Close Reading with Computers Eve, Martin Paul
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory,
2019, 2019-06-04, 20201201, Volume:
6, Issue:
2
eBook, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Open access
Rather than working at the usual scales of distant reading, this book shows what happens when we bring techniques from the digital humanities to bear on a single novel for close readings.
"This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, ...students and researchers in English departments waiver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century. Martin Paul Eve’s engaging and far-reaching study explores the novel's contribution to the ongoing displacement of cultural authority away from university English. Spanning the works of Jennifer Egan, Ishmael Reed, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Waters, Percival Everett, Roberto Bolaño and many others, Literature Against Criticism forces us to re-think our previous notions about the relationship between those who write literary fiction and those who critique it. "
When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate ...groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites") in the mid- to late-1990s. The “Scene," as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez" itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software." Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy. Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.
This book delivers an introduction and overview of developing intersections between digital methods and literary studies. The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies serves as a starting place for ...those who wish to learn more about the possibilities, and the limitations, of the oft-touted digital humanities in the literary space. The volume engages with the proponents of digital humanities and its detractors alike, aiming to offer a fair and balanced perspective on this controversial topic. The book combines a survey and background approach with original literary research and, therefore, straddles the divide between seasoned digital experts and interested newcomers.
Introduction: Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the digital object identifier (DOI) system. We do not currently know, at scale, the extent to ...which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved. Methods: We construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample. Results: Of the 7,438,037 works examined, there were 5.9 million copies spread over the archives used in this work. Furthermore, a total of 4,342,368 of the works that we studied (58.38%) were present in at least one archive. However, this left 2,056,492 works in our sample (27.64%) that are seemingly unpreserved. The remaining 13.98% of works in the sample were excluded either for being too recent (published in the current year), not being journal articles, or having insufficient date metadata for us to identify the source. Discussion: Our study is limited by design in several ways. Among these are the facts that it uses only a subset of archives, it only tracks articles with DOIs, and it does not account for institutional repository coverage. Nonetheless, as an initial attempt to gauge the landscape, our results will still be of interest to libraries, publishers, and researchers. Conclusion: This work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied. (Note that when, in this article, we write “preserved,” we mean “that we were able to confirm as preserved,” as per the specified limitations of this study.) A slightly larger proportion, i.e., 8.5% (n = 1,797), preserved over 50% of their content in two or more archives. However, many members, i.e., 57.7% (n = 12,257), only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n = 6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, which is against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
You may or may not have heard about it, but over the past two decades a secret and dangerous movement has emerged in humanities departments around the world. The so-called "digital humanities" (or ..."HD" to those in the know), which is wiping out all conventional funding for traditional humanities activities, brings a shady entrepreneurial spirit and a technocratic mindset to language, history, classics, archaeology, and any other disciplinary space it can get its hands on. Seemingly charged with perverting the humanistic foundations of critical thinking and replacing them with technosolutionary mentalities, the digital humanities are growing and thriving under our noses and many do not even seem to realize the danger.
Puede que se haya enterado o puede que no, pero en las dos últimas décadas ha surgido un movimiento secreto y peligroso en los departamentos de humanidades de todo el mundo. Las llamadas “humanidades digitales” (o “HD” para los entendidos), que están acabando con toda la financiación convencional de las actividades humanísticas tradicionales, aporta un sombrío espíritu empresarial y una mentalidad tecnocrática sobre lengua, la historia, los clásicos, la arqueología y cualquier otro espacio disciplinar en el que pueda poner sus manos. Aparentemente encargadas de pervertir los fundamentos humanísticos del pensamiento crítico y sustituirlos por mentalidades tecnosolucionistas, las humanidades digitales están creciendo y prosperando ante nuestras narices y muchos parecen ni siquiera haberse dado cuenta del peligro.
Percival Everett’s Telephone (2021) is a novel published, by deliberate design, in three very different versions. Ostensibly, the author has claimed in interview, this choice was to test the ...boundaries of authorial authority and to delegate interpretative control to the reader. In this article, I argue that such a stance is disingenuous. Telephone is, instead, a novel that continually withholds information from the reader and that ultimately frustrates close reading techniques. In doing so, the text casts the reader into the mental viewpoint of the terminally ill child in the novel, Sarah, who suffers from the progressive neurological condition Batten disease. The outcome is that Telephone should be read as a novel that pathologizes readerly inattention but that, as a result, passes innovative comment on disability narratives in fiction more broadly.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The open-access edition of this text was made possible by a ...Philip Leverhulme Prize from The Leverhulme Trust. Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Where does a password end and an identity begin? A person might be more than his chosen ten-character combination, but does a bank know that? Or an email provider? What’s an ‘identity theft’ in the digital age if not the unauthorized use of a password? In untangling the histories, cultural contexts and philosophies of the password, Martin Paul Eve explores how ‘what we know’ became ‘who we are’, revealing how the modern notion of identity has been shaped by the password. Ranging from ancient Rome and the ‘watchwords’ of military encampments, through the three-factor authentication systems of Harry Potter and up to the biometric scanner in the iPhone, Password makes a timely and important contribution to our understanding of the words, phrases and special characters that determine our belonging and, often, our being. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
At 33TB of data in its main collection, the highly illegal Library Genesis project is one of the largest repositories of copyright-violating educational ebooks ever created. Established over a decade ...ago in 2008, the goal of Library Genesis is nothing short of a modern Library of Alexandria, albeit without anyone’s legal sanction. As one of its administrators wrote: “within decades, generations of people everywhere in the world will grow up with access to the best scientific texts of all time. ... The quality and accessibility of education to the poor will grow dramatically too. Frankly, I see this as the only way to naturally improve mankind: we need to make all the information available to them at any time” Bodó 2018b. Rooted in its homeland’s Russian communist principles and particularly the Soviet isolationist copyright policies of the twentieth century, Library Genesis is a formidable resource and threat to conventional academic publishers. The Library Genesis database had just short of 1.2m records (books) in 2014 Bodó 2018a. As of January 2020, this capacity has doubled to 2.5m books. In this article, I examine the minimal computational design choices taken by this maximal-in-intent, illicit archive of epistemological dissent and how such decisions have shaped the scalability and growth of the platform. This includes Library Genesis’s numerical subdivision of record identifiers into “buckets” to work around directory file limitations in the GNU/Linux operating system; its use of md5 hashing of filenames within directories capped at 1,000 files to avoid future hashing collisions while allowing for on-disk integrity checking; and its use of the MySQL socket/network server as opposed to SQLite or similar disk-based database. Beyond these computational details, though, the theoretical tension that this article highlights is the path dependencies that are set in (illegal) computational projects that have goals of absolute abundance and maximalist capacity, and the minimalist design principles that they must instigate at the outset to ensure a degree of scalability. I also query the ways in which the project’s contested mission statements target an economic (geographic) audience demographic with only minimalist access to high-capacity computing resources. I finally examine the limits on scalability of the distribution of the Library Genesis through its torrent archive and other distributed networking technologies such as IPFS, which despite their promise of peer-to-peer redundancy fall down on an archive of this size.
PDF
