Although
rather late, here is my take on what happened last week in the blogosphere in
the two fields I am interested in the most. Early Modernists came up with a
variety of posts about Shakespeare ranging from moods of love, through text
miming and an exploration of a proverbial saying that has its origins in Hamlet, to one of Shakespeare’s sources.
Beyond the Bard there is only one post that I refer to, which is about the
problematics around ending one of the marriages of Henry VIII. Under the label “Digital
Humanities” I have gathered posts discussing the debate on the merits of
Digital Humanities such as Fish’s third post and the reactions to it, along
with definitions and tasks for Digital Humanists. I also refer to a beautiful
collection of Lucas Cranach’s paintings tagged and searchable. Happy reading,
then!
Early Modern Studies:
Stanley Wells in his “Shakespeare’s Many Moods of Love” meditates about the
variety of passions in in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He poetically concludes this
post saying “Shakespeare’s Sonnets transcend the boundaries of sub-divisions of
human experience to encapsulate the very essence of human love.”
Aditi Muralidharan demonstrated the use of WordSeer in her recent post “Men and Women in Shakespeare.” So
far WordSeer was only capable of very simple searches, but now she announces
that it is also capable of “a simple, but complete, exploratory analysis.” The
demonstration consists in this. “‘How does the portrayal of men and women in
Shakespeare’s plays change under different circumstances?’ As one answer, we’ll
see how WordSeer suggests that when love is a major plot point, the language
referring to women changes to become more physical, and the language referring
to men becomes more sentimental.”
Adam G. Hooks meditates in an enlightening way about a line from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his “Mangling Shakespeare.” He explores the
way the line “a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance” makes
sense in the play, and how it is used in another way as a proverbial expression
meaning almost the opposite. Instead of writing about this phenomenon in the
discourse of correctness and incorrectness, he makes a case for the avoidance of
evaluation.
Liz Dollimore in her “Shakespeare’s sources – Henry VIII” explores that
tactful modifications the playwright introduced to Holinshed’s Chronicles, and to what we know nowadays
about the beheading of Anne Boleyn.
Claire showcases the complexities, problematics of dates, the difference
between divorce and a marriage annulled, legitimization of Elizabeth in her
post, “25 January 1533 – Marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.”
Digital Humanities:
Stanley
Fish in his third post on Digital Humanities, entitled “Mind
Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation,” identifies,
I’m afraid somewhat reductively, Digital Humanities with statistical analysis,
or “data mining,” or “formalist analysis.” He claims that Digital Humanists
propose two statements about themselves: “(1) we’re doing what you’ve always been doing,
only we have tools that will enable you to do it better; let us in, and (2) we
are the heralds and bearers of a new truth and it is the disruptive challenge
of that new truth that accounts for your recoiling from us.” His main objection
is that Digital Humanists do not only resist theory, but rather play the role
of anti-theorists, insofar as they conduct data mining randomly, without a
prior hypothesis. Well, I find his approach all too reductive.
Steve
Anderson reacting to Stanley Fish’s post, “Stanley Fish is at
it again: “Mind Your P’s and B’s” argues—not so much to anybody’s surprise—that Fish is mislead. Not
because that he is wrong in his argument, but rather that his hypothesis about
Digital Humanities is mistaken. Anderson
Ted
Underwood, in his “Do
humanists get their ideas from anything at all?” responded to Stanley Fish’s
third post on Digital Humanities the day after Fish’s post was published The
essence of his argument is that Fish’s assumption about the temporal priority
of the hypothesis-evidence dichotomy is false. He claims that tools do not
force a methodology but are rather “transparent extensions of our interpretive
sensibility.”
Alex Reid
also responds to Fish in his “invention and digital humanities navel #dhdebates.” He, similarly to other scholars
reacting to Fish explores the complexity of arriving at a hypothesis, or as he
puts it of the process of invention. He claims that technology liberates the
methods of arriving at an interpretation of a literary work.
Michael
Witmore published his comment on Stanley Fish’s third writing as a separate
post entitled “What did Stanley Fish
count, and when did he start counting it?.” The centre of his argument goes like this: “The
job of digital tools is to draw our attention to evidence impossible or hard to
see during normal reading, prompting us to ask new questions about our texts.
This ability to redirect attention and pose new questions is the strong suit of
certain kinds of digital humanities research. Indeed, we believe the addition
of a digital prosthetic to our insistently human reading complements the skills
of close textual analysis that are the staple of literary training.”
Andrew
Prescott’s post, “‘An Electric
Current of the Imagination’: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They
Might Become,” explores the variety of facets of digital humanities. The
most important aspect of the long post, the transcription of a lecture
originally, is its paving the way for the institutionalization of techniques
and tools used by Digital Humanists.
Trevor
Owens’ post, “Debating the Digital Humanities Gets Real,” is just great on two accounts.
Owens’s post presents a full circle of the life of a writing which first
materialized as a blog post, then was selected as a part of a printed book, and
finally there is the blog post meditating about this passage. Also the post is
a testimony of the way the full circle is lived by the author, and thus it
becomes a true paratextual element.
The SOPA/PIPA debate occasioned Cathy Davidson’s thought-provoking post
entitled “How Digital Humanists Can Lead Us to National Digital Literacy.” The
title speaks for itself, of course, but what I liked in the post the most is
her definition of Digital Humanities, and the role she assigns to it. Roughly
the same text is there on her blog entitled “Digital Literacy: An Agenda for the 21st Century.”
Others:
“Cranach Digital Archive” is a database of the paintings by Lucas Cranach
(c.1472 - 1553). It is an amazing collection of his works with descriptions, especially
because one can zoom on small parts of the paintings.
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