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ISSN 1938-4122
Announcements
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2011 5.3
Futures of Digital Studies
Editors: Mauro Carassai and Elise Takehana
Front Matter
[en] Introduction
Mauro Carassai, University of Florida; Elisabet Takehana, Fitchburg State University
Abstract
[en]
The following contributions offer a comprehensive survey of the impeding turns in the scholarly agenda of digital studies. In so doing, they probe the future cultural scenarios looming beyond digital technologies and their related practices, concepts, and perspectives. Such a collective interrogation of our digital future investigates the full spectrum of the humanities. As a result, our notions of subjectivity, identity, consciousness, literacy, text, and medium emerge in these essays as significantly altered by the digital in unusual and unexpected ways. Papers scrutinize a variegated set of relationships between the human neurological network and the networked computer, real and virtual spaces, and subjectivity and procedurality. Scholars in this cluster re-envision such issues in the light of an all-encompassing ontological shift underway as a consequence of the increasingly pervasive presence of the digital in our relations with machines and their processes.
Articles
[en] Forward to the Past: Nostalgia for Handwriting in Scribblenauts and The World Ends with
You
Aaron Kashtan, Department of English University of Florida
Abstract
[en]
Claims of the supposed disappearance of materiality in digital culture often entail a
nostalgic reimagining of the supposedly embodied, personal or creative aspects of
earlier writing technologies, including handwriting. Although handwriting was never a
fully embodied writing technology, critics of transparent computer graphics often
characterize it as such. This revisionist nostalgia for handwriting is evident not
only in critical literature but also in contemporary graphical media such as video
games.
Two recent Nintendo DS games, Scribblenauts (2009) and
The World Ends with You (2007), represent two
alternative modalities of such nostalgia for handwriting. Scribblenauts claims to fully restore the creative properties of
handwriting, but inevitably fails to do so. By contrast, TWEWY claims to offer not handwriting itself but a digital- and
DS-specific equivalent. Therefore, it opens up possibilities for critical reflection
on the past meaning of handwriting and on the future of the values that handwriting
has come to symbolize.
[en] Digital Literature and the Modernist Problem
Maria Engberg, Blekinge Institute of Technology; Jay David Bolter, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
[en]
What is the status of digital literature in contemporary culture? Many scholars and practitioners assume that digital literature constitutes a contemporary avant-garde, which does its work of experimentation outside or in opposition to the mainstream. The notion of the avant-garde might seem thoroughly out of date in a consideration of the digital future. Important theorists (e.g. Huyssen, Drucker) have argued that the avant-garde is no longer viable even for traditional media and art practices. On the other hand, the avant-gardes of twentieth-century modernism made claims about the function of art that remain surprisingly influential today – within the art community and within popular culture. As Peter Bürger and others have discussed, an important division grew up in modernism on the question of whether art should strive for formal innovation or for sociopolitical change. Avant-gardes of the twentieth century took up positions along a spectrum from pure formalism (e.g. the Abstract Expressionists) to overt political action (e.g. the Situationists). While the digital literature community is in general committed to formal innovation, some are critical of this commitment, in part on the political grounds that (technological) innovation has become a byword for the digital culture industry. Although the modernist problem is still apparent in some digital art and digital literature today, writers such as Jason Nelson seem to be moving beyond that dialectic.
[en] Avatar Emergency
Gregory L. Ulmer, Professor of English and Media Studies University of Florida, Gainesville
Abstract
[en]
The original usage of avatar referred to the incarnation or human appearance
of a deity, particularly Vishnu, in Hindu mythology. The term was adapted to cyberspace to
name one’s online persona. This usage has come to include every aspect of one’s online
representation, from the icon on a blog, or an email signature to the figure one plays in
Second Life. Avatar, then, is a practical point of entry for theorizing the
emergence of the new identity experience of electracy, that is supplementing and
displacing selfhood, the identity formation of literacy. Playing one’s avatar
is to electracy what writing an essay is to literacy. The point addressed in this essay is
that an avatar is not merely the appearance of one’s representation, since through
interactivity and even telepresence, I am t/here with my image. What is it to be/have an
image? The answer begins with noting the literal meaning of the avatar in
Sanskrit: “Descent.” Vishnu has descended (taken on embodiment)
nine times, to correct a disordered world condition. This essay initiates a review of the
cultural archive to see what is known already about our question (representations of
“descent”). It is perhaps obvious, considering the prominence
of Christianity in our heritage, that the West accumulated a huge amount of information
about becoming body. Two examples are referenced in this introductory piece: Krishna and
Orpheus.
[en] Writing to be Found and Writing Readers
John Cayley, Brown University
Abstract
[en]
Poetic writing for programmable and network media seems to have been captivated by
the affordances of new media and questions of whether or not and if so,
how certain novel, media-constituted properties and methods of
literary objects require us to reassess and reconfigure the literary itself. What if
we shift our attention decidedly to practices, processes, procedures — towards
ways of writing and ways of reading rather than dwelling
on either textual artifacts themselves (even time-based literary objects) or the
concepts underpinning objects-as-artifact? What else can we do, given that we must
now write on, for, and with the net which is itself no object but a seething mass of
manifold processes?
Part one of the essay presents a brief analysis of recent experiments in “writing to be found” with Google, making some
claim that such writing may be exemplary, that its aesthetic and conceptual
engagements are distinct, and that there is something at stake here for “the
literary” or rather for certain practices of literary art. After very
brief discussion in part two of some broader implications of writing with the Google
corpus and its tools, part three addresses more examples of writing to be found, and
introduces a collaboration with Daniel Howe, The Readers
Project, many processes of which engage with “writing to be found”
“in” Google and making use of its tools.
[en] The New Place of Reading: Locative Media and the Future of
Narrative
Brian Greenspan, Carleton University
Abstract
[en]
Locative technologies hold out the promise to transform literary space in all of its
dimensions, including its represented spaces, reading interfaces, and the very spaces
within which literature is produced and consumed. Yet, despite the growing use of
location-based technologies, authors and readers alike have been slow to take to
site-specific narrative due to limitations inherent in both the current design of locative
media systems and our received notions of what constitutes the narrative experience.
This paper argues that new mobile reading platforms in general are altering conceptions
of literary space in highly conflicted ways, by radically expanding the sites where
narratives can be accessed and experienced even as they reinforce a residual notion of
literary reading as a sedentary and decontextualized experience. Locative media likewise
hold out the promise of increased mobility and contextual awareness, but confront several
cultural and technological factors preventing such an enhanced emplacement of narrative,
factors that current performance-oriented approaches cannot fully address. At the level of
cognitive engagement, the conditioned expectation of being
“transported” to a remote fictional world interferes with readers'
appreciation of the locative narrative's close ties to the real world, as well as the
contextual effects it elicits by means of transportation through the actual world. At the
technical level, the discontinuous algorithms of place that inform the architecture of
most locative media systems hinder the perception of narrative patterning and flow across
more extensive spaces.
Locative media thus operationalize the spatial tension between conventionally sedentary
modes of literary engagement and new modalities of mobility, a tension that is
constitutive of our present mediality. The study concludes with a discussion of StoryTrek,
a next-generation locative hypernarrative system designed to enable more complex, dynamic
and fluid modes of embodied narrative spatiality. By encouraging the user to actively form
complex narrative links between real and fictional spaces, StoryTrek enables utopian forms
of spatial play that neutralize both the spatial limitations of current locative media
design and the sedentary reading practices that continue to structure the experience of
digital literature.
[en] Nodalism
Phillip H. Gochenour, Towson University
Abstract
[en]
This paper focuses on the use of the trope “x
is like a node in a network” in works of critical
theory, and shows it to be an indicator of a larger discourse,
nodalism, that has its origins in 19th century neuroscience and
Associationist models of mind. This discourse provides a
relationship between structure and function that is used in
attempts to model thought in technological devices, as in the
work of Vannevar Bush and JCR Licklider. These technological
instantiations of nodalism in turn provide the material basis
for the expansion of the discourse into other domains, such as
politics and economics. The paper concludes by considering the
potential positive and negative consequence of nodalism, and the
role of the digitial humanities in the reproduction of this
discourse.
[en] Readies Online
Craig Saper, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Abstract
[en]
The research experiment described in this article, “Readies Online,” started as
a database to make accessible a rare manuscript of important modernist poets and
writers including Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, F. W.
Marinetti, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Eugene Jolas, and many others. Each of these
contributors had sent works prepared for Bob Brown's machine, and he called the
prepared texts readies. In the midst of building the collection of texts, the
researcher realized that moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown's
machine, or through the interface constructed on the website to simulate Brown's
machine, changed how one read — even changed the essence of what one read. Speed,
pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance already apparent in reading
printed texts, but not stressed. Punctuation now represented an illegible and
non-representational, visual cue rather than a direct link to the phono-centric
pauses and stops that are more commonly represented by punctuation. The futures of
reading, and the use of new devices like e-readers, will have consequences for the
definition and practice of what we call reading.
Articles
[en] New Media in the Academy: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in
Scholarly Multimedia
Helen J. Burgess, University of Maryland Baltimore County; Jeanne Hamming, Centenary College of Louisiana
Abstract
[en]
Despite a general interest in exploring the possibilities of multimedia and web-based
research, the humanities profession has been slow to accept digital scholarship as a
valid form of intellectual endeavor. Questions about labor, peer-review, and
co-authorship often arise in academic departments’ attempts to evaluate digital
research in the tenure and promotion process. In this essay, we argue that these
tensions stem from a general misunderstanding of the kinds of
“work” that goes into producing scholarship in multimedia form.
Multimedia work, we suggest, places scholars in an extended network that combines
minds, bodies, machines, and institutional practices, and lays bare the fiction that
scholars are disembodied intellectuals who labor only with the mind. We argue that
while traditional ideas of what “counts” as scholarship continue
to privilege content over form, intellectual labor over physical labor, and print
over digital media, new media’s functional (and in some cases even biological)
difference from old media contributes to a double erasure, for scholars working in
multimedia, of both their intellectual contributions and their material labor.
Issues in Digital Humanities
[en] A View from IT
James Smithies, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Abstract
[en]
As digital humanities projects grow in size and complexity university programs will
need to adapt, balancing the needs of technological systems with the imperatives of
the humanities tradition. While it makes sense to adapt the accumulated expertise of
the commercial and government IT sectors, care needs to be taken to ensure any new
approaches enhance rather than undermine the aims of the humanities generally. While
digital humanists are uniquely positioned to help the humanities, care needs to be
taken to ensure new project management and design techniques sourced from the IT
world are applied critically and do not undermine the core aims of the discipline. If
these caveats are kept in mind the IT world has a lot to offer digital humanists,
however, especially in the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA), which aims to
produce a holistic, high level view of technological systems with a view to
understanding social and cultural as well as technological issues.
[en] Digital Pedagogy Unplugged
Paul Fyfe, Florida State University
Abstract
[en]
Does digital pedagogy have to be electronic? This paper grows out of a sense that
digital pedagogy is too frequently conceived in terms of instructional technologies.
Technology, at least in its electrified forms, can be a limiting factor in imagining
how humanities instruction can be “digital”: something to get your
hands on, to deal with in dynamic units, to manipulate creatively. What might an
electronically-enabled pedagogy look like if we pulled the plug? This paper surveys
several examples to suggest that an unplugged digital humanities pedagogy can be just
as productively disorienting as doing humanities digitally, and can potentially help
students prepare for and contextualize their learning experiences with instructional
technologies or in online environments.
Author Biographies
URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/index.html
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
