the humanities complicit with dominant social values and ideologies."

So, there are the lines. They argue, however, that one of the few things each camp agrees upon is that, "... the humanities should resist our culture's increasing fixation on a practical, utilitarian education. Both complain that the purpose of higher education has been reduced to credentialing students for the marketplace."

After giving several examples, they call out the digital humanities specifically:

The emergence of this field calls attention to how old 20th-century divisions between science and the humanities are breaking down and gives those of us committed to defending the practical value of the humanities a tremendous opportunity. The digital humanities represent the cutting-edge intersection of the humanities and computer science, the merging of skills and points of view from two formerly very different fields that are leading to a host of exciting innovations..."

In closing, Jay and Graff call for the end of lamentation and the beginning of relevance for the humanities:

"We believe it is time to stop the ritualized lamentation over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of making them relevant in the 21st century. Such lamentation only reveals the inability of many humanists to break free of a 19th-century vision of education that sees the humanities as an escape from the world of business and science. As Cathy Davidson has forcefully argued in her new book, Now You See It, this outmoded way of thinking about the humanities as a realm of high-minded cultivation and pleasure in which students contemplate the meaning of life is a relic of the industrial revolution with its crude dualism of lofty spiritual art vs. mechanized smoking factories, a way of thinking that will serve students poorly in meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

And then, the kicker:

Humanities graduates are trained to consider the ethical dimensions of experience, linking the humanities with the sciences as well as with business and looking at both these realms from diverse perspectives.To those who worry that what we urge would blunt the humanities' critical power, we would reply that it would actually figure to increase that power, for power after all is the ability to act in the world."

I completely agree with Jay and Graff. One of the biggest struggles the humanities are facing deals with the fact that most of the other disciplines look upon them with outdated disdain. Sure, you're knowledge of Shakespeare's sonnets may not come in handy during your interview with a large marketing firm. But if those sonnets shaped your perspective in a way that is unique and valuable -- if you have taken apart the words, studied the historical context, developed arguments, and performed in-depth analysis -- have you not benefited?

I wish that Jay and Graff would have discussed more of the digital humanities. I understand that the purpose of the piece was a defense of the humanities overall, but I feel like the topic was glossed over. The "exciting innovations" they observe are indeed exciting, but they seem short-sighted. They observe the digital humanities are for:

students who want to enter fields related to everything from writing computer programs to text encoding and text editing, electronic publishing, interface design, and archive construction. Students in the digital humanities are trained to deal with concrete issues related to intellectual property and privacy, and with questions related to public access and methods of text preservation."

Is that all? Don't get me wrong: those fields didn't exist until fairly recently, and they are just now becoming involved with the humanities. But the digital humanities encompass much more. What about graphic design, photography, and film? What about digital education, online marketing, and the music business industry? What about international relations? It may be that Jay and Graff didn't need to mention all of that, and so they didn't. It occurs to me, however, that mentioning something so specific as "methods of text preservation" isn't an accident. Are the digital humanities really confined to coding, interfaces, and archives?

To me, the digital humanities represent a broad field that embraces, engages, and utilizes a variety of disciplines and other fields of study. Linguistics, graphic design, coding, e-publishing, and videography are just a few I can name. It's not that these fields fall under the umbrella of the digital humanities, rather, by studying the digital humanities, all of these fields (and more) are utilized.

Perhaps, I am wrong. Hopefully, I'll find out.

Next time: thoughts on digital literacy.

Data Mining for Emotions

So I took a hiatus after my last post because it was massive, and because I've acquired a new job doing social media marketing for a couple of local businesses. I'm sure some digital humanities content will stem from what I'm doing with these new jobs.

But you don't care about that right now, so let's get started.

In my last post, I took a look at Stanley Fish's half-hearted argument sort-of against the digital humanities. The first sentence in this paragraph is intentionally wishy-washy to reflect Fish's attitude toward the DH. His conclusion (after three gruelling posts) was that he basically has no need for it, nor it for him. I don't want to spend the majority of my time writing on this blog with attacks on Stanley Fish. I do, however, want to open up with a real example of something that he discusses in one of his posts.

In "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation", Fish talks about data mining using the digital humanities. Data mining is essentially using a logarithm to scan digitized texts to look for patterns. These patterns can, some digital humanists argue, lead to some kind of meaning. It is placing the computer slightly above the interpretive capacities of the human mind, for a moment, in order to process vast quantities of information. The example given in the post is from a researcher who mined through mid-nineteenth century literature and found an increase in the names of foreign countries, cities, etc. mention, and was thus lead to hypothesize that literature during that time was more "diversely outward-looking" than had been noticed before. Fish argues that the data itself can not lead us to that conclusion; to understand the contextual framework, we need legitimate textual analysis of the text itself -- to put it simply, we need to read it.

The researcher, Matthew Wilkens, argues no, we don't have to read every single text. That would take forever. Not to mention, we keep reading the same texts over and over again to prove slightly different points. He argues that by scanning a multitude of other texts, we may be able to find many more meanings and interpretations that would have taken years to find. Then, once the patterns are detected, more close reading can be done.

Something that seems to bother Fish and upset his form of literary criticism is the way that digital humanists go about their research. Whereas Fish follows the traditional path of reading, developing a hypothesis, and then using the text to defend his hypothesis, digital humanists -- particularly data miners -- fire logarithms at the text, seemingly at random. Then, once the dust has settled and the numbers come out, they look for trends and patterns and then formulate a hypothesis. This is why Fish finally comes to the conclusion that the digital humanities have no use for him and his superior literary theory.

Difference between -scores of Joy and Sadness for years from 1900 to 2000 (raw data and smoothed trend). Values above zero indicate generally ‘happy’ periods, and values below the zero indicate generally ‘sad’ periods.

A perfect example of data mining and the style of analysis Fish has a problem with comes from a story on NPR published in early April entitled, "Mining Books to Map Emotions Through a Century." Perfect title, huh? Several years ago, a team of researchers went mining through millions of texts digitized by Google. They started at the beginning of the 20th century and went until 2008. They started, "with lists of 'emotion' words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research." They were looking for the usage of these words over time to see if any of them increased in popularity across the English language. Click here to read the whole report.

What they found was that the usage of certain emotion words were highly correlated to major historical economic, social, and political trends. The 1920s, they reported, was the happiest decade, in terms of positive emotion words. The time during WWII (particularly 1941) was the saddest. What's more is that they have found a steady decline in emotion words being used in general.

"'Generally speaking, the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century,' [Alex] Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness and joy and anger and disgust and surprise."

Difference between -scores of the six emotions and of a random sample of stems (see Methods) for years from 1900 to 2000 (raw data and smoothed trend). Red: the trend for Fear (raw data and smoothed trend), the emotion with the highest final value. Blue: the trend for Disgust (raw data and smoothed trend), the emotion with the lowest final value.

This is surprising, the reporter writes, in a world that seems to be teeming with feelings from blogs, Facebook, advertisements, and the like. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at University of Texas, Austin, thinks it is a little "too soon" to come to any hard conclusions about the decline in emotion words, but he also thinks that the data is extremely interesting and could yield some interesting results in the field of psychology and history. Using language analysis, Pennebaker thinks it's possible to tap into the emotional consciousness and cultural attitudes of bygone eras.

"That's why this language analysis seems so promising to him — as a new window that might offer a different, maybe even more objective, view into our culture. Because, he says, it's difficult for people today to guess the emotions of people of different times."

What really interested me about this story was the content that the researchers skimmed through.

"...the books the computers searched in the Google database included an incredibly wide range of topics. They weren't just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides."

The field of technical writing is generally supposed to be void of bias and of emotion -- generally, it seems hard to put emotion into technical journals and user manuals. But this is exactly why it interests me in the wake of Fish's analysis of the digital humanities. If we were to take this same study and, instead of data mining with a computer, do a close reading of texts in an effort to come to some similar conclusion, it makes sense that a researcher would stick (primarily) to literature. Great literature, at that. Who would have the time, energy, sanity, and, most importantly, forethought to research the language in the technical manual for a 1950s refrigerator, or the introduction from an Audubon collection from 1926?

These are, of course, examples, but it makes a strong argument for the use of data mining in certain contexts. It would be interesting to know how much the data would change if all of the technical material were left out -- presumably as they would be if close reading was performed by a literary researcher. Data mining in this context can allow us to observe certain trends across a myriad of different media that we might ignore if doing traditional research.

Another reason this story is particularly interesting to me is that it allows me to segway into more of what I want to focus on in posts to come: the application and purpose of the digital humanities. What I think Fish missed (or ignored, at least) was the interdisciplinary nature of the digital humanities. He presented it in a relatively 2D format where text / (x + y) = a result or something like it, and he only vaguely mentioned its application in scenarios outside of data-crunching. The author of the NPR article mentions that Pennebaker wants to use data mining and distant reading in an effort to practice language analysis. The practice employs various aspects of literature, literary theory linguistics, psychology, sociology, history, computer information, coding, and statistics, just to get started. The digital humanities, when viewed through this lens, all of a sudden seem very necessary -- a way to tie everything together to embrace many fields of study in varying, limitless combinations.