What a bunch of nerds!

1200 people at 6AM

There’s a lovely piece on ORBIS at Ars Technica causing what is, for a digital humanities project, quite a bit of traffic.

active users as of 8AM

Posted in ORBIS | 2 Comments

Metrics of Success

 

Ancient Rome subreddit, archaeology subreddit, rome sweet rome, am I missing anything?After two weeks, ORBIS has received over 36,000 visitors, with 4000 return visitors and over 45,000 route queries to the map.  People are downloading the traditional PDF version of the article, as well as CSVs and KMLs of their routes. Even more exciting is the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received on Twitter, G+, Facebook, Reddit, Metafilter, Pinterest, and several other social media sites I’ve never heard of and don’t take part in. The best viral media strategy, it seems, is to just produce something really innovative.

In the last week, I’ve done an informal survey and basic analysis of social media response to various digital historical map-based works. These take the form of animated maps of historical borders or Simile Exhibits of historical events or traditional web maps with various layers drawn from historical datasets. In most ways, the language used to assess these maps has been the same as the language used to assess ORBIS, with “awesome” and “cool” even showing up. But there’s one word where ORBIS is significantly overrepresented:

“fun”

Let’s be very clear, other than the existence of a wagon travel option and the fact that it has something to do with historical travel, ORBIS is nothing like Oregon Trail. There is no hunting minigame, no snakebites, no fording the river, no pepperoney and cheese. And yet, Oregon Trail is mentioned more in relation to ORBIS than Pleiades, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations, Rome Reborn, Omnes Viae or any other scholarly digital project about Rome put together. It is, I think, because ORBIS is “fun”. What does that mean? I think the intuitive sense being expressed by this comparison and the predominance of that word is the understanding that a model is something that you interact with in a manner best described as play. You play with ORBIS, to see if small changes have disproportionate effects, and you’re rewarded not with some gamified, badgy nonsense, but with real increased understanding when you see that travel from one place to another was more or less contingent on the factors you explored.

ORBIS is a game because games are models and it’s fun because, like Angry Birds, it gives positive feedback through simple mechanics. Let’s be clear, we could have made the site much prettier, if we’d had the time and funding, but that just reinforces the fact that the most basic mechanics of ORBIS are exciting enough to warrant putting up with a map interface that’s less attractive than Europa Universalis, Civilization 5, or Seven Cities of Gold. Maybe one day scholars and developers of historical, map-based games will collaborate to produce something that is both a historically accurate model of world systems and provides refined UI/UX. Until then, we can continue to produce interactive scholarly works that attract a broad audience by leveraging the real desire on the part of readers to engage with the material in a substantive and playful way. This may sound disconcerting to a traditional scholar who wants their work to be taken seriously, but I don’t think that this definition of fun and play equate to frivolity. And, perhaps if it sometimes does, and folks want to make jokes about being stricken with “dysentarius” or talking to their “GPSius”, or they want to have a mosaic donkey make wisecracks about a historical transportation network, then maybe that’s not such a bad thing either.

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, ORBIS, Social Media Literacy | Comments Off

A Week’s Worth of Travel in the Roman World

A Roman NetworkORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World has been up and running for a week now and the response has been simply incredible. While we all expected it to be well-received, especially among the particular scholarly community for whom it was directed (historians and classicists interested in the structure of the Roman and other classical world systems) it’s hard to imagine we would have received quite the level of attention we already have. I jokingly said that I expected 5 million visitors the first day and that we’d all retire to the Seychelles by August–newly rich from our spin-off companies that take advantage of the untapped need for Imperial Roman Transportation Routefinding in everyday life. Stanford has that effect on you.

The results, while not quite 5 million a day, are still a bit higher than one would expect for a scholarly work on an obscure subject. ORBIS includes fifty pages of text with dozens of footnotes and, in its narrative form, though benefiting from several full-color illustrations of described phenomena, is the kind of thing that is read, perhaps, a hundred times in a year. The site, however, has garnered much more attention than that, in just a week. By the numbers (mostly from Google Analytics):

  • Over 9300 visitors, 1100 of which are return visitors

While averaging over a thousand visitors a day is an abject failure if you’re Smosh, I think we can all agree that this is a pretty exciting sign of interest in the results of digital humanities research. ORBIS was created for a scholarly audience, but one of the values of building models and presenting rich, interactive content is that it is more amenable to exploration, mashup and reuse by a wide variety of perhaps unintended users. Even with the map and dynamic cartogram hidden away in subtabs, surrounded by massive amounts of text dense with academic and/or technical jargon, ORBIS is proving to be popular.

Thanks to articles on a variety of international sites, it’s also proven popular beyond the United States. Croatia, with nearly a thousand visits, is in second place. Why Croatia? It’s followed, naturally, by Italy with 800 visits, Japan and the UK with 700 a piece, and a hundred other countries rounding out the list. And while the overwhelming majority of visitors are heading straight to the map and playing with it and then leaving, the PDF version of ORBIS has already been downloaded over 150 times.

  • Over 1000 likes on Facebook

I had no idea that this would happen. We added a Like button at the last minute with little thought that Facebook would end up providing us with a fifth of all of our visitors. A story on Mashable sent another five hundred, the same number as sent via Twitter and the Japanese tumblr historyanddigital. The largest referrer other than Facebook, though, was mob.hr, which I’d never heard of but is apparently quite big in Croatia. The novelty of the site seems to straddle several categories, including that of gadget, game, popular history and web-based geospatial technology.

  • Countless awesome tweets

I think it would be the highest form of vanity to topic model tweets and Facebook comments to find out just how much people like ORBIS. But an informal poll reveals that it is considered “awesome” by a not insignificant group including teachers, kids, classicists (faculty, grad and undergrad), digital humanities types, librarians and Croatians. This doesn’t surprise me, I think ORBIS is awesome, as well, but there’s going to come a stage after the Awesome stage that involves the general community becoming more aware of how digital representation of the past is problematic. Advancing algorithmic literacy is, in my mind, one of the key benefits of sophisticated, accessible digital models of humanities scholarship.

  • One overused donkey

Seriously, there are horses in this game. Horses, carriages, entire armies and even boats. Why is it that everyone is riding donkeys everywhere? Is this some kind of meme?

12syllables

Orbis Donkey

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Natural Law, New Aesthetic, ORBIS | Comments Off

My Definition of Topic Modeling

What Topic Models ProduceUnderstanding topic modeling is, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, “the war that never ends”. And as I was re-reading the excellent posts by Matt Jockers, Scott Weingart and Ted Underwood, I realized that I may never have made clear that Comprehending the Digital Humanities was much more about understanding how topic modeling worked than it was about understanding how the Digital Humanities defined itself. The reason I chose a corpus of digital humanities articles was because I felt like it was comprehensible to myself and any potential audience.

While I’m sure the name doesn’t help–perhaps, Comprehending Topic Modeling would have been better–I choose to blame the confusion on my lack of legends, so I dug up my favorite data visualization of topic model output, above, and added one in.

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Visualization | Comments Off

May 2nd ORBIS Slides

May 2nd, Wallenberg 124My slides for the talk I’m giving today.

Posted in Digital Scholarly Work | Comments Off

Announcing ORBIS

ORBIS: The Stanford geospatial network model of the Roman WorldThose of you who are regular readers will know that I’ve been working on Roman transportation networks since last July. It is my pleasure to announce the results of that work: the release of ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. Created by Walter Scheidel, myself and Karl Grossner, ORBIS provides a model of the transportation network that linked Rome–presented in a number of ways. While this is a particularly useful resource in the Classics, the Mapping ORBIS section gives you a kind of Google Maps Directions for Imperial Rome, which is rather fun and novel for a very broad audience.

I consider ORBIS to be an example of a new kind of digital scholarly publication, that integrates narrative and data-driven representations of claims. If you happen to be around Stanford today, I’ll be giving a talk on the details of the project today at 2PM in Wallenberg Hall.

ORBIS: A model of and for digital scholarly publication

In the coming weeks, I’ll begin to explain and present the code behind the various pieces of the transportation network model that runs ORBIS, as well as frame where this work sits in respect to other digital scholarly publications. Thanks so much to everyone who has provided feedback on the preliminary site, and for all the support and encouragement that you’ve given us.

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Dynamic Distance Cartogram in D3

One of the features of ORBIS that I’ll be demonstrating next Wednesday is this dynamic distance cartogram, which is on Github as a gist and can be seen using bl.ocks here. It’s been written in D3 and uses a few pre-generated cost paths through the model to provide a cost to ship grain to Rome from the various sites around the Roman empire. The buttons recenter the network on four different cities–Rome, London, Istanbul and Antioch–and distort the position of the rest of the sites so that their distance reflects the cost in denarii to ship a kilogram of grain according to network path cost based on the Edictum De Pretiis Rerum Venalium.

The code is messy and the math is very simple. You need no more than the Pythagorean Theorem to distort geography based on a fixed distance like the cost to ship a kilogram of grain from many points to one. But the effect is very useful. Unfortunately, Github gist doesn’t allow me to post all of the data files (which should, in all honesty, be a single data file with multiple columns, and will as soon as I find the time) and so you can only see the cost in Winter and not be able to compare it to the speed to travel.

Given that this has become a bit of an admission of creaky code, some other things that need to be tightened up are:

  • Use geoJSON instead of JSON for the geography paths in grey
  • Reduce the decimal places in the data file (if only there was a minify tool that had a “bad geographer” setting)
  • Move the label-click event from the labels to the actual nodes
  • Add lines to indicate the roads, rivers and sea routes that are connecting these sites
  • Find out more things that are wrong with it…

We’re supposed to be more open about our development process in digital humanities research, which not only means using open source but actively exposing processes (and problems) and acknowledging just how much of a hack something is. Left out of the various arguments about how we should learn to code or not is the fact that much of the increase in the popularity of coding has occurred because the languages, libraries and tools have grown so accessible that even a schmuck like me can now write interesting little pieces of software. The price we pay is the increase in hacks and inefficiency that makes LISP programmers cry themselves to sleep.

Being a programmer, at least to this degree, isn’t much like being a programmer in the old-fashioned sense. Ugly, unoptimized code like that which I’m not-so-proudly showing here runs quite well on modern machines with too much power and incredibly slick JavaScript engines. It wouldn’t scale to supply the needs of a fortune 500 company, nor will it win any prizes for its efficiency (or run on an old version of Internet Explorer, for that matter). However, it does accomplish the goal of representing how the size of a historical world system is dependent on the reason for travel and the time of year when that travel takes place. I’m really proud of this cartogram, even though it still needs work, but I’m even prouder of the fact that I’m able to bring it to bear in the expression of some scholarly claim. I’d like to be a good coder, but I’ll settle for writing bad code to address interesting problems.

Posted in Algorithmic Literacy, Graph Data Model, HGIS, Spatial Humanities, Visualization | Comments Off

A Visual Representation of Stress

It would be useful for network representation to embed within the representation of edges some visual cue as to whether the edges are longer or shorter based on strength of connection as opposed to other reasons (strength of repulsion, manual shifting of node positions, strength of attraction between opposing clusters). One way to represent this is through what I call Taffy Edges:

Taffy Edges are visual representations of stress in network diagramsOriginally, I thought of taffy edges as only useful for giving visual cues as to the distance between nodes, but if edge weight is represented by thickness, then the deformation that occurs with significant stretching (relative to the network, as with graphs that are laid out using force-directed algorithms) of the taffy edges relays a useful point of data: whether or not a node is in its relative position due primarily to the strength of its edges or if the strength of those edges are being overriden by some other force. Here’s a simple example:

Taffy edges showing variable weight

In this case, we know that the yellow node is being pulled away from its strongest connection by several weaker connections, a typical situation in force-directed algorithms, but we also know that the distance between the yellow node and the orange node is significantly higher than it “should” be (based on the distance of connections of equal weight in the rest of the visible network) and therefore this is a high-stress connection.

I’ll continue to work out the details, for instance I dislike the fact that the 4 and 3 weight connections in the green module don’t appear to be “at rest” and my intuition is that there’s a real physical phenomenon that needs to be emulated in the visual representation to achieve the proper appearance of rest and tension, but I think this would provide a more useful representation of edge weight and interplay than traditional flat weighted edges.

Posted in Graph Data Model, Visualization | Comments Off

Review: Tice and Steiner’s Vasi Map

Tice, James, Erik Steiner and Allan Ceen.  “Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome.”
University of Oregon. http://vasi.uoregon.edu/

 

building detail from Tice and Steiner's Imago Urbis

Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome was created in 2008 by Jim Tice and Erik Steiner and remains, in my mind, one of the finest examples of the integration of spatial and image data into a single digital scholarly work. Only a year after the introduction of Google Street View, Tice and Steiner gave us a street view of 18th century Rome, linked to an impressive and beautiful map of enormous proportions from the same period.

As I continue to struggle with describing the difference between digital collections and digital scholarly works, I felt that the examination of existing digital scholarly works would allow me to better understand this distinction. Obviously, I am neither an art historian nor a geographer, and so my review of Imago Urbis is oriented toward the object as a digital publication, to see if it provides a cohesive and compelling representation of scholarly claims and research, as well as to see if that representation takes advantage of the data-driven or computational aspects of the digital object and is not limited to the narrative text.

To be clear, just placing information on a map does not make it a scholarly argument. The use of the map to index information is no different than using categories, LOC headings or the Dewey Decimal System to index information. If there is no greater goal than to present data in an effective, indexed, searchable way, then the digital scholarly publication in question is a collection or archive, albeit a spatially-indexed one. The creators describe their own sense of the use of this work without reference to any of the arbitrary categories I’ve introduced above:

Vasi’s Grand Tour places the work of these two masters in their cultural context: 18th century Rome and the Age of the Grand Tour examining the cartographic and artistic legacy that they inherited. It gives an account of Nolli’s work in light of this context but especially focuses on the vedutismo tradition and its impact on the work of Vasi and his contribution to the vedute genre. Over two hundred and forty of Vasi’s topographic prints are presented in detail and in relationship to Nolli’s map. Vasi’s work and methods are subsequently interpreted through an analysis of their topographic, artistic, and historic content.

The site has as much narrative text as an in-depth scholarly article, and the Select Bibliography contains nearly thirty references. But unlike a traditional article, it also contains a massive and sophisticated, Flash-based interactive object. This enormous map, while not the only interactive element on the site, is the only data-driven element–the various beautiful high-resolution images that are provided via Zoomify are firmly rooted in the category of illustrations. That we can now provide illustrations with the level of detail witnessed here is extraordinary, and in my mind still not taken advantage of by most digital scholarly works produced nearly half a decade later.

Vasi's "Panorama of Rome" from Tice and Steiner's Imago Urbis

Vasi's "Panorama of Rome" in very high-resolution, provided by the Getty Research Institute and viewable using the Zoomify tiled viewer.

Detail of Vasi's "Panorama of Rome"

Detail of the above.

It is telling that the actual design of the site reinforces through UX the idea that this interactive map is meant to be engaged with after absorbing the narrative text that it is embedded in. The map itself lives on the rightmost side of the menu, after seven tabs (the last three of which contain a total of 19 sub-tabs of information). In this way, the interactive map is implied, through the format of the site, to be the Conclusion–and as such the reader should expect it to draw together the various points leading up to it and see within it some kind of final remarks. That is, of course, if this immersive and masterfully produced site is meant as the expression of a particular scholarly claim. It could also be an exhibit highlighting the work of Vasi and Nolli or an exploration of two “fundamental” ways (pictorial and cartographic) of describing Rome. On the Imago Urbis page, we see one of the core claims that can be explored spatially:

The connection between the work of Nolli and Vasi is direct. Nolli contributed technical information for Vasi at the end of Volume I of the Magnificenze, recording the distances between city gates. Vasi’s credits Nolli by noting measurements “of the distances between city gates supplied to the author of this work by the architect and surveyor Gio. Battista Nolli from Comeo”.  Most of Vasi’s views date from the twenty-year period directly following the publication of the Grande Pianta, so Vasi evidently used this useful tool for his work.

And, later:

It is instructive to see how Vasi uses these themes in his depiction of the city in both its urban center and ex-urban periphery. It is possible to interpret his views as illustrated stage sets which depict the special character of places in the city and he does so with a stage director’s eye for both drama and dramatis personae. The street life of the city adds an important dimension to his work and typically enhances our knowledge about the parts of the city he represents and how they functioned. For example he depicts boisterous markets such as the Campo dei Fiori and the Portico d’Ottavio as swarming with shoppers and shopkeepers. The river ports are teeming with boats and workers while the major basilicas have pilgrims, clergy and the ubiquitous beggar in the forefront of the scene.

I would have preferred a greater emphasis in the design and implementation of both the site as a whole and the interactive map (dealt with in more detail below) in emphasizing and proving these claims about urban and ex-urban periphery, as well as a more exhaustive description of the categories of representation of urban life and the spatial patterns of those categories. Without them, this seems more like the authoritative text that accompanies an exhibit, which seeks to pass on well-understood historical knowledge to an educated but lay audience. But if this is an exhibit, then it would stand to reason from a publishing perspective to place the map and the various collections of images in a more prominent position.

Likely my own inability to describe exactly where this digital scholarly object resides in a strict taxonomic sense is because it straddles the fence between exhibit and research. The map, being a useful tool for the traditional humanistic expert analysis (though not computational spatial analysis) of patterns, is presented along with the narrative results of such analysis, not so much to illustrate arguments about the spatial patterns of Vasi’s work, but rather as a resource for later scholars to further explore patterns such as the relationship between accuracy and urban density:

In general, the visual liberties taken by Vasi’s decrease directly with the increase of real space between viewer and subject. Outside the densely built center Vasi shows his subjects with a remarkable degree of accuracy rivaling those of the camera lens. The views that occur outside or along the Aurelian walls, in the disabitato, and along the banks of the Tiber demonstrate this fact (Books I, V and X). These are the most consistent photographically accurate portrayals of the city and its buildings and spaces in the Magnificenze. The fact that these views had the benefit of unobstructed viewing space suggests that Vasi’s perspectival manipulations are the result of a carefully calculated plan to adjust the method of representation to circumstances and context and were assuredly not the result of whim or even less, inept draftsmanship. When Vasi moves into the dense urban center his methods change accordingly. In this tightly bound context streets and piazze are widened, viewing points of the same scene change from point to point for better viewing and buildings and other features are moved or deleted as necessary.

Ultimately, the language used to describe the sections of the text, as well as the lack of footnotes, tends to reinforce the view of this being an exhibit. This is further accentuated in the Interpreting section, which seems more like public history. Despite the rich multimedia nature of the site, though, the text is typically divorced from the illustrations, as seen in the Related Views page, where a long narrative introduction is followed by a barely annotated list of images. This is fine for an collection, less so for an exhibit and jarring for a scholarly work–if one accepts formal definition of these different digital objects. The decision to divorce text from image does not follow, however, with the View Types page, which contrasts the various methods for representing sites within Rome based on perspective and composition.

Like much collaborative work done in digital humanities scholarship, this is likely the result of an art historian and geographer collaborating to develop not only research but tools and objects. In the GIS Methods section, the spatial humanities effort seems to be directed not at proving spatial patterns but on proving a methodology and providing a resource for later scholars:

The GIS paradigm relies on the principle that it is now feasible to precisely locate—and therefore relate–all features in geographic space whether historic or contemporary. In addition to being an efficient and intuitive method for cataloging historical documents, the ability to geo-reference diverse resources onto a single, accurate base will dramatically enhance the possibilities for the direct inspection and comparison of the architectural, natural, social and artistic dimensions of cities such as Rome. This method provides a paradigm for similar research in other urban centers and for other disciplines that treat a broad range of geographic contexts and issues. The underlying premise of this presentation is that by geo-referencing Nolli and Vasi and by exploring their distinct methods for describing the city one will be better equipped to understand the profound geo-spatial structure of the Eternal city.

While I agree wholeheartedly that this is a path-breaking paradigm, and wish to have seen in the last five years its adoption and extension by historical GIS scholars (which may become more common with the growth of sites like History Pin) it is notably lacking in claims based on this method. In the short “Benefits” section, the map is described as providing a useful tool to facilitate interpretation and scholarship, language traditionally associated with digital archives or collections. The inclusion of elements such as a browseable timeline–hidden away in a link at the bottom of a sub-tab, reinforce this theme. Though, to be fair, the creation of rich, interactive chronological data visualization is still a problem half a decade later.

Nolli and Vasi's life and selected works shown chronologically

Nolli and Vasi's life and selected works shown chronologically using Zoomify to provide readers with access to a static, large-image timeline.

It is not until the Notes tab that we receive a distinct statement of problem–a choice of terminology that more evokes art and museum exhibits than a (hypo)thesis. The statement itself also presents the work (and here it is not clear if the work in question is the entire site or the synthetic, interactive map, though it would seem to imply the latter) as a tool for study and not the presentation of a particular claim:

Given that Nolli and Vasi were contemporaries and collaborators focusing on the same subject, it seems obvious that their work is intrinsically related; up to now no vehicle existed to effectively synthesize their individual achievements into a single resource that effectively evokes Settecento Rome. We believe that it will be extremely informative to place these 18th century documents into their 21st century context so that spatial relationships can be drawn and new conclusions reached about their continuing significance to the understanding of the city. Our overarching objective is to document and integrate two distinct graphic modes for representing the Eternal City: the pictorial view and the ichnographic plan. In concert, we believe they can present a compelling image of the city and in the process inform and inspire its study.

This interactive map, which is one of the finest interactive examples of the linking of image and spatial data that I’ve ever seen in the field of spatial history, bears out the interpretation of its purpose as being a tool for later research. In this sense, it is an index using spatial attributes to organize documents. Don’t let that antiseptic description fool you–an index of historical panoramas of Rome with a highly detailed historical map of Rome provides an uncanny effect. One could imagine how an entire genre of digital scholarly object such as this could provide scholars in various fields of history with a more sophisticated understanding of historical events.

I cannot emphasize enough my admiration for the work Tice and Steiner have done by presenting so much rich media, especially in the interactive map. The text presents an engrossing and full account of the objects and individuals referenced throughout. However, I do think this tension between its role as an exhibit or a research tool or scholarly argument is problematic. While the map presents categories of theme and image style that are referred to throughout the text, there is no unifying course of argument that adequately defines how the two are related. It’s become popular to gesture toward the Spatial Humanities and claim that quantitative historical GIS is not suitable for the study of much of the qualitative and necessarily fuzzy subjects that make up the humanities. But with the quantitative measures already present in the Vasi images, both their spatial location as well as the image attributes–such as perspective, content and architecture–then some kind of demonstration of the correlation between the two using spatial analysis should have been integrated into both the map and the narrative for this to full embrace the role of digital scholarly argument. Such computational claims need not be divorced from narrative claims, though integrating the two is not an easy task.

That said, this does not need to be a scholarly argument. As an exhibit, it is a success par excellence. I have to iterate my shock that I’ve seen nothing to compare with it made in the last five years. But if it is an exhibit, even a great one, then there is a very serious criticism to be made of the site. The placement of the interactive map, as a link on the far right after a series of links to the text about the map, firmly implies that the map, rather than being the centerpiece, is the conclusion of a long, scholarly narrative. This may seem like a silly design issue, but these design issues need to be taken seriously in the production of digital scholarly works. If the centerpiece of a work is an interactive map which is used as a spatial index for two hundred and fifty images, and the text of the work is annotation, analysis and commentary on that map and those images, then the link to the map cannot be placed in a subordinate position to the text.

Half a decade is typically treated as “forever” in terms of production of digital media, while it is “barely yesterday” in terms of academic research. That such an object could still prove digitally impressive hints at the stability of digital scholarly works and highlights the importance of developing methods to publish and review such a mature genre. While publishing and maintaining such works is a pernicious issue, review of them is no less so. Peer reviewers of journal articles need not worry about pagination and formatting, but design elements are integral to rich digital objects and even as the genre stabilizes, will continue to be so into the foreseeable future. The traditional sticking point to reviewing highly collaborative work is that it is difficult to find reviewers with sufficient knowledge in the areas of scholarship being addressed, and so adding to this the need to be aware of design issues in the presentation seems to make practical peer review of digital scholarly works even less achievable. I think an equally valid, and more optimistic, interpretation is that as we come to terms with being able to review these works, these requirements for necessary categories and commensurate skills grow a bit, but also grow more stable. I hope I’ve also highlighted the need to firmly distinguish between types of genres within the spectrum of digital scholarly object, so that we can grapple with what makes a good argument, tool, exhibit or other type that seems to have a formally recognizable set of goals, audience, source material and design.

A goat looks on

Posted in HGIS, Spatial Humanities, Visualization | Comments Off

The Curmudgeon Club

Become the wind

My post tying digital humanities to The New Aesthetic caused a bit of consternation, and forced me to take a closer look at the movement. Matthew Battles gives the best overview that I’ve read so far, and reminds me of my own sense that some of these Internet objects bear a striking resemblance to Cthulhu:

This is off-the-charts otherness, a hyperotherness… and from some quarters there is a yearning, a gnostic peering after some event horizon, a dreamt-of ubiquity or singularity, beyond which machines and human consciousness interpenetrate, some Michelangelesque digital touch-point—all of which Sterling would say is just so much eschatology in the vein of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We’re not in fact empathizing with machines; we’re empathizing with screens. And when you consider what’s really going on in the machine, the screen behavior is epiphenomenal.

But understanding The New Aesthetic is less interesting to me at this point than understanding the community around it. In a sense, The New Aesthetic and The Digital Humanities are already united in their dislike of their own label, their dogged insistence that everything that’s being done has been going on since 1982 (or 1949 or 1736). Like our very own Humanist mailing list, the CRUMB New Media Curating list is rife with discontents happily describing the hopeless naivete of anyone who chooses to adopt the term. Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, every Day of DH is accompanied by definitions of the digital humanities followed by the exasperated responses from the very same people bemoaning the foolishness of said definitions and the practice of defining itself. Similarly, the New Aesthetic has been introduced to the world framed almost entirely as an unneeded and inadequate category for a movement that has existed for decades, if not longer. The seriousness of the disdain and its almost machinelike quality reminds me of an old YouTube video that was played out back when Digital History was all the rage.

Sadly, the New Aesthetic’s Wikipedia page is only five days old, unlike my own Digital Humanities Wikipedia page, which celebrated its sixth birthday in January (And this is why January 30th, as we all know, is Digital Humanities Day). There’s no telling if this upstart phenomenon will have the same staying power, but if the New Aesthetic’s pedantic focus on parsing is any indication, it has a bright future.

Posted in Natural Law, New Aesthetic, New Literature | 1 Comment