Preliminary Class Business

 

• Enrollment / Sign-up sheet / auditors (project and short assignments)
• Books, reader, course log in
• Course site: http://english236w2010.pbworks.com/
  • Printing from the site: add "?mode=print" to the URL

     

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Course Structure and Assignments

 

• Schedule
• Assignments
• Questions?

 

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Course Rationale

 

Disciplinary Rationale: Toward a Next-Generation Digital Humanities

 

• Generations of  Humanities Computing/Digital Humanities (some data points):

   

  1. Roberto Busa, S.J. (and associates), Index Thomisticus (begun in 1946; web edition in 2005 by Eduardo Bernot and Enrique Alarcón)

      

     Jerome J. McGann, "Literary Scholarship in the Digital Future," The Chronicle Review [Chronicle of Higher Education], 49.16 (13 Dec. 2002): B7

      

     [Cf. philological and textual-editing traditions descended from the 19th century--e.g., the OED] [image]

      

  2. JISC, NEH, NSF, SSHRC 2009 "Digging into Data" Challenge Grant Competition [Cf. Cathy Davidson on "Big Humanities"]

      

     NEH "Humanities High-Performance Computing" Grant Program

      

     Swansea University "The Computational Turn" Conference, 2010

      

     UCSD Software Studies Program's "Cultural Analytics" Initiative (Jeremy Douglass, Cultural Analytics demo)  

      

     • "Distant Reading"
       • Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005), pp. 1-4

          

     • "Deformance" Reading
       • Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann, "Deformance and Interpretation," New Literary History 30, No. 1 (Winter, 1999): 25-56

          

     • Non-Hermeneutic (Non-Interpretive) Reading
       • Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) (orig. pub. in German in 1985 as Aufscreibesysteme)
       • Friedrich A. Kittler, "There Is No Software," CTheory (Oct. 10, 1995):
         "In principle, this kind of descent from software to hardware, from higher to lower levels of observation, could be continued over more and more decades. All code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as "call" or "return", come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences."

      

  3.  Next Generation?

      

     Typical trajectory of current state-of-the-art digital humanities projects:

      

     • Discovery of data points in literary or other works
     • Storage and manipulation of data points in a relational database
     • Pattern recognition through visualization (or other means)
     • (Re)presentation or remediation in digital form
       • Networked
       • Interactive

   

  •  Some emergent new phenomena:

     

    • "Borges: An Exploration of Modeling"
    • "Textones" Project
    • "Emigrants" Project
    • "Canterbury Blogs"
    • "Romeo and Juliet: A Facebook Tragedy"
    • "Berlin" Project
    • Jeremy Douglass, Cultural Analytics demo

 

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Interdisciplinary Rationale

 

• Alan Liu, "Digital Humanities and Academic Change," English Language Notes 47 (2009), special issue on "Experimental Literary Education": 17-35 [locked resource; course login required]
• Articles resulting from the 2008 version of this course, forthcoming in Investigating Digital Tools, Texts, and Use Practices: Collaborative Approaches to Research in English Studies, ed. Laura McGrath
  • Monica Bulger, Jessica C. Murphy, Jeff Scheible, and Elizabeth Lagresa, "Interdisciplinary Knowledge Work: Digital Textual Analysis Tools and Their Affordances" (manuscript) [locked resource; course login required]
  • Alan Liu, "'So What': New Tools and New Humanities Paradigms" (response to above; manuscript) [locked resource; course login required]

 

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What is "Close Reading?"

 

• Exemplary Poems
  • Sir Thomas Wyatt, "They Flee From Me" (1557) [commentary by Ian Lancashire]
  • John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819)
  • Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" (1926)
• Close Reading Theory (the "New Criticism")
  • Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase" and "Keats's Sylvan Historian," from his Well Wrought Urn (1947) [course reader] 

 

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To-Do's for Next Class

 

• Create your class bio
• For those in a literature department: be able to explain to an outsider what "close reading" means.
• Think about Franco Moretti's "distant reading"