Theoreti.ca

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:

• Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
• Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
• Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
• Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
• Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.

Christian directed me to a fascinating chronology of information technology (in French) by Sylvie Fayet-Scribe. It is called Chronologie des supports, des dispositifs spatiaux, des outils de repérage de l’information. and the web design isn’t the best, but it seems detailed and annotated. It seems like a good place to start if you want to understand the types of information aides from encyclopedias, indexes, and so on. Here division of time into epochs is also interesting. The bibliography is also good.

Willard McCarty in Humanist drew our attention to the Anthony Grafton article, “Britain: The disgrace of the universities” (New York Review of
Books) about “what is happening now to British universities, King’s College London in particular”.

Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme.

It seems we are passing some threshold like the boiling frog. In the humanities we got used to being slowly starved in a genteel fashion that left us keep some dignity like the frog in slowly heated water. The drama in the UK and elsewhere, where cuts are deep and vicious, should provoke us to think about the humanities and its defense. In humanities computing we smugly feel immune to the cuts as we are the “newest new thing” that shouldn’t get cut, but we could find ourselves alone, without the vital neighboring fields like paleography, philology, and philosophy that we depend on.  Actually, I don’t think we are any longer the new new thing – we just pretend to be so out of habit. Perhaps we should start preparing to be the tired recent thing that can be discarded to make room for the newest new thing.

How then to make the case for the humanities when we have so little experience advertising our wares and so much distaste for marketing? Are we doomed by our very fastidiousness and critical stance?

Peter Baskerville spoke today on “Worth of Children and Women: Life Insurance in Early Twentieth Century Canada” as part of the CIRCA Colloquium. He talked about changes in perceptions regarding children in the early 20th century. They went from being perceived as economic assets (you can send you kids to work) to being seen as worthwhile in and of themselves (you can enjoy them as children.) He looked at census data about insurance as the Canadian census up till 1921 asked questions about who had insurance. Insurance gives you a sense of what people valued. I’m amazed how much one can infer from census data along with contextualization.

Peter found a startling number of children (1 in 10) were insured and for kids under 15 there was no difference between the percentage of boys and girls. When asking why, he noticed that French Catholics were far more likely to insure their kids than other ethno/religious groups. French Catholic kids under the age of 10 are statistically the most likely to die, which may be due to the fact that French Catholic mothers stopped breast-feeding earliest which meant that kids were switching to water or non-pasteurized milk younger. This would suggest that parents were insuring kids to be able to pay of burial costs. Burial fees were also a source of income for RC parish priests so they had pragmatic reasons to encourage parishioners to take out insurance.

He also thinks that insurance is symbolically important. It shows the regendering of the public sphere as women value themselves through insurance.

Reading John B. Smith’s “Computer Criticism”, (Style: Vol. XII, No. 4) I came a reference to a content analysis program called the The General Inquirer from the 1960s. This program still has a following and has been rewritten in Java. See the Inquirer Home Page. There is a web version where you can try it here (DO NOT USE A LARGE TEXT).

The General Inquirer “maps” a text to a thesaurus of categories, disambiguating on the way. The web page about How the General Inquirer is used describes what it does thus:

The General Inquirer is basically a mapping tool. It maps each text file with counts on dictionary-supplied categories. The currently distributed version combines the “Harvard IV-4″ dictionary content-analysis categories, the “Lasswell” dictionary content-analysis categories, and five categories based on the social cognition work of Semin and Fiedler, making for 182 categories in all. Each category is a list of words and word senses. A category such as “self references” may contain only a dozen entries, mostly pronouns. Currently, the category “negative” is our largest with 2291 entries. Users can also add additional categories of any size.

As they say later on, their categories were developed for “social-science content-analysis research applications” and not for other uses like literary study. The original developer published a book on the tool in 1966:

Philip J. Stone, The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis. (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1966).

Fast Company has an interesting graphic to show the “Rise of Digitization in the U.S.” See their article, File Under: Machines, Rise of the. The infographic by Rob Vargas is based on information from the Census Bureau recent Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Thanks to Stéfan for this.

The last week and a bit I have been in Kyoto to give a talk at a conference on the “Possibilities in Digital Humanities” which was organized by Professor Kozaburo Hachimura and sponsored by the Information Processing Society of Japan and by the Ritsumeikan University Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Culture.

While the talks were in Japanese I was able to follow most of the sessions with the help of Mistuyuki Inaba and Keiko Susuki. I was impressed by the quality of the research and the involvement of new scholars. There seemed to be a much higher participation of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students than at similar conferences in Canada which bodes well for digital humanities in Japan.

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Thanks to Willard, I’m reading Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin’s Romance of the Machine, a defense of American materialism, science and engineering. He identifies 3 sets of technologies that have consolidated the Union – the telephone, the vacuum-tube oscillator (radio), and the gas-engine (auto and airplane.) He weaves a consciously idealistic story about engineering mirroring the machines of nature and weaving peace.

The machine is the visible evidence of the close union between man and the spirit of the eternal truth which guides the subtle hand of nature. (p. 29)

It looks like an act of providence that the telephone was born when the consolidation of our Union needed it most; the vacuum-tube oscillator arrived in time to lend its aid in the consolidation of this nation with the other nations of the world. Many an enthusiast believes that these two machines are messengers sent from heaven to aid in the guidance of the destiny of this nation, and of the whole world. This enthusiasm is not surprising. (p. 92)

There is a very interesting chapter (“Romance of the Telephone”, III) where Pupin argues that the telephone provided two important innovations – first the communications network and second a model democratic industry.

There is another epoch-making service which the telephone
rendered to this nation. This service was the creation of a great
American telephone industry, which in many respects serves to-day as a model to other big American industries. (p. 67)

His argument is that ATT is too big to be owned by wealthy families. Instead it is owned by the middle class – people like its employees. He further sees the management as coming from the same middle class and being professionals. He sees a shift from political democracy to economic democracy which benefits all. Whatever happened to that idealism?

Our telephone industry and the other large American industries encourage us in the belief that we are much nearer to the ideal of economic democracy than we are to Lincoln’s ideal of political democracy. The first is developed by scientists and engineers, the second is <pb> in the hands of politicians. (p. 77 – 78)

One thing that happened is a loss of faith in the technocracy. The second thing was a shift in business towards management who saw their mandate narrowly as being only to increase investor value.

Some more quotes:

There will be no place for barbarism, like war, in a world in
which the two American machines, the telephone and the vacuum-tube oscillator, are afforded every opportunity to develop their latent powers for the enlightenment of the world.

Here are two.machines which the American machine civilization has produced, and thus laid the foundation of the radio art, the most subtle and refined of all the technical arts ever conceived by the human mind. No trace of materialism can be detected in their history. On the contrary, their achievements represent them as messengers from heaven sent to earth to rid the world of barbarous notions and raise it to a higher level of civilization.(p. 94)

The telephone, the telegraph, the vacuum-tube oscillator, the aeroplane, and the automobile, will certainly bring the peoples of the world closer to each other and establish between them bonds of friendship, just as they are establishing them between the peoples of our States. That is the highest mission of these machines. (p. 103)

The book ends by talking about “The Great American Experiment” and how this political experiment inspired engineers and scientists to develop technologies to consolidate the Union so that “The designers, the builders, and the machines employed by them are the inseparable parts of the American machine civilization.” (p. 111)

Bibliographic Reference: Michael Pupin, Romance of the Machine (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930).

Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:

People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.

He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.

"Dialogue" in Philosophy Journals

Thanks to Judith I have been playing with JSTOR’s Data for Research (DfR). They provide a faceted way of visualizing and search the entire JSTOR database. Features include:

• Full-text and fielded searching of the entire JSTOR archive using a powerful faceted search interface. Using this interface one can quickly and easily define content of interest through an iterative process of searching and results filtering.
• Online viewing of document-level data including word frequencies, citations, key terms, and ngrams.
• Request and download datasets containing word frequencies, citations, key terms, or ngrams associated with the content selected.
• API for content selection and retrieval. (from the About page)

I’m impressed by how much they expose. They even have a Submit Data Request and an API. This is important – we are seeing a large scale repository exposing its information to new types of queries other than just search.