COCH/COSH 2001 Abstracts
In order of appearance
Bill Winder: Expertise en sciences humaines et pensée collective
Stéfan Sinclair: SATORBASE, un logiciel de collaboration en ligne
Ron Tetreault: Belphégor and the Evolution of the Dalhousie Electronic Text Centre
In the past year, the ETC at Dalhousie University has concentrated on developing an electronic publishing service. We were prompted to move beyond hosting personal research projects by a member of our French Department who wished to start an electronic journal. His project, Belphégor, is a multi-lingual, peer-reviewed online journal devoted to the scholarly study of popular literature and media culture.
The rise of Belphégor made us address several larger issues of electronic publishing. Top priority was given to the issue of credibilty, as raised in Keith Archer's HSSFC report on "Electronic Publishing in the Humanities". Through a system of peer evaluation and an alliance with Dalhousie's Academic Computing Services that guarantees the stability of our data we hope to allay doubts about the quality of online publications.
Belphégor provides the model for a number of other e-publishing projects at Dalhousie, foremost among which is a new Canadian Journal of Law and Technology. We are making every effort to establish our electronic publishing initiatives on a sound institutional footing, not only through measures of quality control but also through the development of a business plan and the fulfillment of legal obligations with regard to copyright and liability. We hope in the future to undertake new projects, and to work in cooperation with other text centres in the region to increase the viability of electronic publishing.
Maite Taboada: The Genre Structure of Bulletin Board Messages
Maite Taboada
MindfulEye Systems Inc.
Vancouver, Canada
maite.taboada@primus.ca
Messages posted on bulletin boards on the Internet represent a new, somewhat different, form of communication. They draw both from casual conversation and from other written genres in their structure and characteristics.
In this paper, I explore the genre structure of bulletin board posts. Genre is defined a purposeful, staged, goal-oriented activity (Martin 1985), which as such evolves in clearly defined stages. For instance, the high-level generic structure of a telephone conversation consists of an opening, a problem-solving (or main body) and a leave-taking stage. Messages posted on bulletin boards correspond to a variety of genres: argumentation for an opinion, personal attacks on other posters, pros and cons of a certain product, demands for advice, etc.
This paper provides definitions of a few of these genres and an exploration of their structural characteristics. Such descriptions are useful in computational applications such as topic classification and information retrieval.
Reference
Martin, J. R. (1985) Process and Text: Two Aspects of Human Semiosis. In James Benson and William Greaves (eds.) Systemic Perspectives on Discourse. Vol. 1. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 248-274.
Francois Lachance: Hyperlistes - Reprise et réalisations: évolution d'un modèle
Le corpus de travail est un ensemble hétérogène de textes à listes du XIIe au XVIe siècles dont le corps principal est constitué de poèmes énumératifs en français. Ceux-ci comportent des listes de noms propres (titres d'oeuvres, personnes, lieux) et communs : nourritures, vins, ustensiles, outils, métiers, etc., qui constituent un riche répertoire terminologique. L'intention du projet est de réaliser une publication hypertextuelle de l'ensemble du corpus avec d'une part, possibilité de liens d'un texte à l'autre entre les différents termes figurant dans le corpus et d'autre part, de liens entre ces termes et le dictionnaire dans lequel ils seront définis et expliqués.
L'encodage du corpus permet de formaliser une intuition théorique, c'est-à-dire, de traiter la liste de façon à y voir plus qu'un simple phénomène d'énumération et de la concevoir comme un appareil de "passerelles".
Greg Polly: Now You See It: Theorizing Computer-Based Interactive Narratives
Denison University
gpolly@clover.net / polly@denison.edu
The computing medium has given rise to new interactive narrative forms like hypertext fiction and narrative video gaming. Increasingly, both textual and video types of interactive narrative are discussed and theorized together, as if they were interchangeable. In this paper I want to distinguish between the effects of the two narrative media by considering the form and function of the image in each.
Common sense suggests that the chief difference between a video narrative and a textual one is that the video medium allows you to see the objects of the narrative whereas the textual narrative does not. Our theorizing tends to underrate this difference, but in this paper I will argue for its central importance. The most important fact about reading a textually-mediated narrative is that the cognitive object is not given in visual perception. Paradoxically enough, this visual absence gives textual experience its own distinctive visual effect--for it forces the imagination to create compensatory objects in "the mind's eye. " We have a different cognitive and existential relationship with these imagined objects than with the perceptually-driven images of film and video, and this relationship marks an important distinction between text and video narrative. This difference has especially significant consequences for the special case of "interactive" narrative structures like hypertext fiction and narrative video games.
A phenomenological tradition represented most famously by Wolfgang Iser has long insisted that the cognitively-simulated image is crucial to the experience of reading fictional narrative. Recently several critics (Collins, Esrock, Scarry) have pointed out that this school of thought is supported by recent experimental findings about mental imagery. Stephen Kosslyn's experiments, for example, strongly indicate that mental imagery not only mediates many kinds of cognitive problem solving--whether or not subjects report seeing it vividly--but recruits the actual perceptual mechanisms of vision in a much more literal sense than anyone had suspected.
Wolfgang Iser insists that images are not a mere aftereffect of cognitive interpretation. On the contrary, they are the primary form in which the mind bridges interpretive gaps or blanks in a text. The vague fluidity of the images that accompany reading is not a deficiency but a consequence of the necessary openness and revisability of the interpretive act that creates them. Indeed, according to Iser, this is why people so often find film versions of their favorite novels so disappointing: not because they imagined the characters differently--for if you ask them, their images turn out to be rather vague and unfinished--but because this lack of specificity marks their participation in the creating the image they observe.
Christopher Collins has offered the most arresting version of this point by reminding us that sensory deprivation experiments cause people literally to hallucinate, as if the brain cannot bear a lack of varied sensory stimulation. Collins reminds us, too, that the conditions used to stimulate hallucinations in the laboratory--like darkness, dimness, homogeneous or random black-and-white patterns--are quite similar to the usual conditions of reading (say, at night in a darkened room). His "hallucinatory" account of reading imagery emphasizes that reading a text has its own peculiarly embodied quality.
By contrast, the image in video narrative is a passively-received percept. It acts (or more accurately is acted upon) as a sign, but its nature is radically different from the reading image. Its perceptual nature makes it more vividly arresting but also more rigid, not so liable to subjective reshaping or mutation and not so ambiguously located inside the subject that nonetheless views it.
What are the implications of this difference for the varieties of open or interactive narrative now making claims upon our attention in both media? I will discuss three.
- From the standpoint of image-production, hypertext narratives are not such a radical departure from traditional textual narratives; the in vivo experience of closing textual gaps with images is much the same in both forms. At the same time, the phenomenological tradition makes traditional narrative appear maximally hypertextual even before the advent of hypertext technology. The text is envisioned as a virtual web of constantly changing information as a reader tests and retests new information against the "archive," updating both in the process.
- Attention to the "image" reveals a profound difference between textual and visual media, however. Image and narrative work together symbiotically in the textual medium. But in the video medium they are pitted against each other in a more zero-sum fashion. Increasing the intensity of images in a video game by making them more perceptually realistic and kinetically compelling foregrounds the moment of quick-reflex skill and detaches it from a cumulative narrative context. It is true that the important video-game aspect of "strategy" is dimly narrative--yet, ironically, the singleminded teleology of strategy tends against dialogic and heteroglossic complexity and thus against narrative complexity. (Puzzle-solving alone is not by itself strongly narrative: try telling the story of how you solved your last crossword.)
- I will close with a provocative claim: if the phenomenological school is correct, then textual narrative can invoke and rehearse a more open, embodied relation to the world than interactive video narrative--even though the video narrative is more apparently mimetic of sensory experience. Video mimesis impinges directly on the senses--except that the body is all the while entirely protected from pain. As a result, the more powerful mimesis of video has in the end a more Cartesian effect: the reactions of the body are directly recruited but the body is turned into a disembodied phenomenon of will. By contrast, textual narrative triggers a virtual simulation of sensory experience that blurs the boundaries between mind and body in a somewhat less programmatic manner. I will mention some theoretical approaches to this topic (e.g., Manuel de Landa) and suggest the specific importance of narrative autonomy as it emerges in interactive text and video.
Sean Gouglas: Uncharted Territory: The Application of Geographical Information Technologies (GIS) Computer Mapping Technologies to Historical Inquiry
Traditional historical studies of the distribution of wealth in nineteenth-century Ontario depend heavily on demographic information obtained from three decennial censuses. Generally, these studies emphasize cultural factors, such as country of birth and religion, as important variables in shaping variations in wealth amongst rural residents. Absent from most of these studies is an incorporation of the physical landscape. GIS mapping techniques allow the digitization of historic maps, permitting the integration of land quality variables, such as distance to water and location relative to the Niagara Escarpment, into conventional cultural statistical models. This digitization of census records and historic maps offers historians and historic geographers an opportunity to challenge traditional interpretations of how Ontario was settled and farmed.
John Bonnet: The Oral Tradition in 3D: Harold Innis, Information Visualisation and the 3D Historical Cities Project
One of the key challenges facing Humanists in the 21st century will be the generation of new conventions. Scholars such as Janet Murray and Robert Logan have argued that western culture is only beginning to break free from conventions created with print technology, and that new forms of narration and representation should be explored. Different conventions may make better use of the computer's capabilities, and may open new vistas for teaching and scholarship.
This paper will argue that as Canadian scholars consider these questions, they would be wise to reacquaint themselves with the communication studies of Harold Innis. In Political Economy in the Modern State and his later studies, Innis anticipated many of the problems tasking educators today, particularly the need for teaching methods that stimulate critical thinking. Innis's endorsement of the oral tradition anticipated contemporary interest in the philosophy of constructivism, the belief that students best learn ideas and concepts by constructing models themselves.
The idea, while good in principle, is often difficult to implement. In history classes students are often overwhelmed by the quantity of information they are asked to retain and manipulate. Historians seeking to foster critical thinking face the key problem of information management. Innis's solution was to shift from text to visual forms of representation, be they emblems, icons or architecture. Such forms often brought to light ideas and patterns that would otherwise not be perceived.
This paper will provide a case study demonstrating how Innis's ideas on information visualisation might be applied. It features the 3D Historical Cities Project, an initiative in which students are taught critical thinking skills while generating historical replicas of Canadian cities using 3D computer modelling software.
Sophie Levy: Cut & Paste: Sexual/Textual Editing in the Work of Monika Treut and Kathy Acker
Novelist/performance artist Kathy Acker and filmmaker Monika Treut are both pioneers in their fields. They both use the guerrilla tactics of raw material, subversion and invective overload, to pursue gender politics in their chosen forms. As socialist, cyborg feminists, both Acker and Treut create from the subjective 'I', embedded in the network of contemporary discourses and communications. Acker's work is controversial as much for its use of 'plagiarism' as for its explicit sexual content, while Treut's documentaries have the same boundary position in the canon as her subjects, experts in their marginal fields by virtue of their lived experience. Their work offers intriguing possibilities for visions of the development of new media. Whereas theorists working from psychoanalytic disciplines argue for virtual reality as a therapeutic space where we can regain a sense of agency within a carefully-edited script (because it is not real), the way in which Acker and Treut draw on postmodern theory to shape their texts suggest that cyberspace, like codex literature and film, may become another arena in which identity can be cut and pasted. The virtual/real binary collapses like the gender binary.
Both Acker and Treut employ technologies to produce their effects - which, I would argue, are Foucauldian effects at the level of the body. Crossing genre/gender boundaries is a subversion that affects not only our perception of the artist, but readers' perception of their (possible) selves. In Acker's Empire of the Senseless, her plagiarism/parody/pastiche of William Gibson's Neuromancer maps surgical procedures of body alteration onto the editing of both text and the author and reader's identities. This creates a shifting signifier 'I', which can be read in parallel with the 'eye' of Monika Treut's films. In Gendernauts, she re-embodies the filmmaker, presenting herself as interrogatory voice and visible subject, rather than recording angel. Yet the film's central project is to problematize the presentation of self in terms of recognised categories. As its title suggests, those exploring the boundaries of gender(s) are similar to other explorers: astronauts and cybernauts. While none of her subjects travel in outer space, many of them use visual, digital and hypermedia to (re)present and edit their sexualities.
Both Acker and Treut frequently use the simple artistic operation of cutting and pasting. Acker has inherited it as a literal action from William Burroughs, whose work draws parallels between surgical and textual intervention in Naked Lunch and Blade Runner: A Movie. Treut foregrounds the role of editing in the film by seguing from in situ monologues by moving subjects, to static blue-screen interviews. Again, the attention she pays to the artists in the film, observing them editing their videos and websites - much as she observes them in medical situations - reinforces the metaphor of cut-and-paste.
Both Acker and Treut practice a mode of creativity that could be related to Haraway's concept of "relational science" (Simians, Cyborgs and Women). Treut's reference to the Brandon Teena project in Gendernauts, and Acker's textual performance of her cancer in Eurydice in the Underworld, address the complex construction and operation of technologies of gender in the real world. Drawing an equivalence between body and text (Acker's essays are collected under the title Bodies of Work), they practice subversion via representation, putting theory into practice by demonstrating the range of possibility existing between zero and one.
Works Cited
Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless (Grove Press: New York 1988
_____, Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press: New York 1996)
_____, Bodies of Work (Serpent's Tail: London 1997)
_____, Eurydice in the Underworld (Arcadia Books: London 1997)
Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body. (Duke University Press: Durham, Texas & London 1996)
Bell, David and Barbara M. Kennedy (eds). The Cybercultures Reader (Routledge: London and New York 2000)
Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch (Grove Press: New York 1959)
_____, Blade Runner: A Movie (Blue Wind Press: Berkeley 1990)
Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberfiction (Athlone Press: London and New Brunswick, New Jersey 2000)
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (4 vols.) tr. Robert Hurley (Pantheon Books: New York 1978)
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. (Ace Books: New York 1984)
_____, Idoru. (Berkeley Books: New York 1996)
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women. (Free Association: London 1991)
Kirkup, Gill, Linda James, Katherine Woodward and Fiona Hovenden. (eds) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. (Routledge: London & New York 2000)
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (The Free Press: New York 1997)
Stone, Allucquere Rosanna (Sandy). The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. (MIT: Cambridge, Massachusetts 1995)
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. The Female Body in Western Culture (Harvard U.P.: Cambridge, Massachusetts 1986)
Treut, Monika. (dir.) The Virgin Machine (1992)
_____, Gendernauts (1999)
http://brandon.guggenheim.org (Last checked 29th March 2001)
Lars Rains: "More Human Than Human": Negotiating Cyborg Subjectivity
Sue Fisher and Lisa Charlong: Surveying the Landscape: A Review of Existing Humanities Computing Programs
Sue Fisher and Lisa Charlong, Electronic Text Centre, University of New Brunswick
Are there commonalities in the philosophy and infrastructure of Humanities Computing curricula? One approach to answering this question involves conducting a survey of existing courses, programs, and degrees to explore how each addresses a set of issues common to curriculum development within the university. Our intent in this paper is to conduct a review that will not only interrogate assumptions about the Humanities Computing tradition and its emerging canon but that will also provide the groundwork for those interested in pursuing Humanities Computing curricular development within their own institutions.
Our intent is to look primarily at graduate courses and degree programs but anticipating their number to be small and in many cases too new to evaluate, we will extend our focus to key undergraduate offerings. Our search will span Canada, the United States, and Europe. Our review will be based upon literature searches (both print and electronic), program material on institutional Web sites, and, where necessary, correspondence with program representatives.
We would bring the following categories of inquiry to the review: á
Philosophy of the program
- What does a comparison of any mission statements or program descriptions reveal?
- To what degree is the program practical, professional, or theoretical in its description or overall course offerings?
- What are the research requirements of the program?
Canon formation
- Which courses are mandatory? Which optional?
- What range of literature is covered?
- What is the home faculty or department for the program?
Interdisciplinarity
- How does the range of humanities disciplines interact within the program?
- What is the relationship among traditional research within the humanities and computing practices and principles?
- How does the program engage other campus resources such as libraries, archives, electronic text centers, university presses etc.
Infrastructure issues
- How has the program addressed issues such as lab space, smart classrooms, and software licensing?
- Has the program integrated existing faculty, staff, courses and other resources, and, if so, how?
Hands-on work
- What is the nature and content of labs or other hands-on course components?
- Does the program offer a mentoring placement, practicum, or internship?
- If so, what types of organizations are students placed in? How is the practicum integrated into the program requirements?
It is our hope that by reviewing what currently exists in terms of humanities computing curricula, we will be able to draw conclusions about the nature and trends in this emerging discipline.
John Unsworth: A Master's Degree in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia
Americ's culture, and its cultural heritage, is migrating very rapidly to the World-Wide Web. To manage that migration, and to take advantage of the new intellectual and creative possibilities it offers, we need trained professionals who understand both the humanities and information technology, and we need them in a number of different areas-museums, libraries, teaching, scholarship, publishing, government, communications, and entertainment, to name a few. We can already see that this is true: the Library of Congress is putting millions of items in its collection online; every major art museum now has a Web site; computers have become part of the teaching of literature, history, religious studies, and other disciplines; the next generation of scholarly editions of major American authors will be electronic editions, and the next generation of paperbacks will be E-Books.
The University of Virginia's Master's Degree in Digital Humanities (enrolling students beginning in Fall of 2002) will prepare graduate students to meet this immediate cultural need, and it will offer them the training to apply information technology to the intellectual content of the humanities, and to experiment with the analytical possibilities that information technology offers the humanities. At the end of the first year of this program, students will have a broad but practical sense of the challenges that one must overcome in making humanities content tractable to computational methods. By the end of the second year, students will be able to meet such challenges, even if doing so requires building new tools or inventing new methods.
The Master's degree in digital humanities will provide students with experience in recognizing and articulating problems in humanities computing and working collaboratively to solve them, as well as providing hands-on experience in designing and creating digital media. Students who complete this degree might go on to further graduate work, for example a Ph.D. in a traditional discipline of the humanities, or they might elect to seek employment in publishing, communications, commerce, cultural institutions, or any of a number of other areas in which their skills and intellectual training would have immediate value.
The course of study for the MA in Digital Humanities is a two-year cycle of core courses and electives: in order to complete the program, a student will take at least 27 hours of coursework at the 500-900 level. In addition, a one-credit internship and a one-credit teaching seminar are required, and students will enroll in several non-topical research courses, for a total of 48 credit hours. Successful completion of this MA program requires students to have, or to acquire, a working familiarity with major computer operating systems (PC, Macintosh, Unix) and software more specialized than the usual office applications (e.g., visual programming software, multimedia authoring tools, databases), as well as with markup languages (e.g., SGML, XML) and programming languages (e.g., Perl, Java). Working with a faculty advisor, each student will develop a thesis project that consists partly of work in team-based environments and partly of individual writing and reflection. In addition to their course work and thesis project, students are required to complete internships: most will also lead discussion sections for Media Studies 110, an introductory undergraduate course.
Concentration Electives: The purpose of these electives is to provide each student with in-depth graduate course work in a humanities subject area, as a context for that studentâs humanities computing-for example, a student with background and research interests in medieval literature might choose to take these electives in medieval literature, medieval history, and linguistics, might choose to intern with an ongoing faculty research project in medieval studies, and might design a thesis project that applies humanities computing tools and techniques to a research problem with a particular medieval text. Students will complete at least three humanities electives during the course of study for the M.A.. These courses must be at the 500-900 level and they must be chosen in consultation with the faculty advisor. These courses may be chosen from approved humanities offerings outside the College of Arts and Sciences (for example, in Architecture, Education, or Law).
Programming Language Requirement: Entering students should be able to demonstrate competence in at least one computer programming language by passing a ninety-minute examination, administered by the Computer Science department at the University and designed to ascertain the studentâs understanding of basic concepts and principles of computer programming. For students entering without this competence, an intensive summer course will be offered in conjunction with Computer Science; other options for acquiring this competence include taking an undergraduate course in the College of Engineering, provided that prerequisites are met, taking a course at Piedmont Virginia Community College, or learning through project-based self-instruction. Whatever course is chosen, students must pass the competency exam no later than the beginning of the third semester.
Geoffrey Rockwell: A Context for Competence: Developing a Multimedia Programme
What should a student know when they graduate from a humanities computing programme? One way to think about the curriculum of a programme is to identify the skills and knowledge that you wish graduate students to possess. Identifying competencies allows you to then work through the curriculum to see if opportunities are created for students to aquire the desired skills and knowledge. Such and "outcome" based way of developing a curriculm has the advantage that it is way of confronting the tangle of issues around teaching technical skills in the humanities and how to integrate such skills into courses.
At McMaster we developed a model for auditing our Multimedia programme based on competencies, which we define broadly so as to include technical skills, knowledge, and certain learning abilities. In this paper I will do the following:
- Introduce the McMaster Combined Honours in Multimedia (and Another Subject) programme.
- Discuss the Competency model, how we developed it and how we use it to audit our programme.
- Summarize the competencies that we identified as important and defend the way we integrate technique and knowledge into courses by creating contexts for the learning of skills.
- Outline the results of our audit and what we learned about our programme by auditing it in this fashion.
- Conclude with a reflection on how we need to discuss such models explicitly in order to build reasonable expectations among students and other stakeholders.
At this point in the development of humanities computing programmes in Canada there is no public understanding of what is learned in such programmes. We are the generation that is taking humanities computing out of the research centre and into the curriculum of the humanities. We are in the unique situation of having to define through instructional structure a new discipline (or interdiscipline). While no one expects anything more than a vague statement from traditional disciplines as to what a student will learn in those areas, in the case of humanities computing we need to explicitly state our expectations to help students make choices and to help our colleagues understand the connection between computing and the humanities. Above all we need to be open so that our experiments can be audited and refined. We need to create a context for instructional competence.
Ray Siemens: Electronic Publication and its Academic Credibility, in Canada and Beyond
Ray Siemens, presenting on the work of Michael Best, Elizabeth Grove-White, Alan Burk, James Kerr, Andy Pope, Jean-Claude GuŽdon, Geoffrey Rockwell, Lynne Siemens, and Ray Siemens (project leader).
At the request of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, a team assembled from among the faculty at Malaspina University-College, the University of Victoria, the University of New Brunswick, McMaster University and UniversitŽ de MontrŽal undertook, last year, an exploration of the urgent issues relating to the perception -- and ultimately the use -- of electronic publication within the Canadian academic community and beyond.
This address will present the findings of that research team, discussing the results of the critical assessment they carried out of the North American and European literature surrounding the notion of credibility in electronic scholarly publication and highlighting the team's recommendations, recommendations that take into account both that literature and factors unique to our national context established, in part, through an extensive questionnaire.