digital humanities studies in English at the University of Victoria and he's going to be
talking about paper types and writing exams composing multimodal long-term scholarship
and this is aspects from the current book called How Text Lots Its Source Magnetic Recording
Cultures which recently received the University of Michigan Press and hashtag, hashtag, hashtag,
there we go, digital humanities publications. So I'm going to hand over to Gentry now. Thank you.
So good morning everyone. I'm actually going to speak for the bulk of my time this morning
about a platform called Scaler and in the past I've spent roughly seven to eight minutes
explaining what Scaler does and right before the conference began the Scaler team based largely at
the University of Southern California released a video, a trailer for the platform so rather than
speaking about it I'm going to let this wonderful trailer with the wonderful boys behind it do the
work for me. So this is a roughly a five minute trailer and I'm going to speak for 15 minutes
afterwards.
So
in Scaler, you can create multiple paths through a location, each one designed for a specific
audience. Scaler also includes tagging functionality for grouping related items together for common
language, unlike in law or evil. In Scaler these features can be applied to any type of content
giving you the freedom to structure your work in its most compelling form.
So if it has a webinars, then you're likely to get an effort. Easily important to be a director of
science on YouTube and video without planning to base this code. The media stays where it is, but your
project stays nimble. Major public and software companies like the Internet Archive and the
Shell Foundation are also supported with more being added all the time.
Important topics require time and sustained attention to be fully explored, and Scaler is designed to
support even detailed analysis of all kinds of materials, audio, video, images, text, maps, and even
source code and all the answers in detail and annotations are shown dynamically on the page as
media are played. If you can post to a blog, you can use Scaler, which includes features designed
specifically for writers working with media based text. Scaler makes it easy to work with multiple
authors. Each author's contributions are tracked and all versions are preserved. Invite contributors
to create new content and engage with comments from readers. Scaler includes direct access to
fair use ready media from archive partner Critical Commons, so you can quote copyrighted materials
with confidence in the validity of your use plan. Scaler lets you take your content anywhere and
use it to drive anything with an easy to use public API, create custom interfaces, mashups, and more.
Content in Scaler is now equal. Ever type a column of the video or edit it in an image with an audio file,
with Scaler it's easy. Scaler supports most major video and audio formats, including MP4, MP3,
All, QuickTime, Flash, and Wave. Where possible, Scaler uses native media delivery mechanisms instead
of plugins, resulting in a high degree of compatibility with the iPad, iPhone, and Android devices.
Designed for sustained reading experiences, Scaler comes preloaded with a selection of
attractive templates. You can set custom backgrounds for an entire org, a single section, or just one
page. For more dramatic changes, CSS style can be applied in the same way.
Scaler also includes a range of visualizations to help reveal the internal structure and connections
of your publication. Any visualization can be integrated directly into your book as a default
view for a page. All these features of Scaler are designed to work together to make it easier
for you to create your own objects to think with. The thinking itself is still up to you.
Thanks for watching this introduction to Scaler. For more explanation, this is scaler.usc.edu.
Thanks. That's what I want to talk about this morning. I'm going to feel a little bit like a
motivational speaker with this headset on. What I want to talk about this morning is essentially
taking a user's angle, if you will, on Scaler and leading you through a case study. I'm really
kind of struck by this phrase that's used in the video, namely, when does an electronic book become
an object to think with? Today, what I'm going to do is modify that question, even if it's a little
clunky to ask this, when does an electronic book become an object to think with sound?
This is based, as was already mentioned in my introduction, in work that's ongoing, a book
project that I'm doing called How Text Losses Source Magnetic Recording Cultures, which is a
cultural history of magnetic recording. I don't have much time to go into the content today,
but I want to basically say, give you a little background on the book, what I've been doing with
it. Right now, I am using Scaler for the book. I wasn't originally. I started using Scaler in
2010 as part of the early development at University of Southern California with support from the US
National Endowment for the Humanities. I'm currently being supported by the University
of Michigan Press and Haystack to further develop the book itself. If you want to learn
a little bit more about the history, the arguments I have in the book, and the work I'm doing,
you can just follow or go to bit.ly slash mag sound, and there's an abstract. It's a bit dated,
but it'll give you a sense of what exactly the cultural history entails and what I'm after with
the book. Just to give you a sense of basically a roadmap for the next 15 minutes or so, I want to
go through a background of the book quite briefly. I want to underscore two important questions that
I have about Scaler and why someone like me who does a lot of work in media history with an
emphasis on sound would be interested in it. Then I want to look at two things in particular about
Scaler. One, the way in which it engages writing and argumentation. Then secondly, how it might
basically help us develop an awareness of technologies. Then close basically in a really
gestural fashion with two possible trajectories for objects to think with. Since I can't really
talk about the content, I thought I'd give you a sense of some of the sounds that I'm working with
in this cultural history of magnetic recording. I'm going to go ahead and play a few for you.
According to the source of New York, USA.
Hello Tony, my name is Thomas Knapp, and I'm going to tell you about each one that I haven't.
When I taught my first winery quarter, I asked the company if they would give me the guarantee
from people from all over the world. When I started doing my research, and this is as an
aside basically the beginning of my dissertation research when I started in 2008, I basically
realized a few things about these kinds of sounds that I was studying. One, very kind of perhaps
obviously based on what you heard, they're difficult to remediate into text. They're either
difficult to describe or quite literally they're difficult to transcribe. Secondly, there's a broad
spectrum of fidelity that I'm dealing with here. Basically, I wanted people to be able to understand
basically as a historian who's interested in the material history of sound, the importance of that
fidelity. How sound was different recorded sound in particular at the turn of the 19th into the
20th century when compared with say the digital audio of today. Third, there's a broad range of
genres and expressions I'm working with. I'm not a musicologist. I'm really interested in the ways
in which a particular technology helped people understand and express sound. I wasn't dealing
with one type of music. I wasn't dealing with one specific type of sound art and what have you.
This posed a number of issues. Finally, in this case, I felt like all these sounds kind of begged
to be heard, not just read. Repeatedly in doing the research, I was spinning page after page
describing what someone may hear in this publication that's more or less intended for print.
So, I came up with once I encountered the possibility of being able to use Scaler,
the platform I just showed you the video of a moment ago, I had two central questions about it,
approaching this platform with this kind of cultural history of magnetic recording in mind.
The first was how does it influence writing and argumentation, right? If I was basically educated
and I learned how to use a word processor to make arguments and I was thinking about
writing for print publications, what would use in this new platform that was geared toward
multimodal argumentation due to my writing and argumentation? And then secondly, how does it
increase an awareness of technologies? And I know this is kind of a broad question, but it's
purposely meant to be that. One way of thinking about this might be to use the recent work of
Alan Liu to kind of anchor it in a particular way. So, recently, Liu in a collection called
Debates in Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, toward the end of his piece called
Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities, has a phrase where he gestures towards
culturally aware technology complementing technologically aware cultural criticism.
So, for me to say how might a platform help people become more aware about technologies,
it meant two things. One, the way in which technologies actually work, right? Their material
particulars, the technical elements of them. But also on the other end, the kind of histories that
they have, the ways in which they are culturally embedded. So, regarding writing, I want to go
ahead and move into these two questions and address them rather quickly today. Here is a
typical kind of paragraph. This is actually cut and pasted essentially out of one of the
earlier drafts of my dissertation, the ways in which I was writing about sound. This particular
paragraph was a paragraph about William S. Burroughs' work in a lecture he gave, Origin Theory of the
Tape Cut-Ups at the Naropa Institute when he was doing, or he was kind of well into his work with
magnetic tape and the cut-up method. When I started using Scaler, I found out kind of quickly and quite
obviously that I could do something like allow the audio to be next to the text. So, as a writer,
this was actually really interesting to me, right? This is something that achieved a really basic
purpose and was useful in a very simple way. So, we might say that here, Scaler in terms of
writing with sound was really helpful because it allowed audio to be co-present with the criticism,
right? It allowed me to basically let a lot of the audio do the work that I wanted it to do,
but at the same time, I should underscore the fact that I think it heightens a kind of scholarly
responsibility to the medium, right? When you know someone can hear when you're writing about,
when it's right next to what you're writing about. In Scaler terminology, this is often referred to
as the composite, right? The ways in which different types of media, text, audio, video,
can be combined together into a single webpage. So, this was something that was really striking to
me. A second thing that was really interesting was the fact that if you notice in the last example
I gave, the text was on the left and the audio was on the right. In this case, the audio could
actually be embedded in the logic and the linear logic of the writing itself. So, you could read
the sentence, then listen to the audio and then continue down the paragraph. It's important to
note that in Scaler, a reader could do this, right? So, essentially here on the left, you would have a
series of views that would be made available to you and you could switch up the views, right? So,
if your preference was to move the audio into the paragraphs themselves or to actually make
the audio disappear and have a text-only view, you could do this. So, as someone who is writing a book
project, this became really interesting to me because it raised the question about how do you
write with these kind of multiple views in mind? How can you anticipate a reader who may redesign
your text, right? And I think in a web environment now where content is increasingly personalized,
search results included, this is a key and important question for scholars as we continue
to work in these digital domains. So, how do we engage flexible design and look at the different
ways in which text can be stylized together with other media? Another thing that I sort of
noticed when I was working with Scaler was the ways in which, in a very appealing way, I could
add annotations to the audio. And this allowed me to basically explain things. For example, in this
case, I explain a reference that Burroughs makes to the Getty family. He leaves out some important
details and I mention, say, for example, at the end that Peter Gordon Getty did, in fact, sue his
father and he did for five million dollars. What this allowed me to think about more intensely
was the ways in which I think, perhaps, really arguably for the first time, scholars have been
able to, in these domains, write with the temporality of the new media they study, right? So, what does
it mean to write within the temporality of audio, right? To write through annotations rather than
through the kind of more block text that we're familiar with, right? What does it mean to write
alongside an audio file? And importantly, these annotations in the audio are time stamped, right?
So, you could go back to them. You could see the ways in which they're discreetly connected
to particular moments in the audio. So, here's another important thing to mark off and to
highlight. The annotations themselves in a platform like Scaler become unique instances with their own
URIs, right? So, you could actually point to the annotation itself independent of the argument,
right? This matters in a really simple way because what you can think about is accessing
the media alone, right? You have the audio file up here on the right and then my series of
annotations on the left, right? This is operating independently of, say, a path or a chapter that
I'm writing in the book, right? So, someone could easily, as an audience member, go through and
basically navigate all the media in your text without actually paying any real significant
attention to the arguments that you're making, right? And for me, as I started to think about
this, I realized that, I think, in a really core and fundamental way, this means that annotations
in the future of scholarly communication are valuable in and of themselves. Scaler is using
the open annotation collaboration specifications to think about the ways in which the annotations
for an individual project can be integrated into another one, right? To think more in terms of
interoperability of annotations across books. Another way that I found that was really
interesting in writing with sound and scaler was the ways in which you could use visualizations
to talk about sound, right? So, in this instance, all the green dots you see, it's kind of nice,
right? Sorry, I don't have a legend. But all the green dots you see here are media instances in
the book. In this particular case, all of my audio files. And then you can see how the audio files
are then, in this particular case, origin, in theory, the tape cut-ups. The excerpt has four
annotations, the purple dots, and is used in two different pages, right? So, what this allows you
to do is to think about, through a book and through the built-in visualizations in a book,
the ways in which you can combine the abstract, in this case, the very abstract visualization
with a bunch of dots, with the particular, right? The ways in which you can think about a book in
the aggregate and in a specific instance. And I think in very granular ways that we're probably
not very familiar with in the composition of, say, our monographs or our sold-authored articles.
Those of you who are curious, those of you who do much work in visualization,
may want to note that Scaler does use D3 JavaScript visualizations to run these kind
of particular built-in graphical expressions. And then one other thing I want to mention here,
kind of quite quickly, much like, I think, more contemporary word processors these days,
is Scaler uses essentially a versioning mechanism where you can go through and see
the ways in which a given instance in a book has changed over time. So, you can see, for instance,
the page on Burroughs went from 2019 characters down to 96. I thought more and more about the
ways in which I could distribute the argument across annotations and cut down my text to make
it more concise. And I think this is probably really not necessarily anything novel to most
people that are studying digital scholarly communication today, but I think it's worth
noting the idea of iterative argumentation, the way you can look at the different instantiations
and versions of the text across its lifecycle. So, being able to, within the platform itself,
version all the resources and actually make all of those versions publicly available. So,
an audience could then go through and see all of your different versions.
So, I could basically ask myself, how did this get to that? Right? And so, as a writer,
I think this is a really interesting question. So, my second question was, what about this kind
of technological awareness? How could a platform allow people to become more aware about technologies,
both in the ways in which they're culturally embedded and their technical particulars?
And what I want to do here, and I can already see the kind of possible critiques in this gesture,
but what I want to do here is think about two or less different camps to put out there. Those who
have largely done work in media studies and those who have largely done work in digital humanities,
precisely because I'm interested in the possible overlaps of those disciplines.
Right? So, I think from the perspective of media studies practitioners, a platform like Scaler,
and questions about how to write with sound or if you're interested how to write with video or other
media, is really a helpful platform for thinking about technology and in specific the technical
particulars of scholarly communication for various reasons. The first is that I think it necessarily,
I think much like platforms such as Omeka, get scholars to think about the relevance of
metadata. I think in fields like media studies, this isn't something that's usually involved in
typical curricula. It's not something that scholars tend to write about. So, Dublin Core,
for example, is applicable to any instance in the Scaler platform. And you can see here that you have,
aside from the basic 15, you have other options as well.
I think that aside from having building metadata into the workflow of the Scaler process,
another one is a basic knowledge or familiarity with the infrastructure that's demanded by these
complex digital projects. So, as you may have seen in the video, media can be imported from
various archives and you see a couple of them mentioned here. And I think this makes scholars
think very quickly about the ways in which their media is tied to other groups and organizations
that need to be sustained. So, the general mindset here is let archivists do, what archivists do well,
right? Let them house and keep their audio and you can import it in, right? So, I think this,
by necessity, makes media scholars think about, for example, where their work is stored and how
to gather and bundle it together to make an argument. Third, I think the insistence on
standards and I think thinking about the kind of long history of standards and its different kind of
valences is important in media studies, right? I think in many ways that the word standard can be
a bad term for scholars who have done work, say, in cultural studies. So, thinking about
standards, multiple valences, and getting, I think, people in media studies to think about it
more intensely, in particular the case with Scaler thinking through RDF and its applications
in that particular platform. And then finally, the relevance of design in media studies work.
The question in the gradual shift, I believe, from print to multimodal argumentation,
thinking about how design allows you to make particular arguments and to take
seriously the question of, well, what is it or what is the possibility if they judge your
book by its cover, right? What are the roles of design and to what degree is collaboration
necessary to think about this design work? And I want to wrap up more or less with these,
a few ways of looking at why I think a platform like Scaler might help digital humanities
practitioners think more intensely about the relevance of technology. And here I'm going to
kind of underscore the cultural embeddedness of technology and the projects that I think,
for lack of a better word, Scaler tends to invite. If you haven't gotten the impression by the
samples, I think Scaler thus far, I don't think this is necessarily an inherent quality, but
Scaler thus far has kind of encouraged a certain kind of technocultural criticism. I point here
to the work of Virginia Kuhn in particular. But I think digital humanities has a lot to learn from
the history of the cultural studies of technology and the work that's been going on in media studies.
And I think using a platform like Scaler to argue with and through new media is one way to do that,
to think about, for example, the relevance of new technologies to questions of political economy,
to questions about difference, to questions about material conditions.
Also, I think thinking about multimodal argumentation seriously as a way to produce
scholarly communication. So I think many of our journals in digital humanities are still largely
text-based. What happens if we take a lot of the visualizations, the text analyses that we're
producing, and we actually start to include them more vigorously into the actual scholarly
communication process? Here I point to the work of Nick Mearsoff as one example. He has recently
published work using Scaler. Two more things. One is the general question of what might be
digital methods for new media. I can already think of where in the case of sound, say,
people in this room have been doing this work, Tanya Clement, Liz Lash in particular, but also
more generally folks like Lev Manovich have been asking, how do we take computational methods in
particular and apply them to the study of new media and not simply text? And I think Scaler kind of
sparks those kind of inquiries and asks those kind of questions. It may not in the computational side
be ready to be kind of perform those kind of inquiries, but I do think it raises them once
various media play such a vital and central role in the argumentation process. And then lastly,
I think taking seriously the relevance of the vernacular web and digital humanities scholarly
communication, right? Not just for the sake of outreach, say, producing scholarly communications
that appeal to broad audiences, but also I think looking at the ways in which we could learn quite
a bit from existing platforms. In this case, I show the kind of importing tool in Scaler for
YouTube videos and the ways that we can take those meaningfully for, say, thinking about the
intersections between public humanities and digital humanities. So I want to close with
this gesture. Two trajectories for objects to think with. And admittedly, these are vague and
they're purposefully vague. I hope, perhaps, that they spark discussion. The first is that I'm
hoping that one trajectory may be, and I am kind of implying here this might also be a trajectory
for digital humanities research, is thinking about the ways that we can seriously ground
intellectual practice in the familiar. Taking new media that's familiar to a broad range of audiences,
capturing readers where they live across a broad range of domains, and engaging via digital
humanities and computational methods in contemporary issues, political ones included.
The second one, I think, is to think about the ways in which we could highlight embodied learning
and digital humanities. I see this being increasingly done in, say, work around tacit
knowledge. The work of Bill Turkle here, I think, is quite relevant. Also in museum studies. But
taking seriously the idea that the things and engagements that we have with technology are
cultural in character and the innovation by necessity is engaging the question of how do we
interact with new devices and new objects. So how do we think more seriously, I think, in my opinion,
about the role of embodiment in the work that we do? Thank you. I just want to give a few acknowledgements.
Okay, I like it.