Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • Questions.

Preliminaries

Admin

• I was disappointed to see so few reading responses for today. (The ones I received were good, though.)
• For Friday, please read and respond to the Digital Humanities manifesto.
• Today's note takers: MK and JV
• Missing: FC (excused), DS, DP, CC, SG

Questions from the Reading

An approach to thinking about these things

• Break into groups of two.
• Identify thorny parts of the text and the questions you have about them.
• Can these approaches be used in your discipline?
• How might collaboration be involved in your discipline?

Word-Level Questions and Observations

• Lots of expectations that you have a particular worldview.
  • Venue is PMLA - Modern Languages Association
• p. 410: Column 2 Role of society, and the reception of humanities and the digital from the perspective of society. What roles do the humanities continue to serve?
  • They address what is human about us.
  • Truth, beauty, morals, ethics.
  • Who are we? What is the meaning of life? What is religion?
  • Characters that we read are put in ethical binds that we wouldn't normally be, and pushes them to the breaking point.
  • Are we rational actors, altruistic, etc.

About the Author and the Article

• Liu is an early adopter of digital humanities
• 1980's traditional scholar.
• Disappears for awhile.
• Reemerges in the late 1990's as a digital humanist.
• He's emerged as one of the primary spokespeople for digital humanities.
• So this article is to convince people that this stuff is useful.
• Language suggests that "I'm an insider."
• Deals with the cricism that the Moretti lab isn't really dealing with language any more.
• The essay is not only descriptive, it's also polemical.

Can we apply this to our own disciplines?

• Collaboration between art and other technologies. Why is the Mac, rather than Windows, considered the preferred machine for artists? What are the characteristics that attract artists?
  • Yes, we need to think about technical issues.
  • And disciplines make interesting decisions.
  • Do you need to code in order to participate in digital humanities work.
  • Important issue: Accessibility. Can you do digital humanities work if you can't program? Not right now.
  • Language issues: Collaborating between Python and Java.
    • "Java makes my head explode."
• Interactionality between digital humanities and tech studies (p. 416)
  • We should not reinvent the world. There's a theoretical vocabulary that we can use.
  • STS is another way of knowing about the digital humanities.
  • As Pickering suggests, it's not as simple as just applying the scientific method to the humanities (or the digital humanities)
  • "We don't have to reinvent the wheel."

Shakespeare Network Analysis

Outline:

1. Experimental, Empirical approach

   • What new understanding?
   • Do we confirm or revise standard paradigms?

2. Network Analysis -> Social Networking

   • 6 Degrees of Francis Bacon
   • Franco Moretti and Plot Analysis

3. Standard Story: Disordering of Social Bonds

   • Carnivalesque
   • Tragedy and Chaos
   • Gap in narrative theory

4. To break social bonds, needs of dense social network.

Narrative

• Network analysis is used a lot in the social sciences.
• An experimental tool can tell us a lot about things.
• It's okay to start with questions or problems.
• Given acts and scenes in Shakespeare's plays, look at who speaks to each other.
• Visualization:
  • For a character: Bubbles are the amount of words a character speaks. (Shakespeare is nice because every line has ten syllables.)
  • Distance: How frequently they speak to each other. (Inverse)
  • Note that formatting of text tells us a lot about crosstalk and such.
• Didn't know what would emerge: Experimental rather than empirical.
• People focus too much on the the answer, and often work backwards.
  • This approach sometimes twists things.
• Really wanted to start with a question and let the data fall where they may.
• Why Shakespeare? The formatting issues above, along with the wealth of scholarship and analysis.
• Social networking
  • Dan Shore (formerly at Grinnell) is part of a project at Georgetown called "six degrees of Francis Bacon". Take "Dictionary of National Biography"
    • Crowdsourcing to identify a network. Using DNB entry with, who is this person associated with? Thinkers, printers, publishers, etc.
    • Critique: This loses so much of the important detail of the biography
  • Moretti: Dig deeply into the plot of plays.
    • Work done by hand.
    • Conclusion: "Network analysis doesn't teach us anything."
    • Lee hopes that this project can show some utility to SNA for literary analysis.
• What did we find? A promising new approach.
  • Moretti suggested SNA to study narrative and plot (not beauty etc.)
  • Standard theory: Shakespearean plays are about the disordering of social bonds.
  • In Shakespearian comedies, there's a "pause button" which leads to a playful reordering of social hierarchies.
  • Input is a stable society, there's temporary upheaval, and then we return to a stable society.
  • There's also chaos in Shakespearian tragedy. Also carnivalesque, but with a harder edge. A tearing apart of the social order. But, unlike in the comedy, we don't return to a stable society. Rather, we end with disorder/chaos.
  • Scholars have identified a gap in this theory: How does drama confirm or deny this approach.
  • Narrative theory tends to focus around novels and films.
  • Plays are different: Performed and seen.
• What did we find?
  • Yes, there's breaking social bonds.
  • But in the scenes that there's breaking of social bonds, there's the thickest social network.
• Let's look at Twelfth Night (1600)
  • Critics focus on a solliloquy moment (Act 1, Scene 2, I think), rather than the scenes in which there's a lot of interaction (e.g., Act 5, Scene 1)
  • A lot of interesting stuff related to social structure appears in the highly-networked sections.
• Similar issues in Hamlet.
• We should think more about these scenes.
• Another project: A macro-scale analylsis of the relationships