Beauty

February 9th, 2011

In the second week of our class HDCC106, the students were reminded that their final project is both about process and creativity, about content and function, about beauty and ideas and all of the things that means when you are building an interface to, well, to what?

First we defined “interface.” What does that mean? For the first discussion, an “interface” was a space or point for communication between divisions. They were very keen on the idea that this concept meant an entrance into content. For the second class, I had to remind the students of the content. They were much more focused on the idea that the interface was how the users got to the functionality of the site. While the first group saw the interface as a way for humans to communicate with machines, the second group were more focused on the interface of different layers of the machine, that there are interfaces between input and output data on all layers. While the first group agreed that one student’s example of the interface as a magazine cover was a viable way of thinking about interfaces, the second group was not convinced. “Well then,” one student said, rolling her eyes, “that means anything could be an interface.” Well, yeah. Okay.

The conversation evolved into considering what is a “successful” anything-could-be-an-interface? This week our reading was based on Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s “‘So the Colors Cover the Wires’: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability” in which he discusses interface, aesthetics, and usability (of all things). We grasped at a couple of things in particular: functionality versus content, notions of beauty and how these relate to usability, as well as pie-in-the-sky dreams about what you could make given the reins to make anything. The functionality versus content debate was not as divisive as I thought it would be: both groups saw “success” in an interface as the happy marriage between these two elements. For example, the first class thought that the main aspects of a successful or “beautiful” interface were

  • Function — practical, easy-to-use, intuitive navigation, efficient, organized
  • Content — interesting
  • Visual appeal — aesthetically pleasing

The second group broke it down a little differently:

  • Usable: intuitive, efficient, functioning (able to access content), organized
  • Visually appealing: clean, streamlined, consistency between elements

Finally, both groups saw the need to define the context (the audience and purpose of the interface) as a factor in defining “success” or beauty in the interface.

@BaronessElsa on Twitter

May 24th, 2010

Introduced with a live tweet on May 22, 2010 at THATcamp 2010 in Fairfax, Virgina, BaronessElsa is a textual performance based on the autobiography of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The original text is in the Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven papers
(http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1501) in Special Collections at the University of Maryland, College Park. It is being edited and produced by tanyaclement. Commentary about the project can be searched under the hashtag #evfl.

Brief history

The Baroness wrote her autobiography in the last years of her life, probably in German between 1923 and her death in 1927. It mainly focuses on her years before moving to New York in the nineteen-teens. The autobiography affords a fascinating prespective on a female artist who not only crosses the Atlantic (multiple times) but crosses perceived boundaries of gender, ethnicity, class, and artistic genre. She was a poet, a performer, a painter, a sculptor, and a critic. During her life, her long-time lover Felix Paul Greve (1879-1948) (better known by the pseudonym he adopted as a Canadian writer and translator, Frederick Philip Grove) wrote two novels based on Freytag-Loringhoven’s life: Fanny Essler (1905) and Maurermeister Ihles Haus [The Master Mason’s House] (1906). A handful of critical studies have written about the extent to which Grove drew from Freytag-Loringhoven’s life to write his own German and Canadian life writings Fanny Essler (1905), Settlers of the Marsh (1925) and In Search of Myself (1946) (Gammel 1994; Hjartarson 1986; Spettigue 1973; Divay 2005), but the materials underlying these assertions are difficult to access.

Djuna Barnes, who inherited the bulk of the Baroness’s literary papers, always maintained that the Baroness’s life story was significant to an understanding of her art. Consequently, in the letters that the Baroness writes to Djuna from Germany during the years 1923-1927, the Baroness clearly believes that a collection of her poetry, under Barnes’s hand, is imminent and that it depends on her writing the autobiography. Sending Barnes her autobiography written as long letters, however, the Baroness found the task onerous even though, ultimately, necessary: “You desire dates and facts out of my life to place before the public to secure their Sympathy,” the Baroness affirms in an undated letter, “‘in a few words’ – mercifull [sic] heaven and hells bells as well – how that is to be done – with my life – that is about half a dozen lifes [sic] in one [. . .] it will be a heroic deed by me ¬- should I succeed -.” [UMCP] Hank O’Neal details Barnes’s subsequent aborted attempt to produce both the Baroness’s autobiography and a collection of her poetry in the introduction to his “Facsimiles of Barnes’ typed and annotated writings about the life of Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven,” in which he compiles and tries to make sense of Barnes’s writings about the Baroness. Here, O’Neal reveals Barnes’s great desire to meet her promise to the Baroness, to see her friend’s poetry published, and Barnes’s ultimate failure due to do so because of what O’Neal calls Barnes’s “noncommittal” work habits (Barnes 4). O’Neal tried himself to see a collection of the Baroness’s poetry in publication for Barnes, going so far as to finish typing what remained untyped and finding a publisher, but Barnes never wrote the introduction she said she would give him and he subsequently lost track of the project. O’Neal calls the fruitless efforts the result of “Elsa’s curse” (7).

Paul I. Hjartarson and Douglas O. Spettigue, edited the autobiography and titled it Baroness Elsa (Oberon 1992), which was the same title Barnes used for her holograph. In light of this dramatized e-version, I am titling this performance @BaronessElsa.

Brief Working Bibliography

Barnes, Djuna. Djuna Barnes and the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven. Ed. O’Neal. [New York: Hank O’Neal, 1992. Print.

Divay, Gaby. “Felix Paul Greve’s & Else von Freytag-Loringhoven’s 1904/5 ‘Fanny Essler’ Poems: His or Hers?” Gaby Divay’s UM Archives Webpages. University of Manitoba, Archives & Special Collections, March 2005. Web. 12 March 2010.

Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von. In Transition: Selected Poems by The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Ed. Tanya Clement. University of Maryland, College Park Libraries, 2008. Web. 17 Sep 2009.

Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002. Print.

–. “‘No Woman Lover’: Baroness Elsa’s Intimate Biography.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (1994): 1-17. Print.

Greve, Felix. Fanny Essler ein Roman. Stuttgart: A. Juncker, 1906. Print.

Grove, Frederick. Settlers of the Marsh. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. Print.

Spettigue, Douglas. FPG : The European years. [Ottawa]. 1973. Print.

Designing for Digital Literacy Survey

May 18th, 2010

Please participate!

I am inviting you to participate in this survey “Designing for Digital Literacy” at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/X3H8YQH as part of a larger research project on curricular and infrastructural development within the digital humanities because you are affiliated with an undergraduate curriculum that is in some way inflected by the digital humanities. Whether your curriculum or program matches this broad description is entirely up to you. Some examples of how scholars and faculty are defining the field in terms of undergraduate curricula can be found on my blog at http://www.palms.wordherders.net/wp/2009/11/digital-humanities-inflected-undergraduate-programs-2/. These examples range from programs that work with new media and mobility devices to programs that are entrenched in textual computational analysis and representation. Other examples also appear–more importantly for this discussion, these participants who are choosing to align themselves with the digital humanities come from a wide range of institutional environments and experiences.

The purpose of this research project is to start making transparent the institutional and infrastructural issues that are specific to certain universities in order to provide insight into how curricula that is inflected by the digital humanities has been, is being, or might be developed. Simply listing examples of existing programs would belie the extent to which scholars and administrators have shaped and are shaping these curricula according to the needs of their specific communities. The results of this research may help us all learn more about the current state of developing digital humanities curricula for undergraduates and provide a background of transparency that encourages continued development and knowledge production in this field.

Scaring little boys near Kennebunkport

April 22nd, 2010

Another sighting of the Baroness. This time, the little boys have to be warded off with cops:
http://www.someoldnews.com/?p=18

Digital Literacy for the Dumbest Generation

March 15th, 2010

Marc Baeurlein argues that undergraduates now and undergraduates to come soon are “the least curious and intellectual generation in national history.”[i] Dubbing them “the dumbest generation” and “mentally agile” but “culturally ignorant,” Bauerlein decrees that The Web hasn’t made them better writers and readers, sharper interpreters and more discerning critics, more knowledgeable citizens and tasteful consumers” (Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation 110). The crux of this attack on digital culture lies in the link that Bauerlein and others (“Reading at Risk” xii) make between paper and digital texts: “the relationship,” Bauerlein explains, “between screens and books isn’t benign” (“Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind”). Like Bauerlein and the authors of the NEA report, Sven Birkerts maintains that book readers learn more because the book is a system that “evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world and that “the electronic book, on the other hand, represents—and furthers—a circuitry of instant access” (“Resisting the Kindle”).

In contrast to this perspective, scholars and educators in the digital humanities have spent decades working with digital texts and arguing that advanced knowledge production is the primary function of using computational methodologies in the humanities. These scholars have situated advanced knowledge in humanistic inquiry as the primary function of computational methodologies in the humanities. In 1980, Roberto Busa argued that using computers for humanistic inquiry meant “the enhancement of the quality, depth, and extension of research and not merely the lessening of human effort and time” (Busa 89). In 2002, Koenraad de Smedt asserted that the primary goals of digital humanistic inquiry was to reflect on the content and, in a more general sense, the humanities discipline, maintaining that “there is of course nothing wrong with new ideas on how a subject is to be taught, as long as they start from the question of what is to be taught . . . the question of what is to be taught should be approached in the light of a reflection on why we teach and learn humanities” (de Smedt 90). Willard McCarty actually locates the work of DH research in the production of written texts, claiming that “research itself (e.g. in philosophy) or its synthesis into a disciplinary contribution (e.g. in history) takes place during the writing, in the essay or monograph, rather than in a non-verbal medium, such as a particle accelerator” (McCarty 13).      In short, The scholarship done by the digital humanities community demonstrates that inquiry enabled by modes of research, dissemination, design, preservation, and communication that rely on algorithms, software, and or the internet network for processing data deepen and advance knowledge in the humanities.

At the same time, more work needs to be done in thinking about the digital humanities from the perspective of the work we need to do to produce culturally literate and critically savvy—that is, not-dumb— undergraduate students. To date, discussion concerning undergraduate pedagogy within the digital humanities community remains limited and scattered. For instance, a search for the word “undergraduate” in the past five years of abstracts from the Digital Humanities annual conference (or the joint ACH/ALLC conference) shows that there have been less than five presentations specifically concerning undergraduate pedagogy (Jessop 2005; Mahony 2008; Keating, et al. 2009). This trend may be linked to the notion that an undergraduate curriculum is more about teaching and less about research (Smedt, et al. 16), but this answer is reductive if not partially untrue. At the same time, if we believe that the work digital humanists do “can help us to be more humanistic than before” (Busa 89), why isn’t there more discussion within the DH conference and publications about this essential aspect of undergraduate study?

This impression, that undergraduate studies are not well discussed within the digital humanities community, is part and parcel with the fact that it is a field or mode of study or methodology of knowledge inquiry and production that engages a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. It is a field that is represented by programs of study that are inflected by, but not necessarily called, Digital Humanities. While the website at Kings College still touts itself as “one of the very few academic institutions in the world where the digital humanities may be pursued as part of a degree” in undergraduate studies—a fact that is largely still true—but there are many programs without formal degrees where important pedagogy concerning digital culture happens.

This piece represents a movement to engage further (both in terms of more and deeper) discussion about undergraduate education in the digital humanities by creating a working bibliography of undergraduate curricula and programs at http://www.palms.wordherders.net/wp/2009/11/digital-humanities-inflected-undergraduate-programs-2/. Currently, Willard McCarty and Matthew Kirschenbaum’s list of “Institutional models for humanities computing” (http://www.allc.org/imhc/) (a precursor or coterminous name for digital humanities) is extensive, but it does not include an updated account of specifically undergraduate programs.[ii] The list included here includes a snapshot of a working, updated and annotated bibliography of current undergraduate programs that are inflected by the digital humanities. This annotated bibliography is being developed as the result of ongoing discussions with a disperse community (called to arms on Twitter, on the Humanist Discussion List, at THATcamp Prime 2010, and at Digital Humanities 2010), it reflects a wide range of programs that the community has itself defined as “inflected by digital humanities.” By an informal survey conducted on Twitter, and the blog U+2E19.

The fact that the list already includes a broad range of programs encompassing information science, digital cultures, new media, and computer science reflects the difficult nature of training an undergraduate student in the “methodological commons” (McCarty 131) of the digital humanities, but it also reflects the provocative nature of describing what that curriculum might look like. According to Unsworth, “the semantic web is our future, and it will require formal representations of the human record” requiring “training in the humanities, but also in elements of mathematics, logic, engineering, and computer science” (Unsworth). Patrik Svensson sees work in the digital humanities as a kind part of a spectrum “from textual analysis of medieval texts and establishment of metadata schemes to the production of alternative computer games and artistic readings of nanotechnology” (Svensson). Smedt and his colleagues choose to limit their definition of digital humanities undergraduate programs in order “to concentrate on computing and to avoid the fields of information, communication, media, and multimedia since these are generally considered as social sciences rather than as humanities” (16). Just as asking the question “What is Humanities Computing and what is not?” (Unsworth) generates more questions, asking the community to identify programs inflected by the digital humanities is sure to provoke more discussion concerning existing models. What is important to teach these students? What is the core knowledge base needed?

When discussing current models, it is equally important to make transparent the institutional and infrastructural issues that are specific to certain universities. What works for one institution will not necessarily work for another. By the same token, simply providing examples of existing programs would belie the extent to which scholars and administrators shape these programs (whether they grant degrees, certificates, or nothing at all) according to the needs of their specific communities. Consequently, in order to make these matters transparent and broaden discussion about the broad range of issues that underpin the formation of an undergraduate curriculum, I am also disseminating a survey to the digital humanities community asking basic questions concerning how an undergraduate program inflected by the digital humanities has been and might be developed within a variety of university settings. These questions are based on previous conversations (Hockey 2001; Unsworth, Butler 2001), but this previous work has focused primarily on graduate (or post-graduate) work. In my attempt to update the conversation with a focus on undergraduate study, I incorporate questions that concern curriculum and questions which point to infrastructural and institutional concerns that are specific to undergraduate education:

  1. What are the aims and objectives of your undergraduate program?
  2. How is the academic content of the program structured? What are the core modules/courses?
  3. What are the academic backgrounds of students accepted for the program? Are there any particular requirements?
  4. Does the program involve participation in research projects at area institutions or centers? If so, what factors influence which projects are chosen? How is participation monitored and assessed?
  5. What is the program’s relationship to the larger undergraduate community? Does the program include events, publications, or other opportunities for outreach? Does the program include a residential component, or other opportunities for community building?
  6. Does the program grant a certificate or degree? What are the key issues in establishing a certificate or degree for students in your program?
  7. How does the program fit into the overall structure of the institution?
  8. Are there classes already being taught at your institution? What are the key issues in bringing these classes together under the rubric of a single curriculum?
  9. What technical facilities are needed for the program and how are these supported?

10.  What are other important infrastructural issues and challenges in setting up a program within your institution?

Baeurlein complains that undergraduates are passive consumers of “information,” that they convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information,” information that becomes, quite simply, “material to retrieve and pass along” (“Online Literacy”). In contrast, Wendell Piez and other digital humanities scholars insist that when we study “how digital media are encoded . . . and how they encode culture in words, colors, sounds, images, and instrumentation,” we are “far from having no more need for literacy” (“Something Called ‘Digital Humanities’”). In fact, “being symbolic constructs arranged to work within algorithmic, machine-mediated processes that are themselves a form of cultural production,” the cultural work of encoding and designing for digital media requires that students “raise it to ever higher levels” (Piez). A glance just at the last ten years of the journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing, the abstracts from the annual Digital Humanities conference, and the first issues of the Digital Humanities Quarterly prove that the digital humanities community has worked hard to create these encoded resources. In addition, scholars in the digital humanities are already teaching the next generation of students not only how to use electronic resources, but how to create them, expand them, and preserve them. Now is the time to make that work transparent and to provide a resource for others who wish to continue, broaden, and support this work.

Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008. Print.

–. “Introduction.” The Dumbest Generation. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

–. “Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind.” 19 September 2008. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

Birkerts, Sven. “Resisting the Kindle.” Atlantic Monthly. 2 March 2009. Web. 15 Nov 2009.

Burnard, Lou. “Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline? or, Why Humanities Computing Matters.” 1999. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

Busa, Roberto. “The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus.” Computers and the Humanities 14 (1980): 83-90.  Print.

Hockey, Susan. “MA Programmes for Humanities Computing and Digital Media.” New York University, 2001. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

“The Humanities Computing Curriculum: The Computing Curriculum in the Arts and Humanities,” Malaspina University College, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. November 9-10, 2001. Web. 15 Nov 2009.

Jessop, Martyn. “In Search of Humanities Computing in Teaching, Learning and Research.” The International Conference on Humanities Computing and Digital Scholarship, The 17th Joint International Conference: Conference Abstracts (2nd Edition). 91-93. Web. 15 Nov 2009.

–. “undergrad programmes.” Humanist Discussion Group. 27 Oct 2009. n. pag. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

Keating, John J., Aja Teehan, Thomas Byrne. “Delivering a Humanities Computing Module at Undergraduate Level: A Case Study.” Digital Humanities 2009 Conference Abstracts 167-169. Web. 15 Nov 2009.

Mahony, Simon. “An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Building Learning Communities Within the Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities 2008 Conference Abstracts 149-151. Web. 15 Nov 2009.

Mangen, Anne. “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion.” Journal of Research in Reading. 31.4 2008. Print.

McCarty, Willard. “New Splashings In The Old Pond: The Cohesibility Of Humanities Computing.” 16. October 2002. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. n. pag. 15 Nov 2009. Web.

McCarty, Willard and Matthew Kirschenbaum. “Institutional models for humanities computing” 12 Dec 2003. Web. 15 Nov 2009.

Nowviskie, B. and Unsworth, J., eds. Is humanities computing an academic discipline? An interdisciplinary seminar. University of Virginia, Autumn 1999. Print.

Piez, Wendell. “Something Called ‘Digital Humanities’.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. 2.1: 2008. n. pag. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

Orlandi, Tito. Is Humanities Computing a Discipline? 17 May 2002. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. n. pag. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

Unsworth, J. and Butler, T. “A Masters Degree in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia.” Session, ACH-ALLC2001, New York University, June 13-16, 2001. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

de Smedt, Koenraad. “Some Reflections on Studies in Humanities Computing.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 17.1 (2002): 89-101. Print.

Smedt, Konrad, Hazel Gardiner, Espen Ore, Tito Orlandi, Harold Short, Jacques Souilliot and William Vaughan (eds). Computing in Humanities Education: A European Perspective. Bergen: University of Bergen, 1999. Print.

Svensson, Patrik. “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. 3.3 (2009): n. pag. Web. 11 Nov 2009.

Terras, Melissa. “Disciplined: Using Curriculum Studies to Define ‘Humanities Computing Abstracts ACH/ALLC 2005. 15 Nov 2009. Web.

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. “The New Knowledge Management and Online Research and Publishing in the Humanities.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.1 (2001). Print.

Unsworth, John. “What is Humanities Computing and What is not?” The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. 2002. n. pag. Web. 11 Nov 2009.


[i] Please see www.dumbestgeneration.com/home.html.

[ii] At the time of this writing, Martyn Jessop has written in the Humanist Discussion Group to clarify: “Sadly the . . . minor at King’s College London has been closed down” though they “still operate ‘standalone’ modules in digital humanities for 1st and 2nd year students” (Jessop 2009).

Baroness Ilsa and Elsa

January 6th, 2010

In the vain vein of keeping up with all things Elsa, I’m going to add this person who calls herself the baroness ilsa von freytag-loringhovnon on LiveJournal:
http://rozele.livejournal.com/profile
Yet another person who takes on the Baroness’s identity as inspiration to create.

On a side note, I got some interesting feedback for my presentation at MLA this year on the Baroness. The panel went well, I thought, and the bulk of the presentation is here at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mla2009/clement.

The interesting comment I got (the name of the person who made the comment escapes me so if you are out there comment-guy please let me know. I have a feeling his name is Jason but not of the Rhody type) was that I should somehow show textual performance by putting the text in performance, by making the text actually fly.

fountain

April 6th, 2006



fountain

Originally uploaded by TanyaClement.

Here she is at the World War II memorial. You’d have thunk the thing was made of fishy crackers the way she wowed it. It was all I could do to keep her from running to it–thankfully, she just sat down in front of it, patted the ground and said, “Sit, Mommy! Sit.”

sunglasses

April 6th, 2006



sunglasses

Originally uploaded by TanyaClement.

Isabela decided that she would wear Mommy’s glasses when we went down to see the Cherry Blossoms. Of course, she wasn’t satisfied unless I was also wearing hers. Unfortunately, she’s still too young to take pictures . . .

Sorry guys

January 18th, 2006

But COME on! Leave it to a group of men to decide that kidnapping the prime minister’s son is the appropriate response to restricted rights for fathers:

London — A fathers rights group known for breaching security said Wednesday police had warned its members they could be shot if they came near Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office amid reports of a plot to kidnap his five-year-old son as a publicity stunt.

Jesus! A kidnapping plot and a shoot-out? Mothers would probably have some sort of knit/sit-in (with good snacks to boot).
On the other hand, the previous antics of “Fathers 4 Justice” do seem a little more “stay-at-home-Dadish”:

Baking: In May 2004, two activists hurled bags of purple flour at Blair inside the House of Commons chamber, prompting a security alert.
Groceries:In April 2005, two members hurled eggs at Blair’s car as he left a campaign rally.
Dress-up:An activist also has scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace dressed as Batman,
Put-the-kid-to-bed-nightime-keep-the marriage-alive games: while another member handcuffed himself to a government minister.

The ‘Death’ of the Scholarly Edition

October 13th, 2005

So, you know how Barthes and Foucault exploded our notions of author? And Barthes and Derrida took on the text? And Judith Butler informed us that gender and sexuality are constructions? I’m here to tell you that there is no such thing as the scholarly edition. It’s true. I swear. This may rock your world, but the scholarly edition is DEAD.