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In: Ted Underwood
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For readers today, there is a wealth of information available about any given work they read, from its date of publication, its author’s biographical information, its genre, details about any previous editions or formats, and the like. On top of that, it seems as though nearly any book is available through online retailers like Amazon, public or university libraries, or as an e-book. With all this information about recent works at our fingertips, it was surprising to learn how much there still is to know about collections of written works that span only the past few centuries. On Friday, September 20, Ted Underwood, professor of English Literature and Information Science at the University of Illinois, addressed the participants of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, answering questions about how data and the absence of data relate to his work. Underwood’s area of expertise is distant reading — drawing conclusions about large collections of written work through an analysis of metadata and other less-subjective characteristics. As Underwood described in Digital Humanities Quarterly, distant reading was a technique in literature long before computers became equipped to help with it. When researchers first had access to computational methods like optical character recognition, which make the full text of a piece searchable, they applied them to a variety of problems, soon realizing what kinds of questions computers are suited to answer. People, rather than computers, are much better at closely reading a single text or the works of one author to characterize them, as well as answering “why” questions, such as “why did Read More

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In: Lyneise Williams
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In the midst of COVID-19 induced social isolation, with many institutions like museums closing their doors, digital surrogates are forced to temporarily take the place of embodied experience. While most of our distancing is temporary — for some objects, their surrogates are all we have. The weight that replicas have to bear is dependent on their function. If the original object is destroyed, through intentional or accidental means, the record of that original no longer serves as a finding aid — something that points the way to an attainable original. If our reproductions will serve in place of original objects, predicting what will be meaningful about the original is necessary, demanding, and maybe impossible. Such mindful practices are also undeniably worth it. Dr. Lyneise Williams has articulated the stakes of this issue well in, “What Computational Archival Science Can Learn from Art History and Material Culture Studies.” Why not just keep the original? Why put so much pressure on replicas? There are cases that require replicas to rise up to the task of “replacement.” Space is often an issue. Thousands of newspapers have been microfilmed, which is a much smaller and more stable form. The stability is also a key reason why originals are often not saved. Newspaper is produced cheaply, and the paper itself degrades over time. These concerns are not trivial, particularly since the housing of archival documents requires a stable environment (reminder: you shouldn’t store things you want to save in non-climate-controlled areas like basements or sheds). Sometimes it is impractical or even Read More

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In: Safiya Noble
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Happy Black History Month! (originally published February 2020) by S.E. Hackney On Thursday, January 23rd, Dr. Safiya Noble spoke to an overflowing room of students, faculty, and community members about her best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression. The thesis of the book, and of Dr. Noble’s talk, is that not only racism is actually built in to the search algorithms which we use to navigate the internet, but that the big players of the internet (Google specifically) actually profit off of that racism by tokenizing the identities of people of color. It does this by associating identity phrases such as “black girls” or “phillipina” with the sites with the most streamlined (aka profitable) SEO, which is often pornography. This is a system of classification explicitly based on the centering of the white experience and and othering of Black people and other people of color. However, as Dr. Noble spoke about in her talk, tweaking a search result or two to avoid offense doesn’t actually solve a systemic problem — one where white voices are treated as the norm, and others eventually become reduced to SEO tags to be bought and sold. This idea played out recently in Barnes & Noble’s miss guided Black History Month project, where public domain books where the race of the protagonist is not specified (determined by algorithm) have new cover art created for them, depicting the characters as People of Color. Rod Faulkner, who first brought this issue to widespread attention describes it as “literary blackface,” and points out, “Slapping illustrations of Black versions Read More