"Notes from a six-day workshop with Johanna Drucker at MIT (April 2012)

[ALL APOLOGIES FOR MIS/INFORMATION BELOW. THESE ARE UNEDITED NOTES WRITTEN IN THE MOMENT AT MIT HYPERSTUDIO]"

"The modern age of landscape is an age where social interactions, markets, and developments are routinely channeled by institutions invisible to the ordinary individual. State infrastructure and capital have made immense and irreversible the effects of building, in the form of corridors, monuments and waste, channeling everyday paths and interactions in new space. In the era of modern building, the secrets of landscape are constantly hidden in plain sight.

To learn to see the landscape, western writers first had to learn to describe it. Unlike studies of rhetoric, which stretch back through the classical tradition, structural studies of the phenomenology, politics, and psychology of landscape only matured in the nineteenth century, in the era when state intervention began to physically reshape the shape of trade, agriculture, and the city at an unprecedented scale. Psychologists like Georg Simmel and cultural critics like Walter Benjamin imported the science of rhetoric and the…"

"One of the great assets of the digital, and what it encourages and enables is multiple voices entering into a dialogue and creating new knowledge out of conversation and discussion."

"I was lucky enough to be taught by some of the greatest international authorities yet it was never assumed that their voice in the conversation was necessarily more important than mine. Far more important than who was talking was the quality of thought expressed and the nature of knowledge that emerged from the dialogue, and I think that's quite right."

"DH is…a collaborative field. We have to learn to work together and understand the different languages that are spoken by different partners in the dialogue: geeks, humanities scholars, information professionals, technical support people & indeed the public. In that sense, therefore, the voice of the DH scholar is of use as an interpreter between different languages & cultures. But interpreters cannot, but the nature of their job, exist in isolation."

"An interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies"

"In the more than twenty years of its existence, Public Culture has established itself as a prize-winning, field-defining cultural studies journal. Public Culture seeks a critical understanding of the global cultural flows and the cultural forms of the public sphere which define the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. As such, the journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks.

Artists, activists, and both well-established and younger scholars, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture."

"The problem is not the humanities as a discipline (who can blame a discipline?), the problem is its members. We are insufferable. We do not want change…do not want centrality…do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.

Humanists work hard, but at all the wrong things, the commonest of which is the fetid fester of a hypothetical socialist dreamworld, one that has become far more disconnected with labor and material than the neoliberalism it claims to replace.

Humanism does not deserve to carry the standard for humans, for frankly it despises them.

We don't reform our mission because we secretly hate the idea of partaking of and in the greater world…"

"The humanities needs more courage and more contact with the world. It needs to extend the practice of humanism into that world, rather than to invite the world in for tea and talk of novels, only to pat itself on the collective back for having injected some small measure of abstract critical thinking into the otherwise empty puppets of industry. As far as indispensability goes, we are not meant to be superheroes nor wizards, but secret agents among the citizens, among the scrap metal, among the coriander, among the parking meters. We earn respect by calling in worldly secrets, by making them public. The worldly spy is the opposite of the elbow-patched humanist, the one never out of place no matter the place. The traveler at home everywhere, with the luxury to look."

"There's a place for potted plants. Every practice has to spend time reflecting on itself and reorienting. There's nothing wrong with importing solutions from the outside, from which there is always much to be learned. But the lower faculties must resist the temptation to partake of daily life only just enough to mine convenient resources into makeshift parapets. It's not a cowardly move nor a treacherous one, but it's not a courageous nor a righteous one either. The digital humanities must decide if they are potting their digital plants in order to prettify the office, or to nurture saplings for later transfer into the great outdoors. Out there, in the messy, humid world of people and machines, it's better to cast off elbow patches for shirt-sleeves."

"But one look at the Mac & you could tell something was different. The white screen alone seemed revolutionary, after years of reading green text on a black background. And there were typefaces! I had been obsessed with typography since my grade-school years; here was a computer that treated fonts as an art, not just a clump of pixels. The then-revolutionary graphic interface made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, the Mac was a machine you wanted to live in.<br />
<br />
Before long I was creating page layouts for student-run philosophy journals; I designed research tools using the visionary Hypercard application…<br />
<br />
Looking back now, I realize that beneath all those surface obsessions, a theme was running through my interests like an underground river, & it didn't fully surface until my mid-20s: the sense that the most fertile and engaging space in our culture lay at the intersection between new technology and the humanities."

""Over the past century, the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together."…<br />
<br />
"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."<br />
<br />
Schmidt's comments echoed sentiments expressed by Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, who revealed this week that he was stepping down. "The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians – who also happened to be excellent computer scientists," Jobs once told the New York Times."

"…digital archivists solve the barrier of accessibility, by making content previously tucked away in analog archives available to the world wide web…

What great curators do is reverse-engineer this dynamic, framing cultural importance first to magnify our motivation to engage with information…shares that manuscript in the context of how it relates to today’s ideals and challenges of publishing, to our shared understanding of creative labor and the changing value systems of authorship, will help integrate this archival item with your existing knowledge and interests, bridging your curiosity with your motivations to truly engage with the content.

Because in a culture where abundance has replaced scarcity as our era’s greatest information problem, without these human sensemakers and curiosity sherpas, even the most abundant and accessible information can remain tragically “rare.”"

[There's more to this. Better to read the entire thing.]

"Even if mapping isn't  your personal interest, digitised archives or artefacts can provide a stimulus for meaningful learning designs and contexts for all stages of learning. Applying digital tools to data we already have allows new interpretations and ways of using the data which makes this a very rich field for educators to explore using digital technologies.

And whilst at first glance, some of the artefacts and ideas from the past may seem absurd today; in context, they reveal the hidden codes for our future, which are gaining recognition amongst an emerging cohort of paleo-futurists, digital humanists, digital anthropologists & archaeologists who participate in innovative projects and networks.  As Tom Seinfield from the Found History blog states:

"innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations.""

"Now historians have a new tool that can help. Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused."

"Cultural Analytics is the term we coined to describe computational analysis of massive cultural and social data sets and data flows. Over last 15-10 years, cultural analytics came to structure contemporary media universe, cultural production and consumption, and cultural memory. Search engines, spam detection, Netflix and Amazon recommendations, Last.fm, Flickr "interesting" photo rankings, movie success predictions, tools such as Google n-gram viewer, Trends, Insights for Search, content-based image search, and and numerous other applications and services all rely on cultural analytics. This work is carried out in media industries and in academia by researchers in data mining, social computing, media computing, music information retrieval, computational linguistics, and other areas of computer science."

"For those reasons, I’ve still been reluctant to say too much, especially on the open web. There are plenty of privacy issues that go way beyond myself…<br />
But since so much of my life now, so many of my friendships, happen online, and since I’m determined to not let fear or anxiety about what I do or don’t say control how I feel about the world, this seems like as good a time as any to tell a whole lot more people all at once. <br />
As Jeff Mangum put it in Neutral Milk Hotel’s song “Ghost,” I’m resolved to “never be afraid / to watch the morning paper blow / into a hole / where no one can escape.” Or as xkcd put it in the comic “dreams” (This is actually the very last part of my talk), Fuck. That. Shit.<br />
It’s an experience — one that’s always ongoing — that broke my heart and changed my life, irrevocably, for the better. Orders of magnitude better. It taught me who I was and is teaching me who I am. I can’t explain it any better than that."

"What we share with our ancestors, though, is the sense of excess. Most Internet searches will turn up vastly more results than can be used. Too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good, has been the subtext of complaints about overload from the beginning. But like the early modern compilers, we too are devising ways to cope. In many ways, our key methods of coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century: We still need to select, summarize, and sort, and ultimately need human judgment and attention to guide the process."

If I ever need to dig into the topic of digital humanities, Luke's bookmarks should be a good start, together with the archives of Tim Carmody and David Jacobs.

"Use the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book." [See also: http://www.dancohen.org/2010/08/02/introducing-anthologize/]

"A number of educational theorists are advocating increased attention on teaching students skills, rather than merely focusing on their mastery of abstract content. Influential reports like Henry Jenkins, et al.'s "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century" & the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project have outlined the skills that students need to be active participants in new media culture. As educators working with digital media, we need to begin to seriously think of our work as a form of apprenticeship, where we ask ourselves: what sorts of skills are we modeling for our students? And how are those skills preparing them for the future?

"toys humanities students&others w/out programming skills can use to create interesting projects. Most...free or relatively inexpensive...books, essays, digital projects--that illustrate kinds of projects software thinking tools/toys might help create."