Digital Humanities

What is the Digital Humanities?

The Digital Humanities has a variety of working definitions. Part of the reason why this discipline is difficult to define is because of its multifaceted commitment to collaboration across different fields. In an attempt to alleviate this ambiguity, Day of DH created an online site that offers personal definitions of the Digital Humanities. This database can be refreshed to reveal individual perspectives and understandings. Personally, I align with the following definition:  

Digital Humanities is the use of digital tools to answer questions about humanity

This simple, yet meaningful answer ends on the most important point: humanity. The purpose of this field is to improve, understand, and represent missing or incomplete areas of social thought. This idea is born out of a desire to view and comprehend the world from a distance. As a humanistic endeavor, this kind of knowledge-seeking behavior has taken foothold in the digital landscape in the form of computation. Notably, Italian literary theorist Franco Moretti has coined the term "distant reading" to describe this phenomenon. In comparison to close reading, distant reading analyzes entire corpuses of textual material in order to make assessments and critiques from afar. This type of analysis is contentious among scholars as it positions the act of traditional reading as negligible and slow. While Moretti's idea of distant reading has many practical uses, it does not supplant long-established research methods; instead, it widens the prism of humanities scholarship. This is because, as UCLA Professor Johanna Drucker comments, "every act of moving humanistic material into digital formats is a mediation and/or a remediation [...] with benefits and liabilities." This suggests that the tractable exchange of information into a digital form has a certain biased outcome, whether intentional or not.

These debates within the Digital Humanities have been further augmented by the works of Alan Liu, Amy Earhart, and others. Liu, for example, argues that any critique of the digital humanities should be reframed as an evaluation of "the humanities themselves." Here, Liu gestures towards the idea that the digital is just a lens through which humanist work is conducted, not the paradigm itself. Earhart on the other hand is interested in how digital humanist work represents the world at large, reviewing the ways in which the field has failed to examine diverse perspectives and areas of inclusive thought. 

These definitions and ideas guide my work and push me to think judiciously. My digital humanist practice has and always will consider the elastic role of technology in research. If we don't strive to understand the impact of digital mediation, then we will never gain to understand our own limitations.

Statement of Vision and Work

In 2013, I watched UCSB Professor Rita Raley explain the complexities of print media. Using the novel House of Leaves as an example, Professor Raley described how form contributes to meaning. As a work filled with pages of densely interconnected words, footnotes, and mirrored language, House of Leaves’ impact is achieved through its physical form. An audio or digital version of the text would render the work unreadable. To support this, I remember Professor Raley slyly asking, "What is a house of leaves if not a book?"

Reflecting on this, it's clear that Professor Raley's words still weigh heavy in my mind. Her lecture made a statement on the bounds of technology, suggesting that the digital landscape is filled with limits of perspective and understandability. Moving forward to present day, my research interests continue to circle back to this foundational moment.

Currently, I am concerned with how human rights and data violence intersect, specifically how technology affects bias related to gender. I am most interested in how feminized forms of technology (e.g. cars, virtual personal assistants, etc.) either forge congenial and expressive relationships among men or simply reinforce discourses of female objectivity. My analysis of this topic has manifested itself by looking at the online arena of search, inspired by the work of Safiya Noble, Virginia Eubanks, and Eve Sedgwick. I have begun to ask: What are the byproducts and symptoms of information-seeking behavior? How is triangulated search complicated or troubled between men when facilitated by technologies such as Siri or Alexa? How do concerns of privacy, ethics, and confidentiality affect displays of masculinity online?

To begin answering these questions, I have researched the complexities of virtual personal assistants, going so far as to publish an article in Public Services Quarterly titled: "Optimal Discovery?: Siri, Alexa, and Other Virtual Personal Assistants in Libraries". This article is an overview of virtual personal assistant technology, but more importantly, is a warning to information professionals—even digital humanists. While this work is just an entry point, it sets the foreground for the issues of gender that lay further down the horizon. I hope to continue this work and discover what relationships and epistemological limits face virtual personal assistant technologies online.

Useful Tools

Here is a list of some useful tools/technologies for Digital Humanities projects. These are resources that I use in my own work. 

• TimelineJS
  TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines.
  
• Lucidchart
  Lucidchart is a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation.
  
• OpenRefine
  OpenRefine is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.
  
• Palladio
  Palladio is a data-driven tool for analyzing relationships across time. It allows users to visualizes complex historical data with ease. 
• R Studio
  R Studio is an open source application that specializes in statistical analysis. It can be used to analyze statistical data, survey data, or other types of structured datasets. 
• Tableau
  Tableau is a great resource for data visualizations. It allows users to create interactive charts that can be embedded in web pages or presentation software. 
• Voyant
  Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public.