New stuff

I sure have been neglecting this blog lately, and all I have of late is a little linkspam.

First of all, Ryan Cordell writes on the overly-Facebooky-but-okay-I-guess Google+ about a cool project for people who want to get started in digital humanities but aren't sure where to begin:

Know someone who wants to get started in the digital humanities but doesn't know how to do so? They should apply for DHCommons' preconvention workshop at MLA 2012, cosponsored by NITLE and the Texas A&M Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture. Representatives from a range of prominent DH projects and centers will be on hand for training and consultation.

Apply here.

And second, we've finally launched Colloquies at Arcade! Here's my Ed Blog post introducing Colloquies, the Colloquies landing page, which will soon have more than one Colloquy on it (specifically, on September 1, when I release the next Colloquy), and our very first Colloquy, "The Contemporary Novel," introduced by the great Lee Konstantinou.

And, shhh, Arcade may also be seeing a long-awaited up-hay-ade-gray.

Oh, and I switched my California driver's license over to a Georgia one. Guess I'm a Georgian now.

Image: Peaches. Bryan Costin, 2005. CC NC-BY-SA 2.0.

I spent a week fiddling with the back end of Arcade, and all I have to show for it is a blog post.

Upon consideration, while that Ruby on Rails workshop didn't equip me to actually develop my own web apps in five magical hours, it did remind me that I can fiddle around with the back ends of things and understand how they work. I predict that I will be giving the Arcade tech editor considerable heartburn in the coming months. ("Hey, what does this do?" *explosion*)

Many thanks to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast and Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic blogs for linking to my recent editor's post over on Arcade. All no doubt due to the Bady Bump, for which Aaron, too, is due thanks.

I hope the extra exposure leads more academics to consider finding ways to think in public.

[Update 5/23: Thanks, also, to BookForum.]

Also: I must admit to feeling a little smug about getting a Marianne Moore line into circulation outside its usual territory. The 1924 version of "Poetry" forever!!

How Public Like a Frog

Over at the Arcade Editors' Blog, I've just posted some more of my usual ramblings about academic blogging. I may enlarge on the issues raised in the final paragraph at a later date, since they relate to teaching and some particular problems I want to solve.

The criticism of enthusiasm

[Update | Greetings, visitors from Eyresses. Thanks for clicking through; I hope you'll read what I've actually written. I'd love it if you also clicked through to Roland Greene's post, to which this is a response.]

* * * * *

This is a response to Roland Greene's post "The Social Role of the Critic," cross-posted from the comment thread at Arcade.

* * * * *

Roland writes:

The fact that so many blogs are produced by enthusiasts is a symptom; critics are not enthusiasts.

This is perhaps the central point that fan studies would contest. One can have reservations about fan studies, but I think there's something to be said for the notion that there can be a meaningfully critical criticism of enthusiasm, what Catharine Stimpson long ago called "reading for love." I've heard Roland argue elsewhere that perhaps close reading ought to be rethought vis-à-vis other modes of critical reading, like translation. I could imagine this argument compassing creative responses of greater or lesser craft as well, as scholars like Julie Levin Russo have suggested, most recently at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference a few weeks ago.*

It is probably not an accident that so much of the critical fan culture that inspires so much scorn is driven by women (think Eyresses or Gaga Stigmata). Feminine reading is by definition uncritical reading, as we see in that scene in Nana (1880) in which Nana, mass culture in the flesh, reads a naturalist novel about a character very much like herself and doesn't "get it." But as theorists of children's literature have pointed out, sometimes enthusiasm is only made possible by a radical imaginative rereading--or rewriting--of the text that does indeed tell us something about literature that's different from what literature tells us about itself. To return to Nana, for example, to be a reader gendered "feminine" is to constantly love literature only insofar as one can critically reread or, indeed, rewrite the elements that figure you, the reader, as, oxymoronically, a non-reader, one who is incapable of reading critically or of "getting it."

The question that Arcade itself, with its three rubrics of "Conversations," "Transactions," and "Publications," raises is what an e-journal is besides a blog, and what a blog is besides an e-journal. Is the front page of Arcade simply a continuum from the raw to the cooked? Do these rubrics differ in degree or in kind?

As my colleague Monica Soare has posed the question, what besides gender and class is the difference between the gendered and classed terms of "enthusiasm" and "connoiseurship"?

*Naturally I heard of this through the high-pitched, fluttering, terrifyingly feminine interface with mass culture known as Twitter, where a bad music video performed by a thirteen-year-old girl has been trending for a week, above several quite major news events, largely on the strength of an outpouring of scorn that was, oddly, directed specifically at the female child in question, rather than at any of the many adults actually responsible for the video.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1983. Print.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March." New Literary History 21.4 (Autumn 1990) 957-976. JSTOR. Web. 21 March 2011.

Podcasts

Okay, since Twitter has failed me: anyone want to recommend some good academic podcasts?

By "podcasts," I don't mean college courses that have been recorded and put on iTunesU, nor one-off lectures; I mean regular series like PoemTalk or Digital Campus.

Attention and Length

In the midst of a satisfying rant about the recent NYT faux-forum on tenure, Aaron notes:

But the real problem is simply that this was never going to be a real discussion anyway; in 350 words, not much can be said about a complicated issue, and so it’s hardly surprising that not much was said. The NY Times’ decision to limit these contributions to such a microscopically small word count — in a virtual forum whose space is virtually infinite — illustrates that they were far more interested in the pretense of debate than an actual discussion (the same way grabbing onto a reliably orthodox leftist and two reliably orthodox conservatives demonstrates an interest in the pretense of balance, rather than the reality of actual discussion). Which is why, as irritating as this non-discussion is, it’s totally unsurprising.

Aaron complains about the shortness of the pieces, none of which respond to the others, because it prevents any depth of discussion. (Uh, MLA roundtable, anybody?)

What caught my eye in Aaron's statement was the point he makes about the cheapness of space on the web. The available space is, if not limitless, much more than anyone could possibly need. This is a point that digital humanists make all the time. This is just a true fact: space is cheap on the web. The capacity to store large texts is there.

Yet there's also a contrary notion, namely that, despite arbitrarily expandable space, the web is not the natural home of the long form but rather a "shallows," a place of soundbites and snippets and Hollywood movies illegally uploaded to YouTube in nine-minute chunks.

This is something less than a true fact, but something more than just a rumor. There is certainly a culture of the internet that privileges the short form, and culture is very, very strong.

Moreover, the web is not only virtual but also material, and while virtual space may be infinite, the ability of my wrists to withstand trackpad scrolling is not. Perhaps iPads and Kindles are more ergonomically sound than is my trusty MacBook (not perhaps: definitely), but there's still a physical limit to the amount of on-screen reading one can do. I don't think the internet makes people stupid, but I also don't think it's especially accommodating of long-form reading, at least not yet.

The web has two great strengths that lie in tension. One is the aforementioned availability of space. The other is ease of linkage: the web makes it very easy to travel around this vast space. (It's less good at marking stable places, keeping the ground from shifting.) So it's possible to stay in one place for a long, long time, because there are no technical obstacles to storing War and Peace online. But to do so mitigates against the other strong impulse of the web, transit -- what Anne Friedberg has pointed to as an arcade-evoking virtual motion through interconnected, visually captivating spaces.



The your-brain-on-teh-internets debates are very much reminiscent of modernist debates about distraction; there's that same fear that attention and the moral rectitude that it implies have been replaced by superficial and trashy pleasures, as Jonathan Crary has so persuasively documented. And yet, I recently had the pleasure of hearing my fourteen-year-old brother narrate the ins and outs of his most recent internet RP in excruciating detail, and it was I, the Ph.D., whose attention wandered (A LOT).* The internet narrative bested my attention span.

Is the internet the future of long-form publications, as the digital humanists would have it (because paper publishing is in the throes of death)? Or is it culturally and materially inimical to longer forms?

Perhaps on the internet the attention-distraction dialectic that Crary describes is simply operating in a way we're not yet used to discussing, offering us a new way to experience old anxieties about where an idle mind might go.

*While the RP itself bores me to tears, I absolutely love that my brother wanted to tell me all about it.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MITP, 1999. Print.

Image: Passage Jouffroy, Paris. Wikimedia.

On the uses of multimedia files

One of my jobs at Arcade is to contact humanities centers about the possibility of cross-posting their audio and video recordings of events. Being the Transactions editor at Arcade has brought home a lot of facts about the use of multimedia in the research humanities.

First of all, nobody has settled on a standard way of handling multimedia. I mean--any standard ways of doing anything. File types (audio, video), file formats, presentation, venue (e.g. YouTube, iTunesU, archive.org, self-hosted), and even what to call these files or where to put them ("events," "library," "multimedia," "podcasts," "check it out!" etc.) vary widely across humanities centers. One humanities center that will remain nameless even streams its files using Real Video, hand to God. Nothing can surprise me now. So research humanities multimedia are a Wild West even logistically.

Here are some examples of humanities center web pages with multimedia files. All of the humanities centers shown below have good collections, arranged with some kind of logic that you can get behind when you think about it, but which are all completely different. Some use video; some use audio; some are all business; some have pretty pictures; some use highly portable file formats; some use proprietary formats.

UC Berkeley's Townsend Center links to separate landing pages for each talk, each of which contains an embedded YouTube video. They're termed "webcasts."

The Institute for the Humanities at Michigan has a number of good talks, but they're buried under a section called "Library." The actual videos are several clicks deep and use proprietary formats.

The University of Chicago's Franke Institute arranges its audio files by lecture series and by chronology. There's an excellent collection with attractive pictures, though no useful abstracts or keywords. They use a highly compatible format (mp3).

The University of Washington's Simpson Center has two lecture series for which it offers audio. The streaming audio player is right on the index page.

But part of the reason there's so much variation in how these files are handled is that nobody seems quite sure what role multimedia are supposed to be playing in the research humanities. There seems to be a sense that recording talks at humanities centers is a good thing, but nobody knows for what.

I think the general lack of strategy attending the posting of multimedia files is evidenced by that fact that, in many cases, the videos are not produced as videos. Instead, they pointedly announce their camera-in-the-back-of-the-room quality: they're an automatic transcription of a ninety-minute period, taken from one fixed point of view, artlessly and objectively. So styled, these videos efface their status as videos; they're faithful if paler representations of what happened in the room. They ostentatiously defer to the live event by being just like the live event, only non-interactive and with poorer sound quality.

I'm not saying this in order to casually denigrate humanities video recordings as such. After all, I'm the Transactions editor at Arcade, and video falls under my vast and evil domain. I am basically in favor of video. But it's a fact that the average humanities center recorded talk advertises itself as a slightly speckled photocopy of a real event that happened in time. What are the possible uses of a video that cedes its authority as video, that defers to a past event and announces its own insufficiency?

Just to be clear, I don't think it's necessarily a problem that humanities videos tend to announce their insufficiency and defer to the event. But this way of thinking about the video will produce certain uses for it, and it's by no means clear to me that these uses have been developed intentionally or strategically.

Offhand, I can think of two ways to use a video construed in this manner.

1. The truth-function that always attends recording, evidence of activity. "We sometimes host awesome people: here's proof!" There certainly is some practical, if not necessarily intellectual, benefit to such a function.


2. The archival impulse. People don't get to work in the humanities by wanting to forget things; they get there by being obsessive hoarders of documents, facts, memorabilia, ephemera, aura. Someone might need it for their research someday. I mean, right?

Both of these uses imagine the role of the video precisely as subordinate to the event. The archival impulse is particularly evinced by the near-total lack of curation or organization on humanities center websites. Multimedia files are (currently) almost always arranged by date, not by subject or name of speaker, and usually no browsing tools of any power (sort by name of speaker, search by keyword, etc.) are offered. The one advantage that the video indisputably offers over the live experience--freedom from the bounds of time--is denied, as the video is subordinated once again to a timeline.

I suspect it's time to rethink what it is that the research humanities actually has to do with online videos of talks, what we really want out of them. Do we have a good reason for posting these talks, or do we just have them because all the kids are posting to the YouTube and the Vimeo these days and we want to Keep Up With The Times?

The two uses I mentioned above aren't bad ones. It definitely helps to have visible evidence that you're Doing Stuff with your meager funding. And I, too, cling to the preservation fantasy that animates the archival impulse.

Yet I wonder how many downloads various centers are getting. I can see the stats at Arcade, and they're nontrivial even in light of the small collection we currently have, but truthfully these videos vary widely in quality, and I wonder how many are actually watched all the way through. We've all been to talks, yes? Some talks are frankly terrible. Must they all be recorded for posterity?

Well, yes and no, right? Suppose Professor Famous recycles a talk at three or four humanities centers; that's worthwhile in the flesh, because people who attend the talk can participate in a lively Q & A session, or use the opportunity to ambush their hard-to-pin-down advisors,* or cadge cheap departmental wine at the reception, or whatever. There are myriad goods that come out of a live talk for which the talk itself is but an excuse (and if the talk itself is good, so much the better). But every time, some underpaid humanities center staffer is wrangling files and paperwork and uploading that puppy to the web, usually in some unlikely and hard-to-find location. All we have is the talk itself, sans advisor, sans cheap wine. Are we adding to the body of knowledge, in that case? Or improving public access to it? I'm not sure.

I mention access advisedly, because within the archival impulse, there seems to be embedded a vague belief, or rather a hope, that posting these videos constitutes outreach in some sense, because it's the internet, and anyone (who has broadband) could find it and watch these videos. So, to summarize, outreach consists of: (1) taking a talk by a professional addressed to professionals (2) posting it three or four clicks deep on a humanities center website (or on Arcade). And that's...not really reasonable. If access is a real goal in posting these videos, we need something more strategic, and if it's not the goal, then we need to decide what is.

The "we do stuff" function of online videos is perfectly fine, I think. But I believe that we need to rethink the archival impulse, and also begin to consider what uses the videos have that live talks don't have--i.e. why they're good as videos.

That means curation. Talks that are good for ambushing your advisor are not necessarily talks that are good as talks. Talks that have a great Q&A are not necessarily talks that you want to watch on video. Somebody needs to be vetting this, and yes, this would take a good amount of time and a little moxy to boot.

Someone also needs to identify the intellectual content of these talks and organize them accordingly. You really might go to a live talk because it's at the Townsend Center this week. Time and place matter a lot with a live talk. Once the talk is on video, though, the specific content of the talk matters a lot more. People will rarely seek out the video of a talk because it was delivered at the Franklin Humanities Institute in Fall 2009. Yet that's exactly how most of these files are currently arranged--by date and by place rather than by speaker or subfield.

I'm hoping that the Arcade multimedia section can ultimately do some of that work, but it can't do all of it. Arcade has particular areas of interest (genre, translation, environmental humanities, to name a few), and we're almost exclusively collecting files that correspond with those areas of interest. Yet there's a sea of humanities multimedia files out there, assiduously recorded and uploaded but languishing in obscurity.

If the humanities are really going to engage productively with new media, then we need to be more strategic about how we use it. As far as I can tell, actual research in the digital humanities rarely deals with audio and video, for perfectly sound reasons. There's a disconnect between the way that "regular humanists" use new media and digital humanists and new media theorists** use them, and you'd think we'd be drawing on the expertise of people who actually think about these media for a living. These jobs can't really be farmed out to the work-study student, because they're substantive intellectual tasks. And isn't that, after all, a good thing?


*Standard disclaimer: my own co-chairs were and are lovely people, and I never had to resort to ambushing them at a talk.

**I recognize that digital humanities can't be conflated with new media studies.

Et in Arcadia ego; or, une coulée de clartés

I'm very excited to have started working on Arcade, a "digital salon." I like its seriousness and its interdisciplinarity, and I'm hoping to help make it even better.

Come and visit!

Il y avait là une cohue, un défilé pénible et lent, reserré entre les boutiques. C'était, sous les vitres blanchies de reflets, un violent éclairage, une coulée de clartés, des globes blancs, des lanternes rouges, des transparents bleues, des rampes de gaz...

      --Émile Zola on the Passage des panoramas, Nana (1880)