Monthly Archives: January 2020

MLA 2020

432. Digital Humanities and Media Studies: Reading at Scale

Saturday, Jan 11, 2020

8:30 AM–9:45 AM
WSCC – 401

General Session Information

Where do digital humanities and computational media studies intersect? What does each offer the other? Is thinking through, or study of, computational media inherently a DH practice?

Presentations

1: Disciplinary Difference: Investigating Text Mining Approaches in Digital Humanities and Computational Media Studies

Morgan Lundy, U of South Carolina, Columbia

@morganluu

This paper investigates the intersections, practices, and values underlying the fields of computational media and digital humanities through the lens of two case studies in which computational methods were applied by the author to diverse media types—social media and early modern literature—for differing disciplinary goals. This presentation would situate the fields of DH and computational media as intersecting in their desire for truly interdisciplinary partnerships between scholars of computer science, information science and diverse studies of cultural, communicative and artistic production –while also differing in evaluative focus, project goals and implementation. To ground these claims, the author calls two research inquiries as case studies: investigating underlying “topics” using natural language processing, specifically LDA topic modelling, on 3 million tweets (computational media) and applying distant reading, network analysis and semantic modelling to Shakespeare plays (digital humanities) through the same statistical software environment, R. Findings include the best practices and importance of qualitative interpretative methods in both studies, as well as “gaps” in practice that each discipline can offer the other – for example, DH could gain from an increased emphasis on computation as partner and driving force, and CM potentially from DH’s theoretical and historical frameworks. Ultimately emphasizing the underlying often false dichotomy between analog “media” and “literature,” and therefore, the materials and approaches brought to digital and computational revolutions of media studies and literary criticism, this paper calls for broader consideration of communicative materials for study in both practices and further collaboration between scholars and practitioners in these fields.

BIO:

Morgan Lundy is a current Master of Arts in English Literature and Master of Science in Library and Information Science candidate at the University of South Carolina, specializing in Digital Humanities. She will be the DH Fellow at USC’s Center for Digital Humanities in the upcoming academic year. While interested in digital archival work and humanities outreach, her research interests also include text mining, “distant reading” and computational linguistics. She is a recent Fulbright grant alumna, and is currently the instructor of an introductory rhetoric course and the graduate project manager of the Victorian Lives & Letters Consortium, a conglomerate of developing digital archives.

2: Simulating the Wall on YouTube: Cultural Analytics of Political Discourse in the Age of New Media

Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple U, Philadelphia

@AlexWermerColan

No one can say what will be ‘real’ for people when the wars which are now beginning come to an end.

– Werner Heisenberg, epigraph to Paul Virilio’s The Information Bomb (1998)

Ever since Donald Trump’s promise to build a “wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border, social media platforms have served as a crucial public arena for the national debate on the treatment of foreign migrants. Throughout the spectacle of news media representations of the border, YouTube has been a vital relay for outrage over violations of human rights. Yet the multi-modal internet platform has also fostered toxic echo chambers, where propaganda and misinformation amplify the false spectacle of endangered border security.

In this paper, I present an ongoing collaborative research project between an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and postdocs from English, Communication and Media Studies, and Political Science. Working within the nebulous confines of Temple University Library’s Digital Scholarship Center, we devised to bridge the boundaries between disciplinary forms of scholarship on new media. In search of a nuanced hermeneutic mode mixing quantitative and qualitative methods of interpretation, we’ve sought to integrate cultural analytics methods of web-scraping and text mining with critical theory born out of the Frankfurt school and applied theory from the social sciences.  

After scraping comment-threads from hundreds of YouTube videos of broadcast news from 2018 to 2019, we deploy three primary modes of analysis, 1) theorizing the often immeasurable effects of recommendation algorithms for related videos, 2) conducting network analysis on the videos’ comment threads, and 3) performing content analysis with WordFish on the comment corpora. Our interdisciplinary analysis brings into relief through close and distant readings, theoretical exegesis and data models, the multifaceted ways YouTube offers refuge for viewers to compensate for their sense of threatened identity by resorting to self-righteous, hateful expressions of exclusion.

BIO:

Alex Wermer-Colan is a Council of Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at Temple University Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio. His research on the politics of aesthetics and technology bridges hermeneutic approaches to twentieth-century avant-garde literature with cultural analytics methods for the age of new media. He has edited books of academic criticism with Lost & Found and Indiana University Press, as well as publishing essays in Twentieth Century Literature, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, the DH Lawrence Review, and the LA Review of Books. His talk will overview and draw conclusions from an interdisciplinary, collaborative digital project to analyze multimodal political discourse on YouTube about the U.S.-Mexico border.

3: Distant-Reading Audiovisual Oral History Narratives: An Ethical Approach

Charlotte Nunes, Lafayette C

@CharlotteLNunes

I propose to explore how digital humanities and computational media studies intersect through a discussion of a collaboration between Lafayette College Libraries and the Texas After Violence Project (https://texasafterviolence.org/), an oral history initiative in Austin, Texas.  The TAVP archives audiovisual oral history testimony of people and communities across Texas who have been impacted by criminal justice policies, including the death penalty. As a digital scholarship librarian and a member of the Board of Directors of the TAVP, I support work to explore these archives through both close-reading and distant-reading methods.  For instance, in the past I supervised students in “English 202: Human Rights and Rhetoric” to create an online exhibit analyzing audiovisual oral history interviews with family members of Charlie Brooks, Jr., the first person executed by lethal injection in Texas. Currently, I collaborate with colleagues at the TAVP and here at Lafayette to conduct a text analysis of all available TAVP oral history transcripts.

What are the ethical risks of exploring oral history collections at scale, for instance through topic modeling?  Do we risk sanitizing the trauma that saturates TAVP audiovisual trauma narratives when we extract transcripts, wrangle them into a machine-readable dataset, and subject them to text analysis?  How can we honor the integrity of unique individual narratives while also exploring patterns that emerge at scale? I will consider how digital humanities approaches and computational media studies (especially visual studies) can usefully complement each other when it comes to structuring a study of audiovisual trauma narratives that accounts for visceral granularity while allowing exploration of what collective voices express.

BIO:

Charlotte Nunes is the Director of Digital Scholarship Services in Skillman Library at Lafayette College in Easton, PA.  She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. Her research explores the role academic libraries can play facilitating undergraduate research opportunities that center on archives, special collections, and community partnerships.  Her article on teaching critical theory via digital archiving tasks in the undergraduate classroom appears in Oral History Review.  At Lafayette, she partners on the Queer Archives Project, an oral history and digital humanities initiative to illuminate queer campus histories. She is on the Board of Directors of the Texas After Violence Project oral history initiative.

Presider

Victoria E. Szabo, Duke U.

BIO:

Victoria Szabo is Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. She was founding Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD program in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures and directs the Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. She is also Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community. Her work focuses on the critical and creative affordances of spatial and interactive media for diverse approaches to cultural heritage, urban exploration, and digital media art. She is outgoing Chair of the MLA TC DH Forum.

Session Program Link: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/meetingapp.cgi/Session/7710

12:00 PM–1:15 PM Sunday, Jan 12, 2020

WSCC – Skagit 4

Session Information

Where do digital humanities and computational media studies intersect? What does each offer the other? Is thinking through, or study of, computational media inherently a DH practice?

Presentations

1: Why the Digital Humanities Needs a Critical History of Human-Computer Interaction

Michael L. Black, U of Massachusetts, Lowell

@mblack884

Recently, research in digital media studies by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Safiya Umoja Noble have called attention to a latent “authoritarian sanction” in Silicon Valley’s innovation rhetoric. Although one would assume humanists are critical of this rhetoric, much of the public promotion and presentation of digital humanities projects adopts many of its tropes. This adoption is especially visible in its engagement with issues of usability and interface design. When considering issues of usability, many digital humanities turn to the field of human-computer interaction, an area of computer science research that has historically framed its work as part of an effort to “humanize” computing and make its processes more readily understandable to non-specialist users. As I will show in this presentation, however, human-computer interaction has historically addressed the cultural and social concerns surrounding computer interfaces by ignoring them: reducing our relationship to them to questions of “universal” cognitive behaviors that are framed as so basic as to exist beneath these complex concerns. In addition to reviewing foundational literature in human-computer interaction, I will focus more directly on Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre (1991). Laurel’s book has proven important to many in digital humanities for developing a theory of interaction out of the history of drama rather than out of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. However, as as I will show, Laurel largely reproduces the strategy of ignoring complex social and cultural concerns but does so through a rhetoric that humanists often respond favorably towards.

BIO:

Michael L. Black is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He researches the history of personal computing, software studies, and internet culture, and is completing a book on the social construction of usability. His work has appeared in Science, Technology, and Human Values, Digital Humanities Quarterly, the International Journal for Humanities and Arts Computing, and Games and Culture.

2: User Experience Research as a Humanist Practice

Zachary Lamm, Social Finance

@zachlamm

In distinguishing Digital Humanities from Computational Media Studies, we are drawing a distinction largely based on methods and materials, and we may find a strong temptation to view the two as existing on linear spectrum: on one end, an computational approach to studying or editing humanist texts utilizing digital tools (DH); on the other, a humanistic approach to analyzing or creating digital media using methods drawn from or inspired by traditional Humanities disciplines (CMS).

I would like to encourage us to think of the distinction between the computational and the humanistic not as a line but as a matrix encompassing not only the humanistic and the scientific but the social scientific. By adding this additional dimension, we can see Digital Humanities and Computational Humanities as part of a larger field of hybrid humanist/computational disciplines that have more closely aligned themselves to the social sciences and business studies, such as Human-Computer Interaction, Information Architecture, Product Design, and User Experience (UX) Research—the field in which I now work. Indeed, I will argue that from its earliest texts, such as Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface and Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, work in UX has attempted to bridge the meta-disciplinary gap that separates the Humanities, the Natural Sciences, and the Social Sciences by emphasizing the importance of analyzing the role of the Human within the realm of technology.

In highlighting how in particular methodological and theoretical approaches common in literary studies (especially close reading, queer theory, and psychoanalysis) have been invaluable to my own work as a practicing UX researcher, I will illuminate how fields such as DH, CMS, and UX trouble not only disciplinary boundaries within academe but the larger distinction between the academic/scholarly and the industrial/professional realms. In this era of professional crisis for many PhD’s in literary studies, I want to offer an example of how our specialized skills might be put to use in professional contexts outside the University, in careers that might not at first seem obviously in the wheelhouse of the Humanist.

BIO:

Zach Lamm is Senior UX Researcher at SoFi in San Francisco. He has a PhD in English from Loyola University Chicago and previously taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

3: The Infinite Woman as an Infinitely Scrolling Script

Kathleen Schaag, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

@KatieSchaag

My computational poetry platform The Infinite Woman explores the impact of algorithmic processes on narrative voice, gendered language, and poetic form. I am working with a team of Georgia Tech computer science and computational media students (Alayna Panlilio, Ryan Power, Josh Terry, Alex Yang, and Jeffrey Zhang) to develop a web app that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of erasure (removing or extracting existing language to reveal patterns) and remix. As an artistic intervention and a feminist critique, the project remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy book The Second Sex (1949). This continuously mutating digital “book” reimagines reading and writing within the time-space of an interactive, open-ended, ephemeral user interface.

The user interface features infinitely scrolling sentences procedurally generated by an n-gram algorithm. Recombining and recontextualizing the two source texts’ vocabulary and syntactic patterns, the algorithm infinitely generates language that attempts to describe and critique an eternal feminine essence. Like social scripts that govern repetitive gendered utterances, the computational code systematically prescribes the form and content of the scrolling sentences. Revealing patterns through iterative permutations, the algorithm stretches the logic of “the infinite woman” to the breaking point. Intentionally resisting the Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Heuristics, the interface is intended to mildly frustrate the user, simulating the lack of control in gender performativity. Although the user can control the speed of scrolling and the text fidelity (how closely the output sentences align with the syntax of the source texts), they cannot pause the scrolling text, nor can they manually scroll up or down: the flow of language is constant and ephemeral. Users do have some agency within the constraints of the system, though: they can select sentences from the scrolling text to send to a canvas workspace, where they can erase words and rearrange sentences. These user-generated erasure poems are repetitions with a difference, rewriting the ephemeral voice of the infinite woman. Meanwhile, fog slowly erases the screen – materializing “the misty mirror of the eternal feminine” (Beauvoir/Marshall).

BIO:

Kathleen Schaag is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she teaches UX, Agile design, and technical communication for computer science students. She earned her PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a specialization in visual cultures and performance studies. As a consultant at UW DesignLab, she developed curricular materials for emerging “smart media” storytelling genres. She co-founded the Art + Scholarship Mellon Workshop and the Madison Performance Philosophy Collective. Her book project theorizes minoritarian avant-garde closet drama, conceptual art, and digital media.

Presider

Victoria E. Szabo, Duke U

BIO:

Victoria Szabo is Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. She was founding Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD program in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures and directs the Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. She is also Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community. Her work focuses on the critical and creative affordances of spatial and interactive media for diverse approaches to cultural heritage, urban exploration, and digital media art. She is outgoing Chair of the MLA TC DH Forum.

Session Program Link: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/meetingapp.cgi/Session/7743