Reporting from DH 2013 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
By Jason Lipshin on July 23, 2013
As a scholar who subscribes to a “big tent” conception of digital humanities, I must admit that I was initially a bit nervous about attending DH 2013 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As the annual international conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, DH 2013 is one of the oldest and most established conferences supporting emerging work in the field of digital humanities, but it also has its roots in old school “humanities computing.” For those who are unfamiliar with the history of the field, humanities computing is the predecessor to digital humanities in its current form and is often associated with work in text mining Shakespeare, using word frequencies to understand an author’s style, or experimenting with TEI to compare different aspects of a text. Although much of this work can be extremely interesting and rigorous in terms of its play with computational affordances, I consider myself much more oriented towards flavors of DH with roots in digital art, design, experimental “multimodal scholarship,” and digital media studies. The distinctions between these camps are, of course, getting fuzzier by the minute, but the history and reputation of the conference implicitly reinforces these boundaries. And if there's one thing I've learned in my short time on the conference circuit, when you’re presenting, it certainly pays to know the composition of your audience.
Upon arriving at the conference, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find scholars from many camps present and conversing in relative harmony. In addition to the humanities computing mainstays, there were also programmers using computer vision to identify dance techniques, literature scholars experimenting with sound art, and even historians using 3-D printing to better understand historical artifacts. Defining what is and what isn’t digital humanities in such an environment is increasingly difficult, but the flip side of this lack of definition is an exciting sense of openness and experimentation. Scholars were tinkering, hacking, failing, and experimenting with the affordances of non-textual forms, while always trying to keep in mind the implications of this work for asking traditional humanities questions.
One of the more interesting talks that I attended was Jentery Sayers’ “Made to Make: Expanding Digital Humanities Through Desktop Fabrication.” As a self-described media archeologist, Jentery is very interested in the materiality of historical artifacts (particularly 19th and 20th century sound technologies) and has begun using 3-D printing in order to better understand this materiality. Leading a “maker lab” on humanities-oriented fabrication at the University of Victoria, Jentery has already begun producing a series of “maker kits for cultural history,” allowing, for instance, students or scholars interested in the history of radio or the telegraph to build their own. Drawing on recent work by Jonathan Sterne, Wendy Chun, Matt Kirschenbaum, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Jentery is interested in “how the hermeneutics of screwing around” with these technologies can fold back into theoretical reflection.
Another fascinating talk that I attended was Michael Aeschbach’s “Dyadic Pulsations as a Signature of Sustainability in Correspondence Networks.” Although Michael’s talk fit much more easily into traditional DH paradigms than Jentery’s, I thought it was equally innovative for the way that it proposed a new direction for research in data visualization. At the core of Michael’s talk was the argument that data viz research has traditionally privileged spatial approaches like topological analysis and graph theory over the temporal. Temporal approaches like measuring response time in a communication exchange between two participants, Michael argues, can be extremely instructive in measuring the “sustainability” or “health” of a communication network. Although he took the long standing Usenet discussion group as his primary case study, he also mentioned that this approach could be applied to non-online phenomena – for instance, mapping the temporality of letter correspondences in Stanford’s “Republic of Letters” project. Many historians in the audience, including Brown’s DH librarian Jean Bauer, seemed to be extremely excited about this possibility.
I delivered my own talk, “Visualizing Centuries: Data Visualization and the Comedie Francaise Registers Project,” on Friday morning to a fairly packed crowd. As an overview of HyperStudio’s use of data visualization in order to understand a large archive of theatrical ticket sales, the talk seemed to strike a chord across many different disciplines, with positive feedback coming from theater historians, computer scientists, and statisticians alike. In particular, many questions following the talk seemed to address the unique dynamism of our data visualization tools and the ways that they allow the user to dynamically combine multiple parameters to help facilitate what we have termed an “exploratory research process.” One scholar was particularly struck by my notion of “combinatorial research” and how this process of combinatorial play might facilitate intellectual exploration, while many others were interested in the ways that our tools could become open source and generalizable enough to be applied to other kinds of data. Hearing such positive feedback was incredibly gratifying, especially after having worked on the project for almost a year.
In all, I felt that attending DH 2013 was an extremely valuable experience, both in terms of promoting HyperStudio’s own work and learning about emerging work in the field. Although I’m still very new to the conference circuit, I’ve already had many wonderfully stimulating discussions, met many like-minded grad students and faculty, and received many encouraging words about my work. Certainly, all of the fault-lines and fissures, boundary work and growing pains of a field in transition are ever present. But so is the nascent sense of an ever expanding scholarly community.
