Digital Humanities and ITL Recent Readings
From digmovements
This is a partial list of readings conducted in the library over the past few years, in the areas of information literacy and the digital humanities. The subject headings are meant to provide context and indicate emergent themes in our learning.
[edit] Computers and the Body of Knowledge
These titles have combined over the years to provide insights into the transhistorical material tasks computers are beginning to perform for the humanities and for all learning. These tasks address the ubiquitous need in literate societies to make knowledge, poetry, art and learning tangible, memorable, and accessible across generations and through time. Some of the books in this section look at technologies that people designed specifically for these tasks, like books, documents, libraries, and so on. Others serve to place these literal technologies of knowledge, old and new, into their larger historical and technological contexts.
Book on the Book Shelf, by Henry Petroski (1999)
Highly readable design history of the book and the bookshelf. Reviews the material problems, design practicalities, and temporal imperatives faced repeatedly in western history in the storage, organization, and aggregation of human knowledge and information over time. Excavates the design elements that arose, fell away, or remained constant across changing technologies, from the Sumerian clay tablet to the modern library book stack. Provides instructive illustrations. The conclusion relates the enduring design constants to the arrival of digital media.
Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, David J. Levy (2002)
Begins with a cheeky exigesis of a cash register receipt and carries forward to a sophisticated and soulful memoir of written forms. Differentiates between documents, which can be cultural artifacts of many types that carry meaning, and texts, a linguistic subset of the former. Examines the ubiquity and manic diversity of printed texts currently around us for their symbolic and functional forms, and for their changing character with the arrival of computers. Considers written forms alongside their creators, quill, typewriter, ballpoint pen, cash register, dot matrix printer, and so on. Levy, a UW professor, is a computer engineer and a book binder and calligrapher. A fine and elegant writer, he is uniquely qualified to identify the material, emotional, and spiritual differences between printed forms and digital media - and articulate the fitting uses of each.
Library: An Unquiet History, by Matthew Battles (2004)
Engaging read provides a political history of libraries, from ancient times to the present. Great libraries have been built, and burned, by great kings and warriors for many reasons across time. Discusses ancient libraries in Alexandria and Baghdad, Renaissance libraries in Florence and Rome, twentieth century libraries in the Progressive Era US and Nazi Era Germany, and more. Battles looks into the design, organization, and motivations for libraries and the information systems they housed. Knowledge historically has been collected, treasured, horded, shared, despised, and destroyed for mostly political reasons, and it has been tied irretrievably to the political fates of the libraries that have housed it. This book demonstrates, in fine complement to Petroski, that knowledge must be fixed materially to survive over time and that the medium of fixation historically has been ...ahem... a large part of the message.
David Nye, Technology Matters (2006)
Nye is a brilliant historian of technology and its social meanings. Over a distinguished academic career, he has developed an analytical acumen that is seismic in its power to shake continents apart and pull new ones together. Here he brings his expertise and wisdom to bear, in the broadest possible way, on questions of human tools and the human beings that create, fight over, and use them. Historians in many fields consider this fascinating, sweeping little book to be foundational to understanding our technology-driven contemporary society and culture.
[edit] Junctures in the History of Knowledge
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1994)
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (2002)
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
Classic article excavates contemporary attitudes about technology, humanity, and relations of power. Postulates a permeable, even collapsing boundary in our understanding of natural and artificial, as well as animal, human, and machine. Valuable for pre-computer insights that apply acutely, if indiretly, to current computer saturation of pop culture and wired life.
Luciano Floridi, "Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information," Metaphilosophy 35:4 (July 2004), 554-582.
Reviews the new field, philosophy of information. Argues that "the modern alliance between sophia and techne has reached a new level of synergy with the digital revolution." Considers the ontological status of information in nature, its phenomenology in human cognition, and its diverse manifestions as spatial probabilities, data formations, and semantic meanings. Floridi fascinates by raising eighteen "open questions" with these and other considerations. A jarring look at our own foundations of scientific and philosophical knowledge in mid-paradigmatic shift.
Paul Privateer, Inventing Intelligence: A Social History of Smart (Blackwell, 2006)
[edit] Communications and Media Studies
From McLuhan to McChesney, these books have encapsulated the alpha and omega of communications and media studies for us. They have provided a bare scaffolding on which we've hung our exploration of the new digital media and the impact it is having on our sholarly and everyday lives. These books have also framed our attention to the ways in which mass media are infiltrating our personal psychology and identity through electronic forms.
Marshall MacLuhan, Essential McLuhan
Umberto Eco, Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Basic Books, 2006)
A fine novel from Eco that tells the tale of a bookseller whose stroke has left him with no personal memory, only the things he has learned from mass media. The bookseller's sojourn into his past, in an effort to recover his identity and himself, provides Eco a device through which to explore the elements of memory and identity that are unique to us as individuals and those that culture high and low contribute to us unaware.
Dan Gilmore, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People (O'Reilly Media, 2006)
Comprehensive look at the blogosphere and the advent of popular citizen journalism. Provides a brief history of the blogopshere and places it in historical context of independent journalism since the founding of the US. Looks into the transformation of the business model for news. Provides advice and protocols for good blogging in niche journalism; defines good blogging as value-added information. Makes an argument for the civic value of watchdog citizen journalism in the present context of information saturation and vertical integration in corporate media. We the Media Blog
Eric Alternman, Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper. New Yorker, March 31, 2008.
Timely assessment of the institutional transformation currently under in newspaper journalism. Discusses changing print news business model, decline in advertising revenues, downsizing and decline of investigative reporting, and the rising journalistic influence of political blogs.
Robert McChesney, Communication Revolution (Basic Books, 2007)
An intellectual biography that narrates changes the field of communications has faced in the past twenty years and that continue today. Book uses a notion of critical junctures as a theory of history to analyze the fortunes communications technologies in the twentieth century. This approach excavates the point - apparently new to the field of communications - that the past matters in both the determination and the understanding of the shape of the past. For example, radio did to start out as a commercial medium but became that way through the deliberate actions of commercial interests. Concludes with a capacious analogy between the fleeting opportunity to prevent the commercialization of radio that was lost in the 1930s and the current moment of opportunity we yet have to maintain net neutrality on the web.
[edit] History of Computers since 1980
These titles explain the origins - and represent the origin of an origins mythology - of the personal computer and the world wide web. They demystify computers by providing conceptual explanations of how they work, accounting for the motivations behind their creation, and demonstrating the functional logics of their design. Reading history books is always a worthy endeavor; these have the added benefit of being urgently current and urgently necessary to understanding our own times.
Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley (O'Reilly Media, 2004)
A design history of the Apple MacIntosh and a personal history of Apple. Provides the insights and memories of one of the original design engineers and inventors of the MacIntosh. Nonlinear text is printed in the size and design style of the original MacIntosh. Gives a specific history to the utterly novel abstract working environment structured by the personal computer, as well as the spatial and transitional metaphors we still employ everyday to use and understand it: the mouse, window, desktop, toolbar, task manager, file folder, and others. A sweet-natured, enjoyable read indispensable for really understanding the past thirty years. Best if accompanied by a screening of the cornball made-for-tv movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley.
John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (2005)
Lively, journalistic business history of Google, Inc., delivered in tandem with an explanation of how internet searching in general, and Google in particular, works. Provides insight into dot.com business model and the logics of computing innovation. Places rise of multibillion dollar Google corporation in context of the Clinton era and, importantly, demystifies the technology and functionalities of internet searching. Lets you know WTF things like "crawling the internet" and "database of intentions" mean. Batelle is the founder of Wired Magazine and Wired.com.
Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (2003)
Social and technological history of Linux operating system and the open source movement that created it. Based on interviews with principals, this book provides a fun and informative look into the altruistic and anti-capitalist impulses that started with GNU, copyleft and the GNU Manifesto, and then went to Linux, free ware, share ware, Creative Commons licensing, and beyond. Also serves to demystify computers and computing technology; provides a common sense and plain language explanation of computer operating systems.
Davenport & Prusak, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Harvard Business School Press, 1998)
One of the earliest scholarly discussions of insourcing as an organizational strategy and as knowledge-building practice. Provided to us a key insight into the notions of an intuitive knowledge of information technologies and their transparency of use once such knowledge is acquired. Discussion of this book led to the original articulation of the Lloyd Wilson Effect.
Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat (2005)
[edit] Pedagogy of Digital Humanities
We have not found many publications that pertain directly to using digital technology and media in a transparent way to teach the humanities. Most everything being published currently is in the K12 literature, apparently because the vital critical faculty of media literacy must begin with kindergarten.
Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History (2005)
Michael Wesch, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Wonderful video explains Web 2.0 as both a semantic approach to cultural knoweldge and a many-to-many revolution in publishing and communications. Demonstrates the malleability and fluidity of online textual content in Web 2.0 applications. Concludes, "we will have to rethink a few things, including copyright, authorship, identity, ethcis, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves." A defining, recursive text of Web 2.0. Posted on Youtube in 2007, it has had almost 6 million viewings so far.
Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997)
“The Integration of Technology into Learning and Teaching in the Liberal Arts," Liberal Education 88:2 (Spring 2002), 30-40.
Sonia Livingstone, “Media Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and Communication Technologies,” The Communication Review 7 (2004), 7-14.
Jeremy Moss, “Power and the Digital Divide” Ethics and Information Technology 4:2 (2002), 159-165.
[edit] Case Study: Born Digital Fine Arts
Daniel Downes, Interactive Realism: Digital Poetics of Cyberspace (2005)
"Internactive realism is an approach to studying new media that emphasizes both the linguistic and nonlinguistic importance of cultural artifacts like the computer in the construction of social reality. Interactive realism focuses... on relationships between representations, systems of representation, and the shape of the social imaginary." --Introduction.
Loss Pequeno Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of e-Poetries (2002)
"..this is a book about Web-based electronic writing viewed through the lens of poetic practice... the goal here is to argue electronic space as a space of poesis; to employ the tropes, hypertextualities, linkages, and static of the medium; to speak from the perspective of one up-to-the-elbows in the ink of this writing machine." -- Introduction.
Rachel Greene, Internet Art (2004)
Describes and portrays developments art on the web. An excellent resource for examples of original works which explore the characteristics of the medium.
George P. Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (2006)
Provides a cautionary for literary theorists who jump too soon into an untested genre. Textbook-ish format and style introduces rhetorical strategies for the creation of nonlinear texts through unstructured hyperlinking. Close analysis the hypertext novels - e-texts that hyperlink segmented narratives innonlinear fashion - as a case study. Novels discussed were already out of readable formats by the time the third edition of Landlow's once lauded definitive text was released. They also didn't make sense.
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998)
Poetic in quality, poignant in mood, this fine and moving book provides a print example of effective nonlinear narrative. Valuable for its print demonstration of nonlinear meaning-making and story-telling goals that can be achieved successfully on the web. Read with Landow, it suggests that nonlinear narratives can work when the content is nonlinear, but not when the information architecture is.
[edit] Case Study: Sociology of Web Use
Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace," Village Voice (Dec 21, 1993), 36-42; Thomas M. Powers, "Real Wrongs in Virtual Communities," Ethics and Information Technology 5:4 (2003), 191-198.
Astonishing original article that reported on one of the first recorded acts of cyber violence, accompanied by a recent discussion of the incident by a moral philosopher. Provides insight into the origins and nature of online community, the personal psychology of avatar identity, and the morality of intangible, online acts. This incident, and Dibbell's article about it, are foundational in the literature of the web. Dibbell is a contributor and editor at Village Voice and a regular contributor to Wired.
Michael Warschauer, Technology and Social Inclusion (MIT Press, 2003)
Karen Mossberger, Virtual Inequality (Georgetown University Press, 2003)
Mia Consalvo and Susanna Paasonen, Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet (2002)
Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (2006)
[edit] Case Study: Impact of the Web on Social Movements
The value of these books is that they all engage a fund of knowledge that is reasonably well known to us - the history of social movements. In order to bring each history up to date, the books one by one span the arrival of computers into their social movements. The result, at the end of each book, reveals the transformative impact of computers in specific environments where other factors can be controlled for. The insights add up, and patterns emerge. This is leaves us with a choice. We can decide if the institutional, cultural, political and economic lessons to be learned from the arrival of computers in social movements can be extrapolated for use in the analysis of other institutions.
Martha McCaughey, Michael D. Ayers, Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (2003)
Still a definitive collection of articles on various social movements and their uses of the internet and the web for education, outreach, organization, mobilization, and sustenance of social movements in the age of the web. Provides foundational insights into positive and negative, direct and indirect, effects of the web on reform organizations. Looks at both pre-existing and born digital reform activities and groups for the benefits and limitations for reform movements provided by the web.
Michael Y. Dartnell, Insurgency Online: Web Activism and Global Conflict (2006)
Three case studies in the use of the web by insurgent organizations, Radical Women of Afghanistan, Irish Republican Socialist Movement, and Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru. Provides insight into the incorrigible nature of the web for authorities and its value to insurgent groups who operate outside a context of civil rights. Points to the deceptive quality of equalized opportunities for rhetorical impact among groups profoundly unequal in power. For example, the outsized rhetorical power of Al Qaeda online and the phantasmagoric reading apparent in the Bush administration’s second Iraq War.
