minotaurs and wolves
What if there are wolves and minotaurs?
A key issue I face in
my own research is not getting lost in the word-woods. I stray from the path a lot -- on purpose to see what’s pit there -- but I need a method charting what I do. It’s more like cartography sometimes, but how
do you draw an accurate map from eye level of the forest floor? How do I achieve that sought after syntopical
reading when I’m lost inside a text or cluster of texts? How do
I know what the next village is reading and saying? Being able to “zoom out” (or up) and see the lay
of the land lets me see the bones of the world.
The patterns become clearer, but I also know where I want to
rezoom. The advantage of big data is
that we can prospect, but when we identify a likely spot (based on pattern
recognition, perhaps), we still need to drill down, put our work under the
microscope. There’s so much more to say
when we look through the magnified lens.
Right? But, perhaps we do need
the lens turned the other way -- the
telescope can look outwards, but also back to earth, across oceans. The far seerer, the closer seer, the across
seer, we need them all. What the visualization
tools do is let us, not to be stunningly obvious, is see the connections and
shapes. A massive value is letting us
externalize the data we are juggling --
out of our heads – and onto a medium that lets us entertain a and b and
c … and so on simultaneously. There’s
no accident in the advice to sketch out or draw a problem in math. ( Or even in other course. This is a neat page for ideas and visual literacy. Have a hover over the elements. I’m currently flailing my way through a stats
course (it’s one of the language options in the English PhD program –along with
coding, boo-yah!) and the drawing of
problems instead of words (words, words, words) is shockingly (for a writer)
making it easier. (In fact, the math
and charts are what I get right. The
true or false language based concept problems are where I struggle.)
Let’s say data and texts are labyrinths a top
labyrinths. (You can call it a web, but
they’re sticky and have spiders. Sorry
intertubes. ) The ideas we try to read across them (synoptics) get fuzzy and dizzyingly tangled the more we
describe them. (I say this as a writer and reader who can get lost almost
instantly in a text based adventure, but does not get lost in visual mazes in
games). Gods and green monkeys, there’s up and down,
and the 4th dimension and parallel universes. Creating databases helps and recording work
in Refworks, Endnote, or Zotero eases it some, as does writing in Scrivener,
but how still to make connections? How
do we even remember? The murder boards
we see in all the cop shows show this “make a connection” visually in practice -- both the old school ones and the “wave your
hand” digital ones. I’ve wrestled with color codes, post-its,
multiple spreadsheets. Other writes make
dioramas and story scrapbooks to help with concepts (as opposed to narrative
story lines). I have another trouble
with my own GIGO storage methods, but trying to deal with others structures? Yikes.
Easier to study their structures than to use them.
I often imagine the labyrinth as really made of thread. What if I jiggle this line? What moves?
Where is it connected? What did
it cross and set up a vibration? What if
I unravel the structure and am left with a huge mess and snarl? What if thread is touching the minotaur and
he notices me? A labyrinth implies design
and structure -- one that’s intended to frustrate -- but
also to protect and guard. The visualization lets us stand atop the tower and
see the maze. (A modern day minotaur
would probably have a laser network, and gps.)
Of course I can’t remember the novel, but a few years
ago I read about a “blocked” academic who attended a conference with his
breakthrough “article” -- a woven color coded timeline tapestry of Ulysses. Meta and visual. As a digital humanities tyro at the time I was stunned that someone would
think of such a creative thing and while admiring the idea, assumed the novel
was satirical . Now I’m not so sure.
that gone with an image? Is the “thick”
description of sociology superceded? Or is visualized data new stuff to
analyze? Is it just a twist on visual rhetoric? I don’t think so -- I think the inclusion of data makes a
substantive difference. The manipulation
of meaning approaches a greater level of concreteness in visuals. We can more readily imagine how it’s shape
might change -- if we could touch
it. And, if we are the creator of the
visualization, we can change it. At the
most basic level we can put our data into Pivot Tables in Excel and add and
remove variables in whatever permutations we wish. But the visualization of data frees us not
just from words, but from numbers. Yes, knowing how, much, how big, how many is
dandy -- and super useful when
visualized (although places like FB
simply use Wordle to impute a false significance to occurrence rate) -- but what we are gaining is the connectivity
of the data.
Maps! Oh how
I love them. They’ve been the digital humanities since
before we were digital. (BTW, one of my
colleagues will wag his index finger at a board and say ‘this digit is the only
tech I need.’ Best joke!) Just look at
the packed info in these guys at one of my favorite blogs!
My own work focuses on manga, in particular on
on-line versions and scanlations, so the One Million Images article both elated
and depressed me. The budget
needed! Holy moly. How does one do this as a non-funded scholar? I’m often more focused on the language and
translation -- which with Japanese characters offers an
intriguing challenge -- as well as on
copyright / intellectual property and
fan culture issues. I’m also interested
in the appropriation issues involved in manga -- of culture --
and in yaoi of sexuality. A
method for mapping and visualizing countries of origin of readers and native
languages would be interesting. I’m
wondering how appropriation issues and digital humanities might work
together. It feels rich, but I need to
go deeper