Professor Andrew Prescott, King’s College London, AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Leader Fellow

The Arts and Humanities in a Digital Age

Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage, 1798- Rural poverty and hunger- Effect of French Wars- Leading characters in poem engage in repetitive, alienated

and meaningless tasks – in an almost machine-like fashion- The poem is haunted by almost spectral figures – elegy for

a lost countryside

The Old Cumberland Beggar

But deem not this Man useless.--Statesmen! ye

Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye

Who have a broom still ready in your hands

To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud,

Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate

Your talents, power, or wisdom, deem him not

A burthen of the earth! 'Tis Nature's law

That none, the meanest of created things,

Or forms created the most vile and brute,

The dullest or most noxious, should exist

Divorced from good

The Excursion, 1814

Meanwhile, at social Industry's commandHow quick, how vast an increase. From the germOf some poor hamlet, rapidly producedHere a huge town, continuous and compactHiding the face of earth for leagues - and there,Where not a habitation stood before, Abodes of men irregularly massedLike trees in forests, - spread through spacious tracts.O'er which the smoke of unremitting firesHangs permanent, and plentiful as wreathsOf vapour glittering in the morning sun.

Coleridge:

‘We are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents’.

Calls for ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worth of the human intellect, strikes Death’.

Seeks studies promoting ‘’the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties which characterise our humanity’

Matthew Arnold, Literature and Science, 1882

‘The great majority of mankind... would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be educated in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences. Letters will call out their being at more points, will make them live more’.

776 pieces of Shakespeare’s Plays from the First Folio, each of 1000 words, rated on two scaled principal components (1 and 4). The color key for the dots: Histories (green), Comedies (red), Tragedies (orange) and Late Plays (blue). Late plays are: The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Henry VIII. Note Romeo and Juliet in the lower-left, History quadrant.

Biblical concordance in a 14th-century manuscript from Rochester: British Library, Royal MS 4 E.V

Long-standing tradition of quantitative analysis using computing by scholars such as the economic historian Roderick Floud working in the 1960s and 1970s

www.janeausten.ac.uk

Online Chopin Variorum Edition: www.ocve.org.uk

Electronic Beowulf

Text of Mark 1:1 in the British Library portion of the Codex Sinaiticus under standard light, showing corrections

including insertion of the phrase ‘Son of God’.

‘The digital humanities are what happens as soon as you start to use computers to study the humanities’ Willard McCarty

As soon as we started creating Electronic Beowulf, we immediately became engaged with: • New research questions• New forms of access• New methods• New skills• New forms of presentation• New forms of collaboration and of working together

Debates in the Digital Humanities

Formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism – grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data. Instead of looking for new ‘isms’, digitally savvy humanists now argue, we should start looking at how technology is currently changing our understanding of what it means to do liberal arts.

New York Times, November 2010

Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?

Stanley Fish, January 2012

Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

Digital humanities (along with other ‘new’ humanities such as spatial humanities, environmental humanities, medical humanities) as a space for debating what the humanities is and should be

Mark Sample: The digital humanities should not be about the digital at all. It’s all about innovation and disruption. The digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities.

What is Changing?

• No longer an easily defined set of methods• Wide variety of formats: not just text but sound, image, moving

image, animation, visualisation, making• Recycling: visualising, linking, mash-up• Cannot be confined within single disciplinary practice or structures• More experimental and ad hoc• Stronger cross-connections with practice-led research of different

types, particularly in arts• Requires fresh appoaches to initiating and conceiving research • Reflects increasing availability of born-digital data; digitisation no

longer at centre of agenda

Letter of Gladstone to Disraeli, 1878: British

Library, Add. MS. 44457, f. 166

The political and literary papers of Gladstone

preserved in the British Library comprise 762

volumes containing approx. 160,000 documents

George W. Bush Presidential Library:200 million e-mails

4 million photographs

Visualisation of languages used in tweets in London in Summer 2012: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL:

http://mappinglondon.co.uk/2012/londons-twitter-tongues/

Visualising milllions of books: The Industrial Revolution in the Ngram Viewer

Mapping Metaphor Project: University of Glasgowhttp://blogs.arts.gla.ac.uk/metaphor/

www.connectedhistories.org

www.oldbaileyonline.org

A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualisation in the Humanities

Texas Advanced Computing Center

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvOuJ2RwBTA

Michael Takeo Magruder, Data Sea: www.takeo.org

Jekyll 2.0: A React Hub project. Collaboration between Slingshot (Pervasive Game Developers) and Dr Anthony

Mandal, Cardiff University: http://www.react-hub.org.uk/books-and-print-sandbox/proj

ects/2013/jekyll-20/

Available at: http://mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/resources/

Data objects developed by Ian Gwilt, Sheffield Hallam University: http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/projects/data-objects

www.bareconductive.com

www.productresearch.ac.uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCYn7oQlLiA

Eduardo Kac, Lagoglyph Sound System