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Via Transversalinflections I learned about Re.Press, an Australian publisher of Open Access titles in Philosophy. Their business model is based on a free Open Access edition in combination with print sales, the model at the moment many presses are experimenting with (amongst others: Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers, National Academies Press, fellow Australians ANU E Press, Rice University Press, AU Press, and Bloomsbury Academic.
Re.Press already established a wonderful collection of titles, amongst others The concept of model by Alain Badiou, Graham Harman’s new book on Bruno Latour and forthcoming titels on Walter Benjamin and on first love by Sigi Jöttkandt, also co-founder of Open Humanities Press. I especially like Re.Press’s statement from their website:
“In line with this ambition, re.press is itself a new kind of publisher. Attentive to the latest developments in contemporary technologies, re.press publications are available globally, wherever there is access to the internet. We seek to make as many of our publications as possible available as open-access files, free to anyone who wishes to download them. Our hard-copy books are print-on-demand, minimizing waste and cost. Yet our publications also maximize design values, boosting clarity and aesthetic qualities.”
They clearly state in there Open Access policy that they believe, as I concur, that the digital and the print fulfill different functions (at least will do so for the time being) making it possible for them to thrive side-by-side. And this dual existence can even strengthen (traditional) Humanities/Philosophy publishing and scholarly communication :
“Our academic titles are published under an open access licence ensuring 
the greatest possible exposure for our authors’ work through the almost unrestricted distribution channels of the internet. This does not mean that re.press is a digital publisher: we are a publisher of ‘real’ books that are available in bricks and mortar booksellers (as well as on-line retailers). However, our open access titles are also available free of charge in digital form. We do not consider the digital version a replacement for the physical book. On the contrary, we believe that the two mediums perform different functions, offering the best of both worlds. In fact, it is our hope that open access publishing will strengthen traditional publishing and scholarship more broadly by releasing ideas and thinkers from the constraints of the market. You can support our endeavour to make our books widely available as open access titles by encouraging your library to buy a print edition (from the usual sources) or by buying one yourself.”
Via the Re-press link section I discovered another very interesting ‘Ópen Access’ initiative, to be more precise, a record company, called Records on Ribs. They actually seem to bring into practice the Maecenas model I described before (and up to now thought to be kind of hypothetical): they give away their music for free (with Creative Commons licenses) and offer deluxe editions for sale and hope that community support will generate some extra revenues. So they actually take donations targeting the ‘good-music-loving-and-supporting hearts of their community.
I love their manifesto so I am going to publish that integrally here now. Read and weep:
Manifesto
Records on Ribs gives away it’s music for free. Records on Ribs is against nothing. We are not here ‘in reaction’ to anything. We are merely putting into practice what we believe. And this is what we believe… To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets. Desire cannot be quantified thusly. Tapes, CD-Rs and the internet give us the opportunity to distribute music for free without losing significant sums of money.
Anyone could do what we are doing. A free for all. Brilliance obscured by an avalanche of mundanity.
So what? There is an avalanche of mundanity already in the shops, and it costs you £9.99 a go.
We only ask that you listen with open hearts and minds. And if one hundred, one thousand, one million people want to do the same as us then good luck to them. What a world that would be! Desire freed from profit.
We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received.
You can also buy lovingly crafted CD-Rs of our albums (made to order). We like to think they are objects worth owning, because we know you are all commodity fetishists when it comes to music, and an MP3 isn’t quite the same. We are hoping to do vinyl one day in the future.
All the best
The Records On Ribs Team
Are there more record companies working with such a model I wonder? And does it work, does it create enough revenue to be sustainable?
Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery. Her latest book Scholarship in the Digital Age, was an indispensable resource for me when writing my Master’s thesis on the Scholarly Communication System and Open Access.
So I was really glad I found this lecture (which I can’t embed, sorry) by Christine Borgman online, in which she discusses most of her main topics: cyberinfrastructure and e-science, Open Access, the data deluge, collaborations and intellectual property and the scholarly communication value chain. The lecture is entitled Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, and was delivered at Columbia University.
I also found, via Open Access News, this podcast with Alma Swan, Key Perspectives main consultant on Open Access, Scholarly Communication and Academic Publishing. In this podcast, conducted by Sara Bartlett from Talis, she discusses amongst others the current state and difficulties concerning e-books or digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the main subject of my current research for the OAPEN project. I especially like the way she recommends in the end that we need to stop the ‘pillarization’ in the Open Access focus, as OA journals, OA books and OA data are mainly targeted as separate issues by separate initiatives, whilst they need to be combined to create a truly interconnected collaborative scholarship.
Alma Swan also maintains a weblog, Optimal Scholarship and has been interviewed before by Richard Poynder. You can find that interview here.
Anne Frances Wysocki already created the webtext or new media piece A Bookling Monument in 2002. Still, it amazed me. The manner in which Wysocki tries to grapple the similarities between the way we view and envision the body and the book, combining this with a visual presentation of her text (which is an exploration of the senses itself) suits the context, the subject and the transitional process she is concurrently describing, perfectly. I also love the way she writes in a ‘tasting’ way, trying to grasp ideas, juxtaposing them with others, sometimes only putting some quotes next to one another, almost trying to create a virtual discussions between the texts she reflects upon and her own thoughts. And I like the way she asks questions way more than she gives statements or conclusions. Her text is like thinking in or as a process and the conclusions she reaches are mere reflections on this process, very insightful reflections that is.
Wysocki combines the idea or the philosophy of thinking about the body and body politics to the way we handle on, interact with and think about (the materiality of) books. Where the book is a carrier of or for words, the body is also a carrier, it can be seen as a place where meaning and context is inscribed in or subscribed too. Politics are inscribed upon the body. Wysocki compares the thoughts of Don Idhe, who states that there are two bodies (or ‘twinned senses’ of our body), the existential body as a precondition and the second body on which meaning is written, with those of Judith Butler, who argues that body and politics are one, for language or discourse already inscribe their materiality on the body, making it impossible to separate the two. Discourse is here seen as a process: our bodies are formed and inscribed upon in the process of discourse, it is not an object but something in flux, in continual transition. Wysocki quotes Butler saying that ‘discourse is a constitutive condition for matter’. Wysocki then uses their (Idhe’s and Butler’s) positions to reflect upon the book:
“Perhaps, then, looking at the body, as a mix of matter and overlaid culture is book-looking; conceptualizing the body as materialized ing through the processes of discourse is more appropriately digital. Perhaps.”
Wysocki argues that our technologies and representations are networked, not falling into the trap of technological determinism for which McLuhan is well known, but for the mutual influence of both on each other. For her there is no causal relationship. She compares “the medium” with the body, inside and outside, the words, the text as the inside, the book as the body, the exteriority.
“The book – pages contained within a cover – is thus a metonym for a particular sense of self: there is the visibly fleshed body containing (and so shaping) the thoughtful interiority visibly fixed within.”
Text on screens, be they ebooks or webtexts, are not static, but fluid, changing. Maybe, Wysocki says, we should look at our bodies also from this perspective of movement. Our thinking also does not resolve around fixed objects but around relations between objects. Our way of seeing of thinking changes in the digital realm as does our thinking about ourselves. However, this is still very much connected, as is with the book, to the ways of seeing and thinking we were used to. Wysocki thus states that “the image of the self [is] made in the image of the text”. We (have learned to) see each other as books as fixed objects, with meaning inside. But the book is also in transition
“But the book is now an unmoving monument in a world that appears to be becoming all moving, Virilio’s speed, Castell’s flows, Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages, Butler’s materializings and performings.”
Our ways of seeing and our memory of how we should see, think, act is not comfortable in this new potential other and more offering digital world. Can we learn to see otherwise, Wysocki asks? It is maybe time for experimenting with other representations, which might be uncomfortable for our old ways of seeing, and memorizing but that might eventually satisfy all our senses. Wysocki wants to explore how we use the screen, how we represent on it. How is it comfortable or uncomfortable to our memory practice of what these things pertain? And how does this again relate to our perceptions of ourselves, as Wysocki states “Our relations to ourselves and bodies are very much dependent on how we see in relation to books.”
The book is also being remediated in the digital realm. The screen, the computer is more immediate, more drawing into the ‘real’ a closer representation of the real. Wysocki reflects upon this issue of the image vs. the word, of textual memory vs. visual memory, on the way our brain works when assessing both these media and thus also influences our perception of self. She questions whether screens are more immediate then books, she says we are in some ways lost between these two worlds, the world of the book and the world of the screen and in this transitory phase we are also at loss about our identity, in ever flux and continuously processual.
But Wysocki does not want to leave the book behind in this other dimension; she wants it to change, to adapt itself:
“In all my new media examples, the book is not being left behind; it is instead being asked to change, to contain a less orderly, less fixed set of characteristics than previously seen as possible.”
She produced four ‘new media pieces’ transcending art and science ‘that challenge the old ways of looking at and thinking about the book and the relationship of the book to ourselves and the way we look at our bodies’.
What kind of discomforts do these multimedia books encounter us with as they loose their fixity and the way we are used to interact with them and integrate multimedia, fluidity and the screen into our memory practices? We are now in a stage in which we are experimenting with “blending book and digital subjectivity”. Should we hold on to books of fixed containers, containing something? Do we need to learn to see differently or should we hold on to both ways of seeing?
As stated above, Wysocki uses quotes and excerpts off texts from book historians, new media theorists, philosophers and literary writers and combines these with her own comments and reflections thereof. She combines the quotes and the thinkers by using different ‘screens’ to bring them together, creating contexts. These screens all represent parts of the body (mouth, hands, figure, skin, hair) and parts of books and screens (paper, printed books, pages) In this way her work is multilayered and also multi-approachable, although it follows a logical route (from left to right, top to bottom, as our memory has learned us to approach a book and a text. This path is however not fixed nor necessary and there is also a lot to explore, things that can be missed and found, making the text not a fixed object but one that is different every time you access it, and you can access it from different places and different contexts.
Another example of a narrative that is different every time you access it is Rhythm Science, from Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. On the website it says:
“Rhythm Science is a text organized around synchronicities, mirror imagings, circularities, repetitions, loops, and spirals. Miller combines and recombines autobiography, history, theory, and practice. He entreats readers to try out their own recombinations: “Dig beneath what lies on the surface only to arrive where you started. It’s a circular logic, a database logic,” Miller intones.”
I am at the moment reading Rhythm Science and will be reflecting on it soon.
By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution
Paradiso was enlightened last Sunday by the presence of a true Digital Media apostle: Lev Manovich, the renowned professor of Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, came to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics. His lecture was part of a one day conference, Archive 2020, organized by the Dutch expertise centre for e-culture, Virtueel Platform.
Manovich used the intriguing title Activating the archive or data dandy meets data mining, in which he referenced Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink who previously described the fetish of data collection by individuals and institutions. Manovich’s talk centered on the massive digitization efforts of existing cultural assets by institutions all over the world, from ARTstor to Google Books and BBC motion gallery (and even China’s CCTV). As Manovich argues, no human being will ever be able to keep track of all this data. However increasingly measures are taken in which the digital preservation of cultural assets is turning into an obligatory act (hence the fetish reference). Moreover this institutionalized digitization is accompanied since, let’s say 2005, by the rise of huge amounts of user generated content. As Manovich mentions, the number of images uploaded every week to Flickr is likely to be larger than all objects contained in all art museums of the world. This development sees a parallel expansion of the professional cultural universe. This rapid growth of a professional universe can mainly be seen in newly globalized countries foremost due to the growth of software tools which made for the instant availability of cultural news. Everyone now has access to the same ideas, information and tools: there are no more centers and provinces. Manovich even argues that the students, cultural professionals and governments in newly globalized countries are often more ready to embrace the latest ideas than their equivalents in the “old centers” of the world.
By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution
All in all this has lead to an explosive growth of cultural production. This has again lead to some intriguing questions and problems: “What does it mean to be a (video) artist today and what does it mean to do cultural criticism in such a world of superabundance? Before cultural theorists and historians generated theories and concepts about relative small data sets. But how can you track “global digital cultures” with billions of cultural objects? As Manovich argues, we need some new methods to track these developments in our cultural imagination. We need a new methodology for the study of cultural processes and artifacts – including cultural production, sharing and consumption. As Manovich explains, to analyze large cultural data sets of cultural information we can apply tools already employed in the sciences to analyze big data. We can create interactive visualizations and dynamic maps of large cultural data sets to find new patterns – and to generate new theoretical questions. Traditional boundaries disappear as visualization can be seen as esthetic statements about the world, so as forms of art (see for instance Stefanie Posavec’s literary organism). Forms of cultural data mining are already starting to rise up as we are slowly shifting from a world of new media into a world of “more media”. In this respect Manovich states ‘culture has become data’. This data (including media content and people’s creative and social activity around this content, i.e. social media) can be and will be mined and visualized.
Manovich explains his new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’ as the use of data mining and interactive visualizations of large sets of cultural data in the humanities context. Manovich introduced the idea of cultural analytics first in 2005 and you can find more information about this method at softwarestudies.com.
Manovich argues that if you have an interesting idea today, you can be sure someone has the same idea somewhere else. Thus it makes no more sense to experience and study these single events. We need to start studying trends and patterns in culture instead of individual projects of ideas and concepts. We need to look at these projects in a larger context of global cultural production.
But how do you put this in practice? We need to represent and work with individual cultural objects and then work to larger and larger datasets. The key differences between existing work in culture visualization and Manovich’s approach, lies in the fact that most research projects now are driven by the existing data. Manovich wants to create techniques which can be used for much larger data sets. In contrast his methodology uses the computational analysis to generate new metadata. In this way one now creates the metadata around the objects, not the patterns inside. Manovich proposes to appropriate software from hard sciences and use them to look at work of arts and cultural works.
He gives examples of a few research projects he has worked on focusing on modern art. You can for example use software to analyze large datatsets of paintings. In this way a computer can ‘see’ whether a painting is realist or modernist (by measuring grayscale, particles, forms etc). Along these lines you can analyze the development of visual culture over time. By means of image processing you can describe the paintings qualitatively in terms of numbers. We can now make new distinctions on the basis of these outcomes; a trend line. In this way one generates new questions. As Manovich states, this method is not about answering old questions. Instead it offers new visions concerning the development of modernism from realism to modernism.
Manovich did a similar project which analyzed 165 paintings by Mark Rothko using a visual super computer to extract computational data. These are all examples of easier and sometimes more productive ways to look at culture. We can get a lot of data from these methods, Manovich says. Also, born digital media is highly interactive, and it is easy to record user interaction and user statistics. We can now use these techniques to ask different questions. This could be very interesting for, for instance, reception theory; we can now analyze the actual patterns of interaction with culture.
Manovich also expanded his analysis to movies, analyzing the variance in shot lengths in movies showing a “development over time”. The average shot length of feature films between 1900-2008 gives some interesting insides into the differences in cultural history in different countries, comparing France, the Soviet Union, the US etc. (in which the Russians proved most extreme or avant-garde prone with Vertov at the one extreme and Tarkovksi at the other…).
These kind of tools would also be able to ‘go around’ the canon. Where in normal science the focus is mostly on the canon, now we can do art history about larger contexts. But unfortunately it is mostly the canon that has been digitized. We should thus expand the canon in our digitization efforts, argues Manovich. But we can not archive everything…Therefore Manovich states we should archive equal amounts of ‘important’ canonical art and ‘random art’ to balance, in his words, ‘the important stuff wit the non important stuff’.
The critique of the audience focused mainly on the problem of how one can quantify qualitative issues? For Manovich seems to propose a shift from qualitative to quantitative analysis. As Manovich replied, quite pragmatically: it is going to happen anyway, it is what social scientists are doing. With these techniques we can do more than with a simple manually descriptive qualitative analysis. For computers can analyze things we cannot: they can find similarities and differences in similar and likely objects. And in a way the question stays ‘how do we see?’ The brain is also a kind of computer, Manovich says. Do we analyze that different from a computer?
But, on the other hand, won’t we loose a sense of meaning if we analyze culture like a thing? Manovich argues that this is of course a complementary method, we should not throw away our other ways of establishing meaning. It is a way of expanding them. And it is also an important expansion, for how is one going to ask about the meaning of large datasets? We need to combine the traditionally humanities approach of interpretation with digital techniques to find out more. And again, meaning is not the only thing to look at. It is also about creating an experience. Patterns are the new real of our society.
You can find an interview with Lev Manovich held by Virtueel Platform here and an article explaining cultural analytics here.
For some time now (and more pressing recently) I have been exploring the possible future of the monograph, of the academic book, in the Humanities. The transition of this tangible medium to a digital environment is one that is (necessarily) slow and cumbersome, due to its strong ties to traditions, habits, practices and honor and reward systems in the aforementioned scholarly field. But also the fixity of the text and the easy practicality of the codex format are factors that have to be taken into consideration when thinking about the benefits of the printed book. How can we make a smooth shift, how can we ensure an easy transition for the monograph from print to digital, without loosing these obvious advantages?
There are quite some experiments going on online in the field (or rather the discipline) of ‘Digital Humanities’. When it comes to adapting the academic book to the web I distinguish three forms of adaptations (each link leads to an example):
These are very broad categories of course but let me explain the logic behind these divisions. The first focuses mainly on experiments with the format, using the possibilities of new digital media tools to present the text in a multi-medial, modal, in different ways approachable manner. The second is an example of new ways of collaboration and internal cooperation of Humanities scholars online. The third example shows how connections can also be made with the community at large, with the wider network of scholars, students and otherwise interested readers. It offers an outreach to a wider community.
All three are also examples of ‘remix practice’ or of remix culture:
- mixing of media
- mixing of ‘authored texts’ within a formal communication context
- mixing of ‘user generated content’ within an informal communication
context
All three different categorization can be seen as new ways of expanding the narrative of the monograph in a ‘remixed’ manner or fashion. The stable form of the text based version gets challenged by the input of ‘foreign’ elements, be they from other narratives, other voices or other discourses. These elements are then inserted (or not really ‘inserted’ as they have increasingly been part of the creation process from the start) into the narration in a continual manner, melting together into a new never-ending ever-updateable ‘form’. We can also go beyond these categorizations, where there is the possibility to include all three forms of experimentation in one ‘digital humanities project’ or ‘publication’: a web-based wiki-shaped networked narrative. Will this be the future of digital scholarship in the Humanities?
All three forms of experimentation still offer the possibility to create or extract a ‘solid form’, a stable published text, whilst at the same time they give an increased insight into knowledge creation, into the process of Humanities scholarship and communication as it grows and forms and gathers strength and form. In this way these experiments form a beautiful bridge between product and process, between the old and the new, between print and digital, holding on to the best of the print past and the possibilities of the digital future. Monographic experiments as a new monographic potentiality.
“Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution.” – A Digital Humanities Manifesto
As I am at the moment researching new forms of scholarly communication in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the context of remix theory, closely connected also to the concepts of repetition and representation which I discussed (or rather struggled with) here and here, I found this project called Remediating the Canons which is using different kinds of media, texts, mappings and web routes in a collaborative approach, to explore new ways of knowledge dissemination. The little movie underneath, entitled “Inventing/Producing Columbus: A New Humanities Remix” made by Shannon Mondor and Angela Rounsaville, is actually a form of remix and a mashup (or as they call it a response video) of core texts of the aforementioned project in an attempt to explore some of the main concepts it uses, also trying to catch the process of incorporating and adapting these kind of concepts into a more finalized structure, thus trying to capture knowledge production as a process. You can find more information about the way the movie was set up and devised and the underlying thoughts and processes that resulted in its becoming here.
Long overdue, here are my notes on the second day of the colloquium Text Comparison and Digital Creativity.
The day started with key note speaker Bella Hass Weinberg who stressed the point that even in the digital era the creativity of text comparison still lies with the researcher. She states: much of the research done concerning text comparison in the pre-computer era cannot be done by a computer. Translation involves hermeneutics, which means that text comparison is about interpretation, not just about linguistics. One of the main questions thus remains: when we analyze texts, what comes first: semantics or linguistics? Weinberg says semantics. When it comes to computers and text comparison, there are still big problems with machine translations and machine comparison of texts because this assumes the perfection of OCR. OCR can work for clearly demarcated letters, it does not work well for scripts that have different shapes according to the position they take in the word. Weinberg goes on to argue that many centuries earlier there was already very sophisticated text comparison without the aid of computers. She thus asks, ‘what can we do with the computer now that we could not do before?’ Computers have facilitated analysis, but in counting and comparing as a basic feature, not for the rest.
Unfortunately, Weinberg only discussed the current state of affairs in ICT and text comparison without contemplating the possible future developments. The next session, however, tried to show what kind of new developments have been made within the digital realm to assist textual comparison. Vika Zafrin, a digital humanities expert, talked about her research on distributed networks with/in text encoding and annotation. In her definition annotation stretches into hypertext resources such as social tagging (for instance deli.cio.us), blog comments and comments solicited via specialized software. She gave the example of the Virtual Humanities Lab (VHL) from Brown University, which created an annotation tool/engine which functioned as a web based space for collaborative work. Zafrin argued that semantic encoding (for instance, what kinds of elements and attributes to use in a DTD) can also be seen as a form of annotation. She mentioned a tool with the help of which comments can be inserted directly into document schemata. She also mentioned some other digital tools: with Diigo you can highlight and annotate web pages. Zotero is a scholarly annotation tool: you can put notes and tags to your objects in your Zotero library. There are also new developments in media annotating, such as Vertov which allows for the annotating of multimedia files. As Zafrin showed, it seems that scholars are increasingly digging distributed networking. Although there are still issues concerning the credibility of scholarship on the Internet and the amount of quality control, Zafrin argued that internet scholarship has many pros too: it will enable scholars to find each other more easily, so it makes the conversation broader. Increased disciplinarity is also encouraged by distributed networking. Next to that Zafrin noted correctly that distributed networked tools are the only ones available for born-digital content.
Adriaan van der Weel talked about how new media are giving us new perspectives on knowledge production. In the digital era the tissue of our society still stays book based. Van der Weel explained this situation by pointing at the history of the textual medium. For the discovery of what the invention of Gutenberg actually meant, took quite a while. So it will equally take some time to find out what digital textuality actually means. What we did at first was appropriate the computer to the ‘book order’. In this sense digital textuality is still a hybrid since we adapted it to the book. Van der Weel spoke of a gestation period, in which the new medium needs to be both discovered and invented. What are the essential differences between what the computer can do and what we could do before? Important in this respect is that the book as a medium never functionally changed. But the nature of text did change with the change of medium. This is what Van der Weel called medial transformativity: there exist discontinuities between the textual mediums, for each medium has its own bias based in its technical properties. Van der Weel went on to elaborate on some possibilities the computer offers in the process of knowledge dissemination. He concluded by saying that to establish the true nature of digital textuality, we need to recognize that next to the process of discovery (the invention of the digital medium) we still need some time for the process of invention: we humanities scholars need to say what we want from the digital medium. We need to be widely creative and experimental to determine what we want: we need to be inventors.
In the next session Peter Øhrstrøm gave a nice overview of his endeavor to turn a seventeenth century book into a hypertext. The book Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard in which the term ontology was coined for the first time, lends itself perfectly for this because of its extensive use of dichotomies. Øhrstrøm argued that the representation of Lorhard’s ontology using modern hypertext provides a better and deeper understanding and overview of the history of ontology, Lorhard’s ideas of knowledge and knowledge organization and Lorhard’s use of ideas from other writers. Ben Salemans delved deeper into the question whether ICT can be seen as a methodological innovation: does it speed up new techniques or does it create a new domain of techniques? Although he remarked these are of course more questions for philosophy of science, he does argue that forms of ‘deductive’ science can also be helped by the computer. Finally John Lavagnino talked about the possibility of systematic emendation and the help of ICT.
Wido van Peursen and Ernst Thoutenhoofd closed the day with their lecture about current and future text comparison and digital creativity, which also served as a wrap up and summary of the colloquium. As they argued, digital creativity is in principle a paradox. The digital stands for calculation and sorting where creativity stands for unpredictability and subjectivity. But digital creativity can also be seen as the ingenuity of human beings to create algorithms for the processing of language. A second paradox can be seen between presence (materiality, ‘what meaning cannot convey’, textual carriers, physics) and meaning (interpretation, attribution of meaning, texts and meta-physics). Van Peursen argued that there has been an increased interest in the material carriers of text, connected to the technological innovations. There are however challenges to the use of the computer in interpretation. The question is: what does the computer contribute to our interpretation of the text? A third paradox exists between scholarly (interpretation, analysis and subjective) and scientific (sort, quantify etc.) research. Does the computer thus give text comparison a more ‘scientific’ character? To some extent it does, but Van Peursen also argued that scholarly judgment and experience are still needed. Finally, he asked whether we only imitate the classical instruments or whether we also develop new research strategies. In this respect it seems that there is a process going on of both continuation and innovation, where the developments in knowledge creation and representation seem both to revolve around the reconsideration of notions like data, information and knowledge. We seem to be heading towards new forms of collaborative knowledge creation and in this way we are now in a transitional phase between the order of the book and the digital order.
Ernst Thoutenhoofd ends the lecture with a short exploration of the notion of presence in virtual environments like Second Life, in which the experience of reality can be seen as a strictly cognitive event. Where in a sense all reality is virtual, the computer can serve the same function as reality, which is the mediation of presence. All our types of knowledge are also mediated and our experiences are also constantly being mediated. In this way the humanities can be seen as a mediation field. And this is something the humanities need to remember; we are not only studying our world but we are studying ourselves or the interactions between ourselves and our world in which we create each other in the same time.
Last Thursday and Friday the two day colloquium ‘Text comparison and digital creativity’ was held at the KNAW, as part of its 200th anniversary year. The symposium was a joint initiative from the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS) and the Leiden based Turgama project. For more information on both organizers simply follow the links.
One of the main points of the colloquium was the paradox of digital creativity. The digital stands for the objective, calculative ‘scientific’ method, where creativity stands for subjectivity, interpretation and scholarship. The concept of digital creativity is coupled to the practice of text comparison, leading to the question what the influence of the recent digital developments has been on the field of textual comparison. One of the main questions asked to the speakers was whether ICT developments only lead to a speeding up of the research process or whether it truly introduces new methods of investigation. Moreover, in what sense does the computer affect the creation and representation of knowledge and data?
Another conceptual theme used during the colloquium was the dichotomy of ‘presence’(materiality, ‘physics’) and meaning (meta-physics, interpretation). The question is whether the hegemony of meaning has come under attack by a re-awakened interest in presence, as stated by Wido van Peursen and Ernst Thoutenhoofd in their introductory text to the colloquium. More focused on the topic of the colloquium they raise the question:
How [does] the computational, analytical work done in digital scholarship relate to the subjective moods of interpretation and intuition that characterize traditional philology?¹
Isn’t text comparison becoming more and more like an exact science with the coming of computation? And is it being separated from text interpretation in this respect? Or does interpretation still play an important role in textual comparison?
One of the keynote speakers was David Crystal, who explored the changing nature of text in his lecture, focusing on the emergence of what he coins Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC). In his lecture he compared DMC (looking at both continuities and discontinuities) with other traditional ‘texts’ (speech, writing and sign), by taking a look at the salient features of these mediums of communication. He concludes that although DMC has more properties linked to writing, it deploys properties of both writing and speech. More interesting however is the fact that, as Crystal argues, DMC has lead to the rise of texts with properties that have no written/speech equivalence (he mentions SPAM filters, search engine rankings and moderated/filtered texts), that are multi-authored (Wiki’s) and have no boundaries (texts are never finished). He argues that the salient features of DMC are still for a large part unknown or uncertain, urging for the study of its properties from within linguistics.
The session on texts as artefacts showed how artefacts can be represented or studied using digital technologies. Bruce Zuckerman gave a tour of the InscriptiFact website/database, which offers different ways of searching for the (texts as) artefacts and inscriptions (using a wide range of indexing techniques) and of representations of (texts as) artefacts, using pictures that are for example movable around the screen and searchable themselves. Zuckerman also talked about an experimental feature of the database where artefacts can be viewed under different angles of lighting, using a light dome thus greatly improving their ‘presence’. These techniques, as he argued have led to different levels of interpretation that were not or almost not possible before. Roger Boyle introduced a technique that makes it possible to take a look ‘inside’ paper, which helps with the identification and finding of watermarks. Watermarks can often be unintentional marks of value and time, which can help to establish the attribution and dating of texts. He argues that computer science can and does bring more than a bag of techniques to improve pictures for codicologists, paleographists and papyrologists.
During the session on texts as objects of transmission, David Parker gave a lecture on the virtual Codex Sinaiticus, which in its original form is scattered around different locations. Four partner institutions are now working together in creating a virtual CS. Parker explored the similarities and differences between the ancient production and its electronic reproduction. Ulrich Schmid gave a kind of similar lecture about his endeavors with transmitting the New Testament online, exploring specifically the question how the digital medium can help us facing challenges in text editing, while also seeing a lot of challenges still surrounding the creation of a fully interactive digital edition (from technical difficulties to platform, preservation and copyright issues).
Eep Talstra’s lecture focused more on philosophical and methodological questions concerning bible study in the digital age. Talstra asked whether we speed up classical techniques, or whether we develop a new domain of techniques for access to classical texts. Basically he asks the question how to use computer technology in the domain of Bible and Philology. For in the study of classical texts three layers of text analysis come together: text as a literary composition, as a linguistic structure and as a source for the study of language. Can computer assisted textual analysis help us to do justice to the three layers present in the classical data, more than classical tools could do for us?
Mats Dahlström explored the issue of scholarly editions and editing. Are they just recordings of matters of fact? In this respect he mentions one of the biggest tensions in scholarly editing, namely the tension between different scholarly and scientific ideals: are scholarly editions a representation of facts or interpretations? He argues that in this respect the pattern of conflicts is not medium specific; it is rather a general trait of textual transmission. The new medium will not do the tensions away; it will in some cases even enhance them, in which Dahlström sees similarities between the tensions in library digitization and in scholarly editing, which he goes on to compare during the rest of his lecture.
Some of the main points made during the first day were that technology should serve as a tool for the scholar/scientist, not the other way around, and that Humanists should be proactive in their demands towards technological implementations. There should be a dialogue between implementation from above and humanities input from below.
More on Day II of the colloquium will follow shortly.
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