Over the course of my time as a student, from working on my B.A., to finishing my Masters work and now beginning my Ph.D., I have always found myself in a conversation with someone who things that technology is ruining the literary field, specifically their relationship with physical, codex books. I remind myself that these people are only concentrating on some of the negatives that come with joining together the world of literature and technology; because as Tanya Clement describes in her article “Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship” some pretty cool things can and are being done.
Overall, I understood the main point of Clement’s essay, and I agree there is a lot to be done, especially through text analysis. I am fascinated with how far technology has come; today we can simply type in a word and find out how many times it was used in comparison to some other word in every book by an British author during the 1800’s. This has been done, as Clement’s article points out, with Jane Austen’s work and other scholars have used similar programs to track really neat things in Shakespeare’s plays as well. I’ll admit, though, that Clement’s essay also left me very confused. She uses a lot of technical jargon that I am not familiar with and left me feeling lost as to how she really understands the relationship between literary scholarship and technology (though I get the feeling that she overall likes it). I wanted to comment on this problem that I had specifically because I feel like technology can be really overwhelming to scholars who do feel distant from and unsure of how to use, or even discuss how technology works in their own fields. Sorry for the tangent, I just felt the need to point out some of the hesitancy that people still have concerning literary scholarship and technology. Much of her article relates the in’s and out’s of popular programs that people use to make really cool things: here’s the problem, I don’t know how to use those programs! So while I can understand how technology can help literary scholarship open new doors, it’s hard to really wrap my head around the plausibility of it because I know I will probably never have the technological skills needed to be successful.
As interesting as Clement’s main points were, I really enjoyed Mills Kelly’s essay titled “Visualizing Millions of Words.” He discusses introducing technology, such as text analysis as a way for his students to understand the relevance of words and how they are used and change overtime. But he makes a great point when he says “While such frequencies do reflect something, it is not clear from one graph just what that something is. So instead of an answer, a graph like this one is a doorway that leads to a room filled with questions, each of which must be answered by the historian before he or she knows something worth knowing.” I agree completely with this statement! A point that I feel I had made before, technology cannot just be used to show how flashy literary scholarship can be, instead it should be used to demonstrate all the ways we have not thought to read or approach a particular text. Graphs can show us things that are sometimes hard to visualize without the actual visualization, but what matters more is what the visualization has taught us about the particular text being considered.
2 Comments on Data Mining, Visualization, and Other Things that Sometimes Make Book Lovers Angry
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I agree that there is the troubling aspect of jargon in the reading and how the Clement’s position to these is from an informed perspective and not giving us a background as how we as educators can first tackle the programs, but also approach the teaching portion of using those programs to benefit us and the students. Like you I agree these are tools and things that we can greatly learn from and help us in our research, but some are still in the research/beta setting that I feel if there is a way to start there then the alpha or official releases would be even simpler to manage and tweak to our benefit.
In the class we have approached some programs and went through the basics in order to produce our own pieces of digital literature, but like with Galatea these tools that are mentioned in Clement’s article are mentioned and discussed as if we are knowledgeable readers without so much as an introduction to how to approach these with a map/procedure to get the most of it.
I think Clements imagines an informed but not expert audience of literary scholars who need persuasion that learning these technologies may be worth their efforts and is, generally, consistent with their values. For me, the implicit question she’s answering is “What can DH do for me? ” But, surely, there is a learning curve. One benefit of the surveying of tools is that it can help you decide (before spending the hours) what paths might be most suitable.
To use a different, simpler example — I am often dumbfounded when talking with teachers about their use of technology because, as a pretty D-literature teacher, I recognize some fundamental differences between things like blogging, forums, twitter, wiki, mass-emails, etc. Yet, I often see teachers struggling to achieve certain pedagogical successes when they have structured an activity and chosen a tool in ways that are not really compatible with their pedagogical objectives (because, I think, they have been seduced into thinking Tool X is the best, or because they only know about Tool Y, or their friend uses Tool Z) — i.e. they don’t have a really good sense of what can and can’t easily be done with a given tool. So … THAT … is what I value about the DH show and tell articles. They help me to understand the choices that are there before me … because it takes some effort and commitment to go very far with any of these, even those that are most user friendly.