6th Post, Week 8

Perry Willett offers interesting history of the electronic text, and to be honest I was kind of surprised that it goes back few decades ago. With the four categories he lists, which defines the interest and the focus of humanities computing, I think they do cover it all, especially with archiving and editing. However, with the last category, Stylistic Analysis, I became a bit confused since I wasn’t sure whether or not to read it as synonym with Data Analysis. Now, obviously, stylistic analysis is concerned with the language of the text itself—its meaning(s) and its social/historical context(s)—and that of course has a huge part in DH. However, DH seems to include a wider scope than the language of the text only, take for instance, the author biography, which is not part of the text. We have seen in the past few weeks that authorship and biographies of the authors are somehow favorable type of study in DH, and it really tells us something different about the past when they become digitized and analyzed—the Pop Chart Tag from the Collective Biographies of Women from last week is an example of this type of study. Yet, all that Willett focuses on in his four category list of the humanities computing has to do only with anything textual, and that is it, which pretty much explains the inclusion of stylistic analysis, but we have seen that DH is not only concerned with stylistics, but more of data analysis. That is why, I had issues with stylistic analysis, which I’d probably alter to data analysis.

Other similar confusing issues had to do with the inclusion of “automated poetry generation” as part of computing humanities. Don’t get me wrong, I totally acknowledge that automatic generation of poetry is indeed a part of the electronic text, but is it part of DH? I mean automatic poetry generation is the kind of literature that is born digital and in this case it is part of digital literature, but again, is it part of DH? From my own experience with DL in the past, and DH so far, I can tell that they are not the same. However, the idea of electronic text is accessible to both DL and DH, and they use it interchangeably, but with quite a distinction of what electronic text really means to both DL and DH. Yet, in his piece, Willett does not seem to make this distinction or acknowledge its existence, and this made me a bit confused.

Willett explores the notion of “skepticism” with regard to electronic texts and builds upon Mark Olsen’s notion of “distrust” to facilitate his argument. I found this quite interesting since we have been debating for some time now on how to approach the text digitally? What’s different about Willett’s discussion from ours is that he gives a glimpse of this kind of debate before the introduction of the World Wide Web, which I found really interesting. According to this rich historical debate, the problem of how to display or transform the text digitally seems to resist a solution. I don’t know but it also seems that the physical bindings of any given book have participated and ENSURED that the text within will remain sacred forever. And so the breaking of those bindings and the digitizing of the text have created a fear, according to Willett, in many traditionalists and un-traditionalists scholars from both the past and the present. The introduction of the WWW, however, did not solve the problem, but according to Willett, it only “simplifies” it with regard to accessibility, and that is it. Therefore, the notion of "faithful representation" of the physical text that Willett points out to kept nagging upon the scholars in the field, and so coming up with different technologies and digital languages to encode the text became a necessity. Still that did not solve the problem. Some of those encoding languages such as XML and TEI need frequent updating and changing (I think we have seen this with the Victorian Women Writers Project) and others may be time consuming or simply costly, such as OCR. That is why some scholars resorts to mainly using metadata (I think we’ve also seen this with ncse). So far, I am little unsure if this problem will ever get resolved.

Reply:

You guys, and girls of course, have been doing excellent discussion with bits and pieces that are related to Perry Willett’s article that I just don’t know where to begin. It is a fascinating article indeed and it touches upon a lot of what we have been reading/discussing so far. I just wanna go way back to the point that Julia made, and which ignited the discussion, because I wanted to tackle it in my response, but didn’t. In addition to what Brandon and Meg said, I think it is crucial to admit that works of DH do target specific audiences, whether we like or not. Those audiences do not have be elite or highly selective in any way, but they’re not the general type of audience anyhow; they’re just specific audiences who are mostly interested scholars, regardless of their qualifications or backgrounds. You referred to this Julia, but we have seen this before in the week of the open-access websites. If I remember correctly, the question that was driving most of our discussion of that week was how far an open-access is actually an open-access? And I think we came to the consensus (whether we believe in it or not) that works of DH favors targeting specific audiences. General audiences of course are welcomed, but in a very limited capacities. Not all the sites that we looked at offer those limited capacities, but I think you touched upon this, Meg, that few websites, such as NINES, do offer this through interactions and social networking. But again, those are still specific audiences, being themselves scholars, teachers and students. Places, such as the Dickens Journals Online, however, do invite general type of audiences, but that is done only, again, through limited capacities, such as, for instance, the Tale of Two Cities Project, which encourages all type of audiences to read the installments, but I bet not all type of audiences will reflect upon their reading experiences with writing back through the blog that DJO provides. Right there we have two types of audiences, the ones who are passive (only read) and the ones who are active (read and write), and I bet again that DJO targets the active ones, even though it is open to all.