The Big Humanities

Digital Humanities/Digital Laboratories

Richard J. Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317692911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This book provides an accessible introduction to, and overview of, the digital humanities, one of the fastest growing areas of literary studies. Lane takes a unique approach by focusing on the technologies and the new environment in which the digital humanities largely takes place: the digital laboratory. The book provides a brief history of DH, explores and explains the methodologies of past and current DH projects, and offers resources such as detailed case studies and bibliographies. Further, the focus on the digital laboratory space reveals affiliations with the types of research that have traditionally taken place in the sciences, as well as convergences with other fast-growing research spaces, namely innovation labs, fabrication labs, maker spaces, digital media labs, and change labs. The volume highlights the profound transformation of literary studies that is underway, one in which the adoption of powerful technology – and concomitantly being situated within a laboratory environment – is leading to an important re-engagement in the arts and humanities, and a renewed understanding of literary studies in the digital age, as well as a return to large-scale financial investment in humanistic research. It will be useful to students and teachers, as well as administrators and managers in charge of research infrastructure and funding decisions who need an accessible overview of this technological transformation in the humanities. Combining useful detail and an overview of the field, the book will offers accessible entry into this rapidly growing field.

1

Into the laboratory

Critics and scholars are perhaps less imaginative beings [than artists], but even we needn’t commit ourselves only to imagining what we already know.

Jerome McGann

The new spaces of humanistic inquiry

Since it is commonplace to associate laboratories with science, it may appear unusual to start a book on the humanities – however transformed when prefaced by the word “big” or “digital” – with the chapter title “Into the laboratory.” By starting this book with the new spaces of humanistic enquiry, my goal is to think not just about changes in methodology or approaches to humanistic study, but also to explore the transformation of humanistic disciplines at a deeper level. Such a transformation is happening because of the computing revolution and the new world of big data and lab-based humanistic research; such scaled-up activities, Crane (1998)argues, need “new research that does not look like old research” (9); in other words, “we desperately – desperately – need experimentation as we explore and seek to understand a radically new space” (15). Crane, one of the founding architects of an important digital humanities resource called Perseus, argues that “Rebuilding the Humanities involved both a theoretical and an applied component” and further “that the best work includes both” (15). I will argue that the shift to lab-based hybrid humanistic/scientific research practices, and the accompanying self-reflexivity and theoretical engagement, does have the potential to not only “rebuild” the otherwise declining arts and humanities (declining in terms of funding and student numbers, as well as the decreasing public respect for an apparently obscurant humanistic discourse), but also produce “the best work” to use Crane’s phrase. But why have I prefaced both “digital humanities” and “digital laboratories” with the phrase “the Big Humanities”? This phrase is indicative, in my opinion, of a new phase of humanistic operations, one which creates analogous research structures to those of “Big Science.”

One of the clearest statements about the Big Humanities is found in the open access book Digital_Humanities, by Burdick et al. (2012). While noting that the digital humanities come in all shapes and forms – and sizes – Burdick et al. also observe that some digital humanities projects are extensive, both in terms of the number of collaborators involved and the timescale of operations: “Big Humanities projects … are realized over many years, with many contributors, developers, and funders involved at various stages of development. Big Humanities projects are built along the lines of Big Science. They involve large-scale, long-term, team-based initiatives that build big pictures out of the tesserae of expert knowledge” (124). One of the co-authors of Digital_Humanities, Jeffrey Schnapp, directed the innovative Stanford Humanities Lab (1999–2009), which as Hayles (2012) notes, modelled itself “on ‘Big/Science’” (52); as Hartwig (n.d.) recounts, the Stanford Humanities Lab “engaged in experimental projects with a ‘laboratory’ ethos – collaborative, co-creative, team-based – involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice”. Schnapp’s fingerprint is clearly impressed on another collaborative endeavour that continues to resonate to this day: the Digital Humanities Manifesto (in versions 1.0 and 2.0), where in its first iteration, the Big Humanities features strongly (in paragraph or proposition 16):

Big Humanities: whereas the revolution of the post-WWII era has consisted in the proliferation of ever smaller and more rigorous areas of expertise and subexpertise [sic], and the consequent emergence of private languages, the Digital Humanities revolution is about integration: the building of bigger pictures out of the tesserae of expert knowledge. It is not about the emergence of a new general culture, Renaissance humanism/humanities, or universal literacy, but, on the contrary, promotes collaboration across domains of expertise.

What is denied here – namely a “new general culture” or “Renaissance humanism/humanities” and even “universal literacy” – may be as important as what is idealized; in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, the ironic throwaway comment in the opening paragraph makes a more deeply allusive but similar statement by referring to “Things hidden, if not since the beginning of the world, then at least by the generation of our immediate forebears, are being exposed to the day’s harsh light.” The allusion to Rene Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987) suggests that the DH Manifesto authors are not attempting to develop a humanistic unifying theory of everything (as, in effect, Girard does); buried more deeply are two further allusions that relate to this rejection of grand theory building: to Matthew 13:35: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world” (ESV), with Matthew intertextually quoting Psalm 78:2. Again, the DH Manifesto authors are rejecting the notion that the digital humanities can function as the latest substitution and replacement for religion, in a series of substitutions that have long served the arts and humanities (organized religion giving way to the study of the “liberal humanist” classics, giving way to that of English studies, giving way to the theory/post-theory eras of ideology and identity politics). I would argue that the parabolic force of the DH Manifesto 2.0, however, leads to an aesthetic and philosophical mysteriousness that counters the scientific methodologies and structures of the Big Humanities as figured by Schnapp and his colleagues.

Reporting back from the Big Humanities workshop organized by Mark Hedges at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (held in Silicon Valley), Barry C. Smith (2013) asks how the Big Humanities – and its exploration and analysis of big data – “will … be of use to the humanities, which concentrates on specific, small scale objects and their peculiarities” (para. 3)? In other words, even given the many years of productive debates and observable benefits that derive from the shift into the digital humanities, the demands of computational processes for analysing massive amounts of data still lead to the anxiety that “something” will “be lost” (para. 6). Here the anxiety stems from the notion that the Big Humanities will have efficient and productive vectors of activity, leading Smith to question whether humanists “Will … follow what the new digital systems do best rather than what they wanted to know” (ibid.)? Smith refers to a paper by Brown and Simpson that explores this question in relation to the semantic web, that is to say, linked open data that enables researchers to ask questions across databases and other digital archives that would have once been impossible to connect, or even digitally locate in the first place. Brown and Simpson (2013) ask whether the semantic web – that is to say, a new way of accessing big data – can lead to the production of “knowledge that could not be arrived at by other means” (78). This question is grounded in the work of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, which Brown and Simpson describe as “a born-digital reference and research resource comprised of more than 1,300 detailed biocritical entries, capturing over 27,000 individual people plus extensive historical and bibliographical detail” (ibid.). Orlando is an excellent choice for understanding what is gained in the development of a particular digital resource – here, a long-term Big Humanities project that “increase[s]‌ the representation of women both on the web and in literary history” (79) – and also what might potentially be lost, since the overall thesis is that linked open data runs the risk of masking the specificities of identity and being that are the very stuff of Orlando and of humanistic enquiry in general. As Brown and Simpson note, “Humanists research diverse aspects of human culture and cultural processes on both large and small scales, with a particular emphasis on the relationship of cultural processes and products to their connections with human agents. To the extent that RDF [Resource Description Framework] is built to work with and through machine-processable ontologies, the implications for knowledge representation and knowledge construction are massive” (78). While this introductory chapter is not the place to go into the technical details, the fundamental problem is that in linking diverse digital resources, the mechanisms for doing so may themselves function at the level of “generalization” (ibid.). Brown and Simpson explain the problem in terms of the importance, to humanists, of “difference”:

Difference, as in distinctions of particularity, specificity, and locality of meaning, provides us with the ability to make sense of the complexities of human records and human lives. Difference also means difference from the norm: the marginalization and anomalousness associated with categories such as race, gender, or nation are registers of difference. Difference is key to understanding how literature, culture, and ideas develop. The semantic web, as a tool for connecting and representing human knowledge and understanding on a massive scale, is poised to either promote or hide difference, and differences in approach matter.

(Brown and Simpson 2013, 79)

The core example of “difference” as a heterogeneous force given by Brown and Simpson is “the” author “Michael Field,” or, in other words, the hybrid, collaborative pseudonymous authorship comprising Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper. Comparing and contrasting the DBpedia linked data representation of Field (drawing upon Wikipedia) with that of Orlando (i.e. as extracted data via an RDF), the former equates Field with Bradley (with no mention of Cooper) and the latter suggests that “Field ends up being born twice and dying twice, and is made out to be female, when the intention behind the partnership was to allow the women to operate as male within the literary scene of the day” (81). The detailed analysis of this problematic representation is well worth reading, but the key point to make here is that the problem of representing specificities, difference, and humanistic particularities do not go away simply by turning to another pre-designed ontology for linking data; as Brown and Simpson argue, humanists need to develop their own “custom ontologies” (82) for facilitating the desire within the Big Humanities to remain focused on the very details and differences that are at the heart of humanistic representation and understanding.

Another way of potentially effacing or not accounting for the core value of “difference” may derive from the dangers of over-simplification, that is to say, to begin this book with a particular site of activity – the laboratory – and simply equating it with a simplistic understanding of science, i.e. as if writing “laboratory” was adequate shorthand for the entire domain of myriad scientific experimental methodologies, philosophies, and associated activities. From the very beginning, laboratories have been complex spaces of activity, with competing notions of how they should function and what precisely their role should be, not just in an intellectual sense, but also in terms of how the activities therein interact with and relate to society. As Owen Hannaway (1986) notes, “any broad investigation of the development of the laboratory in early modern science must include not only the chemistry laboratory but also the anatomy theatre, the cabinet of curiosities, the botanical garden, and the astronomical observatory” (585). What this cluster of heterogeneous spaces share is “a new mode of scientific inquiry” which “involves the observation and manipulation of nature by means of specialized instruments, techniques, and apparatuses that require manual skills as well as conceptual knowledge for their construction and deployment” (ibid.). While this might seem a far-fetched statement in relation to the cabinet of curiosities – literally a collection of exotic items for closer inspection, delight, and entertainment, items such as the “vegetable lamb” that used to be on display in the Museum of Garden History in London – research on this topic reveals that such collections not only “offered new objects for empirical investigation with the microscope” (Zytaruk 2011, 2), but also provide an exemplary site for intersecting paradigms of scientific understanding (ibid.). Intriguingly, in the context of a book on the Big Humanities, Zytaruk notes how apparently “aesthetic” interests could also serve scientific ends, for example, the need to preserve animal specimens for a cabinet of curiosities led to advances in the use of chemicals (5). Cetina (1992) defines the laboratory as the site in which a “reconfiguration of the natural and social order” takes place (114), and that critically focusing upon laboratories (rather than experiments) enables the consideration of “experimental activity within the wider context of equipment and symbolic practices within which the conduct of science is located” (115). Humanistic laboratories belong to a similarly heterogeneous cluster of labs: DH labs, DH/Big Humanities collaboratories, maker/fabrication labs with an arts focus (often called maker spaces); digital and social innovation labs; media labs; change labs; and so on (with the last type of lab being quite different from all the others, but nonetheless representing a shift of location if not necessarily activity or technology). Returning to Hannaway’s notion that in the history of the science, the shift into the laboratory “is indicative of a new mode of scientific inquiry,” it is important to pay attention to detail concerning the actual practices within the lab, practices that involve “the observation and manipulation of nature by means of specialized instruments, techniques, and apparatuses that require manual skills as well as conceptual knowledge for their construction and deployment” (585). I suggest that in the history of the humanities, the shift into the laboratory is similarly “indicative” of transformed inquiry; utilizing Hannaway’s description and terminology, analogous humanistic practices can be observed: the Big Humanities combines traditional modes of humanistic activity (reading; analyzing; interpreting; debating; writing) with new modes of remediating texts (digitizing them in various ways), and observing and manipulating them digitally, using “specialized instruments, techniques, and apparatuses” (such as scanners, digital cameras, computer hardware and software, as well as desktop fabrication equipment such as 3D printers). These “instruments, techniques, and apparatuses” do need “manual skills” and “conceptual knowledge” for their use, and of course such a broad range of skills and the complexity of the required knowledge base leads of necessity to productive, positive, and at times large-scale collaboration.

The Big Humanities, then, usually involves a team effort, requiring a high level of technological infrastructure, practical skills, training and research, as well as significant levels of funding (including operating funds), for the sustainability of its endeavours. It might be asked whether this analogy with the shift in science from pure knowledge to “a form of activity” (Hannaway 1986, 586) that takes place in laboratories, is too far-fetched? Realizing that the data that digital humanists work with is extensive – for example, large collections of electronic manuscripts and other electronic texts and cultural archives, as well as more recently generated web-based data from websites, blogs, social networking sites, and so on – and dynamic (different manuscript versions, including newly discovered manuscripts or archaeological fragments of texts; or the exponential increase in web data produced on a daily basis), then the analogy holds, since digital humanists can observe that data (how it is searched, manipulated, generated in real time, etc.), and manipulate that data (digitize it to an academic standard, tag it, remediate it, analyze it using computer algorithms, etc.). Cetina notes how “The laboratory is an enhanced environment which improves upon the natural order in relation to the social order” (1992, 116), with the key to this improvement being “the malleability of natural objects” (ibid.):

[L]‌aboratories rarely work with objects as they occur in nature. Rather they work with object images or with their visual, auditory, electrical, etc., traces, with their components, their extractions, their purified versions. There are at least three features of natural objects which a laboratory science does not need to accommodate: First, it does not need to put up with the object as it is; it can substitute all of its less literal or partial versions, as illustrated … Second, it does not need to accommodate the natural object where it is, anchored in a natural environment; laboratory sciences bring objects home and manipulate them on their own terms in the laboratory. Third, a laboratory science [sic] does not need to accommodate an event when it happens; it does not need to put up with natural cycles of occurrence but can try to make them happen frequently enough for continuous study.

(Cetina 1992, 117)

Humanists, being used to carrying their books around with them in hard copy or various digital formats, may be amused by this description of the natural object being taken into the laboratory. But the analogies between laboratory science and the labs of the Big Humanities are meaningful. For example, we might imagine a set of texts (objects) that exist in a particular environment – say, the online William Blake archive (www.blakearchive.org/blake/) – and a digital humanist who does not want to treat the objects and their arrangement in this archive as “fixed entities” (Cetina 1992, 116); in this instance, the digital humanist is Jon Saklofske (2010), who argues that the “usefulness” of the online William Blake archive “is hampered by a limited and limiting interface that preserves the effects of restrictive book production technologies that Blake worked within and against” (para. 1). The result, after many years work by Saklofske and his researchers, is an application called NewRadial (http://inke.acadiau.ca/newradial/), an Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) prototype, with the overall INKE collaboratory or Big Humanities infrastructure being directed and managed by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria, BC (http://inke.ca; http://etcl.uvic.ca). NewRadial is a powerful interface that allows for the visualization of creative and critical intersections; the INKE prototypes page describes it as “a web-based digital environment for humanities research and collaboration that encourages users to occupy, search, sort, and annotate database content in a visual field. It has been designed to function as a workspace in which primary objects from existing databases can be browsed, gathered, correlated, and commented on by multiple users in a dynamic visual environment” (http://inke.ca/projects/tools-and-prototypes/). Amy Robinson (2014) makes the point that NewRadial allows readers to shift from thinking about a text holistically, to actually engaging in the reconfiguration of the text via the manipulation of textual parts; in many respects, this is the shift from the readerly text to the writerly text, to use terms explored by Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. Arguably, however, the physical act of creating and moving the NewRadial nodes is even more “hands-on” as Robinson makes clear: “In approaching a model of a text in NewRadial, the parts, in this case the nodes, can relate to each other without necessarily having to relate back to a central idea. This is not to say that they don’t relate back to a central idea, since any ‘good’ literary text will have a degree of unity (even very experimental ones) but that the process of approaching the parts in isolation, without a view of making the relate back to the whole can change our perspective on a text” (ibid.). I suggest that this notion of “approaching the parts in isolation” is analogous to Cetina’s substitution of “partial versions” of the natural object, that is to say, “...