Vol 7 No 1 - Page 2

Selfie and the experience of the virtual image

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Gabriela Farías , Puebla, Mexico

 

 Don’t cry, I’m sorry to have deceived you so much, but that’s how life is.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Abstract

People know the world through images; new realities are created and new identities are developed. Consequently, portraits may become a representation of one’s personality and a reflection of the society of spectacle. These digital pictures change the experience of memory and inherently trace back to photographs. Thus, the “screen” mediates the relations among people and the information flow carrying different meanings. In this way, the photographic material and the virtual image will be analyzed, and distinctions will be noted regarding the aesthetic experience, specifically regarding the self-portrait and the selfie.

Keywords: Photography, virtual image, selfie, self-portrait, and aesthetic experience.

The photographic image

Images are the core of society today; they have become the means of massive communication and, therefore, the essence of daily life. Humans have become homus photographicus. Almost every person has a camera, whether it is in a cellphone, iPad, tablet, point and shoot or any other device. People have learned to express emotions, ideas and concepts through images regardless of its complexity.

Photos may be digital images but not every image is a photograph. In this section, the photographic image will be considered as a print, different from the virtual image, based on their structure, materiality and distribution.

In general, the image is defined as a figure, the representation of something. That is, the copy of an object, a mental representation subject to cognition and interpretation. In that regard, Flusser (2001) writes about images as containers of signified meaning, as an abstraction of something projected into time and space. From ancient cultures and civilizations, the copy made of an object represents that entity along with other attributions given by individuals or a group. In that way, a symbol is created.

Pictures are a means to transmit ideas and even knowledge, since they are the bases of visual communication and they are also a cultural product.

When an artistic representation (drawing, painting, engraving) of an object is made, there is a certain distance between the copy and the original due to skills and techniques used by the author. This is what makes the art unique and provides an aura as Benjamin stated in 1936. However, upon the arrival of photography and the reproducibility of images, this gap is reduced to such an extent that the object depicted may be taken as the object itself conveying its authenticity. In this way, sight is the preferred sense emphasizing that seeing is believing. The image is proof of the subject’s existence, “it has been” as Barthes affirms, undeniably in a specific time and space.

However, the object portrayed no longer subsists, the photograph becomes a testimony, an index of a former event. Then, the picture has a diachronic relationship with the beholder, who has a memory and builds an emotional connection based on something that only exists in the past. In that regard, the image retains significance over time as if it were a ghost, the meaning remains on the surface. In fact, Brea argues that it (the material-image) remains static as a result of their production process in which there is a specific and unique time lapse (Brea, 2010; 113). The material photograph is always in delay, “it has been” and the significance is retrieved through diachronic memories.

Before the appearance of the virtual image, photographs (and previously painted portraits) were consumed, generally in a more intimate context, for example in a private album or they were displayed in the family room. The aesthetic experience was closer to a painting and according to Moxey (2013), the meaning was clear, that is, the viewers easily appreciated the significance since the portrait was conceived for a particular audience in a certain time. In contrast, virtual pictures are distributed in a different way and have diverse spectators.

Fig.1 Hippolyte Bayard, 1840
Fig.1 Hippolyte Bayard, 1840

The material images, under their production scheme, are prone to depict the world as a canvas, the medium determines how people look, read sings and tell stories. Additionally, the narratives are considered to be truthful because, in order to photograph an object, it has to exist; it has a referent, contrary to painting, where the artist may create chimeras based on imagination.

Nonetheless, the veracity of a picture may be questioned since it could be staged or transformed into something else, even something that is not as it appears in reality. For example, a portrait may be an idealistic version of a person, an alter ego or simply not the subject as known in daily life. To illustrate further, the case of Hippolyte Bayard becomes interesting to mention. In 1840, Bayard photographed himself as a drowned man, and people who saw the picture believed it was real. At the time, these images were believed to be real because a mechanic device, a camera, had taken them. In this way, Bayard created an alternative reality, where he was found dead.

In the 19th century people may have been keener to be deceived, but what happens when images are mass created? Presently, the sense of unreality is inherent and it is harder to believe that the subject “has been” the way it is portrayed….Access Full Text of the Article

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CRBTs, LMAOs, ROFLs: Curtailing emotions through cyber-acronyms

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Arafat Mohammad Noman, East West University, Bangladesh

Abstract

Cultural symbols- such as arts, music, literature, movies, novels, history- when shared by the members of a particular culture, remain as dormant in them until and unless they get in contact with a different culture. The exposure to a different culture gives a scope to distinguish between one’s own culture and another. Similarly the technological advancement (basically in the field of communication) has gradually created two types of culture within a particular community/nation/group: a ‘real’ culture which is the embodied experience of a particular group of people or a community and the ‘cyber’ culture which is the result (or experience) of extensive consumption of computer mediated communication (CMC). This exposure in the computer-mediated area (basically known as cyberspace) creates a different level of behavioural pattern in human. By inviting the body and the senses into our dance with our tools, it has extended the landscape of interaction, to new topologies of pleasure, emotion and passion. Thus the current paper tries to discuss the rechanneled emotions through technossories and investigate if it is making us techno-bodies or tech-nobodies. The study is about differentiating emotions at two levels: the embodied emotion and the disembodied emotion. The paper deals with the issue that how far the technological adherence marks the alienation of long nurtured social bond that we used to know.

 

Emotion or e-motion?

 

Our passionate response to VR [virtual reality] mirrors the nature of the medium itself. By inviting the body and the senses into our dance with our tools, it has extended the landscape of interaction, to new topologies of pleasure, emotion and passion (Laurel, 1993).

-Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre

The proximity between technosorries (technological accessories) and human marked a new epoch in the language system. Besides oral and written form of language, a third type has evolved with its revolutionary image: electronic or computer-mediated language. Computer-mediated communication systems are believed to have powerful implications on social life. This system of communication transgresses what is collective and what is individual. Hence, a tension is created with identity: an offline identity and an online identity. The confusion, tension, imbalance whatever we like to tag it with the focus supposedly remains in the arena of how we are dealing with this self-anticipated duality.

Repudiated Self?

Marshall Mcluhan in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan 1994) gives an interesting idea about technology. He shows how we are becoming maimed while superficially being extended by the boon of technology. And my current paper somehow follows Mcluhan’s idea of amputation of human agencies while there is propinquity between technology and human. Interestingly we think ourselves as techno-bodies while there is a chance of being tech-nobodies in dealing with the items we are bestowed with. Every extensions of mankind, especially the technological extensions, have also the flipping side of amputating or modifying some other extensions. Just as the development of gunpowder maimed or curtailed the skill of archery or the invention of telephone extends the voice but maimed the penmanship, similarly the overwhelming usage of cyber technology curtailing our emotional expressions. Let us consider the chat history below:

Rachel: Dude m got fished up

Macklin: sup

Rachel: Moms gonna ban my going to gaming zone

Macklin: LOL

Rachel: CID

Macklin: Let’s see wat happens…FC Dude

Rachel: CRBT L

Definitely one would get confused after going through above chat history. Yes, this is the case when we are too much accustomed to online behaviour. Let me clarify some of the above acronyms: CRBT means Crying Real Big Tears; CID means Crying in Disgrace; FC means Finger crossed and I hope LOL need not to be abbreviated!

Let us try some theoretic consideration in depicting the relationship between human and technology. As structuralism tends to bind us in a structure we human habitually try to breach it and this is the result of breaching: avoiding the structured grammatical rules and way of addressing. The psychoanalytical explanation seems more interesting. Why do we think this virtual entity seems to be more exciting for us? What if I say this is the way of personality formation: an introvert turning out to be an extrovert and vice versa. The outcome of this online interaction is a formation of an e-identity, a virtual whole which is greater than its part and that not being real, is full of life and vitality. In seeking impunity from the age old norms and rules, the “self” gets its virtual identity as unrestrained, less accountable, a little bit on the dark side and unknowingly sexier. This e-personality can act as a liberating force for the real life individual, allowing the person to transcend debilitating shyness, let go of the stultifying and suffocating inhibition and forge him/her into new arena of expression which in real life would seem impossible. It is in many cases complements the real life persona and acts as an extension serving him with vitality, promptness and efficiency. It covers the instant hi hello area to the more vigorous forces that culminates in Revolution 2.0 in Egypt. Disdaining the implicit inertia it helps breaking ice with the significant other over e-mail and also let go of an awkward situation just by blocking and hiding which in real life seems embarrassing. And to sum up we can say having a virtual persona can be like having a proverbial third hand.

But are we so sure of the fact that this cyber world not creating an anarchy itself? Are we not fetishisized by its enticing ingredients? So, if we flip the other side of the coin we find desperation, confusion, pain, disorientation in real life. That is because the online persona is dangerous and irresponsible; making the “self” rough and reckless in its move and encourage attaining unrealistic and unhealthy goals. It nourishes selfishness and creates a sense of isolation yet lingering in a community. The other day I came across a facebook status and that provoked my thought. Here is the status:

Life is like Facebook… people will like your problems and comment on it.. but no one gonna solve them..coz everyone is busy updating their own

This status reminds me of the famous poem Leisure by William Henry Davies. We are too busy and indulged in maintaining “self” that we almost forgot we are in close tie with our surroundings. Wordsworth tripartite relationship seems to dissolve amidst this technocratic modification of us. We rely on technology to fill up our fellow-feeling and texting, chatting, messaging are a good source of marking our presence when needed. We just let our sympathy or empathy limited to GWS Bro (Get well soon brother), It’s K (it’s Okay), CRBT (Crying real big tears) etc. The online arena serves double edged effect here: I) It makes easier to cooperate II) It also make easier to behave selfishly; and not acknowledging our gradual transformation we deliberately lenient of the latter one. The reason behind this let go attitude, what I presume, is that the disembodied interaction does not allow us to get the gesture and posture of the person we are interacting and hence neglecting is easier. We are also in a constant better to say IM communication that allows us to meet more than one person at a time. We tend to forget what we have interacted a moment ago. I have named it as overshadowing effect: the previous condition or interaction is being over shadowed by the present one and it is in a perpetual state of changing, impeding us to focus on a single issue which is possible in real life interaction….Access Full Text of the Article

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The Schizoids and Daydreamers in Cyberspace

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Azam Dashti Khavidaki, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract

This paper embarks on an interdisciplinary study of the novel A Scanner Darkly and cyberspace to explain the human tendency for the realm of dream and imagination. It draws upon Ernest Becker’s death terror theory and discusses human’s basic fear of death and his seeking and clinging to various means to overcome it. One of the human’s mechanisms for self-defense to get over the reality of death is plunging into the realm of imagination and that of infinite fantasy; cyberspace is a systematic form of day dreaming and fantasy. The article shows how characters in the death-stricken world of A Scanner Darkly marred by the presence of computers, scramble suits and scanners manifest a strong tendency for the realm of fantasy and active daydreaming; in addition, it explains that this tendency exists to overcome their basic disguised anxiety, i.e. the fear of death. It draws an analogy between characters and Internet users’ behavior in the novel and cyberspace; and discusses how infinite realms of daydreaming and fantasy evoked by virtual reality touch a latent tendency of schizoid characteristics in humans.

Keywords: A Scanner Darkly, Becker, Cyberspace, Death terror, Daydreaming, Infinitude, Schizoid characteristic.

 

“There is no point identifying the world. Things have to be grasped in their sleep, or in any other circumstance where they are absent from themselves.”

(Baudrillard, 2002, p. 6)

The contemporary world is the age of simulated realities extended to everyday life (Baudrillard, 1988). The online and offline worlds have merged and add to the slippery quality of reality. Hardly can one estimate their impact on a new generation of lifestyle and perception; one can only make concessions that the digital age is unpredictable and still unexplored.

Philip K Dick, the canonical writer of the digital age, is the creator of alternative forms of realities (Kucukalic, 2006, p.1).Dick’s concerns in all his novels revolve around one issue, the question of reality; in his search for “alternative mental life”, he develops schizophrenic characters in his novels and “re-considers the labels and attitudes toward alternative perceptions of reality (Kucukalic, 2006, p.49).

In the novel A Scanner Darkly, he draws the reader’s attention to the role of technology and its effects on the protagonist’s mentality. He envisages a human being whose perception and sense of integrity are shattered by his digital sides, the multitude of faces and of appearances. The altered mentality is the quality that all characters perceive. Characters suffer from anxiety, depression and hallucination; they often lose the sense of time and place, and in the search for improvement in their condition, they manifest active daydreaming. In fact, characters partly intentionally and partly unwittingly, leave the realm of reality and find some sort of abandon and release in the realm of dreams.

Ernest Becker believes that these behavioral tendencies are more or less universal human problems, and that they are part of a massive disguise of humans’ fundamental fear and anxiety (Becker, 1973, p.8). He calls human beings animals with instincts and gods with power of perception and imagination. Sartre ascribes a “useless passion” to man since “he hopelessly always bungles up, so deluded about his true condition”. He continues to say about man that “he wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal and so he thrives on fantasies” (Becker, 1973, p.59).

Thus, humans with such power and the ability to predict the inevitable death have to find some way out, anxious about this imminent fate, suffering from the overhanging black cloud of death constantly. The realm of dreams is a way out of this reality. Daydreaming is a way out, and nowadays cyberspace has provided systematic grounds for daydreaming and fantasy in a world with the quality of infinitude, free of time, place, gender and aging, and all other offline world limitations, but infinite possibility is dangerous and opens a threshold to low or medium levels of schizoid characteristics.

This anxiety later in life finds manifold manifestations and is the cause of other psychological ills. Humans suppress this sense of insecurity and apparently get over it, otherwise they cannot keep on with normal life; however, the truth keeps lurking vividly behind the scenes. Man, meanwhile, unconsciously employs various means such as accumulating wealth, striving to stand out, seeking a wide net of protections and joining groups to think no more of this insecurity; the realm of dream and imagination is also one of these ways out, and perhaps a related one.

Bob Arctor, the protagonist, is a narcotic agent who has to put on the Scramble suit, an inventive piece of clothing which hides the wearer’s appearance entirely, the color of his hair and eyes, and even his voice; he gets the code name Fred for his new appearance. Other police members also have to use this suit to hide their identity and protect themselves against drug dealers. But this digital suit, apart from other evils, inflicts serious damage to Bob Arctor’s perception of reality and leads him to confuse reality with unreality.

During the course of the novel, Bob Arctor, the protagonist in the scramble suits or digital dresses, manifests a range of schizoid traits. Scramble suits which change the character’s appearance altogether and give him a virtual identity unwittingly affect this mentality. Holo-scanners, computer-like high techs, affect the protagonist’s mentality even further and change the atmosphere of the novel into more of a simulated reality….Access Full Text of the Article

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Infinite Ways to Make Profit: Digital Labour and Surveillance on Social Networking Sites

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Rianka Roy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Abstract

Social Networking Sites involve users’ exploitation as digital labourers whose online activities generate a huge amount of data that are sold to various advertisers. The paper discusses the various patterns of exploitation of digital labour in the system of digital capitalism and argues that digital surveillance, following the omniopticon model in SNSs sustains this new kind of capitalist economy, based on the creation and distribution of digital data.

[Keywords: digital labour, digital capitalism, informationalism, exploitation, panopticon, omniopticon, surveillance, prosumers, social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin.]

Introduction: Prosumers and Digital Labour in Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites (SNSs) make enormous monetary profit, as seen in various news reports.[1] Sites like Facebook and Twitter have been churning billion dollar revenues. Dan Schiller claims that the Internet and its technology of easy global connectivity have broadened the scope of globally-spread capitalism, as “networks are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of the capitalist economy as never before”.[2] He calls this “digital capitalism”.[3] Manuel Castells identifies this trait as a “new brand of capitalism”[4] and ‘informationalism’[5], which “depends on innovation as the source of productivity growth, on computer-networked global financial markets, whose criteria for valuation are influenced by information turbulences, on the networking of production and management, internally and externally, locally and globally, and on labor that is flexible and adaptable in all cases.”[6] SNSs have particularly increased the impact of digital networks on economy as they have thrown the gates of digital access wide open to a large number of individual users.

Media researchers like Christian Fuchs find that SNS users have a particular role in the labour that sustains the new type of capitalist economy. They voluntarily put in ‘digital labour’, as they upload data—in the form of messages, images, videos, audio files; consume as well as circulate the data in SNSs.[7] Without the data, the networks would merely have been empty structures. Following Raymond Williams’s concept, the means of digital communication thus become the means of production,[8] as users double as producers, and use the networks of communication to produce data commodities. On the one hand, these users consume the facilities of communication that are provided by the SNSs; on the other hand, they generate data and produce “data commodities”[9] required for targeted advertising. The “distinction between production and consumption” is blurred[10] as users turn into “prosumers”.[11] Fuchs claims that users churn data that facilitate targeted advertising; but the users themselves, too, perhaps are sold to prospective advertisers for targeted advertising. The prosumers, thus, are also commodities themselves as the popularity of a site is determined by the online activities and the log-in time of the users.

Users’ tripartite role of users—as prosumers, website users, and as commodities—sold to capitalist sponsors of SNSs, minimises the temporal gap between production and consumption, by producing merchandise through the process of consumption of the same and thus unifying two different processes. This conflates two kinds of consumption—the consumption of consumers or Marx’s individual consumption, and what Marx identifies as the labourers’ consumption or productive consumption, which indicates the consumption of labour and material conditions of production through the process of production.[12]
…Access Full Text of the Article

[1] Mark McSherry, ‘Facebook revenue up 63 per cent thanks to massive increase in mobile advertising’, The Independent, January 29, 2014 [Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/facebook-revenue-up-63-per-cent-thanks-to-massive-increase-in-mobile-advertising-9094704.html on February 3, 2014 at 3:27 pm], and Hannah Kuchler, ‘Twitter still playing catch-up with Facebook’, FT.com, February 2, 2014 [Retrieved from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/58d11c7c-8a91-11e3-9c29-00144feab7de.html#axzz2sFd3kQjn on February 3, 2014 at 3:32 pm]

[2] Dan Schiller, ‘Introduction: The Enchanted Network’, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System, (Cambridge, Massachusettes: MIT Press, 1999), p.1.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Manuel Castells, ‘Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint’, The Network Society: A Cross Cultural Perspective, edited by Manuel Castells, (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004), p.29.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Manuel Castells, ‘Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint’, The Network Society: A Cross Cultural Perspective, edited by Manuel Castells, (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004), p.29.

[7] Christian Fuchs and Sebastian Sevignani,‘What is Digital Labour? What is Digital Work? What’s their Difference? And why do these Questions Matter for Understanding Social Media?’, Triple C, 11(2), 2013. pp.237-293. [Retrieved from http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/461 on October 24, 2013 at 5 p.m.]

[8] Raymond Williams, ‘Means of Communication as Means of Production’, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays, London: Verso, 2005 (Originally published in 1978). Also see William Henning James Hebblewhite, ‘”Means of Communication as Means of Production” Revisited’, TripleC, 10(2), 2012, pp.203-213 [Retrieved from http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/424/387 on December 26, 2014 at 7:50 am]

[9] Ibid, p.259.

[10] Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for Digital Economy’ [Retrieved from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary on December 9, 2014 at 1:44pm]

[11] Jamie Skye Bianco, ‘Social Networking and Cloud Computing: Precarious Affordances for the “Prosumer”’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly Vol. 37: Issues 1 & 2. pp. 303-312, p.306 (Spring/Summer 2009). [Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wsq/v037/37.1-2.bianco.html on April 23, 2011 at 1:27 pm.]

[12] “Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption. Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption by this, that the latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for the living individual; the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act. The product, therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer himself; the result of productive consumption, is a product distinct from the consumer.”—Karl Marx, ‘The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value’, Capital Vol1: Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value, 1867.[Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm on 7 August, 2011 at 12:35 pm.]

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An Electronic Edition of Eighteenth-Century Drama Manuscripts: Performing for Editing

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Isabel Pinto, Catholic University of Portugal

Abstract

This article addresses a project of electronic edition of eighteenth-century drama manuscripts, introducing performance art as an active methodology. This was meant to isolate the specific features of eighteenth-century drama manuscripts, in order to assess their improved electronic edition. So, to fully grasp the distinctive features of these historical testimonies, performance art was used as a mediation process, and different interrelated performance initiatives took place. Through performance it was possible to restitute the “take place” (Kobialka, 2002) i.e. the eventful nature contained in the manuscripts, instead of searching for metadata innovations, or an ideal critical apparatus. The focus was laid on drama as a particular type of happening and accomplishment, silenced amidst the archive. The happening quality of the manuscripts was then put to proof through different contexts and practices of performance. The resultant digital edition reflects the “remains” of taking drama manuscripts into performance practice, allowing for a new format of reading material.

  1. Digital Edition: Concepts in Review

According to McGann (1997) the electronic environment of hyperediting overcomes the codex-based limits, as computerization can optimize the logical categories of traditional critical editing that can then acquire new functions. In fact, to work in a “hyper” mode, an editing project must use computerization in such a way as to get over the analytic limits of hardcopy text. Accordingly, hypertexts allow us to go through a large number of documents and to relate these documents, or parts of them, in complex varying ways.

He further recognizes the importance of organizing a hyperediting project in hypermedia form, since hypermedia editions can incorporate audial and/or visual elements that reflect the multimedia nature of literary works: “texts are language visible, auditional, and intellectual (gesture and (type)script, voice and instrumentation, syntax and usage)” (p. 33). One example of a hypermedia project is The Rossetti Hypermedia Archive. When presenting this particular project, McGann (1997) introduces a distinction between archive and edition:

It is important to realize that the Rossetti project is an archive rather than an edition. When a book is produced it literally closes its covers on itself. If its work is continued, a new edition, or other related books, have to be (similarly) produced. A work like the Rossetti hypermedia archive has escaped that bibliographical limitation. It has been built so that its contents and its webwork of relations (both internal and external) can be indefinitely expanded and developed (p. 40).

Curiously enough, the author explicitly links the term edition to a book format, with its specific categories of production and dissemination, and, at the same time, connects the archive with an ever-expanding webwork of relations.

However, Drucker (2009) calls attention to the way we have come to analyze, and see the book format. In fact, she claims that it is necessary to identify the specific features of a material form correctly before being able to envision its functionality in a new medial format. She further argues that by looking at all that has happened in the domain of the electronic book, one is prone to understand how the limited apprehension of the specific materiality of the book has originated inadequate digital models. In her opinion, until now the focus has been on the reproduction of the graphic and physical features of the book, while the expansion of bookish functionalities would have been a better tryout.

Deegan and Sutherland (2009) go as far as to consider that in face of the digital tools what is being revised is the concept of text itself and its defining features. Following on the topic, Dahlström (2009) contents idealistic notions of documents, texts and editions, claiming that the nature of editions is rhetorical, social and one that entails complex translation rather than simple transmission. By acknowledging this, scholars would be better prepared to deal with the purposes and critical contributions of their electronic editions.

In this context, a range of possibilities arise, going from the hypermedia multilayered archive, involving multiple research partnerships, to individual manuscript editions. According to Vanhoutte (2009) the audience for scholarly editions is small, specialized, and will scarcely outnumber the scholarly community engaged with the edited title. Hence, in his opinion, this type of editing goes against the importance of the scholarly edition as a cultural product. In fact, the qualifying characteristic of an edition lies in the status of its text, not its function, form of appearance, or method. The electronic edition is thus seen as the optimized medium for the promotion of the scholarly reading edition….Access Full Text of the Article

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Digital Humanities: An attempt to place itself in a new modernity

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Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Abstract

Modernity is often reflected through pedagogy, which in turn is frequently shaped by capitalist forces. The nature of academic disciplines continues to change with time and notions of modernity. Inter-disciplinarity, or a shifting/ dissolution/ creation of disciplines reflect prevailing notions of modernity. It is in this background, that I plan to examine the rise of the digital humanities (henceforth referred to as DH), and the manner in which DH tries to place itself in a new form of modernity. Rather than looking at specific literary and cultural texts, I shall look at the nature of texts. The paper aims to show as to how DH has changed the way of thinking about texts and accessing texts. Rather than looking at a text as a linear narrative, DH opens up the possibility of visualising para-textual matter—matter not contained within the text itself but implied by it. In a way, DH also suggests a post-modern dissolution of the text itself—if the linear narrative is not more important than the para-textual matter, is the value of the text being undermined? This paper tries to conclude by connecting these implications of DH with the nature of how such suggestions of radicality justify the inclusion of DH as a marker of the ‘modern moment’ seeking to wilfully set itself against the past.

Modernity is often reflected through pedagogy, which in turn is frequently shaped by capitalist forces. The nature of academic disciplines continues to change with time and notions of modernity. It is in this background that I plan to examine how Digital Humanities (henceforth referred to as DH) tries to place itself in a new modernity. I shall divide my paper into three sections. The first section will be utilised in discussing the nature of academic funding for DH, the second in looking at how DH changes the notion of the text, and the final section in trying to analyse how DH interacts with the idea of modernity.

  1. The nature of academic funding for DH

It is an obvious truism that academics is governed by funding. DH is primarily reliant upon soft funding, that is, temporary, non-long-term, highly competitive funding, as opposed to hard funding which governs permanent teaching positions in Indian colleges and universities. Given that in 2015, the skills needed to practice DH are not usually acquired by students at either the school level or even at the undergraduate level, DH is a post-graduate subject of academic study. In India, the only full-time DH course is the one run by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. That course is a post-post graduate diploma course. The course is funded by a one-time grant from the currently discontinued UGC-Teaching and Research in Interdisciplinary Innovative and Emerging Areas scheme. Under the scheme, the course could only be a one-year post-post graduate diploma course. In other countries, DH is also taught at the Master’s level.

               Given the nature of soft funding for DH, DH projects tend to be short-term (that is, something which can produce demonstrable artefacts after a period of funding ranging from a few months to a maximum period of say 5 years). Also, given that DH projects are not very well-funded but at the same time require full-time professional service, DH practitioners tend to be either permanent teachers or post-postgraduates on an ad-hoc basis. The nature of soft funding for DH also ensures that DH is restricted most often to the nature of projects, something that is seen as a research activity, as opposed to a teaching activity, which as mentioned earlier, there is only one instance of it in India as of March 2015. Such research projects also have short-term goals, as a result of which once the period of funding ends, there is practically no scope to keep updating the project. The humanities research involved in most DH projects is a laborious task and has usually a longer period of validity as opposed to the technological aspects of DH projects. However, whenever the funds run out, the technological aspect of DH projects is no longer updated. Given the short-term validity of technology, most DH projects seem outdated technology-wise within say a period of 5 years since its completion. Thus, unless the data sets that underlie DH projects is made easily accessible to the public at large (such as the Folger Shakespeare XML-TEI texts), the data of most DH projects is not amenable to re-use.

This nature of research attributed to DH is often thought of as the reason why it alienates other humanities practitioners who are not keen of using DH methods. The fact that a large number of computer science graduates are also often leaders of DH projects and programmes makes DH an area where humanities graduates are often wary of treading. DH funding is also most often granted only to permanent teachers who are allowed to take on project staff. Thus, the nature of DH funding makes it a risk-laden career choice for the project staff. On the one hand, in India, such career experience is not considered for valid Academic Performance Indicator (API) scores, where digital output is not yet a valid form of research output. Moreover, collaborative research, involving much more than 5 or so research fellows, is not amenable to the division of API scores. On the other hand, DH ‘seems’ the practical long-shot risk in the face of dwindling academic funding for the humanities in general…Access Full Text of the Article

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Big Data and the Arts

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Miguel Ángel Medina, University of Málaga (Spain)

Abstract

Big Data has come and is here to stay pervading many human activities, including social, humanistic and natural sciences. This article briefly reviews the emergence of Big Data in Humanities and the Arts, as well as the opportunities and issues it opens.

1. Introduction

Big Data is a relatively recent term that has emerged as a widely recognized trend pervading many different human activities and attracting the attention from the industrial and commercial sectors, governments and academia (Hashem, Yaqoob, Anuar, Mokhtar, Gani & Khan, 2015). There is not a consensus definition for Big Data yet. Big Data is sometimes defined as “the amount of data just beyond technology’s capability to store, manage, and process efficiently” (Manika et al., 2011). Very recently, Big Data has been similarly defined as “a term utlized to refer to the increase in the volume of data that are difficult to store, process, and analyze thorugh traditional database technologies” (Hashem, Yaqoob, Anuar, Mokhtar, Gani & Khan, 2015). Introducing slight but interesting differntial tinges, Magoulas & Lorica introduce the Big Data concept “when the size and performance requirements for data management become significant design and decision factors for implementing a data management and analysis system” (Magoulas & Lorica, 2011). Others define Big Data as characterized by the size of data volume, variety, and acquisition velocity, altogether usually mentioned as “the three Vs” (Zikopoulos, Parasuraman, Deutsch, Giles & Corrigan, 2012; Berman, 2013). Some authors add a fourth essential and key V to the features defining Big Data, namely, V for value (Gantz & Reinsel, 2011; Chen, Mao & Liu, 2014).

It should be stressed that Big Data is a relative and moveable concept in terms of data “size”, taking into account both the actual historical moment and the human activity in which is going to be applied. It is clear that the amount of data to be considered “big” is not the same for the Information Technologies, Biology or History. And it is also clear that the maximal technological capability to manage data is continuosly increasing. A recent analysis carried out by CISCO revealed that from 1992 to 2012 the amount of data transmitted across the Internet hugely increased from 100 gigabytes per day to 12 terabytes a second (mentioned in the AHRC The Challenge of Big Data brochure published in July 2014). Up to the beginning of the current millenium, most of the available information was maintained stored in analog storage systems (books, photographs, drawings, maps, discs, tapes, and so on). In 2002, digital storage of information amounted for a half of the global information sotrage capacity, thus marking the beginning of the digital age. In only five years, by 2007 almost 94% of the totality of the accumulated information was already digitally stored. Furthermore, the trend to accumulate new data is continuously accelerating so fast that currently more than 90% of total data available in the world has been created in the last two years. Thus, currently the “size” of Big Data initiatives ranges from a few terabytes to many petabytes of data.

Although Big Data indeed refers to very large quantities of available data, now it seems clear that size is not the most relevant feature of Big Data, but rather the value of these data is what matters most. As mentioned in the presentation of the Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information symposium held in 2013 to celebrate the 125 years of Georgetown Universtiy Law Library, this value of Big Data is related “with our ability to discover meaning by connecting points of information electronically, across numerous, vast, and often unrelated stores of data“ (available in http://www.georgetown.edu/library/about/125/symposium/index.cfm). Therefore, the most relevant feature of Big Data is not its size, but its relationality to other data. And this is so because Big Data is essentially networked (Boyd & Crawford, 2011). In particular, Big Data coming from data tracking has introduced two new types of social networks, the so-called articulated and behavioral networks. In fact, networks are currently pervading all scientific, humanistic and social disciplines. For a review on networks and arts, see my essay on the issue recently published in Rupkatha (Medina, 2015)….Access Full Text of the Article

Digital Humanities, Big Data, and Literary Studies: Mapping European Literatures in the 21st Century

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Carolina Ferrer, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada        

Abstract

The purpose of this research is, firstly, to map the 48 national literatures of Europe, through the exploration and the analysis of the bibliographic references contained in the main literary database, the Modern Language Association International Bibliography. Secondly, the series obtained are correlated to economic and development indicators in order to determine whether and how the cultural, economic, and social fields interact with each other. From the theoretical viewpoint, this project stands at the crossroad of several concepts: the literary field defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1972, 1980, 1992), knowledge domain analysis (Hjørland& Albrechtsen 1995; Hjørland 2001; Nascimento & Marteleto 2008), scientometrics (Price 1963; Garfield 1980, 2005; Leydesdorff 1998), and the recently emerged concept of big data (Berman 2013; Boyd & Crawford 2012; Mayer-Schönberger& Cukier 2013). Methodologically, aiming at quantitatively identifying the European national literatures, we base our research on scientometrics. Initially developed by Price (1963), the purpose of scientometrics is to measure and to analyze the scientific and technological activity. In this study, we adapt scientometric indicators to the architecture and features of the Modern Language Association International Bibliography. Thus, the elaboration of bibliometric indicators (Garfield 1980, 2005; Hjorland & Albrechtsen 1995) allowed us to obtain the number of bibliographic references dedicated to the study of each of the 48 European national literatures, making it possible for us tovisualize the importance of each of these literatures and to compare them to economic and social indicators.

[Keywords: European literary field, bibliographic databases, data mining, big data, digital humanities, quantitative methods, economic indicators, social indicators]

Digital humanities and big data

In «A genealogy of digital humanities», MarijaDalbello (2011) proposesa definition of digital humanities:

the ability to read the archive of core texts, together with their residual materiality from previous media contexts in order to produce intensive modes of engagement with particular documents, groups of texts, and the archive is brought to broader audiences. (Dalbello, 2011, p. 497)

The following year, Boyd and Crawford (2012), define Big Data «as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology […], analysis […], mythology» (Boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 663). The technological aspect corresponds to the capacity of extracting, storing, and putting in relation immense sets of information. Analytically, these massive amounts of information make it possible to identify patterns that allow us to obtain economic, social, and technical conclusions about the behaviour of the series. The authors consider that the belief that big datasets represent superior knowledge capable of yielding truthful, objective, and exact results is only a mythology.

In 2013, Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger (2013) establish that the phenomenon of massive information implies a change in the way we consider data. Firstly, we can no longer consider a sample of data, since huge amounts of data are available. However, this considerable amount of information implies a certain uncleanness of information. Thus, this change means, secondly, that we have to accept the existence of some inexact data, an amount that is meaningless given the quantity of information available. Finally, frequently, this data does not allow us to know the causes of the phenomena considered, allowing us only to correlate the series. Thus, there is a displacement from the determination of the causes of the events observed to their descriptions: instead of explaining the past, the correlations are used to predict the future. Moreover, as Berman (2013) points out: «Big Data provides quantitative methods to describe relationships, but these descriptions must be transformed into experimentally verified explanations» (p. 226). In this analysis, we will base our explanation on Bourdieu’s study of the behaviour of the literary field (1992).

Once the definitions of digital humanities and big data established, we should examine if there is a relation between these concepts. Thus, we have extracted from the ISI Web of Knowledge the references that correspond to these concepts…Access Full Text of the Article

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