TextArc: The Tool That Wasn't

TextArc, which I've encountered before in a bibliography class, is one of those tools that makes you go "gee Whiz, now that I've got all this computing power, I can do amazing things with those stodgy old books."

But I'm not sure I understand fully what these amazing things are, or how best to use them. Part of this is my issue with running this incredibly memory intensive program; the first five times I tried it crashed my browser. I finally got the Alice in Wonderland to work, but I never did get The Three Muskateers to do so. I didn't realize there was a sound component until I read down the main page -- mostly because I browse with the sound off in my office, so as not to annoy my office-mates when I'm too lazy to dig out my headphones.

My ultimate problem with TextArc functionally boils down to a lack of imagination. I'm sure that if I were to study a text, and then run it through the program (on a much faster computer than mine), I would be able to see the patterns that should be showing up. Currently it looks like a really neato-screen saver, along the lines of Electric Sheep and I'm not sure I'm getting the logic behind what it's doing. I would be interested in a "guided tour" of the TextArc program; I found that I got more out of the Still Images section than running the program itself, because it came with more indepth explanations and didn't kick you out for accidentally clicking on something.

Upshot: I can see where this tool would be useful for a critical examination of a well-known text once one had time to learn how to use the features. My automatic reaction, when attempting to explore anew online feature, is to randomly click on things that look interesting. I suppose this is similar to babies putting everything they find in their mouthes to see what it tastes like, but it usually works. It is not, however, useful behavior for exploring TextArc, and as a result (well, plus the 5-minute-plus load times and the five-or-so crashes) left me feeling rather frustrated. My final reaction: Gee Whiz, I feel incompetent.

Hypertext as persuasion

As part of our discussion of hypertexts and Choose Your Own Adventure Books, I found a link to an interesting BoingBoing article. For another neat example, see this image that I found from a comment on the BoingBoing article.

The mapping process here is what I was trying to talk about in class; trees that allow us to immediately jump to different branches of an argument. While this might not be good entertainment in a CYOA book, this is primarily because CYOA is about entertainment, whereas persuasive hypertexts would highly benefit from this flexibility.

Stealing to feed the media appetite.

Several of my friends were willing to spill on their legal, semilegal, and pretty-illegal collecting habits, so long as I agreed to leave them anonymous or, in one case, identify only by their job. I'll note that the lengthiest answers were from librarians, which, since I was conducting some of the survey on my other blog, lead to comments such as "librarians are the biggest bunch of pirates i ever did see" and "information wants to be FREEEEEEEEEEEE."

Friend 1:
"I regularly rip CDs (of my own, my friends and Public Library) to my computer and from there to my mp3 player, which I believe is a double-violation of the strictest reading of DRM laws...
I justify this because it's MINE (library materials are also "mine" in the way that they are also everyone else's) and I should be able to enjoy music/audio books the way I want when I want if on computer, mp3 player or cd.
I also share these items at will to other people who might like them, and I snag music/video/books from people when they have things that I might like without regard to whether or not those people have acquired the items legally. Gran Torino was an awesome movie. It was even better snuggled up in bed instead of in an uncomfortable movie theather.

On a tangent: If I recommend a book to someone, and they like it, they often pass it around. I bought Predictably Irrational and after I read it, it passed through my mom, dad, sister, best friend and both her roommates. (the second has it still and I'll get it back from her eventually.) All that in less than a year. The same happened with My Jesus Year, My Father's Paradise and Traffic I feel like music and video stuff is kinda like that, except I know that the digital copies being easy and free and non-unique bit makes it totally unlike that."

Friend 2, "I frequently take music from friends -
and I have no other reason other than because I'm cheap."

Friend 3, the School Librarian (phone interview):
Pirates many things, but with lots of justification:
Music: pirates music that he already owns, but for whatever reason cannot put onto his computer, where he listens to most of his music. Otherwise, any music collection which is not released in the US is fairgame; British albums in particular.
TV/Movies: very similar to music, only what is not readily available in US (ie BBC), although he acknowledges that if he wanted to pay $$$$ he could probably get BBC as a premium channel.
Images: Attempts to use fair-use images from Flikr for things like business cards and classroom presentaitons. Has no compunctions about pirating porn. (he went on for a while. This was the short version. Will try to update later).

Friend 4:
"Personally I just pirate software that would in theory let me pirate movies, but that I just use to let me actually use my movies... I can explain in more depth if anyone wants..."

There seems to be a consensus that if you buy a piece of music/movie/item once, but the restrictions do not allow you to use the item as you want (ie, usually on the computer) that it is morally, if not legally, ok to rip it, either from your copy or anohter's copy.

Ganked from the LJ of a friend of mine, because it seemed relevant in the face of our launching into learning how to code:
Profanity in the Comments.


"When we created mozilla.org and released (most of) the source code to Netscape Confusicator 4.x, Netscape's lawyers made us go through a big "sanitization" process on the source code. Largely this consisted of making sure we had the legal rights to all the code we were releasing, and making sure every file had proper and accurate copyright statements; but they also made us take out all the dirty words. Specifically, "any text containing vulgar or offensive words or expressions; any text that might be slanderous or libelous to individuals and/or institutions." " © 2004 Jamie Zawinski

Digital Humanities: History and Future

I find myself having more difficulty with this assignment than I originally expected. This post may sound like a book-report in search of a point, but I think the usability of these sources is inherently informing of their content. If Humanities Computing is the act of putting the output of human creativity into a computer or other electronic device in order to save it for future generations, analyze its content, or cause it to be more easily and effectively accessed and utilized, then it is only successful to the extent that it fulfills these goals.

The readings seem to aim to provide a history of the field, and I actually expected Fraser’s “A Hypertextual History of Humanities Computing,” would be more like the University of Michigan’s timeline for digital technologies and preservation: (this is a really great at-a-glance timeline for technology) but focusing on technologies applied to the humanities. While clearly not finished yet (it currently has an extremely fragmentary feel) this seems like an accessible mode to present this information. The fragmentary nature of the writing makes me wonder how complete the information itself is; are there significant gaps in the units that are up, or is it just waiting for a final read-over?

The mapping exercise (found here), on the other hand, creates a visual overview of the many related fields touched on and influenced by Humanities computing. This visualization is necessarily cramped by the sheer amount of information it attempts to maintain. This is a system of visualization that would benefit greatly from the 3d technologies like those employed by the The Visual Thesaurus, or even the color-dimensions of other modeling software.

I feel like an extensive reading of the ListServ would, eventually, also give an overview of the field, but it isn’t set up for that manner of information retrieval. Like any topical discussion among specialists, the ListServ is chock full of jargon which I’m sure professionals in the digital humanities field understand. Perhaps ironically, my experience in library science makes some of the posts perhaps more obscure than they would be otherwise – I feel like the terminology is just off enough that I’m missing something important while skimming through the archive. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an effective search method for the archive, and the ability to organize “by thread” is only marginally helpful. There’s something that looks like a word-search under ArchTracker Display, but I couldn’t get it to work. Some sort of tagging system would be ideal.

The field of Digital Humanities/ Humanities Computing is about stretching our mental model of humanities to encompass a wider range of display, access, and analysis models. We understand how to access these new forms by employing established mental models (of how to use/examine/analyze “humanities” objects. New technologies allow us to stretch these models by creating new analogies to other, established models (folders, surfing, journaling, forums, classified ads). I feel like the current repositories for digital humanities texts about digital humanities (Ur-Humanities texts?) are currently not living up to the full potential of the medium.

Preliminary Post

Testing out the whole professional blogging for ENG 5933; This post is just to get a feel for Blogger.