At the present moment, the cutting edge of what is variously referred to as humanities computing seems to be happening in information distrubution and the library sciences. I subscribe to a few weblogs by people well-known and well-regarded in the field of humanities computing and am dismayed by the fact that almost none of the topics discussed registers in the working experience of my colleagues here in the trenches of an English Department in the Midwest. There is almost zero connection between what humanites computing folk are doing and what real-life scholars in my branch of humanities are doing. I'm also surprised that social networking seems to be the next big thing in humanities computing. Call me a Luddite.

The disconnect between the concerns of cutting edge humanities computing and plain ol' everyday scholars is undoubtedly due to the esoteric nature of some of the technologies studied by the digital jet set (e.g. server-based technologies to facilitate the interrelation of information across databases) and the fact that the dominant model of humanities scholarship does not stand to greatly improve through the application of advanced computing techniques. When reading and understanding the intricacies of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is an important stage in the development of a scholarly career, surplus petaflops for reorganizing semantic database structures seems a bit wide of the mark.

In fact, I’m somewhat in astonished awe at the recent push for supercomputing in the humanties. Don’t get me wrong; I think that supercomputing power applied to humanties-oriented applications will yield innumerable treasures, helping scholars discover as-yet-unimaginable correspondences between word frequencies, textual representation, and aesthetic structure. Even so, I’m fairly convinced almost none of it will be useful to humanities scholars except in the way that infrared remote controls are useful to Joe Sixpack as the spinoff technology of aerospace research. Naturally, I'm prepared to be wrong, but my present guess is that the work information researchers in the humanites at present do will be more readily adaptible to work done by governmental agencies building databases that contain large chunks of natural languge data than to the work of scholars trying to understand the linkages between the failure to carry of an Equal Rights Amendment and misogynistic representation in 1970s television sitcoms, for example.

Given the seductiveness of the multi-million dollar technological gadgets and widgets being thrown at our best and brightest humanites computing specialists, more attention needs to be paid by us less-capable cyberfolk to the state of everyday computing in the humanities. You know, the day-in-day-out interaction we have with the tools that comprise our fundamental humanist computing tool set. This area of research is so boring that it doesn't deserve so distinguishing a name as "humanities computing." In fact, it's so dull I am going to call this area banalities computing, the computing of the everyday, the pedestrian, the humdrum, the actual lived-in-front-of-keyboard-monitor-and-mouse experience you and I have every single day of our scholarly and pedagogical lives.

Yeah, I'm pretty pissed that computing in 2008 is nowhere near as sexy as Neuromancer promised it would be.

Most of us use a "word processor." We read email, use Blackboard, save to USB thumb drives, and place stickies beneath our keyboards. At least since McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, we have understood that the tools and techniques we use to conduct our research are not distinct from the modes of scholarship in which we are engaged, whatever that means. I think it means that our scholarship is not only shaped by our ideological investments and professional aspirations. Our scholarship is also unavoidably (and irrevocably) conditioned by our computing banalities, by the day-in-day-out, for example, of being forced to use the EBSCOHost web frontend to get information out of the MLA International database. If anything sucks, the EBSCOHost web interface surely does. I guess the bright side is that at least it sucks hard.

I’ll end by saying that in the coming months, I will offer descriptions of (as opposed to screeds against) what I perceive to be my lived share of banalities computing. As of this writing, I intend to produce a series of hands-on tutorials and demonstrations about my workflow with the primary aim of stimulating the generation of ideas about how computing can be made more effective for humanities scholars who are not computer programmers but who are somewhat technically adept (persistence is a workable substitute).

A few things to keep in mind, especially if you decide to follow along.

1. I use OS X. I understand other operating systems exist, but they are not part of my banalities computing experience.
2. I use closed source software.
3. I use open source software.
4. I am not responsible for any harm or damage that may occur to your data, your hardware, your livelihood, your loved ones, or your reputation should you try anything described on this website.
5. I suck as a computer programmer and am open to suggestions.
6. Unless you give me money, I will not fix your computer.
7. And even then.
8. Heck, forget the computer. Just give me money.
9. Thanks.

While the number of foreclosure victims living in this makeshift town are in the minority, all of the people in this shanty town are products of forces more complex and larger than themselves. It's stunning how the United States fails to respond to the needs of these people and how quickly it acts to protect the luxuries of the wealthy.

Can such a device actually have been approved by the governmental bodies who regulate the medical device industry? Did a group of sentient beings actually decide it was OK to connect a pacemaker to the Internet so doctors could surf the status of patients' pacemakers?

My incredulity is like a burning light that's driving me insane.

Calling that XML is like calling hamburger tofu.1 The innards of the .docx formart are binary. I defy anyone to copy-and-paste the text content of a .docx file into a new file without using Microsoft Word. XML is supposed to be human-readable to facilitate precisely such interchange. I couldn't even write a PERL script to convert that mess.2

Ideally (and in practice until Microsoft got around to making an XML DTD of their own), XML files are human-readable, like so:

That's XML.

I don't use Microsoft software except for document compatibility with publishers, colleagues, and students.

Upgrading to Microsoft Office 2008 would cost me out-of-pocket something in the neighborhood of $20 (US). Not much money. On the other hand, Microsoft has removed Visual Basic from Office 2008 for Mac OS, and this means the custom macros I use (colored text and automated insertion as I explain in the "understanding comments" document I provide my students) would not be available to me. It's not just that there is no incentive for me to upgrade; there is disincentive.

Mac users are up in arms about the crippling of Office 2008 for Mac OS. I'm frankly surprised MacWorld gave Word 2008 higher than two out of five. This seems to be of a piece with Microsoft's failures of late, including the ongoing debacle of Vista which Randall Stross covers in today's New York Times, thirteen months after Vista was released.

Furthermore, it is imperative that documents created by a publicly-funded institution such as Ohio University (where I presently teach) be accessible to people who use non-proprietary software. All documents produced by public institutions of higher education should be in open formats, formats other than Microsoft's which have never been open. The pressure Microsoft is placing upon users of older versions of Microsoft Word, upon institutions of higher learning, and upon taxpayer-funded government bodies should be the last warning anyone needs before abandoning closed formats.

Here's what I'm doing.

For the first time in the five years I have required students to submit papers electronically, I will disallow Microsoft Word documents. Starting with Spring quarter 2008, I will require submissions to be in RTF only.

While this will likely go some way to making sure iPhones are stable, it seems to me some of the more interesting uses of iPhone are prevented by this limitation. For example, jailbreakers have successfully installed and run Apache on the iPhone. Apache really only makes sense as an always-on background application. Not that the iPhone would make the fastest or best web server, but the ability to deploy a web server (or a server of any type) that was truly mobile (and small enough to conceal) would profoundly affect certain aspects of Internet computing, perhaps to the point of bringing new ones into being.

I understand jailbreaking will never end, but if one wants the support of official APIs using an iPhone as a server will require the dedication of an iPhone to that service. This seems, to me, a serious lack of foresight on Apple's part. The iPhone represents, to my mind, the way forward for ubiquitous mobile computing, but Apple at present doesn't seem to want the iPhone to take on this role.

I guess the jailbreakers will have to show Apple the way.

Baggs's computer-generated speech makes the point that normal persons would be skeptical that an autistic could produce such analysis in "our language."

The perception of such augmentation often manifests as excitement, joy, curiosity, and self-confidence. They are the feelings which people experience when learning how to knit, understanding a new language, or acquiring a new tool. For example, when I was a child, I remember how excited I was when I got my first ten-speed bicycle. Ten-speed bicycles were several degrees of complexity over a single-gear coaster brake bicycle. They enabled cyclists (cyborgs) to change the ratio between torque and power as occasion demanded. The decoupling of acceleration and deceleration in the form of handbrakes allowed for greater control over balance while turning etc. and so on.

The giddiness I experienced when I got my first ten-speed bicycle was about being able to move my corporeal self in ways that were more efficient than was possible with a single-gear bicycle. The technology was fundamentally about moving my body, about moving meat and bone, flesh and sinew.

Miguel DeLanda considers the augmentation of individual capability when he writes

It isn't too difficult to see how moving one's body, one's flesh and bone, from one location to another enables one to enter new assemblages, whether going to party on the other side of town, riding from one's house in the suburbs to the tidepool down the coast, etc. What is less obvious is how the acquisition of new skills provides access to assemblages whose materiality is less visible to the eye. For example, deploying a content management system to automate the generation of article summaries, summaries monitored by various pieces of software whose output is consulted by, say, a group of students.

Some people are (I am) drawn to tools and information that provide access to new assemblages, to novel informatic and corporeal strata. This kind of activity—the acquisition and development of material which increase the range of one's influence—is distinct from the acquisition and arrangment of data available in strata already familar.

A recent NYTimes article notes a nearly twenty percent increase (20%) in United States suicide rates among people in midlife (45-54) between 1999 and 2004. 1 Also according to the article, more than 32,000 people committed suicide in 2004.

On the other hand, the FBI reports that in 2004 16,137 people died of homicide, just more than half the number of those who died by their own hands.2

The nearly two-to-one prevelance of suicide over homicide is not something to dwell on, but whenever I’m reminded of this fact I nod in sober acknowledgement of just how painful living can sometimes be.

I'm interested in the kinaesthetics of such dances, the way in which mechanism and organism are both signified, each blending into the other.

For example, the initial jerking movements whose range of motion are severely limited signify “robot” and highlight the performer‘s skill precisely because they are modifications of his normal movement as a living organism. When his movements become more fluid (in way characteristic of 1980s popping) they take as their point of contrast not his everyday motor behavior, but his stylized “robot” movements.

The performance draws not only upon the vocabulary of robot kinaesthetics but also on a stylized version of organism kinaesthetics and the two rhetorics are made to play against each other. The performance in this sense can be said to be polyphonic.

There is also a layer of racial complexity in that “The Robot” was pioneered by black Americans in the 1970s. Performances such as the one depicted in the video clip above have roots going back to African-American street vernacular and insofar as they communicate to new generations of dancers and audiences, they branch and grow into something else.1

UPDATE:I have an entry that considers a commercial wherein the dancer in the video above, David Bernal, performs. In post-production, Gene Kelly’s face is digitally imposed over Bernal’s (as well as over the faces of two other dancers dressed up as Kelly).

Thanks to M. for alerting me to Bernal’s presence in both videos and for pointing me to an interview Bernal gave on kotte.org.

Kottke posted Bernal’s interview two years ago to the day, and I would not have learned of it except for two people connecting to me and providing me information.

Tasks which require extended periods of attention have become increasingly difficult for me in the last ten years. I don't think the causes of my difficulties, however, are only about lack. I believe this increasing difficulty is the result of almost a decade of reinforcement which begins with my work in a digital media processing and production shop. What was a benefit in that work context is in some ways an enemy of the modes of thought required of literary and cultural analysis. Even stated this way, the magnitude and depth of the problem are vastly understated. It's one thing to say “literary analysis and creative writing require long spans of attention” and quite another to say “digital media creation, processing, and interpretation reward the ability to context switch.” The logical extension of this is that environments which cultivate the ability to context switch are those which also foster the creation, processing, and interpretation of digital content.

Fast forward.

The mechanisms which can cultivate attention switching (which itself can be broken into parts: awareness of peripheral stimuli; evaluation of stimulus; identification of candidate requiring attention switch; promotion of candidate; deprioritization of current task; storing pertinent information regarding current task; processing stimuli emanating from promoted candidate; executing task required of new context) are undoubtedly infinite, but in an academic environment where pure research is encouraged (if not rewarded) as a good in and of itself, people who are able to rapidly shift attention to new tasks and resume previous tasks are at some advantage.

Due to congenital accident and historical contingency, my own nervous system is good at context switching. Extremely good. My suspicion is that the pleasure centers of my brain are intensely stimulated when the neurological and perceptual mechanisms required to attention switch are activated. I get off when I switch attention.

I am not saying I have digitally-induced ADD. Rather, I’m saying that my involvement with the processes of computation and digital media creation have adapted my brain to absorb information from many sources and that this adaptation tends to produce material that looks quite different from the analyses characteristic of physical print. It’s a feature, not a bug.

However, this ability becomes a problem when the rewards of attention switching are so powerful that they indiscriminately reinforce attention switching for its own sake. Perhaps a more flexible model would be something like

• awareness of peripheral stimuli
• evaluation of stimulus
• rejection/identification of candidate requiring attention switch
• continuance/deprioritization of current task
• etc.

Of course, this model doesn't account for the possibility that some of these threads may run simultaneously. Even so, my main point stands, which is that the indiscriminate reinforcement of attention switching can effectively remove one’s ability to maintain the priority of a current task.

Many people experienced with working in a digital environment are choosing tools that artificially limit distraction. For example, wrting programs which obscure other programs (including the local filing system!) have been gaining adherents and proselytizers. Such tools certainly have their advantages. But tools that eliminate stimuli by hogging screen real estate may reduce the value of digital media workflows which can reveal/disclose related information that will enhance the quality of produced content. Such tools inhibit productive as well as deleterious instances of attention switching. This is the problem of all or none.

My hope is that the value of rapid attention switching can be increased by developing the ability to reject candidates as ones that do not require an attention switch. Eliminating peripheral stimuli altogether may be the only way some of us can maintain the priority of an important task, but I think there is a better way, one that increases the value of attention switching by limiting the frequency with which it occurs.