adventures in digital humanities

The old lament “So many books, so little time” that allegedly originated from Frank Zappa addresses a problem that the digital humanities hope to alleviate. However, as it begins to fix the problem of time consumption, there are concerns being raised over the research deficiencies that also follow. A close reading is the act of … Continue reading So little time

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In my attempts to assess the benefits/drawbacks of close and distant reading I’ve found that I tend to limit my view of each method by reducing them to two examples, each from an individual’s perspective while employing the methods during research. The first, the example of close reading, involves an individual analyzing a small selection … Continue reading Close and Distant

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I can see where both of these techniques are beneficial for researching. Close reading makes me think of dissecting a body of work. You as a scholar want to understand what the author is trying to get across, with every word. I did not know how close you could get to a piece of work … Continue reading Close & Distant Reading

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The growth of digital tools and methods in the humanities has had implications for the ways scholars think about and interact with texts, what with the emergence of so-called “distant reading” techniques. Relying upon software programs that can scan and/or search for key terms within a given amount of text, distant reading excites certain researchers … Continue reading Distant versus Close… or not?

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Technology is ever-increasing the ways in which we can view and research cultural artifacts, but is this a good thing? Before the widespread proliferation of the printing word, scholars could study near everything with relative ease. Books were expensive, and there wasn’t many of them. However, after book production exploded, it was far easier for … Continue reading In Defense of Digital Moderation

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“Close Reading,” as I would envision, would be a dissected analysis of a particular work; this particular work may be poetry, a scientific dissertation, or even an illustration. For example, for many years it has been debated what the song “And Your Bird Can Sing” is really about on the Beatles’ 1966 record, Revolver (debatably … Continue reading What Do We Do: Distantly Read a million books or Closely Read a hundred?

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When I hear the words “close reading”, I instantly think of paying close attention to the details of the text. It was not until I read the required reading for this week that I found out exactly how detailed and time consuming it was. The Shakespeare’s sonnet is made up with certain rules, like: not surpassing 14 lines, identifying … Continue reading Close reading vs. Distant reading

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“The fiction writer and activist Cory Doctorow, among others, has succeeded commercially, as well as in the impact of his ideas, by giving away online access to his books even as he sells paper copies.” – p. 109   I read Little Brother a couple years ago, so whenever Doctorow’s name is mentioned, my ears perk up. … Continue reading No such thing as free information?

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‘The result of the new filtering in the front is an increasingly smart network, with more hooks and ties by which we can find our way through it and make sense of what we find.’ –David Weinberger The innovation of digital information storage and access has changed the way we understand the body of knowledge … Continue reading How Knowledge is Accessed on the Internet by Thuso Motselebane

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We should be able to start at A and reason our way to Z, in careful, measured steps. This long-form argument is what we’ve taken to be human reasoning at its best. So, what if the Internet is shortening our attention spans? Suppose we can no longer get from A to B without being distracted … Continue reading Long-form, Attention, and Darwin

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In David Weinberger’s, Too Big to Know, beginning on page 44 he states: We are losing knowledge’s body: a comprehensible, masterable collection of ideas and works that together reflect the truth about the world. In field after field we’ve witnessed the idea of a “canon” falling. The idea that there is such a thing as … Continue reading The internet as a body of knowledge.

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“We are witnessing a version of Newton’s Second Law: On the Net, every fact has an equal and opposite reaction. Those reactive facts may be dead wrong. Indeed, when facts truly contradict, at least one of them has to be wrong. But this continuous, multi-sided, linked contradiction of every fact changes the nature and role … Continue reading Every Fact Has an Equal and Opposite Reaction

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” We don’t have to choose between them. Both have value. The Circle is a lump of qualified, sober experts. The Facebook page is a big, throbbing lump of people who want to talk about Heidegger for whatever reason. The two together form a loosely connected network of people who care about Heidegger. The participants … Continue reading Education

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Knowledge is taking on the shape of the Net—that is, the Internet. Of all the different communication networks we’ve built for ourselves, with all their many shapes—the history of communication networks includes rings, hubs-and-spokes, stars, and more—the Net is the messiest. That gives it a crucial feature: It works at every scale. … Of course, … Continue reading Post 1

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In short, Expert Labs is a conscious response to the fact that knowledge has rapidly gotten too big for its old container… Especially containers that are shaped like pyramids. The idea that you could gather data and information and then extract value from them by reducing them with every step upward now seems overly controlled … Continue reading The DIKW Pyramid and the Role of Forward Filtering

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“And the fear that keeps us awake at night is not that all this information will cause us to have a mental breakdown, but that we are not getting enough of the information we need” (Weinberger 9).       In Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), the encounter of information overload would induce varying levels of anxieties. … Continue reading Rethinking the Value of Information

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The Internet represents the ascension of yahoos, a victory lap for plagiarists, the end of culture, the beginning of the dark ages inhabited by glassy-eyed chronic masturbators who judge truth by the number of thumbs up, wisdom by the number of views, and knowledge by whatever is most fun to believe … Our task is … Continue reading Building Smart Rooms and Not The End of Culture

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“Filters no longer filter out. They filter forward, bringing their results to the front. What doesn’t make it through a filter is still visible and available in the background.” While reading and coming across this observation that the author makes, I couldn’t help but to think how true this statement resonates in regards of how … Continue reading Blog Post #1

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Page 116 ‘Long-form writing is often a better instrument of understanding when it is embedded in a web of ideas, conversations, and arguments, all linked and traversable.  The writings of Charles Darwin, Nicholas Carr, and Jay Rosen are more useful, understandable, verifiable, and up to date because of the links that point into them and … Continue reading Too Big to Know: 1st post

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Back before Ackoff’s pyramid, back when the idea of knowledge first occurred to us, the ability to know our world was the essential difference between us and the other animals. It was our fulfillment as humans, our destiny. Knowledge itself fit together into a perfectly ordered whole.  Knowledge therefore was considered for thousands of years … Continue reading Knowledge

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