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