Prof. Susan Schreibman: History and future of DH

Dr Susan SchreibmanTrinity Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Digital Humanities

History and Futures of Digital Humanities

1st Bern Summer SchoolJune 2013


What is Digital Humanities?

• One line answers• Work alone or with somebody

next to you or behind you



It’s about connections

people

technology

methods

data

tools

questions?




Three phases of the s Index Thomisticus:

The first one lasted less than 10 years. I began, in 1949, with only electro-countable machines with punched cards. My goal was to have a file of 13 million of these

cards, one for each word, with a context of 12 lines stamped on the back. The file would have been 90 meters long, 1.20 m in height, 1 m in depth, and would have

weighed 500 tonnes.

In His mercy, around 1955, God led men to invent magnetic tapes. The first were the steel ones by Remington, closely followed by the plastic ones of IBM. Until 1980, I was working on 1,800 tapes, each one 2,400 feet long, and their combined length was 1,500 km, the distance from Paris to Lisbon, or from Milan to Palermo. I used

all the generations of the dinosaur computers of IBM at that time. I finished in 1980 (before personal computers came in) with 20 final and conclusive tapes, and with these and the automatic photocompositor of IBM, I prepared for offset the 20 million lines which filled the 65,000 pages of the 56 volumes in encyclopedia

format which make up the Index Thomisticus on paper.

The third phase began in 1987 with the preparations to transfer the data onto CD-ROM. The first edition came out in 1992, and now we are on the threshold of the third. The work now consists of 1.36 GB of data, compressed with the Huffman

method, on one single disk.http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/




0000000 424d 66ec 0100 0000 0000 3600 0000 28000000020 0000 a700 0000 fa00 0000 0100 1800 00000000040 0000 0000 0000 130b 0000 130b 0000 00000000060 0000 0000 0000 0601 000a 0502 0803 00080000100 0300 0c08 030b 0702 0804 000b 0702 0e080000120 030d 0702 0d07 020e 0803 0f09 040f 09040000140 0e08 030d 0702 1006 060e 0404 1208 08140000160 0a0a 1006 0612 0808 150b 0b12 0808 13080000200 0a14 090b 1508 0a14 0709 1609 0b19 0c0e0000220 190b 0f15 0a0d 150a 0d15 0c0f 180f 1219




• “Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of Digital Humanities and I say ‘yes.’”

• “Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things. [. . .] If you are not making anything, you are not…a digital humanist.”


I’ve had the pleasure of talking with lots and lots of people in Digital Humanities from among a wide range of disciplines . . . . since the mid-nineties. I’ve discovered that there are lots of things that distinguish an historian from, say, a literary critic or a philosopher, and there are a lot of differences between 1995 and 2011. But to me, there’s always been a profound — and profoundly exciting and enabling — commonality to everyone who finds their way to dh. And that commonality, I think, involves moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.


Saturday 25 August











D. F. McKenzie The Sociology of Texts

• The problem is, I think, that the moment we are required to explain signs in a book, as distinct from describing or copying them, they assume a symbolic status. If a medium in any sense effects a message, then bibliography cannot exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between form, function, and symbolic meaning. If textual bibliography were merely iconic, it could produce only facsimiles of different versions.


Profession 2011http://www.mlajournals.org/toc/prof/2011/1


They now move front and center inasmuch as the advent of Digital Humanities implies a reinterpretation of the humanities as a generative enterprise: one in which students and faculty alike are making things as they study and perform research, generating not just texts (in the form of analysis, commentary, narration, critique) but also images, interactions,

cross-media corpora, software, and platforms.


MacroanalysisDigital Methods & Literary History

Macroeconomics . . . is about the study of the entire economy. It tends toward enumeration and quantification and is in this sense similar to bibliographic studies, biographical studies, literary history, philology, and the enumerative, quantitative analysis of text that is the foundation of computing in the humanities. . . .


While there is sustained interest in the micro-level, individual occurrences of some feature or word, these individual occurrences (of "love," for example) are either temporarily or permanently deemphasized in favor of a focus on the larger system, the overall frequencies of "love" as a noun verses "love" as a verb. Indeed, the very object of analysis shifts from looking at the individual occurrences of a feature in context to looking at the trends and patterns of that feature over an entire corpus. It is here that one makes the move from a study of words in context to a study of words as data.


















1. De Civitate Hominum Holy God makes no reply Yet.

2. Anglo-Irish Yet how should Theopompus not be tired By sceptical young Egyptians?

3. Dechtire And yet There is no truth but you

4. ExileI knew if you had died that I should grieve Yet I found my heart wishing you were dead.

5. Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill Yet when Unhurried ‑‑

Not as at home Where heroes, hanged, are buried With non‑commissioned officers' bored maledictions Quickly in the gaol yard ‑‑


‑ 6. Sour Swan

Lord! Have mercy on me, a sinner, Yet, let me, of Your Omniscience, Feel grateful, a very little,

7. Moments Musicaux Yet you are bound; And together you take them to her, While, together, you leave them To others, Of hers.

8. Breton OraclesYet, through the nightmare, You were there,



Dublin City Centre in the immediate aftermath of the 1916 Rising




Looked at from the representational side, a data structure of--to invoke the ghost of John Stuart Mill--a chair is just an image… But looked at from the operational side, that same encoded chair becomes a set of computational algorithms that can instruct other digital bodies below a certain virtual weight to conform to it and stay aloft in space. The digital chair can creak or break. It can possess tensile strength, texture, pliancy, abrasion, any affordance its joiner might care to give it. Set free to execute, it becomes an instance of its own description







The capacity with digital media to create enhanced forms of curation brings humanistic values into play in ways that were difficult to achieve in traditional museum or library settings. Rather than being viewed as autonomous or self-evident, artifacts can be seen being shaped by andshaping complex networks of influence, production, dissemination, and reception, animated by multilayered debates and historical forces.



Questions?

Susan [email protected]

Education

Prof. Susan Schreibman: History and future of DH