HyperStudio Blog

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.

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.