Digital Humanities Archives - Page 2 of 2

The Cost of Free

Almost twenty years ago, in The Control Revolution, Andrew Shapiro outlined two potential paths that the Internet could take. The first was a more positive tale of an “increased individual freedom.” However, the second had a more cautionary tone. It warned of institutions harnessing the power of the network and exerting their influence over us as consumers.

Aleks Krotoski
By Paul Downey via Wikimedia Commons

Aleks Krotoski in The Virtual Revolution, The Cost of Free, broadcast by BBC 2, reports on the development of the World Wide Web in the last twenty years and mirrors this cautionary tone. Users access vast, incalculable amounts of information on a daily basis, and the majority of us take this great ‘commodity’ for granted. Countless hours on Google, Facebook, Twitter…… Krotoski argues that there is a heavy price to pay for these interactions. Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life Inc., states: “The product on line is not the content. The product on line is you.”

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 he saw it as an open forum, without boundaries, where information could be shared freely. Stephen Fry, in Krotoski’s The Cost of Free, furthers this notion, saying: “It seemed like a new democracy, of people coming together.”

Stephen Fry
By Marco Raaphorst from The Hague via Wikimedia Commons

However, in 1994, the United States congress lifted the injunction on Web Commerce, and change came about rapidly. Change that was to affect us all deeply. That free content that is available to us on tap? We receive it due to our willingness to sign away our personal data. All those minutiae that may be seen as having little value in the moment are, in fact, priceless. The surveillance that we are constantly under is the price we pay for the ‘free’ services we access on an almost constant basis. Our personal information is that which is being traded.

AdWords is the model implemented by Google whereby advertisers are enabled to target and filter their audience. Google have become the most powerful company in the world simply by using our search preferences and refining their advertising models.

What Google deems us to be interested, this is what we find in our searches. A barrier has been erected towards the discovery of new things. Krotoski proposes that this system denies us the very ‘serendipity’ that the web originally offered. As the algorithm gets to ‘know’ us more, we are cutting off and marginalizing our options and confining them in the direction Google wants us to take. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in an attempt to put a jaunty, positive spin on the process, utilizes a neat turn of phrase to describe it: “It’s not a broadcast mechanism. It’s a narrowcast mechanism.”

Eric Schmidt
By Guillaume Paumier via Wikimedia Commons

It could be argued that ultimately the use of targeted advertising will lead to the de-personalisation and homogeneity of the audience and consumer. There are implications looking to the future as to how we will identify ourselves, but we must also look at and consider the vast reserve of information that is being stored indefinitely, where it is being held and who has access. And how could it potentially be used?

References

The Cost of Free. The Virtual Revolution. Dir. Dan Kendall. BBC, 2010.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. Random House, 2001.

Seeking

PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) define reading literacy as “the ability to understand, use and reflect on written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s knowledge and potential, and to participate effectively in society”. (Education at a Glance, OECD, Paris, 2002, Glossary).

When I last studied, it was all photocopies, highlighters, pencils and books. I was liberal with my scribblings and colour on the photocopies, but very careful with my books/novels. Looking back on them over the last few weeks, I am disappointed I did not write more in the margins. What little bits I did find are fascinating to read!

Annotation converts the reader from a consumer into an active participant, leading to motivation and a better sense of achievement. Personally, my power to recall a text in which I have annotated notes is incomparably stronger in comparison to one which I have just simply read. I think more critically and I am more likely to formulate a personalized response when involved in annotation.

The use of collaboration in annotation is a fairly new concept to me and one I find interesting. I have worked proofreading journals for the last few years. My editor (via Qatar) sends myself and a couple of other colleagues (in various countries) a document via Adobe Acrobat. It provides great insight into other’s knowledge and culture to see what we choose to edit and annotate.

Jerome McGann

McGann reports that there is an educational emergency as a result of the growth of digital. He draws a very pertinent link between our current situation and that of the humanists in the 15th century in outlining the upheaval we are faced with and the reassessment we must make of all of the tools and methods at the core of our current knowledge production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptST75n4AHg — Jerome McGann via Youtube

An entire re-editing of our archive of cultural works within a network of digital storage and access is predicted in the next fifty years by McGann. A main concern of his is that the current educational system is not equipped to undertake this overhaul/mission. It is interesting to note that those who have the most at stake in this movement are the least involved. He despairs “not a person in the room seemed to know what TEI was” at a meeting of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry. He refers to an apartheid being in place between literary and cultural studies and calls for an intertwining of the two moving forward in education, particularly in the US.

Print culture, which has been to some extent relegated since the proliferation of the digital, is here given justified praise. He is of the opinion that we must reengage with print culture on our journey into the digital realm, looking specifically at the bibliographical interface and its mode of organization. Using the bibliography as the launch pad, we can then progress beyond traditional conventions, the digital can build and feed upon this original format. McGann envisions an exciting quantum world becoming thus available, encompassing ideas and theories which are by their very nature “inexhaustible,” ever changing and growing.

References

McGann, Jerome. “A Note on the Current State of Humanities Scholarship.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 409–413.

“Professor Jerome McGann – Truth and Method.” YouTube, uploaded by Crassh Cambridge, 15 May 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptST75n4AHg

My View on the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

Through my reading of the Manifesto, it is apparent that there is a need for a redefinition of the connotation of ‘success’ as we traditionally view it. As the Manifesto puts forth, process is the new god, not product. We need to break the norm of only valuing the end result, and place value on the entire process of learning, discovery, creation etc. I enjoyed the point made that the university library must hence be viewed as a lab, and traditional hierarchy must be broken with in order for the student to be recast as scholar, and vice versa.

This enforces the idea put forth in the Manifesto of the importance of collaboration and community in Digital Humanities moving forward as an inclusive model, where we can all learn equally from one another.

If one of the aims of Digital Humanities is to be inclusive, then on a positive note, the formatting of the article is certainly more inviting and engaging to a wider audience, in comparison to a traditional humanities document which can be austere and intimidating in tone and format. I personally must admit to finding the overall look a little amateurish, as if the tools used were ACTUAL paper, paste and scissors!

I had a definite sense of multiple authorship throughout the article but not to the extent of a hundred plus contributors. In that regard, the editing work must be applauded, but I do wonder, to what extent did the editors have a say in the shaping of this Manifesto? Towards making their individual voices or feelings heard? It is very difficult to edit 100% objectively, one could argue impossible.