Moriarty’s Code: A Cautionary

Tale on Innovation in the Digital

Humanities

Edward Whitley @edwardwhitley

Lehigh University 12.4.2013

―[H]umanities … scholarship will not

take the use of digital technology

seriously until one demonstrates

how its tools improve the ways we

explore and explain aesthetic

works—until, that is, they expand

our interpretational procedures.‖

–Jerome McGann

Radiant Textuality (2001)

―[D]igital scholarship needs

to do things that simply

cannot be done on paper.‖

—Ed Ayers ―Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?‖

EDUCAUSE Review (July/August 2013)

The McGann/Ayers Teleology

Archives > Tools > New Interpretations

The Crowded Page

• NEH-funded with Co-PI

Andrew Jewell (U of

Nebraska, Lincoln) and

Jeff Heflin (Lehigh

U, Computer Science)

• http://crowdedpage.org

The Crowded Page goals

– develop tools for structuring

data that reveal the workings

of literary communities

– create a visualization that

allows for serendipitous

discovery of new knowledge

– link the visualization directly

to source documents in the

database

The Crowded Page

• Confident with data

model, disappointed with

visualization

– is difficult to work with

– flattens out different types of

relationships

– conceals source material

– distorts the reality that only ~40

people at a time could ever

have met together at Pfaff’s

The Crowded Page

• Further development put

on hold because of . . .

– The Selected Letters of Willa

Cather, edited by Andrew

Jewell and Janis Stout

(Random House, 2013)

– Whitman among the

Bohemians, edited by

Edward Whitley and Joanna

Levin (Iowa, 2014)

The McGann/Ayers Teleology

Archive > Tool > New Interpretations

Archive > Scholarly Community >

New Publications in Print

Moriarty’s code

The fantasy of a powerful

digital tool whose work is,

in reality, accomplished

through a combination of

digital and ―analog‖

methods.

Surprise! He just bribed the

security guards.

No (or very few) digital tools

were actually needed…

Wired magazine editor

―hacked‖ with a simple

phone call to the Apple

support line.

―Can we engage in the design of digital environments that embody

specific theoretical principles drawn from the humanities, not merely work

within platforms and protocols

created by disciplines whose

methodological premises are often at

odds with–even hostile to–humanistic

values and thought?‖

—Johanna Drucker―Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,‖

Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)

―Digital humanities method … consists

in repeatedly coadjusting human

concepts and machine technologies until … the two stabilize each other in

temporary postures of truth that

neither by itself could sustain.‖

—Alan Liu

―The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,‖

PMLA March 2013

Moriarty’s Code: A Cautionary

Tale on Innovation in the Digital

Humanities

Edward Whitley @edwardwhitley

Lehigh University 4.12.2013

The Vault at Pfaff’s 2.0

• Interactive map of New York

• Text-based social network

analysis

• Suite of newspapers the

bohemians worked for

• Continual archiving