Why digital?

The gavel bat, submitted for copyright registration by Narendra Anthony Narine in 2017. Rejected for the second and final time in 2019.

One of the questions that we are asked to address in the first iteration of our projects is why digital tools should be used to implement those projects.

This is a question that can stop you in your tracks.

It is also a question that helps me to understand the deepening extent to which I agree with Dr. Langmead's assertion that the "digital humanities" aren't really a thing insofar as our work as scholars, readers, thinkers, question askers and effectively just humans in our present world is, simply, digital. Or at least it is most of the time, anyway, so if humanists set out to analyze a text or an image or some other remnant of our expressed lives, they almost certainly will be using digital tools at some point.

Regarding this project, it is to state the obvious to say first and foremost that digital tools makes sense because the data are digital. Unless they were originally typewritten onto actual paper and only subsequently scanned, they began their lives as digital objects (likely, Word documents) and were made available to the world via the US Copyright Office's Review Board Decision database in digital form. They were downloaded, rendered and converted all in digital format. To interrogate them manually would be as laborious as it would now seem absurd: I would have to print them, take notes from them, somehow manually denote connections between themes and patterns... the whole undertaking would - today - be crazy.

In the fourth week of our course, DSAM 3000 students read Paul Ford's "What is Code" and in our synchronous session contended with precisely what it is that computers can and cannot do. I turns out that computers cannot do anything that humans also cannot. It's just that they can do what we can do a billion times faster than we can do it. So, they're really helpful when working with a lot of data.

I am currently considering cutting my dataset down from comprising roughly two and a half years of Copyright Office Review Board decisions to comprising only one year's decisions. Still, digital tools and methods seem the only plausible approach when dealing with a dataset that is as dense and heterogeneous as mine is. I originally expected to find the Review Board decision letters formulaic and almost agnostic of the finer details of the resource under review. I could not have been more wrong. To the contrary, each reviewed work was considered in minute detail, scrutinized for usefulness, expressiveness and originality. Each letter was correspondingly attuned to these qualities, referencing custom-selected case law and standing on its own as a unique dataset.

My present plan is to use topic modeling to discover unobvious meaning embedded in the letters as a dataset. Topic modeling uses statistical methods impervious to my understanding to reveal patterns and connections between, well, topics in text. If I were to sit down with twenty articles on images and in a day read them all, take notes and discover while doing so that the papers that mentioned, say, moving images also mentioned time, I would have done in several hours in what a topic modeling program could do in an instant. This is the second reason that digital tools and methods make sense for this project.

There is yet a third, however, In this class, we have been asked to consider the ways in which digital tools and methods shape and are shaped by our values. Unstated but evident in Johanna Drucker's "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display" is that in choosing what to reveal and how to reveal it, we make some (likely unintentional) statements about our priorities, interests and assumptions. If this course is about learning how to spot values in our digital artifacts, this project is about how to use and examine digital artifacts to reveal values.

The foundation for copyright law was written into Article I of the Constitution by (it's believed) James Madison. The Copyright Clause grants Congress the authority to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". This bit of text communicates quite a few values and valued things, including "progress," "science," "useful" and "arts". This project, undertaken as part of a class interrogating values, is designed to illuminate what values are embedded in the decisions made by the U.S. Copyright Office.

Postscript

I am fond of the gavel bat. I also find its rejection letter to be particularly demonstrative of the values referenced above. I've included a(n annotated) copy of that letter for your consideration.

gavel-bat.pdf

Download PDF • 128KB

Works Referenced

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities

Quarterly 005, no. 1 (March 10, 2011).

Ford, Paul. “What Is Code?” Businessweek, June 11, 2015. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/.

U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8.