Category: Private (Page 10 of 11)

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• Public sphere – a place for people to share ideas
  • Printing press enabled people who didn’t have a voice to engage
  • Helps us understand the rise of the press in North America
  • Helps us understand the circulation of political opinions openly
  • Grass roots involvement – pamphlets and paper – ˆCommon Sense–
  • Also a way to see what governments saw about revolutionaries
• Framing – How information is presented
  • Journalism
  • Political science
  • Toolset for thinking about how people’s perspectives conditioned the information they produced
  • Different ways of framing things (paradigm)
• History of the book
• • Book as commodity
  • How long it takes new technology to be adopted
  • Spread of knowledge not just for its own sake

Common themes

• Necessity of looking at historical actors’ and their intention in producing sources  – against teleology
• Who is doing the framing – men, educated white men
• Framing particularly relevant because there are a lot of marginalized groups who aren’t able to express their narratives – crucial difference between American and Euro history
• Relates to public sphere, giving the underrepresented a voice
• Something about the public sphere and Revolution
• Power structures around the production and circulation of information – who has the means to buy, publish books
• Think about how that commodification conditions the material that gets published
• Audience dictates what (or some) of the information that gets shared
• American Revolution was the result of a new book/print culture

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By Dr. Shrout

Now that all of the first blog posts have come in, I’m going to do the first of many commentary posts. Mostly I’ll be pulling out interesting quotations from what you’ve written, and trying to tie the posts together somehow.

Avery raises an interesting point when she notes that “Moore was literate because her particular societal position granted her access to education, but Moore’s book does not exist only because she was literate. Moore produced the book, a cultural artefact, because of her personal “commitment to writing.”” This is important because, as (digital) historians, we have to remember to balance contingency with structure – that is, and as Eleanor also points out – Moore’s life was conditioned by her class status (structure) and gender (also structure) as well as by her own desire to write. Avery does a great job of balancing the credit we give to Moore for being an author and aggregator, and the larger structural forces that made her actions possible.

Avery also raised a fair critique of Wulf, when she noted that (for her) Wulf had failed to make the case that Moore was representative of Quaker culture. As we go forward, we’ll try to flag these moments of discomfort with historical argument, as well as what specifically was lacking.

Eleanor also noted the similarities between the kind of work done in commonplace books and that done in blogs, while Aidan (with an excellentally punny title) compares commonplace books to wikipedia. Alec, on the other hand, moves to Pinterest for his comparisons, contending that the creator of an object (digital or otherwise) has special access to the meaning of the material they collect, create and share.

This point links nicely with one made by Matt, that digital humanities make the world more accessible. Just as Moore’s book shared information that she read beyond her and among her circle of friends, so to do digital humanities projects share information beyond the original creator.

Kurt and Cordelia helpfully sums up the state of the field – noting that there is much disagreement about the meaning of digital humanities, but notes future promise.

      

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By Dr. Shrout

Virginia colonies

Dublin Core elements

Maps for metadata exercise:

La Caroline dans l’Amerique Septentrionale Suivant les Cartes Angloises.

Carolina

A New Map of Georgia

      

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By Eleanor

In Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era, Karin A. Hunt makes several interesting observations on the culture of elite, educated American women during the Revolutionary Era.

It is common knowledge that colonial America was a highly patriarchal society. Despite that, Wulf writes of several women who were educated in Quaker schools and had learned to read and write. These women formed literary circles which “mirrored the more formal institutions” among men.

“Particular women’s intellects were highly praised, although often in terms that reinforced traditional ideas about the innate intellectual abilities of men as opposed to a woman’s innate physicality. Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s mother, for example, was celebrated by Benjamin Rush as possessing both “a masculine mind, with all those female charms and accomplishments which render a woman alike agreeable to both sexes.” ” (Wulf, 30).

Even though these women seem to be highly intelligent in their own right, these quotes show us that because of their contemporary historical context, they were often overshadowed by men.

On page 33 of Milach Martha Moore’s Book, Wulf describes the circulation of texts in manuscript form as “more intimate” than printed literature. Hand-written copies could not be spread as widely or as quickly, and as such, the intellectual salons that were beginning to be formed in colonial America were the perfect setting to share these manuscripts: letters, poetry, personal diaries, and the like (Wulf, 23). The people who were interested in reading these daily accounts and thoughts were most likely already close friends of the author. In Moore’s case, “the Despite — or perhaps because of — this intimacy in relationships and scholarship within circles of people, Wulf’s example of Milcah Martha Moore’s personal commonplace book managed to become quite widely read. Rather that having a mass-market, printed edition distributed, Moore’s collected writings were spread from friend to friend. This method of information transfer reminds me in a modern context more of how information spreads over the internet than how we deal with physical printed writings. If you find something interesting, you email it to a friend or share it on a blog, maybe with your own commentary, for a circle of friends to read. That process is much more like how Moore’s writings were passed from friend to friend than if today a thousand separate people were to read the same newspaper article or the same book of poems, for example.

      

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By Eleanor

In Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era, Karin A. Hunt makes several interesting observations on the culture of elite, educated American women during the Revolutionary Era.

It is common knowledge that colonial America was a highly patriarchal society. Despite that, Wulf writes of several women who were educated in Quaker schools and had learned to read and write. These women formed literary circles which “mirrored the more formal institutions” among men.

“Particular women’s intellects were highly praised, although often in terms that reinforced traditional ideas about the innate intellectual abilities of men as opposed to a woman’s innate physicality. Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s mother, for example, was celebrated by Benjamin Rush as possessing both “a masculine mind, with all those female charms and accomplishments which render a woman alike agreeable to both sexes.” ” (Wulf, 30).

Even though these women seem to be highly intelligent in their own right, these quotes show us that because of their contemporary historical context, they were often overshadowed by men.

On page 33 of Milach Martha Moore’s Book, Wulf describes the circulation of texts in manuscript form as “more intimate” than printed literature. Hand-written copies could not be spread as widely or as quickly, and as such, the intellectual salons that were beginning to be formed in colonial America were the perfect setting to share these manuscripts: letters, poetry, personal diaries, and the like (Wulf, 23). The people who were interested in reading these daily accounts and thoughts were most likely already close friends of the author. In Moore’s case, “the Despite — or perhaps because of — this intimacy in relationships and scholarship within circles of people, Wulf’s example of Milcah Martha Moore’s personal commonplace book managed to become quite widely read. Rather that having a mass-market, printed edition distributed, Moore’s collected writings were spread from friend to friend. This method of information transfer reminds me in a modern context more of how information spreads over the internet than how we deal with physical printed writings. If you find something interesting, you email it to a friend or share it on a blog, maybe with your own commentary, for a circle of friends to read. That process is much more like how Moore’s writings were passed from friend to friend than if today a thousand separate people were to read the same newspaper article or the same book of poems, for example.

      

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By admin

However, when many of us hear the term digital humanities today, we take the referent to be not the specific subfield that grew out of humanities computing but rather the changes that digital technologies are producing across the many fields of humanist inquiry.

This caught my attention because I was, in my younger days, very interested in the interplay between history and economics. Through the study of economics’s impact on history and the history of economics separately, it became increasingly apparent that you can’t focus on just one iteration of the relationship between two disciplines without the other seeping in. As well as this, this sentence made me wonder if you could classify Moore’s commonplace book (described brilliantly as a, “a circulating library of Quaker materials” by Wulf) as a conceptual precursor to sites like Wikipedia, wherein content is circulated for the purposes of both viewing and editing/adding to a wide range of contemporaries.

Those differences often produce significant tension, particularly between those who suggest that digital humanities should always be about making (whether making archives, tools, or new digital methods) and those who argue that it must expand to include interpreting.

I found this to be an interesting partner to the idea Wulf suggests when she talks about how contemporary readers of Moore’s commonplace book would have understood and reacted to very different things than modern readers would have. I think when considering this argument it is important to remember that people interpreting sources/archives may well see something distinct from the author’s intended point/area of inquiry. In fact, in the study of primary sources, embracing the fact that we’re not the intended audience and not reading a source in the intended manner often yields more accurate interpretation.

As Neil Fraistat, director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, pointed out in a recent talk at the University of Texas at Austin, these debates can be most productive if we understand them as a means of opening ourselves to the kinds of conversations that true interdisciplinarity can support.

This reminded me of a point I raised in class about the definition of “Digital Humanities”. And it got me thinking, why can’t we acknowledge the benefits of using digital archiving and resource gathering to aid our interpretation of history without having to arbitrarily bracket both practices together under the umbrella of a term that only really directly applies to one of them. The practice of interpreting has been around long before the concept of computers, let alone “Digital Humanities”. But then again, could it not be argued that were it not for the digital resources used, the interpretation would never have been possible? Would that degree of necessity not warrant (or at least excuse) the annexation of interpretation to the study of “Digital Humanities”?

1. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012 Print Edition, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/30.

2. Neil Fraistat, “The Question(s) of Digital Humanities,” Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, last modified February 7, 2011, http://mith.umd.edu/the-questions-of-digital-humanities/.

3. Karin Wulf, “Introduction: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era,” in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, ed Karin Wulf et al (Penn State Press, 2010)

      

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By admin

I have selected three quotes from the Fitzgerald article that I felt related to the Wulf article on commonplace books in the Revolutionary era.

“Digital humanities has gained prominence in the last couple of years, in part because of the visibility given the field by the use of social media, particularly Twitter”

Here, Fitzgerald describes the importance of Twitter in spreading the ideas of digital humanities. This reminded me of the importance of the salon in informal literary culture during the Revolutionary era, as an individual was essentially opening up an intimate area of his or her life (personal opinions in the Twitter example, the home in the salon example) in order to further some agenda.

“There has long been a separation, for instance, between studio artists and art historians or between literary scholars and creative writers”

This statement reminded me of the distinction between informal, salon literary culture and the formal, published literary culture described in the Wulf article.

“The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another.”

This definition of digital made me question the thoughts that I had originally had on the Wulf article. Initially, the salon literary culture seemed purely non-digital in that handwritten manuscripts were passed along instead of printed works. However, if we use the definition quoted above, it seems that the salon literary culture is digital in that it relies heavily on human interaction and direct communication to achieve success.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” Debates in the Digital Humanities, last modified 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/30

Karin Wulf, “Introduction: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era,” in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, ed Karin Wulf et al (Penn State Press, 2010)

      

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By admin

“Digital humanities thus grows specifically out of an attempt to make ‘humanities computing,’ which sounded as though the emphasis lay on the technology, more palatable to humanists in general.”

This quote helps us better understand the goal of digital humanities. This quote stresses the important role that technology plays in the world of digital humanities and that technology plays a bigger role than the actual humanities aspect.

“And there are initiatives that are designed to help digital humanities archives and projects become interoperable and to facilitate the peer review of these projects.”

Here Fitzpatrick talks about the importance of “initiatives” or projects funded, and how they are very useful in the digital humanities world as people can offer commentary on more items. I find this interesting because it makes peoples commentaries more accessible to the general public.

“However, when many of us hear the term digital humanities today, we take the referent to be not the specific subfield that grew out of humanities computing but rather the changes that digital technologies are producing across the many fields of humanist inquiry”

I tend to agree that when hearing digital humanities I do not think of a field that has stranded off of humanities. I see digital humanities as what digital technology has done to make works more accessible. Thus, improving the amount of people that have access to these works. A person no longer has to go to the louvre to see the Mona Lisa they can simply type it into google.

“differences often produce significant tension, particularly between those who suggest that digital humanities should always be about making (whether making archives, tools, or new digital methods) and those who argue that it must expand to include interpreting”

I find this excerpt intriguing as this dilemma among people as to what role interpreting should play in digital humanities. I believe it should play a large role. Computers can do much in terms of accomplishing things and improving the digital humanities, but the computers lack something important that I feel are essential for humanities, and that is human reason.

“The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another.”

I agree with this Fitzpatrick statement on the contribution of digital humanities. I believe a prime example of this accomplishment is the bible. Prior to digital humanities the bible was translated between many of languages. This translations often accidentally included the commentary from the previous translator. With digitalizing all books of the bible you can look at different versions in different languages to attempt to read the bible in its quintessential form. This is where digital humanities is relevant as it helps us better understand the humanities.

      

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By admin

Passages of Interest:

1. “If it is harder for the modern reader to find Moore’s book as accessible as did the author’s contemporaries, it is nonetheless possible to recapture many aspects of the eighteenth-century cultures shared by Moore and her original audience. The friends and family members with whom Moore shared her book would have known the full cast of characters represented in the book … They would have understood the jests, the sly allusions, and the biblical citations.” (2)

Even though Moore’s close companions definitely would have more immediately and intimately understood this text than even an expert scholar could hope to, I think it’s important to remember that there is still some element to the book (and to any text, really) whose meaning can only be accessed by the creator. I think this is especially true for more “personal” texts, like diaries, commonplace books, memoirs, and the like, which makes me feel all the more weird for having access to Moore’s book.

2. “School settings were an arena for the exchange and copying of manuscript writings … [and] evening gatherings provided a forum for reading aloud from poetry or prose manuscripts.” (37)

I’m trying to think of what the modern day equivalent or corollary may be to these social writing swaps. I will often send a friend a link (via Facebook, or maybe email) to a video/article/post I stumble upon and find interesting. Or I may share a piece of writing – typically something for a class that I’d like to get feedback on – in an email or as a hard copy. My digital exchanges of texts far outnumber the in-person physical ones, though, and while I suppose that my Facebook chat logs or archived emails offer a (very cluttered) database of these shared pieces, it’s certainly a less thoughtful and centralized collection than Moore and her peers were likely to have.

3. “Thus the range of political opinions expressed in More’s commonplace book, and authors of those opinions, ranged from extreme patriotism to extreme loyalism.” (38)

This is pretty fascinating to me, perhaps just because I am so used to reading texts (both primary and secondary sources) that tend to ardently tout and express an argument from a single point of view. If other perspectives are mentioned, it is often just to a rhetorical end. So, the fact that Moore’s commonplace book features the heterogenous perspectives of her peers appeals to me, since it’s pretty often in life that I have to come to terms with the diverse opinions of my own companions.

Works Cited:

Moore, Milcah Martha, Catherine L Blecki, and Karin A Wulf. 1997. Milcah Martha Moore’s Book. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.

      

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By admin

“within the field—every “What Is Digital Humanities?” panel aimed at explaining the field to other scholars winds up uncovering more differences of opinion among its practitioners”(Fitzpatrick, The Humanities, Done Digitally).

This quote sticks out to me because it clearly highlights that digital humanities do not have a clear definition and that there is continued debate about what they truly are. This allowed for me to more analyze the article than to take it as fact.

“I wrote that the digital humanities could be understood as “a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities” (Fitzpatrick, The Humanities, Done Digitally).

This quote does a good job of giving readers a brief overview of a basic understanding of digital humanities. Very helpful for someone who has never explored this field before. Also makes me think of the Wulf article, as she clearly explains how it is helpful to have background knowledge of the authors past experiences in regards to religion, marriage, economic status, and experiences.

“Digital humanities as it is currently practiced isn’t just located in literary studies departments; the field is broadly humanities based and includes scholars in history, musicology, performance studies, media studies, and other fields that can benefit from bringing computing technologies to bear on traditional humanities materials” (Fitzpatrick, The Humanities, Done Digitally).

This quote does a great job of emphasizing the versatility of digital humanities studies in a wide variety of academic fields. Makes the study of digital humanities seem very prevalent.

“Those differences often produce significant tension, particularly between those who suggest that digital humanities should always be about making (whether making archives, tools, or new digital methods) and those who argue that it must expand to include interpreting” (Fitzpatrick, The Humanities, Done Digitally).

This ties in to what Fitzpatrick says at the beginning about there still being much debate about what digital humanities truly are. This helps to make it clear as to what the debate is consisting of. Very interesting to think about the possibilities that digital humanities can provide for future research.