The History Boy

This week’s readings and in-class discussion were probably the best that we have had in the past few weeks in that they attacked the issue of what the digital humanities are in a very specific way.  We started out with a tutorial on programming language which was extremely eye-opening.  We got the gist of creating a “static website” using html, and learned a bit about how to make the site more “dynamic.”  Beyond that, we jumped into the digital world.  The lesson helped; at least it did for me, to understand digital language in a practical way, and to understand the use of metadata for a site or a search, as well as how we can use the most basic programming language to physically see how the web page works and what goes into creating it.  Practical application is, I think, the only way for someone as thick as I am when it comes to the digital world, to understand the methods and methodology behind a DH project. 

So, Thank You, Adam.

The second half of the class we discussed the intro and first chapter of James Mussel’s The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age.  What made these reading so incredibly informative was their use of parallels as opposed to differences betwixt the physical, “analog” artifact (in this case, periodicals from 19^th-C Britain), and the digitized version(s) found at several different sites, including http://www.victoriandatabase.com/index.cfm  and http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Victorian-Popular-Culture.aspx which are repositories of SEVERAL digital versions of newspapers, periodicals, playbills, advertisements for diversions, etc.  Mussel asserts that the print material from the Victorian age are similar to contemporary digital productions in their use of new technology, their culture-shaping and culturally shaped position, as well as their proliferation.  Reproductions of 19^th-Century periodicals has, in times past, ignored their larger cultural position by privileging the text (that is, the “articles” and fiction common in these publications) over the items surrounding the text—miscellany, current events, weather forecasts, etc.  (Mussel 31).  This is a very anthropological and New Historical view of literary studies. 

The parallel referred to above derives from Mussel’s collapsing the two productions—periodicals and their digital versions—noting how the printed versions and the contemporary preservation via digitization, includes this miscellany, etc. so as to enable the contemporary scholar to understand a day in this life of a Victorian, and to understand some of the events and news, popular culture and popular stories that would have shaped the minds of writers of text  who have benefitted from the privilege afforded to them by editors of collections and scholars of the past.  The way I view it, the DH projects of today are concerning themselves with the cultural make up of texts we prize over simply fetishizing the author(s), and in so doing recognize the collaborative efforts of publishers, printers, editors, paper-makers, livery drivers, retailers, readers, AS WELL AS writers that culminate in the production of a finished text.  By highlighting this interrelationship in an historical fashion, Mussel made me see the purpose of a DH project by showing that it is a collaborative, interdisciplinary endeavor.  I do not think that this message would have hit me so forcefully had it not been paralleled with print history in a time that I, as a literary scholar, am familiar with. 

Simply put, by taking the digital out of the equation, I am better equipped to understand the concepts and add the digital in my own time, getting a grip on the subject before it is problematized by the DI, W3C, Metadata, XML, CMS, html, PHP, ETC.