You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser.
How does the contemporary academic use digital media to form scholarly arguments about early modern English literature?
This question has served as my central struggle through all of my courses at the IML, but particularly this class, which has been so focused on the use of extant visuals. The most obvious method would be to focus on visual studies, interpreting frontispieces or paintings. There is clearly a value to this kind of work, but it’s not exactly my interest. My solution has generally been to avoid the early modern period altogether and focus instead on the theoretical texts that appeal to me and relate to my interests in early modern England. As noted in my Introduction, the aim of this project is to tie the theoretical together with the historical.
What I am taking away from this class is a sense of the digital humanities as a method for playing with experimental modes of argumentation. Some of these, like the photomontage, have a sustained history of scholarly justification. Some, like video-montage, have a relatively newer set of theoretical and practical defenses. In what follows, I want to take up a few of the issues that have arisen from my projects this semester and conclude with a suggestion of where my work in the digital humanities may be headed.
When faced with the task of creating a photo-montage with a political message, I turned to my theoretical hobby-horse: ecocriticism and object-oriented ontology. My first piece attempted to foreground the way that economic discourse forecloses the possibility of non-human agency. The second illustrated the process through which, as Bruno Latour argues, “the concern for the environment begins at the moment when there is no more environment, no zone of reality in which we could casually rid ourselves of the consequences of human political, industrial, and economic life” (p. 58).
By visually collapsing the distinction between the human political and the “natural” (with a nod to the problem of determining the value of a species by their cuteness factor), I was in part responding to Sontag’s point (2003) that the photograph is “like a quotation, or a maxim, or a proverb” (22). It’s important to note that Sontag avoids saying that the photograph is a quotation. In fact, she argues that despite the lure of viewing a photograph as an objective representation of reality, it is a subjective construction of reality. If the individual photograph serves as a maxim, a reduction of the complexity of reality to a set of quickly apprehendable coordinates, then the photo-montage seeks to break down that maxim and demonstrate its reductive quality. When John Berger (2003) analyzes Heartfield’s photo-montages, he highlights their Marxist methodologies, which is to say that the juxtaposition of images disorients the viewer, defamiliarizing the objects within the montage. He notes, “because these things have been shifted, because the natural continuities within which they normally exist have been broken, and because they have bow been arranged to transmit an unexpected message, we are made conscious of the arbitrariness of their continuous normal message” (Berger, p.221). I am not as confident as Berger is that the photo-montage writ large achieves such a significant ideological shift in the viewer (in part because there is a distinct lack of Marxists in today’s post-photo-montage world). However I do think that the photo-montage can be used for political ends, and certainly underscores the way that the maxim of the individual photograph can be undercut by revealing the tension between the objective and subjective.
And this subject/object negotiation lies at the heart of the theory that I find the most compelling. Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett are all playing with models of the world that shift the human out of the center of concern. Each does this in a slightly different way, using different but related key terms and concepts. In reflecting on my video remix project, The Philosophy of Things, I realize that it is less an introduction to their work, and more an imaginary conversation. The question that has been posed to me throughout the semester is one of audience. Who is the audience for these pieces? It seems to me that part of the rhetoric of new media is that the products should be widely accessible (not just technically but intellectually). The problem I’m running into is that English Departments tend to be methodologically conservative, leaving me in a bind. If all of my media work is geared toward a wide audience, it won’t be given the same weight as traditional publications, but if I make my work more rigorous, I lose a wider audience. So while my colleagues who are reading the same theory that I am respond positively to my remix, my colleagues in different fields seem to feel a bit lost. To be fair, the same could probably be said of the papers that I write, but the difference is that no one outside of my field would ever pick up one of those articles. The thing this course has really highlighted for me is the need to clearly identify my audience in advance, just as I would were I sending an article to a journal.
Returning, for a moment, to the issue of objective accounts of the world, I want to note that our discussions around the photograph’s paradoxical relationship to reality have been a particularly productive avenue of experimentation for me this semester. The time period I study, particularly the eighteenth century, tends to be an easy target for criticism of the Enlightenment as foundation of instrumentalized reason and reductive, positivist accounts of the world. Much of the criticism focuses on the way the period renders the subjective objective and the way this rendering subtends particularly nasty social structures. While I tend to acknowledge this with some push back, the objective area that interests me the most is time and its visual representation. The eighteenth century saw the invention of the timeline as a modern development; it is certainly a model of time that has stuck with us. When I first conceived of this current project, I considered locating my texts on a timeline. However, such visualization of time suggests both a progress of history and a constancy of perception that subjective experiences trouble. Through thinking about the way the photograph seems to present subjective experience as objective, I began thinking about the way timelines do the same for history. For my data visualization class, I then attempted to conceive of a way to represent texts and ideas in time that takes into account the gravity of certain ideas rather than assuming time is a constant container for discrete actions. The final prototype/prospectus is titled Entangled Time.
This current project is a slightly different iteration of my larger project to problematize chronology. Rather than present time as an organizing force in the work of these theorists, I present them intentionally jumbled. This is my first time using scalar, and my aim has been to add a degree of randomness, while maintaining an aesthetic control. To that end, I’ve removed the controls that would allow viewers to change the page view, but I have also consciously left out paths. It is an experiment in non-linear argumentation. If it is a failure, my hope is that it is a productive failure, one that functions as discovery rather than relying on predetermined conclusions. If there were one thing I would like to change about the initial visualization it would be to scale the nodes in size based on the number of thinks they contain. I think this would make for a more effective visualization and the beginning of an argument in its own right.
I came into this class with some technical knowledge and a desire to think through some of the theoretical problems with using media for the study of literature. I am leaving this course with greater sensitivity to the way that media is always subjective, even when it appears objective. Given my interest in decentering human subjectivity from the ethical domain, I want to study and represent/visualize the influence of philosophical materialism and the elevation of the object in literature during a period most scholars point to as the origination of contemporary socio-political structures. My work in this course has been some beginning stabs in this area.
Discussion of "Entangled Time"
Reflection
How does the contemporary academic use digital media to form scholarly arguments about early modern English literature?This question has served as my central struggle through all of my courses at the IML, but particularly this class, which has been so focused on the use of extant visuals. The most obvious method would be to focus on visual studies, interpreting frontispieces or paintings. There is clearly a value to this kind of work, but it’s not exactly my interest. My solution has generally been to avoid the early modern period altogether and focus instead on the theoretical texts that appeal to me and relate to my interests in early modern England. As noted in my Introduction, the aim of this project is to tie the theoretical together with the historical.
What I am taking away from this class is a sense of the digital humanities as a method for playing with experimental modes of argumentation. Some of these, like the photomontage, have a sustained history of scholarly justification. Some, like video-montage, have a relatively newer set of theoretical and practical defenses. In what follows, I want to take up a few of the issues that have arisen from my projects this semester and conclude with a suggestion of where my work in the digital humanities may be headed.
When faced with the task of creating a photo-montage with a political message, I turned to my theoretical hobby-horse: ecocriticism and object-oriented ontology. My first piece attempted to foreground the way that economic discourse forecloses the possibility of non-human agency. The second illustrated the process through which, as Bruno Latour argues, “the concern for the environment begins at the moment when there is no more environment, no zone of reality in which we could casually rid ourselves of the consequences of human political, industrial, and economic life” (p. 58).
By visually collapsing the distinction between the human political and the “natural” (with a nod to the problem of determining the value of a species by their cuteness factor), I was in part responding to Sontag’s point (2003) that the photograph is “like a quotation, or a maxim, or a proverb” (22). It’s important to note that Sontag avoids saying that the photograph is a quotation. In fact, she argues that despite the lure of viewing a photograph as an objective representation of reality, it is a subjective construction of reality. If the individual photograph serves as a maxim, a reduction of the complexity of reality to a set of quickly apprehendable coordinates, then the photo-montage seeks to break down that maxim and demonstrate its reductive quality. When John Berger (2003) analyzes Heartfield’s photo-montages, he highlights their Marxist methodologies, which is to say that the juxtaposition of images disorients the viewer, defamiliarizing the objects within the montage. He notes, “because these things have been shifted, because the natural continuities within which they normally exist have been broken, and because they have bow been arranged to transmit an unexpected message, we are made conscious of the arbitrariness of their continuous normal message” (Berger, p.221). I am not as confident as Berger is that the photo-montage writ large achieves such a significant ideological shift in the viewer (in part because there is a distinct lack of Marxists in today’s post-photo-montage world). However I do think that the photo-montage can be used for political ends, and certainly underscores the way that the maxim of the individual photograph can be undercut by revealing the tension between the objective and subjective.
And this subject/object negotiation lies at the heart of the theory that I find the most compelling. Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett are all playing with models of the world that shift the human out of the center of concern. Each does this in a slightly different way, using different but related key terms and concepts. In reflecting on my video remix project, The Philosophy of Things, I realize that it is less an introduction to their work, and more an imaginary conversation. The question that has been posed to me throughout the semester is one of audience. Who is the audience for these pieces? It seems to me that part of the rhetoric of new media is that the products should be widely accessible (not just technically but intellectually). The problem I’m running into is that English Departments tend to be methodologically conservative, leaving me in a bind. If all of my media work is geared toward a wide audience, it won’t be given the same weight as traditional publications, but if I make my work more rigorous, I lose a wider audience. So while my colleagues who are reading the same theory that I am respond positively to my remix, my colleagues in different fields seem to feel a bit lost. To be fair, the same could probably be said of the papers that I write, but the difference is that no one outside of my field would ever pick up one of those articles. The thing this course has really highlighted for me is the need to clearly identify my audience in advance, just as I would were I sending an article to a journal.
Returning, for a moment, to the issue of objective accounts of the world, I want to note that our discussions around the photograph’s paradoxical relationship to reality have been a particularly productive avenue of experimentation for me this semester. The time period I study, particularly the eighteenth century, tends to be an easy target for criticism of the Enlightenment as foundation of instrumentalized reason and reductive, positivist accounts of the world. Much of the criticism focuses on the way the period renders the subjective objective and the way this rendering subtends particularly nasty social structures. While I tend to acknowledge this with some push back, the objective area that interests me the most is time and its visual representation. The eighteenth century saw the invention of the timeline as a modern development; it is certainly a model of time that has stuck with us. When I first conceived of this current project, I considered locating my texts on a timeline. However, such visualization of time suggests both a progress of history and a constancy of perception that subjective experiences trouble. Through thinking about the way the photograph seems to present subjective experience as objective, I began thinking about the way timelines do the same for history. For my data visualization class, I then attempted to conceive of a way to represent texts and ideas in time that takes into account the gravity of certain ideas rather than assuming time is a constant container for discrete actions. The final prototype/prospectus is titled Entangled Time.
This current project is a slightly different iteration of my larger project to problematize chronology. Rather than present time as an organizing force in the work of these theorists, I present them intentionally jumbled. This is my first time using scalar, and my aim has been to add a degree of randomness, while maintaining an aesthetic control. To that end, I’ve removed the controls that would allow viewers to change the page view, but I have also consciously left out paths. It is an experiment in non-linear argumentation. If it is a failure, my hope is that it is a productive failure, one that functions as discovery rather than relying on predetermined conclusions. If there were one thing I would like to change about the initial visualization it would be to scale the nodes in size based on the number of thinks they contain. I think this would make for a more effective visualization and the beginning of an argument in its own right.
I came into this class with some technical knowledge and a desire to think through some of the theoretical problems with using media for the study of literature. I am leaving this course with greater sensitivity to the way that media is always subjective, even when it appears objective. Given my interest in decentering human subjectivity from the ethical domain, I want to study and represent/visualize the influence of philosophical materialism and the elevation of the object in literature during a period most scholars point to as the origination of contemporary socio-political structures. My work in this course has been some beginning stabs in this area.
Posted on 13 December 2013, 11:15 am by Ash Kramer | Permalink
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...