Tuesday, September 24, 2013

TEI

After reading about The Text Encoding Initiative I get a better understanding of the origin of text encoding and how it is funded.  What interested me most, however, was more closely related to how text encoding is done and what is necessary when encoding text.  The boring parts of this chapter for me were when Cummings talked about why the TEI came into existence and what the guidelines were all about.  I think I'm starting to understand digital humanities a little better so the reason behind starting text encoding was already partly understood for me.
What did surprise me was that according to TEI guideline number 8, they still encourage funding agencies for support.  I guess it doesn't surprise me they encourage support, but what surprises me is that they need the support, but I guess that's what happens with non- profit organizations.  It's just that the TEI seems to be very helpful and I would think that many organizations involved in the humanities or literature would want to fund a program like this. I think that text encoding could be very cool and possibly a useful tool to have in the workforce.

Monday, September 16, 2013

DH Chapter Assignment


The chapter that I read was “Handholding, Remixing, and the Instant Replay: New Narratives in a Postnarrative World” by Carolyn Guertin.  First I would like to explain why I choose this chapter.  Unlike some of the other options for chapters we could read, I felt like I might connect with this one more.  Based on the title and my first impression of the chapter, I thought that it might have something to do with sports instant replay, music, or video games and I was right.  But how do these topics relate to The Digital Humanities?  Aren't they forms of entertainment that don't require much analytical thought? Maybe on the at first glance that's what they appear to be, but when you look at the technology and capabilities that surround these subjects, you soon discover that they are much more than that.

I'll start by talking about the instant replay.  In sports, instant replay allows fans, commentators, and officials to look back at a play and see how it happened or developed.  In this chapter instant replay doesn't mean watching if a football player's feet was in bounds during a catch, but instead it brings up the fact that "replaying" moments is a big part of the new kinds of narratives that are present in our digital culture.  With all the born digital narratives, it’s easy to follow links to other readings while interacting with one narrative and then returning to the text a second or third time.  After reading the text again or “replaying” it in your mind, it alters your understanding of the meaning of the text because it’s a different experience from the first time.

Music also plays a role in this chapter, but it’s not like I initially thought when I saw remixing.  Actually it’s less about music and more about sounds in general.  For example Juliet Davis’s work “Pieces of Herself” was a digital program that allowed the user to drag items from different rooms in a woman’s house onto her body, and the program would respond with a dialogue on topics like “consumerism, feminist politics, and other situated issues relevant to women’s lives and domestic space” (Guertin 235).  In the 70s, when the technologies came out to break music down into multiple tracks, it made easier the manipulation of threads.  In turn, these technologies made it easy to adjust the volume, delete tracks, or add new ones.  Depending on who was tinkering the music, they could make a much different sound from another listener.  It is this same concept that allows softwares such as “StorySpace” produce a novel that changed every time it was read.

Video games and interactive digital narratives were talked about most in the chapter.  There were several digital programs that allowed the viewer to experience something unlike anything they had ever experienced.  What sounds to be one of the most intricate games (if that's even what you call this) is called "Glide."  To understand Glide you must know that it is made up of several different worlds.  it has a digital game interface called the Collabyrinth, downloadable fonts, an interactive visual lexicon resembling a spiders web, and a print based novel called "The Maze Game" which explains the rules of the world and the language to us"(Guertin 239).  Yes that is a lot of information packed into one game. This world would mean nothing to someone who hadn't read the novel, and took the time to learn the ways of the game and connect to it.  Sort of similar to this is a game called "Spore" and in that game you also have another world at your finger tips, but in this one, you can shape it and control it.  In Spore, you create an organism and develop it through generations while helping it evolve in the process.  You must adapt to the climate and environment your in, and learn to be the hunter, not the hunted.  Both of these examples leave the door wide open for hours of exploring new territory for these types of games, and although I only gave two examples, there were a lot more worth reading about or experimenting with inside the chapter.

At the very end of the chapter the Nintendo Wii gets brought into the picture and throughout the chapter that was one of the devices that reminded me some of the things I was reading about.  Clearly this chapter could be another 10-20 pages long if it was up to date because some of the digital advances in technology that have been made are incredible.  The newest technology isn't the Wii remote anymore, now it's the xbox kinect, where your whole body doing the work in front of a sensor.  All of the newest digital media tools are at our fingertips with our ipods and ipads and iphones.  I believe that this topic will continue to be an exciting one for years to come.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

First Impression of Digital Humanities

After reading the three assigned articles from The New York Times 2010 Humanities series I now have a much better grasp on what I think digital humanities are.  They exist because of new technology and people who think efficiently and embrace new things.  The very first thing that I understand from digital humanities is that it is still a relatively new term.  These articles came out in 2010 and each one of them discussed a developing process that could have never happened several years ago, but is now happening through the use of digital technologies.
Another big thing that I have come to understand is that digital humanities have a wide variety of topics.  What I mean by that is in one of the articles it talked about scholars recreating landscapes while in another it talked about the public helping to transcribe papers written long ago.  There are underlying themes in both of these examples since both look to help explain history, and it shows that the digital humanities have a lot to offer.
As my Digital Humanities class continues, I will have a better grasp as to what I might expect in the future and hopefully now I will be even more prepared.