Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: theory

Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: theory - Recent Posts http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/tags/theory Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: theory - Recent Posts en-US Sun, 21 Jul 2013 08:50:21 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/search.php briancroxall on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2029 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:15:20 +0000 briancroxall 2029@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ This is a fascinating question, Josh. I agree that we could expand the categories for posts on the site, although I don't know that it's feasible to go back through and re-tag a large quantity of posts that have already happened on the site. DH loves crowd-sourcing, but that seems a bit unwieldy. I'll agree with Bethany, however, on my belief that the site should remain steered by questions and the community's attempts to answer those questions. In this way, it seems a fitting service of the ACH for fostering and growing the community of people who work on the humanities using / with computers somehow. But there's no reason why an Alan Liu can't come along and ask a question to the effect of "whither cultural studies and digital humanities?" Or someone who has just read one of Steve Ramsay's pieces could ask, "Do I need to learn to code to be a digital humanist." What wouldn't seem appropriate—to me—would be for Alan or Steve to ask that question in a rhetorical way and then to proceed to answer it. A blog or a journal, in other words, this ain't. Patrick Murray-John on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2028 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:11:16 +0000 Patrick Murray-John 2028@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I see a virtue in keeping an emphasis here on exchanges that really can be Question and Answer, as opposed to the broader discussions that are happening in blogs, DHPoco, twitter, and elsewhere. The virtue of this site, as I see it, is the ability for newcomers to DH, or to a particular topic or tool in DH, to get a quick survey of the knowledge lurking in the DH community. It addresses an important issue in DH that has come up at many THATCamps, the tendency of assumptions about technical knowledge to exclude newcomers. Having used and moderated a variety of fora, I find that it is helpful to the community -- whatever community is involved -- to have distinct places to go for different kinds of questions. It makes it easier to respond to a question on Twitter, for example, to be able to say DH Q&A is a good place to ask a question like "Can you point me to projects that have made good use of R?", and DHPoco is a good place to ask more social- or theory- centered questions. Vika Zafrin on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2027 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:24:46 +0000 Vika Zafrin 2027@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Interesting question to think about. The kinds of discussions you're talking about, Josh (and Bethany), are pretty dear to my heart. I like food for thought. It's also nice to have a platform that attracts pragmatic content. This doesn't mean technical questions and answers only: the military/defense funding thread is a good example. I'd love to see more (broadly speaking) cultural DH discussion here, and I'd love for that discussion to be ruthlessly pragmatic. Common good as applied in cyberinfrastructure recommendations. Diversity, how to do it (not why we need it, which I think is pretty much settled). DH's relevance to coders in terms of actively understanding other humans. Humanities disciplines are all pragmatic at heart, but writing about them is often too esoteric. DHAnswers seems like a good venue to shift that (im)balance a little. Ethan Gruber on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2026 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:49:00 +0000 Ethan Gruber 2026@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ To be honest, I will probably stop reading this forum if it becomes overrun with "cultural" questions. Bethany Nowviskie on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2025 Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:36:57 +0000 Bethany Nowviskie 2025@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Hi, Josh -- these are great questions! I'm very interested to hear what others think, but I can also share some observations about DH Answers as one of its founders and moderators. I'd love to see more conversations like the ones you cite happening here. One of the reasons <a href="http://ach.org">ACH</a>, the <a href="http://scholarslab.org">Scholars' Lab</a>, and <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/">ProfHacker</a> developed the site a couple of years ago was to encourage deeper and more easily-followed and -discoverable responses to questions than we were seeing on Twitter. To be honest, the initial idea (after watching people try and fail to troubleshoot each other's code and software installations on Twitter and in blog comments) was a more tech-oriented forum (something similar to the then-nascent Stack Exchange, and not quite as geeky and offputting as pastebin-like gists on GitHub might seem, to people new to DH) -- but we very quickly discovered how much people wanted to use the site to ask broader questions and have deeper conversations, which was something we embraced. As you observe, the initial categories never got revised to encourage that explicitly. That's something that could be easily remedied, if people want to propose new ones and suggest posts that should be migrated over into them. Or we could do it in a more grassroots way, by encouraging people to re-tag older posts (now that there are enough of them!) to form new categories and ways of navigating from the ground up. We could then modify the front page to highlight those. Most of the more meta-conversations have wound up in the category on <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/forum/project-management">projects and professions</a>, but you can also find a bunch by searching for "<a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/search.php?search=theory&forum-id=0">theory</a>," and similar terms, and paging through the results. See, for instance, threads on <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/doing-dh-v-theorizing-dh">practice vs. theory</a>, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/faircite-who-should-we-cite-in-collaborative-dh-projects">how to credit collaborators</a>, the <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/should-dh-matter-to-coders">relevance of DH</a> to tech culture, its <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media">relationship to media studies</a>, the <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-are-resources-that-address-the-idea-of-the-good-in-digital-humanities">common good</a>, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/where-might-i-find-resources-and-literature-regarding-diversity-and-dh">diversity</a>, and <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/has-anybody-written-a-history-of-the-digital-humanities">its own history</a>. That was just from a quick search on one term -- and if you click through, you will certainly observe that the conversations never got as in-depth as they could and should! But the potential is there. My sense is that we got more of that type of question in the early days of the site than lately. It would be interesting to see if the community found value in bringing the more in-depth debates that have been happening elsewhere, mostly in blog comments, to this space -- and what changes that might bring. Speaking only for myself, I do, sincerely, hope that Q&A threads here will always begin with a genuine Q. That is, from the beginning, I imagined DH Answers as a place that could facilitate friendly offers of help (sharing of experiences and perspectives, as well as simple "answers"), and keep the grand-standing ("this is more of a comment than a question") to a minimum. But that's just my taste -- and I don't think it's at all incompatible with in-depth, meaningful discussion. For a number of reasons, the ACH caretakers of DH Answers (now, mainly Stéfan Sinclair, Jeremy Boggs, and me) have been exploring alternate platforms recently, more in the Stack Exchange line -- but this custom-hacked-together implementation of an open source discussion forum platform does have the advantage of encouraging longer responses (case in point! for better or worse!). What's the will of the community? This is everyone's space. We'd love to know where you all see it going. Josh Honn on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2024 Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:03:05 +0000 Josh Honn 2024@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I would like to interrupt our regularly scheduled questioning here at DH Answers and get a little meta. DH Answers is a fantastic resource, but it tends to be very tool and tech centric, and I wonder it isn't time to find ways of facilitating other types of non-totally-unrelated discussion here. Recently, some really great discussions have been happening on Twitter and sites like <a href="http://dhpoco.org/">DH Poco</a> that have arisen in response to more social, political, and cultural questions, events, prompts, and provocations in relation to DH. I feel that some of these questions—of gender, labor, disciplinarity, and others—might be even more illuminating when embedded within other, more dominant, discourses, like those around available tools, technologies, and methodologies. I also think that, due to issues of scope and scale on Twitter and the epic-scrolling and searching that needs to happen to stay up-to-date on the latest of 150+ blog post comments, we might need to seek out a better mechanism for supporting these important discussions. I don't mean to say these discussions shouldn't be happening anywhere and everywhere—of course they should!—but I also think that the way DH Answers was originally set up makes folks less likely to bring these types of discussion here. (Or maybe it's something else entirely? Discuss!) For instance, a quick look at the categories one has to choose from when posting a question (this one is filed under "About DHAnswers" which may or may not makes sense) reveals how much we are privileging technical questions about tools and technologies, and while there's certainly nothing wrong with that (the tools and tech, not so much the privileging) it unfortunately, I'd argue, suggestively narrows the conversation considerably. "1 Year Ago" Matthew Kirschenbaum asked the DH Answers community, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/should-dhers-accept-militarydefense-funding#post-1239">"Should DHers accept military/defense funding?"</a> which he tagged with, among other things, "ethics" (not a single "Popular Tag" explicitly deals with any of these "other" issues). It was also filed under the category "Project Management & DH Profession," which seems to be the catch-all for questions that don't fit strict the limitations of the tech-centric discourse. I think the question Matthew raises, due to everything from recent events (see: PRISM) to the history of humanists working in military research, makes this a very pertinent and important question worth exploring, especially in this particular digital space. And while before and after that post there have been several of a more political or ethical nature, there have not been many, and that seems, at the very least, worthy of concern and some discussion. So, LONG STORY SHORT, I'd like to see what others think about this by asking the following questions (along with all of those implicitly and explicitly raised above): (1) Can and should DH Answers be a place for social, cultural, political, etc. discussion (as it seems it at times has been)? (2) What types of categories can we add that would make folks more comfortable feeling such questions are welcome? (3) How can we continue to further integrate discussions happening in other venues—Twitter, DH Poco, personal blogs, MLA Commons, etc.—with DH Answers? gwijthoff on "History and theory question: lexicography / discourse analysis / text mining" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/history-and-theory-question-lexicography-discourse-analysis-text-mining#post-1965 Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:31:47 +0000 gwijthoff 1965@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Are there any writings on the relationship between lexicography, discourse analysis, and text/data mining? As I continue work on a keyword-specific project, I'm wondering where the theoretical, historical, and methodological overlaps are in these various ways of mapping epistemology through language. There are tons of questions one can ask between these fields, but I'm thinking in particular about whether something like the peaks and valleys in a frequency analysis constitute the rise and fall of a Foucauldian "discursive regularity." I recently saw <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661645">Bernard Geoghegan's piece in Critical Inquiry</a> on enthusiasm for cybernetics research among French structuralists (a history he argues is important to visit in light of today's digital revolutions in the humanities), but it raises more questions than answers, wonderful as they are. Any leads would be much appreciated! Paige Morgan on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1594 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 02:57:13 +0000 Paige Morgan 1594@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @Ethan Gruber's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1593">post</a>: I hear you on this; and I don't think it has to be. It's as much teaching undergraduates* how to use the already effective tools that are out there -- how 18th century English Lit studies are changed by the accessibility of ECCO, EEBO, and the Burney Collection,** for example. *And even graduate students, staff, faculty, in some cases. **Not that I'm blithely assuming that all colleges and unis have access to these tools. Ethan Gruber on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1593 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:06:19 +0000 Ethan Gruber 1593@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I agree with you that interpretations of textual, visual, geographical, archaeological, etc. data within the humanities are digital humanities. Almost everything I have done professionally or academically over the last six years has been DH, from GIS to 3D visualization to cultural heritage informatics. I'm not going split hairs as to whether TEI and data mining are web-based or not, but I find myself increasingly frustrated by conversations about "How do we teach/introduce students to DH," and all of the answers relate to some form of web development: designing a database schema, learning HTML/CSS. These are things that are of limited usefulness in many humanities disciplines. I understand that people will suggest skills based on their own experience, but DH is losing out a lot of experienced technologists and scholars from non-textual fields, and as I have observed DH becoming more and more narrowly focused, voices in the textual humanities fields have greater and greater influence (control, even) over what is or is not "Digital Humanities." That is why I suggest that people who call themselves digital humanists ought to reconsider their notion of DH. I think the field is much bigger than they realize, and thus needs to be more inclusive. Patrick Murray-John on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1584 Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:41:08 +0000 Patrick Murray-John 1584@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @Ethan Gruber's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1583">post</a>: I have to say, I disagree with most, if not all, of this. There is plenty of coding work in DH that is not web-related. Text-mining and distant reading are examples, as is work encoding texts in TEI. I think I remember some very awesome visualizations of ancient architecture, too, that I would call non-web DH coding? :) The thing that I disagree with most is the idea that we (counting myself as a digital humanist) need to rethink our notion of the Digital Humanities. Like the #transformDH hashtag, it is predicated on a set idea of DH that I do not think exists. It seems like less than a year ago that there was still very active discussion about the role of code in DH, what skills could/should be part of it, and how it all fits together. No one, I think, ever came up with a notion of DH that had widespread consensus as being a good definition. Now, it seems, we are chasing after responses to a non-existent notion. That said, I do see the existence of two branches of DH, with different histories. In broad strokes, one is the "Humanities Computing" branch, on is indeed the more web-oriented branch (which shares more in common with ed tech). This has been recounted many times before, sometimes in this very site. I'd ask that we all recognize the youth of DH, and this it is -- whatever it is! -- still developing through informal channels like THATCamps and blogs and twitter conversation, and through the institutional decisions made by administrators and through cluster hires. In short, I think it is far too early to say that DH is far too focused on textual disciplines. It might be at present, but the ultimate constitution of DH is still very much to be determined. Awesome visualization and interpretation of data -- textual, architectual, visual, geographical, temporal, archaeological, and more -- through digital/code-based means can and should be part of DH. I consider it to be implicit that it _is_, but maybe hasn't had as much attention as other aspects. Seems parallel to the Theory and DH questions that way? Ethan Gruber on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1583 Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:15:50 +0000 Ethan Gruber 1583@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Is learning to code even important in Digital Humanities? I argue that it's not. There are particular technologies that are relevant to various disciplines in the humanities, and web development isn't necessarily one of them (since coding always refers to web development in DH contexts). Digital Humanities, capital D capital H, is far too focused on the textual disciplines and hardly inclusive of the humanities as a whole. Digital Humanists ought to reconsider their notion of the Digital Humanities. If you wonder why computer scientists are reluctant to get involved in Capital D Capital H, it's for this reason. There are actually a great many computer scientists involved elsewhere in the humanities. frostdavis on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1563 Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:10:11 +0000 frostdavis 1563@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Thanks for all the great answers! To update this forum, two of the respondents (Brian Croxall and Jeff McClurken) along with Ryan Cordell spoke about "Teaching DH 101: Introduction to the Digital Humanities" for NITLE's Digital Scholarship Seminars in December. You can access the recording from the event website: <a href="http://www.nitle.org/live/events/129-teaching-dh-101-introduction-to-the-digital" rel="nofollow">http://www.nitle.org/live/events/129-teaching-dh-101-introduction-to-the-digital</a> This seminar prompted a couple of posts on the NITLE blog because the presenters didn't really address coding for undergrads. Here are a couple of posts that adress that issue: Can Humanities Undergrads Learn to Code? by undergrads who learned to code in a humanities course at Pitt <a href="http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/01/31/can-humanities-undergrads-learn-to-code/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/01/31/can-humanities-undergrads-learn-to-code/</a> (The answer is yes!!) More Coding for Humanities Undergrads by Kathryn Tomasek, Wheaton College (again yes!!) <a href="http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/02/02/more-coding-for-humanities-undergrads/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/02/02/more-coding-for-humanities-undergrads/</a> Patrick Murray-John on "Doing DH v. Theorizing DH" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/doing-dh-v-theorizing-dh#post-509 Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:21:02 +0000 Patrick Murray-John 509@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I feel like the role of pedagogical innovation has been simmering, and <a href="http://lukewaltzer.com/on-edtech-and-the-digital-humanities">this post from Luke Waltzer</a> brings it and other issues up in forceful ways. What Luke brings up is also a set of issues to address. Daniel Allington on "Doing DH v. Theorizing DH" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/doing-dh-v-theorizing-dh#post-473 Mon, 18 Oct 2010 11:10:45 +0000 Daniel Allington 473@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Although I am very much a newcomer here, the tension <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/doing-dh-v-theorizing-dh#post-436">Amy discusses</a> seems familiar to me, so (if the digression may be permitted), I'd like to draw a comparison with two fields that I have hitherto had more involvement in than DH, ie. book history and cultural studies. These fields formed largely in order to validate and facilitate forms of scholarship that were marginalised in existing disciplines, and in doing so they both provided a space for people working in different disciplines to talk to one another. All to the good. But I can't say I'm comfortable with the way in which either of them has developed, and in both cases what I see as the central problems have to do with the ways in which the tensions between so-called 'theory' and so-called 'practice' have been played out in arguments over what can and can't be permitted to count as a worthwhile contribution. In my opinion, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/doing-dh-v-theorizing-dh#post-439">Bethany's point</a> that 'part of our community is almost exclusively rewarded for one thing, and part for the other' gets to the root of the problem. But that can only be challenged by challenging the institution in which so many of us are (or hope to be) employed, ie. the university, with its always-hierarchised divisions between teaching and research, between tenured and non-tenured staff, between the library and the departments, and of course between individual departments. So while the academic importance of a field is measured by its degree of disciplinarity (which is also its degree of institutionalisation) - annual conferences, dedicated journals, chairs, degree programmes, departments, and the spirit of gatekeeping that runs through all of these - there's something I find profoundly depressing about every step of progress in that direction. I've always been quite taken with Karl Popper's suggestion that disciplines are a fiction of university administrators. There are problems that interest us, and there are traditions of enquiry. The tradition of using technological aids to address humanistic questions is very old (older even than the Hinman Collator!). Isn't that more important than the question of who is and who isn't a 'real' digital humanist? Vika Zafrin on "Doing DH v. Theorizing DH" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/doing-dh-v-theorizing-dh#post-469 Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:07:42 +0000 Vika Zafrin 469@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Amy, I wonder if the gatekeeping is more a function of DHers' lively interest in rigor? More specifically, what counts as rigorous work in DH? This, of course, is closely related to the question of what should count for academic cred (so for hiring, promotion and tenure). I don't think we've fully answered this question, and perhaps until we do, gatekeeping practices will err on the side of extra scrutiny. Just thinking aloud.