As someone who is (still) relatively new to Digital Humanities, I found Scott Weingart’s post, “Demystifying Networks”, incredibly helpful and interesting because it helped to answer a lot of Digital Humanities I knew and didn’t know I found confusing. In his post, Weingart goes through a quick-guide to what kinds of digital tools should and should not be used in certain projects. Emphasizing the project over the tool being used, Weingart urges his readership to look first to the needs of their project rather than the “coolness” of the tool they are drawn to using. In doing so, Weingart expresses as sense of reverence for both the “tool” and the “project” as not identical puzzle pieces that can be appropriated in any way we might want, but unique variables that require a great amount of understanding and consideration. Extending this ideology as he continues his explanation into network analysis and “nodes”, Weingart discusses the different kinds of nodes, or connection patterns that are used. Here, he outlines a major difficulty Digital Humanities faces as it incorporates tools from the sciences into the humanities. While the sciences works with largely uncomplicated connections between nodes, the Digital Humanities is rich with connection because its trademark ambiguity is largely due to the massive amount of influences that can contribute to a single node. Warning his readership of using a tool to analyze a network that doesn’t accomodate for the kind of complex networking that the Digital Humanities requires, Weingart emphasizes useability over convenience since “given that humanistic data are often uncertain and biased to begin with, every arbitrary act of data-cutting has the potential to add further uncertainty and bias to a point where the network no longer provides meaningful results” (Weingart).
Weingart’s discussion of the meaningfulness of connections, regardless of amount or level of complexity, reminded me of Wikipedia and the abundance of links each and every entry is peppered with. Allowing the reader to read an article and click on hyperlinked text to more articles to flesh out knowledge on your initial entry of inquiry, “Wikibinges” are understandably tempting as the site allows anyone with any degree of knowledge on the article’s subject to deepen their conceptualization of a subject. My own late-night Wikibinge started with “pumpkin pie”, and subsquently lead to “Starbucks”, “Moby Dick”, “Nathaniel Hawthorne”, and finally “allegory”. With each and every Wikipedia article a “node”, readers reading one article strewn with hyperlinks are actually being bombarded with an entire network of nodes that connect each of these nodes together. Thus, for Wikipedia, networks are hyper-“spaghetti and meatballs” set of angles Weingart describes of the Digital Humanities, as Wikipedia strives to capture the same kind of multi-facetedness that information ambiguously influences and is influenced by. While insistent curiosity can be blamed for late-night Wikibinges, perhaps we can also now assign some blame to Wikipedia’s “hyper-noded” articles as well.
Weingart’s article: http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=6279