Sunday, June 28, 2015

The New Digital Humanities w/ Angie Bennett Segler


"As long as data is confined to a particular space–be it a book, laptop or even cloud service–it is accessible only through the entry points that medium makes available"

Digital Piers Plowman

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In honor of ThingsTransform.com reaching 100,000 readers
I am hosting a digital humanities forum
showcasing the work of other fantastic young DH scholars
who inform and inspire me with their innovative projects.

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I never really thought of myself as a “digital humanist” until very late in the game. DH had pitched itself in some very particular ways—Big Data, text mining, distant reading—or at least, one particular variety of DH was dominating the landscape. Instead, I saw my own work as being that of a very traditional skill set used to ask some non-traditional questions. That is, I thought of myself as a codicologist [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codicology], and I returned to a study of manuscripts rather than “texts.” As I did so, I began to think of them—the manuscripts—as being intrinsic to the “work” of literature itself.

That is, the work—the labor—that went into producing the text in all its myriad forms and copies was just as much the work of literature as the text itself was. Prior to the advent of the printing press, which changed both the nature of the “Work of Literature” and the nature of literary labor, works were unstable, changing with each new instantiation of them in written form. Literary “things” (Latin rēs) were a kind of public property. They gained authority through communal use, re-use, absorption, and recapitulation.[i] Which is why it doesn’t make much sense to think of a medieval “author” (an ill-fitting designation in itself) as ever “plagiarizing,” since quoting from an existing source, even manipulating it and recasting it in one’s own work, would have just served to authorize the source itself, to turn it into an auctor.[ii] 


Indeed, when we think of “copies” of a medieval work, we may be altogether using an inaccurate idea, an idea that comes from print technology. It is only in print that we have an authoritative “original” that is then copied—or mass-produced in identical copies. In print, the closer a copy is to that original, the better the “copy.” The question then becomes one of locating and verifying what makes an original (the author? the printer? first version? last version? etc.). In medieval textual production, however, authorization works the other way around: it is diffuse, it accrues in the process of re-use and adaptation. 


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In these terms, then, limiting our idea of a medieval “work” of literature only to what we conjecture was the author’s text (or texts) is a very anachronistic imposition of our idea of the “ideal” work of literature onto a set of other works of literature—the copies and recompositions of a text—that were unrecognizable in our print paradigm. All the labor that went into instantiating the work of medieval literature—all the scribes, all the quills and quill-making, the ink, the mixing, the collecting of oak galls, the parchment, the animals, the skin preparation, the lye, the soaking, the scraping, the binding, the sewing, the twine-making, the needle making, the wood, the trees, the chopping, etc.—is effectively erased by our removal of a “text” from its material “context”—or with-text.

In this case, context, comes to mean everything else that is with the text. In manuscripts this can mean other texts copied into the same codex, or it can mean the material with which the text is made, or it can mean the substrates from which the codex materials are made, or it can mean the ecologies and economies out of which all these materials emerge.

And this is where the digital comes in: if the Author-based paradigm neither helps me to establish what the real work of literature is, nor helps me to investigate its medieval con-text, what does?

For me, it is the manuscripts. Not just one manuscript, or a “best” manuscript, but all of them, with all of their contents and con-texts.

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However, in order to take each separate “copy” of the text seriously as equally participating in the work of literature, I would need some new tools that would allow me to not reduce all the copies of a given text to one “ideal” ur-text, but to hold all these different instantiations of a text (and the material-textual con-texts they bring with them) in suspension for consideration at once. That is, I would need graphs, quantitative assistance, and computational intervention to try to make sense of what was now a much bigger object of inquiry.

And that has been the power of DH in my work—to totally and completely redefine my object of inquiry, to expand the boundaries of what I (and maybe you) consider to “count” as the work of literature.

In many ways, this work is only possible because the current revolution in textual media is pushing us far enough outside the print paradigm, or even the print ideology [ https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm] if you will, that we can begin to see the assumptions inherent in the ideology of print itself. That is, we can now better understand a pre-print paradigm only or primarily because we are beginning to be “post”-print* (or post print monoculture).

Thus, digital interventions in literary objects become possible—thinkable—only as they become desirable (which is, of course, only after the tool to see them in this way is available, or at least potentially available). If we use the terminology of physics-based agential realist Karen Barad to describe the relationship between knowledge and knowledge making, the apparatuses that we have available to take a measurement (or, say, make an interpretation) determine the kinds of measurements(/interpretations) we can make.[iii] Indeed, the apparatus even determines the kinds of “objects” we can “make” by knowing them. That is, the “object” itself doesn’t pre-exist the “measurements” we take of it (as Barad says it, “relata do not precede relations”), but comes into being as an object as it comes into legibility—by means of whatever apparatus we use to apprehend it.

In the case of medieval literature, having only a “print apparatus” to apprehend the work of medieval literature necessarily precludes our seeing many of the features and functions of the pre-print medium and literary milieu. While nothing will enable a “recovery” of what codex-culture “really” meant or how it “really” operated, digital tools and other technologies are different apparatuses that afford us the opportunity to not only take different measurements of our “object,” but to even re-make or re-define the object itself, in essence to make a new “literature” and a new “literary inquiry.”

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Angela Bennett Segler is a medievalist and digital humanist, and Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the University of Nevada Reno. She works primarily on the queer materiality of medieval manuscripts, using digital and scientific apparatuses to apprehend their asynchronous ecology. She is the author of the blog A Material Piers Living in a Digital World, guest editor of a postmedieval special issue on “Quantum Medievalisms,” and has essays forthcoming on Queer Manuscript Studies, also for postmedieval, and on EcoDH for PMLA 2016.

[i] This is not unlike the mechanism of communal authorization of Wikipedia and other online Wikis.
[ii] All of this is a distillation of many works on medieval authorship, which is not uniform throughout the many times and places of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, most of “literary culture” shared these attributes for most of the Middle Ages. For reading on this form in particular, see Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory and The Craft of Thought.
[iii] See Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.


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Sunday, June 21, 2015

The New Digital Humanities w/ Derek Newman-Stille


"Realist fiction is often seen as 
the only ‘truly’ Canadian fiction, 
but even realist fiction speculates, 
postulates and creates a fantastic idea"

Speculating Canada

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In honor of ThingsTransform.com reaching 100,000 readers
I am hosting a digital humanities forum
showcasing the work of other fantastic young DH scholars
who inform and inspire me with their innovative projects.

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Accessibility and representation are important to me. As a disabled person who identifies as queer, I think it is important to be visible and to insert myself into spaces that are largely claimed by hegemonically empowered groups. My website, Speculating Canada (speculatingcanada.ca), became a place for inserting a voice into the public and encouraging critical questions from readers. Nominally set as a review site, Speculating Canada produces reviews which are miniature critical examinations of works of fiction, encouraging readers to examine popular fiction with a critical eye. This is coupled with author interviews that challenge the typical author interview (which tend to focus on "how did you get published?", "what inspires you?", "when did you write your first book?", and "which writers inspire you?" ), but rather examines the author's ability to critically analyze their society and look at things considered 'normal' and 'taken-for-granted' from an askance angle that allows them to reveal what is being left out of hegemonically defined 'reality'. I also like to write occasional editorial pieces that raise larger questions about the power of speculative literature, and highlight ideas that I hope readers will interrogate.

Speculating Canada's posts examine speculative fiction because I generally feel that speculative fiction has the potential (though this potential is used too infrequently) to disrupt normalcy by creating a world that is NOT normal and this can allow for a space where ideas that are considered 'real', 'normal', 'true' (with connotations of 'the only way they can be', 'unchallengeable', and 'proven'), are opened to speculation, open to a permeability that conventions of reality don't normally permit.

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I try to write posts on Speculating Canada that are accessible and try to avoid writing in language that is alienating. When I do feel that I need use difficult language, I try to explain it using more accessible language. My hope in doing so is that I can encourage audiences to feel that they can access this space of critical questions and feel welcomed. My radio show and associated podcasts for Speculating Canada further enforce this, and when interviewing authors, I tend to ask them to be relaxed and feel as though they are having a dinner time conversation with all of the "ums", "likes", "you knows", and other pauses part of that conversation. I don't like to edit these moments of pause out because I feel as though listeners who hear them will feel included - as though they have been invited to a dinnertime conversation where ideas are brought up in a relaxed, exciting, open environment. Online platforms have the capacity to invite our readers or listeners into a conversation, bring them to the dinner table of discussion where they can feel at home and welcome without the insecurities of a paywall or other alienating format. We can invite readers to think of themselves as participants in a chat about a particular issue, idea, theory, or thought and feel as though they are included in a way that they may not when they hear the title "academic".

I feel that, as an academic, my job (not in the employment sense, but rather in the life-path orientation sense) is to provide opportunities for education in public spaces, opportunities for the public to critique different ideas and think about things from a new angle, perspective, critical position, or just generally to encourage them to ask questions. I view any space as imbued with pedagogical potential, and by this I don't mean the proselytizing of our own views, which I often hear people referring to as teaching, assuming that the 'student' is an empty vessel, but rather hope that I can open up spaces where questions can be asked and ideas can be challenged. I see speculative fiction, itself a manifestation of the idea of The Question, the hypothetical, the idea, as a manifestation of the possibility and potential to question everything and destabilize hegemonic reality.


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Derek Newman-Stille has a Masters Degree in Anthropology from Trent University. His Masters Degree involved an analysis of ancient Minoan and Mycenaean Art and his interest in the archaeology of ancient societies has had a great deal of impact on his own artistic trends. Many of Derek’s paintings are heavily influenced by the artistic trends of the ancient world and one can see in his art imagery revolving around Palaeolithic goddesses or cave paintings from the past. As a classicist, Derek is particularly influenced by the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, deriving a lot of the themes of his artistic works from classical myth. His interest in anthropology and archaeology has influenced his work, showing an overall love of the rich depth of diversity in the human experience and the wide range of methods people have used to express themselves over the course of human history.

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