Down the Digital Rabbit Hole

After writing the post on archiving after reading Jeffery Feldman’s post “We Didn’t Stop The Fire” I spent some more time perusing Mandy Brown’s site A Working Library. While Brown is a web designer, or has written about web design and who serves as a Community and Support Manager for Typekit (something else I have to go check out), she also speaks my language, having spent ten years working at W.W. Norton & Company. She speaks “books” and “reading” while also diving into some of the technological topics that concern the digital humanities community. In her post “Forever” she discusses the importance of digital archiving, or archiving the digital. Elsewhere, she also compares web design to book design, two things I wouldn’t have thought about side-by-side. She explains in the section about her web site: “Great book design is invisible; it gives form to the text such that you could imagine the words no other way. It makes a graceful entrance, and then disappears as you read. I have sought to achieve these same qualities with the design of this site….”

Besides her post on archiving, the post that includes and considers two excerpts from Rollo May’s book, The Courage to Create provides some food for thought. Published in 1975, his views on our relationship with technology seem particularly prescient.  If, in 1975, he recognized that “we live in a world that has become mechanized to an amazingly high degree” what would he think now?

Brown includes another quote that seems to express what I and perhaps others feel is at risk when diving down the digital rabbit hole, or becoming wholly absorbed in the digital world:

“What people do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious world. This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or techniques or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and  nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but the can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. then tools become defense mechanisms–specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness that we call the unconscious. Our mechanisms and technology then make us ‘uncertain in the impulses of the spirit,’ as the physicist Heisenberg puts it.” (May, The Courage to Create, page 68)

Clearly, though, anything can become a protection from consciousness, not just technology.

From there, I read her post on modes of writing. In this piece she reflects on the differences between writing for the page and writing on a blog, echoing and expanding on Dr. William Turkel’s comment on blogging that Richard included in his post, “Reflective Blogging.” In reference to her own experiences Brown writes, “When I first started blogging, I told myself it was o.k. to post half-formed thoughts; a blog was ephemeral, reactive–the medium cared not so much about completeness as about timeliness. I still believe that to be true, but with one important modification: it’s not that a blog post has permission to be rough so much as that roughness is its natural state. Meaning, blogging encourages exploration and experimentation. In this way, blogging is the kind of writing authors have done for centuries but which  usually remained hidden away.”

She asks an important question here, though, when it comes to the difference between traditional writing in the form of traditional books and writing in the digital arena, expressing a concern shared by those of us who live more in the realm of books: “But if the book morphs from ink on paper to HTML (as I hope it does) what then will distinguish it from other kinds of writing? How will a book be different than a blog? Do we need to distinguish at all?”

First, I hope not all books morph from ink on paper to HTML, though being able to find an electronic version of a book is a valuable tool for research, but in thinking about writing, this makes me reconsider Stephen Ramsay’s comments in “On Building” on one characteristic of digital humanities as moving from reading to building. I took exception to that (and, o.k., I understand that creating a web site is a form of building…I think) until I read Brown’s post. Ramsay may not have meant the idea of building to be taken this way (particularly when he says that someone with a blog is not necessarily building), but I can appreciate Brown’s approach to blogging, seeing it as an act of building, a process of thinking that compounds itself over time, whereas a book is a culmination of the blog kind of writing. “It’s what emerges after years of scratching around the same topic, when all the little pieces start to come together. Where the blog suggests paths, the book draws conclusions.” She goes on to assert that neither one is superior to the other, but both have a place.

As for Mr. Ramsay and his hyperbolic assertion that one should learn code “because it’s fun and because it will change the way you look at the world,” I have yet to find the fun in coding. Do I agree that it’s necessary? Yes, but for me, writing code is as fun as diagramming sentences. Mathematicians claim that math is poetry, but I’d rather have a root canal than factor polynomials. That said, I can appreciate that, with regard to digital humanities, something new is indeed afoot.

However, Ramsay leaves me with more questions than answers. I’m not sure yet what to make of his statement, “Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic — one that is quite a bit more radical than taking the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry and applying them to digital objects.” What does he mean by this? What does he mean by forms of  ”haptic engagement”?

Can Mandy Brown translate this for me?