The White Whale of the Digital Humanities Will Never Be Caught

About two weeks ago, Professor Wickman asked a question that really stood out to me: "Is the digital really new or is it actually super old?"

On Professor Burton's blog, Moby Digital, he says that his blog is all about "chasing the white whale of the digital humanities."

Moby Dick was published in 1851.

The internet was born in the mid-1980s.

Geocities, one of the first social media sites, was invented in 1994 (it is now no longer available).

How do all of these seemingly unrelated things relate? Well, we must return to Professor Wickman's question: "Is the digital really new or is it actually super old?"

Amber, Victoria, and Brittany each discuss the categorization of the novel and whether or not Moby Dick fits into that category. They talk about our need as humans to categorize. Extending this idea to the digital humanities, can we categorize the digital humanities? I suppose we do in a way by broadly calling written material online the "digital humanities" and then by subdividing these humanities into blogs, status updates,  posts, notes, tweets, even online encyclopedias, dictionaries, and poems...but never a novel. I mean,  if someone wrote a novel and posted it online in a form normally reserved for blogs, would it be considered a very long blog or a novel? Does a 40,000 story have to be in print in order for to be considered a novel or is the online medium I just mentioned okay?

These are the kinds of questions Melville explored without using a computer. Moby Dick does not fit into any one category of print. What is it? What can we call it? What should we call it? Moby Dick is digital culture before the digital was invented. And people rebelled against it. They called it an "ill-compounded mixture" and not "entirely comfortable." (See my blog post here for more information on what people thought of the book in 1851).

This is much the same with the digital humanities: blogs are not cited in scholarly papers because they are generally viewed as an "ill-compounded mixture" of one person's thoughts generally not based in hard research or even written with much skill. We are not "entirely comfortable" with the digital humanities. Yet we chase after them anyways. We love our blogs, our tweets, our status updates, etc. We cannot just let them rest, much like Captain Ahab cannot let Moby Dick rest.

Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick

 The digital humanites are becoming a part of us in a very real way (e.g. Facebook updates are sent to our phones which are attached to our hips), and that scares us. Just take a look at Shelly's latest post. Sometimes we rebel against them by not getting on a social media website just because everyone else is on it: there is something very unsettling about that. If we are a part of it, we feel a need to categorize the digital, to control it, to master it. And in some ways we have: We've categorize things into tweets, blogs, Google + updates, etc.We select what stays and what goes. Geocities didn't make the cut for us. But that doesn't mean Geocities didn't influence future social media sites. We got rid of it, but we didn't get rid of its influence. Will we soon learn that we are dealing with a force much greater than ourselves? Should we continue to try to control it? Or should we just let it be much like Captain Ahab should let Moby Dick be? Let it be whatever it is and whatever it will be?

So let's answer that question: "Is the digital really new or is it actually super old?" I say, it's actually super old. Moby Dick cannot be truly categorized, and neither can the digital world. Moby Dick, the whale, cannot be controlled and neither can the digital humanities. It is in their nature. Each will change according to the understandings and changes of each generation. Categorize it if you will, but that category will soon change. The white whale of the digital humanities will never be caught.

Children and Social Media

I recently posed on a question on my Google+ site regarding youth using social media: How young is too young? 

Last year when I returned home from serving my 18 month mission for the church, I decided to stay off of Facebook. I don't think Facebook is bad if it's used wisely, but I really enjoyed the 18 month break I had from it. I felt happier, I had more free time, I felt secure. When I went home for Christmas and explained that to my younger siblings, they were shocked. My 10 year old sister could not believe that I didn't have a Facebook. I couldn't believe that she had one!! Then just last week my 8 year old brother was equally shocked to find out that I didn't have an Instagram! He really wanted me to see the pictures he was taking of his Minecraft skills, so he taught me how to sign up for my very own Instagram account. The next morning I woke up with a clear mind and thought how bizarre it was for my younger siblings to be teaching me how I needed to be more connected in the interest. Because as my sister told me, "People won't know you even exist if you don't go on Facebook." 

I'll save the internet identity issue for another day. Right now I want to focus on my original question of, "how young is too young?" I talked to my parents and apparently they set up accounts-with their parental monitoring- for my younger siblings. 

I personally think they're way too young for these sites. There are so many risks of exposure to adult content that a child could easily stumble upon. I found a great article from a parent website that addresses my question as well: 

http://www.thirdparent.com/kids-teens-and-social-media-how-young-is-too-young/

Do you think parents typically follow COPPA laws? If you were a parent, would you allow your underage children to participate? Why or why not?

Fandoms

During our discussion on Wednesday we talked about the various subgroups on the internet. I found myself drawn to the subgroup that all too often I have found myself identifying with and shying away from when I spend my leisure activities on the Web.

My online network, as the term was phrased in class, would have to be the fandom. This kind of embarrasses me because there can be quite the stigma on "fan groups." After all, fan is shot for "Fanatic" and for a lot of people within this group, that term could not be more accurate. I use pintrest a lot and am also an occasional user of tumblr. I've found that even though there are so many amazing opportunities to connect with other people on the internet, the people that I really want to connect with are the ones that share the same interests as me. And unfortunately for my popularity, that includes tv shows, books, and movies.

Fan groups can be really awesome, and really horrible. There is a part of the "fan culture" called "shipping" which is when a person "ships" for the relationship between two different characters. Most of the time, the ship is considered sexual, though there have been times where I've come across ships that focus only on the relationship, rather than the sexual aspect of it. Sometimes this part of the culture can be entertaining and fun, but all too often it becomes disturbing, uncomfortable, and sometimes downright pornographic. Something that starts off as a simple enjoyment of media can twist into really disturbing stuff.

But on the other hand, a lot of fans find a real support system within their fandom, they can enjoy time together, talk about the show and what happened and look through conspiracy theories and come up with theories of their own. I guess it just goes to show that no matter what it is, there are good and bad aspects to it.

I like to think that the area of fandom that I go into is pretty good and pretty high standard, but then again, maybe I'm getting sucked into the darkness without even knowing about it! Is it possible to have a separation between good and bad things within the same genre? Is it possible to only be a "little bit" of a fanatic?

Show us

After reading Ariel's post, let's talk about who we are. 

First of all, I'll fully admit that I'm in what Dr. Burton referred to as the typical "BYU identity crisis" - meaning that since marriage I haven't quite switched my last name in the BYU system. So I want to move beyond my so-called crisis and look at others' crises. 

 What portrayal of ourselves are we putting out there for the world to see/read/judge? What's our purpose in the online identity we've created? Are we trying to inspire our peers? Maybe we're trying to be adventurous. The point is... is that really you? 

Scenerio 1

I remember an interesting conversation with my best friends about posting pictures on Facebook. It went something like this, "This one time we went to a casual party/get together at a friend's apartment and it was pretty boring. I was there the whole time but later on Facebook I saw pictures of the same event and it looked like a super fun time even though it wasn't!" 

Scenario 2

A recent post that has caught my interest comes from a mom that stands for something. She's calling out to teenage girls who post way more of themselves than she'd like her teenage sons to see. I strongly recommend checking it out! I think it's great that this mom is starting a conversation that means something to her. But more importantly, she's raising questions about how a significant portion of teenage girls are creating an image that is not so becoming, to say the least.

Do you think these are relevant issues? Is this something worth our attention? I'd love to get your thoughts because I think these are worth digesting.

These scenarios call great attention to the question of online identity. Do we think enough about our image on social networks and other digital sites? Don't worry, I know my audience and I know that my peers are not going to be found scantily clad online. However, I believe that we can choose what we want to represent ourselves. 

Are we so focused on impressing others that we lose touch with meaningful ways to use our digital tools? 

Show the world who you are and the positive things you're interested in and capable of. Show the world that you care about God. Show the world that you are an academic and you care about the human condition because that's why we're here. 

HTML vs. XML...HTML still wins, right?

I'll admit that after watching the video on Professor Burton's blog, I didn't understand the significance of XML. What does it do that HTML doesn't? I didn't have time to do all of the research on my own, so I emailed someone who spent four years studying computers and now works as a software developer: my husband. I figured he could explain to me what I was missing. As it turns out, I wasn't missing a whole lot. My skepticism of the video was validated. through email. My husband has given me permission to publish his explanations on my blog, and I'm just going to quote him directly since he explains all this techie stuff a lot better than I can.

He wrote:
"The video glossed over some technical distinctions that may be misguiding:

XML and HTML: Content and Form

As the video said, XML is about content and data, not formatting. You can add formatting to XML, but it is mostly used for data transmission. The video was a little misleading about HTML: HTML handles both content and form. After all, form without content makes no sense: "italicize a blank page" makes no sense.

Modern HTML, called HTML5, is even more powerful in defining how data is presented. Many of today's powerful web and smartdevice apps such as Gmail use HTML5.

XML Does Not Replace HTML

 XML does not replace HTML; the two are complimentary. Because XML is data-centric, it does not allow for formatting text or displaying pictures. XML can link to a picture because a link is just data, but it does not contain the picture itself. HTML is what defines how browsers should display the information.

Here is a use-case where HTML and XML coexist: Imagine an app like Google Docs. It seems just like a program on your desktop and yet it is a webpage. This behavior is achieved by using HTML to format the data and buttons you see and to define what the buttons do when you click them. Then, when you click a button or type something, the browser makes a call to the server providing the website and requests more data. The data is returned as XML. The browser then formats the data according to the instructions contained in the HTML (and the CSS and Javascript).
In summary, XML and HTML are complimentary. XML is used when you need to pass content/data around with no regard to how that data will be displayed, HTML is used when you have content/data and formatting. I feel like the video overly magnified XML's role in Web 2.0 (a generic term for interactive, collaborative web applications like Blogger, YouTube, and Google+ - they allow you to interact with other people, rather than merely reading what the website presents.)"

About five minutes later, he added this thought:

"And when the video wanted to show the supremacy of XML, they clicked on a link and viewed the link's source, and voilà! you have XML. The misleading part was that they clicked on an RSS link. RSS links are not web pages; they are links that allow you to pull data. You paste that link into an RSS reader, which then goes to the site the link points to and downloads the critical data of news articles: the headline, the summary, and the first few pages, and perhaps a link to the main picture. The RSS reader then chooses how to format the headline and body and how to display the picture.

My point is, when you click a link on the Internet, you are rarely clicking an XML link. XML is important for the under-the-hood behavior of a lot of websites and smartdevice apps, but I feel the video was a paean to XML."

So, in summary, while the video may have wonderfully showed the potential of new computer/web languages, it overinflated the uses of XML and did a disservice to HTML as well as other languages that go into creating easier access to data, fun social media sites, etc. Are we (my husband and I) wrong? Did we completely miss the point? I'm willing to discuss this XML vs. HTML debate more.

The New (A Response to Moby Dick: A Novel?)

My post is rather inspired from Victoria's post. What a fascinating question… why should we feel the need to categorize? Perhaps we are driven to familiarity. After all, the very interpretations we make are founded on the information we are familiar with. I feel safe in saying that I haven't encountered anything quite like Moby Dick.

In a way, it is perfect because we see how the whole book focuses on the "new."  When I address the "new" I'm referring to advancement or more generically, change. In our studies we see it directly in terms a new digital age. However, we all can clearly see how interpretations could lead us to allegories for any "new" societal development. As it is not fully an allegory (or any other literary classification per our class discussion), the ambiguous structure itself drives the content of facing the new. This is fascinating to me as I realize, we're trying to decipher the structure and composition of the work just as much as we are wrestling with themes, characters, etc. Perhaps that's why we read this years and years after its initial popularity and feel we're sailing in uncharted territory, if you will.

This book makes you think out of the box and encourages innovation. I love that in class, Kristen was talking about perspectives because right when you think you have an idea of how you're supposed to think about Christians, you look at the perspective of Queequeg and you're back at the beginning trying to find something bigger. As it is a fundamental part of literary history to classify a work to develop the trends during a period of time, Moby Dick is a work of the future. It forces us to get uncomfortable, to swap perspectives, and challenge it all. The very structure intimates the depth found within Melville's ideas and therefore, our inability to classify it means we're on the right track to understanding that this book is more about the new, or what we don't know, instead of what we know.

The Other

Have any of you ever seen the TV show, Lost?

For those of you that have, bear with me while I quickly summarize part of the show to those who haven't:

Lost is a show about a plane crash where the surviving passengers are stranded on a very mysterious island. While they're on the island they soon discover that they are not alone. The island is inhabited by the Others - people that have wild and ferocious exteriors and have mannerisms that resemble savages. By the end of the show we meet and learn more about the Others and how a lot of them are good people that center their lives around a spiritual foundation, trying to survive.

To me, Queequeg is an Other.

Queequeg!

In class today we talked about how Queequeg essentially embodies the new age. He is the character that is different and foreign to the others. He's not the mainstream sailor boy. He is feared by many and catches the attention of passerby's. He doesn't fit the conventional American sailor like many of them do. He's of different race, different status, different religion... heck, he even enjoys sharing a bed with complete strangers! Despite these things, we soon unearth that he is perhaps, more civilized than the other characters on board the ship (minus the cannibalism thing).

Ishmael, anyone?

I thought of how Queequeg's character could possibly relate to the digital culture and this is what continued to play in my head: I think we often judge each other too quickly based off of what we see on a Facebook page or twitter posts or even the lack of a Facebook page (like me!). We instantaneously create for others their backstories and character traits, level of kindness, level of spirituality, and then we compare it all to ourselves, where we then suddenly have a newly justified dislike for a person. This all happens through one quick viewing of someone's social media corner. Where are the morals in that?? I can't find them. We're taught to exercise good judgment - righteous judgment - to keep ourselves safe from harmful people and situations. Oftentimes we get caught up in that dutiful task, that we become overly-judgmental and that righteous judgment turns into self-righteous judgment. I can see this happening in Ishmael in regards to Queequeg.

Over time though, we see Ishmael gradually tolerate Queequeg and that tolerance then becomes friendship and sincere care. The whole progression of their relationship is similar to a relationship founded in digital culture. We come across someone who at first glance, may not be the most inviting (or sane) looking person, but as you allow yourself to understand them more, rather than trying to get them to understand you, then your relationship deepens and you have formed a strong bond. Just like that of Ishmael and Queequeg.

So what's the lesson here? Judge less and snuggle with strangers more? Maybe not. But Melville is using the contrast between Ishmael and Queequeg to captivate the spiritual differences in conventionalism versus radicalism in Christian and pagan beliefs.