Post #3: Exploring Text Visualization Tools

I began this post by perusing the Project Gutenberg website. After lots of meandering, I decided to try "reading" some important historical literature that I've been meaning to get to. Specifically, I endeavored to soak-in the The Canterbury Tales, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf and The Odyssey. Below are the results, which I'm calling "Project Gilga-mash."

Starting out, I did not have a clear outcome in mind beyond learning more about these seminal works. Chaucer's was the first of the poems that I came across on Project Gutenberg. After loading it up on Wordle, there were some interesting immediate observations. First, the word God seems to occur just about as often as words like ye, thy, eke, etc... This is probably not too shocking, considering that the characters in this story are a group of religious pilgrims. Other prominent words like, wise, good, right, love and heart help us further understand that this is intended to be a moralizing narrative. As is to be expected, the words man and men are used much more frequently than the word woman. However, the word wife appears to be the preferred female designation. Also, interestingly, the word Chaucer is on the list with moderate frequency. I don't remember the author being a character in this story, so I probably neglected to remove all of the footnotes and acknowledgements. 

Next, I decided to speed-up my education in classic world literature by throwing the Epic of Gilgamesh into the mix. This one was difficult to format for Wordle because it's separated by tablets and I could not find the entire translated text on Project Gutenberg. After some laborious copy/pasting from another website (fingers-crossed for accuracy), the resulting mash-up of Gilgamesh and the Canterbury Tales can be seen below. The words  ye, thy, thou and man are still going strong. However, God has lost a little traction. It took me a while to find the word Gilgamesh...he's obviously a bit shy or self-conscious. Notably, the words may and full, which were prominently featured in the first word cloud, are joined by the word well.

What most-epic of epic of poems would be complete without the Old English story of Beowulf? I read a good chunk of this in 9th grade English class, and I watched the rest in the recent CGI animated movie. I also enjoyed the novel Grendel by John Gardner. I grew to like that character a lot, and I was a bit dismayed that I could not find the name Grendel anywhere in the word cloud. I understand that I'm compounding a lot of texts, so maybe he was just forced underground (a little Beowulf joke, sort of). The word Beowulf is a bit hard to find, too. He's mentioned less frequently than Gilgamesh, but about the same as Chaucer. God is still doing pretty well, overall.

I thought that I was finished with my incredibly-epic poem, but I had totally forgotten about Homer's Odyssey and Iliad! I decided to add just the Odyssey, so as not to overly-Homerize the word cloud. Immediately, the name Ulysses jumped out at me. He is clearly the winner of the character name mentions. Gilgamesh is still holding on for dear life, but Beowulf and Chaucer appear to have been buried under a Homerific pile of text. In the end, man did slightly better than God. Wife also won out over woman and mother. I didn't realize until the final word cloud that the gender-neutral pronoun one is used about as equally as the gender-specific pronoun man. Maybe this was a more common way to refer to individuals of either gender.

After uploading all the texts into Voyant, I was surprised to see that the pronoun one is, in fact, used more frequently than the pronoun man. Man is at its highest usage with 26.58 per 10,000 words in the Canterbury Tales, where one is at its highest usage with 43.31 per 10,000 words in the Odyssey.

And, here's a DocuBurst with just Beowulf. It kept crashing when I tried uploading the full Project Gilga-mash text. Look, there's Grendel!

Post #2: Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Humanities

For this post, I read  “Print Scholarship and Digital Resources,” by Clair Warwick. This writing discusses the dynamics between print and digital publications today, and the role that both can play in contemporary scholarship. The author keeps a fairly unbiased perspective about the benefits and shortcomings of both mediums. Most interesting to me is the physicality of printed books vs. their digital counterparts. Why do we still ascribe value to printed matter in an era when digital publishing should be the logical standard? Is there something unique about the experience of pouring over dusty volumes that simply cannot be reproduced via reading the same text on a kindle?

I find it easy to draw comparisons to the role of artwork in the digital age. We view more and more artwork online rather than in real life (IRL). This has some incredible benefits, namely that we have access to a much broader sampling of artists and we can easily follow up-to-the-moment trends and practices in contemporary art. A curator in New York can stay up-to-date with the programming of their favorite exhibition space in Los Angeles, read a blog post about a studio visit with a friend in Kansas City, and discover the website of an emerging artists in Japan, all without leaving the comforts of home! The world of art museums and galleries is notoriously limited in its ability to show new artists. There is only so much physical space available to exhibit work, and these institutions tend to favor time (and market)-tested, mid-career and established artists. What this leaves is a huge deficit in the representation of young and emerging artists. For many of these under-represented artists, the internet has become a democratizing space where they can create and maintain their own cultural presence outside of the preferences and market demands of the museum and gallery system.

The internet also presents its own set of challenges and limitations for the presentation of artwork. Primarily, it underscores the physicality of artwork. It would be safe to say that the majority of artwork that we consume is online (this is especially true for art world professionals who wish to stay current, but cannot physically be everywhere at once), and that the majority of artwork created today is made to be viewed by an online audience. Even an artist with a solo show at a major museum can only expect a small percentage of the total art world to visit the exhibition. Therefore, the internet, replacing catalogs and magazines, becomes the primary exhibition space. What gets lost in translation is the physical qualities of the artwork. How can an image on a screen ever truly reproduce the colors or scent of an object, the texture of its materials, or its physical scale in relation to the viewer? Photo documents are mere illustrations of physical things. They give us important clues about the nature of objects, but they can never truly reproduce the experience of physical interaction. In his seminal essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin describes the relation of an object to its reproduction in terms of originality. An original artwork has an "aura of originality" that diminishes over subsequent reproductions. Presumably, the aura of an artwork reproduced online would be even further diminished from its printed reproduction because it can be viewed and re-posted indefinitely.

Regarding my students, I still find it difficult to convey the differences between physical artworks and their representations. One of my favorite tools to spark this conversation in the classroom is the painting, "The Treachery of Images" by the 20th century Belgian painter Rene Magritte. The painting includes a highly-representational depiction of a tobacco pipe with the text beneath, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." or in English, "This is not a pipe." I usually begin by showing an image of the painting and asking students to plainly describe what they see. Generally, they respond along the lines of, "I see a pipe and I see text." I then translate the text for them and ask, "How is this not a pipe?" After some discussion the consensus is that we are not looking at a pipe at all, but a collection of pigments, squished together with oil onto the surface of a canvas. Furthermore, we are not even examining the actual painting, but a photographic reproduction that has been converted into pixels and projected through light onto the surface of a projection screen. The ultimate takeaway? To truly understand a physical work of art, it must be experienced IRL.

As a side-note, I finally saw Magritte's painting IRL last year at the MoMA during their major retrospective of the artist. As an object, I found it to be fairly lack-luster. The paint surface was incredibly flat with a matte finish that looked surprisingly like that of a printed reproduction. Maybe Magritte intentionally negated the aura of his painting, anticipating the massively-reproducible potential of the image. The most physical aspect of experiencing the painting, for me, was navigating through the huge crowd of people milling in front of it.

Radiolab Episode: Colors

Click HERE to listen to the full episode, Colors, from WNYC's Radiolab. One of the stories, about 45 minutes into the episode, chronicles some interesting research from late-19th century. Two different researchers analyzed the mentions of specific colors in ancient texts from around the world to draw fairly shocking conclusions about the evolution of color perception in modern humans. Although this research happened way before the digital humanities, it is apparent how digital tools could be used in such research today.