Crystal Hall

In March 2016 journalist Melissa Dinsman began a new series for the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB): “The Digital in the Humanities.” In late June LARB published Dinsman’s interview with Pamela Fletcher, Professor of Art History at Bowdoin and one of the founding co-directors of DCS. Professor Fletcher’s remarks highlight the value of humanistic inquiry of digital methods and objects as well as the ways in which a computational or digital approach can reshape the questions we ask of cultural objects. The piece is pleasantly provocative reading after the flurry of debate that surrounded an earlier LARB piece on digital humanities, which can be found along with links to responses in a summary post by dh+lib.

Conferences and summer internships are two instructive ways to gain more experience in the field of digital humanities outside of the classroom. Upcoming opportunities include:

The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication has a call for proposals for the Student Research Competition. Selected undergraduate and graduate students will present their individual research at the conference to judges and attendees. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: communication design, user experience, information design, and learning systems/environments. Learn more about the conference and competition here: http://sigdoc.acm.org/conference/2016/student-research-competition/.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has positions for full-time summer interns. Interns work on various projects that explore the intersection of technology and communication in a collaborative environment. Interns can join research teams in areas such as academic innovation, law, computer science, and open access projects. The Berkman Center also hosts intern discussion hours and events with the larger Berkman community. Specific research projects available to interns can vary each summer. Learn more about the internship: http://brk.mn/summer.

The Social Computing Lab at Carnegie Mellon University has a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. This summer program offers research assistant positions in the fields of psychology, computer science, human-computer interfaces and language technologies. The 10 week long summer research exposes a diverse group of undergraduates to academic research in a modern research lab setting. There will also be seminars for students participating in REU in addition to Social Computing Lab seminars and those held by Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute and Language Technologies Institute. Program Details and Application Instructions Available here: https://hciisocialcomputing.wordpress.com/summer-reu-program-description/

Keep an eye on these sites in Winter 2016 for a Summer 2017 opportunity:  http://data.betaworks.com/ (they announced a 2016 summer internship with applications due Jan. 18, 2016)

http://librarylab.law.harvard.edu/fellows (they announced a 2016 summer internship with applications due by April 27, 2016).

In addition to undergraduate research and courses, there are now more graduate opportunities in fields related to digital humanities. The opportunities below represent a sample of opportunities available after undergraduate study.

Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs offers a M.S. in Urban Informatics. The program “couples comprehensive data analytics skills with an understanding of the big questions faced by cities in the 21^st Century city.” There are four Urban Informatics interdisciplinary core courses that focus on data science/analytics as well as two electives in urban data skills. Find more information here: http://www.northeastern.edu/cssh/policyschool/graduate-programs/urban-informatics/.

Northeastern University also offers an MFA in Information Design and Visualization. This program “trains students in harnessing visual languages to support discovery and communicate information across a range of socially relevant issues.” The program is particularly focused on taking an interdisciplinary approach to communication. Find more information here: http://www.northeastern.edu/camd/artdesign/academic-programs/mfa-in-information-design-and-visualization/.

Arizona State University offers a Master’s in Social Technologies. The program “divides its focus between theoretical and applied work, drawing on social, behavioral, critical, cultural and design perspectives. Courses include Networked Social Technologies; Social Technology; and Community Informatics.” Find more information here: https://asunow.asu.edu/20160105-creativity-picturing-where-social-media-headed.

Libraries are very much on my mind these days as I grapple with the best methodologies for reconstructing and visualizing Galileo’s library. I am also working constantly with digital collections: institutional libraries, archives of organizations, and single studies of authors. Perhaps it is no surprise then, that when first asked to suggest possible readings for the section of the Gateway to Digital Humanities Course that focuses on textual analysis, I immediately recommended Jorge Luis Borge’s “Library of Babel.”

To me this short essay represents many of the possibilities and pitfalls of digital and computational library studies. Borges imagines a library that holds one copy of every book that could possibly be written. Some contain gibberish, others perfect copies of known work. Scholars live in the library searching for answers to questions about human experience. Ideological camps form and battles ensue, but all the while, even this hyperbolically complete library remains enigmatic to its users due to its sheer size. In parallel ways, computers have the potential to create a similar digital library. Natural language processing has already shown that computers can generate prose that has the “sound” of known authors like Immanuel Kant. Programming loops (of the kind the Gateway to Digital Humanities students are applying to images) perform the same action repeatedly (changing one pixel at a time, for example) and could conceptually be employed to provide the infinite variety of texts that populate “The Library of Babel.”

For readers of Python programming language, I tried to express this impossible program in loop terms in Jython. Strings and concatenation would help, but I think this still conveys the message in a light-hearted form:

The above attempt at code (that has legal syntax for Jython, but an error-filled program) is a futile approach for bringing order to chaos. Some Digital Humanities (DH) scholars would argue that digital and computational studies could offer partial solutions to comprehending and organizing this vast quantity of textual information. This is quite optimistic that estimates suggest 340 million new 140-character tweets on Twitter daily, not to mention the 3.77 billion (and growing) indexed pages on the world wide web.

Working even with the available (and manageable) digital data, certain assumptions are made by tools and certain information is lost in their application, all of which gives me pause for thought as I reconstruct and try to find analytical pathways through the library of a person about whom ideological fields have been defined and passionate battles have been fought for centuries. Matt Jockers has led the field of DH with his work on Macroanalytics, currently focused on establishing patterns in nineteenth-century fiction, but relies on only the books for which a digital copy has been made. Google books Ngram Viewer allows users to compare the frequencies of words that appear in digital or digitized books during different time periods, which assumes consistency of cataloguing and meta-data entry across all participating institutions, which is not always the case.

As I revisit the data for my own project on Galileo, I wonder where I will enter the ideological disputes that surround the interested fields; I worry about what information will be excluded from the data; and how my users will navigate the digital library I am about to create.