digital humanities – Alyssa Arbuckle

On “Zonas de Contacto: A Digital Humanities Ecology of Knowledges,” by Élika Ortega

November 5, 2021 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “Zonas de Contacto: A Digital Humanities Ecology of Knowledges,” Élika Ortega considers the field of digital humanities and its concentration of English-language work and output. She argues that the purposeful facilitation of zones of contact between practitioners from different regions who work in different languages would support a more diverse ecology of knowledges for the field. Ortega examines the efforts made by groups like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations to encourage multilingual engagement but concludes that these efforts…

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On Living Books by Janneke Adema

October 26, 2021 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

Janneke Adema considers the contemporary scholarly book and how it could transition from a fixed, bound object to a more fluid and evolving entity. She argues that humanities scholars should reconsider their role as authors and strive to engage with knowledge production in more open, critical, and experimental ways. Adema challenges new media scholars (such as Lev Manovich and John Bryant) and print historians (such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns) for their perpetuation of the book as an unchangeable,…

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On Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

January 10, 2021 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

Data Feminism casts a feminist perspective on data science. The book is organized around a set of principles intended to show and do feminist data work: Examine power; Challenge power; Elevate emotion and embodiment; Rethink binaries and hierarchies; Embrace pluralism; Consider context; Make labour visible. D’Ignazio and Klein draw on feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), critical theory, and information science scholars to contest that data are “never neutral; they were always the biased output of unequal social, historical, and…

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On “The Future of the Humanities in the Present & in Public,” by Kathleen Woodward

September 16, 2018 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

Woodward considers the current state of public scholarship in the humanities, specifically in the American context. She argues that by and large universities have not lived up to their civic mission of community engagement, although there are many good reasons to embrace public scholarship, and many examples of important and successful public scholarship initiatives (some of which are listed by Woodward). She calls for “more emphasis in the conversations about the public humanities on the importance of intellectuals writing for…

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On “Back to the Future,” by Bob Stein

November 10, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “Back to the Future,” Bob Stein discusses SocialBook, an Institute for the Future of the Book project that uses networked technologies to publish and read cultural materials. He argues that prior to the invention of the printing press, reading used to be a collaborative activity in social knowledge creation. People would gather around texts, discuss them, and insert comments into manuscripts via marginalia. Once book production became mechanized, and more people developed literacy skills, reading became a much more…

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On “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts,” by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

November 10, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggests that electronic publishing should reproduce the organization and structure of the print book, rather than take a skuemorphic approach that mimics the look of the book, and instead of employing more radical, disorienting approaches. To do so, Fitzpatrick offers Commentpress as a potential option, a WordPress theme that allows for side-by-side commenting on academic texts. She argues that by using a platform like Commentpress, one can return to…

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On Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

November 10, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In the oft-cited touchstone book Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, Kathleen Fitzpatrick examines the current academic publishing system, and outlines its drawbacks and possibilities. She suggests that the current fixation on the printed book monograph, at least in the humanities, needs to change. For Fitzpatrick, the monograph is part of an undead, zombie logic of the academy, as it represents a mandatory but often dysfunctional system of scholarly communication. Beyond the monograph, Fitzpatrick argues, we…

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On “Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration,” by Geoffrey Rockwell

October 19, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration,” Geoffrey Rockwell asserts that the point of his chapter “is not to praise collaboration, but to ask how it can be structured through social media for research” (136). He goes on to explore crowdsourcing as an outcome of social media-enabled collaboration in the humanities. Rockwell surveys the arguments for and against digital humanities collaboration, and tends to come down in the middle: he doesn’t believe that collaboration is a “transcendent value” (138),…

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On “Towards Best Practices in Collaborative Online Knowledge Production,” by Susan Brown

October 13, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “Towards Best Practices in Collaborative Online Knowledge Production,” Susan Brown illuminates the affordances of web technologies and standards for contemporary, large-scale and multiplayer scholarly production, possible in part because of the Web 2.0 evolution. In this chapter she draws explicitly from her experience leading The Orlando Project and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory. Brown suggests that in order to create truly “superior scholarship,” (48) we must design collaborative practices with data management, preservation, standardization, efficacy, and community engagement in…

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On “Developing an Open, Networked Peer Review System,” by Nina Belojevic

September 28, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “Developing an Open, Networked Peer Review System” Nina Belojevic seeks successful methods to combine the scholarly and the practical in digital projects. Digital scholarship is increasingly legitimate in the academy, especially in the realms of digital humanities and new media. But digital project development, Belojevic argues, could benefit from certain game- and other creative-industry project management and design practices. To demonstrate her argument, Belojevic provides the Personas for Open Peer Review project as an example. In developing the Personas…

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