Thoughts on the (Last) Readings

It took me a few pages to figure out just why I was reading Moretti.  Okay, so this must be the part where he switches from literature to history.  Okay, maybe this is the part.  Nope.  But then I realized that it was the presentation of the data (very Tufte) and how presenting the data in different ways can make you see it differently.  I thought the bar-graph-style presentation on the novel was fascinating.  I was less persuaded by the maps — probably just because that’s not the way I visualize things.  But I thought the trees were great too — because that’s *just* the way I visualize things.  Seeing someone with a lot more imagination do what I work hard to do in my head or on paper, depending on the application, was almost inspiring.  I’m not sure that I have the creativity of a Moretti (or a Tufte) but I’ll happily steal, er, borrow from their methods where I can use their styles to draw analogies to the work I’m doing.

I was less interested in Burke’s article — while he appreciated some of the innovation inherent in Moretti, he seemed (like our friend from Google last week) a little more interested in data for data’s sake.  That’s not what Moretti is after, it seems to me.  He’s not crunching numbers to see if the numbers tell us anything interesting, however abstract.  Moretti is visually presenting data that might otherwise be presented in numbers.  It’s the presentation, not the numbers, that I found fascinating.  Does it matter if we know how many things are in a really big archive?  If you can’t read a million things in a lifetime, does it matter if the archive contains two or three million?  Isn’t it more important to “bin” the ones you care about, so that you can get started on the half million or so that you’re actually interested in?  (Okay, maybe just a couple of thousand.)  But maybe Burke is right and the numbers (and the presentation of them) would tell us things we don’t know.  Maybe there are thousands of works in a particular, as-yet-unresearched period, suggesting there’s more “there” there than we thought.

I do think Burke is right that it’s not clear that Moretti’s presentations would explain “rupture, breach, or novelty.”  If the graph is dis-continuous (reaching way back to analytic geometry and calculus there), the graph may not explain why — but it would show you the big gap between where your function was at (t-1) and where it is now (at t).  That would tell you something — maybe something you didn’t know — even if it didn’t explain why the disruption occurred.  So I think Burke’s right about Moretti in that regard, but that doesn’t mean that Moretti’s not helpful (not that Burke is saying that he isn’t) — it just means we’ll need a different toolkit to go at those jumps in the graph and understand and then explain them.  Give Moretti a break — he doesn’t solve *every* problem, he just takes a few steps toward solving a few of them.  Can’t really ask for more.  If not completely satisfied, come up with a better (or complementary) solution.

This probably comes down to different styles of learning.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all the classes I’ve taken, it’s that different people absorb and “get” information differently.  If you “speak” numbers, then Google and Burke are for you.  If you “speak” pictures, stick with Moretti and me

I’m not sure about Thomas and Ayers.  Is their project more appropriate for the web than for a journal because of the flexibility?  The ability to update rapidly (not sure that’s a big issue)?  Or just because it’s cool?  It didn’t seem like they were doing a lot that they couldn’t do in a more static article and, not surprisingly, I found the on-line version harder to reader.  I’m so 20th century.  And it bothered me that it looked like you could only print sections.  When most of the site is text and pictures, how hard would it be to let people print the text?  I understand that they’re experimenting and I’m all in favor of that — I’m just not sure that this is the ideal candidate.  I expected the map to link to more graphics — nope, just more text.  Is this doing more than a table could do in the appropriate paper form?  Not clear.  On balance, however, I applaud the attempt — definitely an interesting example from which others (with perhaps more appropriate projects) could take ideas.

With the respect of the work of our good Dr. Cohen, I thought the analogy from the short story was particularly helpful, and again, I discover that all the readings from last week and this, when taken together, provide a coherent structure.  The analogy to the short story made me rethink some of my inherent dislike for “data for data’s sake” — what I reject in Burke this week and our Google friend from last week.  Computer scientists do approach things differently and that’s a good thing — the tools they bring us likely make us more efficient researchers.  All we have to do is two things:  keep a close eye on the computer scientists, to make sure they don’t run amuk in the data at the expense of the inquiry, and realize that nothing is a panacea to solve everything — not even computers.  I’m pretty sure that all the computer searches in the world aren’t a perfect substitute for flipping open a book to the index or the bibliography. Maybe it’s the same reason that it’s so hard to browse for books on Amazon — when you don’t know just what you’re looking for, Amazon can be very frustrating.  I just want to see what’s “new” from my favorite authors.  I can do that in three second by scanning the table inside the door of Borders but it’ll take much long on Amazon to run all those searches (even if I can remember all the authors I want to look for).  So much for the impulse buys (wait, maybe that’s a good thing, at least for my financial stability) and welcome to the occasional realization (just had on yesterday) that one of my favorite music groups has had a new CD out (could have been out for months for all I’d know).  (I have the same issues with iTunes — very useful when you know what you want, much harder to find things you didn’t know you wanted.  The “things you might also like” software must be worth a fortune, because I know a lot of people who buy things that way, but that won’t find you the completely unrelated thing that you’d like if you knew it existed.)  Okay, back to the main point.  Computers do some things very, very well.  We shouldn’t confuse that, however, with them doing *everything* well.  They don’t.  They don’t understand misspellings or bad syntax or vague requests (though the Google spelling alternatives have helped me on a number of occasions).  They do quickly and efficiently bring up data that has been properly entered and stored –  that’s very helpful but it’s not the ultimate answer.

I did really like the idea of a syllabus finder — I didn’t go check it out, but I will.  I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few months (for the first time in my graduate career) looking for syllabi.  I’m putting together reading lists for directed reading classes, I’m doing a choose-your-own-adventure historiography for a class, and of course, I’ve got this major project that I’m trying to unpack.  It’s amazing how helpful syllabi can be to suggesting a group of works to start with (and then follow those bibliographies) or to helping you be sure that you’re on the right track (in topic, in authors, in books, in what’s “scholarly” in what disciplines and what’s not — love it that everyone’s reading comic books (okay, graphic novels) in history and memory classes — thanks to Art Spiegelman.)  I thought the H-Bot was cool, but I’m not sure that’s a huge step above “Ask Jeeves” or plain old Google.  Just a question of syntax to me — getting the search terms right when you frame your query.  And of course I was shocked, shocked to find Dr. C advocating for cool ways to access digital media and more of them — and free ones available to everyone.  I have my issues with open source (I work with too many economists not to think that money can set priorities in useful ways as well as bad ways) but I do think that Dr. C is right about making tools widely available.  If nothing else, that makes the world a whole big group of “beta testers” if you have the resources to either watch how your tools are being used or take feedback from those users interested enough (or frustrated enough) to send it in.  Would I pay for Google if they suddenly made it fee-for-use?  Well, really, I’d hope that the government would fork out for it and I’d do my searching at work (off hours, of course) — but I’d probably seriously consider it if the price was right.  So tool-providers would always have the option of being like dealers — they could get you addicted and then up the prices.  But if there are enough geeks out there (I use the term with  affection, as those used to be my people), someone will build a better mousetrap and steal, er, borrow and adapt good ideas for more users.  Maybe open source is like free speech — more of it just can’t be a bad thing (with the occasional problematic exception).

Looking forward to our last discussion of assigned readings . . .

-Tracy