Creating Collaborative Data Space: a Profile of the New Social Sciences Data Laboratory
Why write about a social sciences data laboratory on a humanities blog?
Looking at lists of Berkeley departments and programs in the Humanities and in the Social Sciences, we might wonder why history is in the social sciences division, while the history of art is in the humanities; why anthropology is a social science department, while Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology is a humanities program; why Linguistics is not found in the same division as English, Slavic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese.... From the outside, such distinctions can be invisible. For undergraduates in engineering, for instance, all of those different fields are lumped together into one “breadth” requirement, often referred to simply as H/SS. There are reasons for all of this, I’m sure. But are they good ones? I won’t dare answer that question here.
Nevertheless, we might think of several generations of anti-positivist and postmodern scholars who have questioned the nature of the social sciences, asking, "just how scientific are they?" And more recently, some literature scholars have sought to put their fields on a more empirical foundation using digital methodologies (that is, by quantifying and measuring text, and by testing and verifying conclusions). The Townsend Center has stressed interdisciplinarity through its core programs for years, and interdisciplinary programs have been a prominent feature of undergraduate education for at least two decades. Many of these trends have brought plenty of controversy. Yet, from where I sit, it looks as though the social sciences and the humanities—or at least certain segments among them—are closer together, in methods and in theory, than they have been for a long time, and disciplinary boundaries are perhaps fuzzier than our institutional structure would suggest. As we move forward, it is possible that digital methods and data analysis will have a role to play in all of this.
This is why the new Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab) is an appropriate topic for a humanities blog, and why, as a digital humanities blogger, I am excited by what is being done there. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that in my capacities as Digital History Coordinator, I have been working closely with D-Lab from the beginning, but nonetheless). D-Lab has emerged to meet an important need: that of researchers to keep apace of rapidly changing technologies of data or information.
D-Lab was created following a report from the office of the vice chancellor for research Graham Fleming, which called for a more dynamic and flexible laboratory-based approach to social science research, amid the university-wide reorganization stimulated by recent loses in state funding. Led by historian of science Cathryn Carson, Associate Dean of the Social Sciences, D-Lab results from a reorganization of several groups, including UC Data, an archive and a provider of large-scale databases that was formerly part of the Survey Research Center that closed in 2010, and elements of the Social Science Computing Laboratory, a computing facility which dealt mainly with survey data.
This is more than just an institutional shuffle. In order to meet new technological and research demands that senior faculty do not always understand, D-Lab has taken a start-up approach, heavily involving graduate students at every stage of the process. Dean Carson commented on this approach in a D-Lab blog:
This isn’t always how Berkeley has operated. We are betting we can institutionalize this kind of responsiveness, even in the middle of the university’s long-established structures. We partly look outside for models—for fluid, adaptable organizations in the social and private sectors that are attentive to fitting into a scene that is constantly in flux. We also look inside. One thing crystallized out of the D-Lab design process: Berkeley’s graduate students are vastly talented and incredibly inventive. They are D-Lab’s first target audience, as well as the core of our start-up team.—Cathryn Carson, D-Lab as a Start-up
Only time will tell whether this graduate-student led, start-up style research institute is successful, but the early signs are good. In the two months since it opened, the workshops have been frequent and well-attended, drawing faculty, staff, and librarians, as well as graduate students. And a core community of graduate student researchers is growing up in the space.
In the context of a certain amount of convergence among the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, rather than challenging institutional boundaries, D-Lab takes an agnostic approach. Attending a D-Lab event, you will hear this in their introduction: “D-Lab is a about social sciences and data, but it polices the boundaries of neither.” This theoretical and disciplinary agnosticism is intended to keep D-Lab flexible and responsive to the emerging needs of researchers in a computing society, for whom the current disciplinary boundaries, both in and between the humanities and the social sciences, may not be so helpful for engaging with data.
On April 23, D-Lab will participate in "What Can Digital Humanities do for You?" co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Arts and Sciences, The Townsend Center, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and Berkeley IS&T. The event will be followed by D-Lab's end of the semester celebration, "Opening the Black Box."
Three Weeks with Dan Cohen: A DH Microcosm
Last year, Professor Tom Laqueur asked me to recommend someone to invite to apply for a Townsend Avenali Resident Fellowship in history who would enhance our efforts in the area of digital humanities and computational social sciences. Dan Cohen was an obvious choice. Currently the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Professor Cohen is a true leader in the digital humanities and computational social sciences, so we were delighted that he agreed to come.
In anticipation of his residency, my colleague Rochelle Terman wrote about Professor Cohen’s contributions in a post that can be found here. Rather than repeat what has already been said, this post will reflect on Professor Cohen’s visit.
Professor Cohen’s invitation to be the Avenali Resident Fellow in history fits within a larger effort to build a digital humanities and computational social sciences community across disciplines, units, and fields here at UC Berkeley, so that researchers might be able to take better advantage of the rich resources and many talents spread about campus. To the late Roy Rosenzweig, Professor Cohen’s predecessor and founder of CHNM, community building was necessary to fulfill the promise of digital technology. In his own work at the center, Professor Cohen carries this torch. His ‘big-tent,’ inclusive approach to digital methods, his vast knowledge of resources and projects, and his friendly demeanor all helped to further invigorate us in our efforts to create connections among Berkeley's immense but often disjointed resources and talent.
During his stay, Professor Cohen gave a public lecture on the changing nature of scholarly research and communication for the Computing and the Practice of History series, he led a discussion on Digital Humanities institutions for a new Townsend Brown Bag series (information about future events can be found here), he conferred with our Townsend-sponsored Digital Humanities Working Group, and he met individually with faculty, librarians, and graduate students. In addition, a major portion of his visit was dedicated to leading a special seminar, which was hosted in the new Social Sciences Data Lab (D-Lab).
In six meetings over three weeks, this seminar was a crash-course on digital scholarly methods, covering first-principles and methodological issues in several areas while introducing a panoply of new research tools. As it turns out, in ways both anticipated and surprising, Professor Cohen’s digital methods seminar proved to be a microcosm of the state of the digital humanities and computational social sciences, both here at Berkeley and in the world at large.
The seminar’s participants included junior faculty and graduate students from several fields of humanities and social sciences, from computer science, and from the School of Information, alongside librarians from the Bancroft and the Law Library, and IST staff. Among this group, computational abilities were as varied as fields: some participants were very much still beginners, others had robust technical skill sets, and at least one has recently been offered a job at Google.
Such diversity is no accident. As Professor Cohen has himself emphasized on many occasions, digital scholarly methods require multiple skill sets from several disciplines and fields. Hence, CHNM has computing specialists and designers working alongside its historians, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is closely allied with the University of Maryland’s libraries. To wit: digital scholarly methods demand interdisciplinary collaboration.
Aiming to foster that sort of exchange, D-Lab graciously opened its freshly hung doors a bit early to welcome us for Professor Cohen’s class, and the lingering traces of construction in D-Lab suited our seminar well. After all, in the words of Timothy Hitchcock delivering the inaugural Computing and the Practice of History lecture in 2011, “we are halfway through a revolution.” Indeed, there we were, sitting around a cluster of borrowed tables in an unfinished lab, its wires still not hidden away, paint still wet on the walls, Professor Cohen reminding us that much work remains to be done.
It was truly a pleasure to join Professor Cohen for three weeks in this digital humanities microcosm, with all of our diverse interests and backgrounds, exploring the contours of a still very unfinished field.
What Are Patterns For? Big Data and Its Discontents
Around the end of each year, pundits play the parlor game of choosing a “word of the year.” Often, it’s some flash-in-the-pan phrase that seems to capture the zeitgeist. This year’s contenders included “YOLO” and “Eastwooding.” (Visit the Boston Globe for a roundup.) For Geoff Nunberg, Professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and pundit in his own right at NPR, that word was “big data.”
The Text Encoding Initiative: Allowing Preservation and Access to our Textual Heritage through Digital Means
By developing and maintaining an encoding standard for the digitization of text, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is helping to deliver on the the internet's promise to democratize access to the world’s cultural—in this case, textual—heritage.
Viewed from this author’s lay-person’s perspective, libraries, museums, archives, and other custodians of the world’s textual heritage exist to serve at least two crucial functions when it comes to their rare collections: access and preservation. But there is a tension between the two, because institutions often must limit the access to their special collections in order to preserve them. Each time a researcher visits the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, to view the Tebtunis Papyri collection, for example, the millenniums-old papyrus pith is susceptible to damage. What’s more, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. doesn’t want kids on field trips handling a 1604 edition of Hamlet. And no adolescent could match the perniciousness of well-informed thieves such as Farhad Hakimzadeh, the businessman and antiquarian who from 2003 to 2009 used a scalpel to extract pages from some 150 rare books at the British Library and Oxford's Bodleian Library (see this BBC article for more). But even in the face of these dangers, preservation must not occlude access. After all, one of the goals of the American Library Association is “to ensure access to information by all” (ALA “Mission and History”).
Digital technology promises to relieve this tension by granting access to a very wide audience with only a minimum of risk to the materials. So the Bancroft works with the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) project to make their papyri available; the Folger Library makes its collections available and offers virtual tours through its website; and the Fihrist Islamic Manuscripts Catalogue Online offers access to materials (perhaps minus a few pages) from the British Library, the Bodleian, and several other UK institutions. All of these projects use TEI standards.
What is TEI? The TEI is an institution: a consortium of universities, libraries, archives, and others dedicated to the development of an encoding standard for the preservation, description, and publication of digital editions. As such, it holds an annual meeting, maintains discussions and working groups, and, most importantly, publishes and maintains guidelines for the encoding of text, also called TEI. Confused? Put another way, the TEI is both the name of an organization and the name of an encoding language produced by that organization. In the 1980s, incompatible systems for encoding and representing texts were multiplying, a situation which “was inhibiting the development of the full potential of computers to support humanistic inquiry” (TEI “Origins”). In other words, under such circumstances, computers could not increase access in the way that people had hoped. Also, this proliferation of standards aggravated the problem of preservation: what would happen when a standard became obsolete? Who would ensure the long-term preservation of these new documents in the years, decades, and even centuries to come? These important questions were not being answered. So, in 1987, an international group of researchers seeking to remedy these problems created the foundations of the Text Encoding Initiative. A first draft of its guidelines were published in 1990, and the TEI Consortium was formed in 1999 (ibid).
The point of a standardization like the TEI language is to allow for inter-operability among projects, and between projects and users, which should increase access to the encoded texts. And the TEI Consortium exists to make sure that the guidelines continue to be developed and maintained into the future, thus helping to preserve the new, digital editions of these important human creations. This important work will help the custodians of human culture better achieve the dual aims of preservation and access.
Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I did not end this piece with a note of caution. As we continue through this transition to the digital, we must never accept the misguided notion that a digital edition is a perfect and adequate substitute for the material artifact it describes. It is not. The human and scholarly value of the physical carriers of our textual heritage cannot be overestimated. This is well known by those who work most closely with them, including the members of the TEI, but might too easily be forgotten (or ignored) by those who control their purses. It is important that those who provide the funding for the conservation of our textual heritage—governments, institutions, and individual donors—not be tricked by seeing Shakespeare on the web into thinking that the folios themselves are no longer necessary, lest these irreplaceable relics of the human past fade into "The Nothing" before our very eyes. The TEI exists to prevent such loss and should never be used as an excuse to be negligent in our responsibilities to preserve the material objects of the human past.
The Year in Digital Humanities: 2012
In spite of apocalyptic predictions, 2013 is upon us. In honor of the new year, I present the (second annual) Year in Digital Humanities: the most notable stories in technology from 2012 and what it means for scholars in the Humanities.
What it means for digital humanists: Besides a lesson in bad design, the logo snafu proved that when students mobilize via social media, the University must take notice. Unfortunately such mass mobilizations tend to occur over aesthetics more than politics:"It's good that UC is listening to us," said Connor Landgraf, student body president at UC Berkeley. "Hopefully they'll start listening to students on other issues, as well, such as tuition increases."
All Mimsy were the Borogoves: A Brief Introduction to the Unicode Standard
You can’t spell “digital humanities” without letters, and you can’t make letters appear on a computer screen without character encodings. The ubiquity of character encodings, and the enormity of the challenges involved in creating and standardizing them, are (happily) obscured by the fact that, when done well, they are not seen at all. It is when they break down, when a beloved paradox from an ancient text, 名可名非常名 (Laozi 1), turns into a string of unintelligible jabber—hÑOvqÝŸ/PÿQ¶úðͶŒ ¡éØc:¹að—that the issue demands your attention.
The intelligibility of an electronic text rests on its encoding. Since Unicode's inception in 1987, the project has endeavored to create an encoding system capable of including all the world’s written languages, past and present, in a single, standardized format. Their mantra: “a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language" (http://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html).
Before Unicode, the standard was ASCII (The American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which was developed because computers also need standard character sets in order to use the same programs. In 1963, the ASCII character set was limited by hardware capabilities to 128 characters (2^7 or 7 bits), which were based on English (http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/06/1963.idg/index.html).
This standardization allowed for easier communication between computers and in English, but the 128-large character set of ASCII was too limited to encompass even French with diacritics, not to mention Arabic, Braille, Sanskrit, or mathematical notation. Some were later added to the standard as hardware limitations relaxed, by the creation of alternative 128-character sets (using an eighth bit to create a full byte, that is 2^8=256 possibilities). But this led to a proliferation of separate, mutually unintelligible extended sets. And with its 50,000+ large character set, the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) group of written languages presented an encoding challenge at an order of magnitude higher than the others. The eight bits of extended ASCII would not suffice.
Indeed, it was while developing a Japanese Kanji-enabled Macintosh computer in 1985 that Unicode President and co-founder Mark Davis first realized the need for a much larger, comprehensive encoding standard. In 1987, Davis met with researchers from Xerox who were doing work on multilingual character encoding. He joined with two of them, Joe Becker and Lee Collins, and together the three would begin the Unicode project (http://www.unicode.org/history/earlyyears.html). In 1991, the Unicode Consortium was officially incorporated (ibid), and in 1993 the Unicode standard replaced ASCII for the first time in an operating system, Windows NT version 3.1 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/99884).
As is well known, advances in hardware have meant that the memory allocation problem that limited ASCII to 7 bits in 1963 is, thankfully, quite moot. Unicode was developed as a 16-bit standard (UTF-16), which allows for 65,536 unique code-points (without the need for extension into other “planes”). The standard also includes an variable-length 8-bit encoding (UTF-8) and an extended 32-bit encoding (UTF-32). Today, systems based on Windows NT (e.g. XP, Vista, Windows 7) and Mac OS X use the 16-bit standard (UTF-16), and many UNIX-based systems and a majority of websites use UTF-8 (http://trends.builtwith.com/encoding/UTF-8).
Now, with hardware limitations no longer an issue, Unicode offers a practical and comprehensive character encoding standard.
“The majority of common-use characters fit into the first 64K code points, an area of the codespace that is called the basic multilingual plane, or BMP for short. There are sixteen other supplementary planes available for encoding other characters, with currently over 860,000 unused code points. More characters are under consideration for addition to future versions of the standard” (http://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html).
In other words, there is plenty of space in the Unicode standard to handle all of the world’s written languages.
The Unicode Consortium has brought all the major languages written today, and many less-common and ancient ones, into a single standard, thus allowing humanities researchers in many fields and areas of study to read electronic texts as though they weren't just strings of ones and zeros, blissfully unaware of the jabberwocky behind the screen.
Black Studies and Digital Humanities: Perils and Promise
“When you hear the terms ‘new technology’, ‘digital humanities’, and ‘black studies,’” tells Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal on his web series Left of Black, “it’s almost as if its an oxy-moron.”
Neal is Professor Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of a weekly webcast, Left of Black. On the season premier of its third season, Left of Black tackled the uncertain relationship between Black Studies and digital humanities – a relationship that is at once precarious and filled with potential. The conversation was enriched by the contributions of two young scholars who are charting new terrain in the field of Black Studies and digital humanities: Howard Rambsy II, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature and Director of the Black Studies Program at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and Jessica Marie Johnson, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Richards Civil War Era Center and African Research Center at Penn State University.
According to these experts, digital humanities present Black Studies scholars – as well as other scholars studying the experiences of people of color – with a double bind. One the hand, some Black Studies departments have been resistant to embrace the possibilities of emerging technologies, new media, and digital platforms in their work. University departments everywhere tend towards a kind of institutional inertia that, ironically, encourages fierce competition for the cutting edge in research while maintaining and defending “traditional” structures like tenure, disciplinary boundaries, and the traditional academic publication system. As Neal puts it, “on the one hand, if we look at Black Studies proper, the fact is it’s a field that continues to be driven by older scholars [who are] still very much tied to a 1960s style Black Studies model.” In a demonstrative moment of generational critique 2.0, Neal diagnoses the problem: “These folks are still on the listserve.”
On the other hand, Universities are often slow to recognize the ways in which “race” factors in the digital humanities, while ignoring or sequestering the distinctive digital humanities projects created by Black Studies scholars.
“When all these deans and provosts are looking around for folks who are going to be doing the cutting edge work [in digital humanities], the last folks they look for are black folks. Black folks don’t do technology, right?” Neal explains.
We have to move “beyond normative ideas of who is a digital humanities scholar,” says Johnson, “which has been imagined as a white, male academic. And it’s really not. There are ways that we as people of color and people of all kinds of identities are very engaged with what’s happening in technology right now, but are not necessarily having that conversation in the digital humanities space.”
Not only must Black Studies scholars working in digital humanities confront the stereotype that African-Americans are uninterested or unskilled in technology, they must also continue the struggle that Black Studies scholars have felt for decades: educating the public on the relevance, importance, and centrality of Black Studies in the larger liberal arts paradigm. (And if there are still doubts that this struggle continues, this recent Chronicle of Higher Education controversy should lay those doubts to rest.)
“Even when you have folks who do [digital humanities], they’re never included in those conversations, because – let me just be frank – it’s just ‘black shit,’” Neal says. “It’s never integrated into what the folks do in the mainstream University, even as the mainstream university is going forward with this idea of digital humanities.”
Part of the solution, according to Johnson, is to highlight, promote, and celebrate the contributions to digital humanities research by Black Studies scholars and people of color. Projects such as the Black Gotham Archive and Diaspora Hypertext are fine examples. In the realm of pedagogy, Black Girls Code confronts the dearth of African-American women in science, technology, and math while transforming how we think about “access” to new technologies. In the realm of cultural production, The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl is transforming not only “Black television” but the entire universe of television in a digital age.
According to Neal, digital humanists in Black Studies are “educating these institutions that, not only are we using this technology in very interesting and productive ways, but… we’re actually using it in cutting edge ways that has a great deal to teach the university about how to do digital humanities.”
That being said, it is not the sole responsibility of Black Studies scholars to demonstrate the relevance of race to digital humanities. We must all do our part. Indeed, to the extent that digital humanities research tells us something about how society interfaces with technology, an appreciation of racial dynamics in digital spaces is fundamental to our understanding of digital humanities.
As Johnson explains, the same structures we find in the print world get replicated in the digital realm. Even though most people recognize the potential to create Internet spaces that are more egalitarian, open, and diverse, the reality is that structures of race, gender, sexuality and class operate there, too.
“This is where black studies can enter the digital humanities realm in a critical way,” says Johnson. Black Studies is particularly qualified to make scholarly interventions into this area by virtue of its historically strong critical apparatus vis-à-vis these structures. But all of us interested in digital humanities should be charged with recognizing and appreciating the race, gender, class, and other power structures that shape these tools and spaces. Just as the “archive” is now recognized to be problematic with regards to race and gender, so should we be critical in our usage of technology, especially as the Internet becomes more and more commercialized.
This is not to say that digital tools and spaces are useless to Black Studies scholars and those working to interrogate power structures in our society. Indeed, all the contributors to the discussion on Left of Black acknowledge the potential of the Internet and new media for new knowledge production and critique.
The challenge Black Studies scholars face, according to Howard, is the same one facing so many in the digital world: how to produce quality content that is centralized enough to provide a cumulative critical apparatus, as opposed to a flurry of unorganized memes. As Neal puts it: “The irony is that there was a real critical apparatus 50 years ago when folks didn’t have access to publishing houses they way we do, no internet. Now we have access, we can publish anything we want at any time, but yet we find ourselves hamstrung to actually speak back critically at what we’re producing.”
Considering the impressive history of prolific publishing and content creation by their forbearers in the analog world, digital humanists in Black Studies have big shoes to fill. As they continue to innovate in digital humanities, scholars outside of Black Studies will have much to learn.
Dan Cohen Brings Tech Edge to Berkeley Humanities
We’re now entering the third decade of the Web. And yet, according to historian and digital humanist Dan Cohen, many scholars still don’t grasp the full potential of digital tools. Unfortunately, the humanities and interpretative social scientists are the furthest behind. These scholars may see digital technologies as a way to data crunch mass amounts of text in a form of “distant reading,” a distribution warehouse for electronic articles, or a new-age mailbox. But too few are engaging the Web and information technologies as a platform that fosters new ways of thinking, teaching, and building knowledge.
In Defense of Browsing: Digital Humanities and the Upshot of Screwing Around
A study from the Pew Internet and Life Project on Friday reported that 53% of those 18-29 years old go online "for no particular reason except to have fun or to pass the time." Furthermore, the study highlighted a significant generation gap. Just 12% of those 65 or older said they go online for no particular reason.
The randomness that guides the activity of browsing is not confined to the web; it also seems to be shaping digital humanities. In a recent column Stanley Fish portrays browsing as the dominant method (or anti-method) in digital humanities: randomly traversing huge amounts of data with the hope of stumbling upon some surprising statistical pattern of sameness or difference undetectable by the eye of the human reader. In contrast to the “conventional” humanities project in which the scholar approaches a close reading of a text with some hypothesis in mind, the computer-aided process of “text mining” is neither interpretively directed nor theoretically guided.
The process might look something like this: Let’s see how many time the word "orange" is used versus "clementine" in this 10-million-book corpus. If a significant pattern arises, a hypothesis follows. In other words, the practice is dictated by the tool; millions of texts are analyzed together in a panoramic-like practice of “distant reading.”
It should be clear by now that if digital humanities are coterminous with this “text-mining” or “distance reading” orgy of randomness and technological fetishism, then neither Stanley Fish nor many other established humanists look upon it as a particularly positive development in their discipline. Fish concludes, “whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice… a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play."
But the phrase “mere play” begs the question. There exists a significant group of people for whom play is very serious indeed, namely experts in child development and psychology who contribute to the growing consensus that “idle, creative, unstructured free play… is a central part of neurological growth and development.”
Play has also enjoyed a value boost in the world of adults in recent decades, and humanist scholars in particular have touted its productive potential. From Jacques Derrida’s “free Play” and Herald Bloom’s “productive misreading, to Barthe’s discussion of “the pleasure of the text”, play is not just a pathway for distraction and procrastination; it is vital for creativity and critique.
Play can take a variety of productive forms, but perhaps the most important – at least for current debate around digital humanities - is the play involved in the process of “screwing around”. Stephen Ramsey describes this using a library analogy: One can enter a library in order to conduct a specific search about a particular topic. Alternatively, one can go into a library and “wander around in a state of insouciant boredom”. This is called browsing, and it’s a completely different activity. Unlike searching, when I am browsing I don’t know what’s here, and I don’t know what I’m looking for.
So perhaps the appropriate dichotomy in the debate over digital humanities is not between close reading and far reading, or interpretation and text-mining, but rather between searching and browsing. Searching is approaching the text “armed with a hypothesis”. Browsing uses “a machine that is ready to recognize the text in a thousand different ways instantly”. As Fish puts it:
Each reorganization (sometimes called a “deformation”) creates a new text that can be reorganized in turn and each new text raises new questions that can be pursued to the point where still newer questions emerge. The point is not to get to a place you had in mind and then stop; the point is to keep on going, as, aided by the data-generating machine, you notice this and then notice that which suggests something else and so an, ad infinitum.
Are we ready, Ramsey asks, “to accept surfing and stumbling — screwing around, broadly understood — as a research methodology?”
Criticisms of the browsing method are easy to find. For instance, some denounce this approach by arguing that important treasures cannot be found without a map of sorts; randomness will lead to bunk. But this seems fundamentally counterintuitive to anybody who has practiced the art of browsing on the Web, or even in a book or record store. I dare say I have discovered many of my favorite musical artists, my most useful skills, and my most passionate interests in the course of “screwing around”. I have also consumed a wealth of fascinating, if not entirely “practical” knowledge; this afternoon included the wondrous features of the cuttlefish. The beauty of “the accidental finding” is something that humanist scholars should embrace as they would the value of interdisciplinarity, the participant observation, and the openness that so often results in creative thinking.
Others argue that the browsing – and particularly web browsing – is mired by anarchical content structures that prevent the development of community or cumulative knowledge. This criticism, however, seem to ignore the remarkable order that exists within the so-called anarchy of the web and digital technologies.
Yes, “screwing around” on the internet does not follow as narrow a guide as peer-reviewed journal or MLA bibliography, but chaos it is not. Indeed there is a sophisticated and complex order to web interactions that produce trends, vocabularies, and communities, even though these may be unpredictable. It is worth remembering that today, the dominant format of the Web is not a random assortment of millions of static “Pages” but a system of aggregate, browse-amenable forums: Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Youtube, and others. As Ramsey puts it: “These sites are at once the product of screwing around and the social network that invariably results when people screw with each other.”
Finally, the most pervasive criticism does not concern the form of textual interaction that browsing represents but the “texts” themselves that browsing tends to encounter and encourage. Columnist Mitch Albom, in a somewhat curmudgeonly Sunday column reacting to the PEW poll, writes that the kind of aimless activity that young people perform when online has led to the proliferation of mindless content: "When you're not looking for anything special, the un-special will do just fine," he writes. But I wonder exactly what content Ablom is referring to here: is it the straw-men of banal haranguing or scatological humor that has populated every media form since stone carvings? Or is the specifically internet-esque system of content creation, interactions and iterations – think the recent “Shit Girls Say” video and its derivatives, or the pepper spray meme – that seem particularly “mindless” to Ablom? Is “mindless” without thought or consideration, or is simply without restraint?
Indeed, it is difficult as a young person to read these now-cliché denouncements of web browsing without feeling put down or alienated at the thinly veiled ageism that underlies such critiques. Take these lines for instance:
I have long since believed that going into cyberspace is a mission young people take not to actually land on a planet, but to cruise around the stars until the ship runs out of gas.
They could, of course, discover a previously-unknown galaxy of wonder that could change our world forever.
Unfortunately, the rise of the semantic and integrated web may signal the decline of browsing as we know it. A vital part of “screwing around” is the very possibility of stumbling upon a piece of content that is outside one’s informational “normal”. That is, a crucial element of web browsing is the potential for exposure to weird content -- that is, content you did not search for, content you could not have imagined existed, content that is perhaps five or six degrees of “link” separation away from a first-order facebook or googlereader browse. But with the rise of user-specific content display – for instance Google’s new plan to track users across services - we may soon find ourselves surrounded by the ordinary. Content will now be tailored to us (or more specifically who the machine thinks we are) eliminating the random potential that has made the web scary, and amazing.
Scholars such as Stanley Fish would do well to appreciate how much browsing, randomness, and “screwing around” has benefited his own work and that of others. After all, how did I stumble upon his column – which then became inspiration for this blog post? Well, I was screwing around on the internet.
The Year in Digital Humanities
