Andrew Smith’s commentary on William Turkel’s work on the Old Bailey project was particularly eye-catching this week to me. Comparing this study with another recent study on speech analysis from the Civil War, Smith humorously points out not only the speech-analysis project’s lack of foresight, but a more broad problem the Digital Humanities faces is it seems to feel increasing pressure to be quantitative and technically in order to substantiate itself. The Civil War speeches, when analyzed, were concluded to be incredibly preoccupied with notions on slavery – a fact that isn’t entirely surprising. On the other hand, Turkel’s analysis and finding of an unusual rise in guilty pleas in British courtrooms complimented the changes in the way criminal trials were structured to proceed and the kinds of punishments and consequences would be executed for the individuals each person on trial depending on their crime and sentence. This compare-and-contrast demonstrating the “right” and “wrong” ways in which the digital humanities structures and approaches questions in the humanities reveals the importance of the question and issue in the first place, and not just the elaborateness of the tool being used to study the same “artifact”.
This notion of a solution being implemented to inefficiently solve a project because of a seeming fixation over “form”, the way in which an artifact is studied, and the “content”, the significance of the artifact itself, reminded me of the popular anecdote/urban legend of the US creation of the space pen. Noticing the difference in atmosphere in space and on Earth affecting astronauts’ ability to write with a regular pen, US manufacturers allegedly poured millions of dollars into developing a pen that could compensate for the pressure differences and then, could be used in environments like space. This pen was then manufactured as the “space pen”, a pen that had a pressured ink cartridge that allowed the individual to write in conditions where gravity is inconsistent with the way it is on Earth. Russian astronauts, on the other hand, solved the issue with a pencil. Just as the research on the Civil War documents should have considered the purpose of their project before embarking on it, the space pen manufacturers should have considered the purpose of theirs – making both instances humorous and didactic. While both projects admittedly used and developed incredibly fancy, remarkable pieces of engineering and technology, these projects are demonstrated as clearly ridiculous because of their inability to consider the needs they were expected to fill, erroneously focusing their efforts elsewhere.
Space Pen: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Smith on the Old Bailey Project: http://pastspeaks.com/2011/08/21/the-promise-of-digital-humanities/