Word Cloud: Thomas Jefferson

The book that I found on HathiTrust is simply titled “Thomas Jefferson,” by John T. Morse.  The interesting thing about this book is that it was written in 1899 — most biographies about presidents that we get our hands on today are written by modern day historians and history-enthusiasts, so I thought it might be extremely interesting to read up on my favorite president sometime through the lens of an individual who was not nearly as far-removed from the events of Jefferson’s day.  He and others probably even made slightly different interpretations about historical events than we might make today. The words in this cloud have been pulled from a section in Chapter 2 in which Morse discusses Jefferson’s first experience in the House of Burgesses.

Word Cloud: Wilson Diary

I searched through all my research material, reference material, class material, and I found everything was in PDF. I see this as an illustration of the long delay in moving to “born-digital” material within the academia. So I settled on converting the month of August from the Wilson Diary Transcript that I finished last semester. To me the word cloud is really revealing, if totally predicable. 

A Wordle of “A Christmas Carol”

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/8303977/A_Wordle_of_%22A_Christmas_Carol%22

I am having trouble showing the picture on here, so I inserted the link. On Hathitrust, I found a 1922 copy of A Christmas Carol in prose by Charles Dickens. I used pages 25 and 28 where Scrooge sees Marley’s face on the knocker and then he sees the ghost of Marley himself in chains.

 

 

HathiTrust Word Cloud

On HathiTrust I was able to find a book titled, Color Picture Guide Book of Washington. I downloaded the file and then chose the section on the Iwo Jima statue (my favorite D.C. area memorial) to create my word cloud on Wordle.

“Iwo Jima Memorial”

For Monday

Post your word cloud and give a little information on what your source is.

Ask a history professor what theories or how theory informs their research and teaching.

WordCloud on Memoranda of the Preston Family

My source was “Memoranda of the Preston Family” by Orlando Brown.  It was originally intended as a pamphlet to be distributed throughout the family.

Digital Theory in the Humanities

In “Thing Theory: Can DH Things be Theories,” Rockwell and Ramsay state that “in the context of history or literary study, ‘theory’ doesn’t predict, but it does explain. It promises deeper understanding of something already given, like historical events. . . ” (77). The humanities definition varies widely from the scientific definition of theory which tries to predict future observations. Explaining historical events and drawing a deeper understanding of them beyond facts, makes up much of what a historian does. As a history major, we have to utilize theory constantly. In my historical methods class with Dr. Thorp, we have been working on a census of Liverpool, England from 1795 to 1796. The sheet gives us a great deal of metadata. It tells us the number of births, burials and marriages and the churches/chapels that they occurred in. We are also given the monthly data for births, marriages, and burials for that year. From here, Dr. Thorp has been challenging us to pull theories and explanations about Liverpool and its population from that data. By taking the data from the census, we have determined that people are coming from the farms to Liverpool and bringing their culture with them because most marriages are occurring in the fall and winter when farmers do not have to work on the fields. We have determined that the living conditions in the city are extremely cramped and small because the burials are highest in the winter. When it is cold, one goes inside to closed quarters, the confined space spreads disease, and disease spreads fastest when there are numerous people living in cramped spaces that we know occurred in the Industrial Revolution. From taking a look at census that is made up of mostly numbers and metadata, we have been able to draw theories from the data and developed a better understanding of what life was like in Liverpool at this time.

The authors suggest that theory in the digital humanities can allow us to develop a method of interpretation that will allow us to see material in a new light. Theory in the digital humanities has the ability to provide a deeper explanation for events. Digital history extends past the theoretical concerns of analog history. McCarty cites Weil in by stating that “’Analogy is an identity of relationships’ not things” (113). McCarty continues to state that digital history and computing “forces a crisis of understanding from which new, more adequate cosmology arises” (114). I have seen theoretical ideas come into action through museum collection sites. I have done a lot of research on bubonic plague artifacts from the collection of the Science Museum, London. The site provides mostly factual information such as the date of the artifact, what it is made out of, and how exactly it would be used. Thus, I have taken the factual information and the artifacts and objects and molded them to my paper about social reactions to the bubonic plague in Europe. I have been using the artifacts as the main backdrop for my paper while using primary documents and secondary sources to provide further evidence to how the artifacts appear to represent social change in Europe.

Week 11: Digital Theory

In it’s most sophisticated form theory represents an intricate framework of self-affirming philosophical principles. But there are far less sophisticated ideological labyrinths to which we may liberally extend the term theory. Assumptions, presumptions, convictions, and beliefs amass in forming the intellectual foundation from which we as individuals, and collectively as societies, operate.

How do you use theory in your history classes? 

It’s difficult for me to define my own theoretical approach to history; it is still somewhat embryonic. I try to approach everything as relative. While that sounds inherently postmodern I don’t consider myself to be as such. Finally, I am equivocally committed to the idea that truth belongs exclusively to the individual.

To what extent do faculty frame their lectures and material with theory? 

The broad definition I provided above implies that everyone possesses and employees a unique set of theories that govern their professional if not their personal life. I am sure that our faculty constructs their lectures on some theoretical foundation. Whether or not they are explicitly conscious of the intellectual underpinnings of their work is dubious. Many of them no doubt assimilated such theories during their own secondary education to such an extent that they are no longer consciously aware of their implications.

What are some prominent theories you have found in your courses?

One theory, which I learned of recently, is the world-systems theory, which originates from sociology as opposed to history. The world-systems theory eschews discussion of nation states as the decisive units of social analysis, in favor of discussion and examination of broader trade relations and technological developments.

What role do the authors suggest for theory in the digital humanities? 

Centrally all the articles this week, “Developing Things, Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,” “This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One,” “A Telescope for the Mind?,” and “Sunset for Ideology,” “Sunset for Methodology?,” attempt to reconcile the definitive nature of computation, and non traditional prototypes, with the relativistic nature of humanities theory. Up to this point, the authors maintain, the digitization of the humanities has been defined—and confined—by platforms and protocols developed by individuals and corporations interested in quantitative rather than qualitative analysis. Jointly the authors advocate for technological innovation lead by humanistic theory.

What are some examples where you have seen these theoretical ideas in action? 

More and more sites are offering tools that allow consumers explore virtual historic space or collections in a manner dictated by the consumer’s own personal interests and whimsy. The work Dr. Cline is doing with the Christiansburg Institute is one example of this.

Does digital history (or the digital humanities) have a different set of theoretical concerns from analog history or humanities?

Digital-humanities are fundamentally different from the practice of analog history or traditional humanities because of the way digital work is developed and disseminated. The discussion presented by Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell is illustrative of this. The very nature of scholarly work has to be redefined to encompass the diversity of contributions made by digital scholars. Not to mention new barometers must be created to measure the success of such projects. So those are concerns unique to digital humanities.

Historical Theory

Prior to reading the Ramsay and Rockwell article, theory was something of a myth.  It was this overarching force that only graduate students had to deal with and, to be honest, a frightening concept in my future.  I believe that I felt this way about theory because I did not understand what it is–a fear of the unknown that kept me ignorant of how I am already learning and applying theory to my studies.  The authors state that, in the humanities, theory does not predict like it does in the sciences but explains (77).  This instantly helped me understand that theory was not something to be afraid of but an integral part of what historians do.  For example, in Dr. Wallenstein’s course on the history of Virginia, he consistently challenges us to determine and explain why and how American society functions the way it does.  The discussion almost always ties back to the same answer:  power.  Therefore (if I’m understanding the definition of theory correctly) that discussion is the formation of a historical theory.  The desire for power encompasses social, economic, cultural, political, and military history in some form.  I can connect this theory to every class I’m in now as well as past and future classes as a lens of analysis, which I consider to be another key definition of theory in the humanities.

The way I understood theory in the digital humanities is a method of understanding why the author chose to use a certain digital interface and how they used it to convey their research.  I found this section more difficult to comprehend and have lots of questions for class tomorrow.  I liked the TextArc example because it was explained in a way that I could almost understand.  In particular, the statement that TextArc’s visualizations are not about what they are portraying, but about how TextArc is a complex program designed to achieve a certain aesthetic quality (78). However introductory this section was to theory in the humanities, I can see why it is such a tough concept.  Hopefully tomorrow’s class will clear a lot of things up.

Theory and the Digital Humanities

Luckily for me, the first reading by Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell contained an interpretation of the term “theory” as related specifically to the humanities: “In the context of history or literary study, ‘theory’ doesn’t predict, but it does explain. It promises deeper understanding of something already given, like historical events or a literary work” (77). As history students, theorizing is our job; our professors and instructors seek to prompt our ability to seek explanation and a deeper understanding of certain historical inquiries. We do this through discussion, collaboration, research, and other methods that ideally produce theses that are “contestable, defensible, and substantive” (77). Oftentimes, our professors will provide us with a certain theory concerning a certain issue so that we might build skills to analyze and assess theories as well. For instance, I experienced an opportunity to theorize this very morning in my Renaissance Literature course; our professor was reviewing the life and background of the Renaissance poet Ben Jonson when she began to formulate a question concerning Jonson’s relationship with Williams Shakespeare. She had informed us of Ben Jonson’s publishing of Shakespeare’s works in a comprehensive collection to be circulated despite Jonson’s disdain for Shakespeare’s prominence compared to his own – ironically, we realized, Shakespeare receives much more attention and admiration today than does Ben Jonson. Our professor then prompted us to consider the theory that, however the two poets ended up by modern standards, Shakespeare’s success would not have been nearly such as it is without Ben Jonson’s publication of Shakespeare’s plays. This, by my understanding, is a type of humanist theorizing that prompts students of the humanities to analyze a specific statement through contesting, defense, and substantiation.

In the same essay, the authors carry this idea over to the subject of “digital artifacts,” stating that these themselves “should stand as peer-reviewable forms of research, worthy of professional credit and contestable as forms of argument.” This idea treats theory in the digital realm in the same way as theory and discourse in the analog realm; still, the contributing authors to this subject acknowledge the differences between the two and the difficulty that some humanists might have approaching the new digital platform as a “new norm” for theoretical work. Ramsay and Rockwell mention the agreeable suggestion that “digital artifacts like text analysis and visualization tools are theories in the very highest tradition of what it is to theorize in the humanities, because they show us the world differently” (79). On the other hand, Johanna Drucker points out in her essay the negative points of the digital in the face of humanist theory: she speaks of digital environments whose methodological premises are “often at odds with – even hostile to – humanistic values and thought,” but also emphasizes the question of whether we can “engage in the design of digital environments that embody specific theoretical principles drawn from the humanities” (86). Drucker states that she is making a call for a new phase of humanities that would “synthesize method and theory into ways of doing as thinking” (87). Drucker mentions, at one point, versions of data mining and their visualization techniques – one of these is “engagement with geospatial tools” (89). Yes, tools such as this rely foundationally upon quantitative data, not humanistic data, in order to produce the display we seek; however, Drucker points out, only a viewer unskilled and untrained in statistics OR critical thought would accept the image at face value. The medium of theorizing differs from analog history or the humanities, yet the ultimate goal remains consistent across the board: digital or no, historians and humanists in general should be able to approach varying theory and thought with the same mind to question, analyze, and verify.