Alan Bilansky is completing an MS in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after earning a PhD in Rhetoric and Democracy form Penn State. At the U of I he has taught undergraduates in social aspects of information technology, and also consults with faculty. He is currently at work studying the institutional, social and material history of databases like EEBO and ECCO and how they affect scholarly practice.
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Rhetoricians can boast working in a more or less unbroken conversation stretching
back to before Corax and Tisias, two millennia before modern English was spoken. Of
course, humans have been speaking, reasoning, and arguing long before that, and all
over the planet. The rhetorical tradition starting in the Mediterranean is generally
considered unique because it both produced and theorized rhetoric at the same time.
And in the present, the teaching and study of rhetoric is consistently theoretically
self-aware. Surveying the methodologies of presenters at the 2015 Indiana Digital
Rhetoric Symposium and also reflecting on the state of the field, Crystal VanKooten
assigns theory more than half of a pie chart and concludes Most of us are theorizing digital
rhetoric
That is one reason for reading this book. It has been argued (by, for example, Drucker and Liu in the landmark collection
Drucker and Liu’s stance toward DH is reinforced when contributors McNely and Teston
assert: Rhetorically-informed digital
humanists should proceed with caution — doing DH is not as simple as
choosing a digital tool and then combining that tool and tactic with a given
methodological approach; indeed, a given tactic may be at odds with one's
strategy
Below I account for some of the contributions to this thoughtful collection.
The positionality of the digital humanities, and how it might disrupt established
disciplinary lines, is much discussed at the moment (for that matter, so is the
institutional status of English studies generally). Chapters take on these
disciplinary issues, and these are all distinguished by self-awareness. Reid argues
that just as digital humanities disrupts the humanities, digital rhetorics are
post-human, post-structuralist disruptions of humanist traditions in rhetoric.
Carter, Jones, and Hamcumpai argue for viewing disciplinary lines like rhetoric and
DH not as territory to be seized and defended but rather as
Two theoretically-aware case studies of editing projects demonstrate how we might proceed on practical projects while trying to maintain theoretical awareness. Eyman and Ball narrate their efforts to put in place a new online publishing system for the online journal
Other contributors explore new methods to conduct research in writing and
communication. Johnson suggests ways we might model scholarly influence, beginning
with citation data. These include factor analysis, grouping by institutions, and
geographic mapping. How he would get all the information he plans to model is not
always clear, but his arguments could point to future studies. The primary
counter-argument Johnson sets himself against is that many humanists are skeptical
of numbers and suspicious of reducing their own influence to numbers (particularly
as these numbers could be used for tenure) and he says, Scholars who are hesitant to adopt
numerical values as a way to bargain for tenure and promotions are giving up
one of the more powerful argumentative rhetorics of the twenty-first century
— the use of mathematics
Kennedy and Long use online interaction to view the writing process. They argue that
sources such as the version histories of wiki pages (where every single edit is
recorded), can be an excellent place to study authorship: these writerly moves and practices
reveal the authorial life of the writer . . . as well as the life of the
document
Hart describes his effort running a commercial program, DICTION, to perform sentiment
analysis of the words in a corpus of texts with predefined genres. The corpus is
described only as sixteen thousand
contemporary texts spanning the rhetorical universe
DICTION cannot distinguish between a
sentence like
the dog bit the man
and the man bit the
dog
To Hart’s credit, this is the only reference in the collection to the concept of the
bag of words,
so it was disappointing how quickly he moved past this
important point. In topic modeling, a very popular method of text mining at the
moment, a that audiences depend on human understandings of
proportionality when responding to a text
Three thoughtful chapters on archives and digitization should be read by the broad
community of researchers concerned with digital archives and libraries. Hoffman and
Waisanen's chapter provides a survey of algorithmic tools for analyzing texts and
corpora. Like Hart, they theorize these methods rhetorically. They bring in the
theory of the ideograph
as formulated by Michael McGee, referring to specific
words that carry ideological weight in a given historic moment keywords,
and several other formulations linking words with ideologies.
When in DH we count words and find patterns, we hope that the words will serve as
surrogates for something significant. But so far this is a blunt instrument and we
cannot generalize from one case to another very well. This activity would benefit
from more general theorizing, and contributors to this book offer some points of
entry.
Samra Graban, Ramsey-Tobienne, and Myers do something that should be done more often.
They survey theoretical issues – invigorating epistemological
dilemmas
Rice and Rice describe efforts at participatory archiving, similar to many projects
in community-based archiving and community informatics (and they would probably
benefit from studying this body of research). The archives Rice and Rice advocate
are bottom-up and not necessarily built to last: while its longevity may be useful for a number of
reasons, we would not consider this archive a failure if it is erased tomorrow.
The pop-up archive's focus is not in preservation but in the gesture and
performance of archiving moments
For some working in archiving and cultural heritage, this could sound like a shot across the bow. What I mean is: everything that Barack Obama and John Boehner say is carefully preserved with the intention of keeping it findable, usable, and trustworthy for as long as there might be persons to read it — because it is considered important. Many in the cultural heritage community are doing the same thing with the texts, artifacts, and stories left behind by members of subaltern groups which otherwise might be forgotten. On the one hand, building archives not defined by persistence is wonderfully provocative: it can prompt questions about the nature of memory and cultural production and narrative. On the other hand, the longevity of archives from Queen Elizabeth II or Donald Trump is in little doubt. We preserve what we value.
Potts's essay starts from a withering critique of digital archives: these systems are clunky at best and irrelevant at
worst
; they prioritize data over
experience
What these archives in practice and
the digital humanities in general desperately need is a sense of audience,
appeal, and interaction
Several contributions cite Matthew Kirschenbaum's argument that students in the
humanities should learn to code, and also Ian Bogost's formulation of procedural
literacy.
Two of the most interesting pieces, by Stolley and Ballentine,
could be read as responding directly to Potts, arguing Many of the discussions of making
fetishize the concept of coding
Stolley discusses programming in Rails in an essay that, along with Hart's
contribution, is probably the best read in the book. He argues that coding is an
essentially writerly activity. In observing that Rails is installed and accessed
entirely through the command line with no downloading, dragging, or double-clicking,
he says, Rails can be installed, invoked, and
developed entirely though writing
Ballentine argues that the alternative to procedural literacy is rapid obsolescence,
and our future requires...collaboration with computer
science and technical communication in order to not be shut out of important
discussions (and our own interpretive practices) because we do not have the
language to argue in these spaces
This volume should be read by digital humanists in their various disciplinary homes. It is a good introduction for those coming from a rhetoric background, and is of interest not only to those in English studies generally, but also to digital humanists in informatics programs. Of course, it is somewhat artificial to segregate rhetoricians, who swim in the same water as their colleagues in English and Communications departments, from other scholars with research agendas in digital humanities. But we can go further. Reading the essays in this book, I often found myself thinking that if these researchers were to walk into the nearest iSchool, and compare notes with researchers in informatics, both would benefit from the resulting conversations.