Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities
Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies, Editors
Deadline for 500-word abstracts: December 15, 2021
For more info:
https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-critical-infrastructure-studies-digital-humanities
Part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series A book series from the University of Minnesota Press Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, Series Editors
Defintion
Critical infrastructure studies has emerged as a framework for linking thought on the complex relations between society and its material structures across fields such as science and technology studies, design, ethnography, media infrastructure studies, feminist theory, critical race and ethnicity studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, animal studies, literary studies, the creative arts, and others (see the CIstudies.org Bibliography )
CIstudies Bibliography
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2019
teaching quantitative methods:
https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/620caf9f-08a8-485e-a496-51400296ebcd#ch19
Problem 1: Programming Is Not an End in Itself
An informal consensus seems to have emerged that if students in the humanities are going to make use of quantitative methods, they should probably first learn to program. Introductions to this dimension of the field are organized around programming languages: The Programming Historian is built around an introduction to Python; Matthew Jockers’s Text Analysis with R is at its heart a tutorial in the R language; Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton’s Humanities Data in R begins with chapters on the language; Folgert Karsdorp’s Python Programming for the Humanities is a course in the language with examples from stylometry and information retrieval.[11] “On the basis of programming,” writes Moretti in “Literature, Measured,” a recent retrospective on the work of his Literary Lab, “much more becomes possible”
programming competence is not equivalent to competence in analytical methods. It might allow students to prepare data for some future analysis and to produce visual, tabular, numerical, or even interactive summaries; Humanities Data in R gives a fuller survey of the possibilities of exploratory data analysis than the other texts.[15] Yet students who have focused on programming will have to rely on their intuition when it comes to interpreting exploratory results. Intuition gives only a weak basis for arguing about whether apparent trends, groupings, or principles of variation are supported by the data.
From Humanities to Scholarship: Librarians, Labor, and the Digital
Bobby L. Smiley
https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/bf082d0f-e26b-4293-a7f6-a1ffdc10ba39#ch35
First hired as a “digital humanities librarian,” I saw my title changed within less than a year to “digital scholarship librarian,” with a subject specialty later appended (American History). Some three-plus years later at a different institution, I now find myself a digital-less “religion and theology librarian.” At the same time, in this position, my experience and expertise in digital humanities (or “digital scholarship”) are assumed, and any associated duties are already baked into the job description itself.
Jonathan Senchyne has written about the need to reimagine library and information science graduate education and develop its capacity to recognize, accommodate, and help train future library-based digital humanists in both computational research methods and discipline-focused humanities content (368–76). However, less attention has been paid to tracking where these digital humanities and digital scholarship librarians come from, the consequences and opportunities that arise from sourcing librarians from multiple professional and educational stations, and the more ontological issues associated with the nature of their labor—that is, what is understood as work for the digital humanist in the library and what librarians could be doing.
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More on digital humanities in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Digital+humanities
Digital Humanities for Librarians
By: Emma Annette Wilson
Digital Humanities For Librarians. Some librarians are born to digital humanities; some aspire to digital humanities; and some have digital humanities thrust upon them. Digital Humanities For Librarians is a one-stop resource for librarians and LIS students working in this growing new area of academic librarianship. The book begins by introducing digital humanities, addressing key questions such as, “What is it?”, “Who does it?”, “How do they do it?”, “Why do they do it?”, and “How can I do it?”. This broad overview is followed by a series of practical chapters answering those questions with step-by-step approaches to both the digital and the human elements of digital humanities librarianship. Digital Humanities For Librarians covers a wide range of technologies currently used in the field, from creating digital exhibits, archives, and databases, to digital mapping, text encoding, and computational text analysis (big data for the humanities). However, the book never loses sight of the all-important human component to digital humanities work, and culminates in a series of chapters on management and personnel strategies in this area. These chapters walk readers through approaches to project management, effective collaboration, outreach, the reference interview for digital humanities, sustainability, and data management, making this a valuable resource for administrators as well as librarians directly involved in digital humanities work. There is also a consideration of budgeting questions, including strategies for supporting digital humanities work on a shoestring. Special features include: Case studies of a wide range of projects and management issues Digital instructional documents guiding readers through specific digital technologies and techniques An accompanying website featuring digital humanities tools and resources and digital interviews with librarians and scholars leading the way in digital humanities work across North America, from a range of larger and smaller institutionsWhether you are a librarian primarily working in digital humanities for the first time, a student hoping to do so, or a librarian in a cognate area newly-charged with these responsibilities, Digital Humanities For Librarians will be with you every step of the way, drawing on the author’s experiences and those of a network of librarians and scholars to give you the practical support and guidance needed to bring your digital humanities initiatives to life.
Burdick, A. (2012). Digital humanities . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma990078472690104318&context=L&vid=01MNPALS_SCS:SCS&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&tab=Everything&lang=en
digital humanities is born f the encounter between traditional humanities and computational methods.
p. 5. From Humanism to Humanities
While the foundations of of humanistic inquiry and the liberal arts can be traced back in the west to the medieval trivium and quadrivium, the modern and human sciences are rooted in the Renaissance shift from a medieval, church dominated, theocratic world view to be human centered one period the gradual transformation of early humanism into the disciplines that make up the humanities today Was profoundly shaped by the editorial practices involved in the recovery of the corpus of works from classical antiquity
P. 6. The shift from humanism to the institution only sanctioned disciplinary practices and protocols that we associate with the humanities today is best described as a gradual process of subdivision and specialization.
P. 7. Text-based disciplines in studies (classics, literature, philosophy, the history of ideas) make up, from the very start, the core of both the humanities and the great books curricular instituted in the 1920s and 1930s.
P. 10. Transmedia modes of argumentation
In the 21st-century, we communicate in media significantly more varied, extensible, and multiplicative then linear text. From scalable databases to information visualizations, from video lectures to multi-user virtual platforms serious content and rigorous argumentation take shape across multiple platforms in media. The best digital humanities pedagogy and research projects train students both in “reading “and “writing “this emergent rhetoric and in understanding how the reshape and three model humanistic knowledge. This means developing critically informed literacy expensive enough to include graphic design visual narrative time based media, and the development of interfaces (Rather then the rote acceptance of them as off-the-shelf products).
P. 11. The visual becomes ever more fundamental to the digital humanities, in ways that compliment, enhance, and sometimes are in pension with the textual.
There is no either/or, no simple interchangeability between language and the visual, no strict sub ordination of the one to the other. Words are themselves visual but other kinds of visual constructs do different things. The question is how to use each to its best effect into device meaningful interpret wing links, to use Theodor Nelson’s ludic neologism.
P. 11. The suite of expressive forms now encompasses the use of sound, motion graphics, animation, screen capture, video, audio, and the appropriation and into remix sink of code it underlines game engines. This expanded range of communicative tools requires those who are engaged in digital humanities world to familiarize themselves with issues, discussions, and debates in design fields, especially communication and interaction design. Like their print predecessors, form at the convention center screen environments can become naturalized all too quickly, with the results that the thinking that informed they were designed goes unperceived.
p. 13.
For digital humanists, design is a creative practice harnessing cultural, social, economic, and technological constraints in order to bring systems and objects into the world. Design in dialogue with research is simply a picnic, but when used to pose in frame questions about knowledge, design becomes an intellectual method. Digital humanities is a production based in Denver in which theoretical issues get tested in the design of implementations and implementations or loci after your radical reflection and elaboration.
Did you thaw humanists have much to learn from communication and media design about how to juxtapose and integrate words and images create hire he is of reading, Forge pathways of understanding, deployed grades in templates to best effect, and develop navigational schemata that guide in produce meaningful interactions.
P. 15. The field of digital digital humanities me see the emergence of polymaths who can “ do it all” : Who can research, write, shoot, edit, code, model, design, network, and dialogue with users. But there is also ample room for specialization and, particularly, for collaboration.
P. 16. Computational activities in digital humanities.
The foundational layer, computation, relies on principles that are, on the surface, at odds with humanistic methods.
P. 17. The second level involves processing in a way that conform to computational capacities, and this were explored in the first generation of digital scholarship and stylometrics, concordance development, and indexing.
P. 17.
Duration, analysis, editing, modeling.
Duration, analysis, editing, and modeling comprise fundamental activities at the core of digital humanities. Involving archives, collections, repositories, and other aggregations of materials, duration is the selection and organization of materials in an interpretive framework, argument, or exhibit.
P. 18. Analysis refers to the processing of text or data: statistical and quantitative methods of analysis have brought close readings of texts (stylometrics and genre analysis, correlation, comparisons of versions for alter attribution or usage patterns ) into dialogue with distant reading (The crunching cuff large quantities of information across the corpus of textual data or its metadata).
Edit think has been revived with the advent of digital media and the web and to continue to be an integral activity in textual as well as time based formats.
P. 18. Model link highlights the notion of content models- shapes of argument expressed in information structures in their design he digital project is always an expression of assumptions about knowledge: usually domain specific knowledge given an explicit form by the model in which it is designed.
P. 19. Each of these areas of activity- cure ration, analysis, editing, and modeling is supported by the basic building blocks of digital activity. But they also depend upon networks and infrastructure that are cultural and institutional as well as technical. Servers, software, and systems administration are key elements of any project design.
P. 30. Digital media are not more “evolved” have them print media nor are books obsolete; but the multiplicity of media in the very processes of mediation entry mediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and humanistic inquiry required close attention. Tug link between distant and clothes, macro and micro, and surface in depth becomes the norm. Here, we focus on the importance of visualization to the digital humanities before moving on to other, though often related, genre and methods such as
Locative investigation, thick mapping, animated archives, database documentaries, platform studies, and emerging practices like cultural analytics, data mining and humanities gaming.
P. 35. Fluid texture out what he refers to the mutability of texts in the variants and versions Whether these are produced through Authorial changes, anything, transcription, translation, or print production
Cultural Analytics, aggregation, and data mining.
The field of cultural Analytics has emerged over the past few years, utilizing tools of high-end computational analysis and data visualization today sect large-scale coach data sets. Cultural Analytic does Not analyze cultural artifacts, but operates on the level of digital models of this materials in aggregate. Again, the point is not to pit “close” hermeneutic reading against “distant” data mapping, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities and tensions that exist between a hyper localized, deep analysis and a microcosmic view
p. 42.
Data mining is a term that covers a host of picnics for analyzing digital material by “parameterizing” some feature of information and extract in it. This means that any element of a file or collection of files that can be given explicit specifications, or parameters, can be extracted from those files for analysis.
Understanding the rehtoric of graphics is another essential skill, therefore, in working at a skill where individual objects are lost in the mass of processed information and data. To date, much humanities data mining has merely involved counting. Much more sophisticated statistical methods and use of probability will be needed for humanists to absorb the lessons of the social sciences into their methods
P. 42. Visualization and data design
Currently, visualization in the humanities uses techniques drawn largely from the social sciences, Business applications, and the natural sciences, all of which require self-conscious criticality in their adoption. Such visual displays including graphs and charts, may present themselves is subjective or even unmediated views of reality, rather then is rhetorical constructs.
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Warwick, C., Terras, M., & Nyhan, J. (2012). Digital humanities in practice . London: Facet Publishing in association with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.
https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma990078423690104318&context=L&vid=01MNPALS_SCS:SCS&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&tab=Everything&lang=en
We Need More Men in the Humanities
Around the turn of the millennium, American society realized a looming crisis: the lack of female representation in STEM fields. But today we are witnessing a crisis of male leadership in a variety of workplaces. From the president to CEOs of major companies to actors and power players in Hollywood, the past several months have exposed the toxic work environments they preside over or worsen in scandal after scandal. Though different in nature, this crisis is of equal importance as the STEM shortage. Yet, to date, no prominent solutions or interventions have been seriously proposed. In contrast, a quick Google search brings up dozens of programs for girls in STEM, but not one national program appears for boys in the arts and humanities.
latest indicators of the
demographics and
earnings of public school humanities teachers — most of whom are women and many of whom aren’t paid well — underscore that we need more men in the arts and humanities.
The Humanities Indicators report that, “As of 2015, women earned 61 percent of all master’s and professional-practice degrees in the humanities and 54 percent of the doctoral degrees in the field.” And the
latest report on public school teachers found that “76 percent of humanities teachers were women, the largest share among subject specialists.” When male K-12 role models barely exist in these disciplines, what message does that send to our young boys and men?
But our society suffers when boys and men are actively discouraged from pursuing their interests in the arts and humanities. The cycle of toxic masculinity starts early. Boys are often told not to cry or show emotion. They are socially trained to repress it, and they take pride in this false resilience.
the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. In an annual event called “
Cops and Docs,” accomplished medical professionals and highly trained police officers take a group trip to the museum. Over the course of the evening, mixed groups of cops and docs look at paintings, sculptures and other works of art, and t
hey then share their answers to a pretty basic question: What do you see?
Another program, “
The Art of Perception,” takes police detectives, FBI agents and high-ranking Secret Service and CIA executives to well-known museums and galleries like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection to observe works by Picasso, Caravaggio, Edward Hopper and other masters. Program creator Amy E. Herman says the exercise
is “not about looking at art. It’s about talking about what you see.”
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more on male students in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/09/19/less-boys-more-girls-in-college/