I would like to propose an alternative to the sort of mixed reality video games Steve Jones places a huge emphasis on. It is just another expression of the same underlying idea (I am doing this out of fear that video games be taken as paradigmatic source of the idea and not merely one of its many manifestations): It comes down to personal choice. What I would like to present is sample based music.

Sampling produces an entire aesthetic and philosophy. You take someone else’s sound and (in Steve Jones’ words) “decode and manipulate”.

1) Decoding: I hear a sound I like. I look it up on Youtube (or I search for some vague term like “blue and grass”). I take the resulting sound and plop it into a website which converts Youtube videos into mp3 audio files and then download it onto my hard drive.

2) Manipulate: I import the file into an audio editing program and tweak it using a variety of parameters.

In lieu of getting too stranded from my initial point, that this is merely another product of the “mixed reality” Steve Jones points out we live within, I want to give a context of how this happens. I fear I am being narcissistic here but this is how it really happens and what I think of when I look for concrete examples of this mixed reality: I am in my car driving home from a friends house and turn on a radio station I know to occasionally play songs I like: 89.1 on the FM dial. There is a song playing which perks my ears and I immediately think of not how I am listening to the song and enjoying it at that very moment, but how when I get home I know exactly how to access it and manipulate it. It is that easy. And that is the sort of mixed reality I think Steve Jones points us towards which I think is a valid one, though not without it’s problems (which I may elaborate on in a future post, or which anyone else should feel free to propose); a reality which is about criticism through production.

Day 41 on the Around DH in 80 Days projects brings us to the Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Art and Culture, or DH-JAC for short. The ambition of this project is “to adopt a global perspective and to promote the development of Japanese scholars whose skills match those of their foreign counterparts” and to become a “global hub” of Japanese artistic and cultural studies. I wonder if it’s possible for there to be a Japanese approach to DH that is unique from a western one, or if the overall goal is instead to create a universal language within DH for the preservation of Japanese art and artifacts.

I noticed that the link to the woodblock print collection, to my disappointment, just leads to a white screen so I decided to look at the map collection of Hugh Cortazzi instead. Tokyo is a city that has been consistently remade, whether it is because of war, nature, commerce, or a combination of all three, but no matter what era, it’s construct has always been confusing and labyrinthine, even to locals. It may be just romantic posturing, but I cannot help but see the sprawl of old Edo mirror that of a circuit board. Fritz Lang’s sci-fi fable Metropolis reinterpreted the 20th century city as a machine constructed in the image of a human with hands, a brain, and a heart, and these maps show an extremely complex urban nervous system.

Looking at this makes me wish there was some sort of film preservation database, especially considering that over 90% of Japanese films made prior to 1945 have been lost or destroyed. But that also gave me pause to think about if there could be a use beyond preservation for DH. Can it be creation and preservation combined? 3D printed recreations of decrepit artifacts, perhaps. But if I’m looking for information about how DH is shaping Japan right now, I’m usually checking my Twitter feed rather than an academic website, often time from American or British writers or journalists.

If more than one people you subscribed retweeted this post, you can also see their “retweet” at the bottom.

When you click “forward” on user A’s retweet, you can see all the retweets made from user A. You can write down your own comment but only 85 characters remain due to pervious comments were being made. You have to share the length. There will be a double slash to separate the two opinions. Weibo considers this as part of your post. So you can delete or edit the previous opinions if you want. One thing about weibo is its privacy. You don’t have to make every tweet public. You can choose to tweet it as visible only to your own friends group. It also applies when you retweet. You can even retweet it via private message. It is like Facebook.

You can go to the original post and check all the forwards (retweet) and comments made directly to the original post. And if you decide to forward directly from the original post, you have 140 characters to comment! Yay!

The “forward” (retweet) and comments allow for more ‘reposted’, engaged, threaded conversation. Twitter users can also share the tweet with her/his followers by retweeting. However, the tweet to be shared can’t be modified.

On weibo, user can do more than that. She or he can add comments or opinions to the retweeted tweet. The opinion is limited to 140 Chinese or 280 western characters.

This is how you “Weibo”.

You can see different potions to insert rich media like images, videos, music, emoticons and polls when you click “more”.

You can see different portions to insert rich media like images, videos, music, emoticons and polls when you click “more”.

Weibo in Chinese means “micro-blogging”, with its hierarchical  comments to the original tweet, it seems quite easy to follow and participate in conversation. Weibo has adopted many features from Facebook to fit into the Twitter platform. These features such as the emoticon which people can use to tweet to total online strangers is a representation of the “online-identity”, which can be very different from the one in real life. Comments made when retweeting or those which are read after the previous tweet is also a process of self-consciousness and self-censorship. If you use Weibo as database to study an Internet phenomenon, the numbers of forwards and comments can show you directly how hot and trendy the post is.

One of the criticisms about Weibo is that it is not simple enough. The conversation may be fun but information can be overwhelming. You cannot directly quote from one comment to reply, which makes it hard to follow (but now Weibo learnt from Twitter again and had the feature of conversation that allows you see the information line). If the original poster deletes her/his post, you can no longer see it, which unlike on Twitter when you RT the tweet, it is on your timeline and no one can take it off.

However, simply being a database or archive, Weibo may have done enough.

Here are some English weibo accounts from celebrities if you want to explore weibo further:

David Beckham,  Stephon Marbury, Alicia Keys.

Happy weiboing!

Until fairly recently I was not aware of the subject of Digital Humanities, and now it seems the only concrete aspect of it I can grasp is that it is a subject in constant flux, controversy, and debate. But just as I know the best books or films were controversial and considered filth or drech, I can tell that this controversy is what gives DH some life. The fact that people are saying terrible things about digital humanities (according to Matthew Kirschenbaum) is a sign that it is a subject worth pursuing (or at least paying attention to).  You can pick your cliche du jour for DH’s situation (“the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about” or “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” perhaps?), but the controversy and mystique of the subject might be part of what allows it to thrive.

When I told people I was taking digital humanities, they usually followed up my response with “what is digital humanities?” I can see in blog posts that some of my classmates were in a similar predicament. Having enrolled in the class but not yet taken it, I was slightly flummoxed as to what to tell them, but I ultimately settled on “the ethics of algorithms.” Little did I realize that this quandary of uncertainty is part of what makes DH the subject that it is.If we look at the news nowadays we can see algorithms being used for less than ethical ends.

The Theories and Virtues of Digital Humanities by Natalia Cecire spoke of “getting your hands dirty” as one of the (possible) central tenants of DH. This version of getting your hands dirty has to do with coding, learning practical applications of programming and it’s possibilities. But we see many people getting their hands dirty in coding for less than humanistic ends. Privacy destroyed, Twitter being used as a battleground rather than a forum for discussion, decapitations on Youtube. It’s a reminder of how the unfortunately all too human sides of humanity can worm their way into our idealized digital utopia. But is this the realm of Digital Humanities to judge or fix? Or is it to study and dissect how humanity has changed in this new era? Or is DH meant to divorce technology from this uglier side of programing and using technology?

Is it the business of DH to truly get its hands dirty? Does DH distinguish between the voice of “the people” and that of “the mob?” Just as Twitter was being used to show what was happening on the streets of #ferguson (Sure, Ferguson is a real place, but far more people have come in contact with the hashtag than set foot in the place), it was also being abused by #gamergate under the banner of journalist transparency (while harassing women working in or critiquing the video game industry).DH is meant to have loftier goals than navigating the minutia of sarcasm in 140 characters. After all, DH supposedly started as an attempt to translate the divine into punch cards. Today there are schools in Japan cataloguing the works of Edo-period woodblock artists, and attempts to study and preserve the works of pre-Islamic Persian scholars. Tara McPherson’s essay Why Are Digital Humanities So White? intrigues me because it leans towards the belief that while we must get our hands dirty with programming and writing digital languages, which much also be mindful of humanity’s own ugliness. If the digital is divine, than it is human to error.

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More of the same, but still ongoing.

http://chronicle.com/article/What-the-Digital-Humanities/148597/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

I am a Victorianist in the English Ph.D. program, and one of my particular interests is in disability studies. Reading one of this week’s articles entitled “Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities” made me made me realize that though we may consider our conceptions of disability to be more “evolved,” than those of the Victorians, the digital world we have built often excludes people to the same degree the material world used to exclude disabled Victorians. Furthermore, digital media have come to be used for so many tasks that are fundamental to our functioning in the larger world that digital exclusion may be just as debilitating as exclusion from participation in the physical world was for the Victorians.

Many people today, citing such examples as Dickens’s well-known crippled child, Tiny Tim, may think Victorians representations of disability are sappy and cliched. However, their sympathetic nature also implied a high level of concern for the plight of the disabled. The mere extent to which disability was portrayed with feeling in novels–particularly in the novels of such (then) well-known writers as Charles Dickens, Dinah Craik, and Charlotte Yonge testifies to this fact.

Thus, there were also large-scale efforts at improving things for the disabled in the real world of Victorian England–especially for the blind. One prominent example was Samuel Gridley Howe who developed a method of proto-braille by which the deaf-blind girl, Laura Bridgman, learned to read.

Of course Victorian representations of disabled people were also far from uncomplicated. Gender, race, and age all inflected them to a great degree. As disability theorist Martha Stoddard Holmes has pointed out, crippled, aging men were quite often the villains of Dickens’s novels. The roles disabled people could play (in novels even more than in life) were also severely restricted. However, the fact remains that people like Howe recognized that in the Victorians’ hyper-visual culture, a culture of which illustrated periodicals and novels were the primary forms of expression, being able to decode that medium of expression was particularly important.

In our own culture, depictions of disability are often similarly conflicted–laden alternately with sentiment (think inspirational stories and fundraising campaigns) and mistrust (as when people suspect disabled homeless people of really being able to work after all). We also inhabit a world in which physically disabled people sometimes cannot use the tools digital humanists are making. If they are scholars, this lack of access could set their work back years, and if not, could nevertheless set back their personal drive to learn for its own sake–a drive which the humanities is supposed to foster.  I therefore hope that Williams’s call for the development of tools such as  a freely available online captioning tool and software that converts files into digital talking books will be answered. I also think his idea to use crowd-sourcing in order to caption online videos illuminates an important difference between the Victorian age and our own–that even people with little technical expertise could (perhaps should) have a share in the responsibility of extending access to disabled users of digital humanities technologies.