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	<title>We think History</title>
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	<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org</link>
	<description>Collaborative Digital History</description>
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		<title>The economics of writing (and publishing)</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/1079</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/1079#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2013 10:58:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Theoretical Approaches]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Discourse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wethink.hypotheses.org/?p=1079</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns, Berlin 1988 Review for the Digital Humanities The art of acting, L&#8217;Invention du quotidien &#8211; Arts de faire, respectively, as the book is originally called, has long been an insider tip. Its author, a &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/1079">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns, Berlin 1988</strong></p>
<p><strong>Review for the <i>Digital Humanities</i></strong></p>
<p>The art of acting, <i>L&#8217;Invention du quotidien &#8211; Arts de faire,</i> respectively, as the book is originally called, has long been an insider tip. Its author, a french historian and Jesuit, working inter alia in the Americas, tried to translate back to Europe much of what anthropologists have written into the new world. He worked on a mystique that in part can be used for the legend of the <i>Digital Humanities</i>, too:</p>
<p>De Certeau describes the actions of people in everyday life as <i>poaching</i> &#8211; a view that fits well to the behavior of users in the network and that that has been described by Claude Lévi-Strauss as <em><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/320">bricolage</a></em>. Our practices correspond to what could be called creative consuming. For de Certeau it was important that everyday things should penetrate into the firmly established science. That way, he hoped to overcome the paradox of the authority of experts: That their knowledge would again become credible outside of universities. He used Pierre Bourdieu’s <em><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/468">theory of practice</a></em> and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ as &#8211; albeit fragile – witnesses: The real order of things, de Certeau says, following also <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/280">Foucault</a>, exists in the popular tactics to convert things to their own purpose. The result is an economy of giving, which undermines the constraints of institutionalized order. With such a reciprocity, a socio-political ethics would come back in the economic system, de Certeau thought extremely optimistic.</p>
<p>Writing history means to build one’s own text with excerpts from sources and pieces of other’s findings. Even though the subject of history is a scientific one, it’s knowledge resembles art, a practical insight and a form that goes beyond knowledge. This corresponds to the “workshop of the historian”, the famous image of Marc Bloch about the production of history. </p>
<p>In this context, writing, naturally, is an important element. It consists of three elements: First, there is the blank page, a field for the activity of the subject. It allows us to retreat, to take a distance to all other activities. Then, a text is designed in this field, the artifact of another world. A man-made world. This play of writing wants to act on the reality. So, the page is a place of passage: what has been recorded, is transformed into a product. Each discourse demonstrates the need to look for a place, from where we can talk. And a language to a field that needs to be opened up. The mastery of the language guarantees a power that expands into a whole territory, a nation. Writing and language help to produce a (territorial) order.</p>
<p>What can we learn from Michel de Certeau for the <i>Digital Humanities</i>? His investigations mainly build on the theory of the speech act. Thus, each expression requires a saying, an implementation of the linguistic system. It follows the introduction of an interlocutor, i.e. the constitution of a contract speech, and finally: the production of a present through the self that speaks. These theoretical steps can be well extended to a theory of the publication act – except for the two last steps. Here, speaking and writing differ from each other. Speaking produces a present, i.e. a <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/383">presence in the world</a>. Writing can’t do this, or when, then only delayed, when it is adopted after publication and realized in reading. The act of publication does not establish a contract with the other in any case, as the speaking act does. But then only, when the written is being read.</p>
<p>20 years ago, de Certeau said, that writing works completely systematically and automatically; that it transforms subjects into assistants of the typewriter and into a society of computer science. Would he be astonished about what we have establish in the meantime? We are able to leave the production of texts to writing machines – <i>content modeling</i> and <i>distant reading</i> are businesses in the <i>Digital Humanities</i> coming very soon. This will change the work of humanists heavily. To that, see my post about the MIT&#8217;s book to the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/854">Digital_Humanities</a>.</p>
<p><em>Post Scriptum:</em></p>
<p>What became clear reading de Certeau, irrespective of the <em>Digital Humanities</em>: He is a sharp thinker and close observer of the real life and its developments.</p>
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		<title>Do We still need History? And if so: Why?</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/988</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/988#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:51:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Theoretical Approaches]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Discourse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Reinhart Koselleck, Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte, Berlin 2010 A short cut and a remark for the Digital Humanities The historical sciences since quite a long time have been in crisis, Reinhart Koselleck, the famous German historian, writes in &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/988">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Reinhart Koselleck, Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte, Berlin 2010</strong></p>
<p><strong>A short cut and a remark for the Digital Humanities</strong></p>
<p>The historical sciences since quite a long time have been in crisis, Reinhart Koselleck, the famous German historian, writes in his essay “Wozu noch Geschichte?”. He asks about the theoretical possibilities of history – questions that can be used also for the <em>Digital Humanities</em>.</p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2013/01/Bild-Reinhart-Koselleck.jpg" alt="" width="339" height="240" />Historical science is not tied to a particular object, it exists only in its method: history itself is its area of research. It began in the modern era, when an event and its story grew together. History became a category of awareness, a “knowledge of itself” (Droysen). History as a plural form of individual stories referred to the modern experience of accelerated change, to the open future. Since the <em>French Revolution</em>, history is a meta historical concept, a melting pot of numerous ideologies, ultimately: an empty formula.</p>
<p>The historical analysis of the term “history” shows what historical science could accomplish still today:  (1) The work on the individual case, the historical method, provides the test, whether a general set of questions can be kept; (2) The work on temporal depth leads us beyond our own horizon of experience, giving a distortion, which contributes to knowledge; (3) The work on the social and temporal condition of statements leads to a critique of ideology, but not, (4) to instructions for action: History does not repeat itself.</p>
<p>Its antinomy presents special challenges to the dealing with history. We need a theory about the past, its present and its future, a theory about the game of possibilities, a theory of historical time and its structure. Temporal structures divide the historical space of experience as its own research area. Terms such as “acceleration”, “progress” or precisely “history” can be analyzed in it and can so giving back meaning to the historical sciences.</p>
<p align="center">x x x</p>
<p>Reading Koselleck, his essay of 1971, we meet again the dissolution of history in favor of stories, the end of the <em>telos</em>. But he does not give up history. He counts on a theory of temporal structures and on ideas from the social sciences. Koselleck thinks a history, through which we discover new stories, absolutely necessary. Work on the individual case and to the temporal depth gives us a space in which historical knowledge is possible. Koselleck would encourage us to operate <em>Digital History</em>. For him, it would be an accurate form of confrontation with the essence of “acceleration”. But he would urge us to do this in a critical way, not to succumb to the myths of technology. The distance, the alienation as a prerequisite for the analysis of <em>Digital History</em> must first be created. The discipline is still too young to be self-reflexive. First, it must become sure of itself.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>If you still wonder why it should be useful to read a text from the seventies for the <em>Digital Humanities</em>, I kindly ask you to check the two following post: <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/383">The question of presence in the Digital Humanities</a> about Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. In his critical cultural approach he used the concept of time developped by Reinhart Koselleck. And if you are interested in the concepts of history, please check my post about <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/894">Niklas Luhmann and his system analytic concept of time</a>.</p>
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		<title>“Sowohl-als-Auch”: Hybridity, a cultural and scientific model for the future</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/926</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/926#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jan 2013 11:20:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Digital Networking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lectures / Readings]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theoretical Approaches]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Decentration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Discourse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hybridity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Time]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Yvonne Spielmann, Hybridkultur, Berlin 2010 A brief summary and a few theories for the Digital Humanities Hybrid culture correlates and fuses elements from different media, cultural contexts and discourses. The decisive factor here: Networks change the direction and speed of &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/926">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Yvonne Spielmann, Hybridkultur, Berlin 2010</strong></p>
<p><strong>A brief summary and a few theories for the <em>Digital Humanities</em></strong></p>
<p>Hybrid culture correlates and fuses elements from different media, cultural contexts and discourses. The decisive factor here: Networks change the direction and speed of communication and information. They allow the creation of a public sphere simultaneously anywhere (to that, see my posts about the question of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421">place</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/383">time</a> in the <em>Digital Humanities</em>). What criteria should be used to identify and evaluate the medial construction of reality in its constant variability?</p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2013/01/Bild-Spielmann-Hybridkultur.jpg" alt="" width="265" height="353" />The pluralization of cultural practices becomes even more complex because inconsistent or even contradictory processes are linked. This mixing, this hybrid fusion of real and virtual elements creates new artificial worlds in <em>cyberspace</em>. Such <em>human-machine-interactions</em> require an extended critique of knowledge (see my remarks on the book of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/784">Mercedes Bunz</a> to that).</p>
<p>Of particular interest in this mixture is the fact that the alien is not culturally adapted (anymore), but that its being different is emphasized. The culture is a hybrid field of plural possibilities, complex overlays. This contrasts with the computer technology with its trend towards ever closer standards and its trend to keep repeating the same mechanically: “In the real world, it is impossible to make the same object. But in the data space, it is easy. Just make a copy and it&#8217;s totally the same”, the Japanese artist <a href="http://www.fujihata.jp/">Masaki Fujihata</a> says.</p>
<p>At the interfaces of virtual and interactive applications, network-like states of co-authorship are something new. They are hybrid, because they circulate <em>non-linear</em>, because they have no beginning and no end and because they cross hierarchies (to that, see my posts about <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/170">Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht</a>). The multiplication of personal profiles in the Internet communication is an example for the manifestation of inconsistency as a feature of hybrid cultures. Intermediate areas are created where different influences coexist and the confrontation with difference and diversity is reflected. There are opportunities for the dissolution of dominant, solidified cultural forms. Hybridity thus leads to the displacement and liquefaction of borders, the modulation of productive differences towards pluralism and ambiguity. </p>
<p>Globalization creates a situation in which the dominated cultural context can be detached by diversity. Stuart Hall wants to replace the Western strategy with a productive difference and alignment of production and consumption. There will be no leading media anymore, but a network of information that is evaluated by the recipient. Thus, the (Western) author model is leveled in favor of mixed forms of communal creativity. Hybridity is essentially a relationship of ambivalence, then. </p>
<p>The analysis of hybrid cultures must be concentrated on the location from where it is led. The global networking requires a localization of discussion and experience. Categories of self and others are to be called into question. The absence of knowledge <em>on</em> the foreign will serve as a prerequisite for a dialogue <em>with</em> the stranger. This dialogue model recognizes hybridity as a cultural model of the present and, one must add, to the future. In the <em>Cultural Studies</em> one speaks of <em>in-between-zones</em>. <a href="http://nestorgarciacanclini.net/">Nestor Garcia Canclini</a> explains hybridization using three processes: “The mixing of collections that used to organize cultural systems, the deterritorialization of symbolic processes, and the expansion of impure genres”. </p>
<p>Hybridization, the mixing of media and cultural practices, establishes a global mass culture, which acts through ethnic and structural differences. To understand these processes, the networks must be analyzed that reshape production, distribution and communication on a global scale. Nation states erode, public issues are shifted to the private. Central authorities and responsibilities disintegrate. Decentralization abolishes periphery ( about that, please see my posts to <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/280">Michel Foucault</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/196">Jacques Derrida</a>). A discursive bridge between a media-critical structural analysis and identity-critical approaches to cultural studies should help to come to terms with this. The bridge leads from the place where the concept of a culture is reflected to specific locations with their production and thought horizons (and back again). </p>
<p>Positive hybridization is thus the difference and its placement in a <em>Sowohl-als-Auch</em>. It creates temporary global forums and is becoming the difference-technology for intermediality. Here, technical and aesthetic phenomena are closely related (see my remarks on the interesting book of the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/854">Massachusetts Institute of Technology</a> to that). Thus, cultural contacts are located in a <em>third space</em> outside time. The result is an extra-territorial, hybrid place for creativity.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x </p>
<p>So far, a short summary of some statements of <a href="http://www.yvonne-spielmann.com/">Yvonne Spielmann</a>, <em>Dean of Faculty of Fine Arts</em> in Singapore, in her book, which are of importance for the <em>Digital Humanities</em>. So, what role plays hybridity essentialy in the humanities? Here, three theses to this: </p>
<ul>
<li>Networks allow the production of a public sphere simultaneously in every place. The result is an extra-territorial, hybrid place for works in the humanities.</li>
<li>Hybridity correlates elements from different scientific and cultural contexts and discourses. The blurring of practices deconstructs existing science cultures. Does this mean that a new global science culture is going to be established? This is not quite clear and has to be examined.</li>
<li>The past is renewed, liquefied in a contingent space <em>in-between</em> that controls the appearance of the presence. This creates an ambiguity between past and present (please see my post on <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/894">Niklas Luhmann</a> and his system-analytic concept of time to this). This extension of the present is the real challenge for the future historiography (see my review to the book of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/383">Unsere breite Gegenwart</a>, to that). It seems that we have a totally open situation, here.</li>
</ul>
<p>It is, of course, to work on these theories. Here, just a first, very preliminary conclusion: If you follow Yvonne Spielmann – and others –, hybridity permeates culture, art and science globaly, thus, creating a new world scale.</p>
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		<title>How do we get rid of History?</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/894</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/894#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Dec 2012 11:56:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Theoretical Approaches]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Time]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Niklas Luhmann, „Weltzeit und Systemgeschichte, Über Beziehungen zwischen Zeithorizonten und Strukturen gesellschaftlicher Systeme“, in: Soziologische Aufklärung 2. Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft, Opladen 1975 Review and Update for the Digital Humanities In a global world of information the presence expands &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/894">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Niklas Luhmann, „Weltzeit und Systemgeschichte, Über Beziehungen zwischen Zeithorizonten und Strukturen gesellschaftlicher Systeme“, in: <em>Soziologische Aufklärung 2. Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft</em>, Opladen 1975</strong></p>
<p><strong>Review and Update for the <em>Digital Humanities</em></strong></p>
<p>In a global world of information the presence expands at the expense of the past, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht write in his book <em><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/383">Unsere breite Gegenwart</a></em>. And what about the future? What is the impact of technological change and the constant availability of information on shaping of the future? The question of present future horizons is particularly important for the Humanities. The authors of a book from the <em><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/854">Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)</a></em> predict the breakup of the Humanities in a rapidly growing area approaching the quantitative social sciences and a rapidly diminishing area that defends the traditional heuristic and interpretive appeal vehemently. The time in form of change presses against the historiography once again &#8211; and this time not too soft!</p>
<p style="text-align: left"><img class="alignleft" alt="" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/12/Bild-Luhmann.jpg" width="414" height="199" />How time emerges in history? What role does it play in the conditions for the production of history? There is probably no better author to answer these questions, as Niklaus Luhmann. According to him social history is concerned with the knowledge of past social structures and processes. It is based on sociology, which also asks about the social conditions for the constitution of time and history. In proportion as it involves the problem of meaning, temporality is a fundamental dimension of its investigation. The awareness of time depends on the social structure in social systems. This makes time and time horizons meaningfully available.</p>
<p>Talcott Parsons has shown that temporality arises from the distinction between a system and its environment. It cannot all happen at once. We detect temporal arrangements that are based on the identity of a system in the succession of different states. The sense of history is the difference between the possible and the real. Historical events are relevant not as pure facts, but in the option of their selection. History is created as a selection of possible horizons. And memory is the reproduction of the selectivity of events. The system creates its own history and thus, as a difference, the history of its environment.</p>
<p>A system history experienced together is a prerequisite for communication in groups and organizations. If the memories differ too much, experience cannot be mediated. This causes blockages, so that past selections cannot be continued, but must be repeated or thwarted. History in complex societies is contingent, remembering and forgetting is possible side by side. A time series coordinates between the system and the events in its environment. This linear timeline allows the complete separation of past and future as independent time horizons. The linking of the past with the future is becoming contingent. The scientific study of history deals with the past present times and so dissociates the system of its own history. The historicization of time provides access to a distinct sequence of possible horizons.</p>
<p>How do we get rid of history? How can we relieve the presence of what it created?</p>
<p>In heavily documented societies there are mechanisms in order to distance oneself from history. One such mechanism is technology: it makes symbols that are free of contexts and allow thus that selective processes can take place in a complex social system, without subjectivity and historicity must be carried out with. This can be shown by the example of organizations: They are based on abstract positions for roles where assignments can be changed independently of specific biographies, people or tasks.</p>
<p>Technological transformation is currently changing the framework of historiography massively. <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/43">Kiran Klaus Patel</a> have discussed this, for instance. What does it mean for the writing of history when documents are available at all times and are handled more and more by computers? When selective processes occur without that subjectivity and historicity must be carried out with? When information on events is communicated anytime, anywhere, in real time? When this communication is done directly from the producer to the user, without passing an intermediary? When it is available virtually at any time, regardless of time and place – is history still needed at all, then?</p>
<p>Yes, many scientists believe. The <em><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/71">Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences</a></em> has recently published a <a href="http://www.sagw.ch/de/sagw/oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/publikationen/publis-schwerpunkte/publis-wiss-tech.html">Position Paper</a> for a renewal of the Humanities. The situation is presenting itself contradictory, the SAHSS writes. The Humanities teach skills for coping with the problems of a culturally heterogeneous society in a globalized world. And the social interest for orientation knowledge that helps to form identities involves a core competence of the Humanities. But these are not capable to meet the demand (enough). Especially the politics put in question the value of the Humanities, when it comes to the distribution of (scarce) resources. High time then to examine how the Humanities are to respond to the criticism and the new situation. The SAHSS fearlessly makes recommendations for the design of teaching, academic structure and to improve quality and performance measurement.</p>
<p>The <em><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/854">Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)</a></em><em> </em>is a little more skeptical. It fears a division of the Humanities due to digitization and the pace of technological change: The ability of computers to work with large data sets will lead to a “bifurcation within the <em>Digital Humanities</em>”. Beyond the traditional humanistic interpretation, the protagonists of data analysis will undertake tasks that come close with the quantitative social sciences. They will examine questions that are rejected by humanists who consider such quantitative methods naive and their results as trivial. What is at stake is the Humanities’ “unique commitment to wrestle with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity, to attend to nonstandard phenomena”, the authors of the interesting MIT book <em>Digital_Humanities</em> say.</p>
<p>But it is far from certain that it has to come like this: With the ever wider access to cultural data sets, the separation may well grow, but with more and more platforms that combine qualitative and quantitative methods, there could also be generated a synthesis of both. We just do not know yet. Perhaps the growing demand for orientation saves the Humanities as a socially relevant scientific discipline. Time will show.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">x x x</p>
<p><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/988">Do We still need History? And if so: Why?</a> Please check my  post to Reinhart Koselleck to get an answer.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Digital_Humanities: THE Book!</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/854</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/854#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:49:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Best Practice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Knowledge]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanites, Cambridge 2012 A short cut and some remarks “Two decades ago, working with digital documents was the exception. Today it is the norm” – Anne Burdick and her &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/854">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp, <em>Digital_Humanites</em>, Cambridge 2012</strong></p>
<p><strong>A short cut and some remarks</strong></p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/11/Bild-Digital-Humanites-MIT.jpg" alt="" width="277" height="374" />“Two decades ago, working with digital documents was the exception. Today it is the norm” – Anne Burdick and her co-authors write; and: “If the humanities are to thrive and not just exist in niches of privilege, they will have to visibly demonstrate the contributions to knowledge and society they are making in the digital era”. This extremely interesting book from the MIT studies emerging methods and genres, cases as <em>Geographical Information Systems (GIS)</em>, new textual corpuses and virtual reconstructions, deals with “the social life of the <em>Digital Humanities”, </em>confronts us with some “provocations” and ends with a short practical guide to the emerging <em>Digital Humanities</em>.</p>
<p>This book will change some basic guidelines for the perception of the production of contemporary and future knowledge, so it seems. Convincingly, the authors argue that the <em>Digital Humanities</em> will “revitalize the liberal arts tradition” in “the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century”. And the book offers some familiar and some new tools to cope with this. But the most interesting part of the book are it’s <strong>“provocations”</strong>. Let’s deal with some of them:</p>
<p>Much has already been done for building digital repositories and establishing conventions for access, presentation and publication. But the migration from analog to digital and advanced Web technologies will create further possibilities as well as new constraints, the authors say. <em>Digital Humanities</em> require an <strong>experimentally thinking</strong> and a work across the digital or analog divide, respectively. Even digital natives recognize now, after some years of digital experiences, the difference between a manuscript held in one’s hands and one viewed on the screen &#8211; please see my review to the book of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale</a> to that issue. And: The routines that structure the new practice in the <em>Humanities</em> have the potential to become just as automatic as those of the print era, and when they do, they could bring the <em>Digital Humanities</em> to a quick end, the authors say, somewhat surprisingly. So, what should be different, then?</p>
<p>Innovative forms of public engagement, new publishing models and other ways of structuring work, they say. It should be a new way to produce knowledge with <strong>new skill-sets</strong> as design, programming, statistical analysis, data visualization, and data-mining. To make a difference means to show that interpretation is rethought with computational methods and that this methods are rethought with humanistic modes of knowing. Humanists should create their own programming languages and computational work should not remain exclusively quantitative. Techniques like interpretive mapping and subjective visualizations can alter our experience and analysis of the digital field and analog culture.</p>
<p>Tools are not just tools, the authors say. They are <strong>cognitive interfaces</strong> that adopt forms of discipline and organization. They produce and transmit knowledge and model worlds. An “indigenous humanities digital toolkit” must more than just meet the needs of the common digital world. Trust in computers’ capacities for aggregation, synthesis and even selectivity is sure to grow over the coming years. We will probably deal with machine’s analyses and summaries of texts. Will the computer be an “extension of our own cognitive capacities”, the authors even ask.</p>
<p>In <strong>historical sciences</strong>, for instance, the machine may provide conceptual frames and filters that provide access to, process and shape historical records. Analysis of materials concerning the relative significance of human history could generate political, economic or geological filters, for instance. Each framework would then create a different corpuses with different levels of aggregation on which the synthesis will be compiled.</p>
<p>The ways of <strong>production of knowledge</strong> will change fundamentally, that is for sure – familiar key words here are <em>working in networks</em> and <em>collective activity</em>; please see my separate posts about the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421">Place in the Digital Humanities</a>, <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/468">A Short Outline of a Theory of Practice</a>, <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/121">Opening up Workshops of Historians</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/24">Charles Leadbeater</a> to that issue. The authors of the book to review think that the humanities community should be “excited by the design of projects” to address the new questions in this field: “Phrases like <em>distant reading</em>, <em>content modeling</em> or <em>knowledge representation</em> will become just as familiar” as the term <em>social media</em>, for instance, they say.</p>
<p>The ability of computers to work with large data sets will lead to a <strong>“bifurcation within the <em>Digital Humanities</em>”</strong>: Beyond the traditional humanistic interpretation, the protagonists of data analysis will undertake tasks that come close with the quantitative social sciences. They will examine the dissemination of cultural patterns, for instance, or other questions that are rejected by humanists who consider such quantitative methods naive and their results trivial &#8211; see the <a href="http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=event%2C+structure&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=8&amp;smoothing=1">Google Ngram Viewer</a> as one example for that. What is at stake, according to the authors, is the humanities’ “unique commitment to wrestle with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity, to attend to nonstandard phenomena”. With the ever wider access to cultural data sets, the separation may well expand, but with more and more platforms that combine qualitative and quantitative methods, there could also grow a synthesis of both. We do not know yet.</p>
<p><strong>Authorship and texts</strong> in <em>Digital Humanities</em> are more and more trending toward fluid, iterative and distributive models &#8211; please see my review to the arguments of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale</a> to that issue. Writing is increasingly understood as a collaborative process, with individuals creating text elements within the setting of a group that merges their identities into a corporate subject (the laboratory, the research team etc.). Analytical tools will extract the fingerprints of intellectual property and algorithmic criticism will soon become widespread practices. Our notion of the document will shift accordingly. As the additive product of multiple interventions by different authors, the text will be reshaped within its boundaries as a discursive object – please see my posts on <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/280">Michel Foucault</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/196">Jacques Derrida</a> to that issue. According to the authors, in future, authority may be conceived less in terms of credential platforms such as universities than in terms of public performance, so that an expert in history, for instance, would take a place beside other storytellers.</p>
<p>It is important to build the <strong>digital infrastructure</strong> and to find answers to respective questions now: should network environments be established by private firms or public institutions? Will cultural commons be made available to the citizens of the world or will distinct cultures emerge with their own rules and practices for use and access? <strong>Cultural commons</strong> offer the prospect of revitalize the humanities in contemporary public life. And they “may well cast digital humanists in innovative public roles”, building bridges between professionals and amateurs as <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/24">Charles Leadbeater</a> suggests. But the realization of such an inclusive vision encounters many obstacles as copyright restrictions, for instance. The authors think that (digital) humanists will have “to storm the barricades for the causes of open access, copyright reform, and the global cultural commons”: “The future of the humanities depend upon the successful creation of public spaces of knowledge production and knowledge exchange”, they say.</p>
<p>So, more and more, purely “professional” questions are accompanied by others that relate to the involvement of non-science partners. Many challenging issues lie before <strong>best practices of </strong><em><strong>Digital Humanities</strong>:</em> There is, above all, an urgent need for a critical language to describe projects and for standards for evaluating the architecture and other features of platforms. The prevailing culture of the <em>Digital Humanities</em> will become entrepreneurial, much like engineering. Careers will be built around answers to questions like: What are interesting opportunities? What is fundable? Which lab is doing the most exciting work? The digital humanist’s sense of identity will be less anchored in a discipline than in a sense of belonging to a community of practice, where tools and methods are primary to objects of study, the authors strongly believe.</p>
<p>According to the book, <strong>knowledge design</strong> becomes very important. Design means shaping knowledge. Developing an understanding of technical components will therefore be essential and projects without high design standards are unlikely to achieve enduring results, the authors believe. Humanists still have much to learn about design and production of networked repositories and new media environments. Practice and theory must be exchanged, authorship and display converge in a way that arguments become visible, both graphically and spatially. Relations among visible entities have to become tractable.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>So far, the short cut of this extremely interesting book. It will change some <strong>basic guidelines</strong> for the production of  contemporary and future knowledge in the Humanities. The authors see one wing of the <em>Digital Humanities</em> “embracing quantitative methods”, the other wing insisting upon its roots in qualitative analysis. The quantitative wing will be integrated into the social sciences, the other “defends its autonomy and critical stance”, they believe. This corresponds with the view in Europe, where some scholars fear the unfriendly takeover of a reductive, non-objective thinking, in the Humanities, and other welcome the <em>Digital Humanities</em> either as a support towards human sciences, or even as the spearhead of a full transformation of the Humanities – please see my separate post to the <a href="http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/">Hamburg Conference 2012</a> on this.</p>
<p>The authors support the view that concepts of <strong>authorship, document and provenance</strong> are becoming fluid, as already mentioned above. This will also reshape the notion of the scholar, as many agree. But they probably underestimate the resistance of experts that gain their identity from <em>their</em> genuine professional work, and do not want their vocation and profile to be imposed by the computer technology. Another vision that has to be relativized is the rise of <strong>global digital commons</strong>. It is true that cultural goods will virtual be accessible more and more in the Internet. But culturally, societies and countries will rather develop counter movements to the globalization and virtualization of the world (please see my post on <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/926">Yvonne Spielmann&#8217;s</a> book about hybrid culture to this). The significance of culture and the establishment of identity will therefore rather be regional in the years to come, a developement to study intensively in the human and social sciences.</p>
<p>It seems that the books exaggerates the <strong>importance of design</strong> in the <em>Digital Humanities</em>, too: “Design emerges as the new foundation for the conceptualization and production of knowledge”, the authors say. Form is important, no doubt, but it should still follow function. The interaction between content and form determines whether a project or product will succeed, and not design itself. But I agree with the main message of the book: humanities that count will have to demonstrate the contributions to knowledge and society they are making in the digital era.</p>
<p>Anyway: If colleagues want to know what the <em>Digital Humanities</em> are, I will recommend them to read <em>this</em> book. It is extremely well informed and written and shows what new forms of knowledge production and diffusion we will encounter in the next future. It is a collection of the relevant elements in digital thinking in the <em>Humanities</em>, sort of a declaration for a new scientific practice. An important book!</p>
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		<title>Silent Revolution: The Algorithms and Hyper-modern Knowledge</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/784</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/784#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:32:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Digital Knowledge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Documents]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hybridity]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Mercedes Bunz, Die stille Revolution, Wie Algorithmen Wissen, Arbeit, Öffentlichkeit und Politik verändern, ohne dabei viel Lärm zu machen, Berlin 2012 A short cut and some remarks Mercedes Bunz, former chief editor of Tagesspiegel online, believes that the digital revolution &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/784">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Mercedes Bunz, Die stille Revolution, Wie Algorithmen Wissen, Arbeit, Öffentlichkeit und Politik verändern, ohne dabei viel Lärm zu machen, Berlin 2012</strong></p>
<p><strong>A short cut and some remarks</strong></p>
<p>Mercedes Bunz, former chief editor of <em>Tagesspiegel online</em>, believes that the digital revolution could have “dramatic consequences” – dramatic as those of the industrial revolution in the 19th Century. In the information society, according to her thesis, algorithms change the professional lives of the middle class today, as the machines changed the lives of workers that time. This “silent revolution” is accentuated through the creation of a new, naturally digital organized, public. Here&#8217;s a <em>short cut</em>, and some comments on the general argumentation of Mercedes Bunz.</p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/11/Bild-Bunz-Stille-Revolution.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="327" />She argues that, without us even realizing it, digital innovation change the world fundamentally. This seems particularly to be true for the increasingly wide use of algorithms: <em><a href="http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=event%2C+structure&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=8&amp;smoothing=1">Google</a></em>, for example, has started as a project at an US university and, a short time after, has changed, quietly, the “course of events” in our (media) world. Bunz compares this with the invention of the “spinning jenny” in England, the symbol of a wave of innovation and production pressure that unleashed the industrial revolution unspectacularly. As counterpart for the digital revolution, the author sees <em>Stats Monkey</em>,  a tool that students programmed for the automatic texting of sport reports for local newspapers. The aim of this small project was to produce more and cheap content for local media, which lost in the process of digitalization readers to the net.</p>
<p><em>Stats Monkey</em> captured and processed information independently, automatically. Is that knowledge? Yes, clearly, the author responds, knowledge consists of “processed information”. Thus, according to the famous French newspaper <em>Le Monde</em>, “the era of robotic journalists has begun”. Bunz predicts that algorithms will not only change workflows in journalism, but in all areas where knowledge is produced and communicated. The “automation of a cultural technique” over which man possessed so far alone, will “fundamentally transform our world”, Bunz says.</p>
<p>The author stresses that algorithms are not artificial intelligence. She uses the term as a metaphor for a cultural or social engineering, respectively. Her main concern is to open a debate on how digitization can be used for the good of people and society. The development should not, as now, run more or less “naturally” or quietly but should be deliberate and active in discussing visions. Because the Internet offers a lot of potential: it multiplies the access to knowledge and can create a space of shared benefit. So, man must not necessarily deliver himself under the excessive demands of the new technology, as many believe, Bunz says.</p>
<p>Her appeal for a conscious design of digital change is important and seems probably to be right: We need to know what expectations we have of or to this change, to be able to contribute our time and talents in a good way. But: the essay shortens some important things a bit too well. In addition to the parallelization of industrial and digital revolution, it seems to me that the concept of <em>knowledge</em> is used in a rather problematic way here. Mercedes Bunz worked with this term quite different recently . In her fascinating essay on the consequences of<em> </em><em><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/243">WikiLeaks</a></em> to the claim of truth in journalism, she deals with the automatic handling of information with respect to sources.</p>
<p>“Source material” becomes “a special explosive power”, Bunz says, borrowing it from reality, knowledge and the material nature: Sources act as a relic, a testimony to a past reality. They “draw on the strength of authenticity”. That something really is, does <em>not</em> mean, that it is - or must be - true. “This gap of the real” is checked with knowledge. This is the way in which data become facts. In the case of sources, the authenticity of the material is testified. That makes sources to “strong, consistent witnesses”. All this puts them in the vicinity of truth, Bunz describes wonderfully an examiniation, no machine, as sophisticated as  ever, could do.</p>
<p>My main objection relates to the interaction between man and machine in the constitution of experience areas such as journalism. Here a deepening of the argumentation with the help of the <em>actor-network theory</em> as, for instance, Bruno Latour did it in his “new sociology for a new society”, would be extremely exciting. One would like to know more from Mercedes Bunz  about the particular strength of the technical infrastructure to design symbol systems in relation to the reification of man as a carrier of roles such as, for instance, in the Internet. Humans, with their ability to (self-) representation, strongly rely on creating reality (Ian Hacking). It would be very interesting, if an expert of the world of modern digital <em>know how</em>, as is Mercedes Bunz, would explore the chances (and risks) of the deliberate design of a behaviour in the logic of the use of things, an analysis of continuous surpassing of man, espacially in the Internet.</p>
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		<title>Trust in Numbers</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/758</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/758#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:30:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Science and Objectivity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Statistics]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers, The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton 1995 Review for the Digital Humanities Preliminary remark: Numbers are an important element in the Digital Humanities. The Frankfurter Allgemeine even writes, in connection &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/758">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers, The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton 1995</strong></p>
<p><strong>Review for the Digital Humanities</strong></p>
<p><em>Preliminary remark: </em>Numbers are an important element in the <em>Digital Humanities</em>. The <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/digital-humanities-eine-empirische-wende-fuer-die-geisteswissenschaften-11830514.html">Frankfurter Allgemeine</a> even writes, in connection with the <a href="http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/">Digital Humanities Conference</a> 2012 in Hamburg, Germany, of the <em>empirical turn</em> in the humanities. High time, then, to read the book of Theodore M. Porter on numbers as well as the book of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/622">Alain Desrosières</a> on statistics (please see my separate post) again.</p>
<p>Porter seeks to understand the growing importance of quantification in politics and science. He analyzes this development as part of a communication strategy, which has to do with the social identity of researchers. Quantification is a technology of alienation. It minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust. It is a trend that gives science authority in the political life. Porter shows this using historical examples.</p>
<p>Objectivity means to follow certain rules, implies personal restraint and refers to fairness and independence. It is an ideal of knowledge and moral value. Why quantitative expertises have gained so enormous importance in the political decision-making? The expertise is a relationship between science and politics. It must be objective and quantification is a way to correspond to this requirement. Objectivity gives political or administrative measures authority without making decisions, Porter says.</p>
<p align="center">x x x</p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/10/Bild-Trust-in-Numbers.gif" alt="" width="261" height="374" />Which facts and figures are true? Scientific knowledge is a collective product. Norms of scientific communication demand that knowledge is authorized by specialists of a scientific discipline. This is evident for example in <em>peer review</em>. Knowledge travels along networks: what appears to be universal valid is, in fact, a “triumph of social cloning”. Positivist science classifies facts carefully, compares their relationships and consolidates them into a formula. Such approach means rather managing the world, than to understand it. But this bureaucratic unification of standards and norms was essential to transform local practices in general knowledge. The result is objectivity, the victory of the quantitative over the qualitative element of the pre-industrial world. </p>
<p align="center">x x x</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center">Statistics are capable to describe the social reality in part because they help to define it. In the Soviet Union, the party has not predicted the future, but planned it. History was then an attempt to conform to the plan. Accounting is less mapping conditions than to steer and control behaviour in large institutions. Codes of profitability or return on investment are the basis for self-discipline. They are “technologies of the soul” (Nicholas Rose). They provide administrative decisions legitimacy because they set standards against which people judge themselves: “Numbers turn people into objects to be manipulated”, Porter says. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno criticized positivism; it would replace concepts by using formulas and causes by probability. Objectivity is thus characterized by what it missed out. What is missing is the unique, interested, localized individual. So desires, expectations and meaning go lost.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center">Scientific knowledge is not alone formalized theory, but also practical knowledge. Objectivity is here an alternative to personal trust. Standards and norms supersede local practices with formalized procedures in order to minimize conflicts and avoid stalemates. Porter illustrates this finding from using historical case studies on sizes and weights, accounting and cost-benefit analysis of infrastructure projects in France and the USA. </p>
<p align="center">x x x</p>
<p> “Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge”, Max Weber wrote. In the 1960s and 1970s, quantitative methods have been increasingly important in policy decisions. This corresponded to a trend in the sciences, where objectivity was ultimately a know­­ledge that has been produced conform to prevailing standards in scientific practices. Objectivity is a classical ideal of science: impersonal, fair, universally, without prejudice. Science is a community with its own rules, a meritocracy of free discussion and informal negotiations. Much of this happens silently due to common expectations and shared interpretations. Formalization and standardization will address then uncertainty and variability in new or exposed areas. </p>
<p align="center">x x x</p>
<p> What does it mean for the <em>Digital Humanities</em> to read Theodore M. Porter’s book on numbers and trust again?</p>
<p>We learn about the growing authority of quantitative methods both in sciences and politics, a social and political phenomenon. Porter sees scientific knowledge as made by communities. His thesis: the quantification is associated with objectivity, impersonal knowledge. It is used when it needs to gain trust universally. The need to standardize goes along with the growth of the state and the development of a large-scale economy. Porter shows how such pressures to quantification have also operated in science.</p>
<p>Porter shows how closely state, administration and research are cooperating in certain fields of knowledge and sciences. Who in social and human sciences is dealing with numbers and their importance for the society, state and sciences is very well served with this interesting book.</p>
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		<title>Digital History. Ready made.</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/701</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/701#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Sep 2012 06:14:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Best Practice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Peter Haber, Digital Past, Geschichtswissenschaft im Digitalen Zeitalter, München 2011 Review “What happens to the science of history in the digital age”, Peter Haber, University of Basel, wants to know. His concern is primarily about three things: The origins of &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/701">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Peter Haber, Digital Past, Geschichtswissenschaft im Digitalen Zeitalter, München 2011</strong></p>
<p><strong>Review</strong></p>
<p>“What happens to the science of history in the digital age”, Peter Haber, <em>University of Basel</em>, wants to know. His concern is primarily about three things: The origins of electronic data processing in the historical sciences, the changing of the organization of historical knowledge and the emerging of a new “workshop of the historian” (Marc Bloch).</p>
<p>With this questions, the author is a pioneer in the Swiss historical landscape. These days he is not (anymore) alone in this field of an emering scientific practice – as can been seen with the activities of the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/71">Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences</a> or the universities that begin to establish respective departments, for instance. But: If we can already speak of a <em>digital turn </em>in historical sciences, as the author does, seems still questionable, at least for the time being.</p>
<p>Here is a brief overview of key aspects in this book:</p>
<p>First, Haber deals with the question of how the computer has come into the humanities. He describes the use of mainframe computers for quantitative text analysis, the use of the personal computer as a “smart typewriter”, the first real hype with the new communication medium <em>e-mail</em> and the final breakthrough of digital media with the <em>Internet</em>. Henceforth, also the tradition-conscious historical science could no longer escape to the use of a so powerful media that will shape many more life and knowledge fields.</p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/09/Bild-Haber-Digital-Past.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="302" />The author devotes a large part of his book to the question of how the digital media change, or have already been changing, historical sciences. This involves <em>inter alia</em> the importance of the increasingly digital “order of knowledge”. Also here he argues close to the practice with concrete examples of digital knowledge systems such as <em>Wikipedia</em> and <em>blogs.</em> He is asking about the sheer volume and the archiving of information produced and mediated on the Internet, a question that not only interests future historians. He speaks in this context of the myth of the “universally available knowledge” and the “Google syndrome”. Haber therefore stresses the need to provide “information literacy” to the students.</p>
<p>The impact of the <em>digital media</em> in history is also reflected in respect to the work with historical sources (please see my review of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/43">Kiran Klaus Patel</a> to that). In particular, the critical assessment of sources must be extended with the consequences of the digital factor. To deal with such crucial terms as the “original” or “authenticity” proves to be difficult. The historical sciences will have to use appropriate techniques as <em>digital signatures </em>for instance. Haber is optimistic: he pleads for a “new history” with “new sources” in the digital era. For him, a modell is <a href="http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=event%2C+structure&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=8&amp;smoothing=1">Google Ngram</a>, the statistically useful database of <em>Google Books.</em></p>
<p>Further, Peter Haber sees a decisive impact of the digital media in new forms of communication of research results in history. He focuses primarily on <em>hypertexts</em>, the endless writing and cross linking of short texts on specific topics, and on visualization techniques (cf. my input to <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale&#8217;s</a> position on this issue).</p>
<p>Finally, the digital instruments open new collaborative work processes (see my input to the model of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/24">Charles Leadbeater</a> to this). Here, Haber remains rather vague, understandable, given the speed at which new digital applications are under development. He consequently abstains to identify the main technological trajectories here.  </p>
<p align="center">x x x</p>
<p>Peter Haber is, as already mentioned, a pioneer of <em>Digital History</em> in Switzerland. He seems to move on a line of development which is shaped by the <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/">Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media</a> at the <em>George Mason University</em> in the United States. A slightly different orientation can be observed in France, where especially the infrastructure for communication seems to be in the foreground of the digital humanities (see the different tools of <a href="http://www.openedition.org/">OpenEdition</a>).</p>
<p>In the meantime, in Switzerland, universities and the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/71">Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences</a> have adopted the issue. If we can already speak of a <em>digital turn </em>in historical sciences, as the author does, seems still to be open. For the time being, it is probably primarily a cross-cutting issue or a new auxiliary science. Thus, the University of Berne has announced 2012 a corresponding assistant professorship.</p>
<p>Haber’s book describes very well informed &#8211; watching and participating &#8211; the development and current status of <em>Digital History</em> in Switzerland. One question remains open, it seems to me: Is it necessary to have a theory of the <em>digital humanities</em>? If this is so, then an analysis would have to deal with questions as, for instance, the following: the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/320">delegitimization of great stories</a>, the decentration of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/280">authorship</a> and in the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/196">episteme</a>, the question of <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421">place</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/383">time</a>. To this, see the inputs on  <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/">We think History</a>. Ready made.</p>
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		<title>Statistics: The Politics of large Numbers</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/622</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/622#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:13:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Science and Objectivity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Statistics]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Alain Desrosières, La Politique des Grands Nombres, Histoire de la raison statistique, Paris 1993, 2000 Review with respect to the Digital Humanities Numbers and statistics are an extremely important element in the Digital Humanities. The Frankfurter Allgemeine writes, after the Digital Humanities &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/622">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Alain Desrosières, La Politique des Grands Nombres, Histoire de la raison statistique, Paris 1993, 2000</strong></p>
<p><strong>Review with respect to the <em>Digital Humanities</em></strong></p>
<p>Numbers and statistics are an extremely important element in the <em>Digital Humanities</em>. The <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/digital-humanities-eine-empirische-wende-fuer-die-geisteswissenschaften-11830514.html">Frankfurter Allgemeine</a> writes, after the <a href="http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/">Digital Humanities Conference</a> 2012 in Hamburg, Germany, of the <em>empirical turn</em> in the humanities. High time, then, to read the classic book of <em>Alain Desrosières</em> again (this is also true for Theodore M. Porter&#8217;s <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/758">Trust in Numbers</a>, of course). It is about the social world as a construct, about calculating probabilities, mean values, the law of large numbers, nominalism and taxonomy, the history of the statistics in different countries (France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States), (sample) surveys, econometrics and about the prediction of a victory of the <em>Republicans</em> that was wrong because the survey has been made by telephone.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>“Everything that happens in the world, happens in accordance with laws”, <em>Stader</em> declaims in Robert Musil’s book <em>Die Schwärmer</em>. Such lawful acts and events can be measured – an advantage owed to the empiricism that the social sciences willingly claim against the humanities. About this arose a controversy: The measured objects should be perceived incontestable. But this is not the case – the question is: Existed the fact in question before the measurement, is its reality independent of it, or does the definition create the object, would it, in reality, be a convention?</p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/09/Bild-Die-Politik-der-grossen-Zahlen.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="282" /> Emile Durkheim treated social facts as things. This objectification moved sociology to the vicinity of natural sciences. The statistical procedure is similar: with its “formalized synthetic terms”  it operates with formulas that simulate accuracy. But: these tools are the product of a development with all its variations and uncertainties. It is important to know how they came about. Because the statistics serves the sciences <em>and</em> politics. Their tools enable the creation of objects that not only describe the world but also take an impact on it. It is “an interaction between the world of knowledge and the world of power”.</p>
<p>Modern statistics provide a “single measurement space” in which things can be compared, an important condition for the formation of a “political space”, in which decisions are enforced uniformly. The statistical objectification combines science and administrative practices. On them the “administration of the social world” is based: The statistics is an “administrative task of recording data”, Desrosières summarizes his concept of analysis. </p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>The<strong> social world is a construct</strong>. Things described by statistics must be consistent to be valid. Therefore, it analyzes what gives things their cohesion. It gets its meaning from the state, which uses the data. The basic act of all statistical work is the creation and maintenance of registers, which guarantee the identity of persons legally and administratively. Important in this context is the codification: Statistical constructions should receive “a theoretical independence of the singular and local circumstances” in a country. So, first of all, it is all about “the unification of the national space”.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p><strong>Calculating probabilities</strong>, „a method by which the rationality of decisions in situations of uncertainty should be justified”, has been developed in the mid-17<sup>th</sup> Century. It was still strongly influenced theologically in its beginnings: Dice and lots were means of <em>divination</em>, the exploration of the divine will. Later it was about uncertain future profits, investments in maritime trade, insurance, annuities. There was a debate on security and knowledge, the attempt to define an idea of “what simply was probable”. The probabilistic method objectified uncertainty and in so far was a part of the process of secularization. It postulated that similar causes lead to similar consequences. Therefore, it it possible to link future events with past observations in way that the uncertainty of these events can be described.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>How from the <em>many</em> emerges the <em>one</em>, the <strong>mean value</strong>? This was essentially a question of the old philosophy, the one to the reality of aggregates of things or persons. Since Durkheim we work with the concept of social groups existing outside of individuals. Thus, there is a transition from one level of reality to another – and from one language to another. The statistical construction of the mean value provides the ability to deal with social objects without deforming them, even when they differ greatly in their construction.</p>
<p><img class="alignright" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/09/Bild-Mittelwert.gif" alt="" width="236" height="331" />The mean value refers to what lies between two extremes. It creates, on the one hand, the best possible approximation to a value at different measurements based on incomplete observations, and, on the other hand, a new reality based on the observation of different objects. Deviations are now considered as “imperfection in the implementation of a model”. In relation to man, on a massive scale, both behaviours and physical characteristics show a big regularity because of the “<strong>law of large numbers</strong>”. The “average person&#8221;, the guiding principle for political decisions is formed by such a “totalization”. It embodies the administrative perfection. With it emerges a new entity: the <em>society</em>.</p>
<p>A good example of the measurement of the effectiveness of actions in relation to a large number of people is the establishment of social security systems, which ensure statistical coverage of the individual risks. Epidemics for instance must be considered as a whole. Mortality statistics in relation to social groups provide information on possible preventive measures. Hygienists constantly tried to achieve improvements through collective preventive measures with the help of statisticians.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>The development of statistics can <em>retrospectively</em> be regarded as a product of the philosophy of Karl Pearson. In his famous book, <em>The Grammar of Science</em>, he took position against <em>causality</em> in favour of <em>correlation</em>. Pearson&#8217;s theory of knowledge was close to <strong><em>nominalism</em></strong> in which terms are stable because they are charged “with history and experience”. For Pearson, scientific laws were “abbreviated formulas for the synthesis of perception routines”. He saw statistical objects as real, when they could be sent to and used by others on a “turnkey basis”. That Pearson, based on Galton and Darwin, also tried “to improve the human species on the basis of heredity” is not be further developed here.</p>
<p>In certain cases, Desrosières writes in relation to Pearson, “things exist because others need them”. In other cases he sees them rather as conventions. Such questions were asked particularly in relation to the study of pauperism. In England, one of the values used to measure poverty was the number of people who were receiving welfare assistance. Thus, this object exists because of social coding through an administrative process – but that may be subject to fluctuations, and perhaps only a part of the “real poverty”.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>A state is a “singular totality of social relations” and the statistics their objectification. Insofar, statistics has a strong legitimation: a double guarantee of state <em>and</em> science. This seem to give statistics a high degree of credibility.</p>
<p>In <strong>France</strong>, the first national surveys were used to collect data on the movement of the population. Then it came to the study of the living conditions of workers (wages, working hours, unemployment). This questions have constantly been expanded and deepened, so that in the 20<sup>th  </sup>Century it finally was all about “the analysis of the relationship between capitalism and state”, as Desrosières writes. The <em>Royal Statistical Society</em> simultaneously analyzed in the <strong>United Kingdom</strong>, where the study of poverty was in the foreground, seven prerequisites for that “a statistical operation produces consistent objects”: Definition of units, homogeneity of the populations in study; <em>exhaustiveness</em>; relative stability, comparability, relativity [and] accuracy”.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>The German word “statistics” in the 18<sup>th </sup> Century referred to a “descriptive and not quantitative knowledge of the state” [sic!]. Statistics from the beginning was closely linked to the German administration. Desrosières interprets this as one of the mechanisms to hold together a state “whose consistency has more problems than others”. Closely connected to the beginning of the statistics in <strong>Germany</strong> is the <em>Verein für Socialpolitik</em> (<em>Association for Social Policy)</em> that built a public insurance systems on the idea of mutual self-help among workers. Max Weber led an important inquiry for the association, studying farm workers in <em>East Prussia</em>.</p>
<p>In the <strong>United States</strong> Census provide every ten years the basis for the distribution of seats of members of Parliament and of direct taxes on the states. This repeatedly led to bitter debates: how should slaves, how foreigners being counted? The statistics also were from a society in which the various authorities always had to be balanced. Therefore, statisticians not only should document and describe the state of affairs, but also help to find political solutions to conflicts between states. Their figures were more than elsewhere not “a truth that stood <em>over</em> the various camps” but linked to argumentation, decision and influence.</p>
<p>Data were first processed by machine, 1890, in the United States. In the 1930s, new statistical tools “to manage the political, economic and social imbalance”, as Desrosières writes, have been developed. Here, the definition of unemployment posed a problem: Besides the question of the number of people affected, the question was, if this number should be put into proportion to the whole or only to the (potentially) working population. The statistics also played a crucial role in other social facts in order to make things consistent and thus politically workable. In this context, George Horace Gallup showed that sample surveys are more durable and better than conventional recordings. He became famous when he predicted, in 1936, the re-election of President Roosevelt (see below).</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>Systematic “<strong>random-based sample surveys</strong>” are an example for the fact that the invention and application of a technology is related to certain conditions attached to the possibility of innovation: Before solving, the problem must be “invented” – or perhaps better: “found”. First, one had  to know if <em>the whole</em>, thus exhaustive surveys, can be replaced by <em>a part</em>, partial surveys. Then it was about the method: deliberate or random selection? Finally it came to the question of how observations can be generalized in a way to allow statements about the society as a whole. For a <em>representative sample</em> the statistics uses a design approach according to certain criteria in respect to collective actors. The framework of this “macro sociology” is based on the “law of large numbers”. It postulates an external reality beyond the individuals. This was the main idea of Emile Durkheim in his famous study about <em>suicide.</em></p>
<p>From the 1930s, the representative method was increasingly used in market studies on consumer choice and in election predictions. This required for nationwide standardizations and equivalences with respect to the tested products and objects. For election forecasts, samples had to be collected close to the electorate. In 1936, the telephone survey in the United States became famous. It was predicted a victory of the <strong><em>Republicans</em></strong> – wrongly, as it became clear after the election. The reason for this false prognosis: Only individuals were interviewed who had a phone, so were relatively prosperous.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>The statistics establishes a cohesion between singular things, and lends the objects thus a more comprehensive reality and consistency. This includes questions of taxonomy, which lead to very different concepts of social tools in the humanities. They all carry in them “the project to organize the things in a comprehensive way” as Michel Foucault said. In the “Archaeology of the <strong>taxonomy</strong>” he lists the classifications, which appear in the statistics ever again: “Codification as sacrificing insignificant perceptions, choosing the right variables, the technique of the construction of equivalence classes, the realism of the categories and the historicity of discontinuities”. For example: To reveal the order of nature, Linné deliberately limited his experience range: He dropped hearing, taste, smell and touch in favour of the vision, with which he recorded sizes, lines, shapes and relative positions. So, Linné chose some characteristics out of all features to build his classification on these criteria. This exclusion of certain properties created discontinuities, boundaries between the classes. The resulting categories are considered to be sufficiently stable to allow them to be incorporated in the production of knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>The history of economic analysis contains three different elements: the <em>mathematization</em>, <em>quantification</em> and the <em>probability calculation</em>. Although their association joined difficulties in the new <strong><em>econometrics</em></strong>, it was clear that it would break away from philosophy and political economy. The questions were now empirical and analytical – such as: What kind of relationship can be established between theoretical laws and the observed data? There were two opposing trends: one from the data to theory (<em>indices, economic analysis, and national income</em>) and one from the theory to the data (<em>estimation of parameters, verification</em>).</p>
<p>In the 1930s, with the help of probability, it was possible to find a link between the empirical observations and theoretical formalisms. In relation to economic cycles the newly developed statistical tools led to a “taming of chance”. The method allowed to eliminate oscillations with ever longer periods progressively: initially seasonal, then short-term (three to four years) and finally medium (eight to nine years) cycles have been made visible. The result was a long-term trend. It could be shown that “the energy to maintain the cycles is supplied by random disturbances”. Thus, it became clear that the economy is driven in an uneven manner.</p>
<p>So, it was realized that a government can influence the movement of the economy: one the one hand to intervene selectively, on the other hand to change the internal relations in the dynamic system. During the economic crisis of the 1930s following regulatory decisions were examined to reduce unemployment: <em>charitable works, protectionism, industrial rationalization, reduction of monopoly prices, wage cuts</em> and <em>currency devaluation</em>. Keynes noted that <em>random shocks</em> may only be applied if the effective causes can be analyzed in advance completely without doubt. He thereby pointed to non-measurable factors, such as psychological, political or social variables.</p>
<p>The lack of a controlled experimental situation and the non-observance of the <em>ceteris paribus clause</em> repeatedly led to debates about the possibility of applying empirical techniques in economics. An alternative between subjective and objective probability offered the term <em>likelihood</em>, the phrase that “everything happens as if”. The idea behind that: Within a well-defined probability distribution, to find out the one that gives the greatest plausibility to a set of observations. The <em>Cowles Commission</em> took up this idea. Its program was part of the founding of modern <em>econometrics</em>.</p>
<p>Economists assumed now that they can rely on a system, if it worked in the past and if no important elements are changed. So, in the 1940s, it came to a synthesis of all these theories, methods and empirical values: old and new economic theory, statistical records, national income, inferential statistics, and linear algebra. Tax rates and price controls were considered as structural models in which authorities could make optimal decisions. The most important area for the application of these new methods and techniques then was the national income.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">x x x</p>
<p>What does it mean for the <em>Digital Humanities</em> to read Alain Desrosières book again?</p>
<p>First, we learn that statistical figures are simultaneously found <em>and</em> constructed. Indeed, a social fact exists before its measurement, but is formed as a scientific object only by the statistical operation. Desrosières&#8217; elaboration of these relations and connections into categories, such as Michel Foucault has provided them, is very valuable for the human and social sciences.</p>
<p>Second, it is important to realize how closely state, administration and research are cooperating in the field of statistics. Modern statistics provide a “single measurement space” in which things can be compared, an important pre-condition for the formation of a “political space”, in which decisions are enforced uniformly. The “objectification”, the creation of “permanent things”, combines science and administrative practices. The “administration of the social world” is based on them. Shortly: The statistics is an “administrative task of recording data”.</p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/09/Bild-Alain-Desrosières.jpg" alt="" width="166" height="220" />Finally, also the history of statistics is of great interest: its emergence in the context of <em>political philosophy</em> and its detachment towards the <em>econometrics</em>. In this context Desrosières creates a knowledge about the basic elements of statistics, which could not be considered here in detail (<em>the law of large numbers, averages, probability, sampling, etc.</em>), but which is very import in the practice of the <em>Digital Humanities</em>. In any case: Who in social and human sciences is dealing with the function of the statistics and its importance for the state and society – in general but also especially in France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States – is very well served with this interesting book of Alain Desrosières, written in the tradion of the deconstruction of a Michel Foucault.</p>
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		<title>Twitter in the Humanities</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/593</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/593#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:17:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Digital Networking]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Microblogging more and more is an issue in the Humanities, too. ScienceFeed on ResearchGate, for instance, has especially been developped for the exchange of information in research and science. But better known is Twitter. Mareike König from the DHI in Paris has published an interesting and &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/593">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Microblogging </em>more and more is an issue in the <em>Humanities</em>, too. <a href="http://www.sciencefeed.com/" target="_blank">ScienceFeed</a> on <em>ResearchGate,</em> for instance, has especially been developped for the exchange of information in research and science<em>. </em>But better known is <em>Twitter</em>.<em> </em>Mareike König from the DHI in Paris has published an interesting and detailed <em>guide</em> to the use of <a href="http://dhdhi.hypotheses.org/1072">Twitter in History</a> (in German). Here an English <em>short cut</em>.</p>
<p><em>Twitter</em> is a &#8220;real-time information network&#8221;, with the spread of short messages, called tweets, which contain up to 140 characters. A tweet can also contain images, videos or links. The messages can normally be viewed publicly. Those who would like to send tweets themselves need an account. <em>Twitter</em>, up to now, is not much used by historians. Mareike König understands her input as a practical aid for researchers that want to use <em>Twitter</em> for scientific purposes.</p>
<p>She sees this social media as an &#8220;excellent tool&#8221; to be informed and to let colleagues, peers etc. know about one&#8217;s publications, new articles etc. With this sort of <em>microblogging</em>, a researcher can expand his or her own network. The handling is less formal than in emails or letters, and it&#8217;s easier to keep in contact with others than by meetings or conferences. <em>Twitter</em> offers just for young researchers a good opportunity to build up a network; and it can also make fun, König says.</p>
<p>Scientific twittering historians can be found on <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/erfagen/european-twitterstorians" target="_blank">European Twitterstorians</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/Histonaut/historische-zeiten" target="_blank">Historische Zeiten</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/epenschmied/geschichte">Geschichte</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/TheHistoryList" target="_blank">@TheHistoryList</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/myHNN/historians-who-tweet">Historians Who Tweet</a> and other. Moreover, it is worthwhile to pursue various academic institutions, such as the University, Department or Library, as well as platformes for the <em>Digital Humanities</em> as for instance <a href="http://hypotheses.org/">Hypotheses.org</a> or <a href="http://www.infoclio.ch/">infoclio.ch</a>.</p>
<p>In her input Mareike Königs explains step by step how to start<em> Twitter</em> and shows in detail on what one has to look at for that it really works.</p>
<p><em>Remark</em>: My blog <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/">We think History</a> on the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421">place</a> and the future of the (digital) historiography treats the use of modern social media, too. See, for instance, my review on Pierre Mounier&#8217;s interesting demand to <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/121">open up the Workshop of the Historian</a> or <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale&#8217;s</a> innovative text about <em>digital history. </em>As for <em>microblogging</em>, I wonder if it really will be of great help in the humanities beyond the exchange of short text messages. Because: <em>Twitter</em> is very fast but also very short.</p>
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		<title>Empirical turn in the Humanities? The Frankfurter Allgemeine on the results of the Hamburg conference</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/542</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/542#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:57:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Digital tools and methods become more and more important in the Humanities. The Frankfurter Allgemeine, a leading journal in Germany, sees &#8221;the end of the hermeneutical individual research&#8221; coming. The computer based processing of huge data bases allows researchers totaly new &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/542">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Digital tools and methods become more and more important in the Humanities. The <em><a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/digital-humanities-eine-empirische-wende-fuer-die-geisteswissenschaften-11830514.html">Frankfurter Allgemeine</a></em>, a leading journal in Germany, sees &#8221;the end of the hermeneutical individual research&#8221; coming. The computer based processing of huge data bases allows researchers totaly new approaches to and in their field of studies. But a prerequisite for this is the development and maintenance of a &#8211; rather expensive &#8211; research infrastructures (digitization, data management, data archiving). In Germany, the politicians seem to be ready to take this new situation into account and to draw the (financial) consequences.</p>
<p>The German <em>Digital Humanities</em>, &#8220;inspired by this gain on importance&#8221;, met for their <a href="http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/">annual meeting in Hamburg</a>, 16 &#8211; 22 July 2012. <em>Digital Humanities</em> are not &#8220;a fixed disciplin of research, but a specific field of methods&#8221;, the journal explains; and: Their &#8220;headwater&#8221; are computer based linguistic and philology as well as computer sciences in their respective disciplines. They can be seen as &#8220;technical auxiliary of the Humanities&#8221;, according to the <em>Frankfurter Allgemeine.</em>  This work on infrastructure should be recognized as an independent research performance, the journal agrees with the German <em>Wissenschaftsrat</em> (Science Council).</p>
<p>The conference in Hamburg offered a comparison of methods and a look at the whole field of the emerging practice: the trend towards quantification and towards crowdsourcing, modellation and visualizition of huge data group and structures. A big issue are the <em>geographical information systems</em> (GIS) and their possibilities for the humanities. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de/konferenzen/-/k/13910">organizers of the conference</a> proclaimed &#8220;the empirical turn in the Humanities&#8221;: also here, they say, the era of projects and working in teams has begun. This contrasts, within a part of the conference participants, with the fear &#8220;of the import of a reductive, non-objective thinking&#8221;, into the Humanities in front of a computer industry that dictates the methods. Anyway: the question, whether the <em>Digital Humanities</em> see themself - application-oriented &#8211; as a support towards human and social sciences, rather than as &#8220;the spearhead of a full transformation of the Humanities&#8221; will remain an open one probably for still quite some time.</p>
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		<title>Rousseau Digital &#8211; The Philosophers Work accessible online</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/527</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/527#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:03:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Digital Sources]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Best Practice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Documents]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[2012 is the year of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. infoclio.ch took this occassion to publish the work of the famous philosopher in its first reference edition in 17 volumes and nearly 9,000 pages. The texts are freely available on rousseauonline.ch for download in various formats (pdf, epub). They include &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/527">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/07/Bild-Emile-ou-de-l-Education.jpg" alt="" width="204" height="234" />2012 is the year of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. <a href="http://www.infoclio.ch/">infoclio.ch</a> took this occassion to publish the work of the famous philosopher in its first reference edition in 17 volumes and nearly 9,000 pages. The texts are freely available on <a href="http://www.rousseauonline.ch/">rousseauonline.ch</a> for download in various formats (pdf, epub). They include bibliographic notes and the original numbering of pages. Through collaboration with the Geneva Library each page number is hyperlinked to a high definition image of the original page.</p>
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		<title>Digital Humanities: Short Outline of a Theory of Practice</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/468</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/468#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:18:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Theoretical Approaches]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Best Practice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wethink.hypotheses.org/?p=468</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Pierre Bourdieu, Entwurf einer Theorie der Praxis. Auf der ethnologischen Grundlage der kabylischen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1976 (French original 1972) Review with respect to Digital Humanities Preliminary remarks: I have tried in previous posts, to outline the framework and &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/468">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Pierre Bourdieu, <em>Entwurf einer Theorie der Praxis. Auf der ethnologischen Grundlage der kabylischen Gesellschaft</em>, Frankfurt am Main 1976 (French original 1972)</strong></p>
<p><strong>Review with respect to Digital Humanities</strong></p>
<p><em>Preliminary remarks: </em>I have tried in previous posts, to outline the framework and parameters for the <em>Digital Humanities: </em>the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/320">delegitimization of great stories</a>, the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/196">decentration in the epistemes</a>, the question of the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421">place (lieux)</a> and of the <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/383">time (presence)</a>, the media (<a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/350">book</a>, <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/243">documents</a>, and other <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/43">archival sources</a>), <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/280">authorship</a> and the conditions of production (<a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/24">Charles Leadbeater</a>). I have also presented some examples for <em>Digital History </em>(<a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale</a>, <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/43">Kiran Klaus Patel</a>, <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/71">Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences</a>, <a href="http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=event%2C+structure&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=8&amp;smoothing=1">Google applications</a>) and, finally, a <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/448">comment</a> from a specialist of a leading platform of the <em>Digital Humanities</em> to these questions.</p>
<p>It seems now time to think about the theory of practice in the <em>Digital Humanities</em>. And who would be better suited as an inspiration to do this than Pierre Bourdieu.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> x x x</p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The study of the formation of categories in the social sciences helped Pierre Bourdieu to his breakthrough as a well known social scientist. He had tried to describe a <em>Berber</em> tribe in Algeria with the help of scientific opposition chains, thus creating a cultural totality in the sense of structuralism &#8211; as he had learned it from Claude Lévy-Strauss.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">But the 1,500 punch cards that he made, describing cultural and social traits of this group, gave not a logical whole, in any combination whatsoever. The structuralist theory found no model-based, consistent explanation for the empirical findings. Therefore, the practice must have its own logic and follow certain strategies. So, Bourdieu questioned the relationship of a theoretical model to practical sense in relation to the actors. He found that the rules of the model (the standard) are not simply followed, but interpreted according to the situation.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Based on his theory of practice, Bourdieu created a sociology, which has become famous for its concept of <em>Habitus</em>. The dispositions described in the <em>Habitus</em> structure the actions of the people involved. They adapt to the social field in which they come into play. They are the basis for continuity in our lives. What matters is that we grow into such a practice field. If we want to be successful, we need to invest, to acquire social and/or cultural capital. And when we want to invest, we must believe, be convinced that there is no other important field of action, as the one chosen. Its value must not be questioned. For the social success it is vital that the players do not know – deliberately? – what the logic in their field of practice is.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Bourdieu radically thinks relations. There are no ready-mades, but relationships that make up the things. This applies also for speaking and, one might add, writing. Both are performative, focused on social actions and contexts. Language is socially determined.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #000000;">x x x</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/07/Bild-Practice.jpg" alt="" width="277" height="236" />Reading Bourdieu means, almost, to acquire a guide to action (in science). For Bourdieu, the practice is crucial. Thus, if you want to run <em>Digital Humanities</em>, just do it and be convinced of it. Already existing platforms for the <em>Digital History</em> and/or <em>Digital Humanities</em> like <a href="http://www.infoclio.ch/">infoclio.ch</a> or <a href="http://www.openedition.org/">OpenEdition</a> </span><span style="color: #000000;">show how this could work. </span><span style="color: #000000;">It will be interesting to see whether the rules for this scientific field of practice tend to derive from the digital technologies rather than from the standards of the Humanities or the standards of the social sciences in the long term. Wherein: if we talk about the logic for the basic lines of this field, i</span><span style="color: #000000;">t seems that the dice have already fallen: Here the Humanities have clearly adapted to the Technologies. </span><span style="color: #000000;">Actually, it is primarily about a new practice field of the human and social sciences. But, until now, the digital resources and logic seem to dominate the definition of this field of practice. </span><span style="color: #000000;">In any case, the <em>Digital Humanities</em> seem to be much more than just an extension of the media used by the human and social sciences. The previous posts have shown that very clear (see my <em>preliminary remarks </em>to this).</span></p>
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		<title>La place dans les Humanités Digitales &#8211; Commentaire</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/448</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/448#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:51:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Best Practice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Innovation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Participation]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Le billet &#8220;The place in the Digital Humanities&#8221; du 8 Juin 2012 (revue du livre Non-lieux de Marc Augé) me semble intéressant et je vous donnerai mon opinion, non pas exclusivement depuis la perspective des communautés des humanités numériques et &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/448">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Le billet &#8220;<a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421">The place in the Digital Humanities</a>&#8221; du 8 Juin 2012 (revue du livre <em>Non-lieux</em> de Marc Augé) me semble intéressant et je vous donnerai mon opinion, non pas exclusivement depuis la perspective des communautés des humanités numériques et de leurs lieux de vie et de travail mais depuis mon expérience générale des communautés numériques et physiques.</p>
<p>Les lieux des communautés numériques ne me semblent pas des non-lieux, car, si l&#8217;on s&#8217;en tient à la définition de Marc Augé, ces espaces ont bien des histoires (encore à écrire et raconter) et des identités et ont même réinventé la notion d&#8217;identité me semble-t-il en lui donnant beaucoup plus de complexité et à la fois d&#8217;ouverture.</p>
<p>Les relations numériques, comme le note notamment Casilli, permettent de créer de nouveaux types de relations sociales qui n&#8217;existent pas encore ou ne peuvent exister dans l&#8217;espace physique. Par ailleurs, les espaces des communautés numériques autorisent une articulation individu/collectif particulièrement intéressante : l&#8217;identité des communautés numériques est certainement une identité ad minima, fondée sur la mise en commun d&#8217;un intérêt avec lequel chaque individu est libre d&#8217;entretenir des relations plus ou moins intenses. La possibilité de se désengager à tout moment est aussi intéressante. Ce collectif est un collectif fondé sur la rencontre d&#8217;individus autour d&#8217;un objet, pas sur un projet politique du collectif porté par une entité censée dépassée l&#8217;individu.</p>
<p>Dans cette perspective, identité et histoire existent bien dans les espaces des communautés numériques mais sont différents. </p>
<p>Espaces numériques des communautés et espaces physiques ne me semblent pas non plus déconnectés. Les personnes d&#8217;une communauté virtuelles se rencontrent parfois. Mais c&#8217;est certainement le déplacement des logiques notamment de contribution, des modes de travail, etc. inventés dans les espaces numériques vers les espaces physiques qui montre à quel point ces deux espaces s&#8217;interpénètrent. Par ailleurs, l&#8217;intégration du numérique dans l&#8217;espace physique et la disparition des supports au profit d&#8217;un numérique intégré dans l&#8217;environnement physique amoindrira certainement cette sensation de perte ou d&#8217;absence de réalité que transmettent parfois les espaces numériques.  </p>
<p>Pour faire lieu ou non lieu, la gestion de l&#8217;espace où l&#8217;on est me semble importante. Cette question relevée par Marc Augé traverse aussi le sujet du Commun en général, car à l&#8217;image des Non-lieux qui sont à la fois espaces et relations sociales, le Commun est régime de propriété et mode de gestion et donc de relations sociales.</p>
<p>Le point qui pourrait aider à penser ce qu&#8217;est le lieu et le non-lieu numérique pourrait être ce point critique que l&#8217;on peut résumer par cette question &#8220;qui pense, conçoit et gère le lieu?&#8221;. Ceci pose la question de la représentation ou de la disponibilité de la technologie en fonction de ce qu&#8217;elle permet ou interdit, prescrit ou rend difficile d&#8217;accès, etc.</p>
<p>Pour terminer et à titre d&#8217;illustration, un élément certainement significatif est la métaphore de l&#8217;habitat qui est employée pour parler d&#8217;une présence individuelle dans un espace numérique. Le réseau social alternatif <a href="https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/7826/lorea/">N-1 de Lorea</a> parle, depuis ses débuts et en opposition aux non-lieux que représenteraient des interfaces propriétaires comme Facebook, des habitants de ce lieu. Les habitants ont tout loisir de modeler leurs espaces de vie. Sur Hypothèses, la même métaphore est redécouverte et utilisée par les carnetiers qui ont créé des <a href="http://reflexivites.hypotheses.org/">Espaces réflexifs</a>. Le carnet est une maison ou une villa, que, mensuellement, de nouveaux locataires investissent et redécorent tout en laissant les traces des locataires antérieurs. Ce projet, comme son nom l&#8217;indique, est une réflexion sur l&#8217;activité d&#8217;écrire et notamment d&#8217;écrire dans un carnet de recherche. C&#8217;est donc une réflexion sur le faire mais aussi sur l&#8217;espace, me semble-t-il.</p>
<p>Dans le cas d&#8217;Hypothèses, la technologie choisie est ouverte. Les logiciels que nous utilisons sont <em>Open source</em>. Le blog est une technologie d&#8217;écriture et de lecture extrêmement malléable. La conversation permanente entre communauté et équipe permet de modeler techniquement la plateforme selon des usages existants dans la communauté. Appartenir à la communauté des carnetiers propose un trait identitaire de plus à l&#8217;individu qui s&#8217;y aventure et qu&#8217;il peut partager. Néanmoins les outils communautaires proposés n&#8217;impliquent pas du tout que l&#8217;ensemble des individus s&#8217;investissent de la même façon. Les projets et les usages enfin sont à tels points différents qu&#8217;il se peut même que l&#8217;expérience soit pour certains l&#8217;expérience d&#8217;un lieu et pour d&#8217;autres d&#8217;un non-lieu. </p>
<p>Pour terminer, je pense que la maturité des usages provenant de l&#8217;expérience est un facteur particulièrement important pour se sentir à l&#8217;aise dans les espaces numériques et pour les &#8220;vivre&#8221; comme des lieux.</p>
<p>Frédérique Muscinesi</p>
<p><a href="http://hypotheses.org/" target="_blank">Hypotheses.org</a><a href="http://cleo.cnrs.fr/" target="_blank">Cléo</a>/<a href="http://openedition.org/" target="_blank">OpenEdition.org</a></p>
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		<title>The place in the Digital Humanities</title>
		<link>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421</link>
		<comments>http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jun 2012 10:40:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Guido Koller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Theoretical Approaches]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Digital Humanities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Episteme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hybridity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wikipedia]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Marc Augé, Non-Lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris 1992 Review with respect to the Digital Humanities We have become strangers in our own world – due to its accelerated change. This calls for the anthropological perspective, for &#8230; <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/421">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Marc Augé, <em>Non-Lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité</em>, Paris 1992</strong></p>
<p><strong>Review with respect to the <em>Digital Humanities</em></strong></p>
<p>We have become strangers in our own world – due to its accelerated change. This calls for the anthropological perspective, for the thinking about the category of the other. It is perfectly exemplified by Pierre Nora’s <em>Lieux de mémoire. </em>What we are looking for in the historical testimonies, in the traces of what once was, is our being different, the appearance of an identity. History is no longer <em>genesis</em>, but the deciphering of what we are, in the mirror of what we have been.</p>
<p>The background for this desire is the fact of the acceleration: History is on our heels, the superabundance of events threaten to catch up with us all time. The most important feature of the <em>super-modernity</em> is the excess of affairs. Due to their density, we are hardly able to give sense to events. For we do it not for our village or our country anymore, but for the whole world. This plethora of events makes it difficult for us to think the <em>time</em>. Our desire to understand the presence draws with it the inability to give the (near) past a meaning.</p>
<p>This acceleration also covers the <em>space</em>. It shows itself in the speed with which people, goods and information are transported. In our homes, we can look almost at the same time to events that take place at the “other end” of the planet. This spatial overabundance is a substitute for the symbolic worlds of recognition. There are <em>non-lieux</em>, <em>non-places</em> being formed such as airports, freeway junctions, shopping centers and transit camps. They stand in contrast to places such as Marcel Mauss has defined them in the term of a culture localized in time and space. We need to think this space new, Augé says. The anthropology with its experience to decentring perspectives can help us here.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Remark / Interjection:</em> Please read my separate post to <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/196">Jacques Derrida</a> (and to Claude Lévy-strauss) to this.</p>
<p>The third figure of this excess concerns the individual. In the <em>super-modernity</em> the framework for the collective identification is fluid. The production of meaning is therefore crucial – a situation that is actively being used  by the advertisement, for instance. Conversely, this should be mentioned too, the people bend existing constraints, interpret them, in order to impress them with their own traces. Michel Certeau calls this stratagem the <em>Art of acting</em>.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong> * * *</strong></p>
<p><img class="alignleft" src="http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/704/files/2012/06/Bild-Freyung-Ort-Ortstafel.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="216" />Every social group organizes the space and constitutes thus its place. It relies on the individuals who belong to it, to think identity and relation, to symbolize it. This is done precisely through work in time and space. So, the social order is visible as an ensemble of relations and symbols, as a culture. Thus, places are identical, relational and historical. Geometrically, they consist of three simple figures (or forms): the line, the cutting of the lines and the cross point. These are the elementary forms of social space: Routes, intersections and squares. These relations are also written in(to) time: In many regions, markets rotate in a week from place to place, ceremonies are based on a religious and social calendar. The places of power, however, are stable: Monuments represent centers of religious or political power. In all these places individual and collective experience are intersected and combined.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>* * *</strong></p>
<p>Jean Starobinsky sees the essence of modernity in the attendance of the past in the presence, that limits and claims it for itself. Modernity is not deleting old places, but moves them into the background. Just as a place is characterized by identity, relations and history, a space without this features defines a <em>non-lieux</em>. The <em>super-modernity</em> generates such <em>non-places</em>, spaces that do not integrate the old places (anymore). These become specific locations in memory.</p>
<p><em>Non-places</em> indicate two distinct and complementary realities: Spaces that serve specific purposes (traffic, transit, recreation) and the relationship that the individual maintains to them. This relationships take place through orders, advertisement, instructions, prohibitions and ideograms. They are addressed to us average persons, to the consumers, passengers etc. Such spaces provide no particular identity, no special relationship, no history.</p>
<p>In these areas of the <em>super-modernity</em> we are “still and never more at home”. The passages lead no longer to entirely different worlds. The <em>super-modernity</em> finds its expression in these non-places. It makes old things into a spectacle. History and exoticism become quotations – a status that is shown very nicely in travel brochures for instance.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>* * *</strong></span></strong></p>
<p>What could be learned from Marc Augé for the <em>Digital Humanities? </em>Science is a social practice that needs its own place to work. If the <em>Digital Humanities </em>should make a place for the humanities and the social sciences, they not only need virtual spaces and platforms, but an identity and relations. Those involved need to organize, to work this space to make it come alive. According to what principles? <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/24">Charles Leadbeater</a> has proposed to use the model of <em>commons</em> with joint and collaborative participation and benefits, as with <em>Wikipedia</em>. It is not clear whether we can succeed in this, if we follow Marc Augé. He tells us to think space new but he doesn’t tell us how. Can virtual platforms create places that do not simply accelerate the communication, but are equipped with symbols that make actions understandable and provide them with meaning? Can relationships and identity being shaped virtual in a way, that creates its own cultural pattern, in which people meet and exchange?</p>
<p><a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/926">Yvonne Spielmann</a> would probably say yes, within the emerging hybrid culture. <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/170">Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht</a> and <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/350">Michael Giesecke</a> probably would say no. For both creative research and learning need the physical presence, the resistance in the face of others. <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/43">Kiran Klaus Patel</a> would also be very skeptical – he fears that the right sources for contemporary historical research will no longer be available in the archives. <a href="http://wethink.hypotheses.org/101">Wolfgang Schmale</a> sees a possible solution in a hybrid model: Research and learning <em>onsite</em>, providing the results <em>online</em>.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to know the opinion of the operators of virtual scientific platforms to that.</p>
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