Celui dans lequel Paris me manque

Citroën DS at Café de Paris. (click to enlarge)

This might get a bit weepy or whiny in places, but I promise there’s a bigger point to it.

I’m writing this post from Café de Paris, which is more or less exactly what it sounds like, except that it’s in Vilnius. I’ve spent a lot of time here over the two months I’ve been in Lithuania, and it’s not entirely because I pursue a Parisian lifestyle here. What I do here (drink espressos and play on my computer) would bankrupt me in a Parisian setting, where the coffee is about three times more expensive.

But being here has been part of a set of actions that has made me start to miss Paris rather terribly, which I find bizarre in the extreme. Remember, I’m the person who left for Paris with absolutely no sort of romantic illusions or fantasies about the city–it hadn’t even been a city I particularly wanted to visit, much less live in. A couple other things have helped push this missing along. First, I was reading, at the same time, two books: David Harvey’s Paris: Capital of Modernity, which I found not as great as I hoped it would be, though the last chapter, on the Commune, is a must-read; and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which I had found in a Russian edition for students of English (so there were Russian glosses of idioms and historical personages and places; love it).¹ Further, watching L’Armée du crime last night (prompted by this review) also upped a bit of the emotional longing. This emotional longing is weird, because while I absolutely adore living in Paris, I certainly don’t think I’ve developed, a posteriori, the sorts of fantasies about the city that many arrive with.

So there must be something else I miss, and I think what that thing could be is named, variously, “structure” or “work.” When I first explained to friends that I would be spending two months in Vilnius this summer, most were convinced that I would drown in a giant ocean of debt, settling into my usual Vilnius routine of two meals at restaurants every day and six hour shifts at nightclubs every night. No, I kept reassuring them. This would not be a vacation. I had a writing deadline to meet and money to not spend. I would finally experience Vilnius not as a partying tourist, but as something even resembling a local; I even bought more than one bus ticket at a time, knowing there would be multiple future trips on Vilnius public transportation!

The first month felt like that of a local: I stayed in the apartment as much as I could and read, took notes, and even wrote. A couple friends blew through, but usually I would only go out to watch a World Cup match and then go to a club afterward for a drink or two. But the deadline came and went, and my writing—which sketches out a theory of the realist novel that is scale-less, historico-geographically materialist yet non-transcendental, non-humanist, pre-cognitively affect-based, and counter-factual—was submitted.

Suddenly, I was again a bit adrift what concerns the dissertation. I felt entitled to a mini-vacation because of the amount of focus I had expended the previous seven or so weeks putting together the theory (much was based on stuff I had just read in the past few weeks!). But by that point, I only had about three weeks left in my trip, and all my earlier desires to establish some level of permanence out here (I even considered starting up a early 20th c. short story reading group!) started being framed in the sense of “you’re leaving in three weeks. Don’t tie yourself down.”

And so I’ve been drifting. I’ve worked a bit on the chapter revision I need to do, but mostly, I’ve sat in the apartment and watched downloaded television and movies. I don’t really leave the apartment except to buy food, and it all seems like a bit of a waste of my time out here.² I can’t wait to get back to Paris, I keep telling myself, even though my day-to-day life in France is not terribly different from what I’ve settled into here; I tend to spend most of my time there in my apartment reading and sometimes leave only to get food from Carrefour.

But in Paris, I have a job. I’m required, four times a week, to travel the 20 minutes by bike to the Paris Center and spend a handful of hours there helping students and faculty with their computer troubles.³ So I feel rather plugged into some kind of community, even if it’s made up of co-workers and student-clients. Here, I don’t really have many friends, and the friends I have are pretty much always busy and not willing or able to alter their schedule to fit my idiosyncracies. So I drift into a solitary bubble. Further, because I’m a transient (leaving in less than a week!), I’m very disinclined to go out and meet new people or try to enrich already existing acquaintances (into friendships).

It’s funny what work does, right? I watched Toy Story 3 this morning, and I finally understood Aaron’s point about its relationship to labor. I feel a bit like the toys. Without a structured job, I feel useless, adrift. This is why I don’t like vacations in general, and I certainly don’t like vacations that last more than a week. After a while they become grossly indulgent.⁴ Of course, it helps that my job is not a grind and that I enjoy it and that it provides me with piles of flexibility and freedom. I appreciate all that, and I don’t look badly at people who need to simply escape from their wage slavery for a while and rebuild themselves.

But it’s not for me. These past few weeks have been a sort of murky hell of indecision, sloth, and basically an endless open mic night for my worst self-indulgences.

So where this gets complicated is when I think beyond my post in Paris, when I will, hopefully, have a diss-writing fellowship so that I can get the hell out of grad school with a finished dissertation. If I’ve only had my dissertation to work on for the past three weeks and felt like a floating cloud of scum that has gotten little to nothing done, what will I do if I’m lucky enough to win a fellowship, so that I will be paid only to write and will be prevented from having a “job” by the terms of the award? I’m terrified that this Vilnius muck will return.

Of course, I could take Brian Croxall’s advice and treat grad school like a job, finding some little never-before-used reservoir of discipline in my body and do something like go to the library for 9–5 every day. Furthermore, I suspect that my fellowship year will be chock full of various writing deadlines. Finally, I won’t be a couch-surfing transient for that year. I’ll have my computer, my workspace, and the rest.

So I’ve got that going for me.

1. It’s been kind of the Summer of Harvey here, as I spent much of June fighting through a close-read of the ontology he develops in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, and then I followed up in July reading newer essays by him and about him and about how he’s old-fashioned and Marxism is over, and so on. [↩]
2. Granted, some of the disinclination to do stuff has been related to by slicing the hell out of my toes from stepping on broken glass, an injury that has taken over two weeks to heal and has left my eagerness to walk a lot (a Vilnius must) wanting. [↩]
3. There are other things I have in Paris that I don’t have in Vilnius, including a sense of permanence about my living quarters. Here I have been moving every few weeks between two apartments depending on the visiting schedules of others. Furthermore, in Paris I have my normal computer, which provides a much more pleasant reading / writing / creating environment than my little netbook. [↩]
4. Part of this, though I don’t know how much, is related to the fact that I do not like the fact that I am only spending money now and not earning any. Weirdly (or maybe not), I get very, very anxious when I’m not earning money. [↩]

Tags: Brian Croxall, Café de Paris, david harvey, Ernest Hemingway, Paris, Profhacker, sentimentality, Vilnius, work, zunguzungu

This xkcd comic from Monday has been forwarded around a bit. My own reaction was heavily influenced by @sepoy’s comment that maybe JFK was talking about the “global south (po folk)” avant la lettre.

I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall Munroe’s snarky joke doesn’t change the metaphorical power of the expression.

But what a glance at Munroe’s own map shows is that the bulk of the land on Earth is located north of the Equator, so if we picked a speck of terrain at random, it’ll more often fall north of the Equator. What if, I then wondered, I got rid of the Equator and split the Earth in half by area, in effect making an “Area Equator,” so that a randomly selected point on land would have a 50% chance of landing in the “South” as opposed to the “North.” What might that world look like?

Enter Quantum GIS. I downloaded a shapefile of the world, and it had area already keyed in as an attribute for each country.¹ I was ready to calculate the areas of each polygon, but I’m glad I didn’t have to. Then I added polygons until the sum of the areas of the selected polygons was about half of the total sum of the area. Next, I chose an outrageous color scheme. The results:²

The world, split by area. (click to enlarge)

What’s interesting is that this map is not so terribly different than the map of the North-South Divide provided by Wikipedia. The main difference is that I include Australia, while they include much more of Asia. China by itself has a larger area than Australia, so subtracting the Aussies from my area list and adding China would already knock the swing out. But my point is, at this stage, strictly cartographical.³ One can now sort of see where the “Area Equator” of the Earth is.

So this doesn’t let JFK off the hook, but it might nuance the point a bit.

1. There were some errors. A handful of small countries and Eritrea reported 0 for their area. [↩]
2. I ran the test twice, with and without Antarctica. Mostly adding in that frozen landmass means that I have to deselect much of the Middle East, Pakistan, and, I think, Algeria. So it’s not terribly different. Remember: Antarctica is never as big as it seems on unprojected maps. [↩]
3. Another caveat: I have no idea where the “area” calculation came from, so who knows how reliable my results are. [↩]

Tags: geography, GIS, Global South, Quantum GIS, Randall Munroe, xkcd

Yoann Gourcuff is blaming the vuvuzelas for France’s uninspired play on Friday night in Cape Town. The players couldn’t hear each other on the field, he whined, and they had to rely on gestures. Patrice Évra added that the players can’t sleep because the vuvuzelas start going off at 6am every morning.¹

Twitter has been full of people complaining about the vuvuzelas, arguing even that soccer will never succeed in the US (as though it needs to succeed in the US in order to mean something) if there is a threat of having to endure this constant buzzing.

Banning the vuvuzelas was even half of the pre-game show yesterday afternoon on France2 (the rest was about a visit to a “bidonville” by the French team), and reports are surfacing that indicate that the organizers, in the voice of World Cup organising chief Danny Jordaan, are considering putting a halt to the horns.²

To everyone who is complaining about the vuvuzelas, I offer you one of two bullets by which to shoot yourself: either you are completely new to the sport, or you are an imperialist.

Consider this: horns are played, without pause, around the world. The constant noise predates the South Africa World Cup. Making noise constantly is precisely the Ultras credo. Don’t believe me? Watch some footage of the US playing Mexico in Mexico City last year. Forward about 2:10 into the video below and listen to the din. The main difference, in terms of noise, is that there is cheering mixed in with the constant horns, which we heard last night in the Australia match, where Australian fans managed to drown out the vuvuzelas.

Again, there’s nothing new to constant din in the stadium. It’s the point, as any English fan will tell you, as he or she boasts about the sheds over the supporters that let the supporters’ racket echo out over the pitch. It’s part of caring for your team. Soccer, no matter what those who say it’s boring believe, is an intensely passionate sport, and passion is displayed by lots. of. noise.³

So if it strikes you as annoying, and you want it gone, take the easy way out and admit to barely ever watching soccer; admit that seeing a match where crowd response isn’t conducted by hopping frogs on a jumbotron is a completely brand new experience.

I recommend that as a way out, since the other variant is basically this: you have certain expectations about what is “appropriate” fan behavior, and they are probably rather puritan and emblematic of your western European cultural upbringing. Blowing horns without pause for two hours isn’t what’s done at Harvard-Yale football games, so it must be the wrong kind of exuberant gesture from a fan base. Tut-tut the shit out of that vuvuzela feeling.

A World Cup already heavily biased towards Europe (playing in Euro-friendly temperature) also now needs to regulate fan behavior to coddle European sensibilities? Really?

Keep the vuvuzelas around. If you don’t like the buzz, sing over them (as the Australians managed to). Imagine yourself in a round of “We’ve got spirit, how about you?” with the vuvuzelas until you’re showing so much spirit that you’re winning.

And now, ultras courtesy YouTube:

1. Les Bleus are turning into advanced level catfighting egomaniacs, by the way, as Four Four Two shows us. [↩]
2. Now Libération is getting into the mix, asking readers which is more annoying, the horns or the cheesy pop songs that support Les Bleus? [↩]
3. And they do this in the US, too, thank heavens. Go to a Chicago Fire game. Sit by Section 8. [↩]

Tags: Chicago Fire, Danny Jordaan, Four Four Two, France, France 2, Patrice Évra, soccer, vuvuzela, World Cup, Yoann Gourcuff

ArcGIS in action. (click to enlarge)

[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital humanists to move past prose to include other forms of analysis (maps, in this specific example), geographers have a different approach to the post-prose moment, one steeped in skepticism over the value of visual representations of data. Are geographers scaredy cats? Or might digital humanists be overexuberant? Or some combination of neither?]

Aside from the “reflexive vs. positivist” opposition in Martyn Jessop‘s talk at the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research and his similar article in Literary and Linguistic Computing (discussed briefly here), the opposition that caught me most off-guard in Jessop’s article was one that was reasserted a few times at Geoinst:

there are fundamental issues concerning the status and function of images in humanities scholarship, this includes the images produced by digital visualization tools. Humanists are used to expressing themselves, and assessing the work of others, through the medium of prose. There is a belief that the visual cannot be as rigorous as the written. It is seen, as, at best, a supplement to the written word and stands in a subordinate position.

Jessop continues to explain how images in “modern educational texts” tend to be merely distractions to break up the flow of the text as opposed to being an integral part of the argument. There are “very few instances where the visual is treated on an equal pedagogical footing with the written.”

This line of reasoning from Jessop’s article continued in his talk, and Anne Kelly Knowles referred to it as well, explaining that history tends to be verbal, whereas geography tends to be visual, setting up the situation in history where the text is privileged over the map, which requires more critical response.

Now it is certainly not the case that the humanities value the textual over the visual as objects of study. I know a few art historians, musicologists, and students of film who would spit milk over their keyboards upon reading an assertion like that online. But it feels true to say that, as a mode of scholarship, the prose work lays claim to the most prestigious form of knowledge creation in academe.

From my reading of the dizzying Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 at UCLA, I get the sense that this tension is a relatively well-investigated and argued one within the digital humanities.¹ Part of the appeal of DH, it seems, is precisely attacking the primacy of prose as the form good scholarship should take, which is reflected in the value given the curatorial (as opposed to the straight analytical). As the UCLA manifesto asserts,

[W]e are advocating for a neo- or post-print model where print becomes embedded within a multiplicity of media practices and forms of knowledge production… Digital Humanists recognize curation as a central feature of the future of the Humanities disciplines… Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds… All of which is to say that we consider curation on a par with traditional narrative scholarship.²

What’s interesting here, to me, is the interest of the digital humanities to move toward the visual precisely when geography is having its own crises, especially among critical geographers, regarding the visual. The visual is attached to the “scopic regime,” an “ocularcentrism” derived from Descartes, who posited “an epistemological standpoint of early modernity that subscribed to the notion of a detached, objective observer capable of a ‘god’s eye‘ view of the world.” Barney Warf here is drawing a history of geography’s relationship with “capital accumulation [and] the rise of the nation-state,” a relationship helped by the illusion of the “certainty of visual knowledge.”

As the visual arts came to be dominated by linear perspective, so, too, did geography come to be dominated by the idea of homogenous, infinite, Newtonian space containing interlocked nation-states or other rigidly bounded entities, within the metaphor of the surface. “The rise of logical positivism in the late nineteenth century,” Warf continues, “added a aura of scientism to this view, mathematicizing it with the disciplines concerned with space such as geography and urban planning in the forms of isotropic planes, surface in which the distribution of social features is evenly distributed.” This scopic regime continued in geography, more or less, until the critical geographers began to break away from it and the quantitative revolution in the 1970s.³

But it is not the case that the critical geographers are asserting for “more prose” in their work. Instead, they were looking for ways to get out from the empirical burden, which, as Soja remarks, though producing “significant and useful factual knowledge about the objective, real world,” had a “tendency to fixate on materialized surface appearances and directly measurable patterning, creating an illusion of opaqueness that could block deeper understanding of the causal forces underpinning these surface expressions.” These “idealized visions of the world” led to a “luminous search for deep structures of causality as the imagined took precedence over the real.”

Soja himself, one of the fiercest proponents of a larger role of spatial thinking in attempts to understand the world, does not argue for “more maps / less prose” but for merely an approach that treats the spatial as an equal party in the trialectic of spatiality-historicality-sociality. In fact, it seems that it is the reliance on the visual that gives geography its static and synchronic sense, a rigidity (in comparison to history’s richness and dialecticity) that Michel Foucault suspects is the result of Henri Bergson.⁴

I bring up this brief history of geography since it shows how the emergence of GIS can be seen (and is often seen) as a reaction to the work of the critical geographers. Soja calls it a “defensive disciplinary response.” “Over the past ten years,” he continues, “the positivist and descriptive core of geographical analysis has refortified its centrality, sustained in part by large flows of financial support for the advancement of Geographical Information Systems (GIS).” The apparent intellectual offspring of the quantitative revolution in geography, “today GIS,” as Marianna Pavlovskaya explains in a 2006 article in Environment and Planning A, “sustains an industry worth $6 billion a year… and remains a corporate and state-sponsored technology widely used for profit making and control.” If GIS was not so appealing as a means of state and capital control, it wouldn’t be getting the funding it is today, especially in contrast with critical geography.⁵

GeoDa, now available for Mac and Linux! (click to enlarge)

But Pavlovskaya’s article does not to simply criticize GIS: she explains that the reception of GIS as the latest guise of state-control/positivism is misguided, and that, in fact, GIS is beginning to be used as a qualitative method, that is, one of the methods that has “become an accepted strategy for those advocating nonpositivist knowledge production and aspiring for emancipatory change.” GIS, Pavlovskaya argues, gives the illusion of precision and exactness, which subsequently gives the illusion of quantitative analysis. But putting something in a database doesn’t guarantee accuracy, just like relying on fieldnotes doesn’t guarantee sloppiness. Furthermore, computers don’t guarantee logic: one can behave illogically with them and logically without them. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches involve interpretive efforts at pattern detecting, at reading textual fields.

Next, and on this point I’m not sure I stand with Pavlovskaya, it’s not the case that the math used in GIS analysis is actually complex enough to qualify as “quantitative” or even “statistical.” A lot of it is, at its root, just counting or not notably different from regular human interaction with space. She writes,

In truth, most spatial techniques available in GIS are only marginally ‘quantitative’ despite being very illuminating. Using simple math (such as distance measurements or calculations between raster layers), they require spatial imagination skills (such as buffering or overlay) and logical thinking (such as combining layers in site selection of multicriteria evaluation). As such, these core functions replicate human spatial thinking about places and phenomena that is common to all geographic research. Overall, spatial analysis in GIS today is largely qualitative, visual, and intuitive despite its insistent labeling as a quantitative method.

She further offers that even cutting edge “quantitative” work in GIS using AI or Bayesian probability is just an “attempt to replicate human reasoning.” In my mere year’s worth of GIS training, we definitely started feeding legitimate statistical beasts, doing spatial regressions and clustering calculations. These don’t replicate human reasoning–in fact, they exist precisely to slow down human reasoning, which is often terrible at detecting randomness, or the lack thereof. Pavlovskaya certainly isn’t asserting that all GIS is qualitative, of course, but I know that, in my work, I felt like I was eating at the kid’s table until I started being able to attach p-values.⁶ This is my own bias, though, that I’ll unpack another day.

Pavlovskaya does approach the leading question of this post head on, however, in terms of visualization–the image over/with the text. Data visualization is what GIS’s core strength seems to be, as GIS can output maps quickly and efficiently, with both quantitative or qualitative data. She points to Mei-Po Kwan’s work on irrational responses to data visualization to argue that it’s “the most telling example of nonquantitative functionality in GIS.” The visualization is, in fact, quite the alluring song that attracts people–myself included–to GIS. If part of our charge, as digital humanists, is to move past prose, to visualize our data, the satisfaction of GIS is really right up our alley. And it’s easy to get striking results: “Visualization is so powerful a technique that often the manipulation of data within GIS does not go beyond querying the data and displaying the results.” Feed in a spreadsheet of census data, dial up a chloropleth, export to .jpg, and move on.

This is a bit flip, but I think it’s important to assert it. Visualization shouldn’t be an end in itself, and engagement with and understanding the tool of visualization deserves the highest priority. Pavlovskaya warns about how maps are tools of control. Maps over-assert their reliability by relying on a metaphor in the mind of the viewer in which space is scientific and exact, so, as a result, maps are true. Here I cue, again, of course, Mark Monmonier, who warns in his epilogue about using a map with the “dual role of both informing and impressing its audience.” After all, “a flashy map… touts its author’s sense of innovation, and cartographic window dressing in a doctoral dissertation… suggests that the work is scholarly or scientific.” With GIS, we have the added authority of having a computer that’s making the map, so the stink of truthiness clings even more formidably to the embedded .jpg.

Warf closes his own article on networks with a bomb detonated in the ocularcentrist modernist’s favorite street-corner café. Vision’s attachment to truth “is essentially a positivist assumption that denies the possibility of other ways of understanding the world.” Mobilizing Richard Rorty, he finishes by declaring that “once we abandon the positivist metaphor of the mirror as the basis of objective knowledge, we are led to the metaphor of the conversation, in which language, positionally, and dialogue are central.” Strangely, to me, this sounds like, in part, a call for less image-based analysis and more dialogue-based thinking, which gets recreated in prose.

I plan on not introducing any more new sources from here on in, so a recap is in order: there is a move to advance past prose-based scholarship in the digital humanities. This means curating various kinds of objects, this means incorporating non-prose forms of analysis (like maps) and data visualizations in general.

Visualization, however, is an approach to data that, along with its current big-budget exponent, GIS, is attached to quantitative analysis, and, hence, to forms of state and corporate control, power relations that move in direct opposition to projects in the digital humanities that are interested in the empowering capability of digital humanistic scholarship. Furthermore, visualization as an end to itself is still wrapped up in questions of power and control that, in my reading of the UCLA Manifesto, remain unaddressed, pushed aside to make room for unrelated emancipatory rhetoric.

On the other hand, GIS itself has not managed to live up to the hype surrounding it as a quantitative tool. In fact, the revolutionaries in the qualitative world can exploit its power for their own purposes.

But is quantitative work necessarily bad? Can’t there be a quant/qual matrix that people like? This is probably a terribly boring discussion that’s been had at every social sciences get together where there are as many bottles of wine as graduate students, but it’s still new to me.

I find it interesting, for example, that the UCLA manifesto separates quantitative and qualitative into historical moments–a sort of political/developmental timeline that Marx might be proud of:

The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. It harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation.

Now there’s a lot in this snippet that I think is very, very wrong (or, at least, getting carried away in the rhetoric of the manifesto).⁷ But it does pitch the digital humanities in a similar historical narrative as that of critical geography. Quantitative geography, however, has not disappeared, so we can’t talk of geography in waves as much as in branches. And considering the fantasy of the quantitative promise of GIS (which, pace Pavlovskaya, I still have), being encouraged to incorporate it into my digital humanities work certainly doesn’t seem like a full on, earnest effort to be, also, “qualitative” and “emotive.”

So I end with two messes on the table for starters: the political/control nature of visualization is unaddressed in relation to the pressure/encouragement to visualize and the role of quantitative work in digital humanities seems to earn the feeling of being old-fashioned or compartmentalized within a larger qualitative framework, at least within the framework of the UCLA manifesto.

Conveniently, I’m walking away from these messes, citing a lack of space on this page to continue. But I do have a feeling I’ll be returning to the UCLA manifesto soon enough. The tension over visualization, though, seems like it might be too complex for me right now.

1. I’m new around here, remember. [↩]
2. “Narrative scholarship” here, I think, means “prose scholarship,” not scholarship of narratives. But I’m not positive. [↩]
3. Soja on the quantitative revolution: “This increasingly technical and mathematized version of geographical description, however, differed only superficially from the neo-Kantian tradition that helped to justify the isolation of geography from history, the social sciences, and Western Marxism.” [↩]
4. “Est-ce que ça a commencé avec Bergson ou avant ? L’espace, c’est ce qui était mort, figé, non dialectique. En revanche, le temps, c’était riche, fécond, vivant, dialectique.” [↩]
5. For a tour de force of geography in the service of state control, I encourage one to read the opening pages of Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics. The short version is that Ireland did not exist until the English crown needed to control it, so they sent in their surveyors to create an Ireland by mapping and dividing up the land. [↩]
6. On the other hand, Pavlovskaya mentions that even with the hard core quantitative work, “GIS technology has fulfilled its promise for quantitative analysis only marginally.” [↩]
7. These concerns are not appropriately addressed by the backtracking in the sentences that follow the quoted material. [↩]

Tags: Anne Kelly Knowles, ArcGIS, Barney Warf, digital humanities, Edward W. Soja, Environment and Planning A, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, GeoDa, geography, Geoinst, GIS, Henri Bergson, Literary and Linguistic Computing, manifesto, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Mark Monmonier, Martyn Jessop, Mei-Po Kwan, Michel Foucault, positivism, Richard Rorty, statistics, Thirdspace, visualization

I have been called a “provocateur” at work for supporting les fennecs. This is my office door. (click to enlarge)

Yet again, I’m putting off the “Fieldwork vs. Armchairwork” post, which began as a joke threat, but is actually slowly turning into a few ideas about methods courses from a total neophyte and non DGS.

In the meantime, I’m getting very excited about 64 other “vs.” coming up in the next six weeks, namely the World Cup in South Africa, which opens on June 11th, pitting the hosts against the uncertain Mexican team. I think the Bafana Bafana will need quite a bit of hometown bounce to beat Mexico, but I find that totally within the realm of possible outcomes.

If you fancy yourself a good prognosticator of possible outcomes, I welcome you to join my silly little World Cup Challenge Pool, where one can pick the results of all 64 matches and win potential prizes.

I like some of the tricks I pulled off with the website, and it is, I promise, the last thing I ever write in procedural PHP (at least, that is, until I feel confident saying “Give me procedural PHP or give me death!” In other words, there’s a lot of progamming pupu platters in perceived future). Furthermore, the site relates a bit to the themes of this week’s posts in that I worked on it during downtime at Geoinst, despite the fact that it was already live. Oops.

Tags: Algeria, football, Geoinst, Mexico, php, programming, South Africa, World Cup

Charlottesville, VA.

Yesterday’s post on the tension between curatorial/service-y intellectual work and straight up analytical work was intentionally kept rather general, both for larger appeal and since I’m trying to figure out my approach to these questions in a way that’s consistent. Today, I’ll be a bit more specific, and this is sort of a warning about that.¹ I want to show how geospatial scholarship can be a sort of ground zero of these kinds of discussions and debates, though, about curating and analysis.²

Whether factually true or not, I got the sense that I was one of the only people at the NEH-sponsored Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA’s Scholar’s Lab who had never used Google Earth as more than a fun little toy.³ I’m still pretty uncomfortable with the interface, I have no idea what the program does, and I really can’t figure out what role it plays in my life. Most succinctly, finding the url for the following link is the most work I have ever done with the Google Earth API.

On the other hand, I was probably in the top quintile among participants in the use of ArcGIS. So how is it that I’m reasonably proficient, by humanities student standards, with ArcGIS, but completely covered in thumbs regarding Google Earth? Curating vs. analyzing. Webmapping vs. mapping (for the argument).

While trying to figure out, during the proposal process, if my approach to literature was crazy or mainstream, I spent a lot of time trying to find similar projects to mine online. Much of the work I found was similar to Google Lit Trips, a persistent whipping boy of mine. Google Lit Trips is a curated repository of data from multiple contributors (so, collaborative) leaning on the Google Earth API, available largely to enhance the experiences of the encoded text for K–12 readers. In other words, it features service- and pedagogy-oriented work that leaves the work of analysis and argument to the reader. There are many projects like this online, and we were even shown many over the course of the Institute, either as in-the-world examples or by the “curators” themselves.⁴

I have no epistemological quarrel with Google Lit Trips (despite the fact that they’re getting darned close to my datasets!) or similar projects, like (the now defunct?!?) Gutenkarte.⁵  At this time, I have not made any use of them, as I prefer (and have the luxury of doing so) to collect my own data and code my own representations of the data. Furthermore, though our initial actions are similar–we make note of where things happen in texts–the scope of the following step is dramatically different. Google Lit Trips compiles that data into a public fly-through that helps readers orient themselves with a text. Gutenkarte scatters place names from a text on a publicly accessible map. I, on the other hand, process the data (in private) to try and make a (public) argument with it. I play the role not only of the service, but also that of the sole reader, who then transforms into analyzer and broadcasts results of analysis to the public of my dissertation committee.

My argument with Google Lit Trips, and why it’s “my whipping boy,” is that I find it limiting as far as general expectations of what geospatial scholarship in the humanities can do.⁶ I don’t want it to be the case that saying “I do geospatial work on novels” will come to be understood as “I wrote my own version of Google Lit Trips.” This is why the tension between curating and analyzing I remarked on yesterday is still not entirely resolved.

To, me, in fact, putting the data out there by itself, as, let’s say, a table of geolocated and page referenced events, is almost irresponsible, since I feel an obligation to make use of my training to provide some kind of analysis. Sure, anyone can read a .kmz displayed on Google Earth, just like anyone can read a novel. But close reading a novel is a skill that, presumably, adds some kind of value that justifies the extra layer of literary scholar to the interpretation of a text. The same is true of a map, which is basically the same thing as a Google Earth fly-through. I have been trained to close read maps, and I think that’s a skill worth sharing.⁷

But it gets even more complex. Not only have I been trained to read maps, but I’ve been trained to make them. And then I’ve been trained to augment the data on them (“geoprocess”) in order to answer questions. Once I introduce other analytical tools (network analysis, geostatistical analysis), not only does the range of possible questions I can ask (and subsequently try to answer) explode, but the answers become much more… precise. I can start talking about “confidence” and “significance.” And then I can generate arguments, which lead to chapters, monographs, etc.

At some point in this chain of events, however, I stopped being interested in webmapping, in providing a service for people to “explore” the data I’ve accumulated. I turned inward, engaging in my own play of buffers, directional distributions, and nearest neighbor calculations to see what I could learn from that play. None of this looks anything like “so you wrote your own version of Google Lit Trips,” which is why I want to encourage a high enough profile for it, so that people don’t underestimate the usefulness of geospatial work in the humanities.

But this, then, explains why I’ve never used the Google Earth API, and it’s why I only found out about Mapnik for the first time last week. Making web-accessible, pretty, interactive maps has never been the focus of my work. In fact, my maps are pointedly offline, ugly, and frozen, which they have to be for when I start processing them.⁸ And even now, I’m not sure I have a great interest in changing my approach. So, at the Institute, I was less interested in the discussions of making webmaps aesthetically appealing than in finding out if there were free ways to recreate the ArcGIS Spatial Statistics toolbox with something like Quantum GIS (signs point to no). It’s also why what I was possibly most excited about at the Institute–as far as “I can use this in my work immediately!” value is concerned–was learning that Open GeoDa had become publicly available.

On the other hand, back when I was planning my dissertation proposal, and back when that project included geocoding the events of a couple dozen novels, I always assumed that, when I was done geocoding, I would make the data available publicly. Maybe not as a interactive webmap, but still. Why not, after all? I can’t claim proprietary control over mere facts that I collected (as we learned during the fair use presentation at the Institute!). The number of novels I’ll geocode (and the depth to which I’m coding them) has greatly shrunk as my project has changed, however, to the point where I stopped thinking about the data I’m collecting as of any public utility.

In other words, I always assumed some sort of service-y aspect to my dissertation work in addition to the analytical; I was already pursuing an argument via curation, via play, via iterative exploration of my own dataset. I just wasn’t calling it that, and once I stopped considering my data to be of interest to the public, I even stopped thinking about it as a potential site of service.

But that tension… that tension remains, since now I’m saying basically that I would leave the data available in my wake. That is, I’ll continue building a monograph, and as a side benefit, anyone with a web browser can see where all the activity in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. occurred. As a result, service becomes the cherry on top, which feels kind of wrong. Or, at least, a copout.

I think I’ll end here, despite the fact that it feels like my argument has more run out of steam than concluded. These pieces I’m writing this week–most everything I’m writing about the Institute–is going to be half-baked, since it’s more a question of relating a response to the events of the Institute to my own interests than presenting finished, tidy thoughts. Oh well.

1. I know, I promised “fieldwork vs. armchairwork,” but that will come later! [↩]
2. Ooh! maybe this will be “fieldwork vs. armchairwork”! [↩]
3. A variant of this arose during our Twitter argument over cartographical aesthetics. I was forwarded links to Mapnik, which I had never even heard of before. As I’ll show, I’m still not sure how I’ll ever use it, though I’m glad to know about it. [↩]
4. I don’t know that the people involved would agree to such a designation, which is why I isolate it in quotes [↩]
5. Gutenkarte’s domain has expired. Here’s Metacarta‘s description of it: “Ever read a book, and wondered where the heck it took place? With Gutenkarte, we combine books with maps to show where a story is taking place.” [↩]
6. This part is a bit strawmanny, but I think it’s an important discussion to have, and I sort of regret shying away from it at the Institute. [↩]
7. A quick example: everyone who has taken a statistics course has probably had some kind of exercise to show that humans are awful at detecting or creating randomness. This is true on the spatial plane, too. Eyes are crappy at separating clusters from random distributions, so that it can often be the case that untrained eyes (non-skeptical eyes) can straight up misread a map. That actually may be easier to do than to misread a novel. [↩]
8. I pretty them up a bit when I prepare them for public presentation. And by “frozen” here, I mean in contrast to “flat,” which is a distinction I’ve tackled elsewhere. [↩]

Tags: ArcGIS, digital humanities, Fair Use, GeoDa, Geoinst, Google Earth, Google Lit Trips, Gutenkarte, John Dos Passos, Mapnik, programming, Quantum GIS, statistics

The Rotunda again. (click for original)

“It seems kind of absurd to expect a 30 year old to be able to produce a monograph,” one of the attendees of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA said after our dinner in the stunning Dome Room. We were chatting as a group, and the topic moved to how the dissertation as a project has changed over time. Robert Scholes, one person pointed out, catalogued the Cornell Joyce collection to earn his PhD. So no less a luminary than Scholes, whose Textual Power I had to read twice by the end of my second year of undergrad, did not write a monograph for his dissertation.

Then another person at the table mentioned the frustration that emerged over getting little appreciation for the amount of extra-analytical work that went into the dissertation project… databases, webpages, etc. None of it counted, presumably since none of it would go into the monograph.¹

Personally, I had never really considered these issues. I always figured the non-monograph dissertation was a sort of fluky thing that happened after the fact, like how Tractatus became Wittgenstein’s dissertation as a formality. Similarly, I had never expected that extra-monograph-y work, like a database, would (or even should) count toward a PhD. In framing my project in the formal document of the proposal, I knew I would need to build a database. And since the proposal is a contract to do certain amount of work, I knew that building a database would be part of the labor, which can include reading (novels, theory, archival material), writing (the dissertation) and other things, like learning a foreign language or programming language or acquiring some other skill. So if I didn’t want to spend time with a db, I should’ve invented a project that didn’t require one.²

The Scholes example, though, messes my preconceived notions up a bit. And during the course of the Institute, precisely during Todd Presner‘s great presentation on the work he has done with HyperCities, the tension in my preconceived notions was framed in a tidy grudge match: curating vs. analyzing.³

HyperCities calls itself a “collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.” Pulling from various online repositories, the HyperCities project creates something like what “The Arcades Project would have looked like if Benjamin had Google Earth,” according to my notes. Layer atop layer of feature-rich historical data spatializes various narratives of the city that is being “hyperized” (my term). I instantly saw in it lots of potential for projects that friends of mine are working on (and duly let them know about it), but it left me cold regarding the very narrow silliness that is the argument of the/my dissertation.

Presner anticipated this response, if I recall correctly, by saying that the HyperCities project is “not an argument, but a curation.” He later added that curation can be its own argument, and I’ll get to that, but I want to spend a bit more time on the coarse opposition on the table. As a curated project, HyperCities allows the visitor to “explore” a city and a history as one object made up of a staggering number of embedded, spatialized narratives, with no real argument to be found.

And there’s a weird word in that description of HyperCities: “visitor.” I can’t imagine a dissertation having a “visitor.” It has, at best, “readers,” and one can usually count those readers on one hand. Further, the monograph dissertation makes an argument. It’s not a curation. Curation is more like Scholes’s dissertation, the kind of dissertation that, to me, at this time, sounds totally inconceivable as a dissertation.

Most of the participants, or so it seemed, at the Institute were faculty, so they were not, obviously, dissertating anymore. But wouldn’t their projects, which were often similarly more aligned along the curatorial side than the arguing (I’m going to use “analyzing” from now on) side, surely have to be eventually converted into the coin of the academic realm, the monograph that posits a thesis and engages in analysis to reach a conclusion? Generating these curatorial projects seem to be great for pedagogy and for “visitors,” but I’m surprised that they get folded into promotion.

In fact, a feature-rich website offered to the public sounds a whole lot like “service,” which, one presenter remarked, doesn’t count for much when it comes to promotion. I certainly think that’s a crummy state of affairs, and I’ve written before that I think that if the humanities wants to get its “we matter” mojo back, a great way to do it is precisely via service-oriented projects, especially those with a collaborative element. But those are wishes, and, as Steve Sanders famously remarked, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

So as I wrote above, I was left cold by the presentation. I analyze, I said to myself. I don’t curate. And I still think that’s true, for what it’s worth, but Presner’s saying that “curation can be its own argument” requires a bit of expansion, since I think it muddies things up for me rather seriously.

If Presner described what he meant by the above, I didn’t jot it down. But to me, it reminds me of the role of the cartographer in making a map. Curation isn’t about collecting every little datapoint about every little thing. That would be a task for Arthur Danto’s “Ideal Chronicler,” and, as Danto shows, the Ideal Chronicler cannot exist. Curators, like cartographers, make choices. They have biases. A curation can’t have everything just like a map can’t show everything. Cue Monmonier’s axiom that not only is it “easy to lie with maps… it’s essential.” The map and the curation both reflect the choices of the person behind the product—and that person’s omissions, agenda, and so on.

But, amazingly, this sort of known incompleteness, even if it cannot be totally grasped, resonated with a second theme from the first day of the Institute, which was the conflict between reflexivity and positivism. Martyn Jessop, who presented on issues facing geospatial research in the humanities (a presentation similar to his article from 2008 in Literary and Linguistic Computing), closes a section of his article by asserting, “Ultimately, the most significant contribution of GIS to humanities scholarship may not be as a positivist tool but as a reflexive one.” In his talk, he repeated this sentiment, and both times I did not understand what he meant by “reflexive.” Seeing GIS as “positivist” is pretty easy (and a possibly wrong… or, at least, conclusion-jumping… move), but I had no idea what the “reflexive” side would look like.

So I asked. Jessop answered that it involved collecting the data and looking at it, thinking about it. Reflecting on it. As I understood it, this meant a strategy of collecting data and not considering the day done once R^2 is calculated. This reflexive move then returned in Presner’s presentation. HyperCities invites the visitor to explore (or, perhaps, better, “play with”) the data, setting up playful situations that generate aleatory encounters that lead to future arguments.⁴ This idea persisted through to the final day, when Bethany Nowviskie presented on “graphesis,” a term I don’t know, but that I’ve described in my notes as a sort of “sketching” or “iterative graphical ideation/expression/inquiry” that generates, through the play of iteration, previously unseen strategies of argument.⁵

So “curation can be its own argument” incorporates reflexivity, play, the aleatory, graphesis. It’s iterative and unpredictable. Exciting. Oh, and it’s service-oriented and open to the public. All this against “analytical,” which is closed, limited, deliberate. A precision strike. Maybe I should reconsider my earlier pride from declaring that “I analyze” instead of “I curate”?

And maybe, then, the dissertation that is only a monograph might begin to seem antiquated, selfish, and, perhaps, even, problematically élitist?

1. These memories are intentionally a bit fuzzy and uncertain, since nothing was on the record, but I don’t think that, if the people involved were to recognize themselves in what I’ve produced here, they would complain. The details aren’t terribly important, but what is important is to show that this discussion stretched beyond just the presentations I describe below. [↩]
2. “Waste” would be the currently appropriate verb, as the mess sits as an .mdb, waiting desperately to get converted to a real format with a web interface, but that’s a project for another time. [↩]
3. I think that all of my Geoinst-related posts should be presented in this combative style. We had human (language) vs. machine (language), now this, and next will be, um… fieldwork vs. armchairwork? Yeah! [↩]
4. I’m not sure it’s fair to suggest, which is what’s implied by setting up this “reflexive” or “play” mode against the “positivist” one, that there isn’t a certain amount of play and experimentation with data in the positivist social sciences, but that’s not a terribly crucial point here. [↩]
5. The role of the random in project planning, inspiration, and execution is way outside of my expertise, but it seems like any and all projects involve a certain amount of randomness in the form of contingency: the agents are at a certain place at a certain time, and the like. As such, there is no dissertation in the world that does not have some stage of spaghetti being thrown against a wall that then moves forward from the contingent circumstances surrounding which spaghetti it was that, finally, stuck. The issue here is whether the play gets suffocated—straightened out—in the sclerotizing effort of the PhD candidate to make something Serious that can get the candidate Hired. [↩]

Tags: 90210, Arthur C. Danto, Bethany Nowviskie, digital humanities, Geoinst, graphesis, HyperCities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Mark Monmonier, Martyn Jessop, positivism, Robert Scholes, service, Steve Sanders, stochasticity, Todd Presner, Walter Benjamin

UVA Rotunda. (click for original)

Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)?

These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely (since it reminds me of high school) UVA, where I participated in the NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research in the Humanities, run out of UVA’s impressive Scholar’s Lab. It was a great time, I appreciate the NEH for tossing the cheese the Scholar’s Lab’s way, and I especially appreciate all the hard work the UVA people did to pull off a seamless little three-day event.

Over the next few days (read: weeks), I hope to write up more about the various things that went on at UVA, but the one that has been needling me most came from a quick flash of Twitter conversation on the topics in the lede, prompted by Brian (@briancroxall), who wondered whether GIS methodologies should count toward a “methods” course requirement in a PhD program, as it already does at Penn’s History Department. This then led toward the suggestion that, perhaps, proficiency in a machine language should be accepted as fulfillment of a foreign language requirement in a PhD program. Ryan (@ryancordell) even wished he had spent the time cramming for a French exam learning Ruby, instead.

As I mentioned while recusing myself, I’m kind of a militant about foreign languages (the more the better), to the point where I would consider basic Spanish proficiency a requirement of any specialist of American (U.S.) literature.

But after thinking about it, I realized that the two languages, human and machine, are, bizarrely, and in most mainstream use scenarios, totally non-comparable. Human language proficiency, at the literature PhD level at least, is measured in ability to read.¹ The mere fact that my classmates can (and have) fulfilled their requirements by taking “Reading German” or Latin (dead language!) courses demonstrates that the key skill being taught is reading.

Someday being able to read a machine language, however, is never the goal of learning it. As Matt Kirschenbaum writes in his appeal to humanities students to learn to program (my emph):

Many of us in the humanities miss the extent to which programming is a creative and generative activity… Programming is about choices and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of the world around you in the formal environment of a computer. This idea of modeling is vital.

From this promising beginning, Kirschenbaum comes out in favor of using machine languages as substitutes for human languages in fulfilling requirements.²  If one is studying contemporary American literature, in which code can appear, he argues, it has certain value.

But Kirschenbaum’s understanding of the value of the foreign language requirement seems misplaced.³ In the beginning of his article he criticizes those who view what we literary scholars do as little more than correcting spelling and grammar in comparison to those who think wrongly that computer scientists do nothing but fix bugs in code. So why, then, is he willing to imagine the foreign language requirement in such reductive terms when he says explains that (my emph),

Knowledge of a foreign language is desirable so that a scholar does not have to rely exclusively on existing translations and so that the accuracy of others’ translations can be scrutinized. One also learns something about the idiosyncrasies of the English language in the process.

Really? That’s it? Nothing about alterity, about imagining different conceptual schemes (pace Davidson), about forcing a disruption in one’s comfort zones (and comfort Weltanschauungs)? I should learn French just so I can take Massumi to task on how he continues the tradition of the translation of “agencement”? That seems a bit… thin.

Furthermore, when he pushes human and machine languages together, since knowing code helps one understand novels in which code appears, he is working against the very point of programming with which he opens his piece: programming is world-making. Sure, if I know C, I can read a novel that has pages of C. But I’m interpreting it and re-generating there, not generating tout court, as I would be with a “Hello World” program.

So the confusion in the Kirschenbaum piece gets reflected in the argument on Twitter: a willingness to compare human and machine languages, perhaps only since they are both called “languages,” emerges. This gets amplified, then, in the academic world; looking back at Penn’s history requirements, we see that they treat foreign language acquisition as a “competence” in a “technical area” (if I read the guideline correctly), akin to competence in GIS or statistics. Language is foregrounded–the technical option seems available more to US history scholars–but it is still treated as part of the same piece.

But history is not literary study; in an English department, I maintain, knowing French and python are completely different beasts serving two different masters in the scholarly process. The former relates to how stuff goes into the scholar (reading), while the latter relates to what comes out of the scholar (analysis). Exceptions are obvious, as one could publish in French and analysis usually involves quite a bit of feedback looping, but I think that I’m more or less right for the huge majority of cases.

So, on the one hand, I do wish that I could get the sense that computational methods training had greater appeal in the humanities.⁴ But, on the other, I do not think that it is entirely appropriate to view methods and foreign language as either/or objects in a course of study, when, as at my university, a student needs to show only proficiency in a single foreign language.

Given how my colleagues dismissively look back on their foreign language requirement (something like “I took ‘Reading German’ and remember none of it” is common), this distinction is probably unnecessary. In fact, as far as real-world skills are concerned, a much more lucrative future can be built up in a quarter-long course on Ruby than in the first quarter of first-year French. Human languages require care and attention, like Gabriel Conroy’s going to the continent to “keep in touch with the languages.” But though machine languages also benefit from practice (like any skill), it strikes me that it’s much easier to get back in the coding swing.

Still, maybe the question gets a bit more provocative if we consider the language requirement not at the PhD level, but, rather, at the undergrad level. Undergrads at my university can fulfill their math requirement by taking intro level CS courses that include vocational programming courses for web development, but the math requirement is certainly not the same thing as the foreign language requirement, which can be met in a dizzying array of ways. I cannot imagine that my university, which has made a huge deal over the past decade about expanding study abroad opportunities, would start accepting perl proficiency as meeting the foreign language requirement. And I’m not sure that’s bad.

Now it seems like we’re still comparing two things, human and machine languages, that can only really be compared in coarse ways, like through simple, macro-level questions of time management or speculation regarding future employability–two things, I think, that fall out of consideration at the PhD level (ha!).

So back to Kirschenbaum as I try to wrap up this wandering. HASTAC recently published a response to his article that reminds readers that one shouldn’t think that CS familiarity is demonstrated by machine language proficiency. This is certainly true: I know how to build and manage a GIS, but I don’t think I’m at all a geographer. I can code, but I’m not a computer scientist. And I don’t think my two years of formal French language study make me a scholar of French.

The article continues to discuss NLP, suggesting that the humanistic disciplines and CS have quite a lot in common. This is certainly true, too: my old CS roommate and I were often working on similar projects from different angles. But that then cuts out the final leg from the table that is Kirschenbaum’s argument. In describing programming as world-making, Kirschenbaum compares the coder to Jane Austen, a formidable world-maker herself of reasonable renown. Yet CSers working on NLP aren’t making worlds. They are investigating the world around us, just like us boring literary scholars.

1. I fulfilled the requirement with Russian by showing that I was reading Russian literature and engaging in literary discussion of the texts without translation. [↩]
2. He hedges, hardcore, by arguing that, in fact, it should be not only case-by-case but implicitly appropriate only for programs that require two foreign languages, which is not, as I mention, the case at my university, where one foreign language suffices. [↩]
3. I am working under a bit of a fantasy here about what the foreign language requirement should do for PhD students. I know the reality is just about always different. [↩]
4. My committee certainly had no issues with my pursuing further foreign language acquisition, or learning statistics, or taking a full year’s worth of GIS training. The promise to learn and work with GISes was written into my dissertation proposal, even! [↩]

Tags: assemblage, Brian Croxall, Brian Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari, digital humanities, geography, Geoinst, GIS, HASTAC, language, Matthew Kirschenbaum, natural language processing, programming, Ryan Cordell, the dead

When I last wrote about the World Cup ads in March, they were just starting to appear. Now Nike has tossed out an initial try with their “Write the Future” ad campaign:

It’s a cute enough ad, to be sure, on the first viewing, and it gets me a bit excited, but there are some major, major problems.

First, at this time, Ronaldinho is not even going to the World Cup. Though listed on the provisional 30-man roster, which was submitted earlier this month, he was not listed in Dunga’s unofficial squad of 23. And here I was, thinking the inclusion of Edgar Davids in the Nike ads eight years ago was a flub…

Next, what is up with Cristiano Ronaldo’s being the hero at the end of the commercial? This is the same Cristiano Ronaldo, mind you, who will not even make it out of the group stage. Although I feel sorry for Gael García Bernal…

Furthermore, those cheap jerseys that Didier Drogba, Fabio Cannavaro, and Franck Ribéry are wearing have got to go. I understand that those countries don’t have shirts made by Nike, but I can get more inspired bootleg renditions at Maxwell St. Market.

Finally, there’s the weird way in which the success of each team is interpreted depending on the country. Drogba’s heroics are classically “Dark Continent”-ized: his success involves clusters of people around fuzzy televisions cheering amongst themselves. We get no sense of an Ivorian element to his potential goal.

But Wayne Rooney–his success or failure affects the entire UK economy. Furthermore, his tackle of Ribéry triggers a crypto-racist spurt in white baby births in the UK, so that we have new Rooneys in England to figuratively cut the influence of the immigrant wave off at the knees, an immigrant wave symbolized, of course, by Franck Ribéry, a famous convert to Islam.

So what’s up, Wieden Kennedy?

(Also: I started a World Cup pick ’em pool you can join: Lithchat 2010 World Cup Challenge)

Tags: Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba, England, France, Franck Ribéry, Ronaldinho, Wayne Rooney, World Cup

My little collection of webpages and blog posts (pearltree) grows slowly, but I was glad to add a post today by Matthew Jockers, whose work got highlighted in an article in the Chronicle back in 2008, just as I was designing my dissertation proposal. It was inspiring in the sense that I felt like what I was doing was related, but cooler. I felt encouraged, in a word. I wasn’t being as bizarrely idiosyncratic as I feared.

Anyway, Jockers divides the digital humanities into two groups: those that work on digital objects and those who use digital tools on objects (that may or may not be digital). In my department, the former group (“A”) seems to circulate around the New Media Workshop, and the latter… well, they don’t really seem to have a high profile.

I like to imagine myself as part of the second group, the group B, to the point where I’m not positive I’d even consider those who are exclusively in group A “Digital Humanists,” but that’s probably not a fight worth having. Point is, I’ve got some of the cred,¹ but one glance at the latest Literary and Linguistic Computing indicates that I’m still a total n00b.

Still, the reason I bring this all up is that Jockers closes his post by pointing out that there is nothing quite as “new” about us Type B Digital Humanists as current outsider articles seem to be suggesting. As he writes:

I came to utilize computation in my research not because the siren’s song of revolution was tempting me away from my dusty, tired, and antiquated approaches to literature. Rather, computational tools and statistical methods simply offered a way of asking and exploring the questions that I (and others such as those pictured above) have about the literary field. What has changed is not the object of study but the nature of the questions.

That’s right. I mean, it’s tough to say straight that one did not pursue question x instead of question y without some kind of fantasy of “revolution”; there’s a reason a dissertation proposal includes a “state of the field” section, after all. But what I extrapolate from Jockers’s position is dead on: you can’t digi yourself up in a useful manner until your questions need digi techniques to get answered (cue my usual complaint about Wordles).

And that Wordle complaint is worth cuing again, since the point deserves being repeated over, and over, and over, and over…

1. Membership in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, utilizing tools like R, ArcGIS, and GeoDa in my work [↩]

Tags: Chronicle of Higher Education, digital humanities, Matthew Jockers