Whitley New Media in American Literary History Symposium #nmalh
1. Moriarty’s Code: A Cautionary
Tale on Innovation in the Digital
Humanities
Edward Whitley
Lehigh University
@edwardwhitley
12.4.2013
2. ―[H]umanities … scholarship will not
take the use of digital technology
seriously until one demonstrates
how its tools improve the ways we
explore and explain aesthetic
works—until, that is, they expand
our interpretational procedures.‖
–Jerome McGann
Radiant Textuality (2001)
3. ―[D]igital scholarship needs
to do things that simply
cannot be done on paper.‖
—Ed Ayers
―Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?‖
EDUCAUSE Review (July/August 2013)
6. The Crowded Page
• NEH-funded with Co-PI
Andrew Jewell (U of
Nebraska, Lincoln) and
Jeff Heflin (Lehigh
U, Computer Science)
• http://crowdedpage.org
7. The Crowded Page goals
– develop tools for structuring
data that reveal the workings
of literary communities
– create a visualization that
allows for serendipitous
discovery of new knowledge
– link the visualization directly
to source documents in the
database
8.
9.
10.
11.
12. The Crowded Page
• Confident with data
model, disappointed with
visualization
– is difficult to work with
– flattens out different types of
relationships
– conceals source material
– distorts the reality that only ~40
people at a time could ever
have met together at Pfaff’s
13.
14. The Crowded Page
• Further development put
on hold because of . . .
– The Selected Letters of Willa
Cather, edited by Andrew
Jewell and Janis Stout
(Random House, 2013)
– Whitman among the
Bohemians, edited by
Edward Whitley and Joanna
Levin (Iowa, 2014)
16. Moriarty’s code
The fantasy of a powerful
digital tool whose work is,
in reality, accomplished
through a combination of
digital and ―analog‖
methods.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21. Surprise! He just bribed the
security guards.
No (or very few) digital tools
were actually needed…
23. ―Can we engage in the design of
digital environments that embody
specific theoretical principles drawn
from the humanities, not merely work
within platforms and protocols
created by disciplines whose
methodological premises are often at
odds with–even hostile to–humanistic
values and thought?‖
—Johanna Drucker
―Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,‖
Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
24. ―Digital humanities method … consists
in repeatedly coadjusting human
concepts and machine technologies
until … the two stabilize each other in
temporary postures of truth that
neither by itself could sustain.‖
—Alan Liu
―The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,‖
PMLA March 2013
25. Moriarty’s Code: A Cautionary
Tale on Innovation in the Digital
Humanities
Edward Whitley
Lehigh University
@edwardwhitley
4.12.2013
26. The Vault at Pfaff’s 2.0
• Interactive map of New York
• Text-based social network
analysis
• Suite of newspapers the
bohemians worked for
• Continual archiving
Editor's Notes
Ayers and McGann have created a horizon of expectations that creates a teleology that can potentially distort the kinds of questions we ask. We have to conform our questions to being (1) 100% digital and incapable of being realized on paper alone, and (2) to lead to interpretations that are achievable through those digital means. This insistence on avoiding paper scholarship on all costs distorts the long historical reality of how multiple media forms interoperate. Print coexists with manuscript. Television coexists with radio. The story of media over time has always been mixed-media interoperability, not the total triumph of one new media over its predecessors. I wanted to follow this teleology in my effort to recover a neglected moment of American Literary History: the bohemians of antebellum New York. A couple of years after creating this archive, I thought that the next step was to create a tool—a social networking tool that would allow for new discoveries that would be unavailable in print.
Andy and I wanted to follow McGann and Ayers and move beyond the archives we had built. We wanted serendipitous discovery of the type that could only be achieved with digital tools
The Crowded Page: the end result was both a design mess and a conceptual mess, rooted in the 21st-century digital sense of total, immediate connection of social media and not the actual sense of 40 people max who would fit at the bar. We did a good job capturing the relationships, but we need to work more closely with a designer to effectively represent visually and/or textually the relationships. Google the phrase “social network visualization” and 99% of what you get are spider graphs. We’ve assented to that form far too quickly. There have to be other ways to capture complex social networks. I’d like to think about some text-based ways of doing this if for no other reason than to upset the hegemony of the spider graph.
Ed Ayers: “Monographic scholarship, though routinized in many ways, is restlessly creative in argument and perspective…. monographic scholarship has never been richer, more wide-ranging, or more inventive than it is today.” (And yet, the printed monograph does not take full advantage of its medium: it’s not a pop-up book with transparencies and color plates, etc.)
In other words, is there a humanistic way to do digital scholarship as opposed to a digital way to do humanities scholarship? Can we do digital scholarship without assenting to the Ayers/McGann teleology? Can we imagine end goals that are not 100% digital interpretive tools?
The key is to ask good questions (like the infections texts project) and then match the media and the method to those questions. If we start with the expectation that we must be all digital and we must use interpretive tools we go awry.
The map is to deal with the problem of the false sense of spatial relations created by the spider graph.The text-base social network analysis is to deliberately push back against the hegemony of the spider-graph.The newspapers is to push back against “big data” with “middling-sized” data.The continual archiving is to resist the teleology of moving from archive to digital tool to new interpretations. Part of what we want to do now is to try to understand networks between the select group of newspapers that this group worked for. This is middling-sized data, rather than big data. Is the big data methodology the right fit for working with a middling-sized group of newspapers? “Big data” does not equal “all the data. We’re always working with curated data sets, either we curate them intentionally ourselves, or we curate them without intention by taking whatever happens to be available. The lure of “Big data” is “all the data,” but that’s a fantasy. We need to ask better questions about delimited data sets. That’s one of the skills we bring to the table as humanists.
![―[H]umanities … scholarship will not
take the use of digital technology
seriously until one demonstrates
how its tools improve the ways we
explore and explain aesthetic
works—until, that is, they expand
our interpretational procedures.‖
–Jerome McGann
Radiant Textuality (2001)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)