1.1 From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing - UCLA ...

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often structured into the shape of the metadata, mark-up, search design, or presentation and expressed in graphic display. The grid-like structures and frames in web browsers express this interpretive organization of elements and their relations, though not in anything like an isomorphic mirroring of data structures to visual presentation. Web page features such as sidebars, hot links, menus, tabs, have become so rapidly conventionalized that their character as representations has become invisible. Under scrutiny, the structural hierarchy of information coded into buttons, bars, windows, and other elements of interface reveals the rhetoric of display. Viewing the source code–the electronic equivalent of looking under the hood–shows an additional level of information structure. But this still doesn’t provide access to or reading knowledge of the metadata, database structures, programming protocols, mark-up tags, or style sheets that are behind the display. Because these various metatexts actively structure a domain of knowledge production in digital projects, they are crucial instruments in the creation of the next generation of our cultural legacy. Arguably, few other textual forms will have greater impact on the way we read, receive, search, access, use, and engage with the primary materials of humanities studies than the metadata structures that organize and present that knowledge in digital form. xxi Digital humanities can be described in terms of its basic elements–statistical processing, structured data, meta-data, and information structures. Migrating traditional texts into electronic form allows certain things to be done with them that are difficult, if not impossible, with print texts. These functions are largely enabled by the ability of computers to perform certain kinds of rote tasks very quickly. Automating the act of string searching (matching specific sequences of alphanumeric characters) allows the 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 29
creation of concordances, word lists, and other statistical information about a text. This supports stylometrics, the statistical analysis of characteristics of style for purposes of attribution. It also allows large quantities of text to be searched for discourse analysis, particularly that which is based on reading a word, term, or name in all its many contexts across a corpus of texts. Many of the questions that can be asked using these methods are well-served by automation. Finding every instance of a word or name in a large body of work is so tedious and repetitive that the basic grunt-work – like that performed by the aforementioned Father Busa – takes so long that the analysis was deferred during years of data gathering by hand. Automating highly defined tasks creates enormous amounts of statistical data. The data then suggest other approaches to the study at hand. The use of pronouns vs. proper names, the use of first person plural vs. singular, the reduction or expansion of vocabulary, use of Latinate vs. Germanic forms – these are very basic elements of linguistic analysis in textual studies that give rise to interesting speculation and scholarly projects. xxii Seeing patterns across data is a powerful effect of aggregation. Such basic automated searching and analysis can be performed on any text that has been put into electronic form. In the last decade the processes for statistical analysis have sophisticated dramatically. String searches on ASCII (keyboarded) text have been superceded by folksonomies and tag clouds generated automatically through tracking patterns of use. xxiii Search engines and analytic tools no longer rely exclusively on the tedious work of human agents as part of the computational procedure. xxiv Data mining allows context dependent and context-independent variables to be put into play in ways that would have 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 30
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Page 7 and 8: the lessons of deconstruction and p
Page 9: Early digital humanities is general
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Page 25 and 26: knowledge is always interpretation,
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Page 31 and 32: Electronic communication approaches
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Page 49: lvi McGann, ibid, cites George Spen

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