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.

Okay. Once more. With feeling.

That was the most anticlimactic resurrection ever (see previous post).

I have had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to approach the final stages of this project. I'm still not sure I have come to any conclusions, but I am just going to dive right in with an analysis of Stanley Fish's opinion articles on the digital humanities, as featured in The New York Times.

For someone as active and giant in the field of literary criticism and interpretation, I searched Fish's column archives expecting a great deal of content on the digital humanities. I wasn't sure what his take on them would be, but I thought that the man who gave the world interpretive communities would have quite a bit to say about a huge blending of (potentially) global communities.

What I found were three columns from a little over a year ago, and that is all. They are as follows:

"The Old Order Changeth"

"The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality"

"Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation"

The articles were all published from December to January 2011-2012. I'll try to do a short summary of all three and then go in to an assessment.

They begin with "The Old Order Changeth," as Fish is perusing the 2012 MLA Convention program. He finds that "if you like the way literary studies were done in 1950 or even 1930, there will be a department or a journal that allows you to proceed as if nothing had happened in the last 50 or 75 years," which is something he says he observed a long time ago. No surprise there: I've been recently struggling with the fact that I have read a painful few contemporary authors, and even fewer emerging ones, during college. In a field that celebrates the "greats" and is still plagued by the shadow of the Canon, it seems literature will always try to hold on to all of the old guys. And rightfully so, in my opinion.

Then Fish weaves in another observation about the program line-up: there are very few of the "topics that in previous years dominated the meeting and identified the avant garde — multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, racialism, feminism, queer theory, theory in general." He recalls when postmodernism was the biggest topic at the MLA convention and how so many refuted the tradition-devouring, textual-shaking, Canonical-demolishing philosophy:

"old questions were revealed to be based on a mistaken belief in the stability of texts and the self-identity of authors; rock-solid procedures and methodologies were shown to rest on the shifting sands of history; canonical authors were dislodged from their pedestals and exposed as racists, misogynists and apologists for empire; the canon itself was condemned as an artifact of patriarchal politics; and the practitioners of traditional criticism (yesterday’s stars, today’s relics) were denounced for being complicit with every evil known to humankind."

Now there's a new kid in town, a "new insurgency," he says, called the digital humanities. He defines it as:

"an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything."

It is here that Fish sets up the tone and a metaphor he carries through the rest of this column and the others. The overarching tone in the columns ("blogs", he is forced to admit in the second one) is one of faint cynicism rooted in a vast amount of knowledge that he is not ashamed to flaunt, and riddled thick with theoretical rhetoric. My harsh criticism should not indicate that I entirely disagree with Fish, nor should it say that his opinion is devalued to me (I'm not a literary theorist, after all). However, the tone is the strongest indicator of his opinion of the digital humanities, and it sounds like he doesn't like them. Why doesn't he like them? Read on.

The metaphor Fish sets up relates the digital humanities to a religious phenomenon. "Religion," he writes, "is the location of, and for many the source of, renewal, aspiration, redemption and hope... there must be a redeemer. Who or what shall it be? Again, according to the program, it can only be one thing — the digital humanities... The digital humanities is the name of the new dispensation and its prophets tell us that if we put our faith in it, we shall be saved."

Describing digital humanists as prophets and using the world "shall" make the passage drip with his patronizing. His tone continues with his metaphor into the next article. He begins with a bashing of blogs calling them "...provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last." His complaint stems from his own career: "...whereas in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine."

In his field, he has always had "a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power" on a subject or theory, and that "is what blogs and the digital humanities stand against." Here, Fish sets up an "Us or Them" attitude. At the core, digital writing stands against that "authority and disciplinary power" because digital text is always malleable and editable. A writer doesn't have to get everything "right" the first time, because the writer can always go back and change it. More than that, in a collaborative atmosphere, there are many other people who can make additions, subtractions, edits, and rewrites to a "text." He quotes Kathleen Fitzpatrick from her book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, as saying:

“we need to think less about completed products and more about text in process; less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; less about originality and more about remix; less about ownership and more about sharing.”

Fitzpatrick's statement seems to harbor one of the the biggest problems Fish has with the digital humanities: "text in process." He calls the idea an "oxymoron," and he is right. After all, how could a text -- something traditionally considered finite and solid -- ever be in process? The fact that a digital text is in a state of constant flux completely removes the linearity of text, and thereby the notion of what textness is. In addition, the fact that there is a possibility of multiple people collaborating in, as Fitzpatrick says, "a fertile community composed of multiple intelligences, each of which is always working in relationship with others," Fish says that the concept of the author disappears as well.

The new text and the new author are now, in Fish's assessment, "...everywhere and nowhere, produced not by anyone but by everyone in concert, meaning not waiting for us at the end of a linear chain of authored thought in the form of a sentence or an essay or a book, but immediately and multiply present in a cornucopia of ever-expanding significances."

Fish's main argument is that this vision of what the digital humanities means to authorship, communication, and, therefore, meaning, is both theological and political:

"The vision is theological because it promises to liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated...and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system."

What he is basically saying is that the digital vision of the humanities is an information afterlife (be it Heaven, Nirvana, Jannah, Elysium, or whatever you'd like). There is no separation from the All-Knowing because everyone is connected to -- and the purveyors of -- any and all knowledge that ever was. To me, this sounds like a grand idea, but I can't fully understand how Fish feels about it. "What it does, he says, is take away the linearity from meaning and communication and create "steady yet dynamic state where there is movement and change, but no center, no beginning and end, just all middle... a new era of expanding, borderless collaboration in which all the infirmities of linearity will be removed."

Those "infirmities" are "institutions that operate to keep scholar separated from scholar, readers separate from the creation as well as the consumption of meaning, and ordinary men and women separate from the knowledge-making machinery from which they are excluded by the gate-keeping mechanisms of departments, colleges, universities, university presses and other engines dedicated to the maintaining of the status quo."

Okay. There it is, but read on.

This is where the political portion of his assessment comes to play. By abolishing the status quo and giving the opportunity of knowledge to all (a buffet from the tree in Eden, if you will), Fish firmly plants the digital humanities as far left on the political spectrum -- though, he admits, there are no real politics involved here. But, they are, in a sense, a revolution in the way we think about the humanities and how we address the situations that have been looming over them for years. Fish equates the rhetoric used by digital humanists as revolutionary:

"The project is insurgent in relation, first, to the present exclusionary structures of access and accreditation and, second, to the hegemony of global capitalism of which those structures are an extension. Digital humanities, declares the Manifesto, “have a utopian core shaped by its genealogical descent from the counterculture-cyberculture of the ’60s and ’70s. This is why it affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive [and] the democratization of culture and scholarship.”

We see this more and more everyday. There are many free online institutions. Berkeley is one of many colleges that publishes podcasts of professors' lectures online for free. There is the on-going debate about the on-line badge system relating to the academic and professional world. And even outside of the academic world, knowledge is only a Google search away. Fish is right is his assessment that the digital humanities will crumble some of the institutional walls that have been standing too long (tenure, for instance). It is in the nature of the digital humanities to be subversive in the same way every new generation is somehow subversive to the one that came before. However, I believe the power and effect that the digital humanities have -- not to mention the massiveness of the scope -- has an unprecedented effect on the way we think about everything.

Here is where Fish is hung up. It seems that Fish is one of those he mentioned in the first column who put up a fight against postmodernism. The difference is that Fish says that postmodernism became "domesticated and absorbed into the mainstream," which indicates that it came from outside of the mainstream -- namely academia. The digital humanities, however, have arisen from the mainstream, for the mainstream, and one of the many things they do -- as Fish has pointed out -- is make knowledge that was once exclusive to the academy available for all. Not only that, they provide an infinite stage -- infinite in both space and time -- from which anyone at all can flaunt their potentially limitless knowledge. Power to the people, indeed. 

And that is what, it seems to me, Fish is hung up on. He ends the column by pointing out the digital humanities claims that they can, first, pull more support from a society that has recently rejected the traditional humanities, and, second, "confer on students skills that will be attractive to employers inside and outside the academy." He quotes Paul Jay and Gerald Graff as saying that, because of the nature of what the digital humanities teach, students will be equipped “to enter fields related to everything from writing computer programs to text encoding and text editing, electronic publishing, interface design, and archive construction.”

I'll speak more on what Jay and Graff said in a different post. What I'll say now is that Fish leaves it hanging. No analysis of this at all. He then simply asks the questions, "Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?" Valid questions, to be sure, but it is almost as if Fish didn't want to address the fact that Jay and Graff are right (again, more on that later). Fish then ends with a subtle quip against blogs that only make the chains that he has fastened to the wall of his academy more visible.

I'll end by saying just a very few words on his final column, because this post is huge, and his last column is pointless.

Fish sets up the answer he concluded with in the previous column by offering an example of literary analysis. His analysis is centered around John Milton's "Areopagitica" (yes, that is a link to an ebook, a product of the digital humanities). In order to spare any of the thick details, Milton was writing about Presbyterians being censored by Episcopal bishops. Fish states that in one of the passages, there is a huge proliferation of the p and b sounds. It is obvious that the amount of alliteration in the passage means something, but to fully come to any specific conclusions, " I would have to demonstrate that Milton self-consciously put the pattern there and made it the formal bearer of his argument. I would have to build a chain of inference that led from the undoubted, countable presence of the “b’s” and “p’s” in the passage to Milton’s intention and back again."

This is formal analysis: "the noting of formal properties to the drawing of interpretive conclusions." The point he wants to make is that the digital humanities do the opposite. They take a hypothesis or an idea and simply, as he puts it, "run the numbers." The issue boils down to the idea of "close reading." Could a computer or program that could look up all of the p and b sounds actually come to some conclusion with the data? Or would we need some close reading with historical, political, social context (a contextual framework) to really delve deep into meaning? Do we need formal analysis? Or do we need algorithmic criticism?

The rest of the column is focused on this issue, and it is clear that Fish is for his own style of literary theory. All of the digital humanists and theorists he quotes are undermined in some way, and his whole view of what the digital humanities has to do with literary theory seems to be hung up on this idea of running the numbers to get meaning. His whole take on the subject, to me, is incredibly flawed. The digital humanities seem to be so much more than that, and that is something I will address in later posts.

Finally, after three columns I'm assuming that he was paid for, Fish cops out, still looking down his nose:

"But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play. Nothing ludic in what I do or try to do. I have a lot to answer for."

Somewhere in history, Pontius Pilate washes his hands. With that finale, Fish never wrote another column/blog for The New York Times on the digital humanities again (that I have been able to find). After all of the words spoken, the conclusion is that he doesn't need it.

My argument is not so much that he needs it, but rather that -- in my scope of understand as to what the digital humanities are -- his kind of criticism is just as relevant to the digital humanities as many other kinds of theories are. And he should hope that I'm right, because the way things are shaping out in the digital world, Fish's criticism might already be old hat.

Re-Opened for Business

Something like this...

Hello there, all.

It's been over a full year since I last posted. I'm not sure what the protocol is for a proper resurrection, so I'm just going to skip past that.

I started this blog a year ago to explore how society and language (sort of) has changed with the shift from a primarily oral culture to primarily literate culture to a now digital community. The assignment was for a Literary Criticism class for the University of North Alabama. I relied heavily on Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, as well as my own random findings and insights from the interwebs.

I'm starting this blog back up for a couple of reasons: 1. I need to do more work on it to receive full credit for the course (from a year ago--yeah, I know) and 2. I've started to take a strong interest in linguistic studies and feel that this might be a good practice to help me research and follow thought traces running through the literary communities.

For the assignment's purposes, and per the instructor's request, I will be responding to numerous articles in the New York Times written by Stanley Fish over the past year. Fish is a loud voice in the humanities and literary criticism world. He developed the idea of interpretive communities, which I will also be exploring in the re-opening of this blog.

I hope to make this interesting and insightful for you, dear reader, and I welcome all comments, shares, and collaborations.

See you next post.

Temporary Closure

Okay, I'm going to make an attempt to wrap this whole thing up for the moment.

I have to say, first of all, that I have enjoyed this method of research and response. This is my first blog and, as I have always been fairly ignorant of the whole blogosphere that has existed for well over a decade, the thought of maintaining one unnerved me at first. However, I have actually grown pretty fond of it and could definitely see myself utilizing this in my personal life as well as my professional life (whatever that will be). The educational opportunities here are great and I think the network that can be created is extremely beneficial.

I would also like to keep posting on this blog as I find more information on the subject. There has been a lot I've skipped over or left out that would be very beneficial for my argument, but maybe I can revisit those soon. There's also more that I haven't discovered yet. For instance, tomorrow evening I am putting on a poetry and short story reading in my hometown that I'm planning on recording and uploading on Facebook and on here. I think it would be a great addition to my topic, especially with the talks about spoken word poetry. This is our third event, and it is really great to experience something that is based in oral tradition. Hopefully there will many more events, each unique, that I can upload.

So down to business.

We started with a talk on language and the meaning we assign to words as being completely arbitrary to the words themselves. This is embodied in the ideas of Saussure's signified and signifier, and it ties in later on with the discussion of orality and literacy. The meaning of words being assigned by us as humans plays a role in Steve Pinker's lecture on human nature and social relations that I discussed earlier.  Since we, as humans, have assigned-- and continue to assign--meanings to words, it only makes sense that, by taking a closer look at language, we can understand aspects of human nature. Pinker does this by looking at implied meanings such as what lies behind the old phrase, "Would you like to come up and take a look at my etchings."

I also looked at the video itself that was being presented. The video is a great representation of the potential offered in the digital humanities. It combines aural with visual stimulus to create a thoroughly engaging, educational tool. This visual and aural combo goes right along with Walter Ong's idea that we are a visual culture: the idea that we think of words in terms of the words actually being spelled out visible on the page as opposed to words as sounds. When a word is a sound only, as it is in oral cultures, it becomes an experience (or an event or occurrence, as Ong says) in space and time. The audible sound, unlike text, is not locked into space and time, however, because it then become subject to the memory of the listener.

Memory then is one of the biggest aspects that separates oral and literate culture for a few different reasons. The first is that oral cultures have to rely much more heavily on memory because that is their only mode of transfer of history, ritual, and, ultimately, culture. Literate cultures don't need to put such a strong emphasis on memory because their information is all written down and stored. All they (we) have to do is pick up a book and "look-up" the information we need. Since oral cultures have "nowhere" to look, they store it all internally so that they can reproduce it later. They do this by using mnemonic devices, something familiar to the literate world, but not used in the same ways (i.e. the using of mnemonic devices in the learning of musical intervals as opposed to memorizing a poem, which is almost a type of muscle memory).

Another difference is the community that memory creates. While memory is an individual process,  oral cultures relied heavily on communities to help remember stories. A really good example of this is at the end of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury where some of the characters have memorized entire books in order to preserve the books history and message. In oral cultures, the stories were meant to be told and retold to communities to keep them fresh and to pass them on. In the tellings, the speaker would hone his own craft with the practice while the listeners (and future storytellers) would build their own stocks of mnemonic devices and figure out how to use them effectively. The entire process of storytelling and preserving history was entirely based on the concept of a strong community.

According to Ong, individuals in literate cultures are more separated. Not necessarily isolated, but separated because of the words themselves. The word, once written down, has been given a feeling of finality and "closure." The word becomes something separate from the author and is then read by the reader, who is also separated from it. The author assigned his own meaning to the word, but the reader is then propelled into an internal dialogue with the word and himself on trying to understand it. As I said in one post, "writing... internalizes the experience of giving and receiving information." This, Ong says, is why literacy raises consciousness. It forces the individual to ponder all the different aspects of meaning and being in words and self.

(Taking a breath.)(Drinking some water.)

Still awake?







Ong also introduces the idea of the secondary orality. Since he wrote his book in 1982, his ideas of technology were the television, radio, and telephone. High tech for almost 30 years ago. But now we have the internet. Now we have iPads. Now we have social networking. His view has not changed too much, but it definitely has a whole new arsenal of toys to play with.

The second orality, to Ong, borrowed from the primary oral cultures, but applied the technology of the literate cultures. I agree with that idea. Primary orality in a literate society is simply not possible. The frames of thought are completely different and one finds it hard, if not impossible, to relate to the other. With secondary orality, the technology is able to capture some parts of the primary orality and make it available to the literate culture. My example of this is pretty much every video I posted, but with special attention to the Grateful Dead concert and Taylor Mali's spoken word performance. While these things are not the same, despite their aural characteristics, as information in an oral culture, that is what we have to use in order to maintain our own tendencies toward orality.

That is also, in effect, my main argument. By rediscovering the concept of community found in oral cultures and by utilizing the introspection that raises consciousness made prevalent in literate cultures, the digital humanities are putting us on the threshold of a new consciousness. We are an increasingly socially based culture. With new so many ways to connect to people like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, smartphones, Skype, etc. and all sorts of new technology to access them, the world has gotten smaller and we have gotten closer. People who have the same or opposing thoughts and ideas can interact with each other and have discourse in order to grow in their own consciousnesses. The presentation of information itself is changing and becoming more interactive. The last video of that new eBook for the iPad is a good example. It combines oral aspects, documentary footage, and access to other information outside of the book itself. That sort of interaction with information has never been available before and has only come out in the extremely recent past. What can we do with it in the future? While it is still too early to tell, rest assured we are in for serious changes in the way we obtain, process, and broadcast information.

I haven't given any answers or predictions with regard to my argument, and I don't think I will be able to anytime soon. There's a lot more research to be done-- a lot more exploring to experience. I have only scratched the surface (if that) and have already missed a lot and excluded more. I want to keep this up though, and fully document where we are going as a culture and as a consciousness. It will be interesting and I'm glad that I'm along for the ride. Maybe I'll take one of the wheels one day. That's a scary thought.

For now though, goodbye and goodnight.

Coolness

So I don't get thoroughly impressed easily. Technology is usually what does it for me, but since there has been such a huge explosion in just my lifetime I tend to expect technology to impress me. But this thing is just really really cool.

Okay so a question for book-nerds: Is that not the coolest thing you've ever seen? While I'm still a strong proponent for a traditional book and all the nostalgia and emotion that comes with one, the eBooks really are taking over. And technology like this makes me think that it might not be so bad.

While there is, what appears to be, a substantial oral component to this technology (over an hour of documentary footage!), I don't think this applies as directly to my study on orality as the spoken word poetry. This seems to be more pertaining to digital humanities today. Even if it doesn't apply anywhere at all I just wanted to show it because it's bad ass.

It could pertain to the orality study in a certain way though. Ong talks about the finality of the word. Once the word is on print it becomes separate, and acts as a separation, from author and reader. It becomes a "thing" instead of an event. Technology like this could totally change that viewpoint or, at least, modify its dimensions. Now the word is interactive with information available to the reader immediately. The possibilities are incredible.

Spoken Words

Dig this.

I've just recently been getting into Spoken Word poetry, and I think that nothing better exemplifies the continuance of orality. In spoken word, the piece is usually memorized and performed for a crowd. It usually has some kind of rhythm, but to put any sort of definite limitations on it is to go against the freedom that spoken word embodies.

Since the piece is memorized, it is subject to memory (DUH). This is a factor that can change the performance. Not only that, it is subject-- to a degree-- to the audience. Differently levels of audience participation can change the way a poet delivers a line or puts inflection on a certain word. This added influence from the audience goes back to what Ong was saying about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. While they were speaking to a crowd of around 15,000, the audience was loudly voicing their approval or disgust. There was an interplay between audience and speaker, which Ong says is important for orality. Listen to these two performances of the same piece by Taylor Mali. Listen to differences in his voice, but also listen to differences in his audience. Notice the difference in his wardrobe and what that could entail. But, most importantly, listen to his poetry.

Quite a few changes taking place here. The first video is much more subdued. His dress is classier. His delivery is calmer until the end. In the second video, he starts out almost screaming. Sweat is dripping off of him, or rolling down to what looks like sweat pants. The audience is very clearly different here. They are loud and responsive with laughter and expressions of shock and joy. In the first one, there is some laughing, but, until the end, they are generally quiet.

This shows how Ong's secondary orality differs from primary orality and literacy. It differs from literacy in that it is a completely aural experience. It differs from primary orality because it is recorded, which is one way that it is actually similar to literacy. Another similarity to literacy, and departure from primary orality, is the visual aspect. That, in effect, is my argument: the way we learn and process information as a visual culture has to be accounted for through digital means in order to preserve and recreate any aspect of the oral culture.

While this is a big departure from the oral culture, it is the way that we have to come to terms with. The days of oral storytelling to preserve history in the way Native American, or Greeks, or other primarily oral cultures understood it, are over. But we can still celebrate it and learn from it and define our own knowledge by turning toward our digital technology.

I think these videos are really good representations of how the digital humanities can perpetuate orality. The spoken word artists are the modern storytellers, and now their stories can be told and retold by anyone in the world.

Two Stories

So I was thinking about the Grateful Dead concert I posted and how that was a continuance of the oral tradition. Ong would say no, because the fact that it's recorded makes it basically a type of print. But I think that that is just part of the secondary orality-- it's what we have to work with. Storytelling, concerts, and conversations can only take place in the true primary oral sense if they are experienced in person. The second orality has to capture the opportunities technology has to offer in order to manifest itself.

SO, talking about secondary orality in the world today. I think a really good way to look at it is through the use of musical recordings and concerts. When an artist performs a song in a different style, or covers a song from a another artist, they are carrying on the message of that song with their own added flavors. This is very similar to the way oral cultures performed storytelling. The audience would listen closely, learn the story, and then retell it in their own ways.

A good example is the song Gin and Juice by Snoop Dog and a cover done by The Gourds. All you need to hear is the first few lyrics, but if you can listen up to the chorus it is awesome (Explicit Lyric Warning):

 Did you find some differences? Stylistically the song has changed completely, but the core of the song is still exactly the same. Think about what this means. Snoop Dogg rapping on stage is going to attract a completely different demographic compared to a country bluegrass band from Austin, Texas. The different styles of storytelling make the story more available. Does that make one version better than another? That isn't even an argument. The fact is that it is two storytellers doing what they do in two different ways.

Digital Classroom

Check out this article from The Chronicle of High Education.

There's definitely some more digital humanity business going on. I feel like this wouldn't be as applicable toward the idea that the D.H. can recapture the oral culture. I actually think this particular instance is working against it. While college classroom lectures aren't exactly what Ong had in mind when he discussed primary orality, they are still a form of primarily oral communication with the opportunity for discourse.

I don't necessarily agree with the fact that traditional classrooms are on the way out. I can see how they would be diminishing, but it seems as if there will always be enough students who either want or have to come to class. Personally, I have a hard time taking internet classes. There are too many distractions and the disease of procrastination sets in strong. I'm much better in a classroom setting, even if I don't want to show up all the time.

Even so, it's another picture of what the D.H. can do. In speaking of, I got REALLY excited about this:
Berkeley Podcast. It's every lecture of certain classes offered at Berkeley! Pretty sweet little set up here. While I think that this might make students in the classroom feel less inclined to go to class, it is a really cool thing for everyone else who can't afford Berkeley but want to explore different educational settings and experience that kind of class. Why, yes. I am a nerd.

Digital Library

So I've been wanting to post this for awhile. It's not directly related to my aforementioned thesis-ish statement, but it's an informative video. It's a part of the Technology, Education, Design (TED) conferences. I think that these conferences, along with the RSA and others, are brilliant examples of what the digital humanities can offer in terms of education opportunities. More on that later...

 So Brewster Kahle has developed a feasible way in which to digitize all of the written material in the Library of Congress and one day... THE WORLD. I expect some diabolical laughter at that point. Not only that, but it would all be free! (more diabolical laughter).

This is a good example of what the digital humanities can do. His website, The Internet Archive, has everything from Walt Whitman to the Grateful Dead to 16th century prose. How cool is that? The ability to access all of that information from one place... for FREE.

To tie it in, this is also a good example of the preservation of the oral culture-- the video and the archive that is. The video because the TED conference is set up as a series of talks in which people with ideas get onstage and basically just go off about their ideas. Mostly an oral function with a captive audience. The archive by capturing interviews and concerts, such as the Grateful Dead. The Dead was what would come to be known as a "jam band." A whole lot of their stage time at shows was spent jamming out and improvising around songs they already knew. Sound familiar? This meant that no performance was ever exactly alike. However, now Kahle has them stored, forever sealing their permanence in the world of digital print. Just because there's nothing overly fun on this blog, I'm leaving this post with something tasty...

Secondary Orality and a Thesis-ish statement

So we're about to say "Goodbye" to Mr. Ong. Been fun.

I left the last post mentioning Ong's idea of what he called the "secondary orality." In a sense, Ong is directly addressing the onset of the digital humanities which, in 1982, were just beginning to take form with groups like Project Gutenberg.

Ong's argument is that the new orality (using telephones, radio, email, and some computer systems at the time) is similar, but still different, to the primary oral cultures. He says that it brings back the sense of the group and of community that writing had no part of. We are now turned toward each other, having discourse with other human beings, as opposed to having our heads buried in unanswerable text. The reason for this, however, is because we have already seen the inside of ourselves. Therein lies the difference: the secondary orality is just as introspective as literary culture, because now we must examine ourselves in the context of everyone else, not just through dead words on a page.

Ong suggests that the new orality has replaced the old, but not without borrowing some of the same concepts. Our presidents can speak directly to us, similar to his example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But now the information flows one way. The conversation is not really a conversation at all since there is no way for immediate reply, unlike the presidential debates in which a throng of people expressed their agreements or disagreements at the source.

So how does this all tie in?


We live in time vastly different even from 1982. Ong's idea of the new orality creating a stronger social connection (he cites Marshall McLuhan's Global Village) has increased exponentially. Now Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and social media dominate our lives. The one way media sources of radio, television, etc. are not the same. Now with technology like the iPhone, Skype, and chat features, the relationship is two-way in many cases.

Okay so... thesis? Maybe? Well here is a claim anyway:  Through the use of social media and the technology behind the Digital Humanities, it is possible--maybe inevitable-- that aspects of oral culture will manifest themselves in modern culture.

This is already seen in those RSA videos. While based primarily off of text and visual stimulus, there is still an oral component. The video provides the viewers with their mnemonic devices so that they will remember it when trying to relate the video to someone else.

So lets explore the digital culture.

Got Some More Ong

Okay, so I'm going to try to get away from Ong after another post or two, but it is really important that I make a strong connection between the oral and the literate. I'll try to do some condensing...

In Chapter 4 of Orality and Literacy, Ong solidifies the idea that we are visual learners in a literate culture, and, by seeing the word on the page, we have put a sense of finality on ourselves that is extremely hard-- if not impossible-- to shake off. That sense of finality is what is hazardous to the primary oral culture because it is the process of naming with something physical that is permanent. He uses Plato's dialogue in Phaedrus to make an example of how an oral culture often views a literate culture. Essentially, Plato says (or rather, has Socrates say) four things:

1) Writing... is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. (I want to come back to that last statement shortly).

2) Writing destroys memory...Writing weakens the mind. By relying on an external source for their internal deficiencies will, according to Plato, make people forgetful. Ong makes the same comparison of children using pocket calculators for multiplication tables. The calculators relieve you of mental work that keeps you in shape.

3) a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a question of someone who just said something to you, you will ideally get a response. Written text just stars mockingly back at you. Ong says that the same principle is said of computers "Garbage in, garbage out."

4) Plato's Socrates also holds it against writing that the written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken word can: real speech and thought always exist essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons. Writing is passive, out of it, in an unreal, unnatural world. So are computers (79).

Ong is making quite a few statements about computers here, if you haven't noticed. Now he did write this in 1982, but he knew what he was saying. He presents writing as a form of technology. It is a part of our social progress and, therefore, our progress in consciousness. He argues that just as writing "heightens consciousness," so will computers in a different way.

The way writing heightens consciousness is that it internalizes the experience of giving and receiving information. There is a separation between the author and the text and the text from the reader because the reader isn't usually there after the author writes.

But written words sharpen analysis, for the individual words are called on to do more. To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for any possible reader in any possible situation... (104)

By separating the knower from the known (Havelock 1963), writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set (105).

 So what does that mean? Basically that the act of writing words, from an oral culture's point of view, sets them in that finality I keep talking about. That means the writer has to delve into their own understanding of what that word means and make sure that, along with everything arranged around it, the word is used in its absolutely correct context. Even then, the reader is often not around the author, so the reader may read into a different context.

All of that though-- for the writer and the reader-- is a growth in consciousness.

Ong also argues (condensing Chapter 5) that print is an even further departure from oral culture. The sense of closure in print is even worse than with writing. "Print encloses thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency" (132)."

The next big thing Ong argues really ties it in:  second orality-- what's to come after, or as an off-shoot, of literacy.

Ong's Orality Part Deux

Okay, so now that we've laid out a little ground work about what an oral and literate culture is, and how they differ, it's time to delve a little deeper.

The third chapter of Orality and Literacy is entitled "Some Psychoanalytics of Orality." In it, he begins to define the way the primary oral cultures process information and language. His first example throws back to the idea that we are visual learners:

Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever 'looked up' anything... the expression 'to look up something' is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might 'call' them back -- 'recall' them. But there is nowhere to 'look' for them... They are occurrences, events (30).

 That's an interesting concept to try to wrap your mind around. No only do the actions of the words we use to describe the visual way we handle information-- 'to look up'-- but the word itself implies visual stimulus. The last line is particularly interesting. To describe a word, but more specifically an utterance, as an event. An occurrence. That is something completely forlorn to our way of thinking. What that implies is that it can be missed or looked over (not looked... see? it's inescapable! misheard or not heard or missed). If a piece of the story is left out, that adds to the subjectivity of the story that gets passed on to other storytellers in other regions and so on. That will be addressed more in a later post.

Well, without the visual, how is it that an oral culture can learn and, more importantly, retain information? The same way someone memorizes a poem, or a guitar player memorizes scales, or the way you finally learned all the words to that song on the radio so you won't be mumbling every other word:  mnemonic patterns.

In order to fully remember all the stories, which are all the histories and folklore, in an oral culture, the listeners would use "heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antithesis," and other devices to help recall. Another aspect is the use of cliches which, as Ong says,

can be 'looked up' in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them (35).

It's almost the exact same concept as musicians training their ears. For various intervals on between pitches, there are certain mnemonic devices that can be used. A tritone, or a diminished 5th, which would be a C to a Gb, is the open interval of the song "Maria" from West Side Story, or the interval used throughout The Simpson's theme song. By comparing each interval with a familiar song, it gives a frame of reference to the player's ear that makes learning much easier. But I mean really, who needs more of a reason to remember Natalie Wood?


Ong says the understanding of mnemonic thought provides a baseline to understanding other aspects of their thought processes. He categorizes characteristics of their thoughts and expressions in nine different ways. For the sake of time I will just list them, but I may come back and expound later.

1. Expression is additive rather than subordinative.
2. It is aggregative rather than analytic.
3. It tends to be redundant or "copious."
4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative.
5. Out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close reference to the human lifeworld.
6. Expression is agonistically toned.
7. It is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.
8. It is Homeostatic.
9. It is situational rather than abstract.

These aspects of the primary oral culture are characteristic of their patters of thought and expressions. They, as Bingham says, "contribute to the saliency, and, consequently, enhance the memorability of an utterance." Instead of relying on specific words or, obviously, a text, the narrator tries to mesh the story with his framework of proverbs, maxims, and cliches that he has picked up over the years. This way, like the musical mnemonic devices, he has a frame of reference he can refer back to on the spot if ever he loses his place or forgets a line.

Write or Ong?

Alright. It's the home stretch. Time to get the hands dirty.

In the last post, I ended by trying to make an analogy for the connection between orality, literacy, and the digital humanities. The RSA video is a good example of how the digital humanities can be utilized in the future for educational purposes, and I'll talk more about that later.

Now it's time to talk about the Grand Master of oral studies:  Dr. Walter Ong. Ong wrote a book in 1982 called Orality and Literacy, which is his study on what happens to culture as it moves from a primarily oral culture to primarily literate one. For you language, post-colonial studies, oral communications, or other assorted nerds out there, it is incredibly interesting. But, for everyone who doesn't have time to read the whole thing, there's a very thorough review and summary by Art Bingham. I'll be taking some quotes from the book itself and the summary. The summary is using the 1988 reprint whereas I am using the 1982 original (citations, if necessary, at the bottom).

I suppose I should define, in my best terms, what makes an "oral" or a "literate" culture. When Ong speaks of an "oral" culture-- which is the way this project will coincide with it-- he means a culture that has never had any experience with written language, even its own. A literate culture, in turn, is one that is based primarily off the use of written text as its main mode of communication, education, and general transfer of information.

I'm just going to take Chapter 1 at the moment to give some direction. He begins by defining some basics about what an oral culture is and what a literate culture is, thereby setting up some boundaries for each to be studied. A few interesting quotes I found:

Ferdinand de Saussure...called attention to the primacy of oral speech, which underpins all verbal communication, as well as to the persistent tendency... to think of writing as the basic form of language...he thought of writing as a kind of complement to oral speech, not as a transformer of verbalization (5).

Language study in all but recent decades has focused on written texts rather than on orality for a readily assignable reason: the relationship of study itself to writing...Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not 'study.' They learn by apprenticeship... by listening, by repeating what they hear... not by study in the strict sense (8-9).

In the beginning, Ong lays out some basics on how oral cultures operate with information. He brings in Saussure, who, as we've said, is important for the way in which WE (as a literate culture) view language and, as the next few quotes say, "words" in general.

 Writing makes 'words' appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling words to decoders: we can see and touch such inscribed 'words' in texts and books. Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it (11).

 Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever (12).

Here, Ong introduces an idea that he goes back to in later chapters: the idea that, as literate cultures, we become almost completely visually based as opposed to aurally based. He challenges the reader to think of the word "nevertheless" for more than 60 seconds without thinking of the spelling out of the word itself. I couldn't do it either.

The visual part of our learning has lasting implications though, especially in response to the RSA video. Think about it... while that video has a strong oral component to it, it was still mostly visual! Drawings to represent the ideas and even text being written in-- "tyrannically" locked to the screen and your consciousness.

Ong's last point in the chapter is that the literate culture, right at the start, has a hard time even comprehending the concept of a primary oral culture. We always try to relate the oral culture in terms of the literate culture with terms like "oral literature" which he says is like describing a horse as a "wheelless automobile." "In the end," says Ong," horses are only what they are not."

He also goes on to say that literacy is the natural evolution of an oral culture. It slowly becomes aware of the possibilities that lie in embracing literacy. The problem becomes leaving so many aspects of a culture behind. He makes the argument, however, that "Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all - at least to reconstruct this consciousness pretty well, though not perfectly" (15).

It is the leaving behind of orality to embrace literacy, and in turn the leaving of literacy to embrace digitization that I will be studying.

Works cited (just in case):
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Print.

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.

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.

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 outré 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.