This past week we looked into the NINES website (www.nines.org) in an attempt to see what the site
could do for our understanding of the Digital humanities as well as what it
could do for us in our own research. The
discussion was terrific, despite the fact that I was the one tasked with
leading it, but I am not sure if we were able to come to a consensus as to what
the site could do for us.
In my own private exploration of the site, I ignored the who
and the how, that is, who is responsible for the site and how does it run. I am not really all that interested in
knowing how my tools work, as Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell note,
because a “well-tuned instrument might be used to understand something, but
that doesn’t mean that you, as the user, understand how the tool works”
(80). How does knowing that the site was
developed by Jerome McGann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_McGann)
assist me in using it for my research?
So I jumped right into the site and tried to use it as intended—for research. I had just read Martin Delany’s Blake, so I decided to use this text as
the title/keyword for my search. The
results were varied. The first time I
attempted the search, what returned was:
No NINES objects fit your constraints. Remove Last Constraint.
So I did, and tried
the search again, but using only the title, the result of which was:
No NINES objects fit your constraints. Remove Last Constraint.
How could I remove
the last constrain? It was the ONLY
constraint! So I opted to start all over
again, only this time I would not try to start with the advanced search. I went to the home page and typed in the
title of the text into the generic search bar and after a few moments of
waiting (the search was obviously working as it was taking so long to load), I
was given a long list—over a hundred titles—of articles and reviews dealing
with the text or, more commonly, dealing with Martin Delany. The links took me to JSTOR and Project Muse,
but as I was not signed into these sites through my university’s library page,
all I was able to see was the citation and the first page of the article.
OK, thought I, NINES
can help me find things that I could find though JSTOR and Academic Search
Complete (and EBSCO hosted interface). How
does this help me seeing as I could have done this on my own, independent of
NINES? I concluded that, in this case, I
was not being helped.
Perhaps the issue
is due to the subject. OK, thought I, I
will change it to something a little more Victorian. Charles Dickens seems about right.
Search Reults (19,594)
This is FAR too
many results, so I added the constraint “Women”
Search Reults (2,369)
This is FAR too
many results, so I added the constraint “Insanity” and got back:
Search Query
Add new search criteria or select limiters to refine your search
No NINES objects fit
your constraints. Remove Last
Constraint.
Notice how the
platform reverted back to my Blake
search? In one click my search on this
gorgeous web site prompted me to think two things:
- 1 Nuts to this, I’m using EBSCO; and
- 2 What a pretty site. It’s a shame that I won’t ever be using it.
Johanna Drucker
notes the “persuasive and seductive rhetorical force of visualization performs
such a powerful reification of information that graphics such as Google Maps”—or
in this case, NINES, “are taken to be simply presentations of ‘what is’”
(86). If I am reading this correctly,
and I like to think that I am, she is asserting that the way a digital artifact
looks is more important to our (the user’s epistemology than the actual
information that the artifact presents.
I categorically reject this assertion on a scholarly level, but recognize
its truth on a visceral, consumer level.
Drucker is pointing out that a site like Google Maps, or NINES, trades
more on its aesthetics rather than its knowledge dissemination. I am guilty of falling for this marketing
trap; but I have realized, after having poked around on the site, that no
matter how the site looks, if it cannot get me to the information I am seeking
it is of no use to me as a scholar.
But what about what
the site is attempting to do, as a site itself—not the applications that I am
using it for? What about this
dimension? The artifact is here now, but
where are my results? Our class
conversation touched on this concept, and attempted to batten-down an answer
and only got so far as recognizing that:
“AJ wants the site to work better, and Brandon(http://www.pixelscholars.org/brandongalm) says ‘Just wait, it will be better’” .
Frankly, I am not
convinced that NINES will be better; but I am not really all that
pessimistic. If the technology of NINES
can do what the site purports it can, there are several scholarly applications
that can be derived from the site. Time
will tell, I suppose; but there is precious little time!
*Note: all
citations above come out of Debates in
the Digital Humanities, Ed. Matthew K. Gold (http://www.2shared.com/document/5HbhJuMi/Debates_in_the_Digital_Humanit.html)
No comments:
Post a Comment