Digital Humans

Woah. I'm a digital human!

I wanted to use a picture of a bunch of finger puppets arguing over the meaning of Hamlet, but I think Keanu works just as well for digital humanists. I think I like "Humanities Computing" more than "Digital Humanities" (see Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Chronicle article, "The Humanities, Done Digitally"). Humanities Computing sounds like a field within the Humanities -- it's what we normally do, but it happens to take place on the interblog, on a DVD, on a Smart Board or through some medium that's electronic.

Weird thought: Television falls into the realm of digital humanities, but television wasn't required to be digital until just a few years ago. But I guess having an Analog Humanities would've just been silly.

Now that that's out of the way, Fitzpatrick's quick coverage of Kirschenbaum's more in-depth "What Is Digital Humanities abd What's It Doing in English Departments?" (ADE Bulletin 150, both fairly recent) both try to bring us to the point that DH (the field, not the author) is the thing we've always done, but now we're using the power of technology to make it better.

Steve! Stop! We can get the library to PDF our sources to us! You don't have to run there!

We can data mine digital texts (who knew Plato used Justice so much), we can trace the histories and movements of authors and their works (and see where they might have bumped into other interesting folk), we can use Google Scholar to stalk other academics' work. Or we can see how many ways "Literacies Of..." gets abused. Even better, we can weep at the intellectual acclaim something like My Life as a Night Elf Priest gets. Is that better? I don't know.

More importantly, is this new? (Yes, it's a contrived question. I'm trying to answer a prompt here.) Folks like Lanham and Ohmann and Selfe and Cooper and Hawisher and others were building up the wonders of technology ages ago. Even my favorite mad inventor has been telling us how much computers can do for humanity, leading to all sorts of literature and film adaptations of his theories. But, those folks were looking forward at all the possibilities technology could bring. Current conversations seem to look at what we can do now that the potential has solidified a little more.

Woah. My brain can hold more than 250 of the greatest literary works of all time!

Which sort of returns me to that Bauerlein book I mentioned a few weeks ago. Bolter and Grusin's Remediation (2000) details some issues of new media we still haven't exactly figure out how to deal with. Media today is hypermediate (31) - it's realistic, but it's impossible; it draws attention to the medium while we look through the medium.But, like we talked about in class last week, it's that transparency that makes the interfaceless interface (32) so powerful. All of a sudden, when I'm composing, I'm not worried that my body paragraphs

are going to get a funky alignment because I flubbed an HTML tag.

And, like others have noted before me, the prevailing abilities in the means of production dictates the kinds of things we'll produce. So long as I have a big stand mixer, I'll keep making bread. So long as I'm using this blog service, I'll keep adding pictures, links and spinning GIFs to my reading responses. I refuse to do any of those three in traditional print.

Hey, did you know that in just a few short years, you'll be able to pet your Nintendogs? Yeah, that's messed up. Technology is becoming more immediate every day. Does this mean we'll be able to assign projects where students express themselves using only textures?

This is my report on Antebellum tariff policies in the Ohio Valley.

I really hope that composition instructors recognize the responsibility that comes with this power.

When I'm reading or viewing, especially on this series of tubes, I'm not thinking about the fact that I'm scrolling through text or clicking through links. Bolter and Grusin's notion of replacement (48) explains the greatest strength and the worst flaw of electronic ultramedia (mmm, self citation, makes me feel like Kress). At any time, I can summon up a new page, new line of thought, new anything. The interface isn't exactly invisible (those of you with parents who aren't as adept at navigating the blogosphere know what I mean), but it's transparent enough that I think about it less than I think about turning a page. Especially since I can't turn a page without getting two or three at a time.

With this ease, though, comes an almost insatiable need to keep redoing what's been done with the tools we've got now. It's sort of like getting a new power tool. The world needs another Great Gatsby remake as much as my walls need more holes in them, but darn it, if I've got the power to repurpose that useless wall into a speaker-holder, then Di Caprio should get to do what he wants as well.

I take that back. I draw the line at 3d.

This "aggressive remediation" (48) at first made me think of such masterpieces as Videodrome (1983), in which we are regularly told that "television has become the aperture of the mind." Of course, Bolter and Grusin are quick to point out that in our era, virtual reality is a preferred mode because it mimics our subjective point-of-view reality (77). I'm getting a little far from composition issues here, but like Hawisher and Selfe ("The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class" CCC 42:1) said in the early 90s, we need to be wary of where all this stuff can lead us. The internet may well be the new "aperture of the mind," which might explain why writing instruction has taken such a drastic turn over the past few years (not for better or worse, just a new direction). And it might be "dangerously shortsighted" (Selfe's CCCC Chair's address, 1997) not to think about these affordances of technology, mediation, remediation, and hypermediation in the classroom, but we've got to stay a few steps back to get an idea of the broader picture.

To paraphrase George Carlin, not every Tweet deserves a citation.