HyperStudio Blog

Last weekend my colleague Whitney Trettien and I presented a paper, “Acts of Translation: Digital Humanities and the Archive Interface, at MIT’s Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission conference. In our presentation and paper, we argued for an increased awareness of the importance of design (the presentation and organization of visual information) in Digital Humanities projects. Through the discussion of projects such as NINES, the CHNM’s Object of History, and SFMOMA’s ArtScope, our goal was to show that design is far from “an accessorizing activity.” (See Johanna Drucker’s critique of the reigning attitude toward design Digital Humanities projects.) Indeed, design opens and forecloses interpretative possibilities and essentially influences the ways in which scholars and students can engage with material.

The process of writing this paper has been exhilarating on many levels. Digital Humanities requires a grounding in practical projects with scholars and material. But theory need not be divorced from practice. A constant dialogue must exist between, on the one hand, the material realities and insights gained working through practice, and on the other hand, the expanding potentials and critical perspective of theory. This paper was a chance to take a set back from our own projects at Hyperstudio and engage more broadly with theoretical concerns and other projects in the field. The work we have done for this paper will certainly influence how we conceive of and develop projects in the future.

Also, it was an interesting experience to apply the perspectives of art history and especially comparative media studies, the areas that constitute my own academic background, to the theorization of Digital Humanities. I think these approaches broaden the dialogue and scope of what Digital Humanities can be. This paper, written over the course of a few months through a series of intense discussions and writing sessions, was a truly collaborative process between Whitney and I, who have different academic backgrounds and approaches but shared intellectual commitments – much like the collaborations that occurring throughout the field of Digital Humanities.

Still, Whitney and I are both Masters Students in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department and believe in the importance of medium-specific considerations, the idea that different forms of media provide different affordances which must be taken into account. The ideas in our paper certainly stem from this kind of media studies perspective. In the case of digital media, the inherent structure requires acts of translation, from binary machine code to visible, linguistic symbol. As we write in our paper,

“This constituent role of mediation, and the necessary acts of translation that must occur between modes of representation, is crucial to consider as scholars turn increasingly to digital resources. UI design is, in one sense, the cumulative expression of the acts of translation required to transform physical artifacts to digital objects. Indeed, Mathew Kirschenbaum points out that the

“interface presents a number of interesting and unique problems for the Digital Humanist. Understandably driven by pragmatic and utilitarian needs, the interface is also where representation and its attendant ideologies are most conspicuous to our critical eyes. …. Too often put together as the final phase of a project under a tight deadline and an even tighter budget, the interface becomes the first and in most respects the exclusive experience of the project for its end users.” (Kirschenbaum online)

Our paper concludes by—and our main interest rests in—considering where Digital Humanities might grow and develop as a field:

This paper is intended to provide a provocation rather than a prescription, pointing to areas of possibility and potential growth as informed by a common goal of Digital Humanities: to provide compelling and useful access to humanist resources in digital form.

By speaking about visual epistemology and its expression through design as a constituent element of the experience and interaction enabled through Digital Humanities projects, we hope to illuminate what has too often been overlooked. Moreover, we hope to provide an entry point into discussing the affordances and expressive potential of digital media. To bring Drucker into the conversation once again, “we [Digital Humanists] have to show that digital approaches don’t simply provide objects of study in new formats, but shift the critical ground on which we conceptualize our activity.” (Drucker online) As Digital Humanities is forming itself as a discipline, we need to think less about digitization and more about the expressive potential of digital form. Digital documents are distinct from their physical counterparts. How can Digital Humanities go beyond a kind of mirror representation and take advantage of what is different, new and possible?

I think this paper was a beginning, a way to raise important questions and considerations as we create compelling and innovative projects — and I look forward to continuing the dialogue.

The coalescence of Digital Humanities as a field, a discipline, even (at some institutions) a degree-granting department has been a hot topic lately. Inevitably, a few questions float to the top: What will be our standards, and who will decide them? How can we implement peer-review structures into our project work? What is our canon?

And, perhaps the question I hear most often, even from colleagues in the field: What is Digital Humanities, anyway?

The ACLS report that Madeleine talked about in the previous post was a first step towards developing a cyberinfrastructure that allows collaboration among scholars across the humanities; over the past year, projects like Bamboo, in which HyperStudio is involved, have followed up with a series of workshops that encourage scholars to think through these questions in a sustained and rigorous way. All of this buzz around has sparked some thoughtful commentary on what this all means, and where we’re going. I’d like to gather some recent favorites:

• Over at Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Lisa Spiro has begun posting an excellent summary of developments in DH during 2008. She writes:

For me, a key sign of the DH’s emergence came when the NEH transformed the Digital Humanities Initiative into the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), signaling the significance of the “digital” to humanities scholarship.  After the office was established, Inside Higher Ed noted in “Rise of the Digital NEH” that what had been a “grassroots movement” was attracting funding and developing “organizational structure.”  Establishing the ODH gave credibility to an emerging field (discipline? methodology?).

• Matthew Kirschenbaum has written an excellent and very thoughtful article for the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Hello Worlds: Why humanities students should learn to program.” While not explicitly addressing the project work of digital humanities, he gets at the heart of why computing matters for humanities.

It used to be that we in English departments were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text. Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds as much as words. Worlds are emerging as the consummate genre of the new century, whether it’s the virtual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft or the more specialized venues seen in high-end simulation and visualization environments. Virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that.

Importantly, “world” here means something very much like model, a selective and premeditated representation of reality, where some elements of the real are emphasized and exaggerated, others are distorted and caricatured, still others are absent altogether. Virtual worlds are interactive, manipulable, extensible; they are not necessarily games, though they may support and contain games alongside other systems. Virtual worlds are sites of exploration, simulation, play. We will want many virtual worlds, not few, because reality can be sliced and sampled in an infinite variety of ways.

• Robert Darnton has recently another article on “Google & the Future of Books” in light of the recent settlement between Google and publishers. As he points out, Google took the initiative in digitizing our world’s collections; but it also maintains a somewhat frightening monopoly.

• The NYTimes has an article on the “Demand for Digital Archivists.”

• Over at HASTAC, Michael Gavin and Kathleen Smith are running a forum on “The Future of the Digital Humanities,” with Brett Bobley, Director of the new Office of Digital Humanities at NEH. See their Q&A with Bobley for a summary of the state of the field.

Technology changes not only what we do, but also how we do things. This seems an obvious observation. However, the consequences of these changes are far-reaching and demand attention. For example, the internet has profoundly affected the ability and necessity to collaborate among humanities scholars. The very idea of collaboration is something we at the Hypestudio have been thinking a lot about lately. From our US-Iran project (bringing together Iranian and American scholars and policy makers) to our Comédie Française Registers Project (bringing together scholars and archivists from England, France, Australia and US) to Cultura (bringing together students in France and the US in cross-cultural exchange) collaboration is, indeed, the essence of our work. With this blog post, I’d like to begin and open up a discussion about collaboration that I hope to revisit in the coming months.

First published in 2006, the ACLS [American Council of Learned Societies] put together a Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences, chaired by John Unsworth and supported by the Mellon Foundation. The commission report, Our Cultural Commonwealth, underscores the urgent need to develop strategies and tools for scholars to collaborate in the humanities, writing:

“Despite the demonstrated value of collaboration in the sciences, there are relatively few formal digital communities and relatively few institutional platforms for online collaboration in the humanities. In these disciplines, single-author work continues to dominate.”

The report continues,

“Most people the Commission interviewed expressed hope that an investment in cyberinfrastructure would allow humanists and social scientists to conduct new types of research in new ways. …

To take advantage of the technology, one must engage directly with it, and one must allow traditions of practice to be flexibly influenced by it. One such tradition in the humanities is that of the ‘individual genius.’ Nevertheless, many of the examples cited in this report show us that humanists can be highly collaborative and that by working in groups, they can sometimes address research questions of greater scope, scale, and complexity than any individual—even a brilliant one—could address in isolation…

For the humanities and social sciences, then, an effective cyberinfrastructure will have to support the computer-assisted use of both physical and digital resources, and it will have to enable communication and collaboration using a range of digital surrogates for physical artifacts; in fact, it will have to embody an understanding of the continuity between digital and physical, rather than promoting the notion that the two are distinct from or opposed to one another.”

Collaboration in this context is itself a link, a gathering, between the digital and the physical.

Earlier this month, Jim Brown facilitated a discussion about collaboration in the HASTAC Scholars Forum. The discussion was very interesting, and seemed to expand and contract around two common points: collaboration necessarily involves some kind of emotional investment, (the work must be effective and satisfying), and collaboration online cannot be severed from the physical world. As Cathy Davidson pointed out, “the Web isn’t about the act of collaboration but the ACTORS of collaboration, the community of connection as an end almost in itself. ” Further reading and resources were offered throughout the discussion, including Howard Reingold’s delicious links on collaboration and cooperation.

Collaboration online, especially in the humanities is emerging as an intricate weaving of digital and physical, tradition and experimentation, individual and community. At this point, I think we have more questions than answers. Collaboration has become an ideal and, to some extent, a dilemma. In this respect, I think it’s important not to let collaboration devolve into an empty buzzword. The potential actions and ideas that come and will continue to come from online collaboration are some of the most exciting areas of humanities research and the academic community. I leave you with a comment from Kristin Wolf that approaches the idea of collaboration,

“I think that the art of collaboration 2.0 is more about the multiple dimensions (on-line, offline, all-at-once-smaller groups-one2one) of collaboration than about just web-based collaboration alone (just like web2.0 is about participation, not about the technology alone).”

Above image: Collaborativesociability, vaXzine/flickr.

Our ongoing studio talk series has been a great success. First we had Amber Frid-Jimenez come speak and most recently, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh came to speak about flap books. Jacqui is an enthusiastic and engaging speaker, and her talk was illustrated with many photographs. We couldn’t reproduce them all here (below are some of my personal favorites). However, we did record the talk and you can download an .mp3 file in case you weren’t able to join us.

Jacqui has done fascinating research on the history of children’s interactive narrative media, digging up paper doll games, puzzles, and flap books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. This talk was an introduction to her work. The history of flap books, like their design and construction, is intricate, and their themes draw from disparate realms like the bible, theater or other forms of popular performance. As flap books rose to popularity in the 17th century, they were primarily religious in theme. In the 18th century, the scope of their themes enlarged to include an educational aspect, teaching good behavior and conduct. Toward the end of the 18th century, the books also began to be seen as opportunities for game play. Their history is also a little mysterious. There exists no complete bibliography – no one has any idea how many there are or where they all are. They seem to have been primarily created in England, Europe and America, but again, this is conjecture.

What is truly incredible is the way in which flap-books tell a story. Through words, images, and movable parts, a reader/user of these objects becomes an interactor, more than just an observer. Their actions and interactions become part of the story. Moreover, these objects were not limited to an elite echelon of society. They were relatively cheap and were offered in two versions: one already colored in (more expensive), and a plain black and white version not yet colored in (less expensive.)

Near the beginning of her talk, Jacqui recounted an anecdote that I think captures the gripping and delightful bafflement with which a modern viewer experiences these objects. Jacqui was in the Opie collection at the Bodleian Library at University of Oxford, researching early flap books. A curator came up to her, showing her an object, and asked, “Is this a book or a toy?” And Jacqui remembered thinking, “What is this? What am I looking at? How do I even read it?

Fascinating though they may be, the materials she works with are fragile and little-known, and the very nature of these wonderful little books creates an archival dilemma. What gets lost in the digital archive? How can we recreate the interactive, tactile dimension of these books online? Much of our Q&A session discussed these problems, and this is certainly something that all of us in the Digital Humanities think about and must work toward solving.

A fellow member of the Hyperstudio, Whitney Trettien, introduced Jacqui and is writing her thesis about a related topic, seventeenth-century volvelles, or spinning paper discs used to generate language. She’s posted some wonderful writing about moving parts in books on her blog, and has some amazing images of anatomical flap books.

As I’ve discussed at length elsewhere, I’m currently researching moving parts in books for my thesis on seventeenth-century volvelles, or spinning paper discs used to generate language. Unfortunately, digital archives have not been helpful in either identifying or studying these objects. Looking at images like this one –

– only reminds me how different these pages were in person, when I could use my thumbnail to gently turn the wheels against each other, or wiggle the surprisingly sturdy thread contraption holding it all together.

I don’t mean to fetishize the book. But, as our research increasingly relies on facsimiles — from fac simile, literally “to make similar” — it’s worth asking: what gets lost in the digital archive? What is flattened on the screen?

Despite persistent beliefs about so-called “print culture”, paper is not two-dimensional, and the codex does more than merely store and transmit text. Books are tactile objects, small sculptures designed to be folded, touched, torn, and written on, from the Old English writan, meaning to score a surface the way a stylus marks clay or papyrus. The most playful and imaginative authors understand this and exploit the expressive power of their medium, using the book to teach anatomy with paper flaps:

[From Thomas Gemini's English language version of Vesalius's anatomy (1543); various layers of flaps lift up to reveal different views of human anatomy.]

– or calculate the position of the stars with spinning paper discs:

[From Peter Apian's absolutely gorgeous Astronomicon Caesareum (1540); these layered volvelles and threads calculate positions of planets and stars]

– or simply depict certain beliefs about language, as Georg Philipp Harsdörffer does in his Fünffacher Denckring der Teutschen Sprache (1651, pictured above), used to automatically generate German words. We see digital archives, faceted browsing and visualizations as having a certain depth — you can zoom in, we say, or drill down — yet, ironically, depth is precisely what is lost when we re-frame the printed page as a digital image. We should interrogate how the digital archive is mediating our relationship to the objects we study with as much vigorousness as we argue over how writing transformed oral culture, or how print transformed scribal culture.

Will the digital archive reinforce our often misguided notions about the fixity of print, or the flatness of the page? What would the study of volvelles or book flaps look like in a digital space?

Last year, HyperStudio sponsored an talk entitled “Harlequin Meets The Sims,” by Jaqueline Reid-Walsh. Reid-Walsh has done fascinating research on the history of children’s interactive narrative media, digging up paper doll games, puzzles, and flap books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because the materials she works with are fragile and little-known, she’s turned to digital humanities labs like HyperStudio to digitize and display the materials.

The only problem: no one has come up with a good digital solution for capturing what it feels like to cut out and play with paper dolls, or flip the page of a pop-up book to reveal a small paper universe. And, of course, we never will. The British Library’s Turning Pages technology is neat, but paper is not a screen, and a screen is not paper. Instead of trying to “recreate” these experiences in a virtual space, thereby pretending there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the two technologies, we should build on the digital archive’s strengths (broader access to rare materials, smart searches, the ability to manipulate and annotate the facsimile without destroying the original), and be honest about its possible weaknesses — what it elides, and how it frames the book.