Fracturing Pittsburgh

Original skyline of Pittsburgh

Fractured skyline of Pittsburgh

Pat "The Bunny" Schneeweis

Serge Gainsbourg

Sharon Olds

London

EUCALYPTUS!

Broken Koala

Bots

Mark Sample

While digital humanities encases a wide variety of literary works, some of the most interesting objects are robots, or bots, that are created with the intention of providing insight into the shear capabilities that these devices have. To understand their capabilities, one must first truly understand what a bot is. As Mark Sample, professor of digital studies at Davidson College explains in his article “A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit”, “Bots are small automated programs that index websites, edit Wikipedia entries, spam users, scrape data from pages, launch denial of service attacks, and other assorted activities, both mundane and nefarious.” To further understand bots, Wikipedia also describe bots as an automated system that is designed to perform a specific task online, called scripts, which are orders given to the bot through coding. 
   
     Some of the reasons that make bots unique is the unending questions that surround them. For instance, because bots have many purposes, including to generate spam, audiences are left to wonder whether or not the bot’s work has any meaning, which those audiences would decide for their own, if the find anything of value in the works. Moreover, another reason that bots are questioned, is because of the inability to give authorship to one specific person or tool. Does the computer assume ownership because the code for the bot was created on it? Is ownership given to the author who created the code? Or is ownership given to the platform that hosts the bot? It is up to the viewer to decide and answer these questions for themselves, which leads viewers to have different reactions to the bots and the works that they view.

Another reason that make bots interesting, is the fact that they are seen all over the world, even right in your pocket. Probably one of the most well-known bots is Siri, a voice activated bot that communicates with its users, who have devices through Apple. Primarily seen as a “chatterbot,” Siri is able to conduct a conversation with a human, In addition, because Siri is a “chatterbot,” it is able to replicate human intelligence, designed to understand context, which then allows it to answer whatever questions a user might have, to the best of its ability.

While bots are a very useful tool, as seen through the use and success of Siri, bots also have a history of being used for more nefarious purposes. For instance, some of the malicious purposes bots are used for are a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or spam attack websites, overloading their servers. These types of cyber crimes have been utilized by hacker organizations like anonymous or DERP who have orchestrated them as a form of vigilante justice.

Besides Siri, another type of bot that has been widely created are Twitter bots. As the Wikipedia page describing Twitter bots expresses, a twitter bot can be described as a computer program that takes control of the social media site Twitter, to automatically create or tweet posts or follow other Twitter users. Through their code, Twitter bots can be set up in such a way that they will respond to other people's posts in a comical way, tweeting posts that have little meaning, or in a way that is helpful, tweeting informative posts about events that occurring in everyday life, as seen in the Twitter bot @EarthquakesSF, which as Wikipedia states, “tweets about earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area as they happen using real-time seismographic information.”As Sample further tells in his article, most Twitter bots are mostly spam, however a small number of them are “creative endeavors,” generating tweets that may be topical, data-based, cumulative, oppositional, or uncanny. Throughout his article Sample writes about various examples of Twitter bots that encase one or more of these aspect, even describing some of his own Twitter bots that he originally created.

Specifically, one of the Twitter bots that Sample created and mentions in his article, is the bot @NRA_Tally, which was created to, in a sense, make the NRA look bad. For example,  this account was created as a form of anger towards the NRA, protesting the false claim that guns don’t kill people. Due to this, @NRA_Tally is considered to be a protest bot.

As shown throughout its various tweets, this bot was used to create a repetition of Twitter posts exemplifying U.S. historical shootings that have occurred in years past. In addition to showing where the shooting occurred, the bot also digs deeper by describing and supporting the claims with specific details and numerical data. Some of these details and numbers include items such as the caliber and brand of the weapon used, the number of casualties, and the location of the shooting. To conclude each of these Tweets, the bot also follows up each statement with an NRA response to the situation. The response selected from the bots database typically shows the NRA coming up with different reasons for the shooting besides the guns, or changing the subject completely to something else occurring within the NRA. Furthermore, it is important to note that all information produced by this bot comes from a number of reliable sources, such as press releases and historical recordings, rendering it impossible to consider any of the information exemplified in the tweets, as bullshit. Ultimately, with all of these elements included, the bot creates a sense of seriousness and realism that really impacts the reader as they browse through @NRA_Tally’s multiple posts. With an understanding of the @NRA_Tally bot, it can be noted that very few people actually follow this Twitter account. This may be due to the specific feeling of unease created by these posts(as shown in the image pictured above) or because of concerns relating to the government tracking those who follow such accounts. Additionally, this feeling of unease created by the bot is the overall intended goal. @NRA_Tally presents information that cannot be ignored or explained by gun supporters. Finally, the tweets present realistic facts that can intimidate and make gun owners and organizations, such as the NRA, feel guilty,leading them to see that these malicious crimes are preventable, but that they are too stubborn to do anything about it, because they are so closely and strongly tied to guns and their right to bear arms. Above all, bots are an unique work that can be found in the field of digital humanities. While Sample and Wikipedia explain bots’ various capabilities, even if its just to create spam, many bots, like Siri or Twitter bots are created to help users better understand and answer questions about the world around them. In the end after looking at and interacting with different bots, it is up to the viewer to decide who has ownership of the work, whether it is the computer, the author of the code, the bot itself, or the platform it is displayed through. Furthermore, along with the ownship of the bot and it's work, it is also up to the viewer to decide if a bot's work has any meaning at all, finding valuing in even the simplest or most oppositional works, as shown in @NRA_Tally, or finding little to no value at all, just seeing it as another form of spam.

Hot and Cold Media

Marshall McLuhan

We live in a society filled with media. Whether it be television, video games, print magazines, cell phones, or online websites, media is a prevalent part of our lives. However, much of the media we participate in differs in a variety of ways. As Marshall McLuhan states in his article Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, there are two different types of media that people participate in. These two forms of media, as McLuhan defines, are hot media and cold media.

Hot media, is a type of media that is low in user participation, but because of this, hot media is richly filled with information and details. For instance television shows are a form of hot media that people regularly engage in. Since television shows give audiences an abundance of details, providing story lines, characters, and tension, they are richly filled with information. However, since television shows give audience a great deal of information, they are low in participation and only ask viewers to watch the show to experience it. This in return gives viewers roughly the same experience.

The other form of media, is cold media. As McLuhan states, cold media is high in user participation, only giving users a baseline of information, which lets them have their own unique experience. An example of cold media is video games. Unlike television, video games engage users to participate; travelling across the screen with help from controllers and keyboards, listening for opponents through headsets, and playing with other teammates in multiplayer games.

One of the hot media items our class studied was the piece titled “Up Against the Screen M-Fers” by Justin Katko. In this piece, Katko uses a video that pushes the limits of electronic literature and calls for the destruction of screens, emphasizing their control on society, which is blatantly apparent due to the eerie tone expressed throughout the video. Furthermore, not only does the video create an eerie sense of unease towards modern digital technology but it also implies that the viewer is actually represented by a drone, which can be explained by the pixels and color scheme that are used to manipulate the mind into believing the user is actually hovering and looking into a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) of colorful light.

Additionally, the pace of the video emphasizes a feeling of chaos in an almost mind-consuming way.  For example, the blasts of piercing sound in the background creates a feeling of unease for the entirety of the video, which is created by an atmosphere that resembles human control and destruction. This apprehensive feeling, along with the authority figure represented by the soldier, may cause one to feel angry toward the screen and want to destroy it; ultimately fulfilling the goal of Katko’s literature creation.

Overall, “Up Against the Screen M-Fers”  is a work of hot media due to the abundance of information and lack of user control over the duration of the display. Through these aspects, the piece was able to create a dark mood and atmosphere that represents society being controlled and the anger of people wanting to demolish this control.

Our class also looked at a variety of cold media this week as well. For instance, “Pieces of Herself” by Juliet Davis is an exceptional form digital media that portrays exactly what cold media is. In this work, Davis describes society’s views of women and how people have portrayed women throughout time. In addition, Davis asks users to discover these views by actively participating in a series of black and white settings: such as the kitchen, shower, living room, and outside, which are commonly related to the thoughts of women. Along with the black and white settings, a few colored objects are placed around scene, as well as a blank body of a woman pictured on the left side of the screen. Dragging the colored images onto the blank body, users discover sounds, statements, and stories that relate to society’s views of women.

For instance, in the kitchen scene, a red flame can be seen in the oven. When users drag the flame to the woman’s body, they hear a story about how a woman’s favorite thing to bake is a pastry called nut-filled butterhorn, that takes all day to make and must perfect. The flame in particular relates a story that shows a woman’s domesticity in the kitchen. As society has shown and taught throughout time, a woman’s position is in the kitchen, where she is required to make food all day, that must turn out perfectly for her family. Furthermore, in the outside setting, a red apple is placed in one of the trees. As users drag the apple down from the tree and onto the woman’s body, they hear a passage from the Bible that states she will bring forth children out of sorrow and that she will desire her husband who rules superior to her.

Above all, through her work, Davis makes an important claim about the way women are viewed in society. These scenes depict the crude thoughts and views of women throughout society. But more importantly, they show how a woman’s identity is literally described on her body, just like the objects dragged onto the blank body represent, and that those images limit women to how they are viewed by society. In the end, “Pieces of Herself” is a work that calls audiences to open their eyes to the views that society have held of women, and to change those views into ones that celebrate and accept women for who they are and not the idea of who they are supposed to be.

"Mr. Plimpton's Revenge"

This week in class, our lectures focused on the topic of Electronic Literature, otherwise known as e-lit. As N. Katherine Hayles, professor of English at UCLA, describes in the article “Electronic Literature: What is it?”, electronic literature is a “digital born” object, which she refers to as works of literature that are created on the computer and meant to be read by audiences on their personal digital devices instead of being viewed on a printed version.

Dinty W. Moore

George Plimpton

One of the various pieces of e-lit that our class viewed this week was Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge. This piece was created on Google maps and was used to reconstruct the history of run-ins between the author of the essay, Dinty W. Moore , and his one-time passenger, George Plimpton, as well as an embarrassing situation involving Mr.Plimpton that would haunt Moore for a decades after their encounter.

University of Pittsburgh

In the beginning of his essay, Moore speaks of his journey by telling the audience of his first account with Plimpton. As Moore explains, Mr. Plimpton was invited to speak at the University of Pittsburgh, where Moore attended school at the time. Due to Moore being considered one of the most reliable undergraduate writing major students, he was assigned to pick Mr. Plimpton up from the airport and chauffeur him around. However, as Moore further explains, he made as absolute fool of himself in front of  Plimpton during their time together.  For instance, while Moore taxied Plimpton around, still high from the morning’s buzz, he could not stop talking. More embarrassing than that, Moore was unable to pay for their meal at the Chinese restaurant, leaving Mr. Plimpton with the check.

Later in his life, as he tells, Moore encounters Mr. Plimpton on several additional occasions including: seeing him at Harrisburg airport, across the street from a Music store in New York City, and at a national nonfiction conference outside of Baltimore where Mr.Plimpton was the keynote speaker. During each occasion, Moore instantly recognized Mr. Plimpton’s presence, waving to him and asking him if he remembered the time he picked him up from the airport and furthermore remembered the fool he made out of himself.

In the end, after the national conference outside of Baltimore, Mr. Plimpton finally gets his revenge. After the passing years, Plimpton approaches Moore and tells him that he recalls all the run-ins and the first time that they met at the Pittsburgh airport. Unfortunately, because of Plimpton’s recollection, Moore’s embarrassment of their first encounter is emphasized once again, leading Moore to wonder if Plimpton really does remember the fool he made out of himself. However, nearing the end of Moore’s essay, audiences discover Mr. Plimpton did not, in fact, remember who Moore was or the fool he portrayed himself to be. Instead, it was one of Moore’s colleagues who had reminded Plimpton of his encounter with Moore. Ultimately, as users discover, it was Moore who took revenge out on himself, living his life reflecting on the embarrassment of his run ins with Plimpton, who ultimately did not even remember him.

Aside from its addicting storyline, the Google maps essay written by Moore is also a great work of electronic literature. First of all, the essay shows a map of all the points, locations, and destinations that surround the history of Moore and Plimpton. For instance, the map takes users to the airport where Moore picked Mr. Plimpton up, to the Chinese restaurant where Moore was  unable to pay for the meal, and the music store in New York City where Moore sees Mr. Plimpton across the street. Moreover, the piece actively involves audiences, inviting them to discover the exact areas of Moore’s essay along with plotting points of interest on the map. The Google maps essay also allows viewers to change the map’s appearance and zoom in on specific locations to get a sense of where they are as well as what they look like.

What is Digital Humanities?

        Digital Humanities is a broad field of study that has recently developed over the past 65 years, when advances in technology began around the 1950s. Even though Digital Humanities is a fairly new concept; it is one that is truly difficult to define.

Jeffrey Schnapp

    As Jeffrey Schnapp, professor and founder of metaLab at Harvard University, summarizes in his work, A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities, Digital Humanities redefines the studies of the Humanities and the practices of digital media. Instead, as Schnapp suggests, the study of Digital Humanities is about:

expanding the audience and social impact of scholarship in the humanities; developing new forms of inquiry and knowledge production and reinvigorating ones that have fallen by the wayside, training future generations of humanists through hands-on, project-based learning as a complement to classroom-based learning; and developing practices that expand the scope, enhance the quality, and increase thevisibility of humanistic research.

Essentially what Schnapp explains is that Digital Humanities is the combination of the humanities division with technology. Furthermore, this means that through the study of Digital Humanities, scholars are able to discover, observe, research, and understand how people express themselves and communicate with others- through art, music, language, and philosophy- in a way that encases the advances of technology and digital media, of the present day.
Ultimately through the use and practices of Digital Humanities, our world and its scholars will be able to transform the way we express ourselves and communicate with the world around us, enabling us to reach out and communicate with people from around the world with the help of new mediums of technology.

Digital Humanities

What is Digital Humanities?

Digital Humanities, or just simply DH, is a field of study covering a broad subject of computerized and online arts, archives, and programs pertaining to the humanities. DH covers philosophy, such as the impact of the digital world colliding with our own “realities”, and how those two worlds interact with each other. Digital Humanities has both digitized and born digital works, born digital meaning being created in digital form and digitized being converted over to digital form. Material such as converting Shakespeare's texts to be viewed digitally and apps. Digital Humanities uses social science mixed with computers in order to observe online culture and the many and ever expansive communities of the internet. This interaction is important to follow as it gives us an insight into what types of behavior exist online and how that differs from the behaviors in real world. It also creates new and innovative material to process and receive information, which includes, but is not limited to, electronic literature, hypertext fiction, electronic poetry, and digital archives. Different art forms are a big study of Digital Humanities one being video games and how far creators/developers have come with even more interactive and engrossing plots. In addition it studies how video games, or any other form of digital content, leave a lasting impact on people.  

What is "Digital Humanities"?

Digital Humanities is the study of human behavior and interaction through the increasingly expanding advancement of technology. At their core, humanities study human culture, and as our culture is ever-evolving with technology, new, more specific disciplines are required. Social media, for example, is studied to better understand what people use social media for and how they use it. The way people interact through an anonymous and/or physically detached medium may allow for a different form of communication with different standards for interaction, such as the online messaging board 4chan. Digital Humanities also studies various art forms made through technology, such as self-generated poems made using human input into some kind of algorithm.

Things like video games are studied as a way of expanding and evolving story-telling and entertainment. When video games are made more social, such as through multiplayer games, Digital Humanities also studies that form of interaction. Edited videos and mixed music, such as this song composed entirely digitally, that take man-made instruments and experiences and mix them together in a form impossible without technology are a prime example of the things Digital Humanities grapples with. As technology advances, such as with augmented reality systems, Digital Humanities also covers the studying of that newfound form of interaction.

Digital Humanities

I believe digital humanities encompasses the study of human actions as well as the behaviors and emotions behind said actions, with the modern interface of digital technology. These actions are not limited by specific activities/subjects and can be expressed and studied in a variety of different ways. The basic forms of humanities can be studied in the form of writing, reading, speaking, and musical expression to name a few. Each of these categories contain their own unique characteristics, allowing us to begin understanding why DH cannot simply be described in a single definition. The digital portion of the humanities study generally includes popular social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. In addition, this study can include items such as video games, e-poetry, and e-lit. These items fully expose DH at work because of the shear variety of options they offer users to express emotion and how they explain emotion to the user. In DH, the use of social media allows the display of emotion by the textual sharing of thoughts, emoji cons, and more recently live displays. Due to these features, we can see that this field applies the advantages of digital technology to expand upon the generic and vast humanities study. With the continued expansion of technology in today’s society, DH is also the answer to applying an age old study to more modern aspects of life. Moreover, DH strikes an interest in the youth of society which benefits by allowing the expansion of current thoughts through fresh ideas. Due to these aspects and the idea of being able to explain and show emotion with the absence of face to face communication, DH continues to revolutionize human interaction around the world.