Jones 2013

Jones, Steven E. The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2013.

http://emergenceofdhbook.tumblr.com

maker lab culture – how to turn digital files into 3d objects, turning 3d objects back into digital files

William Gibson, “eversion” of the network

"I assume that today’s network is significantly different in various material ways from the Internet of the 1980s-1990s, in terms of scale, speed, access, and ubiquity. Some of the key differences were instituted 2004-2008. The most important effect of these differences is in the way people experience the network every day – in material terms, yes, as they use smartphones and cloud services and expect to be always connected, for example, but also emotionally and imaginatively, and this aspect of their experience is often revealed in metaphors, figures through which they think about and represent their experience. Those metaphors are collectively constructed and experienced, as they’re shared and altered in the sharing. So I take seriously the effects of the these new collective ‘’perceptions’’ of the network’s eversion, as well as perceptions that a new form of digital humanities has emerged as an academic field of study." (9)

"The sometimes world-weary and condescending skepticism common in some segments of the humanities often finds itself at odds with – and in fact deeply suspicious of – this kind of confident hacker ethos, which can seem naïve or deluded. But those outside DH often underestimate the theoretical sophistication of many in computing, who deal every day, for example, with gaps between complex datamining algorithms and the practical sources of those data, or with the production of multiple, sometimes contradictory, visualizations from the same dataset. They know better than many of their humanist critics that their science is provisional and contingent, and that the results of research require interpretive acts." (10-11)

11, DHers as “advocates instead for labs and workshops, a collaborative, hands-on model” instead of CMSs, MOOCs (11)

”For the DH scholar, the archival objects on which humanities discourse is based, the material things that, in a very real sense, prompt that discourse and afford that knowledge, were always already saturated in data.” (13)

”Digitization is a process for producing augmented data objects, spime-like combinations of material things and data, networked things that embody the already-hybrid nature of our overall experience of inter-networked technology in the era of the eversion. And the preoccupation of DH with building things, making things, even software things, is therefore a potentially serious form of theoretical engagement.” (15)

Eversion

http://emergenceofdhbook.tumblr.com/post/59772273737/you-can-now-read-the-introduction-at-the#1

eversion -- the network is no longer a virtual place we visit, but is here; those moments of disconnection, when the wifi goes down, are there

2004-2008 -- "preponderant collective perception fundamentally changed"

"everyware" -- paradigm shift to ubiquitous or pervasive computing

"the central role of fictional designs or deliberate “design fictions,” and their closeness to being translated into actual, physical prototypes, is one of the features of the eversion, one of the ways the (imagined) virtual and physical are linked, not dual, separate realms, but two possibility states, always already available."

"what Jurgenson calls enmeshed or augmented reality, what Coleman calls x-reality, what Greenfield calls everyware, and what Hayles calls mixed reality"

"the concurrent eversion of cyberspace and the rise of the new DH was no mere coincidence. In one sense, the new digital humanities is the product of the same changes marked by the eversion, is arguably humanities computing everted."

" It’s the process of moving from one dominant metaphor to another, a direction or trajectory, from cyberspace out into the data-saturated world, which characterizes our sometimes tense and ambiguous relationship to technology at the moment. That’s why I value Gibson’s figure of eversion, a term for a complex process of turning. As a metaphor, eversion calls attention to the messy and uneven status of that process–the network’s leaking, spilling its guts out into the world. The process remains ongoing, and the results continue to complicate our engagements with humanities archives and new media. It’s an often disorienting experience, like looking at a Klein bottle, affording a sense of newly exposed overlapping dimensions, of layers of data and cultural expression combining with the ambient environment via sensors and processors, with a host of attendant risks to privacy and civil liberties."

"If the eversion coincides with the rise of the digital humanities in the new millennium, the increased emphasis on layerings of data with physical reality can, I believe, help us to distinguish some aspects of the new-model digital humanities from traditional humanities computing.'

"Rather than divide the methodological old dispensation from the new in ways that reduce both (such as opposing humanities computing to studies of new media, or merely “instrumental” to more truly “theoretical” approaches), I’ll suggest throughout this book that we’d do better to recognize that changing cultural contexts in the era of the eversion have called for changing emphases in digital humanities research, some of which have surely effected changing cultural contexts in turn."

"Much of the practical digital humanities work during the decade that followed, which formed an important core of the newly emergent field of activity, was undertaken not in avoidance of theory or in pursuit of scientistic instrumentalism, but against disembodiment, against the ideology of cyberspace. The new digital humanities often aimed to question “screen essentialism,” the immateriality of digital texts, and other reductive assumptions, including romantic constructions of the network as a world apart, instead emphasizing the complex materialities of digital platforms and digital objects. New digital humanities work, including digital forensics, critical code studies, platform studies, game studies, not to mention work with linguistic data and large corpora of texts, data visualization and distant reading, is a collective response by one segment of the digital humanities community to the wider cultural shift toward a more worldly, layered, hybrid, experience of digital data and digital media brought into direct contact with physical objects, in physical space, from archived manuscripts to Arduino circuit boards.

"From its origins in the early modern era to today, the humanities has been in part a collective effort by scholars and others to discover, edit, archive, interpret and understand our cultural heritage as it has been transmitted–which is to say in the forms of inherited material objects, stone tools, runes, artifacts and works of art, manuscripts and books, new media and software. Encoding and decoding, augmenting, commenting on and interpreting the layers of data that surround those objects and make them culturally significant, has historically been the agenda (or call it the calling) of the humanities. Within the past decade humanities work and cultural heritage itself have been digitized, just as the larger collective understanding of everything that digitization means has undergone a major conceptual and practical shift. ... One job for the digital humanities going forward might be consciously to engage with, to help make sense of, and to shape the dynamic process of that ongoing eversion (and its distribution) out in the world at large. The digital humanities should be about this work, as I’ll argue in the rest of this book, because the digital humanities is, in fact, the humanities everted."

Dimensions

http://emergenceofdhbook.tumblr.com/

"QR codes make more sense if we see interpret them as a cultural symptom—mundane signs that someone is trying to communicate with invisible, unknown intelligences out there somewhere in the ether—in "the digital realm.""

"Contemporary video games offer vital examples of digital humanities in practice, creative works of cultural expression in digital media, living examples of the contemporary liberal arts, not just born digital but created to be experienced on the latest software-and-hardware platforms. But the digital humanities, at least in some quarters, has been somewhat slow to embrace the study of games, even while many DH practitioners and scholars are themselves avid gamers, fans, and collectors of games. Part of my purpose in this book is to bring the relationship of games and digital humanities out into the open, where its potential can continue to be explored."

"Contemporary video games offer vital examples of digital humanities in practice, creative works of cultural expression in digital media, living examples of the contemporary liberal arts, not just born digital but created to be experienced on the latest software-and-hardware platforms. But the digital humanities, at least in some quarters, has been somewhat slow to embrace the study of games, even while many DH practitioners and scholars are themselves avid gamers, fans, and collectors of games. Part of my purpose in this book is to bring the relationship of games and digital humanities out into the open, where its potential can continue to be explored."

"A text’s—any text’s—interpretive possibilities are always manifold, measured along different axes of relationship. Digital technologies can open up new views of those axes, those possibilities. So the goal of digital humanities work with texts is not simply to translate texts from print to digital environments, moving them from one world into another, and, as it’s often feared, relegating the husk of the physical object to the darkness of storage stacks. It’s to digitize texts in ways that reveal new dimensions and open up portals, modes of transit, between physical books or manuscripts and the digital transcriptions and metadata attached to them. The dimensions of texts include and are revealed by networked data, derived directly from texts or their various contexts. Such data now address themselves to texts as a matter of course, constituting a new dimension of textuality in the digital era."