This book highlights the quantitative methods of data mining and information visualization and explores their use in relation to the films and writings of the Russian director, Dziga Vertov. The theoretical basis of the work harkens back to the time when a group of Russian artists and scholars, known as the “formalists,” developed new concepts of how art could be studied and measured. This book brings those ideas to the digital age. One of the central questions the book intends to address is, “How can hypothetical notions in film studies be supported or falsified using empirical data and statistical tools?” The first stage involves manual and computer-assisted annotation of the films, leading to the production of empirical data which is then used for statistical analysis but more importantly for the development of visualizations. Studies of this type furthermore shed light on the field of visual presentation of time-based processes; an area which has its origin in the Russian formalist sphere of the 1920s and which has recently gained new relevance due to technological advances and new possibilities for computer-assisted analysis of large and complex data sets. In order to reach a profound understanding of Vertov and his films, the manual or computer-assisted data analysis must be combined with film-historical knowledge and a study of primary sources. In addition, the status of the surviving film materials and the precise analysis of these materials combined with knowledge of historical film technology provide insight into archival policy and political culture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s.
This fluent and comprehensive field guide responds to increased interest, across the humanities, in the ways in which digital technologies can disrupt and open up new research and pedagogical avenues. It is designed to help scholars and students engage with their subjects using an audio-visual grammar, and to allow readers to efficiently gain the technical and theoretical skills necessary to create and disseminate their own trans-media projects. Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape. The book walks its readers through the intellectual and practical processes of creating digital media and documentary projects. It is further equipped with video elements, supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process. This will be a valuable resource to humanist scholars and students seeking to embrace new media production and the digital landscape, and to those researchers interested in using means beyond the written word to disseminate their work. It constitutes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of digital humanities, as the first practical guide of its kind designed to facilitate humanist interactions with digital filmmaking, and to empower scholars and students alike to create and distribute new media audio-visual artefacts.
Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersections of media, culture, and practice. Topics include: access, praxis, social justice, design, interaction, interfaces, mediation, materiality, remediation, data, memory, making, programming, and hacking.
A hemispheric view of the practice of digital humanities in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas As digital media and technologies transform the study of the humanities around the world, this volume provides the first hemispheric view of the practice of digital humanities in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas. These essays examine how participation and research in new media have helped configure identities and collectivities in the region. Featuring case studies from throughout Latin America, including the United States Latinx community, contributors analyze documentary films, television series, and social media to show how digital technologies create hybrid virtual spaces and facilitate connections across borders. They investigate how Latinx bloggers and online activists navigate governmental restrictions in order to connect with the global online community. These essays also incorporate perspectives of race, gender, and class that challenge the assumption that technology is a democratizing force. Digital Humanities in Latin America illuminates the cultural, political, and social implications of the ways Latinx communities engage with new technologies. In doing so, it connects digital humanities research taking place in Latin America with that of the Anglophone world. Contributors: Paul Alonso | Morgan Ames | Eduard Arriaga | Anita Say Chan | Ricardo Dominguez | Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo | Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste | Jennifer M. Lozano | Ana Lígia Silva Medeiros | Gimena del Río Riande | Juan Carlos Rodríguez | Isabel Galina Russell | Angharad Valdivia | Anastasia Valecce | Cristina Venegas A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez
This book provides an accessible introduction to, and overview of, the digital humanities, one of the fastest growing areas of literary studies. Lane takes a unique approach by focusing on the technologies and the new environment in which the digital humanities largely takes place: the digital laboratory. The book provides a brief history of DH, explores and explains the methodologies of past and current DH projects, and offers resources such as detailed case studies and bibliographies. Further, the focus on the digital laboratory space reveals affiliations with the types of research that have traditionally taken place in the sciences, as well as convergences with other fast-growing research spaces, namely innovation labs, fabrication labs, maker spaces, digital media labs, and change labs. The volume highlights the profound transformation of literary studies that is underway, one in which the adoption of powerful technology – and concomitantly being situated within a laboratory environment – is leading to an important re-engagement in the arts and humanities, and a renewed understanding of literary studies in the digital age, as well as a return to large-scale financial investment in humanistic research. It will be useful to students and teachers, as well as administrators and managers in charge of research infrastructure and funding decisions who need an accessible overview of this technological transformation in the humanities. Combining useful detail and an overview of the field, the book will offers accessible entry into this rapidly growing field.
The latest installment of a digital humanities bellwether Contending with recent developments like the shocking 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the radical transformation of the social web, and passionate debates about the future of data in higher education, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 brings together a broad array of important, thought-provoking perspectives on the field’s many sides. With a wide range of subjects including gender-based assumptions made by algorithms, the place of the digital humanities within art history, data-based methods for exhuming forgotten histories, video games, three-dimensional printing, and decolonial work, this book assembles a who’s who of the field in more than thirty impactful essays. Contributors: Rafael Alvarado, U of Virginia; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; James Baker, U of Sussex; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; David M. Berry, U of Sussex; Claire Bishop, The Graduate Center, CUNY; James Coltrain, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Crunk Feminist Collective; Johanna Drucker, U of California–Los Angeles; Jennifer Edmond, Trinity College; Marta Effinger-Crichlow, New York City College of Technology–CUNY; M. Beatrice Fazi, U of Sussex; Kevin L. Ferguson, Queens College–CUNY; Curtis Fletcher, U of Southern California; Neil Fraistat, U of Maryland; Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State U; Michael Gavin, U of South Carolina; Andrew Goldstone, Rutgers U; Andrew Gomez, U of Puget Sound; Elyse Graham, Stony Brook U; Brian Greenspan, Carleton U; John Hunter, Bucknell U; Steven J. Jackson, Cornell U; Collin Jennings, Miami U; Lauren Kersey, Saint Louis U; Kari Kraus, U of Maryland; Seth Long, U of Nebraska, Kearney; Laura Mandell, Texas A&M U; Rachel Mann, U of South Carolina; Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Lincoln A. Mullen, George Mason U; Trevor Muñoz, U of Maryland; Safiya Umoja Noble, U of Southern California; Jack Norton, Normandale Community College; Bethany Nowviskie, U of Virginia; Élika Ortega, Northeastern U; Marisa Parham, Amherst College; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Kyle Parry, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brad Pasanek, U of Virginia; Stephen Ramsay, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Matt Ratto, U of Toronto; Katie Rawson, U of Pennsylvania; Ben Roberts, U of Sussex; David S. Roh, U of Utah; Mark Sample, Davidson College; Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, New York U; Tim Sherratt, U of Canberra; Bobby L. Smiley, Vanderbilt U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Ted Underwood, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Megan Ward, Oregon State U; Claire Warwick, Durham U; Alban Webb, U of Sussex; Adrian S. Wisnicki, U of Nebraska–Lincoln.
All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. Disrupting the Digital Humanities seeks to rethink how we map disciplinary terrain by directly confronting the gatekeeping impulse of many other so-called field-defining collections. What is most beautiful about the work of the Digital Humanities is exactly the fact that it can't be tidily anthologized. In fact, the desire to neatly define the Digital Humanities (to filter the DH-y from the DH) is a way of excluding the radically diverse work that actually constitutes the field. This collection, then, works to push and prod at the edges of the Digital Humanities -- to open the Digital Humanities rather than close it down. Ultimately, it's exactly the fringes, the outliers, that make the Digital Humanities both heterogeneous and rigorous. This collection does not constitute yet another reservoir for the new Digital Humanities canon. Rather, its aim is less about assembling content as it is about creating new conversations. Building a truly communal space for the digital humanities requires that we all approach that space with a commitment to: 1) creating open and non-hierarchical dialogues; 2) championing non-traditional work that might not otherwise be recognized through conventional scholarly channels; 3) amplifying marginalized voices; 4) advocating for students and learners; and 5) sharing generously and openly to support the work of our peers.
The past decade has seen a profound shift in our collective understanding of the digital network. What was once understood to be a transcendent virtual reality is now experienced as a ubiquitous grid of data that we move through and interact with every day, raising new questions about the social, locative, embodied, and object-oriented nature of our experience in the networked world. In The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, Steven E. Jones examines this shift in our relationship to digital technology and the ways that it has affected humanities scholarship and the academy more broadly. Based on the premise that the network is now everywhere rather than merely "out there," Jones links together seemingly disparate cultural events—the essential features of popular social media, the rise of motion-control gaming and mobile platforms, the controversy over the "gamification" of everyday life, the spatial turn, fabrication and 3D printing, and electronic publishing—and argues that cultural responses to changes in technology provide an essential context for understanding the emergence of the digital humanities as a new field of study in this millennium. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203093085, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Pairing full-length scholarly essays with shorter pieces drawn from scholarly blogs and conference presentations, as well as commissioned interviews and position statements, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 reveals a dynamic view of a field in negotiation with its identity, methods, and reach. Pieces in the book explore how DH can and must change in response to social justice movements and events like #Ferguson; how DH alters and is altered by community college classrooms; and how scholars applying DH approaches to feminist studies, queer studies, and black studies might reframe the commitments of DH analysts. Numerous contributors examine the movement of interdisciplinary DH work into areas such as history, art history, and archaeology, and a special forum on large-scale text mining brings together position statements on a fast-growing area of DH research. In the multivalent aspects of its arguments, progressing across a range of platforms and environments, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 offers a vision of DH as an expanded field—new possibilities, differently structured. Published simultaneously in print, e-book, and interactive webtext formats, each DH annual will be a book-length publication highlighting the particular debates that have shaped the discipline in a given year. By identifying key issues as they unfold, and by providing a hybrid model of open-access publication, these volumes and the Debates in the Digital Humanities series will articulate the present contours of the field and help forge its future. Contributors: Moya Bailey, Northeastern U; Fiona Barnett; Matthew Battles, Harvard U; Jeffrey M. Binder; Zach Blas, U of London; Cameron Blevins, Rutgers U; Sheila A. Brennan, George Mason U; Timothy Burke, Swarthmore College; Rachel Sagner Buurma, Swarthmore College; Micha Cárdenas, U of Washington–Bothell; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Tanya E. Clement, U of Texas–Austin; Anne Cong-Huyen, Whittier College; Ryan Cordell, Northeastern U; Tressie McMillan Cottom, Virginia Commonwealth U; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M U; Domenico Fiormonte, U of Roma Tre; Paul Fyfe, North Carolina State U; Jacob Gaboury, Stony Brook U; Kim Gallon, Purdue U; Alex Gil, Columbia U; Brian Greenspan, Carleton U; Richard Grusin, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Michael Hancher, U of Minnesota; Molly O’Hagan Hardy; David L. Hoover, New York U; Wendy F. Hsu; Patrick Jagoda, U of Chicago; Jessica Marie Johnson, Michigan State U; Steven E. Jones, Loyola U; Margaret Linley, Simon Fraser U; Alan Liu, U of California, Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Losh, U of California, San Diego; Alexis Lothian, U of Maryland; Michael Maizels, Wellesley College; Mark C. Marino, U of Southern California; Anne B. McGrail, Lane Community College; Bethany Nowviskie, U of Virginia; Julianne Nyhan, U College London; Amanda Phillips, U of California, Davis; Miriam Posner, U of California, Los Angeles; Rita Raley, U of California, Santa Barbara; Stephen Ramsay, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Margaret Rhee, U of Oregon; Lisa Marie Rhody, Graduate Center, CUNY; Roopika Risam, Salem State U; Stephen Robertson, George Mason U; Mark Sample, Davidson College; Jentery Sayers, U of Victoria; Benjamin M. Schmidt, Northeastern U; Scott Selisker, U of Arizona; Jonathan Senchyne, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Andrew Stauffer, U of Virginia; Joanna Swafford, SUNY New Paltz; Toniesha L. Taylor, Prairie View A&M U; Dennis Tenen; Melissa Terras, U College London; Anna Tione; Ted Underwood, U of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign; Ethan Watrall, Michigan State U; Jacqueline Wernimont, Arizona State U; Laura Wexler, Yale U; Hong-An Wu, U of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign.
From the Renaissance idea of the painting as an open window to the nested windows and multiple images on today's cinema, television, and computer screens: a cultural history of the metaphoric, literal, and virtual window. As we spend more and more of our time staring at the screens of movies, televisions, computers, and handheld devices—"windows" full of moving images, texts, and icons—how the world is framed has become as important as what is in the frame. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen. In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Alberti's metaphor as her starting point, Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window, developments in glass and transparency, and the emerging apparatuses of photography, cinema, television, and digital imaging. Single-point perspective—Alberti's metaphorical window—has long been challenged by modern painting, modern architecture, and moving-image technologies. And yet, notes Friedberg, for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting, for example, remained largely confined to experimental, avant-garde work. On the computer screen, however, where multiple 'windows' coexist and overlap, perspective may have met its end. In this wide-ranging book, Friedberg considers such topics as the framed view of the camera obscura, Le Corbusier's mandates for the architectural window, Eisenstein's opinions on the shape of the movie screen, and the multiple images and nested windows commonly displayed on screens today. The Virtual Window proposes a new logic of visuality, framed and virtual: an architecture not only of space but of time.
