These readings constituted a  peek into coding culture as experienced by digital humanists.

Ghajar

It seems Ghajar’s main point is that historians are always going to want context in relation to their digital projects. Just learning to code isn’t a destination in itself, but the historian who wants to be involved in the digital humanities will need to know the why of the tools, not just the how. Why should we be able to design a database, or write code for a project? What are the possibilities in collaboration with web developers, and why would we collaborate in the first place? Why does learning to code affect our methodologies, or become a new methodology to use?  I always say, if I understand why, it helps me understand how.

Wildner

I think Wildner wants people to understand there is a culture which goes along with coding.  Coding is a language, there are ideals, and a lifestyle  just like any foreign culture.  It’s not just syntax, grammar and vocabulary.  There are also shortcuts and best practices that help digital humanists use their time productively if they are involved in coding, so it pays to understand the culture.  In our class discussion we agreed that it made sense for liberal arts people to be familiar with technology and digital culture, because everyone else must be familiar with humanities as a core part of education.  So, coding literacy would be one way to have liberal arts/humanists get familiar with digital technology and culture.  I think that is a great idea and would go a long way towards bringing together science and liberal arts, which we have blogged about before.

Posner

Posner addressed the issue of exhorting women to code.  She agreed that coding is a good skill to have, but she also talked about the reality of the coding culture which is made up of “middle-class white men” who have had greater access to technology, for far longer than women, in the first place. I don’t know what else to say about it, but gender struggles in technology fields are a problem throughout society.  Posner really wants that part of technology culture to change, to be more welcoming to diversity.  Of course I agree.

The readings this week address digital preservation, digital oncology, and interoperability. Much of the information in these readings was somewhat abstract and technical, but I think I understand what is at stake.

McDonough

This article talks about the unintended consequences of  XML use in the digital library community, mainly why there are failures of interoperability between institutions, developers and other users of XML.  The whole idea of XML was to have flexibility within a generalized, standard mark-up language so that different programs could communicate within it.  What has happened, though, is not quite what the creators of XML envisioned.  McDonough says this is because of culture and social relationships between content creators and software vendors (par. 13), among other things.

His solution is to establish “common principles of structural encoding and standardized stylesheets for translation” (par. 36).  The main problem I see is that a standard, or universal mark-up language is probably impossible.  We don’t have a standard, universal human language, we don’t have a standard, universal culture, and we don’t have standard, universal social relationships.  A consequence of human flexibility makes it hard to generalize the digital.

Kirschenbaum

We are again dealing with archives in this article.  The author tells a great story about preservation and possibility for research within the born-digital archives with his example of MITH.  His hook is the “.txtual condition.” He says the catechism of this condition is “Access is duplication, duplication is preservation, and preservation is creation – and recreation”  (par. 16).  I took this to mean that archiving is all about making things ready for recall.

In the digital aspect, an archivist has to “be able to identify and retrieve all its digital components” -Kenneth Thibodeau (par. 16).  What this means is hardware and software may need to be physically available, or emulated, to access old digital information.  This would be very important to a historian because records are primary sources.  Digital records will need to be accessible if future historians are to study the digital age.

Evens

This is a very abstract article about the abstraction of the digital world.  It is about binary code (0,1) being behind everything digital.  We don’t think about that as we go about our digital lives, but it is real.  Evens says, ” The digital has an ontology, a way of being, and products and processes generated through digital technologies bear traces of this way of being” (par. 9).  Later, Evans says it’s not just about technology, but binary code has abstract, ideal and discrete characteristics that end up being expressed in human relations (par. 15).  I found this article difficult to digest, but do think it would be an interesting area of study for philosophers.

Machine Learning, Text Mining and Archives

Argamon and Olsen

This article from 2009 introduces the challenges faced by humanities scholars of dealing with voluminous digital/digitized sources, or the “global digital library.”  These authors believe text mining is complementary to traditional textual analysis.   They used predictive text mining, comparative text mining, and clustering/similarity analysis on three different projects.  In two cases, the digital tools supported the original, traditional scholarly conclusions, and one case found new connections previously unnoticed by traditional scholarly methods.

I thought the warnings were interesting.  You could create the results you want to find based on the construction of the task itself, and there is anxiety inherent in doing criticism by algorithm.   I think these warnings are born of normal professional concerns for historians, whether digital tools are used or not.  I mean, is the evidence there, or are we forcing the evidence to fit our argument?

Kramer

I did not know there were any issues between historians and archivists.  Kramer’s article makes it sound like historians take archivists for granted, and that historians think the archive is for their use alone.  I don’t like the sound of that, but the article is from summer 2014, so apparently it’s a thing.  I agree with his point that digitization will bring the archival and history professions closer together.  I like the idea of digital historiography and all the possibilities that digitization opens up for historical transparency, accessibility and openness.  I think historians and archivists all need to reconsider their relevance in the digital age, so this kind of discussion makes sense.

The history of historical inquiry could become much more interesting than reading traditional historiography.  To follow intellectual journeys in the digital world sounds more fun than reading dry bibliographies to me.  I think this is what Kramer meant when he said we could dynamically link primary sources and their subsequent interpretations.

The readings this week were thought-provoking. What happens to the humanities now that they are digital, and what if we could have a richer querying system that let us search across different kinds of sources and databases to make more connections to the past?

Porsdam

There are a lot of things going on in Digital Humanities.  Quantitative vs qualitative concerns, computational humanities, humanistic technology, losing humanistic core competencies, the cross-over with public interests, perhaps a utopian “digital enfranchisement of the public.”  It’s all a bit much for a digital historian newly under development, to take in. However, I have always been concerned about the divide between history (humanities) and science.  I believe the state of our education system derives from this divide. I have read C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), and found that my concerns lived a long life before I came to know them.

I agree that we “should work toward developing a humanistic understanding of technology.” It isn’t up to historians alone, it’s also up to scientists.  I fully believe we need each other, because we are all having the human experience.  So, I am all for using digital tools to “bridge the gap…between the quantitative orientation of the natural sciences and critical cultural discourses in the humanities.”  Bridging that gap may be part of the whole digital age paradigm shift, but I am not sure we will know it has worked until it has passed. That’s history.

Ciravegna et al.

The Semantic Web.  This is different than the plethora of “application-specific interfaces” that humanities database designers have created along the way.  The semantic web would be an attempt to go beyond internet keyword searching, to mine information in web pages, not just perform data retrieval (66).  It would be able to draw data from a variety of differently structured sources and render it intelligible, with a single, unified matrix which defines the relations of the parts to one another and to the whole (69).  The issue of how historians deal with primary and secondary sources came up.  There’s the evidence, and then there’s the historiography.  Which should be included?  At stake is an oncology of history, but the ambiguity and complexity of history makes it difficult to to model history this way.  Anyway, there are strides being made in the techniques of Semantic Web technology, if not the thing being made, itself.  I am excited about this technology.