Anxiously awaiting the Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities . . .

A DH-er’s day naturally begins at the zeroth hour, and at 00:00 CDT, I was listening to some very beautiful music.

I’m on spring break this week, and as any academic knows, spring break is an overflow buffer we build into the calendar to keep us all from going insane. So I’m caught between the urge to do Useful Work and the urge to play.

So, my particular mode of planned procrastination this week has involved music software. Last semester, I had some windfall cash from an honorarium or something and decided to buy a copy of Logic Studio. This is really the first chance I’ve had in months to open it up and really fool around with it, and so I’ve been playing with Logic and reading about electronic music.

As a musician, I’m somewhere between a hack and a competent instrumentalist. I’ve studied piano, flute, and saxophone, but spent most of my youth playing acoustic guitar. I read music, but I’m a miserable sight reader. I know some music theory, but, like my knowledge of Latin, it’s fading from lack of use. Still, my house is full of noise makers (dulcimers, bamboo flutes, penny whistles, a bodhran, a didgeridoo), and I pick up the guitar once in awhile.

Electronic music seems like a natural for someone like me, since modern digital audio workstations (Cubase, Logic, Pro Tools, Reason) combine music with geekery. I’ve been meaning to play with this stuff for years, really, and just haven’t been able to get the time.

Let me just say right now that if you can imagine putting yourself into the above sentence, and would like to remain a functioning member of society, you should avoid these programs like the plague. Every time I open Logic, it’s as if I’m opening up some kind of wormhole. Hours disappear. Hours. It’s worse than the Web.

If you are already into music software, you know that these programs are really powerful. Even if you aren’t, you’re probably aware that there are kids out there who compose symphonies on their laptops while sipping a soy latte. I guess I knew both things, but I really wasn’t prepared for just how transcendentally elaborate these programs are.

Thousands upon thousands of instruments. And not just broad classes, but particular instruments. So, say you need an organ. Which one of the particular organs from the 70s do you want to use? And then thousand upon thousands of effects, and synth patches, and drum kits, and methods for correcting, morphing, bending, and reversing. You can write in ordinary music notation, or write like you’re using a tracker on the Amiga, or in a loop editor, or using sine waves.

Then I got to the part where you can run your piece through a filter that will give it the specific acoustic properties of a particular room (say, a cathedral or a garage).

When I was a kid — and unless you are a kid right now, this is true of you too — there was an enormous gulf between the amateur and the professional in terms of media creation tools. If you wanted to make a movie, your parents might be able to spring for a Super 8 or something like that, but you weren’t going to make Star Wars with a camera like that. When a product advertised itself as being “What the pros use,” we knew that was just marketing.

Now, you can walk down to Best Buy and purchase (for less than the amortized price of a Super 8) a camera that would have made George Lucas’s lightsaber turn on unbidden. And more importantly, you can lay your hands on the software that is literally what the pros use (and which, as the pros know, is in the end more important than the camera). There’s no difference between my copy of InDesign, Photoshop, Blender, or Logic and the ones wielded by the greatest new media artists of the age. What’s to stop some enterprising teenager from creating Toy Story on their laptop?

“Time and Talent,” I can hear some say. But I still want to say that the accessibility of the tools represents an epochal land shift in human culture. It’s a cliche to say that the printing press democratized information, but even there, the medium remained in the hands of the few. The fact that I use the same tools as Daft Punk seems to me quite a bit different. It takes hard work to use these tools effectively (because, of course, it’s not about the tools). At the same time, nothing prevents you from putting in the effort to master your medium (because it’s all about the tools). I’ll never stop being completely wide-eyed about this.

What? Oh, right. The Day of DH.

So, this little jag has me listening to lots of electronic music, and at the zeroth hour, I was listening to some cuts off an album called Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music (1948-1980).

It starts out with Clara Rockmore playing Tchaikovsky’s Valse Sentimentale on the theremin. That confirmed two things for me:

1. The theremin is possibly my least favorite instrument in the world.
2. Clara Rockmore is the Paganini of the theremin.

So, track 1 both did and did not blow my mind. But then . . .

Messiaen’s Oraison from 1937! Good heavens. I love Messiaen, first of all — particularly his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which I think is one of the greatest works of twentieth-century music. Anyone who thinks that the twentieth century didn’t produce any great religious music, should listen to this quartet, which was written and performed in a concentration camp on broken instruments.

But the Oraison! Am I the last geek on earth to become aware of an instrument called an Ondes Martenot? This is a very early electronic instrument, roughly contemporary with the theremin. But where the theremin gets on my nerves, the Ondes just about brings me to tears of joy. I can’t tell you how badly I want one of these:

Jean Laurendeau and the Ondes Martenot

So my Day of DH began with an achingly beautiful piece of music written for a new tool. It’s a good thing my days don’t usually involve writing about what I’m doing.

Why am I skeptical of this whole auto-ethnography thing? I suppose, in part, I’m not convinced that DH-ers’ day-to-day lives are that much different from other academics, knowledge workers, IT professionals, librarians, museum curators, or what have you. We shuttle kids around, go to meetings, deal with bureaucracy, try to figure out what to have for lunch (speaking of which . . .).

But then, as I do this — and astute readers will note that for someone who claims to be skeptical, I’m awfully into this whole thing — I notice that my day probably is a bit unusual, at least for a professor. To start with, my day is really dominated by the caring and feeding of machines. For example, I see that there are about twelve of them on my desk.

Three computers (four, if you count the Blackberry), but then my (so-expensive-I-still-feel-guilty) speakers, two headsets, two condenser mics, a 2 terabyte external drive, an atomic clock, a card reader, an ethernet router, a USB hub . . . I won’t even show you what it looks like behind the desk.

But of course, that’s just the home rig. The two desktop machines and the laptop on my desk are connected to a couple of exceedingly powerful servers and another desktop (and two of the desktops are set up as servers). Since I’m completely obsessive about keeping things in working order, my day usually begins with a whole bunch of system administration tasks: syncing, building, updating, repairing. It’s just astonishing how much time I spend dealing with the equipment. I work mostly on my fancy Macbook Pro, and yet I’m almost always at the command line, talking to one of the machines (and to twitter, AIM, whatever).

Now, this is probably a bit unusual even for the DH crowd, but I bet we’re all “monitoring” machines all day long. Do people outside of our field (defining “our field” very broadly for a moment) think of themselves as maintaining relationships with machines throughout the day, or is the computer more like the coffeemaker — an item with which I have a momentary relationship because I’d like to get some work done?

One of the lessons of Day of DH for me has been that most people don’t get around to working on what they really want to work on until about 4:00 in the afternoon.

I my case, that thing is a tf-idf library for Ruby.

I have taught a course on digital humanities every semester since 2003. My courses are usually a combination of the contemplative and the practical. That is, we read Heidegger and hack code.

Right now, I’m well into the second semester with a group of students who, last semester, learned to program in Ruby. This semester, they’re working on a group project that I’m extremely excited about it.

They’ve decided to write a program that can automatically “illustrate” a text using a photograph from Flickr (we’ve decided we’re going to call it “Illustratr” until the cease-and-desist order arrives). In other words, you feed it a text, and it will output that same text with a photograph next to it. The idea, of course, is to have the program choose the photograph based on the text, without any user input.

For the last couple of weeks, the students have been writing code that uses a combination of word frequency analysis and the getRelated and getCluster functions from the Flickr API. That, it turns out, doesn’t work so well — mostly because people tag their photographs in an utterly quixotic way. But of course, this is part of the whole exercise. The students really have to work through the design issues (which include grappling with some non-trivial NLP problems).

Since I want them to focus on the main algorithms, I’ve been writing some utility code for them. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a wrapper for the Flickr API that was mostly focused on their needs. Last week, they got interested in algorithms for determining distinctive vocabulary. We went over that, and it was decided that I would implement a simple module for doing tf-if. (How is it that the professor ends up doing a problem set over break?)

So anyway, that was what I was hoping to get done today. Here it is: 4:00. Time to start working!

Night has fallen. The girls (Maggie, 7, and Julia, 4) are in bed, though not anything like asleep. Also in bed is my wife (June, not a day over 26), who, alas, is sick. She would like me to come in and watch TV with her, so I think the tf-idf library will have to wait until tomorrow.

It’s been a good day. I got some work done, and had some fun blogging. I’ve read around here and there on the RSS-feed, which, I have to admit, makes for fascinating reading. Here are some preliminary ethnographic conclusions, in no particular order.

• Most people make really good choices about what to have for lunch.
• Writing a dissertation is a drag.
• People go to way, way too many meetings.
• Most people spend most of the day preparing to work on DH projects.
• Teaching makes you really tired.
• It is an act of cruelty to send email to Brett Bobley asking why you weren’t funded.
• Digital Humanists are far more likely to have daughters than sons.
• Most people are treading dangerously close to the toxicity threshold for caffeinated beverages.

Of the posts I read today, though, the sweetest one of all was undoubtedly from Geoffrey Rockwell:

Needless to say I woke up over an over last night worrying about the Day of DH project.

As far as I can tell it went off without a hitch. So thanks, Geoff! You’ve done it again . . .