Are Video Games redefining what the humanities mean to us? Could every game be considered a digital humanities project, by the stance of how it is produced and how it is received? This is a look at how digital methods that are performed by digital humanists are used for the production of this medium

By looking at the ways video games engage in the digital practices that DH performs, we can see how they are a part but yet not a part of the digital humanities or the humanities for that matter. By looking at the production of games and looking at the different media that exist within it, one can dissect each facet of the game and discover how it relates to DH. But… the impact it is where we see an extension of a game being communicated about in many technological forms from videos to online forums. This is a look on how people engage with games, break down the construction of them, and how it contributes to the society that we are in.

Harig, Dominik “Inside and Outside the Game.” Computer Games and New Media Cultures (2012): 93-106.

This chapter is about the relationship between game and player and the communication that happens between that party. Communication could be the information being transferred through button presses and visual response of those presses, or omitted input. The way that the player communicates with the game, give the game information of what the player is doing and how the player is doing in the game. However this piece also brings up communication in multiplayer games as player identifies with this avatar and can interact with other players via the avatar’s actions or actual messages. This is the side effect of immersion that players as they see themselves as the avatar on the screen.

Steinkuehler, Constance. “Video Games and Digital Literacies.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 54, no. 1, 2010, pp. 61-63. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/docview/750429343?accountid=7287.

A small paper relating how video games affect young students in their studies, but allow them to delved in digital literacy, a sort of consequence after playing games where it allows discourse between the players and the games. Steinkuehler is asking what the relationship between literacy and video games is, where he goes on to say that video gameplay is a form of digital literacy. I am using this piece to connect the lines of what one of the consequence of video games as a medium of pop culture can have with a pedagogical lens. However he goes on to point out how video games have a strong mutual relationship as many fans or consumers express their reaction to each game on discussion board, fan fictions, and the like.

Feige, Daniel Martin. “Computer Games as Works of Art.” Computer Games and New Media Cultures (2012): 93-106.

This is a discussion of what art means and the aesthetics that we hold for art in general. He believes that finding relational properties instead of intrinsic ones will allow us to regard something as a work of art. He takes a philosophical lens of aesthetics and looks at the ludology as well as the narratology of games to determine their place as artworks. I plan to use this piece to show the thought process of how video games can be seen and how it cannot be categorized simply as an artwork because of the variables that come in producing certain games. Each game has its own genre, world, narrative, limitations and boundaries, and how all those things express themselves in a form of game is what brings my question to surface.

Murray, Sarah C. “Blog: Video Games and Ancient War-Gaming as Pedagogy.” Society for Classical Studies, Society for Classical Studies, 1 May 2017, classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/sarah-murray/blog-video-games-and-ancient-war—gaming-pedagogy.

Dr. Murray uses games for a pedagogical practice, using Rome: Total War for her students to display an understanding of ancient war. The process of doing this allowed a sort of immersion within the idea of ancient war and presented the idea of how to engage with this idea. This is a text of how pedagogical practices become different when implementing video games; a facet that digital humanities mainly implement within the projects that are developed. Murray allowed the students to control their own learning environment by letting them set up customized battles where there are choices such as geographical locations, factions, the amount of troops and their disposition on the battlefield.  This presents a clear understanding of how video games can assist in the classroom and ultimately pedagogical environments.

Jones, Steven E. “The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (as the Network Is Everting).” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; London, 2016, p. 3.

The idea of how digital humanities have everted where there is now a connection between the digital world and physical world. Around 2006, there have been prominent technological advances, as well as the sudden acknowledgement of digital humanities. The attention towards new media has been refined towards fully acknowledging video games and video game theories. These practices allowed helped pushed digital humanities towards eversion. This recognize video games as one of the most prominent forms of new media under a digital humanist context, showing the bridge that this medium brings into scholarship.  How they structure relationships between the data and the player, or the data and the actual game to even going through this term “gamification” which is employing gameplay attributes to things that aren’t a game. E.g. A leaderboard in an exercise application.

Patrick Jagoda. “Gaming the Humanities.” Differences, vol. 25, no. 1, 2014, pp. 189–215.

“What does it mean to include new media- let alone digital games- in a discussion about the digital humanities?” Jagoda argues that games require new ways of perceiving and working, as they promote this pro social behavior to where players can perceive problems differently. She goes through the idea of gamification where games become capitalized, even though at its core, games does use modes of intellects that would be found in the humanities. She also break down how games made, and affect the players playing them from the multiple learning styles to the ways that the games engage them.

Heineman, David “Chris Melissinos: ART AND VIDEO GAMES.” Thinking about Video Games: Interviews with the Experts, Indiana University Press, BLOOMINGTON; INDIANAPOLIS, 2015, p. 36.

This piece is an interview with Chris Melissinos about his exhibition The Art of Video Games that was curated for the Smithsonian Art Museum. The exhibition was presenting games as an art form and not just the art that is used to conceptualize the game. The understanding of trying to find an intent or to interpret meaning from video games when Melissinos brings up how people can play games differently. Players can understand the intent of a game from the director, but can always grasp some meaning from their subjective background making a game be placed in between these ideas. Though the perceiving of games as art is taking the entire content including the code and seeing the humanity inside it.

Hergenrader, Trent. “The Place of Videogames in the Digital Humanities.” On the Horizon, vol. 24, no. 1, 2016, pp. 29–33.

This piece speaks on how game culture spans out across different mediums that primarily lie on an online space such as wikis, walkthroughs, hints and so on and the controversies that lives on those spaces. It also touches upon the rhetoric of how games are experienced and how they should be critiqued for the language and representation of people, places, and things. It explores games in different facets that would help create an understanding for digital humanists, by expressing a balance of between technology and humanistic thought. Games are flexible tools that can either be studied separately or integrated in a curriculum.

Sandifer, Philip. “Avatari: Disruption and Imago in Video Games.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Avatari: Disruption and Imago in Video Games, 2009, www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000066/000066.html.

Sandifer breaks down video games components from the controllers that are used to the actual character on the screen. An avatari is an avatar (or controlled character) that experience something that the player wouldn’t want to happen. Sandifer express the different forms of an avatar and the complexities they have due to the generational expanse of technology such as how a controller currently have more buttons and joysticks compared to Super Nintendo controller that had a directional button pad and four buttons. This paper looks at video games and analyze just the practical forms of how it operates and what the player is experiencing. Sandifer argues that if a game creates a virtual world, then it is not a medium, which I find interesting for my research. If it isn’t a medium, could there be another way to quantify video games within the sphere of digital humanities than just referring it as new media?

Vrabel, Jeff. “Why do my kids waste hours watching millennials play video games on YouTube?” Washington Post, 12 Oct. 2017. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509252023/AONE?u=cuny_gradctr&sid=AONE&xid=1d27b5ff.

This article is a funny critique about how there is an online community of gamers that persist in game culture through video. While I didn’t think I would get anything substantial about it, I found that in a way it’s a type of pedagogy being done in a unique type of way. While this piece is a small comparison between generations and how active they was, it also show the activeness of game culture, which made me consider my claim of games redefining the humanities as we know it. But the humanities interact with people on a social level, as it is always a reflection of on the subjectivity of the creator as they detail the environment that surrounds them. This however shows what happen when people who witness a creator work and their response to it.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND THE 15M MOVEMENT

I came to this course with the vague idea of learning more about Digital Humanities and using that knowledge to interpret and problematize the 15M or Indignados movement. I was motivated by the intention to have a digital component in my dissertation in which I could make use of some form of DH to contribute to what I will be researching in parallel to more conventional approaches.

Throughout the different sessions, I have been inspired by the manifold branches of the DH and their possibilities for interpreting and problematizing the cultural, political and social aspects of our societies. In particular, my ideas have been strongly influenced by the insights from scholars who warn about the perils of reproducing the system of inequalities in the digital realm and turn their eyes to a more democratic, more horizontal, and freer use of the DH.

A hypothetic final paper for this class would draw from Social Movements Studies alongside the critiques of DH that are coming from Race, Gender and Class analyses, Critical Theory, and Postcolonial Studies.

When I first started to conceptualize this paper, I tried to find ways in which I could use digital tools to examine the online traces of the Indignados movement: their twitter accounts, their blogs, their websites or the YouTube channels. In doing that I had to conceive the Indignados movement as a digital one.

This task proved unsatisfactory because I was not using the right approach. After reading authors like Safiya Noble, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Johanna Drucker, and so forth, I have become aware of the necessity of treating 15M’s digital manifestations as different ways of producing knowledge. Rather than seeing them as raw material for scholar interpretation, these digital artifacts are themselves engaged in the work of analysis. This stance would diverge from any false pretention of a scientific unbiased analysis and consequently would entail a move forward in the sheer interpretative use of DH.

Some of the articles that I am including in this bibliography deal directly with the digital production of 15M. Other sources take a more general perspective and would be useful to delineate the theoretical framework in which I will inscribe the analyses of the specific examples of my case study.

Castells, Manuel. Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the Internet age. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.

Castells was one of the first scholars who established connections between the 2011 uprisings in different parts of the world through their use of digital media. He provides insightful examples from which to lay out an analysis of the digital production of 15M’s participants in relation to the international context. His use of the rhizome metaphor points to a different conception of these networks, bringing about their alternative and counterhegemonic potential thanks to their ideas of participatory democracy, but above all their use of imaginative and unprecedented practices.

Barreiro, Belén. La sociedad que seremos: digitales, analógicos, acomodados y empobrecidos. Planeta, 2017.

This book proposes a digital division of Spanish society (analogs vs. digitals) in relation to a socioeconomic division created by the crisis (well-off vs. impoverished). Its author, the former director of the Sociologic Research Center, depicts a new distribution of the society affected by the crisis and shaped by the new political subjectivity that stemmed from the 15M.

I would use Barreiro’s ideas to buttress the argument that the 15M was (and continues to be) a digital movement based on the demographic conditions of its participants. In the same way that the author applies her hypothesis to the electoral outputs and the new parties’ supporters, I would look for continuities between what was digitally produced by the movement and the new platforms put in place by the new political actors who define themselves as heir of the Indignados’ spirit.

de Ramón Carrión, Manuel. “Las redes sociales 2.0 como fuentes informativas en las revoluciones y movimientos populares de 2011:(Túnez, Egipto y 15-m). Resultados de la encuesta a periodistas españoles.” TecCom Studies: Estudios de Tecnología y Comunicación 4 (2012): 367-375.

This article gives account of the use of social media in the Occupy movements of Tunisia, Egypt and Spain. His tone is more informative than analytic, but the fact that the author reproduces first hand testimonies from Spanish journalists would provide me with a privileged access to primary sources.

de Soto, Pablo. “Los mapas del #15M: el arte de la cartografía de la multitud conectada.” 15MP2P. Una mirada transdisciplinar del 15M (2014): 363-387.

De Soto compares different maps created by the 15M to contextualize the dimension and outspread of the movement, to locate services, or more importantly, to trace networks of production of knowledge, such as wikis and databases. He interprets the technopolitical dimension of 15M as an open source revolution in which knowledges, techniques, practices, and strategies are collectively learnt, replicated and enhanced by a connected multitude. Cartography is framed by de Soto within the logic of the production of the commons. In his view, maps generate processes of subjetivation through the depiction of alternative worlds.

This “art of cartography by a connected multitude,” as the author names it, would be considered in my paper as one of the main branches of the 15M production of knowledge within the realm of DH.

Fuster Morell, Mayo. “From digital commons to society commons: Influence of the free culture movement in the 15M mobilization.” Crisis and Social Mobilization in Contemporary Spain: The 15M Movement. Routledge (2017): 54-72.

This article suggests a process of continuity between participatory democracy in the squares and participation and deliberation in digital forums and platforms. That is an important gesture toward the consideration of 15M as a digital movement. Unlike many scholars who see digital activism as a precedent of the 2011 protests and mobilizations, Fuster understands it in fruitful dialogue with the non-virtual practices. The text goes beyond the period of 15M to include the subsequent iterations of the Indignados spirit, such as the housing movement, the ties in defense of public health and education, and the coalitions of parties and social movements which won the municipal elections of 2014.

Jenkins, Henry, et al. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Mit Press, 2009.

Jenkins et al. define participatory culture as relationships “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, with strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others, with some type of informal mentorship (…), where members believe that their contributions matter, and where members feel some degree of social connection with one another.” This framework is useful to consider the 15M mobilizations, their political impact, and their digital productions as forms of culture that challenge institutions.

Liu, Alan. “Where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?” Debates in the digital humanities (2012): 490-509.

Liu claims that in order to be a full partner of the mainstream humanities, DH has to engage with cultural criticism. Digital spaces democratize the ideas of expert and scholar being at the vanguard of the production of knowledge. From that position a unique opportunity for leadership in the humanities arises. Digital Humanities has the potential to scale into thinking critically about power relations, finances and other governance protocols.

Liu’s ideas are inspiring in terms of assuring the role of DH in the production of knowledge and in dialogue with contemporary processes of political innovation and social transformation.

Losh, Elizabeth. “Hacktivism and the humanities: Programming protest in the era of the digital university.” Debates in the digital humanities (2012): 161-186.

Losh’s article is a recollection of several practices of hacktivism hosted by or related to university campuses. These practices are rooted in the tradition of university activism, but also part of a “new vanguard of networked digital culture in which protests in the temporary autonomous zones of computational media are rhizomatic, sporadic, and even ironic in the rhetorical stances that they adopt.” The author sees a relationship between “the old guard of political organizers and a new cadre of programmers” in the way they use dissensus.

As Losh says, the use of hacktivism theory offers an alluring critical approach to broaden the understanding of digital tools and to engage with a more critical dimension of Digital Humanities.

Peña-López, Ismael, Mariluz Congosto, and Pablo Aragón. “Spanish Indignados and the evolution of the 15M movement on Twitter: towards networked para-institutions.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 15.1-2 (2014): 189-216.

The authors define the movement in terms of network citizen politics characterized by decentralization, swarm-like actions and intensive used of information and communication technologies. They compare and contrast the use of Twitter by 15M activist and new political actors within formal democratic institutions. According to the authors, both seem to have a similar use of Politics 2.0, but with very different purposes and dissimilar vocabulary. The fact that there is no inter-institutional dialogue points to the fundamental break with the institutions that the 15M entailed; and thereby, to the necessity of considering Indignados’ uses of social media an alternative, counterhegemonic methods of creation of meaning.

Rice, Jeff. “Occupying the digital humanities.” College English 75.4 (2013): 360-378.

The author focuses on a photograph of the Occupy movement to draw attention to the way knowledge is created in the digital humanities. He posits suggestion, what the photograph is doing, as a method of activating a network of forces in digital environments which would generate their own suggestions (memes, video commentaries, blog or Facebook posts, etc.) from the original source. Suggestion, insofar as it re-mythologizes interpretation, offers an alternative digital humanities approach aligned with the counterhegemonic practices of the Occupy movements. Inspired by the possibilities of DH, Rice encourages humanities to move beyond hermeneutics to consider other approaches relevant to the production of meaning.

I would translate Rice analysis to the context of the Spanish uprising and the diverse materials that could fit this transformative notion of suggestion as” a process of re-mythologizing, not a settling on a reading or understanding.”

All in all, I am using these articles to discern how and what can be used within the digital humanities to support some of the work I am doing towards my thesis project on eugenics.

After this week’s class, I wouldn’t mind more in the area of infrastructure studies because I think that has some bearing on my project.

Liu, Alan. “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” pmla vol. 128, no. 2, 2013, pp. 409-423.

In general, my interest is in the tools and methods used by digital humanities scholars in the consideration of a small digital project for my thesis. Alan Liu evaluates a particular digital humanities project and attempts to locate it within the humanities overall. It is useful as an example of a clear practice with a specific set of tools and methods used in an attempt to answer a clearly drawn out question. Liu emphasizes the importance of meaning, and this is essential in understanding eugenics. Besides counting and determining a number of texts and associated documents that circulated in the early formation of eugenic ideology, eugenics had a significant meaning that made it accessible. Can digital humanities techniques or methodology help discover correlations of meaning among the large volume of eugenic periodicals, pamphlets, and newspaper articles that circulated? Liu’s review of one particular DH project inspired me and helped see potential in using DH research methods. Of particular interest was what Liu calls Heuser and Le-Khac’ “methodological self-awareness” (411). While they are looking at word use, I am interested in the variety of lexical expressions related to positive and negative eugenics and their persuasive force and longevity. Teleology.

Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Routledge, 2002.  

Like Rita Felski, Karl Popper looks at the “logic,” or procedures, and the limits of the methods used to assess experimental results and progressive steps involved in scientific discovery and why they matter in the pursuit of justified true belief. He also examines the limit of scientific examination of new discoveries. Popper has some chapters on the usefulness of simplicity in modeling empirical data, which is relevant in DH. There is also an important chapter on falsification, which seems to integral to improving the certainty and verifiability of observable phenomena. In thinking about the comparisons of “objective” science, I think an overview of the scientific method is pertinent to maintaining a methodological awareness.  Since there are some within the digital humanities who liken the use of computation to objectivity and scientific exploration, I found Popper’s Logic useful in discerning the validity of some of those claims. Tautological and teleological

Hayles, N. Katherine. How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Hayles’ chapters on “hyper reading” and attention/distraction and by other means and “technogenesis,” the way society and emerging technologies relate to one another are essential to exploring the significance of relying on machines to complete computation that lie outside of our abilities. People think individually and socially. How do technological advancements influence human cognitive? Can this be a good analogy for the advancement of eugenic thought? Teleological

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol 5, 1, 2011, pp. 1-20.

“The map is not the territory.” Yet the critiques that emerge from some DH work believes that the intention and design of models is a direct one-to-one representation. Drucker makes a number of claims I think are based in some misconceptions about the uses of models in science and what humanists borrow from them. She makes some valid points if these claims are indeed true, and it seems like each one must be investigated. In Daniela Bailer-Jones chapter from Scientific Models, as well as in Richard Jean So’s article “All Models are Wrong,” it clear that models are necessary for helping scientists and humanists revise their thinking and re-evaluate their data sets. There are folks who put too much stock in statistical models, but I think these folks are not the designers or users of these models. She makes very good points to adjust models to accommodate dynamic data sets. Tautological

Putnam, Hilary. “The Meaning of “Meaning.” Language, Mind, and Knowledge, edited by Keith Gunderson, University of Minnesota Press, 1975, pp. 131-193.

Wallack, Jessica Seddon, and Ramesh Srinivasan. “Local-global: Reconciling mismatched ontologies in development information systems.” System Sciences, 2009. HICSS’09. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on. IEEE, 2009.

This article focuses on how administrator and local communities describe and report information representing their interests, concerns, and context differ. Wallack and Srinivasan explore the specific incongruities in the information systems designed by a local community in India and the state agency responsible for some of the public works in that area. They claim that there is “information loss” that occurs when the state agency collects information from the local community using its state apparatus and fundamental understanding of what information is relevant. The idea of information loss as a result of the difference between the two information systems seems significant when considering the use of digital archives and databases to preserve indigenous knowledge. It is a useful way to consider how the Eugenics Records Office collected and interpreted the information it received and collected and what information was lost or never considered. The Eugenics Records Office’s information was archived. Is the archive serviceable as instructive of the errors related to its set of premises, or is it keeping it alive?  

Cushman, E. C. (2013). “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the digital Archive.” College English, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 115-135.

Cushman explains the use of a digital archive as a pedagogical tool for language learners and/or as a means of mediating new interpretations of knowledge production. The Cherokee Nation commissioned the creation and the hosting of a digital archive of Cherokee stories in the Cherokee language. It is part of an immersion program, and it supports “the curriculum of the K-6 Cherokee immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, as one facet of larger language perseverance efforts” (115). She addresses the Cherokee stories and songs section of the digital archive as a means of decolonizing literacy practices by centering around the social practices and linguistic structures inherent and specific to Cherokee and Sequoyan, the syllabary of the Cherokee language. The use of the archive here as a means of preservation seems feasible, and it is highlights the importance of the Cherokee language speakers and cultural stakeholders assist in the design of the archive and privileging Cherokee, Sequoyan, and other culturally important works. Again, this work is instructive in reconceptualizing databases and archives as pedagogical tools.

Christie, Michael J. “Computer databases and Aboriginal knowledge.” Learning communities: International journal of learning in social contexts Vol. 1, 2004, pp. 4-12.

This article problematizes the use of databases to preserve indigenous knowledge. Specifically, it comes to the conclusion that the structure and organization of databases are incompatible with what knowledge is and how it is shared. In the introduction, Christie makes it clear that this exploration was inspired by concerns voiced by an older generation concern a younger generation’s attitude towards traditional knowledge, “Many Aboriginal parents and grandparents, concerned that the younger generation are not growing up with a strong indigenous knowledge/identity, endorse the use of computer databases to store texts, photos, videos, maps, lists etc to help with their work of teaching.” As Christie points out strongly and immediately, “Databases do not contain knowledge, they contain information (ie ones and zeros in particular formation).” The purpose the Yolngu Aboriginal people have in mind is education, so Christie examines the potential of databases being a part of the discursive practices of literacy as explained by James Paul Gee. Christie also examines the specific aspects of Yolngu Aboriginal people’s culture that could be potentially compatible with databases and their internal structures. This idea is useful because perhaps the preservation of materials, especially historically and culturally specific ones, needs to be framed in a similar manner so that they are instructive rather than a display.  

Gentner, Dedre and Arthur B. Markman. “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity.” American Psychologist, vol. 52, no. 1, Jan. 1997, pp. 45-56.

The use of analogy is important to knowledge construction. Gentner uses the example of Kepler and his approximations of the influence of gravity through analogy, which are based on his observations of the motion of the planets. Examining the nature of analogy and similarity can provide insight into how to possibly code, TEI, and create semantic text mining programs that can identify analogy and similar, which are often themselves models within scientific controversy. I think this clarification can offer some help in designing tools that search with greater precision. How does a better understanding fundamental structure of language help create more precise tools?

Huijnen, Pim, et. al. “A Digital Humanities Approach to the History of Science: Eugenics revisited in hidden debates by means of semantic text mining.” Workshops at the International Conference on Social Informatics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.

This is useful for my specific thesis project. It is an example of what semantic text mining and various graphical representations can yield for the history of science subjects. One of my primary questions has to do with eugenics and US culture, in particular, seemed to be susceptible to eugenic thinking. Certain materials and methods remain the same. It also was very clear about how the methods were used to produce a particular result. “Digital history is a methodological approach framed by the capacities of these digital tools to make, define, query, and annotate associations and analyze long-term patterns of economic, technological and cultural change.” Their techniques seemed pretty comprehensive, and they employed large databases of material and a very dynamic system to get results (2).

Bailer-Jones, Daniela M. “Scientific Models.” Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, pp. 1-20.

The discussion of scientific models is useful in discerning the difference in approaches to models in the sciences and those in the digital humanities. There are places where the approaches approach similarity and are compatible; there are other places where there are controversy and contention within the digital humanities.

Mohr, John W., and Petko Bogdanov. “Introduction—Topic models: What they are and why they matter.” Poetics.  vol. 41, 2013, pp. 545-569.

Wong, Shun Ha Sylvia, and Peter Hancox. “An Investigation into the use of Argument Structure and Lexical Mapping Theory for Machine Translation.” Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 12, 1998, pp. 334-339.

Holyoak, Keith J. and Dušan Stamenković. “Metaphor Comprehension: A Critical Review of Theories and Evidence.” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 08, 2018.

Catrambone, Richard. “The Effects of Surface and Structural Feature Matches on the Access of Story Analogs.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 28, no. 2, Mar. 2002, pp. 318-334.

Yang, Tze-I., Andrew J. Torget, and Rada Mihalcea. “Topic modeling on historical newspapers.” Proceedings of the 5th ACL-HLT Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011.

Tangherlini, Timothy R., and Peter Leonard. “Trawling in the Sea of the Great Unread: Sub-corpus topic modeling and Humanities research.” Poetics vol. 41, no. 6, 2013, pp. 725-749.

Hello all! Here’s the link to the article in Social Text by Vincent Brown that I had mentioned in class yesterday – Vincent Brown; Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery. Social Text 1 December 2015; 33 (4 (125)): 134–141. doi: https://doi-org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/10.1215/01642472-3315826

An excerpt from his article –

Fortunately, there has lately been a spatial, even a cartographic emphasis in humanistic and social scientific study that encourages scholars to think more explicitly about how we can represent changing spatial linkages without reverting to the traditional geographic divisions. New historical cartographies allow us to visualize the networks and circuits that define spatial history, which the historian Richard White has succinctly characterized as the study of movements (of people, plants, animals, goods, and information) over time. With movement, interaction, and transformation, patterns are made and remade. By tracing these patterns, historical analysts can develop a visual language that may recover and illustrate spatial practices and processes. This is a thematic historical cartography, seen less as a technoscientifc form of observation than as a rhetorical practice that can defne, clarify, and advocate visions of the world that might otherwise go unarticulated. Cartographic visualization can be, says White, a fundamental part of historians’ analytical process: a means of doing research, generating questions, and revealing historical relations. New techniques present novel opportunities, but they also highlight the limitations of the archival material they employ.

His map can be found at revolt.axismaps.com

Using the StoryMapJS tool developed by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, I created a map [https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/7ed69da1bf32f9f828bf6a8fc34ddb7e/the-east-india-companys-first-voyage/index.html] charting the East India Company’s (EIC) first trading voyage. The StoryMapsJS interface is very intuitive and can be picked up with ease. The challenge, however, lies in being able to make sense of the EIC’s papers, given the style that it is written in and largely forgotten place names that it uses. For this map, I used a company record titled “A true and large discourse of the voyage of the whole fleete of ships set forth the 20. of Aprill 1601. by the Gouernours and assistants of the East Indian marchants in London, to the East Indies Wherein is set downe the order and manner of their trafficke, the discription of the countries, the nature of the people and their language, with the names of all the men dead in the voyage,” which I sourced from the EEBO database. As is suggested by the title, this record is written in more or less chronological order and details the major locations where the EIC fleet stopped, the names and ways in which various sailors / officers died in the voyage, the nature of storms encountered, descriptions of landscape and communities, as well as other moments of interest in the journey. My method for mapping this journey was to read the primary source, focus in on the place names that it mentions, and then plot them on my StoryMapJS in the order that it appears in the text. With each location that I plotted, I added a little snippet from the record that mentioned the place. In doing so, I hoped to import some of the historical language and context from the primary source into the digital map.

As I reflect on what I learnt through this exercise, I realize that mapping provides a very specific mode of inquiry that relies on a great deal of inference from the primary source. Despite the suggestions invoked by the neat lines drawn on my StoryMapJS, the exact path of the EIC’s voyage will not be revealed by just focusing on the places that they visited because the record is rife with mentions of being tossed and turned in tempestous seas. Moreover, the subjective experience of the journey with its storms, sickness, and failed mutinies is lost when pursuing a purely cartographic approach to this voyage. What is gained through this process, however, is a head-on confrontation with the constitutive imprecisions in historical texts describing journeys and the limits of digital mapping. Whereas the digital map needs a location, an exact point or series of points that can be placed on the map, the historical sources often simply mention vague details, such as being four degrees below the equator or seven leagues from the shore. How do we balance the imprecise information that we have with the clarity required of our digital tools? Does the necessity of digital mapping to require definite coordinates actually come in the way of working with older materials that do not have this data? I dealt with this hurdle by simply skipping all the locations that I couldn’t figure out. Hardly the best approach, but workable given the context of this exercise.