This is a very hot take and I’m only up to page 13, but I’m posting this anyway.
I want to like this reading selection because I think it’s important to question how our cultural beliefs about logic and computing affect social structures… but I don’t like it. I think the introduction comes off as overwrought, self-serving hand-wringing and it’s really putting me off.
As I was reading this I thought of Richard Jean So’s article “All Models are Wrong.” The picture Drucker paints of the DH world is a model. Maybe in 2009 DH was as unthinking as she portrays, or maybe she distant read digital humanities projects without close reading the thinking around them to test her assumptions. I’m not in a position to say, with my 2018 perspective and only 5 weeks of studying the field. What I can point out is that this piece is riddled with absolutisms and sweeping declarations that strike me as iffy. To me, it feels like Drucker’s read of the DH field and DH projects lacks the very nuance, sensitivity and interpretism (whatever spellcheck, it’s a word if I want it to be) that she claims are missing in the DH work she critiques.
Drucker claims that consideration of design as a means of communication and usability, “plagues the digital humanities community” (p. 6). This is a cheap shot on my part, but has she actually used many DH tools? The user experience for many of them quite closely aligns with design as meditation, freestyle, or opportunity for idiosyncratic thinking.
Also what the hell is that weird conversation on page 12 where Drucker is trying to demonstrate that XML doesn’t communicate flirting?
In the example Drucker gives, a woman is bewildered and a man is “graciously” giving that woman knowledge and validation. The woman has big blue eyes that drop submissively as she blushes and asks him to guide her. No aspect of the man’s physical appearance is described. As always, it’s women who are fair game objects of a one-directional, sexualizing gaze.
I’m going to go stress eat about sexism (haha, I’m such a woman!). If, when I come back to this, further reading makes me reconsider these POVs, I’ll mea culpa in the comments.
But what are your thoughts on her implications for the importance of responsible design and coding? I see your point in the sexist example, but I think there is a lot more being said here beyond that example. TEI, modeling, theoretical concerns… all are imperative aspects of any DH project. Being as she seems to run or be part of a DH lab, I am sure she has used many DH tools. What is absolutist and iffy? The nature of text layout as an integral part of design? I’m a little confused.
“In the example above, the conceptof is far more elastic than that of .”
I also think she was trying to illustrate the ability of computers to read human interaction (and its many nuances) quantitatively. Flirting is an example that I’d assume most of us are familiar with. “Conversation” is just as much an integral aspect of this issue, but flirting is a specificity that just illustrates what she is trying to explain.
^ , AS TEI CODE
ugh, it won’t let me write flirtation and conversation in brackets
I strongly disagree with this attempted dismissal of my dismay at the sexist example. Why am I talking about that instead of about TEI? Because I chose to. Because I think calling out casual sexism is very important. I am engaging with the parts of the text with which I engaged. I’m sure we can agree that there is more in this reading selection than any one post will cover anyway!
Statements in the introduction that pigeon-hole DH:
“Blindness to the rhetorical effects of design as a form of mediation (not of transmission or delivery) is an aspect of the cultural authority of mathesis that plagues the digital humanities community.”
“Digital humanists, however, were interested not in analogies between organic bodies and logical systems, but in the intellectual power of information structures and processes.”
“If digital humanities activity were reduced to a single precept, it would be the requirement to disambiguate knowledge representation so that it operates within the codes of computational processing.”
You go, Hannah! Thank you for denouncing the sexual objectification of women on page 13. Your observations are spot on and Speclac and Drucker’s choice to quote this passage without critiquing it as offensively sexist is not OK. What the hell indeed.
Here’s another thing – not offensive like the above, but rather a statement about DH that fails to convince me: Drucker and Speclac write that “If digital humanities activity were reduced to a single precept, it would be the requirement to disambiguate knowledge representation so that it operates within the codes of computational processing” (5). Isn’t it really the other way around? That digital humanities complicates the codes of computational processing so that they can encompass ambiguous representations of knowledge?
Drucker and Speclac see limitations where there are really possibilities, reducing DH to a fixed number of inflexible digital tools. They ask, for example, whether the hand-drawn figures that intersperse William Blake’s poems should be disregarded because they can’t be rendered as ASCII (6). Digital humanities fortunately has many more tools than ASCII, and not only recovers Blake’s figures but preserves them in archives, and can render them in a multiplicity of ways (how about memes or GIFs?) if it will.
Thanks for getting this conversation started Hannah!
I would hope, Sabina, that Digital Humanities complicate the codes of computational processing so that they can encompass ambiguous representations of knowledge. However, DH works within the confines of computation. It seems like you are asking it to do what computers aren’t programmed for… yet.
It is terrific if you want to point out sexism in academia, there is plenty of it, but why hinder yourself from acknowledging the tools and capabilities we are working with? And from the overall message of an article based on a few lines, you don’t like.
As far as pigeon holing DH, “Blindness to the rhetorical effects of design as a form of mediation (not of transmission or delivery) is an aspect of the cultural authority of mathesis that plagues the digital humanities community.”
—–“Humanists are skilled at complexity and ambiguity. Computers, as is
well known, are not.” Humans can interpret sexism, computers cannot. Until they are taught to. You need to take it amongst yourself to create programs that find sexism in the computation if there is such inherent sexism in coding and modeling.
“Digital humanists, however, were interested not in analogies between organic bodies and logical systems, but in the intellectual power of information structures and processes.”
—-But you left out the following sentence: “The task of designing content
models or conceptual frameworks within which to order and organize
information, as well as the requirements of data types and formats at
the level of code or file management, forged a pragmatic connection
between humanities research and information processing.”
There is great difficulty in discerning quantitative usefulness from verbal prose, such as literature. You are always only as powerful as the code and data you are working with and it isn’t fair to take a weakness of the DH, in whose case is apparent, and mark that as any kind of pigeonhole. Yea, there are problems with DH but we can only move as fast as technology allows.
As for your last quote, all it does is open a passage on how to consider a corpus before digitally exploring it? How is that a problem?
If you did not like that one aspect of the article, that makes sense, but I don’t see the logic in tearing apart all of the information that is provided throughout the remainder.
Hey Patrick, I appreciate your reading and agree that we should not let the unfortunate flirtation tag passage get in the way of appreciating the many other questions that this article discusses.
I saw the passage on how to consider Blake’s poetry before digitally exploring it as problematic because Drucker seems to say that if we can’t render it as ASCII we’ll not render it. I may have read too quickly, however. I must say that as I read on I see that some really important questions about representation are addressed, not the least of these being the question of design which you discuss in your post, and which I will respond to in a reply there.
I hope that my reply to Hannah’s post didn’t come off as a flippant dismissal of Drucker. To move my position to a more positive, appreciative one, I’ll point to a compelling question Drucker raises about the ideological implications of quantifying humanities scholarship:
“What is considered data – that is, what is available for analysis – is as substantive
a consideration as what is revealed by its analysis. I am not making a simple distinction between
what is discrete and can be measured easily ( such as counting the number
of e’s in a document) and what cannot (quantifying the white space that
surrounds them). Far more important is the difference between what we
think can be measured and what is outside that conception entirely (e .g.,
the history 0f the design of any particular e as expressed or repressed
in its form). The critique that poststructuralism posed ‘to structuralist
formalisms exposed assumptions based in cultural value systems but
expressed as epistemological categories. The very notion of a standard
metric is ideological.,,(The history of any e is a complicated story indeed.)
The distinction between what can be parameterized and what cannot is
not the same as the difference between analog and digital systems, but
that between complex, culturally situated approaches to knowledge and
totalized, systematic ones.” (10)
I’m having a hard time understanding the last sentence. Is Drucker saying that traditional non-digital humanities research is a “complex, culturally situated approach” and quantitative digital methods a “totalized, systematic” approach?
Hmm, it ate my first reply, and my second attempt. Let me try one more time (and my apologies if this shows up multiple times!!)
I read this line more in the context of Drucker’s own self-promotion: that more “mainstream” DH work is “totalized, systematic” if it collapses nuances in favor of looking only at what can be conveniently (or even inconveniently) quantified, whereas her work with SpecLab attempts a more “complex, culturally situated approach” by pointing out context and keeping an awareness of design choices.
Which was actually something I found frustrating in this reading, because Drucker spends so much time describing the inadequacies of DH and the superiority of the speculative computing approach, but she doesn’t provide any examples until the second chapter. This is kind of an interesting rhetorical trick: point out a problem that seems both important and impossible (surely ANY representation of a work, under ANY circumstances, will include some interpretive choices, not all of which will be explicit and well-considered?), and then show us how she’s tried to address it.
I haven’t yet had the chance to look at any of the projects she describes, and she mentions that some of them aren’t available, but maybe I’ll try to take a look at the ones I can find and see whether I agree that she’s doing the work she calls for.
Hmmm that is a good question. If I had to guess, I would think it is more a reference in how to consider data and digital solutions in both circumstances, not necessarily non-digital vs digital… but maybe you’re approach is right
Hannah,
I think you have a very good point about Drucker’s understanding of DH lacking the nuance she also critiques. I too had to pause on page 13 with that cringe-worthy XML example. If it doesn’t discredit the entire article like Patrick hinted toward, It definitely cheapened it for me and left a bad taste in my mouth going forward. Thank you for posting about it.
It’s not an either/or, Patrick. I didn’t say anything about discrediting her body of work. Why do you think you’re reading it that way?
I like a lot of Drucker (I was reading something else of hers over the summer just for fun), but the very real sexism in this piece is appalling. You have multiple women saying that in this thread. Believe us.
Letting things slide because we like someone’s work is problematic. In this paper Drucker calls out her peers for reifying an undesirable power structure. I’m pointing out that in this very piece she does that exact thing herself.
Re your reply to Sabina, my POV is that DH is about more than just what computers can do. It’s critical thinking about computing as well. Maybe I misunderstand the point you were trying to make though, so I hope you come back and weigh in!
I think the whole thing got too heated for an academic level, probably largely on my part. I agree the reference is unfortunate but as long as we can agree to not diminish the rest of the work we are all good 😺
Calling out problems in work is very important
…and just to be clear, of course that means sexism, racism, trans/homophobia, mental disorders you name it. It’s important to keep an eye out for these things in what we read
I whole-heartedly agree. And definitely Drucker’s got some great ideas. She should just stay away from writing Ayn Rand fanfic.
Hi All — I will just say that as this discussion has taken place, I’ve wondered whether we should have assigned her “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display” ( http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html ) piece instead of the _SpecLab_ excerpts. I do encourage students interested in her work to check that other piece out.
That’s the piece I read part of over the summer and liked. You do have it on the syllabus for a couple of weeks from now.
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I can relate to Hannah’s “hot take” of p. 13’s flirting example, and echoing Quinn, esp. as it came so early on in the reading, which was “out-of-left-field” distracting to me. I felt “forced” to then simultaneously try to rectify ‘flirting’ as an XML example while also trying to grasp the data science of XML which Drucker attempts to illustrate through it. Very circuit jamming. And it catalyzed the above dialogue of Hannah’s “hot take” to p. 13 about “what the hell” does this very flawed “sexist” have to do with demonstrating plasticity in XML (agreed) to which Patrick noted to Hannah detracted from the XML itself (also agreed).
To all in this thread, why do suppose Drucker muddied her XML discussion waters with ‘flirting’?
It’s definitely a sexist and bad example. I suspect there are two reasons she used it:
1) she probably thought it was funny, because it transforms the driest of technical topics into a matter for flirtation — which actually makes it even MORE sexist in the way that it frames the pursuit of intellectual subjects, but I think that’s been covered elsewhere in the thread…
2) flirtation comes to mind as an example of human interaction where much of the meaning is in the subtext.
Which isn’t to justify her use of this example at all — there are certainly other and better examples she could have used.
Also, Hannah, even aside from the unfortunate XML example, I had a similar response to Drucker’s rhetoric, especially early in this piece! You call it “overwrought, self-serving, and hand-wringing.” Like you, I read her piece and thought “surely she’s overstating her case?” I *do* think that the problems Drucker describes of unreflective framing and loss of nuance are important ones, but she discusses it as if it were both specific to DH and characteristic of all of DH. When academic authors criticize a larger field, it’s pretty common to include a counter-example, but Drucker doesn’t do that, although she does cite many authors from other fields who are her philosophical inspirations. So the effect is pretty harsh, as if she were the only person in DH who is talking about this stuff (at least, until she starts thanking her collaborators!).
AND ALSO, she frames this as a DH problem because it’s about the cultural conflict between humanistic thinking and computing culture, where computing culture is purely instrumentalist and has the tendency of creating absolute, reductive categories. I kept thinking, wow, it’s really going to blow her mind when she finds out how libraries work! Or periodization in literature and history. Or the design of the book. That’s a little ungracious and snarky of me — if it’s a problem elsewhere, it’s a problem in DH too, and the fact that she’s trying to find other ways is very interesting and exciting. But I agree that framing this as a DH problem IS a little self-serving, because it makes her work sound that much more important.
Brava, Nancy, I strongly agree with you that Drucker’s mo in using flirting MAY have been b/c “flirtation comes to mind as an example of human interaction where much of the meaning is in the subtext.” Hence my screenplay/actor parallel where the actor’s imperative is to convey subtext perhaps moreso than “lines”. BUT in being “cute” with an example and “making the driest of technical topics into a matter for flirtation” Drucker digs herself even deeper into an intended/unintended “sexist” hole, down which this thread has indeed plumbed. And totally agree also that even aside from this wacky “flirting” sidebar, her essay style is strange at best, which is actually my deeper complaint with S-P-E-C-L-A-B.
Hi Nancy, thank you for all of your well-articulated insights in the comments.
Something funny, I wrote this (as noted) when I was only up to page 13. I finally read the rest of it last night, and she actually refers to one of her own previous statements as “overwrought” on page 21! It seems she’s aware of her own flair for the dramatic.
Excellent point categorization for information organization and retrieval predating computing culture.
It sounds like SpecLab was an interesting studio, but I’m not sold by how much space she tries to put between SpecLab and the digital humanities.
(I can’t log into the Commons right now so leaving this comment as a guest. -Hannah)