Engl507

Class Notes: Meeting 5

Here are a few issues you mentioned during seminar (I will address them when providing feedback on your research logs):

• If materials are already digital and available online (e.g., in the Internet Archive), then what's the DH project? What is DH outside of digitization, encoding, and preservation?
• What's the computational method to be used for a particular project, and what to do when there's limited digital/digitized materials at hand?
• How to address the question of scale? In the space of a semester, what's feasible, and what is too blue sky?
• How to find enough information in a single corpus in order to make an argument/claim?
• Also, how to address material / infrastructure issues (including computer resources)?
• How to read / scan with a computer? Here, engaging large amounts of files/data is especially pertinent.
• When looking at material in bulk, how to study a project's design in addition to its content?
• When studying a specific platform, what's the learning curve? How to gauge or estimate time to be spent? What will ultimately pay off?
• How to present or express data after it's gathered?
• How to balance questions of scale with argumentation? When using algorithmic methods, when does a meaningful argument emerge?
• The question of sampling: how to select specific materials and explain why those materials were selected?
• How to respond to a lack of materials? What can be pieced together in the face of absence? How much material to include in a given argument?

Here are a few terms (from previous seminar meetings) to keep in mind as we proceed:

• Exegesis (clear communication): relatively superficial; taken as a given; rarely assumed to be subject to disagreement
• Hermeneutics (deep communication): beyond the surface; framework involved; exposing assumptions; frequently associated with suspicion; rhetoric of unconscious; close reading for irony/ambivalence
• Symptomatics/deconstruction (stresspoint communication): breaks down exsiting frameworks and their assumptions; constellation model; subconscious tendencies of texts; emphasis on imbricated meaning, with some resistance to depth
• Iridescent communication: apparent immediacy and certainty; veiling/unveiling; illustrative instead of explanatory; letting be; immersion; image instead of text
• Furious communication: without center or source; systematic / machinic approaches; conducive to diagrams and visualizations; often a gesture to synthesize an abundance of information; resonates with theories of emergence and peer-to-peer networking
• Memory (as a defining characteristic of new media): how media are accessed, not just stored; acts of reading and re-membering; the role of compilers in new media
• Enduring ephemeral: the continuous reapparence of media; the rhetoric of "undead" media; what's lost and re-membered in the compiliation process
• Numerical representation (new media): programmable across a common substrate (the popular representation of things as 1s and 0s)
• Automation (new media): outsourcing compilation to machines (e.g., HTML and CSS files via a browser)
• Variability (new media): version instead of copy/original (potentially infinite versions)
• Modularity (new media): new media is scalable; component parts make a whole
• Transcoding (new media): all technologies and computers are also cultural; where there is a computational layer, there is also a cultural layer
• Model of: representation of something that exists; poor substitute for the original
• Model for: modelling something that you want to enact or bring into being
• Speculative computing: making models for; leaving space for ambivalence, irony, or multiple interpretations; affording emergent discoveries; author/creator is not the only authority about what the text says; an organic approach to computation (rather than a mechanical/objective approach)
• Standard: prescriptive; relies on authority; enforced by authorities/law; difficult to change; some classifications become standardized; no natural standard or rule
• Boundary object: affords unique uses across communities of practice while also supporting common views, beliefs, ideologies; helps scholars attend simultaneously to sameness and difference, through an attention to material culture

A few remarks, by Kirschenbaum, to consider:

• "Nick Montfort has coined the term 'screen essentialism' to refer to the prevailing bias in new media studies toward display technologies that would have been unknown to most computer users before the mid-1970s (the teletype being the then-dominant output device)" (31)
• "Attention to the affordances of various kinds of storage media can reveal much about computing in different contexts, allowing us to reconstruct salient aspects of now-obsolete systems and the human practices that attended them" (32).
• "the 'ideology' I want to delineate below is perhaps better thought of as medial---that is, one that substitutes popular representations of a medium, socially constructed and cultural activated to perform specific kinds of work, for a more comprehensive treatment of the material particulars of a given technology" (36)
• "At the core of a medial ideology of electronic text is the notion that in place of inscription, mechanism, sweat of brow (or its mechanical equivalent steam), and cramp of hand, there is light, reason, and energy unleashed in the electric empyrean" (39)
• "I want to focus on three specific sets from computer forensics in order to challenge some of the common assumptions about electronic textuality that characterize what I have been calling the medial ideology. They are as follows: that electronic text is hopelessly ephemeral, that it is infinitely fungible or self-identical, and that it is fluid or infinitely malleable" (50)
• "Whereas formal materiality depends on the use of the machine's symbolic regimen to model particular properties or behaviors of documents or other electronic objects (CTRL-Z thereby allowing one to 'undo' a deletion by recapturing an earlier, still-saved state of file), forensic materiality rests upon the instrumental mark or trace, the inscription that is fundamental to new media as it is to other impositions and interventions in the long technological history of writing" (70)
• "In Goodman's terms, allographic objects, such as written texts, fulfill their ontology in reproduction, while autographic objects, such as painting, betray their ontology in reproduction" (133)

A few remarks, by Bogost, to consider:

• "Procedural rhetoric, then, is a practice of using processes persuasively" (3)
• "Procedural representation explains processes with other processes" (9)
• "Procedural representation itself requires inscription in a medium that actually enacts processes rather than merely describe them" (9)
• "digital rhetoric tends to focus on the presentation of traditional materials---especially text and images---without accounting for the computational underpinnings of that presentation" (28)
• "Procedural rhetorics afford a new and promising way to make claims about how things work (29)"
• "all artifacts subject to dissemination need not facilitate direct argument with the rhetorical author; in fact, even verbal arguments usually do not facilitate the open discourse of the Athenian assembly. Instead, they invite other, subsequent forms of discourse, in which interlocutors can engage, consider, and respond in turn, either via the same medium or a different one" (37)
• "Procedural representations do not necessarily support user interaction" (40)