[iDC] Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches

[Trebor Scholz]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html?_r=1&src=tp

Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: November 16, 2010

A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in
“isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism —
grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of
literature, politics and culture spread.
The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.

Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is
time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or
philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our
understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method,
they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized
materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.
These researchers are digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to
understand what role topography played in victory, using databases of
thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced
jazz, searching through large numbers of scientific texts and books to
track where concepts first appeared and how they spread, and combining
animation, charts and primary documents about Thomas Jefferson’s travels
to create new ways to teach history.

This alliance of geeks and poets has generated exhilaration and also
anxiety. The humanities, after all, deal with elusive questions of
aesthetics, existence and meaning, the words that bring tears or the
melody that raises goose bumps. Are these elements that can be measured?

“The digital humanities do fantastic things,” said the eminent Princeton
historian Anthony Grafton. “I’m a believer in quantification. But I
don’t believe quantification can do everything. So much of humanistic
scholarship is about interpretation.”
“It’s easy to forget the digital media are means and not ends,” he
added.

Digital humanities scholars also face a more practical test: What
knowledge can they produce that their predecessors could not? “I call it
the ‘Where’s the beef?’ question said Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director
of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Hoping to find the “beef,” the National Endowment for the Humanities
teamed up with the National Science Foundation and institutions in
Canada and Britain last year to create the Digging Into Data Challenge,
a grant program designed to push research in new directions.
As Brett Bobley, director of the endowment’s office of digital
humanities, explained, analyzing unprecedented amounts of data can
reveal patterns and trends and raise unexpected questions for study. He
offered the human genome project as an example of how an area of study
can be transformed: “Technology hasn’t just made astronomy, biology and
physics more efficient. It has let scientists do research they simply
couldn’t do before.”

Mr. Bobley said the emerging field of digital humanities is probably
best understood as an umbrella term covering a wide range of activities,
from online preservation and digital mapping to data mining and the use
of geographic information systems.
Some pioneering efforts began years ago, but most humanities professors
remain unaware, uninterested or unconvinced that digital humanities has
much to offer. Even historians, who have used databases before, have
been slow to embrace the trend. Just one of the nearly 300 main panels
scheduled for next year’s annual meeting of the American Historical
Association covers digital matters. Still, universities, professional
associations and private institutions are increasingly devoting a larger
slice of the pie to the field.
“The humanities and social sciences are the emerging domains for using
high-performance computers,” said Peter Bajcsy, a research scientist at
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

In Europe 10 nations have embarked on a large-scale project, beginning
in March, that plans to digitize arts and humanities data. Last summer
Google awarded $1 million to professors doing digital humanities
research, and last year the National Endowment for the Humanities spent
$2 million on digital projects.

One of the endowment’s grantees is Dan Edelstein, an associate professor
of French and Italian at Stanford University who is charting the flow of
ideas during the Enlightenment. The era’s great thinkers — Locke,
Newton, Voltaire — exchanged tens of thousands of letters; Voltaire
alone wrote more than 18,000.

“You could form an impressionistic sense of the shape and content of a
correspondence, but no one could really know the whole picture,” said
Mr. Edelstein, who, along with collaborators at Stanford and Oxford
University in England, is using a geographic information system to trace
the letters’ journeys.

He continued: “Where were these networks going? Did they actually have
the breadth that people would often boast about, or were they
functioning in a different way? We’re able to ask new questions.”

One surprising revelation of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project
was the paucity of exchanges between Paris and London, Mr. Edelstein
said. The common narrative is that the Enlightenment started in England
and spread to the rest of Europe. “You would think if England was this
fountainhead of freedom and religious tolerance,” he said, “there would
have been greater continuing interest there than what our correspondence
map shows us.”

Mr. Edelstein said that many of his senior colleagues view his work as
whimsical, the result of playing with technological toys. But he argues
such play can lead to discoveries.

In Mr. Scheinfeldt’s view academia has moved into “a post-theoretical
age.” This “methodological moment,” he said, is similar to the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, when scholars were preoccupied with collating
and cataloging the flood of information brought about by revolutions in
communication, transportation and science. The practical issues of
discipline building, of assembling an annotated bibliography, of
defining the research agenda and what it means to be a historian “were
the main work of a great number of scholars,” he said.

Figuring out how to collect, house and connect more than 350 years of
scholarship motivated Martin K. Foys, a medievalist at Drew University
in Madison, N.J., to create a digital map of the Bayeux Tapestry, a
gargantuan 11th-century embroidery displayed in a museum in Bayeux,
France, that depicts the Battle of Hastings, when the Normans conquered
England. At 224 feet long, about two-thirds the length of a football
field, this tapestry is both a work of art and a historical document
that mingles text and image.
“It is almost impossible to study traditionally,” Mr. Foys said. No one
person could digest the work’s enormous amount of material, and no
single printing could render it accurately, so Mr. Foys created a
prize-winning digital version with commentary that scholars could scroll
through. Such digital mapping has the potential to transform medieval
studies, Mr. Foys said.

His latest project, which he directs with Shannon Bradshaw, a computer
scientist at Drew, and Asa Simon Mittman, an art historian from
California State University, Chico, is an online network of medieval
maps and texts that scholars can work on simultaneously. Once specific
areas of maps are identified and tagged with information, it becomes
possible to analyze and compare quantifiable data about images and
sources, he explained, adding, “We have a whole new set of tools not
dominated by the written word.”

The online network of maps is distinct from most scholarly endeavors in
another respect: It is communal. The traditional model of the solitary
humanities professor, toiling away in an archive or spending years
composing a philosophical treatise or historical opus is repthis project with contributions from a global community of experts.

“The ease with which a community can collaborate on the production of
scholarship is something that is fundamentally changing the way we do
our work,” said Mr. Foys, whose 2007 book, “Virtually Anglo-Saxon,”
discusses the influence of technology on scholarship.
Digital humanities is so new that its practitioners are frequently
surprised by what develops.

When the collected published works of Abraham Lincoln were posted online
a few years ago, the director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Daniel
W. Stowell, said he expected historians to be the most frequent visitors
to his project’s site. But he was surprised to discover that the
heaviest users were connected to Oxford University Press; editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary had been searching 
the papers to track down the first appearance of particular words.

“People will use this data in ways we can’t even imagine yet,” Mr.
Stowell said, “and I think that is one of the most exciting developments
in the humanities.”