Author: Ben Smith

Overview

My name is Ben Smith – I am a first-year PhD student in English at Brown. This is a final project for Digital Storytelling, AMST 2699, Spring Semester 2017. It focuses on digital textual analysis. It is an extension of another project I conducted earlier in the semester on Voyant: https://digitalstorytelling.jimmcgrath.us/uncategorized/voyant-read-this-for-me/.

Debates, Major Issues, and Points of Contention for Digital Textual Interpretation

In an article for the LA Review of Books, David Golumbia spells out what seems to me to be the basic point of contention surrounding digital textual interpretation in particular, and Digital Humanities in general:

Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives.

Continue reading “Final Project: Digital Textual Analysis”

Curation Project Concept:

This semester, I’m taking a graduate seminar called Reading Remains. We’re reading essays, most of them published in the last ten years, that discuss the practice of reading – how we should read, what stance we should take in relation to a text, how much or little we should engage emotionally, whether we should be suspicious of a text and seek to expose its hidden meaning, or whether we should read generously and assume that a text is openly presenting its meaning on the surface.

One of the challenges the course presents is keeping track of the terms. Different authors use different terms to describe slightly different reading styles: suspicious reading, symptomatic reading, surface reading, reparative reading, thin-description reading, thick-description reading, paranoid reading, to name a few.

So, I decided to upload the essays into Voyant in order to help me discern patterns in how the authors were using these terms. (Here are three examples of the eight I used in total).

Continue reading “Voyant, Read This For Me”

San Francisco is gentrifying. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s message could be communicated in so many words. Instead, the project uses a chaotic, disparate collection of images, links, data, audio recordings, maps, and written narratives to digitally visualize San Francisco’s gentrification. The project’s approach to data visualization is one that leads with distortion. As a user, I was disoriented immediately upon entering the site. I didn’t know where to click first, where to look first, or what the site wanted me to do or understand. That first impression planted a seed of antagonism that remained with me for the duration of my interaction with the project.

But I trudged on, clicking more or less randomly through the maps, the reports, the narratives, the statistics, the visuals. Slowly I got the picture. Tech companies are moving to San Francisco and driving up real-estate prices, and lower-income, long-time San Francisco residents are being evicted. The eviction part I got right away. But the narrative that tech companies are precipitating these evictions took me longer to understand. I had to click through dozens of links before I found the text stating explicitly that certain companies, people, laws, and organizations were to blame for gentrification.

Continue reading “Seeing Gentrification”