[{"id":289,"title":"A first law of humanities computing","sha":"2887a2c8127dea5e64e512ae7f6a2407","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"In the course of the last decade, I formulated what I consider to be something of [a law concerning the use of computing in Humanities research](http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Blog/the-first-law-of-humanities-computing):\r\n\r\n\u003eThe novel and non-trivial application of computation to humanities research problems inevitably requires an examination of first principles including the social, political, economic, and disciplinary rationale for the research itself.\r\n\r\nThe point is that you can never simply copy a technique from the pre-digital Humanities into the digital without addressing fundamental questions of why you are doing what you are doing, what it is that you think you are doing, and whether what you are doing actually does what you think it does. \r\n\r\nThis law is related to the New Media concept of [“remediation,”](http://seminar.net/index.php/reviews-hovedmeny-110/68-remediation-understanding-new-media-revisiting-a-classic) the process by which works are refashioned when they move from one medium to another.  \r\n\r\nIt stems from the contrast between digital and non-digital methodologies. In the non-digital space, we can work by analogy and intuition. In the digital world, however, we must work by design and algorithm if we are doing something non-trivial. It is possible to simply replicate pre-digital formats (e.g. the PDF); but taking advantage of the fundamental power of computation requires us to work programmatically. \r\n\r\nExamples in action include [John Unsworth's study of \"Scholarly Primitives\"](http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html) and much early digital editing theory.","created_at":"2016-03-13T19:26:08.521Z","updated_at":"2017-07-29T11:07:54.259Z","zenodo_id":101409,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.47473","subject":null,"tags":["digital humanities","humanities computing","methodology"],"vote_count":4,"view_count":1,"score":4.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null},{"id":308,"title":"Synchronic similarity in scholarly communication may mask diachronically distinct goals and histories","sha":"6dc5147aa8f81c4f15346335dfd211ae","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"The [Force11](http://force11.org/) [Scholarly Commons Working Group (SCWG)](https://www.force11.org/group/scholarly-commons-working-group) aims to \r\n\r\n\u003e [a]rticulate a set of high level principles... for the Scholarly Commons[,]... focus on assessing the... convergence of thinking around these issues..., [map] current efforts against this thinking, and [develop] the materials necessary to promote future activity in this space.\r\n\r\nThe underlying assumption is that differences in the form of scholarly communication among disciplines represents a divergence from a discoverable (and hence reversible or bridgeable) set of common goals and purposes.\r\n\r\nI am struck by the extent to which synchronic similarities in research communication map onto diachronically distinct goals and histories, however. \r\n\r\nThus JSTOR and PubMed look similar: both are digital libraries for discovering research. But they have completely separate histories. [PubMed comes out of the 1970s MedLine database](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubMed); [JSTOR was developed in the 1990s to improve the storage of Humanities journals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR#History). One began as a database, the other as a virtual bookshelf.\r\n\r\nSo cross-disciplinary differences between these or other systems may be more fundamental than they look: JSTOR and PubMed were not developed as divergent approaches to a common problem; they are solutions to different problems that happen to look a little like each other. That JSTOR is better at presentation and PubMed better at discovery may not be an accident.\r\n\r\nThis doesn't invalidate the goals of the SCWG. It suggests that surface similarities may mask fundamental differences of intent or purpose. ","created_at":"2016-05-29T23:23:36.718Z","updated_at":"2017-07-29T11:07:14.385Z","zenodo_id":118011,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.53748","subject":null,"tags":["scholarly communication","force 11","jstor","pubmed","library science","information studies"],"vote_count":2,"view_count":1,"score":2.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null}]