RP 2

Adam Roberts, in the article “A Brief Note on Moretti and Science Fiction,” suggests that science fiction’s persistence as a genre challenges Moretti’s assertion about the impending death of such genres. Roberts supports his claim by expanding the origins of science fiction from the earliest accepted example (Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)) to include Kepler’s Somnium (published 1634), then traces the genre through its major movements through to the present, careful to include the modern, multimodal additions of comic books and movies, before returning to an overview of the genre. The author’s purpose is to illustrate the reluctance of the SF genre to die, which might be said to challenge Moretti, though it has to be noted that Roberts couches his argument by closing with the note that a map of his genre divisions would mirror a graph from Moretti. The author writes in a conversational tone for general audiences.

Notes: It was great to see that someone already had the thought of SF after reading Moretti that I did; how do you explain a genre that’s continued to live despite passing the lifespan Moretti would give it? While this article lacks any real reasons for persistence, other than to state it, that leaves the topic open for other explanation (or to sell the book he mentioned having just published). As a dedicated genre reader, I’m happy that Moretti isn’t right about lifespans and that others were inclined to help prove that.

A Post About Video Games (Mostly)

In response to the Jones chapter, I wanted to cover my response almost solely from the video game perspective. For starters, the whole time I’m reading this chapter I’m thinking “Okay, AR. You’re talking about AR. Just say that already.” Pages later we get to AR. Now, if you’re going to talk about augmented reality and then discuss video games, why not talk about attempts at AR games?!?!?!? Then I checked the copyright and saw that Pokémon Go hadn’t been released yet. So at least I get why…

Anyway, Pokémon Go is (was? It’s hard to tell since I never played it) an augmented reality game where you’d use your phone to “see” Pokémon in the real world and battle them, meet other people to battle theirs, and generally use you phone as the console and controller to immerse yourself in a world half real half game. It didn’t do great since it had a spotty roll out but I’m sure people still play it since a fan of a franchise will stick with anything.

Oh yeah, sticking with things. Regarding World of Warcraft (WoW): People generally only stick with one MMO since there’s a multi-layered cost. WoW requires a monthly subscription. There’s also a sunk-time cost (I have played this for three hundred hours over two years…) so it’s hard for a new one to pick up market share until the reigning king goes down.

Finally, I don’t understand “gamification” as Jones reported it. I’d only heard the term with regards to corporate culture (“We’re gamifying our office!!!”) while what he seems to be referring to are disgusting business practices by publishers. That’s where the exploitation comes from. Before the ubiquity of publishers, we had shareware and it’s hard to argue for a more customer-focused business model than that.

Oh yeah, I heard about a HUD (heads up display) in a car commercial once. That was weird…

I don’t dislike the Jones chapter, I just had some things to say about it. Using games is necessary since a video game is currently the single most successful piece of media in human history… https://www.pcgamer.com/gta-5-estimated-to-be-the-most-profitable-entertainment-product-of-all-time/

I’ll close with the best DH definition/description I’ve read so far: “…the digital humanities looks less like an academic movement and more like a transitional set of practices at a crucial juncture, on the one hand moving between old ideas of the digital and of the humanities, and, on the other hand, moving toward new ideas about both” (Jones 34).

RP 1

Amy E. Earhart and Toniesha L. Taylor, in the article “Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson,” argue that removing some of the barriers to DH projects can empower undergraduates and the public to engage in such a project like they have seen in their own White Violence, Black Resistance. Earhart and Taylor support their thesis by chronicling the prevalence of social media posts around police violence that popped up organically after Ferguson and other events, showing a connection between historic events as far back as the 19^th century that involved racial violence, and note student reports of gratitude for having been apart of such a project in their education. The authors’ purpose is to educate the academic community of ways that they have tried to democratize DH projects to suggest others might do the same. The authors write in formal language for an educated audience.

Notes:

Some definite ties to the prevailing Marxist thread in the literature around DH.

This article provided some insight into the ways archived data is treated, both around race and through separate work involving women.

Student engagement with the project is the ultimate goal, and the technical discussion around specific software is interesting.

University policy presented a new barrier and I wonder if this was met with backlash?

The metadata discussion is less technical than this sentence mentioning it will indicate.

“forged at the intersection…”

“…of histories of race, language, gender, access, method, and scholarly practice.” (Crompton, Lane and Siemens 3-4). This was the takeaway for me for this book. It reads like intersectionality on steroids. Intersectionality, as I understand it, includes the effect of adding up all the little parts of you into a whole that got started around a court case that decided a discrimination case could not include both gender and race. Of course it can, was the response, since discrimination can be both sex/gender based AND race based, so of course combining them makes sense (that’s the gist from old research of the term so I can’t remember who to cite). Then when you add things like orientation and reflect on our 1301 readings like Pritchard and Young, it gets clearer (apologies for the GAT reference here, I can’t help it…). If DH is the intersectional mode of communication, I’m all for it.

Emergence:

This is going to be my favorite book by a large distance, I would imagine. Sure, there’s a huge Gibson influence (readers of my Cyberpunk post will know how carried away I got…) but the emphasis on video games is of special interest to me. I have long embraced the storytelling nature of the media and can’t help but see its terms influencing DH (MOOC literally HAD TO HAVE come from MMORPG (sorry to yell)). Anyway, if we’re going to talk games, we have to talk monetization and that’s where I have to gripe about the book’s not meaning “to gloss over” distribution (Jones 3). Include the media in all its literary criticisms, even Marxist views of the publishers’ business practices or leave the medium out. Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now…

“a trio of artificial constructs…”

Graphs, maps, trees:

I’m fascinated to see where this goes. Seeing “a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction” originally made me nervous – I see reduction as a negative (indeed I have said “not to be overly reductionist…” more times than I care to count) (Moretti i). This seems like a project rooted in theory (Marxism mentioned by name) though I have to admit unfamiliarity with the work of this DellaVolpe, so that information only hints at some meaning for me. I guess that’s a good statement for this introduction – hints at meaning. There’s enough here (I know what literature is, I know what Marxism is) and then just enough I don’t (i.e. that Marxist mentioned, evolutionary theory (further complicating what I thought a tree was…)). While I’m a little confused, I’m certainly intrigued…

 p.s. I inferred that page number in the citation since none was listed.

Debates…

The sculpture analogy was helpful. Expanding definitions for what used to be so concrete a term is difficult, met with resistance, like the things mentioned (“hashtag activism and the analysis thereof”). This helped solidify this in terms I could understand. The role of social media as a platform for things (good and ill, it should be noted) has been something I’ve struggled to contextualize. It’s clearly important, it clearly happens, though I’ve frankly had trouble compartmentalizing this stuff. It’s hard to call it activism in a traditional sense, though it’s not without effect, so the emergence of a field like Digital Humanities goes a long way to helping me understand where to put some of the new trends in human interaction. This introduction did a good job outlining the positions of some of the debates that will be forthcoming (effects on students, its origins, etc.). “Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 has a markedly political bent” is a refreshing bit of honesty, too, and not at all a problem for me, but that’s a tangent decidedly outside the scope of this post (Klein and Gold).

Cyberpunk

Warning: This post gets very spoiler heavy for Neuromancer.

Neuromancer seems determined to blur the line between the physical and the digital. For starters, the main character Case is a data thief (referred to inside the work as a console cowboy and by shorthand, but we’d consider him a hacker). In Gibson’s world, Cyberspace is more akin to a physical location that Case (and others) can project his consciousness into. After being caught stealing from a former employee, Case’s nervous system is crippled in a way that prevents him from entering cyberspace anymore, so he’s essentially out of work. This is the point readers meet Case, in a seedy bar in the Sprawl. He’s found here drinking and drugging and involved with unsavory characters and in bad relationships since he’s adrift now without the thing that made him tick. Case hates himself biologically (referring to his physical body as “meat”) so readers get the sense that he is only really happy in Cyberspace, and the physical world is at least a little gross to him. He is presented with the ability to re-enter Cyberspace by a figure named Armitage, although it is revealed later that AI is involved in the plot as well, who is offering to allow him back into Cyberspace, reversing the damage done to his nervous system, in return for one more job. Since Case hates the physical world, he’s got little choice in the matter. So in following this character through the novel it can be increasingly hard for readers to tell that the physical world and Cyberspace are not the same thing, thoroughly blurring that line.

Oh yeah, there’s a street samurai named Molly Millions in the book, too.

Cyberpunk is the term for a subgenre of science fiction, and Neuromancer is pretty much the Bible for it. It was born in the early 1980s, a time when The Clash and The Ramones were big in the US (I know they formed in the 70s or something but it takes time to build a fan base and this is about the fiction so I’m sorry), and that music carried with it the same kind of attitude that can be seen in the characters. What makes Cyberpunk different from the 80s punk rock scene is technology. While characters that moved in Case’s orbit might have a mohawk or liberty spikes (anyone remember that haircut?), it would also include the physical incorporation of technology. You can slot disks into your head if you want. Those cool glasses from The Matrix that slide out of your eye sockets were Molly’s first, so you’re getting the idea now about the book’s influence. Case’s nihilism about life without Cyberspace can be equated to the attitude of the music scene, and I guess this is all meant to say that imagine the crowd of a Ramones show circa the mid-1980s but they all had technology grafted into their bodies and you’ve got the gist.

There’s also a world component- it’s generally inferred that this novel is post-apocalyptic to some extent. There is references to war (interestingly now that war can happen inside Cyberspace), and it’s got almost the same environment as something like Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where most of the population is unhappy, though in Gibson’s world there’s a poverty aspect missing in Bradbury’s work so maybe that’s an inelegant comparison (or a budding research topic).

For the specific DH angle, I have to address the AI thing I mentioned in the first answer in greater depth so it’s a MAJOR SPOILER. LIKE, IT RUINS A LOT OF THE SURPRISE OF THE BOOK SO MAYBE READ IT FIRST OR PROMISE NOT TO GET MAD.

…ahem…

Sorry about all that yelling, I just had to make sure you heard me.

Anyway, if DH is the intersection between technology and the human condition, there are a couple of ways to answer this. There’s a movement that came out of the research for this book called Posthumanism which is, oversimply, human-directed evolution. By integrating tech into your body you can overcome nature and become more human than human (that’s a White Zombie lyric and from a movie I think…). So one can say that the whole Posthuman thing is DH, but I want to talk about the AI.

Okay, some creepy family (Tessier-Ashpool) has both a huge company and a space station called Straylight that is the thing to be hacked by Case. It’s revealed an AI is behind all of this, and what the AI wants (which is hard to gather sometimes from reading the novel) is for Case to break what are called Turing locks that keep the AI from free mobility. The AI then wants to fuse with the second AI (called neuromancer) created by this family, become something greater, and freely roam (presumably just Cyberspace but we talked about how tenuous these divisions are). Okay, so if the human condition is to further the species, and the species is being furthered by Artificial Intelligence, we have perhaps crossed a threshold in DH. This technology does not reflect/discuss the human condition but learns to have its own wants, its own condition, so is it human? That’s ultimately the question I’ll leave here as my answer.