May 2008 Archives
A Digital Humanities Rant
I've been looking through digital humanities conference programmes lately (DH2008 and SDH/SEMI 2008 to be precise), and I'm a bit frustrated. It's an old frustration I've had with the digital humanities, in that there's far too much of a focus on the 'digital' and not enough on the 'humanities'.
I started my MA in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta in 2003. It sounded like an interesting program (and, thanks to my profs it was) at the time. I quickly learned, however, that one of the things computing humanists are most interested in is text analysis. Word counts, concordances, keywords in context, tagging... everyone's focused on what we can do when we mix up words and silicon. We spent a fair amount of time learning about technologies: XML, statistics programs, GIS, text analysis portals, and the like.
It's just as apparent today how deeply the digital humanities field is mired in text analysis and text visualization. Looking at the SDH/SEMI program, the bulk of the papers cover these two fields, and DH2008 is almost solely dedicated to the topic. The programs are full of titles like "The Margins of an Infinite Page: Paratext Display in Digital Online Editions", "The pragmatics of a thesaurus-based multilingual information retrieval system", and "Feature Creep: Evaluating feature sets for text mining literary corpora".
What isn't getting as much time in coverage is what all this focus on text analysis and visualization is doing to us as scholars. Nor are we spending sufficient time on digital literatures and digital culture; it seems like it's all about what tools we can build and how much funding we can get for them.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there isn't a place for text analysis and visualization. There has absolutely been some great work done in that space, including that done by my good friend Dr. Stan Ruecker. Even K is doing some work with the Monk Project's text analysis and visualization tools that are going to inform her own research. But I think that text analysis and visualization has had its day in the sun and should move over for the humanists in the digital humanities. There's signs that this might be happening, that the humanists in the group are pushing their way into conferences. The paper K and I are presenting at DH2008 is one of these, as is Sandra Buchmueller, Gesche Joost, and Rosan Chow's paper "The impact of digital interfaces on virtual gender images". But we're not there yet. Taking DH2008 as an example, there are 88 papers and panels in all. 75 of these are centered around building or using tools, while 13 are centered around more fuzzy topics, such as how those tools are affecting digital scholarship. There are only two papers (of the 13) that deal with actual humanities topics: the one K and I are giving (how interface and infrastructure are used to develop identity in bloggers, and how interface affects virtual gender identity).
It's not that there isn't good work being done on the Humanities side of Digital Humanities; Jill Walker and danah boyd are but two examples of what we can achieve. I think it's just that the text analysis folks have ruled the roost for too long and have defined digital humanities to suit their own research needs. We need to start rocking the boat, shaking the tree - whatever epithet works best for you - and start pushing our own research interests. There is a lot of work to be done in studying digital culture and literature, and it isn't going to get done through metadata or cluster diagrams alone.
Time for new glasses...
During the trek around PEI with her mom, K accidentally lost her glasses. As a result, one of the chores we had when she came back home was to get a new pair. We figured it was probably a good idea to get our eyes examined, as we hadn't done so for a couple of years (we bought our last pair of glasses with our Klein Bucks).
As it turns out, my prescription changed a little for the worse in my left eye (which is already nearly twice as bad as my right) and that means it's time for new glasses! Here's what I ended up getting, after a much briefer search than the last couple of times:
I'm trying a high index refractive lens this time around, which I've never done before. My left eye, which has a prescription of -4.5 (the right has a prescription of about -2.25), has never really been thick enough to bother me. But with this pair of frames, I'm going to something that's open on the sides. And since the optician was cutting us a bit of a deal I decided to give it a go and see. What's a little vanity when it's only $50 more?
K got herself a nice pair of Prodesign Denmarks, which is the same brand she has had twice before (though this time she's going with a blue frame - crazy!). This time around, she's trying the Transitions 6 lenses so that she doesn't have to get a separate pair of sunglasses (which, if history is any indicator, would get lost within the first month of ownership).
Barking mad
As you are no doubt aware, K was away in Nova Scotia this year (she's back) on a teaching contract, and I was keeping the home fires burning here in Edmonton. A couple of months ago, one of our across-the-alley neighbours pulled me aside and told me that she was bothered by our dogs barking at her when I left them alone for the day. Our dogs bark at people in the alley, and there's really not a whole lot that we can do about that, because they see it as territory they have to protect. Combined with a little separation anxiety, that makes for some barky dogs when she walks out into her driveway. We try to be good neighbours, however, so I started using a bark collar we'd previously bought and put it on Ruby, since she's generally the barking ringleader.
This worked up until a couple of weeks ago, when Ruby - having caught on to the bark collar being associated with a mild shock when she barks - went and hid the bark collar somewhere (we have yet to find it). I guess at some point yesterday, K talked to the neighbour and mentioned that we'd been putting the back collar on her and that we were trying to control the barking.
Later that day, I was out raking in the back yard (we're either replanting sod or we're building a couple of new garden beds, I'm not sure which yet) and the neighbour called me over again. "Shit," I thought, "she's going to complain more about the dogs." As it turns out, this wasn't the case. After talking to K, she talked to her sister (who lives next door) about how we'd been putting a bark collar on the dogs, and they both decided to call a vet and ask about it. As soon as they heard the dogs were receiving shocks (mild as they may be), they decided that they couldn't have it on their consciences. She'd come over, almost in tears, to tell me that she'd rather be barked at than have the dogs hurt.
I assured her that it was only a mild shock and that we'd actually tried it on ourselves (complete truth - K tried it because she wanted to make sure it wasn't hurting the dogs), but thanked her and assured her that we wouldn't put the collar back on the dogs -- and in fact couldn't, because Ruby had hid it so well. Of course, I can't help but think she continues to see us as monsters: first for having dogs that bark at her, and now for shocking them into submission...