“Reframing the Humanities as Useful,” Humanities for the Public Good Closing Symposium: A Celebration, Obermann Center, University of Iowa, 1 March 2024.

“Toward New MLA Guidelines on Evalutatiing Digital Scholarship,” session 404 on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship Today: Problems and Solutions” organized by the MLA Committee on Information Technology, MLA 2024, Philadelphia, 6 January 2024.

  • Session information
  • Abstract: As a respondent to talks at this panel, Alan Liu will share a preview of the MLA Committee on Information Technology’s work in drafting revised MLA guidelines for evaluating digital scholarlship. (The previous revision of the guidelines was issued in 2012.)

Citation: Alan Liu, “Messages and Values ??in the Age of Machine Learning: From Postcards to Social Media,” Prace Kulturoznawcze 26, no. 4 (2023): 125–29, https://doi.org/10.19195/0860-6668.26.4.8.

  • Excerpt (first paragraphs):
    If Stanislaw Pietraszko were to update his essay “Messages and Values” today, would he write about social media instead of postcards?
    Superficially, the analogy between postcards and social media seems unavoidable. After all, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media transmit short messages of text, images, and/or videos characterized by the same feature that Pietraszko noticed distinguishes postcards from letters: “the public availability of the verbal text” (and other content). One can assume, then, that Pietraszko and other scholars of the “axiosemiotics” of the postcard such as Zdzislaw W?sik would today also wish to discuss social media forms whose “excessive” and “redundant” performativity (to use Pietraszko’s terms) make them objects not just of information but also, and often primarily, of culture. After all, the visual “filters” that users frequently apply to their Instagram or TikTok posts are perfect examples of such excess or redundancy. There is almost no informational and only cultural value, for instance, in making oneself look like a cat.
    Yet one doubts that Pietraszko would have been content with just a superficial comparison of postcards to social media. His theoretical analysis was systemic in its aims, focusing on postcards to formulate a general relation between “messages and values” based on the difference between the semiotic function of information and the axiological values of culture. One surmises that today Pietraszko would want to pursue the same kind of systemic analysis by looking deeper into the systems of information and culture behind social media—a level of analysis, however, that poses challenges to his axiosemiotic approach.
  • Excerpt (last paragraph):
    “Culture … is neither communication nor information,” Pietraszko wished to believe. But for those working in data science now, the challenge is that communication and information are saturated by cultural values that cannot be partitioned off. Reciprocally, for those working in cultural studies, the challenge is that cultural values increasingly are fused to the instrumental functions of communication and information (as when a “like” in social media is exploited by the system to promote an advertisement). Instrumental functions cannot be compartmentalized from values because in the final analysis the very concept of instrumentality or functionality (and its underlying logics of cause and effect) are changing. Functionalism now incorporates probabilistic operations of predictive modeling that—as technology companies like to say—“just work,” but work in semiotically non-understandable ways that perhaps most resemble how culture works.

 

“Where Does Data Science Fit in a Liberal Arts Academy?”, seminar on “The Place of Data” (part of the Stanford CESTA/Mellon Sawyer Seminar series on “The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities”)Stanford University, 2 November 2023.

“Toward a Center for Humanities Communication,” session on “How to Communicate Your Humanities Scholarship to the Public,” National Humanities Conference, Indianapolis, 26 Octobeer 2023.

“Reframing the Humanities as Useful,” session on “From Thinking to Doing: Making the Humanities Public,” National Humanities Conference, Indianapolis, 26 October 2023.

  • Session information
  • Abstract: Alan Liu will draw on the findings of the Mellon Foundation funded “WhatEvery1Says” (WE1S) project he directed to suggest specific areas where innovative organizations, programs, structures, practices, and media are needed to design fresh ways of engaging the public with the humanities. These include ways to activate the material culture of the humanities (not just curated objects but the artifacts of citizens and local communities); create resources and practices for bridging between the “personal” humanities (e.g., a poem one loves) and community, state, national, and global humanities issues; experiment with new media forms to communicate the humanities; and draw on the experiences and heritage of underrepresented social groups.

“What is Good Writing in the Age of ChatGPT?”, speech for English Department commencement ceremony, 18 June 2023.

  • Full Text of Speech
     
    What is good writing in the age of ChatGPT (which, as you know, is the most celebrated of the new generative artificial-intelligence tools based on large language models that can write prose, verse, and lies just like a human being)?

    That’s the question I call on you as graduating English majors to help society answer as you bring your skills in writing and speaking well — and in knowing well through language and its literatures — into the world….

    [go to full speech]

“What is Good Writing in the Age of ChatGPT?”, speech for English Department commencement ceremony, 18 June 2023.

  • Full Text of Speech
     
    What is good writing in the age of ChatGPT (which, as you know, is the most celebrated of the new generative artificial-intelligence tools based on large language models that can write prose, verse, and lies just like a human being)?

    That’s the question I call on you as graduating English majors to help society answer as you bring your skills in writing and speaking well — and in knowing well through language and its literatures — into the world….

    [go to full speech published as blog post]

“Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) and the Sociology of New Media,” virtual presentation at the Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), Oxford U., 18 May 2023.

“Reframing the Use of the Humanities,” Panel on “Can the Humanities Be ‘Useful’” at the Symposium on 10th-Year Annersary of The Heart of the Matter Report, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA, 2 April 2023.

“Infrastructure as Epistemic Value in the Digital Humanities,” Symposium on “The Integrative Potential of Epistemic Virtues for the Digital Humanities,” German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, 27 January 2023.

  • Abstract: In seeking legitimacy as a field of study, the digital humanities have cultivated epistemic values that combine some from the sciences (such as evidence, precision, and reproducibility) and some from the contemporary humanities (such as being “interpretative” and “critical”). These values sum up at a higher level in the more general epistemic values that the digital humanities have made it a priority to attain: being “meaningful” and “cultural critical.” (Some in the humanities have been skeptical that quantitative and other DH methods can be interpretatively meaningful or engage in sociopolitical and cultural critique.)
    1-px spacer graphicBut there is one other general epistemic value in the digital humanities that makes the field distinctive among the humanities: valuing the “infrastructural” (i.e., thinking about and developing infrastructure as an interpretative and critical object). This talk surveys some of the intellectual approaches that converge in current “critical infrastructure studies,” inquires into the constitutive epistemic values underlying such studies, and concludes with a suggestion about how textual analysis of the “verbs” as opposed to “nouns” of infrastructure can unlock the “black box” of these values.

“Thinking at the ‘Enterprise Technology Systems’ Level.” Panel on What Do We Want In A Research Platform Of The Future? (session 620), Modern Language Association convention, San Francisco, 7 January 2023.

“Research Learning: Digital Project Courses & Teaching Research Practices.” Panel on From Pedagogy to Research and Back Again (session 432), Modern Language Association convention, San Francisco, 7 January 2023.

Citation: “Theses on Large Language Models and ‘Good’ Writing” Alan Liu, 4 December 2022. doi:

The following was originally posted on Mastodon on December 3, 2022, in a series of eight posts (beginning at https://fosstodon.org/@ayliu/109451839640202878). In assembling the thread together here I have added a few links.

4 December 2022

1/8 As an English professor working in the digital humanities, my takeaway from ChatGPT (& large-language-model discourse generators in general) is that society will soon need to decide which values associated with “good” writing can and will be offloaded to LLMs so that the value added by humans can be shifted to a smaller or restructured spectrum of the functions of “good” writing for which humans can be recognized, rewarded, and held responsible.

 

“WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse.” Humanities & Fine Arts Digital Humanities Showcase, UC Santa Barbara, 18 November 2022.

“WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse.” Panel on “The Public, the Humanities, and the Public Humanities” at the National Humanities Conference 2022, Los Angeles, 12 November 2022.

“Research-based Humanities Advocacy: 4Humanities.org and the WhatEvery1Says Project” Talk for 25Humans For the Humanities, hosted virtually by Goethe University, Frankfurt, 14 December 2021.

“Where Does Data Science Fit in a Liberal Arts University?” Data Science Summit, UCSB, 3 December 2021.

“What Everyone Says About the Humanities: The Challenge Posed by the Public Perception of the Humanities in the Media.” Daedalus authors’ meeting for contributors to special issue on “The Humanities in American Life,” 10 Sept. 2021 (conducted over Zoom).

“Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies — An Overview.” King’s College, London, 21 June 2021, 5:10-5:50 pm London time. Keynote lecture for the “Infrastructural Interventions” workshop in the Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies series organized by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger. (Delivered by Microsoft Teams meeting.)

  • Abstract: In this talk, Alan Liu provides an introduction to “critical infrastructure studies” and the place of the digital humanities in it. What have been the main approaches to infrastructure that today make the topic of such compelling socio-political, technological, media-informatic, cultural, historical, and artistic interest across the disciplines? How are the digital humanities positioned in relation to those approaches; and what is “critical” about that relation?
  • Useful links for citations and other material mentioned in the talk:

“WhatEvery1Says: Data Mining Media Coverage of the Humanities.” The Education University of Hong Kong, 8 April 2021.

  • Abstract: Backed by a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) project uses digital humanities methods—primarily topic modeling, complemented by such other methods as text classification—to study media discourse about the humanities at big data scales. Alan Liu, director of WE1S, will give an overview of the project and its open-source datasets and topic-model analysis, visualization, and interpretation tools (as well as its surveys of students and others providing a ground-truth perspective on views on the humanities). He will also highlight selected project outputs, including explanations of findings, methods, data, and tools in a “card” format inspired by new practices in data-model reporting.
    The goal of the WE1S project is to provide advocates for the humanities with research-based materials and strategies for effective communication about the value of humanistic study and knowledge in today’s world.

“WhatEvery1Says: Data Mining Media Coverage of the Humanities.” Digital Tools for Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Workshop Series, Public Humanities Design Studio, University of California, Merced, 15 March 2021.

  • Abstract: Backed by a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) project uses digital humanities methods—primarily topic modeling, complemented by such other methods as text classification—to study media discourse about the humanities at big data scales. Alan Liu, director of WE1S, will give an overview of the project and its open-source datasets and topic-model analysis, visualization, and interpretation tools (as well as its surveys of students and others providing a ground-truth perspective on views on the humanities). He will also highlight selected project outputs, including explanations of findings, methods, data, and tools in a “card” format inspired by new practices in data-model reporting.
    The goal of the WE1S project is to provide advocates for the humanities with research-based materials and strategies for effective communication about the value of humanistic study and knowledge in today’s world.

“Writing Data: Literary Scholars and New Forms of Public Writing.” Panel on “Public Humanities in the Age of Precarity, Modern Language Association convention (virtually presented panel), 7 January 2021.

“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer.” Furman University, 12 November 2020, 1:30-2:30 pm Pacific time (4:30-5:30 Eastern time). (Lecture delivered by Zoom webinar: registration.)

  • Abstract: What have been the main approaches to the study of infrastructure that now combine to make the topic of such compelling socio-political, technological, media-informatic, cultural, historical, and artistic interest across the disciplines? In this talk, Alan Liu provides an introduction to “critical infrastructure studies,” focusing on why multidisciplinary perspectives–sometimes tensely divergent in their premises even when converging to make, for example, a “bridge” or a “barrier”–are needed to imagine good infrastructure.
  • Useful links for citations and other material mentioned in the talk:

“Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age — A Virtual Talk.” History Department, U. California, Santa Barbara (4 May 2020, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time) (Zoom meeting information sent after request through this form.)

  • Abstract: Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive ‘network archaeologies’ can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other.
  • Video Video recording of this talk (47 min.)

Citation:”Data Moves: Libraries and Data Science Workflows.” Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age. Ed. Susan Mizruchi. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020: 211-219.

  • Abstract: Library-based collections and repositories are today advancing well beyond accumulating resources in digital form for the purposes of searching, reading, and other primary access. New advances toward treating collections as “always already data” facilitate next-generation computational uses of digitized materials—for example, treating collections as datasets for advanced datamining analysis.
            In considering how library collections can serve as data for a variety of data ingestion, transformation, analysis, reproduction, presentation, and circulation purposes, it may be useful to compare examples of data workflows across disciplines to identify common data-analysis “moves” as well as points in the data trajectory that are especially in need of library support because they are for a variety of reasons brittle. Drawing on the precedent of so-called in silico science—which has had a ten-year start on developing methods and standards for tracking the provenance of data, annotating and visualizing data analysis workflows for reproducibility, and comparing data workflows in different fields—Liu argues that other disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences can exploit today’s library data collections in similar ways. The goal is twofold: first, open, shareable, and reproducible data scholarship, and second, higher or meta-level analysis of such scholarship. For example, might methods for comparing data workflows in the sciences (seeing, e.g., how astrophysics compares with medical science in using data) be extended across the disciplines to the digital humanities, digital arts, and digital social sciences? Beyond borrowing science data paradigms for other disciplines, Liu also thinks in the reverse direction. He draws on the twentieth-century tradition of literary and ethnographical analysis—for example, the idea of the narrative “motif” or “move” (in the Russian: mov)—to suggest that humanities and social science approaches to data workflows are just as crucial as scientific ones. After all, however one analyzes data (and in which field), one ultimately has to tell the story of that workflow and its results. That puts the problem squarely in the domain of narrative motifs and moves, which Liu argues can be matched to data workflow moves.

 

“Humans in the Loop: Humanities Hermeneutics and Machine Learning.” Keynote for DHd2020 (7th Annual Conference of the German Society for Digital Humanities), University of Paderborn, 6 March 2020.

  • Abstract: As indicated by the emergent research fields of computational “interpretability” and “explainability,” machine learning creates fundamental hermeneutical problems. One of the least understood aspects of machine learning is how humans learn from machine learning. How does an individual, team, organization, or society “read” computational “distant reading” when it is performed by complex algorithms on immense datasets? Can methods of interpretation familiar to the humanities (e.g., traditional or poststructuralist ways of relating the general and the specific, the abstract and the concrete, the structure and the event, or the same and the different) be applied to machine learning? Further, can such traditions be applied with the explicitness, standardization, and reproducibility needed to engage meaningfully with the different Spielräum – scope for “play” (as in the “play of a rope,” “wiggle room,” or machine-part “tolerance”) – of computation? If so, how might that change the hermeneutics of the humanities themselves?
    In his keynote lecture, Alan Liu uses the example of the formalized “interpretation protocol” for topic models he is developing for the Mellon Foundation funded WhatEvery1Says project (which is text-analyzing millions of newspaper articles mentioning the humanities) to reflect on how humanistic traditions of interpretation can contribute to machine learning. But he also suggests how machine learning changes humanistic interpretation through fresh ideas about wholes and parts, mimetic representation and probabilistic modeling, and similarity and difference (or identity and culture).
  • Video Video of lecture

“The WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) Project.” Mellon Research Forum Convening, University of California, Irvine, January 31, 2020.

Citation:“Toward a Diversity Stack: Digital Humanities and Diversity as Technical Problem.” PMLA 135.1 (2020): 130-151.

  • DOI: 10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.130.
  • Open access (post-embargo published version in institutional repository, PDF) [TBD]
  • Paywalled (published version, PDF)
  • Abstract: How can the digital humanities help support humanities scholarship on diversity both ideologically and technically? This essay abandons the diversity paradigm prevalent in DH—the “big tent”—for a more technically functional one: the “stack.” It proposes that DH can create a “diversity stack” (conceptually like the “Internet protocol stack”) that combines technical and theoretical strategies for advancing scholarship on diversity. From low to high, crucial levels in such a stacked approach include technical methods for dealing with multilingualism, multimedia, unrepresentative corpora, geopolitical and temporal organizations of identity, and the theory of identity.

 

“Dialogue between Alan Liu (UC Santa Barbara), Tim Hitchcock (U. Sussex), and Jessica Otis (George Mason U.).” Fourth Annual Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History at the German Historical Institute. Washington, D.C., 12 October 2019.

“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer.” University of Texas at Austin, 4 September 2019.

  • Abstract: What have been the main approaches to the study of infrastructure that now combine to make the topic of such compelling socio-political, technological, media-informatic, cultural, historical, and artistic interest across the disciplines? In this talk, Alan Liu provides an introduction to “critical infrastructure studies,” focusing on why multi-disciplinary perspectives–sometimes tensely divergent in their premises even when converging to make, for example, a “bridge” or a “barrier”–are needed to imagine good infrastructure as the foundation for “good systems.” In the case of the University of Texas “Bridging Barriers” Grand Challenges initiative, for example, how many different ways are there to understand what a bridge or a barrier is good for (and for whom)?
  • Citations for the works in the “primer” included in the talk: bit.ly/cistudies-primer

“What Infrastructure Assumes: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies.” U. Guelph, 7 March 2019.

“Digital Humanities Learning Goals for Undergraduates.” U. Colorado, Boulder, 22 February 2019.

“What Infrastructure Assumes: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies.” The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), 15 February 2019.

“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer.” Initial talk of a pair of presentations by Alan Liu and James Smithies. Humanities Research Center, Rice University, 24 January 2019.

“The WhatEvery1Says Project — An Overview.” Panel on the WhatEvery1Says Project, U. Miami, 17 January, 2019.

Citation: Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

[336 pages, 49 halftones, ISBN paperback: 9780226451954; E-book: 9780226452005]

Video Companion video (talk by Alan Liu on the book) (recorded 4 May 2020; 47 min.)

Cover of Alan Liu, Friending the Past

book spine back cover back cover front cover

/ excerpt » /

“Open and Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities–A 35,000-foot Elevation View.” Keynote at the Digital Bridges Symposium (Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry project), University of Iowa and Grinnell College, 10 August 2018.

“Romanticism and Critical Infrastructure Studies.” Introduction to seminar co-led with Jacques Khalip on “Romanticism and Critical Infrastructural Studies.” NASSR 2018, Brown University, 22 June 2018.

Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018 (forthcoming  November 2018).

Cover of Alan Liu, Friending the Past
Catalogue Copy

Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all?

In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry.

Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.

[See abstracts for book and chapters]

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction (abstract)

1          Friending the Past (abstract)

2          Imagining the New Media Encounter (abstract)

3          When Was Linearity? (abstract)

4          Remembering Networks (abstract)

5          Like a Sense of History (abstract)

Appendix: Hypothetical Machine-Learning Workflow for Studying the Sense of History

 

Book Abstract

Friending the Past asks if today’s society, increasingly captivated by up-to-the-minute information media, can have a sense of history. What is the relation between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal or self-aware sense of history—for example, storytelling in prehistorical oral societies, or the great print works of historicism in the nineteenth century—and today’s “instant” networked information society? How did the sense of history once balance between the feeling for the present and for the absent, the temporal and the social, the individual and the collective, and the static and the dynamic? And how do digital networks now change the balance? Blending the approaches of intellectual history, media studies, and digital humanities, the book proposes novel ways of thinking about the evolving sense of history. Topics include the relation between high-print historicism and social networking; narratives of “new media encounters” between societies; graphically visualized and conceptualized understandings of history; and “network archaeology” as the variant of media archaeology needed to grasp the networked texture of our contemporary feeling for history. At its close, the book calls the question: is there a sense of history in the digital, networked age? The book concludes with an example of what a digitally networked sense of history can be by examining (in a manner poised between “close reading” and “distant reading”) the code of one of today’s JavaScript “timelines” and comparing it to the experience of temporality encoded in William Wordsworth’s poetry during the era of romanticism.

Book Keywords:
digital humanities, historicism, history, information society, media, media archaeology, networks, romanticism, temporality, timelines

 


Chapter Abstracts

Introduction

Written fictionally in the voice of today’s “sense of history,” the introduction frames the central question of the book: in the age of digital media, digital networks, social networking, and data, can society have a sense of history comparable to that which characterized earlier eras of history and media? Speaking like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, the Sense of History speaks in character to reframe the problem as the transition from an older, interconnected circuit of meaning-making acts—”rhetoric representation interpretation”—to a later one: “communication information media.”

Chapter Keywords: communication, data, digital, information, interpretation, media, networks, representation, rhetoric, sense of history

 


Chapter 1: Friending the Past

Chapter 1 studies the change from prior senses of history to today’s “real time” sense of history—or instant sense of community—of social networks. How was the equivalent of a sense of history experienced, and mediated, in prehistorical oral cultures? How did print culture at the height of the history of the book, which coincided with narrative historicism in the mode of Leopold von Ranke (Historismus), alter the sense of history? And how do “Web 2.0” and social networking today yet again change the sense of history? Can today’s society “friend” past ones to imagine, and absorb, prior senses of history as a layered, enrichening texture of the present? What continuities—for example, of Internet transmissions following the routes once forced by imperial roads across conquered lands—lock the digital present to its historical past? But, also, what discontinuities allow past historicism and today’s information empire to challenge each other’s assumptions, thus enabling a more humane texture of the present mindful of the past?

Chapter Keywords: historicism, Historismus, history of the book, Leopold von Ranke, media determinism, narrative, oral culture, print culture, social networking, web 2.0

 


Chapter 2: Imagining the New Media Encounter

This chapter studies “narratives of new media encounter” (accounts of how individuals and societies react to the introduction of writing, radio, television, the Internet, Web 2.0, and so on) to suggest that major historical changes in the sociocultural order are mirrored in narratives of media history. Often, as in the case of Marshall McLuhan’s writings, such narratives follow a plot of progressivist media determinism—of necessary change from old media to new media—even as they also reveal the more ambivalent experience of a “contact zone” between civilizations. At once descriptive and interpretive, tales of new media encounter are a foundational form of media theory—a kind of media archaeology of media theory. They show how societies experience history as communication and information media, and communication and information media as history. They register the experience of history as media history. Finishing on the promising example of a recent collection of essays on the digital humanities, the chapter concludes by asking the critical question: what is an imaginatively enrichening rather than determinist and constraining narrative of new media encounter?

Chapter Keywords: contact zone, digital humanities, Marshall McLuhan, media archaeology, media determinism, media history, media theory, narrative, new media, old media,

 


Chapter 3: When Was Linearity?

Linearists, as they might be called, have staked deep claims of cultural and other value on the linear exposition of history, narrative, argument, and other forms of thought. Theorists of networks, hypertext, and other domains of today’s digital era stake equally significant claims on the nonlinear, often represented emblematically in network-style or other postlinear graphical visualizations. Indeed, they often elevate the importance of graphical knowledge in general. Informed by media history extending from oral culture and the history of the book to digital new media, this chapter asks the simplifying question: what if there never was any linearity to defend or to contest? What if the idea of linearity has always been an ideology deployed through graphical knowledge systems that are realized in graphics as the visualization of any era’s idea of authoritative linearity—for example, who gets to go to the front of a line and why—and ultimately of its sense of history? The chapter makes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” (with its invocation of “meaningless plungings” yet also visualization of seas “portioned” into fixed “emblazoned zones”) a recurrent poetic touchstone of its argument–in part by using digital humanities text analysis methods to render the poem as visualizations.

Chapter Keywords: digital humanities, graphics, history of the book, ideology, linearity, media history, networks, oral culture, Wallace Stevens, visualization

 


Chapter 4: Remembering Networks

Chapter 4 begins on the paradigmatic instance of a hybrid print/digital work at the onset of the digital networked era—Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos, Jr., and William Gibson (1992)—to call for a method of “network archaeology” extending media archaeology. Network archaeology facilitates understanding the sense of history in our postlinear age of digital networks filled with buzzing, flitting ephemeral and dynamic artifacts making a mockery of archiving yet urgently requiring methods not just of archiving but of open, transparent archiving. Past eras created networked artifacts and systems in their own way. The chapter braids together research on web archiving, scientific workflows (data-analysis workflows facilitating reproducible research), data provenance, and digital humanities prosopography to make the case for remembering networks through new digital archiving methods. Remembering networks, it argues, is foundational for providing our networked age with its appropriate, distinctive sense of history.

Chapter Keywords: Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), media archaeology, network archaeology, networks, prosopography, provenance, reproducible research, scientific workflows, web archiving, William Gibson

 


Chapter 5: Like a Sense of History

This concluding chapter defines the sense of history of any era or culture as a set of parameters—ontological, epistemological, socio-historical, and others—that can be studied through a combination of close reading and digital humanities distant reading. Splitting the difference between close and distant reading, the chapter studies visualized “timelines” as a traditional mode of distant reading history (analyzing and visualizing long vistas of historical event). Then, to define the sense of history specific to the internet age, it “close reads” at the code level an influential contemporary form of history: digital timelines. Focusing on the genre of JavaScript digital timelines, which dynamically draw data from backend sources to populate the “document object model” (DOM) of web-based timelines in frontend interfaces, the chapter postulates that the digital era is characterized by its own sense of history—one attuned to the contingency of networks. Setting this contingent sense of history in relief against that of an earlier era, the chapter ends by comparing the TimelineJS Javascript timeline in particular to the time sense, and implicit timelines, in William Wordsworth’s poetry and romanticism. Code meets poetry at a junction between the internet era and the humanities.

Chapter Keywords: close reading, contingency, digital humanities, distant reading, JavaScript, networks, romanticism, sense of history, timelines, William Wordsworth

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