Graphs, Maps, and Trees (Oh My)

I liked this book, even if I'm not sure I understood it (a common occurance when I encounter something weird in literature: sometimes I think I want to like something more because I don't understand it but want to). The idea of graphing out literary genres in terms of their rise and fall is appealing for the simple fact that they put the lie to the notion that "we've always had [insert literary genre here] around." There's no doubt in my mind that, with certain literary genres, movements, and forms, history has a way of informing both their rise and fall. Formalism begat Structuralism, which begat Post-Structuralism (seems like you can create whole new schools of thought simply by adding "post-" to the front of existing realms), and so on. Literature doesn't happen in a vaccum, at least I'd like to think. Sometimes the world isn't ready for a particular genre, sometimes the genre isn't ready for the world.

The idea of mapping out literary locations, at least in terms of how they correspond to the text, was illustrated intriguingly enough with the "village novels" of the nineteenth century. We like to think of the past as somehow being less complicated than our present, with self-sufficient villages doting the landscape and safe havens from the problems of the outside world. But as the maps demonstrate, a lot of the outside world was encroaching on the villages at the time that PBS would have you think that villages were still universes into themselves (not Downton Abbey perhaps, but more like the Austen adaptations and other nineteenth-century-set projects, where the outside world only comes into play through letters or news from relatives about what a scoundrel this Napoleon Bonaparte fellow is being on the continent). Interconnectivity isn't an innovation of the twenty-first century; the world first began to shrink thanks to the telegraph, then the telephone, and other forms of communication brought into the same world that hosted Little Women or Moby-Dick.

I'm a sucker for graphs charting the rise and fall of things (I have never, ever liked math, but graphs give me something to envision to make sense of the numbers), and I keep going back to the graphs charting the rise of the modern novel through its various incarnations. It's surprising to me that the first wave of gothic fiction seemed to peter out around 1815, seeing as the novel I most associate with gothic fiction (Frankenstein) was published three years later. The tastes of the public have as much to do with the rise or fall of a genre, it seems; artistic merits be damned, if the public ain't buying it we need to cut back on the production. I'm a bit of a free-market capitalist when it comes to culture, because as stupid as a lot of popular things seem now I know from past experience (MC Hammer, Beverly Hills 90210, mullets) that eventually something will come along to replace it (that replacement might be equally stupid, but at least it's new and stupid, as opposed to old and stupid). Like I said about gothic fiction, it seemed to nosedive into irrelevance for most of the nineteenth century, but made a comeback via Dracula in the 1890s.

I'm guilty of thinking that Sherlock Holmes has been around for a long time (and technically he has), but I always find it surprising to see how recent his creation really was; in terms of overall history, the 1890s aren't that far away from our own time. The evolution of the clue (whether it was revealed in detective fiction or kept just off the page) was interesting to consider, as well as the names of Conan Doyle's contemporaries whose inability to adapt as well as he did meant their literary doom. Genres live or die by the best work of the master of the craft, and it's hard to think of a bigger name in the evolution of the detective genre than Arthur Conan Doyle (cameos in Shanghei Knights nonwithstanding). We always tend, in looking back on an author's career, to think that he or she was always that person, always that creative force who fashioned fantasies out pure air, with no one able to compete. It helps to know that Conan Doyle was, at one point, simply one of many authors applying himself to a genre that might or might not have led anywhere, if he'd not worked hard at it.

There are some works that need maps (Lord of the Rings, treasure-hunting or travelogue works) and there are some that don't. Graphs and trees are fantastic and weird ways to bring literature to life. I think I understood this book, but I'm not sure.

Hacking the Academy

This week's reading was like a mini-"Debates in the Digital Humanities," only better organized (I think we gave last week's reading hell for seeming like an afterthought after the first two readings we did in the Debates book). There were a lot of interesting things to dissect, which I'm sure we'll get to in class, but I want to address two things.

First, not to bore you with another "when I was a freelance writer" story, but when I was starting out in the freelance writing world, the target was always more print-based than digital publishing (or, as we called it back then, "getting on a website"). I was still of the mindset that real writing was done for magazines that put out editions in print (it took me forever to adjust to the idea of a magazine being a solely online venture, but I caught on to that notion quicker than did the editors of print media, I will say). I can't tell you how many times I sent something to the New Yorker in the vague hope that it would somehow leap off the (electronic) page and make me famous (because I honestly thought that getting published in The New Yorker was how you got famous).

In Hacking the Academy, this ties into the peer-review old-school style of getting published versus the new-fangled open-source online publishing that a lot of scholars in DH advocate. In practice, then, I've been open-sourcing my work for years: like I said last week, the bulk of my published "work" is online, and much of it lost to the cosmos of websites crashing (I liked the article which cautioned against scholars assuming that, just because they publish something online, that means it's preserved forever; "forever" in online terms could be as fleeting as the very same week, if someone on the website side of things fucks up, blows all their money on Vegas, or accepts a friend request from a spambot intent on infecting the world with ads for boner pills). I think it's telling that some scholars think in these terms, for while books may rot, be burned, water-logged, or otherwise compromised, we like to think that books are a permenant way of preserving knowledge. In this sense, the notion of DHers that online means always online (that what you publish online can be kept safe from the changing whims of departamental heads, because it's online) is rooted more in the past than the present: we're projecting the myth of knowledge preservation in book form upon the online variation, and it doesn't hold water. Does this immediately invalidate the research published online, as somehow not being "worthy" of being kept in books (on the face more physically preservable than websites)? That is the assumption that DHers are working against, which comes from the side of the academy that doesn't understand (or want to understand) the possibilities of digital preservation.

Secondly, one of the sources of heated debate amongst DHers and more traditional academics is the notion of "open-source" online publishing, that is posting work online (not through the hurdles of peer review that could take months or even years and eventually result in a book that, for all its merits, would likely have a small audience even within the stated target audience of academics devoted to the subject at hand). Blogs are cited as a way to get the word out, and even though I dispute the notion of Twitter as being anything other than something that celebrities get on to annoy the rest of us, I agree that in the right hands it could be a tool for promoting more helpful things than just another picture of Kim Kardashian looking constipated in yet another selfie. I would caution against citing Wikipedia as an ideal form of this open-source, however; with all the controls in place, there are still the obvious mistakes or outright manipulations that give Wikipedia a bad name in academic circles (I cite the example I ran across when, looking up SS chief and architect of the Holocaust Heinrich Himmler, I read that, according to whoever wrote up the bio, Himmler was "a pretty cool dude." I hope that the editors of the site caught that in time to correct it). Wikipedia is a great resource, of course: by its very nature it both highlights the pros and cons of open-source and user-controlled data outlets.

I took away from the book a sense that traditional scholarship needs to change, to keep up with the demands of a world increasingly digital. It also needs to be vigilant not to lose the aspects of it that make it valuable (some sort of peer review is available online, even if it's in real time and not kept from the public eye like traditional peer review). I believe that education shouldn't be elitist in how it's applied. I've known people in life whose lack of formal education doesn't reflect their natural desire to learn and grow in intelligence, or indeed to posess more of it than some people for whom educational outlets are limitless. I think DH could be a conduit for a more democratic distribution of education, and having some sort of open forum where DHers can debate each other's work, not hidden from the public but openly engaging it, is called for. The academy could do with some hacking.

Why DH Matters (Unless It Doesn't)

In reading the last two sections of the Debates in Digital Humanities, I've had a hard time coming up with possible post topics for the Facebook page or indeed for this blog entry. There's a real sense of "a discipline in search of itself" that runs through the entire book (hence the debates), but a lot of the last two sections comes across as even more so. We see, in the section on teaching DH, a real awareness that the lab work DH is engaged in to some extent takes away from the pedagogy of it. You can show better than you can teach, seems to be the message of some essays, and with the fluid, amorphous definition of DH itself, a lot can be done by those outside DH (like, say, in college administration) to undercut the idea of DH being taught on campus. So in that sense, it's just as much a part of the humanities as the English department and other "traditional" disciplines.

It all seems to go back to justification, not self-justification so much as justification to the outside world, and in that I can relate. As someone who's pursued degrees in English for well over a decade (my undergrad career, first at South Carolina in 1997-1998, then Tri-County Tech in 2001-2004, and finally at Clemson in 2006-2008), my choices have left a lot of people in my family scratching their heads. I'm not sold on the idea of being a teacher, per se; I'm closer to acknowledging that it's probably where I'm headed more today than ever before, but at heart I'm a writer, or a wannabe writer. Problem is, my fiction is lacking (to me, anyway), and while I could tell you what makes a book good or bad, I'm not sure I have the ability to render a book myself (which bodes well for the "publish or perish" mentality of faculty, I'm sure). I've had a hard time justifying to others and to myself just why I am pursuing such avenues of education, if I can't "do" anything with it, at least not in the eyes of a lot of people.

A humanities degree in some circles seems like a waste; compared to pre-med or pre-law, it's easy to see why some might think that it's a waste of time. A digital humanities degree, or a class in DH, might be even harder to justify to someone unfamiliar with the concept. It all ties back to the idea of functionality in education: pursue a degree in something that gives back to the common good, the idea seems to be.

But art is important, if you'll forgive a lifelong English major saying it. Art informs life, makes it worth living, makes it bearable when science and other more rational, more fact-based ideas fail. I've gotten through more tough times with the help of good books (and even some bad ones) than with any other coping mechanism save humor (which is also an art). The divide in DH seems to be between emphasizing the cold mechanics of making a text available online and making the text come alive through interpretations, or doing something totally unthought of before. It reminds me of the Robin Williams speech in Dead Poets Society: all the sciences are noble pursuits, but poetry gives meaning to life. I believe that, anyway.

Perhaps in the texts to come, we can get away from debates about the merits of DH, because in a sense it doesn't matter. DH has the ability to make art, to make it accessible. That should be enough, I think, to justify any amount of expenditure from the higher-ups. Yes, the law schools and science labs might be more flashy, with their output more easily identified. But art has the ability of burrowing into your soul, changing your outlook on life. It's not easily quantifiable, and it shouldn't be. Perhaps if DH embraces the less results-oriented approach of its sister humanities, we wouldn't have to have debates about its merits.

Don DeLilo and Covert Racism

The readings for this week covered a lot of ground, but the essays that stuck with me were about Don DeLilo and racism, respectively. I can relate to the idea of an author's work either not being digitized (and thus lost to the ages) or an author's work being on the web on sites that no longer operate and thus being lost to the ages. Because it's happened to me.


Back in 2003, while attending Tri-County Tech, I started sending off short "witty" humor pieces (at least I thought they were witty at the time, but I was twenty-four and probably thought everything I did was "witty") to smaller humor websites that thrived on reader submissions. Your National Lampoons or Cracked.coms of the world were too good for my sophisticated humor (again, I thought it was sophisticated, odds are it wasn't), so I sent off pieces dashed off on my mom's computer or at the computer lab on campus to various websites until I hit paydirt. The first site to publish my work was the Neurotic Eclectic (I remember the name, even if no one else does). It was a website run by a guy living in Arizona (for some strange reason, most of the early success I had with freelance humor writing came via websites based in Arizona), and he accepted one of my pieces based on the premise of has-been celebrities doing "books on tape" of Cliff's Notes-versions of American classics. Like I said, I thought I was witty at twenty-four.


At any rate, I had a good run with the website, and with other sites where I got acceptance, and over the years you could say I built up a pretty good archive of original material. You'd be wrong, however; within a year of publishing me, a lot of those websites that welcomed my work went kaput. It was and remains a fact that internet web sites live or die by viewer traffic, and sometimes they get infected by viruses sent by people who have nothing better to do. A lot of the sites where I was most prolific seemed to suffer this fate: there is a likely chance that somewhere, there exist archives of my work alongside others who wrote for the sites back then, but I wouldn't bet on it ever seeing the light of day. Like I said, most of my writing at this time was done on my mom's PC (which bit the dust sometime around 2006 or so) or at the computer labs, and I didn't think to save anything to either of those. I got my own PC in 2004, with internet connection (via old-school dial-up), but once my Norton Anti-Virus ran out (it had been free for a year, but I was too cheap to pay for it after that), that computer became a victim of random computer viruses, often spread via the very same websites I was submitting to.


I learned an important lesson then: don't submit material that you don't already have saved somewhere else, multiple times over if you can (not just to your PC or laptop, but also on discs or flash drives or Nanos or what have you). I also learned that internet commentators can be assholes: one site that published me fairly regularly had comments sections for the articles, and I got reamed cyber-wise by people whom at first I took seriously and then later realized were just jealous that their work wasn't considered good enough for the website (us writers got a regular log-in ID and password, instead of having to send everything via the "we might take a look at this" email address for freelance submitters, many of whom I gathered were commentators and frustrated humorists themselves). At least that's what I tell myself.


At any rate, all the discussion of DeLillo's lost work (stories that vanished in the pre-internet ether of magazine submission bins or were published, but in magazines now lost to time) hit a nerve. I would never presume to say that the work I did during those years when I self-identified as a freelance humor writer would be up to the level of DeLillo (I've read White Noise and Great Jones Street, and I once started Underworld without getting too far into it, so I'd probably substitute some other writer whose work I'm more familiar with, like Pynchon or Lethem), but I do mourn the fact that, supposing I ever did become a famous author and someone wanted to do research on my early work, they'd be hard-pressed to find it (then again, that might be a good thing: "juvenile" wouldn't begin to cover the tone of much of that early internet work). Archiving an author's work (not just his published books or stories, but also essays, correspondence, and so on) is likely to be harder in this digital age, where the idea is "nothing is lost" but the reality is "websites crash, magazines lose their online presence, and shit just happens." One of my favorite books was the first volume of Hunter S. Thompson's collected letters, which got me into the Great Gonzo Writer; I wonder if a collected volume of "the emails of Trevor Seigler" would have the same resonance.


The discussion of the apparent "whiteness" of the digital humanities, at least as it related to the civil-rights era, was interesting too, and I hope I remember to bring up in class the idea that digital technology sought to streamline itself so as to avoid much of the upset and tumult of the Sixties. Interesting too was the discussion of the move from overt racism (whites-only signs) to covert racism over the years, as a response to the work of MLK and other civil-rights leaders. This past NBA season, we had an example of covert racism being made public (Donald Sterling's comments to his girlfriend) resulting in the public shaming of a horrible person and the forced sale of his team (the Clippers). It would seem that such instances might actually support the notion, contrary to covert racism seemingly codified by digital design, that the online world can expose such thoughts more than hide them. Again, I hope that we bring this up in class more, but I think it merits some discussion about how the internet can both be a conduit for such covert racism and at the same time an exposing agent for such thoughts that we (and we are all prejudiced in some way or another) might think of as "private conversation." It also gets to the debate about a possible "chilling effect" on free speech, versus the idea of accountability for the things that you say.

Is DH the Hip-Hop of the Humanities?

A random thought popped into my head after class yesterday, and I'm posting it here because I wonder if it can come across effectively on the class' Facebook page (and also I'm a bit afraid that it may be ridiculous once I type it up and look at it, so I figured it was safe here): what if digital humanites is like hip-hop/rap once was, at least in the early days of the genre?

Consider: when rap came into being in the late Seventies, it was a process of using established tools for listening to music (turn-tables, records, etc.) and turning them into music-making devices. A lot of this was due to chronic neglect in the inner-city, where buying instruments traditionally associated with music-making might be out of the question, and also a reaction against the fact that rock and roll (once a melding of black blues and white country) was now pretty much a whites-only genre, due to the prevalence of white rock stars (Hendrix was more the exception to the rule in 1967, after Chuck Berry and other black artists associated with rock either fell on hard times, died, or were just neglected by the record-buying public). Similarly, it could be said that the early practitioners of DH were using computers not for the process that the public might have imagined in terms of total immersion in "cyberspace," but to connect more to the world than to escape it, subverting the natural expectations that "the internet is apart from the world" in much the same way that hip-hop took the record-player turn-table and subverted expectations by scratching the records, creating new beats for rappers then to overlay their own work.

Bit of a tortured analogy, I know, but there was a mention of rap in the class last night, and it set me off on this path of intellectual wondering about whether, by virtue of its youth and relative new-ness on the scene, DH might be comparable in some ways to hip-hop pre-"Walk This Way" (the Aerosmith/Run DMC collaberation that is cited as the crossover moment for rap and hip-hop into the mainstream). The debates about what DH is and isn't, how inclusive/exclusive it should be, are issues that in some ways are reflected in the notion that rap has become omnipresent as the dominant medium for music, yet there are many who use rap who aren't rap (I doubt Katy Perry has tons of street cred).

Rap has benefited immensely from the advances of technology, with sampling and digital recording being but two of the more obvious examples of this. Humanities purists might sound like the same people who dismissed rap as "crap" because they either don't understand it or fear its impact. A progressive force meets a conservative object and chaos tends to ensue. In much the same ways that technology is chided by some as leading to a "coarsening" of our culture, rap was from its inception attacked for various reasons, but mostly because it upset the natural idea that musicians had to play instruments (but turn-tables *were* instruments).

Like I said, this might be total crap on my part so I figured it was safe here, for Dr. Morey's eyes only.

Why We Fight: Debates In Digital Humanities, Parts 1 & 2

One of the essays in the first section was titled "Why We Fight," which led to the Decemberists song of the same name being stuck in my head all the rest of that day that I read it. But I think it's an apt description of the "debate" going on in digital humanities about just what DH is.


All through the first section, we get an overview of the evolution of digital humanities, from its emergence as a topic for consideration in the Nineties (with the rise of the internet and more access to information than ever before) all through the various labor pains of its gestation and eventual naming. DH is a young 'un in the world of scholarly disciplines, coming of age just as I was, to an extent. It would be fair to say that I'd never even heard of the concept until I signed up for this class.


The definition of DH is fluid right now, because in a lot of ways we're still trying to figure out just what "digital humanities" are and what they should (or shouldn't) include. It's easy (if a little arrogant) to assume that History is "the story of the past and how it relates to us today," if you will, but History covers quite a bit of territory, and can be divided into various strains (European history alone would require quite a bit of leeway in terms of what can be covered within the parameters of a lecture course and what has to be left by the wayside for lack of time or relevance to the overall idea of the course). English is similarly both easy to define and slippery from such formal definition: we can all agree it's the study of writing and how writers write, but what can you cover (and what can't you cover in the time allotted)? It can encompass the study of literature (and that in and of itself is another huge chunk of territory, because every country and even regions of countries has their own brand; you could take enough courses on "Southern literature of the United States" to cover any pre-requirement for a major, though you run the risk of Faulkner overload). DH is facing much of the same concerns that disciplines far, far older than it have faced and (arguably) overcome, or shrunk in the face of.


The idea of the digital humanities eventually "becoming" the humanities (as one of the respondents to a questionnaire about DH predicted) is interesting, because the humanities could be said to cover not just the obvious (literature, grammar, etc.) but also defining characteristics of shared culture. I thought it was interesting how one article cited the seemingly random inclusion of film and music as falling under the future banner of DH at some point in time, though such citations weren't as well defined as the ones listed under perhaps more "typical" humanities concerns. Film, like DH, is relatively new to the scene in terms of other artistic mediums; literature's been around at least as long as Chaucer, if not even earlier, and music (in the sense of being performed, not recorded) is probably one of mankind's oldest means of expression. Film came along through photography, and the desire to tell stories through images (film, as magnetic as it is, is basically still photographs taken one upon another and run through a projector to create the illusion of movement, or at least it is when it's literally "on film." Digital filmmaking doesn't use film, of course). I know when I originally signed up for a film class during my undergrad term at Clemson, I didn't consider it an "art" at least because I'd taken it for granted that movies were there. But an intro to film class caused me to reconsider, to see the inherent beauty and flaws of the medium, and to embrace the notion that, while not all films are art, there is art in film.


Like DH, film studies can encompass a wide berth: for example, I took an entire course devoted to Jean-Luc Godard, with pit stops into the territory of Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda, and other French filmmakers. Like DH, it's a new discipline, but one that has long since established criteria (it's hard for me to imagine that anyone would take a course in "the films of Michael Bay" except as a joke, or a tongue-in-cheek "celebration" of camp cinema, but it could easily happen within time). Film would be an ideal medium through which to examine the digital humanities, because it leads inevitably to the plethora of images we can see on the internet, which is where the concept of DH laid its roots.


I think that the debate over just what is or isn't DH is healthy and necessary, a discipline in search of itself and experiencing growing pains but finding the strength to assert itself. I have no doubt that one day the digital humanities will be defined conclusively. It may even encompass the whole of humanities, like the Blob eating up entire towns. But right now it's trying to find itself, and there may be some stumbles along the way or missteps. DH is at an interesting stage of its development, and I wonder how it will proceed from here.