Ada Lovelace Blogging

Argh! Blogger eated my Ada Lovelace Blogging Day paean to the women in technology who have amazed, inspired and mentored me! Grr!

Well, I'll try again tomorrow, but while the hour of the day is left to me let me boil that nice post down to its essence: the women in technology that I know rock!

Sigh.

Immersed in Old Media

Not much time to post here lately. I've been immersed in the production of old media ("book") and I've needed to stay focused on that. Perhaps I should practice producing shorter blog posts in this interim.

So,  let me just say in response to folks like Marc Bauerlein and Sven Birkerts (as quoted in this post) who argue that reading online is passive:

Going Big, or "Let's Try This in Okinawa"

Following up on an earlier post, it is probably time to say something about the primary motivation behind my leap into the waters of digital humanities (Dan Cohen tweeted recently that I was dipping my toe in the waters, but, if so, why are my pits so wet?). The experimentation with classroom presentations was a small first step and wouldn't, of itself, automatically have led to a prolonged engagement with "digital humanities." But it was a classroom experience that did set me on this path.

In the late 1990s, my colleague, Alice Yang, asked me if I would consider teaching with her a comparative course on how WWII in the Pacific has been remembered in the U.S. and Japan. Postwar Japanese history wasn't really my forte, but I loved the thought of teaching with Alice and I loved the idea of getting Japanese history into conversation with American history. Two early conditions really set the stage for what came next. First, since we both wanted credit for teaching, we were expected to develop a class with large enrollment. Second, Alice's training as an oral historian meant that she was inclined from the very beginning to bring older guests to the class who could speak of their experiences in the war (although I worked on the history of ethnography in Japan, I was shy about asking people to come in).

Our first iteration of the class had an enrollment of 80. Not bad for a history course in those days, but nothing exceptional. By the third time, however, it rose to 220, a level it has held since then, capped only by a reluctance to give us any more T.A.s. So something was clearly working in terms of the content and delivery of the course. But we also worried a lot about what the larger size would mean for the students. We worried about how the larger numbers could lead to larger numbers of students engaged only passively, alienated and atomized in the large impersonal classroom. This concern was fed by our students' clear affection for our older visitors. They loved our Communist Marine (he joined the Marines to "save Mother Russia!"), our Japanese American internees, our A-bomb survivors, our ship's engineer from the USS Maryland, our Okinawan American MIS interpreter/interrogator, our former P.O.W.s. The American majority of the class was intrigued by the perspectives of exchange students from Japan, China and Korea. These visible and personal connections to the content of the class were some of the most important things we did to keep the students engaged. But these visitors were just moments in a course that could otherwise fall into a large-lecture swamp.

One of the tricks in the class is getting the students to understand that the course is not actually about WWII, it is about the memories of WWII in the U.S. and Japan. It is, in other words, about 1945 to the present. It is about the meaning of the past in all of the present "nows" we have gone through since 1945, including the present time of the class. With that in mind, we wanted to engage the students by having them do small-scale research themselves: interviewing family members and family friends, finding things in their attics, or looking at features of the landscape in the SF Bay and Monterey Bay areas. We hoped such assignments might both keep them engaged and effectively deliver our foundational message about the pervasive and heterogeneous salience of the past to the present. Through the research projects, they would not only study memories, they would be involved in memory-making.

In our second or third run of the class, one of our T.A.s, a history graduate student from Okinawa, inadvertently gave us another way to deal with the problem of class size. She was in my office complaining about the difficulties of getting many of the students to broaden their horizons and see the impact of the war across all facets of postwar society (her particular complaint was with a student who was obsessed with writing about the bomb, and only the bomb). With perhaps a hint of homesickness, she ended the session with a wistful, "If you did this class in Okinawa, they'd get it."

That sounded like a Great Idea and I immediately began thinking about how we could do that. But as flattering as it was to think that we could teach the class in Okinawa, it took little reflection to understand that there was much more for us to learn than teach in Okinawa. With our T.A.'s wish that we could do this in Okinawa, Alice and I began to think of opening our classroom to Okinawa and other places in the same way as we had with our elderly guest speakers. Put another way, our strategic response to the growth of the class size was not to fight to hold it as small as possible, but to "go big." (We owe thanks to Gerald Barnett, our campus' intellectual property specialist in the Office of Research for giving us heaping spoonfuls of encouragment on this).

The vision we had was of building the class into an international collaborative class, with students in American and Japanese (and eventually Chinese and Korean and...) classrooms working together on research projects in which research teams would be composed of students from all participating universities. We wanted to avoid a situation in which students elsewhere sat in virtual classrooms watching Alice and me piped to them across the ocean and we wanted to make the focus of the collaboration be the students themselves. This means that we don't want collaborating faculty to commit to our specific syllabus, necessarily, but we do want to create a format whereby comparable classes can make points of contact through the students. Peering into a possible future, we had visions of teams of students from everywhere producing collaborative virtual exhibits, engaging in team translations, sharing oral histories, collaborative films and so on.

As we began to share this vision with others, the inevitable first question we got was, "how are you going to deal with the language problem?" Clearly there won't be a sufficient number of Japanese-speaking/reading students, even in a class of 220 and even with the robust enrollments in Japanese language classes that we have at UC Santa Cruz. And while Japanese university students have to pass an English exam to get in, the exam is not actually a measure of an ability to use English. If we eventually expand the project to include Chinese and Korean speakers, we will be adding tremendous levels of complication.

Our move to embrace a digital humanities approach was occasioned by a desire to "go big," meaning we saw the possibility of being very effective at very large scales by going digital. But what is making us really dig in to the field is the problem of language. How can we make it possible for students who don't share sufficient common language to do collaborative research? It feels deliciously impossible, so well worth doing.

There are many posts to do on this subject, so let me just outline the approaches we are exploring at present.

We are building a website that will function as a combination of digital archive, collaborative research space and social network. In a doubled reference to an icon of commemorative sites and to the durability of WWII memory controversies, we are naming the site "Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Asia Pacific War." The site will be multi-lingual and structured around an archive of digital artifacts (photos, videos, scans, audio recordings, texts and so on) that are produced by ourselves, students in our classes and, eventually, collaborating institutions and a broader public. Each artifact will be the site of possible research, manifested in a multi-lingual wiki (for ease of reading, each artifact will have parallel wikis in four languages). Each artifact will also have a forum column in which visitors may raise questions or post research or translation inquiries. Each artifact will also have multilingual tags, of course. The site will have a multilingual search function that allows people to search in one language and retrieve information in others. We will also build in a number of tools that will help people gain access to information and other users in the site.

The guiding principle in this is the idea that we want a site that gives users tools and opportunities to explore memory artifacts in multiple languages. Many have wondered if we are going to use machine translators, like Babblefish. I think there is a place for machine translators, but it is rarely ever past an entryway. When dealing with blunt searches for information in other languages, machine translators get you a view of what's out there. But when the object of research is the highly nuanced question of memory, machine translators are more likely to become an impediment to translingual collaboration because of the opportunities for mistranslation. Moreover, we believe that there is greater pedagogical value in creating a situation in which students/users have to forge their own translingual communications strategies. We want our students to understand the limits of translation, to understand that sometimes concepts don't translate well. We want our students to encounter viscerally the obstacles to the vision of a universal convergence of understanding (not because that future vision isn't beautiful, but because it is really, really hard). And we want students to feel the empowerment that comes when they use whatever is at hand to actually achieve communication, however limited, in the same way they would if they were plopped down in the streets of Seoul, Nanjing or Naha today. In those situations, students would make use of many strategies—pantomime and gesture, props, pidgeon, drawing, and finding someone who can help them speak—to get what they need. Once the possibilities are experienced, we believe that many will become more motivated to engage translingually and transculturally.

In terms of translingual communication, the digital artifacts can serve as markers to gather shared interest and begin to construct specific points of communication (what are the specific items in a picture, for example). The multilingual tags can help users explore into the realms of other languages by serving as portals for wandering in other languages and as pointers to help direct help from other users. Parallel multilingual wikis can provoke curiosity about how information on both specific artifacts and larger metanarratives are presented in other languages, serving as a magnet for engagement with discourses in other languages (I can see a frequent query asking for a bilingual user to compare texts for one object in two languages as a beginning of a discussion as to why the frames are different). And the multilingual information access searches (which we are in discussion with Doug Oard at Maryland about creating), will help students envision scope, intensity and density of discussion of topics in different languages, even if they can't read them.

Much of our approach to the translingual problem looks to mobilizing human skills, rather than machine. We want to highlight our forums as a place where users can exchange work skills ("anyone able to translate this for me in return for a little video editing I can offer?") or find folks who can facilitate access for them. I can imagine the development of a kind of corollary to Amazon's Mechanical Turking in which some tasks can be broken down into small bits that can be farmed out to community members who can respond with minimal effort that aggregates into something big. I have begun talking with linguists and game designers to explore the possibility of creating "games with a purpose" such as Luis von Ahn is working on. I can see constructing games that have students playing with words and images that result in translations, or the development of things like a site-specific reCaptcha. In all of these ideas, the notion is that we use digital possibilities to mobilize and connect human users and their very human skills.

In short, what we have come to want to build is not just an archive, but a social research site that is built around an archive. We've had a lot of help imagining this, most importantly from two very talented graduate students at UC Santa Cruz, Amanda Shuman and Josh McVeigh-Schultz (now at USC). Now we are working with a generous grant from NEH's Office of Digital Humanities and a wonderful computer scientist, Suzana Djurcilov, and actually building the thing.

If this thing actually flies, I will have more than wet armpits.

iPhone Dunce

The other morning, while dropping off my youngest son at kindergarten, I found that I needed to get a message to my wife at home. As usual, I forgot to carry my cell phone, so when I spotted my friend Nathaniel, I asked if I could borrow his phone to make a quick call home. Nathaniel graciously pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and reached out to hand it to me. Upon seeing his iPhone, I stalled and said, "Um, could you please dial it for me?" He smiled and made a crack about having to dial an iPhone for "Mr. Digital Humanities." What could I say? I, too, had to laugh at the incongruity. I am working hard to develop digital humanities, both in my own work and in my academic division, but I've only touched an iPhone twice, each time to make a call on my colleague's phone while she was driving. While I think I can eventually get the hang of it, my first attempts at using the thing weren't exactly smooth.

While chuckling on my way home at my mid-forties old-fogey persona ("make this gizmo work for me, sonny!"), I did wonder whether my distance from gadgetry was either sustainable or acceptable in my continuing pursuit of digital humanities. I think the guys at the Digital Campus podcast make a compelling case for the inevitability of mobile devices in the immediate and longterm future of digital pedagogy. But I don't have an iPhone, or a Nexus One or any other smart phone with Android or whatnot. Moreover, the list of things that I would like to spend my money on that come before "smart phone" is very long and includes mostly life-enhancing things like a bicycle odometer or a wetsuit, or family needs like a car to replace our slowly disintegrating Nissan Sentra or a second bathroom in our very small house with two growing boys. I just can't see spending my money on a smart phone, especially with the costs of the monthly plans that come with them. Not at this point in my family's growth and not at this point with the 8% pay cut (excuse me, "furlough") that the University of California has implemented.

But here's the thing: I think (fear?) there is a compelling case to be made that unless I am actively using the gadgets, software applications or coding languages of the digital media, then I have no real business in this field.

Start, for example, with an analogy that comes from close to my home: when a student comes to talk to me about going to graduate school to pursue advanced studies in history, one of my very first questions is: "What's your second language?" Because I teach Japanese history, many of the students who come to discuss grad school with me are coming with an interest in Japanese history and, because our University has such an "uncommon commitment to undergraduate education" that we don't have a foreign language requirement, many of them have not even begun to study Japanese. In the majority of cases, I have to tell them to either forget about it, or to get off their asses and start studying Japanese intensively. In short, waving to my wall of Japanese language books, I tell them you can't be taken seriously as a historian of Japan if you can't read those books.

On the other hand, while Japanese language skills have long served a gate-keeper function in Japanese historiographical training, they have also long served to ghettoize the historiography in the American academy. There is a deeply ingrained tendency to evaluate the quality of work in the field through what are essentially measures of fluency in Japanese because linguistic skill is understood to be what guarantees access to a "Japanese" viewpoint (which, in turn, means prioritizing the perspective of the object of inquiry over the inquiring subject). The corollary is that anyone who lacks language skills can't possibly produce anything of value to the field. This means that those from outside the field who want to know anything about Japan should wait for a specialist to make a pronouncement and that the likelihood that knowledge of Japan will be relevant to anything else is relatively low (since little else should be relevant to it).

I saw the pernicious effects of this policing in the field's responses to my graduate advisors. A common response to their radical re-readings of early modern Japanese intellectual history was to accuse them of being unable to read the originals properly, rather than to engage with the readings themselves. A similar paradigm governs the field of Chinese history with the brouhaha a couple years ago over Jim Hevia's book Cherishing Men from Afar with the criticism of the book (and of the book's critics) essentially emerging as a series of escalating accusations of failure to understand Chinese. (At a recent event at a nearby university, I had the pleasure of watching a number of folks who had been harsh critics of my advisors a couple decades ago basically admit that my advisors had won the argument about the value of "theory" to the field.)

As I contemplate my relationship to emergent digital humanities, I find myself haunted by the memory of my advisors, with the key difference being that, while unconventional, my advisors really were excellent readers of Japanese texts. What is the role of those who are not digital natives in the formation of digital humanities?

One other issue that my relationship to mobile media raises for me: cost and social class. I have a colleague who is very sensitive to issues that effect equal access to the university for students from poor and working class backgrounds. She has long resisted any assignments or class work that might require all students to use a computer because she insists that will penalize poor students. Many of us have argued back that anyone coming out of college these days must have training in the use of computers or else they will be at a severe disadvantage in the job market. And with the availability of computers all across the campus, in the library and many computer labs, students don't need to own a computer in order to get easy access to one. Admittedly, since these arguments were made in a day when we all had the university buy computers for us (that day is gone for the moment at UCSC; we are told that if our computers go bad, we'll have to replace them ourselves), so we may not have been so sensitive to the cost issue.

But if mobile devices really are the impending future of computing, does that mean that we really don't have a choice much longer, if we want to be responsible educators, about whether or not we incorporate mobile devices into our classrooms? Suddenly, I find myself very sensitive to the cost question. The university simply isn't going to buy me an iPhone, and even if it did, it wouldn't pay for my monthly data plan. So incorporating this into my classroom constitutes real expenditure of personal funds for my profession. Even if many (if not most) of the students have these devices, not all of them do and now the obstacles to access for those who don't have them appear very serious.

I'd be interested to read takes on the two main issues I raised here from any readers. Are possession of digital skills and devices for a digital humanist analogous to possession of linguistic skills to the traditional humanist, or does that analogy not actually work? And second, do mobile devices, at present, exacerbate the problem of the so-called digital divide, or are they on the cusp of minimizing them?

Becoming a Digital Humanist

Alex Reid, a professor in the English Dept. at the University of Buffalo, has a post up today that I found in a tweet from Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The post is called "Strategies to Develop the Digital Humanities" and it triggered one of my "non-native speaker" reactions. Reid may very well be effective in the way he approaches the question of developing digital humanities, but there is something that is missing here for me. It's like I don't speak his language. I walk away from reading the post feeling like I'm not quite part of the digital tribe. This isn't meant necessarily as a criticism of Reid. I'm just trying to articulate where the cogs miss.

Reid builds his argument on a formula from Gladwell (which Gladwell? not sure. Malcolm, maybe? I guess my ignorance is showing) that classifies technology users as "innovators, early adopters, early majority and late majority." Reid proposes that "one way of approaching supporting digital humanities is to identify faculty who are innovators and early adopters and support their efforts in these areas." These faculty, who he distinguishes from "print humanities faculty" have distinct needs: 1) more technology and 2) more money (since their work requires collaboration, which means hiring grad students and tech specialists, traveling to meetings and other management costs). Another way he proposes, sticking with the Gladwell formula, is to identify emerging practices among early adopters and support them in ways that would help those practices move from an early adopters phase to an early majority phase. He blocks that out in the following steps:

1. Identify a technology/tech practice poised to tip toward the early majority.
2. Recruit innovators and early adopters already using it for research/teaching.
3. Support and publicize their activities on the campus.
4. Make it easier for more early adopter types and early majority folks to get on board.

Here's what feels wrong about this: what drives this list, it seems to me, is technology trends not humanities developments. Put another way, the necessity comes from adopting the technology, not from wrestling with a problematic in humanities research or teaching.

Let me explain through autobiography. How did I get involved with technology in my work? It came from experiences in the classroom. An early epiphany came at the end of a lecture one day in my third quarter of teaching when I looked at the chalkboard before erasing it and thought, could I replicate the lecture based upon what remained on the board at the end of it all? Not at all. If anything, the board looked like a John Madden play diagram, words distributed randomly across the board, marked in circles and connected by arcing lines. I thought about how easily names like Yamagata Aritomo and slogans like Fukoku kyohei rolled off my tongue, but how hard they must be to hear for those unfamiliar with Japanese. I thought, as well, about how frustrating it was not being able to show the students the rich images that could help them inhabit my lectures in a portion of their imaginations. So I started using transparencies, burning through boxes of them, to help me show the students the order of my lectures, help them parse the Japanese words I used and give them some images on which they could hang my words. About a year into that I encountered PowerPoint (I can't remember how) and began the switch (I now use Keynote and won't go back to PowerPoint without a gun at my head). Almost immediately, I began playing with the way that PowerPoint allowed me to expand the materials I could ask the students to analyze. Images in class weren't just about imagination, but they were also about analytical opportunities. Later, I experimented with the possibilities of communication and engaging student engagement by playing with fonts, color schemes and design, subtly reinforcing transitions and contradictions and correlations in the classroom materials. But through all of this it wasn't the desire to adopt cutting edge technology that drove me. I would have been perfectly happy working in the most traditional ways if it worked well. But there were things I couldn't do that I discovered the technology was letting me do and it was those things that mattered.

A similar process was responsible for my transition to a guy who endlessly writes grant applications for a project to do things in digital media that are, frankly, still somewhat beyond my imagination. The key issue for me was trying to figure out how to viscerally bring to students the rich dimensions of discourses in other languages, languages they can't understand. As a person working in a non-Anglophone subject, I have never taken for granted the accessibility of information or the smoothness of communication. I presume that information may be very hard to get and very hard to understand once you get it. The first step to getting and understanding it, however, is even imagining that it is there and imagining that it has a scale. Digital media offer me excellent ways of cultivating this imagination and so digital media are of interest to me. Absent that rationale, I don't really think it would be worth the investment of time and energy to adopt the technology. Certainly, my colleagues who are reluctant to "go there" are reluctant to do so not because of Ludditism, but because they haven't seen the payoff. And there is little question that my success with Keynote in the classroom has had little impact on my colleagues (and why should it?).

I should wrap this up, but let me offer one more example of an occasion when I became even more motivated to explore this thing called "digital humanities." In a couple of formal talks and informal conversations over the last year or so, I have been introduced to the field of "software studies" by my colleagues Warren Sack and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Warren, as he so often does, has put it very succinctly: software studies is the proposition that software code can (and should) be read as a text. Put in other terms, the analytical methodologies and problematics of the humanities can be applied to the analysis of software code and thus transform our understanding of what code is (not merely instrumental, but revealing of many things, including world view, social analysis, historicity, etc.) while also making us think again about the textual analysis that is at the heart of most humanities practices. Now, I don't write or read code and the thought of learning how to do so strikes me as of a difficulty akin to learning Tibetan. I could do it, I suppose, but the investment of time would be ruinously expensive. But, again, as a guy working in Japanese (an impenetrable code to most of my colleagues) the principle was ridiculously easy to grasp. Why did this never occur to me before? I grew up in a household where my father spent a huge amount of time writing .... code, something that I could never understand. This was another epiphany that served as a spur to think more carefully about how the idea of digital humanities was meaningful and potentially transformative to me (and, incidentally, has made me start to rethink my father as a writer). And the motivation didn't come from a desire to be an early adopter of technology, but from an ability of a colleague to communicate the technological issue to me in terms of a humanities problematic that was very important to me. And for Warren, the intellectual drive behind this project isn't his experience with writing code. It is in the work of Wittgenstein and Derrida.

I don't think these concerns are entirely absent from Reid's list. The "recruitment of early adopters" and the "publicity" of their efforts may well take place by identifying the humanities problematics that the digital enhances or transforms. But I still find it interesting that his framing doesn't appear in his list. That it is still framed in a way in which the technology drives the transition rather than the other way around. My apologies to Reid if I've badly misread him, but I would like to see more explicit discussion of the humanities issues that drive the "digital humanities".  My gut and my experience suggest to me that that will be a more powerful way to expand the digital humanities than to begin with a presumption, such as he does at the end of his post, that we should identify the technological trend (mobile computing) and then find those doing that work and set them up as those who will lead us to the new era. Give us a reason to go there first.

Biopolitics and Computational Humanities

Conversations (real! live!) with friends have me back to thinking about the Yaeyama malaria project. Tom came in town and gave a good talk that dealt with biopolitics and memory. Warren and I took a walk and ended up talking about computational humanities. As usual, these friends make me see things differently. Let me see if I can bring the two strands together here.

The presentation I gave on the Yaeyama project a year ago was incomplete. What I did present needs a lot of polishing, but I wasn't able to finish writing everything I planned to write (and I wouldn't have had time to present the complete thing anyway). The unfinished portion was meant to be a comparative consideration of the different commemorative methods employed by survivors and Yaeyamans in general during the 60 years since the war. The primary focus was to be on how the money that the movement received from the government was used—to create a museum and a monument—and how that government money produced a different kind of materialization of memory than did the earlier efforts. I don't want to privilege one over the other. I think each has certain potent effects. But I did want to plumb some of the differences.

A pivotal comparison would be between the markers/monuments pictured to the left and below this paragraph. Here's the story: in the spring of 1945, the residents of Hateruma Island were told that, due to conditions in the war, they would have to leave their homes on Hateruma and relocate to a site in the forest on the SE coast of Iriomote. The principal of the elementary school on Hateruma, Shikina Nobumasa, protested the move, arguing that their designated place of relocation was a malarial death trap, but he was unable to resist the military command. During their evacuation to this site, Shikina labored to sustain some sense of normalcy for the community, to the point of continuing classes for the kids on a broad rock on the beach adjacent to the forest-covered evacuation site. As Shikina feared, the infection rate among his charges was horrific and many died. Shikina pleaded with the authorities to release the villagers from their exile as quickly as possible, and actually succeeded in arranging a return to their homes earlier than many other evacuees. Of course, once transmitted, the malaria continued to take its toll and the residents of Hateruma continued to die after their return. Years after the war was over, and after malaria had been eradicated from the archipelago, Shikina continued to bear the guilt and grief of a man who viewed himself as the shepherd of a decimated flock. One day, well after the war ended, Shikina left his home on Hateruma and took a boat across to Iriomote. He returned to his erstwhile classroom on that exposed rock on the beach, took out a hammer and chisel and carved the characters you see on the left. In classical Chinese: "The Rock That Doesn't Forget". In the katakana phonetic syllabary: "Hateruma" and "Shikina." And there these words remained, carved on an unseen rock on a rarely visited beach.

Eventually, of course, others, driven by similar impulses to Shikina's, returned to that beach and found his message. Years later, near the close of the century, when the movement demanding reparations closed down having acquired state funds for a museum and a monument (but none for individual reparations), Shikina's quiet carving formed the basis for a new monument. Right next to his rock (you can see it in the lower left corner of the photo, the above, state-financed, marker was erected. Topped with a bust of Principal Shikina, with a recreation of his hand-chiseled message, the new monument contains a list of those who died from malaria contracted near this site (the two plaques on the left side), an explanation of the inscription (upper right) and the poem from which the phrase "stone of non-forgetting" derives (lower right).

There are many ways of describing the differences between these two monuments, and I hope to cover most of them in the article. But the state-financed monument provides an opportunity to talk about Foucault's idea of biopolitics (see "Security, Territory, and Population"): the notion that the state identifies populations, often articulated at the level of the value of the individual, as the proper object of its policies. The state, as shepherd and, in a sense, proprietor, sees to the needs of its population/flock in the interest of seeing to the flock's happiness and its increase, an increase that can be tabulated as an increase in the resources available to the state for its own ends. Setting aside for the moment an interpretation of Shikina's terse lament, the state-financed monument reveals a concern for individuals aggregated also as a population, recognizing their deaths as "sacrifices". There is, in this monument, a kind of expression of state grief, an eruption of an instance in which the contradiction between the state's care of its population and its utilization of its resources becomes incommensurate.

This revelation helps us go back a bit and consider two competing discourses about malaria in the islands and what the wartime malaria deaths mean. When the movement for reparations began in the late 1980s, it quickly adopted a strategy that would align its narrative of victimization with a law passed in the early 1950s that would provide compensation to the families of those who died in the service of the state during the war. I suspect that among the several reasons that this strategy seemed to make sense at the time was the existence of prewar documentation by the state of the malaria problem in Yaeyama and of the efforts by the agents of the state to manage the problem. Those documents, dating back to the 1920s, are classic examples of the biopolitical perspective: they constitute the Yaeyamans as a population that was naturally susceptible to an environmental condition that could, potentially, be subjected to a rational and artifical (state-originated) policy that would naturally adjust conditions to the benefit of the population. For the movement, the prewar documents constituted evidence that the agents of the state were fully apprised of the likely consequences of their policy decisions and that acting with that knowledge, therefore, they had consciously made the local population sacrifice themselves for the state. In instrumental terms, this seemed like a good way to get the money. But the adoption of this narrative meant silencing other narratives based on other kinds of perspectives and values, especially the idea of the authorities responsibility for moral leadership (which, ironically, the reparations movement also called for, but through a biopolitical discourse).

I had started to think through the implications of Foucault's discussion of biopolitics when I had my conversation with Warren on computational humanities. He observed that a lot of what he's seen professed as "computational humanities" is essentially an attempt to process a large amount of data and determine some kind of median point. This struck him as wrong-headed. It is an approach to data that replicates a 20th century framework. To illustrate he found a chart in the book Kanashimi wo norikoete (my main source of testimonies that I mentioned in the earlier post), and asked me what it showed. I translated it as a table showing cases of malaria per hamlet from 1917 to 1921 (not the chart on the right, btw). We considered the flattening that the table achieved, even as it gave a sense of precision, a counting of individuals, through its accurate numbers. The tabulation of 710 cases of illness told us about a population, but nothing about the varying experiences of sickness, their different severities or shifting phases. They told us nothing about the effects in specific time on victims, families and communities, nor about the strategies of remediation adopted in the full range from hopefully "irrational" to hopelessly "rational." The table, focused on a population, produces a norm. He wondered how different the search for a median point in large scale computational humanities projects was from this state-sponsored production of normative data.

I outlined for him the thoughts on data mining I had explored in my earlier post. I mentioned how my initial thoughts had been to use data mining to test my intuitions about narrative trends across the testimonies, based on my prior readings. Warren proposed that what computational humanities should do is enable the kinds of close readings that humanities disciplines have excelled at. What that would mean is a kind of computation that produces not a representation of the norm but a vision of gaps, outliers, exceptions and contingencies. I told him about my mosquito question: namely, while the biopolitical discourse of the state, from the 1920s through the 1960s eradication, was fixated on the mosquito as the controllable vector, the testimonies from the 1990s, recalling the period 45 years earlier, seemed remarkably indifferent to the mosquito. I thought about summers I've spent in mosquito infested places and I viscerally remember being driven insane by the buzz of the damn things. And I was surprised that, contra my experience and inclination, the mosquito just wasn't an issue in the testimonies. I told him that I wanted to run numbers to see if my hunch were true (we are talking about 300 testimonies after all) and, if it were only partially true, see where the mosquito was a presence in the narrative and where it wasn't. Drawing on Warren's proposal for computational humanities, the computations would be run to reveal discursive irregularities as an entryway into deeper reading, rather than to reveal discursive regularities as a way of summing things up from an "all things being equal" perspective.

Warren rephrased this in a way that brought it back to a biopolitical perspective by asking what would a 21st century table of data look like if computational humanities was operating as a means of opening up the text to a close reading rather than as a way of bringing things to a conclusion. Corollary to that question, however, was the question of whether or not the computations would open things up any better than a direct reading approach. I don't think it necessarily would (neither does Warren), but then it very well might.

I still don't know if the computation/data mining will play a major role in the completion of this essay. But at the very least, paired with the question of biopolitics (about which there is much more to say, such as biopolitics as the foundation of generational discourses), I feel like I am forming a strong framework for digging into the troubled history of the Yaeyama wartime malaria issue.

The Humanities in Digital Humanities

One of the reasons I started this blog was because of my dissatisfaction with the discussions of "humanities" in writing about "digital humanities." It seemed that most of what I read or listened to dealt with the digital and merely assumed the humanities. This often left the question of the potential transformative effect of the digital on the humanities extremely vague and, therefore, it seemed to me, often led to presentations of digital humanities projects that were underwhelming in humanities terms (whatever those might be).

Let me put it this way, using computers to do data mining on a large body of texts (say, plays and poems attributed to some guy known as "Shakespeare") cross referenced to data mined from the collected works of a guy known as, say, Francis Bacon, to see if "Shakespeare" was really Bacon is to use computers to ask a question (on authorship) that work in Literary studies over the past 30 years has rendered uninteresting, if not irrelevant. In a way, it seemed, ironically, as if the in-roads digital technology and digitally-based methodologies were making into humanities research were in the most conservative kinds of humanistic research. On the other hand, it is still possible to do really cutting edge stuff in humanities terms on objects that are digital without necessarily "being digital" in the process.

This is a way of thinking again about Academhack's desire for a digital humanities that transforms the disciplines. I think that work is out there—I don't know more than a fraction of the stuff that is going on—but I'm not yet seeing discussion of the principles that would make for a transformative digital humanities and I feel like that is because the concept of the humanities is given insufficient attention. For example, until recently the main page of the Division of Humanities at my home institution used to define the humanities as "the study of what makes us human." In a post at HASTAC this morning, Cathy Davidson calls the question "what it means to be human" "the key humanities question." While I agree with much of what Davidson wrote in that post, I can't help but feel deeply dissatisfied with that way of defining the humanities. Can't we have something better than that?

One way to approach the question is through institutional organization. After all, a key force behind the asking of this question has to do with the survival, or at least an argument for the coninuing relevance, of Humanities in the university. Put in the pure defensiveness that I usually experience, why should the departments that are currently housed in a place called "the Humanities" at some (and only some) universities not be cut? Put in a way I would prefer, why should "the Humanities" be strengthened? Of course, when we approach things institutionally, we are immediately confronted with the contingencies of institutional organizations. Taking my university, what binds together the departments of History, Literature, Philosophy, Linguistics, Language Studies, Feminist Studies, American Studies, History of Consciousness, the Writing program and small minors like Classics, Jewish Studies, German Studies, Italian Studies and East Asian Studies? How does whatever bind these not also tie in departments in our Social Sciences Division, such as Anthropology, Psychology, Social Sciences, Politics,  Latino and Latin American Studies and Legal Studies, or such Arts Division departments as History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC, one of the great acronyms in academia), Theater Studies, Film and Digital Media, Music or Art (indeed, Arts used to be in the Humanities division at UCSC before these departments split off to form their own division)? Clearly these divisions are contingent and their separations are unstable. That is probably why I hear so much about the high value placed in our university on inter-disciplinarity, which I tend to view as bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense.

But, since we have those divisions and since the debate on survival takes place in those terms in the place where I live, what characterizes these divisions? The Social Science Division welcomes us on their introductory webpage to a place where "Our focus is on human relationships and society." Well, there's a punt; what about that word "science" in their name? Does this mean that the departments in the Humanities Division don't study either society or human relationships? The Arts Division claims that they "nurture the imagination and encourage inquiry." O-kay. The Humanities Division has dropped the "what it means to be human" formulation for something that is possibly more ambitious.

The humanities are the cornerstone of higher education. They underpin all the academic disciplines by shedding light on the underlying assumptions of social policy, technological development, economic planning, and public and private values. Study of the humanities provides students with historical perspective and cultural awareness, and with the ability to express themselves clearly and accurately, to evaluate critically both ideas and actions, and the courage to make choices on shared values and priorities.

 In other words, without us, bub, you don't have a university.

Just for a brief comparison with a place where the separation feels less contingent, what about our Division of Physical and Biological Sciences?  They state that they are "redefining our understanding of the world in which we live" and that they deal with "today's most challenging problems in human health, environment and advanced technology."

Let me see if I can restate the Divisional organization of the unity of knowledge (as in the "uni-versity") as our divisions express themselves. The Social Sciences here define themselves by their object of inquiry and skirt the issue of methodology. That object, "human relations and society" cannot possibly belong to them alone, so their definition of the necessity of their discrete existence in our university as currently configured is pretty weak. The Arts define themselves in terms of the characteristics they would like to cultivate in their students. A kind of definition via results? The Physical and Biological Sciences define themselves as solvers of particular kinds of problems, not entirely unlike the Social Sciences' definition via object of inquiry, but in this case the definition through object of inquiry is clearly instrumental: the object will be acted upon and transformed. The Humanities definition focuses on skills (another kind of results formulation) and a kind of thinking process (critical evaluation of underlying assumptions). Let me put these self-presentations into one word form: Arts=Imagination, Social Science=Society, Physical and Biological Sciences=World, Humanities=Epistemology.

Personally, I would prefer greater methodological clarity in these presentations. I don't object to references to generic or normative objects of inquiry, but given that there is likely to be a lot of object overlap, some sense of how the approach to that object will differ is important. I don't see why someone in any of the other divisions wouldn't be slightly pissed off by a Humanities claim to be the place where we think about what it means to be human (is the imagination not human? are relationships and society not human?) so I'm much happier with this definition. I don't see how Social Science's claims to study human relationships and society can meaningfully distinguish it from Humanities which also tends to deal with those objects. While "imagination" might be a reasonable distinction from the scientific approach to society, I can't see how it provides a meaningful distinction for the Arts from Humanities. Moreover, I don't know how the Arts "nurture imagination and encourage inquiry," nor do I understand how Social Sciences proposes to study human relationships and society in a way that differs from other places where those objects are also viably studied. In short, of the four divisions I've examined here, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the Humanities does, for me, the best job of talking about what it does for the production of knowledge in the university. But that doesn't necessarily mean it works well enough for me yet.

For me, I think that what distinguishes the Humanities, at least as practiced at UCSC, is primarily two things: it is the only place where language (especially texts) matters and it is the only place where place really matters.

In the social sciences on our campus, as far as I can see, there is little consistent interest in paying close attention to where a social phenomenon takes place (Anthropology being sort of an exception). Of course there are exceptions to this caricature, but the pursuit is after models of human relations and society that are universal. At least on our campus, there is very little evidence of programatic interest in any kind of area studies coming from the Social Sciences (which is interesting given the history of Title VI centers in the U.S.). Places in the world are interesting, but only temporarily and inconsistently so. Our Economics department is a classic case of this. A very large department, they have many people who are knowledgeable about Asian economies, but they have essentially only one class on Asian Economies (this is probably in part because I think our Economics department is indifferent to economic history). In the Humanities, the specificity of place is considered too important.

This importance of place derives from what I think is the core concern in the Humanities with language. And I think we have that concern because I think the primary mission of the Humanities is to think about how human beings create meaning, how they create understanding of the world. Epistemology, in short. That is not the same as what it means to be human. I think that language is the most important of the means for creating meaning. But meaning is also created over time, in temporal, historical processes. This "creation of meaning" is another way of saying "culture" and an understanding of how meaning is created is the foundation of critical evaluation. Since language is so important to culture, linguistic differences, mapped across the real space of the globe, can never be easily subordinated to a universalizing enterprise because it is in actual language, manifested in speech and text, organized in narratives, logics and rhetorics, accumulated over time in specific places that humans create meaning/culture.

This post has gone on too long, as is my pattern. It has perhaps gotten somewhat incoherent because I was trying to write it on a Sunday while playing with my sons, sentences written in snatches of free time. But it gets at some of my basic assumptions about what I'm trying to do in thinking about digital humanities. I'm sympathetic to Academhack's desire to redefine disciplinarity, but I'm also not willing to do so without a clear foundational account of what it is we're redefining.

For another post: consider the pros and cons of renaming the Humanities as the Human Sciences. Or perhaps scrap everything I think I believe.