The Computational Turn: Thinking About The Digital Humanities
"first-wave digital humanities involved the building of infrastructure in the studying of humanities texts through digital repositories, text markup, etc., whereas second-wave digital humanities expands the notional limits of the archive to include digital works, and so bring to bear the humanities’ own methodological toolkits to look at ‘born-digital’ materials, such as electronic literature (e-lit), interactive fiction (IF), web-based artefacts, and so forth."
(David M. Berry, 2011)
Berry, D. M. (2011). "The Computational Turn: Thinking About The Digital Humanities." Culture Machine 12.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies
"Wardrip-Fruin builds upon the foundation laid by Lev Manovich, who, in his 2002 book The Language of New Media, suggested that the natural development of media studies in an age of 'programmable media' should be 'software studies' (a set of approaches which includes 'expressive processing' but also code studies which, in Wardrip-Fruin's words, looks at 'the specific text of code' written by developers).
Expressive Processing fulfills and extends the promise of Manovich's ideas, putting the theory into practice through a set of case studies of the artificial intelligence engines of a dozen or so software programs that might be loosely called 'games.' That the first real example of a software studies approach comes out of game studies is both to be expected and (somewhat) regretted. On one hand, games of the sort Wardrip-Fruin examines are a medium for storytelling and character creation, and as such are natural extensions of the work of previous literary and media studies scholars and thereby set up a convenient space for humanities scholars and teachers to consider the important cultural and technical issues raised by Wardrip-Fruin in an environment more familiar than, for instance, an analysis of the software that drives Walmart (one of Wardrip-Fruin's suggestions for another work of software studies scholarship). Unfortunately, like graphic novels and musical theater, the genre is still too easily dismissed as popular entertainment by too many of those who most need to hear Wardrip-Fruin's arguments."
(Doug Reside, 2010)
Reside, D. (Fall 2010). "A review of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies." Digital Humanities Quarterly 4(2).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The creative writing exegesis sets off on its own trajectory: from reflective text, to parallel text, to plaited text
"The reflective journal exegesis, with its this-is-how-I-wrote-my-creative-piece approach, was soon deemed unexciting by creative writing candidates, supervisors and examiners. In the early 2000s, research scholars who had risen above questions like What is an exegesis? and Why do I have to do one? sought to achieve more with the exegesis form. They and their supervisors discussed the aims and focus of the exegesis and its orientation to the creative product (see dozens of articles in TEXT and, e.g. Fletcher & Mann 2004). The discussion questioned and attacked the exegesis, and also the gap between it and the artefact. This lent impetus to exploratory experimentation.
Departures from the reflective journal exegesis included the exegesis in the form of an essay providing a conceptual or historical framework - a mini-dissertation of the style familiar as submission for disciplines such as Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, History, Sociology or Philosophy - i.e. a prose work that swapped the tradition of the Creative Arts journal for traditions of academic writing in other Humanities disciplines. In this parallel text, the candidate might be seen to stop being creative writer, becoming instead the more disengaged and critical humanities academic. However, Butt takes an opposite view on this. She thinks, in examining the impact of outside influences on the writer and the writing, the parallel text 'is a conscious reflection of the largely unconscious act of writing' (Butt 2009: 55).
There's a schizophrenia apparent in this situation. The researching writer, trying to be creative writer, is forced back to the role of critic distanced from the process, as opposed to being critic inside the process. The exegesis here wasn't something home-grown in the Creative Writing discipline - it was an imposition from contextualising, 'more authoritative' disciplines - but was an initial extending of the umbilical cord between artefact and exegesis because it allowed the exegesis to be a parallel commentary with an implied relationship to the artefact, suggesting an added or alternative outcome to the research undertaken in writing the creative product. This raised the status of the exegesis from servant-to-the-master narrative to a sort of equal, to a narrative in its own right. An example of this is Nike Bourke's The Bone Flute - From the cradle to the grave (Bourke 2003), where the novel told a disturbing story about domestic violence and infanticide, and the exegesis was a study of infanticide in contemporary society.
In the early 2000s there was plenty of room for experimentation. In this context, two of my own candidates tested the idea of parallel texts brought together and plaited in the submission structure. Peter Wise, in The Turns of Engagement: A Thesis / Novel on the Circumstances of Writing (2001), presented exegesis and creative narrative as alternating, mirror-image, theory-then-fiction-then-theory chapters which blended together progressively until creative product chapters became, eventually, indistinguishable from dissertation chapters (Wise 2001). Wise's submission performed the evolution of fictocriticism, the creation of the thesis-slash-novel. It had a hard time passing examination in 2001.
In 2005, another student of mine, Marilynn Loveless, produced Mrs Shakespeare: Muse, Mother, Matriarch, Madonna, Whore, Writer, Woman, Wife - Recovering a Lost Life (2005). At Loveless's graduation, the Acting Dean refused to read out the title of her PhD; perhaps he considered it un-academic. The submission involved the chapters of a novel revealing Anne Hathaway as the real writer of Shakespeare's canon being alternated with the chapters of an exegesis about male-dominated discourse in the academy (Loveless 2005). Here the plaited texts worked off each other and created their own dialogue; Loveless's discontinuous narrative was about reading the gap between exegesis and artefact, and analysing it.
There's much to learn from the idea of the exegesis and artefact as plaited text. Barthes insisted on the death of the author because the exegetical wasn't present. He asserted that because the writer wasn't present in the work, the reader must alone create the work. But the creative writing doctorate's combination of creative product and exegesis insists on the writer's presence. The plaited text, in showing both the product and aspects of the process or its context, asserts the existence of the author."
(Nigel Krauth)
Krauth, N. (2011). "Evolution of the exegesis: the radical trajectory of the creative writing doctorate in Australia." TEXT 15(1).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
PhD pedagogy and the changing knowledge landscapes of universities
"At the level of form and content of the knowledge produced in postgraduates' work, the supervisor, whose intellectual roots are frequently based in a singular domain characterised by horizontal knowledge structures, must acquire principles that enable them to understand the students' research problems in terms of a vertical or hierarchical knowledge structure. For example, a student may wish to contribute to insights in the domain of social aspects of urban design. The supervisor, who may be a sociologist, must find a means of integrating insights from sociology with its own nuanced conceptual language, with discourses from design associated with user centred design principles, at a level that is sufficient to guide the student through the processes of integration and recontextualisation. Thus vertical knowledge structures need to be employed by both supervisor and student to address the weakening classifications between sociology and design. Further, however, the hidden aspect of pedagogy here is that the supervisor must have a sufficient understanding at a generic level of what is required for the development of knowledge through integration to provide the student with the tools to accomplish this with respect to their own specific topic area. This is an area that receives very little attention in any of the discourses or literature around what is required of supervisors, and is a key area for further research on postgraduate pedagogy."
(Barbara Adkins, 2009, QUT ePrints)
Adkins, Barbara A. (2009) PhD pedagogy and the changing knowledge landscapes of universities. Higher Education Research and Development Journal, 28(2), pp. 165-177.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Communicating knowledge: How & why UK researchers publish & disseminate their findings
"The motivations that lead researchers to publish in different formats – particularly in scholarly journals – differ significantly across disciplines. Researchers in the sciences are more likely to see publication in a learned journal as a ‘natural’ means of communication with their desired audience, while their colleagues in engineering, the humanities and the social sciences are more likely to see it as meeting essentially external requirements for research assessment and career advancement.
In these latter disciplines, therefore, the rise of journals is more closely associated with an environment where there is increasing emphasis on measuring, assessing, and evaluating research, its outputs and impact."
(HEFCE on behalf of JISC, UK, 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
