Matthew Kirschenbaum’s research while affiliated with Loyola University Maryland and other places

Encompassing new technologies, research methods, and opportunities for collaborative scholarship and open-source peer review, as well as innovative ways of sharing knowledge and teaching, the digital humanities promises to transform the liberal arts—and perhaps the university itself. Indeed, at a time when many academic institutions are facing austerity budgets, digital humanities programs have been able to hire new faculty, establish new centers and initiatives, and attract multimillion-dollar grants. Clearly the digital humanities has reached a significant moment in its brief history. But what sort of moment is it? This book explores its theories, methods, and practices and to clarify its multiple possibilities and tensions. From defining what a digital humanist is and determining whether the field has (or needs) theoretical grounding, to discussions of coding as scholarship and trends in data-driven research, this cutting-edge volume delineates the current state of the digital humanities and envisions potential futures and challenges. At the same time, several essays aim pointed critiques at the field for its lack of attention to race, gender, class, and sexuality; the inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners; its absence of political commitment; and its preference for research over teaching.

Library of Congress, UIeRA#2008-01111-00-00 published or submitted for publication not peer reviewed

Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits were undertaken with the twofold objective of exchanging knowledge amongst the still relatively small community of practitioners engaged in such efforts, and facilitating the preparation of a larger collaborative project proposal aimed at preserving and accessing the born-digital documents and records of contemporary authorship. The grant period was September 2008-March 2009. The only specified deliverable was this white paper; however, as the Outcomes and Next Steps sections (below) suggest, a small initial investment by NEH has yielded significant benefit in the form of infrastructure, knowledge sharing, and future collaboration.

This paper discusses applications of data mining in the seemingly unlikely field of literary criticism. While the underlying techniques are traditional—Naïve Bayes, SVM—literary criticism, and the "digital humanities" more generally, differ from other domains in that they rarely admit ground truth into their discussions. Instead, data mining and machine learning are best understood in terms of "provocation"—the potential for outlier results to surprise a reader into attending to some aspect of a text not previously deemed significant—as well as "not-reading" or "distant reading," the automated search for patterns across a much wider corpus than could be read and assimilated via traditional humanistic methods of "close reading." At a moment when a widely publicized report by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded reading itself was "at risk," large online text collections (Google Books, the Open Content Alliance) are making millions of texts available in machine-readable form. Data mining is part of this remaking of reading.

Word processors of the Gods William Gibson, in his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, allows Ngemi, collector and connoisseur of antiquarian computers, to have his joke: “I am negotiating to buy Stephen King's Wang,” he announces deadpan. “The provenance,” Ngemi continues, “is immaculate, the price high, but, I believe, reasonable. A huge thing, one of the early dedicated word processors.” King, in fact, acquired his Wang word processor in 1983, the same year Time Magazine dubbed personal computers the “machine of the year.” The Wang would have included a Z80 processor and 64K of RAM. Clearly the technology was tantalizing to him. The following year, in the introduction to his short story collection Skeleton Crew, King wrote: In particular I was fascinated with the INSERT and DELETE buttons, which make cross-outs and carets almost obsolete&. I thought, “Wouldn't it be funny if this guy wrote a sentence, and then, when he pushed DELETE, the subject of the sentence was deleted from the world?” Anyway, I started&not exactly making up a story so much as seeing pictures in my head. I was watching this guy&delete pictures hanging on the wall, and chairs in the living room, and New York City, and the concept of war. Then I thought of having him insert things and having those things just pop into the world. “Word Processor of the Gods,” the story that resulted, is about a writer who is given a homebrew word processor as a gift from his favorite nephew shortly before the latter is killed in a car accident. Our protagonist, Richard, discovers that the machine has precisely the awesome (or ominous) powers described above: writing about a person or thing can bring it to life in the real world, and deleting the passage likewise causes the person or object to be summarily “erased” from existence.

This paper describes a system to support humanities scholars in their interpretation of literary work. It presents a user interface and web architecture that integrates text mining, a graphical user interface and visualization, while attempting to remain easy to use by non specialists. Users can interactively read and rate documents found in a digital libraries collection, prepare training sets, review results of classification algorithms and explore possible indicators and explanations. Initial evaluation steps suggest that there is a rationale for " provocational " text mining in literary interpretation.

Extreme Inscription" attempts to articulate the grammatological primi- tives of the hard drive, the inscription technology that has had the single greatest impact on computing in the latter half of the 20th century. Rather than offer up yet another generalized account of electronic textuality, my objective in this essay is to examine one specific writing machine in its unique social, technical, and imaginative milieu. Random access disk stor- age, I argue, is the technology that embodies the "database paradigm" a critic such as Lev Manovich sees as fundamental to new media. The his- tory of hard drive technology is treated in the essay, as is the cultural impact of new hard drive-based technologies like iPod, TiVo, and Gmail's massive multi-gigabyte quotas. Ultimately the article seeks to establish a place for the often invisible and certainly unglamorous presence of stor- age technologies amid the largely visual and screen-based approaches that currently prevail in new media theory. "Had however this friction really existed, in the many cen- turies that these heavens have revolved they would have been consumed by their own immense speed of every day ... we arrive therefore at the conclusion that the friction would have rubbed away the boundaries of each heaven, and in proportion as its movement is swifter towards the center than toward the poles it would be more consumed in the center than at the poles, and then there would not be friction anymore, and the sound would cease, and the dancers would stop ..." --Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks, F 56 V