1. October 8: What is digital humanities? (part two)
On Monday, we talked about some of the basic elements of this class, and I explained that digital humanities is the collision of open-ended humanistic questions with the binary logic of the digital. I also talked about the three layers of a digital project, and promised to talk more about those today.

2. 1. Some DH history
2. What does it mean to be a digital scholar?
3. Three levels of a digital project
4. Project examples

3. Some milestones in DH history
1949: Roberto Busa, a Jesuit priest, was trying to analyze the complete works of Thomas Aquinas, which consist of about 9 million words. He wanted to connect together expressions and quotes and compare them across the whole body of work. He approached IBM for help. At that point, computers were used almost exclusively for calculations, but Busa persisted. With IBM’s help, Busa built a 56-volume concordance that allowed him to calculate word frequencies on Aquinas’s work.
Followed by a number of indexing projects and concordances, some experiments in determining authorship from word counts.
1949
Roberto Busa begins to develop the Index Thomisticus

4. Some milestones in DH history
More and more people were doing projects like Busa’s, using card-punch machines and tape-based computers to analyze texts and compute things like word frequencies in patterns. In 1978, a major digital humanities group, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, was founded.
1978
Association for Computers and the Humanities founded

5. Some milestones in DH history
Marked an era of increased consolidation, communication, efforts to standardize.
1987
The Text Encoding Initiative is formalized (to standardize efforts underway in previous decades)

6. Some milestones in DH history
Exemplifies a number of pioneering projects and scholars, including projects that problematize the notion of the archive and question the primacy of the book.
1992
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is founded at UVA

7. Some milestones in DH history
Marks a new visibility for digital humanities. More schools offer classes in it — including UCLA — and more people are familiar with it.
2008
Office of Digital Humanities established at the National Endowment for the Humanities

8. 1 2 3 Three Waves digitization, interpretive, new ways of knowing
text retrieval 2
interpretive,
interactive 3
new ways of knowing
David Berry talks about different eras in thinking about the digital. The first period is where people are really focused on big textual projects: digitizing large bodies of work and structuring them so that they’re classifiable and accessible. (Text Encoding Initiative) In the second era, Berry says, scholars began thinking about the ways we could take older forms of knowledge and use computers to interpret it in interesting ways. (Hypercities) Berry says we’re now at a third age, where we’re ready to start really thinking about what it means to understand a subject. He thinks it’s crucial in this new age, to understand how computers think, and to reconsider some of the essential practices of humanistic work — like close reading and solitary work — even the centrality of the human in the digital age.

9. digital mediation
He says that now we’re at a moment where we can really think about what it means to take raw material and transform it into digital material. David Berry talks about what he calls digital mediation. Who has a sense of what that is?
He says it’s important to think about how medial changes produce epistemic changes.

10. If we imagine that a reality exists out in the world — like this garden, say — certain things need to happen to it in order for a computer to be able to understand it and act on it. You can’t just put a computer a garden and tell it to go to town.

11. In order to feed the world to a computer, we have to decide how we want to divide it up and what we want to do to it. If you’re wandering through this garden, you might enjoy everything at once in different ways — the sun, the flowers, the smells, the sky. But the computer doesn’t wander and contemplate the way a human does. It has to have everything chewed up for it in tiny, bite-size chunks. And the way we bite off those chunks has a big effect on what we’re later able to do with that information.
David Berry is saying that over the last few decades, huge swathes of the world have gotten divided up like our garden and turned into actionable data. So in a sense, whenever we interact with anything on our screen, we’re interacting with software. We just don’t understand how, because we’re not trained to.
On the one hand, it’s not fair to the garden to break it up like this. We’re losing information and making decisions about what’s included and excluded. But on the other hand — and this is what digital humanists argue — if we really understand the implications of dividing and processing our garden in different ways, if we really think hard about our decisions about dividing our garden, then we’ll only understand it better. And we’ll be able to show it to other people in cool ways.