DOCSLIB.ORG

Bringing the Digital Humanities Into Reader's Advisory

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Bringing the Digital Humanities Into Reader's Advisory Judging a Book By Its Cover: Bringing the Digital Humanities into Reader’s Advisory by Laura Michelle Gerlitz A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts and Master of Library and Information Studies Digital Humanities and Library and Information Studies University of Alberta © Laura Michelle Gerlitz, 2019 ii Abstract This study sets out to examine recurring themes found on book wrappers published by Harlequin in their first seventeen years as a form of marketing strategy. Through the use of specific image and text patterns that correspond to common themes found in paperback genres, Harlequin was able to appeal to targeted audiences, competing with other early reprint companies and eventually become the colossal modern publishing company of today. A unique approach using several digital humanities methods, namely text and image analyses, and data visualizations, will be employed to examine a special collection of several hundred wrappers. An interdisciplinary approach to research in book history will be taken, utilizing a blend of methods from digital humanities, and theories from library and information studies, humanities, and communication studies. The resulting patterns will be connected to reader’s advisory as appeal factors in successful book selection by readers. iii Preface This thesis is an original work by Laura Gerlitz. Portions of this thesis will be published in a future volume of the Bibliographical Society of Canada’s journal, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, as part of the Society’s Emerging Scholar Award for 2018. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank a number of librarians, professors and other staff and individuals who supported me throughout these three years of research, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. Robert Desmerais, for suggesting the Peel Harlequin collection in the first place, as well as Linda Quirk for allowing me the opportunity to work with the books and working with me on the online exhibit. Thank you to Jeff Papineau for taking the time to deliver the collection to the digitization room in Cameron library when I needed them. My two thesis supervisors, Tami Oliphant and Harvey Quamen, deserve immense credit for assisting me with my research and providing extremely valuable guidance. Cecily Devereaux and Danielle Allard, my first and second readers, for taking the time to be a part of my supervisory committee and in Cecily’s case for allowing me to audit her course on Harlequin and the romance genre. I would also like to thank Peggy Sue Ewanyshyn, as well as the University of Alberta Library’s Digital Initiatives, for providing me with the resources and space to digitize the collection. Last but certainly not least is my family, for encouraging me to apply for graduate school, and for supporting me throughout my entire program. v Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Preface............................................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 1.1: My research journey ............................................................................................................. 1 1.2: Research Goal and Questions............................................................................................... 2 1.3: Research Outline .................................................................................................................. 4 Chapter 2: Literature Review .......................................................................................................... 5 2.1: Histories ............................................................................................................................... 5 2.1.1: History of Harlequin ............................................................................................................... 5 2.1.2: Reader’s advisory history ....................................................................................................... 7 2.2: Theories .............................................................................................................................. 10 2.2.1: Reader’s advisory .................................................................................................................. 10 2.2.2: Semiotics ................................................................................................................................ 14 2.2.3: Colour theory ......................................................................................................................... 18 2.2.4: Paratext and peritext ............................................................................................................. 23 2.2.5: Distant reading ....................................................................................................................... 26 2.3: Literature reviews............................................................................................................... 28 2.3.1: Image analysis studies .......................................................................................................... 28 2.4: Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 31 Chapter 3: Research Design .......................................................................................................... 33 3.1: Data collection ................................................................................................................... 33 3.1.1: Collection description ........................................................................................................... 34 3.1.2: Digitization of collection ...................................................................................................... 38 3.2: Analysis methods ............................................................................................................... 43 3.2.1: Text analysis .......................................................................................................................... 43 3.2.2: Image analysis ....................................................................................................................... 46 3.3: Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 54 Chapter 4: Analysis Results and Discussion ................................................................................. 56 4.1: Results ................................................................................................................................ 56 4.1.1: Text Analysis Results and Discussion ................................................................................ 57 4.1.2: Image Analysis Results and Discussion ............................................................................. 64 4.2: Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 93 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 97 vi Appendices .................................................................................................................................. 107 Appendix A: PHP Scripts to Run Color Summarizer ............................................................. 107 Autoload .......................................................................................................................................... 107 Running different image measurement options in Color Summarizer .................................... 107 Color Summarizer Class ................................................................................................................ 107 Appendix B: K-means Clustering Scripts ............................................................................... 110 Hex code extractor ......................................................................................................................... 110 Silhouette Method for Determining number of K-Clusters in R.............................................. 110 Appendix C: Visualization Scripts .......................................................................................... 112 Scatterplot of brightness median over time in R ........................................................................ 112 Scatterplot of brightness median across genres in R ................................................................. 112 Comparison of hue, saturation and value within genre in R..................................................... 112 Palette creator in R ......................................................................................................................... 112 Appendix D: Color Summarizer Statistics .............................................................................. 114 “The Manatee” original image vs. resized image aggregate statistics from Color Summarizer
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Digital Humanities
    Miriam Posner Digital Humanities Chapter 27 DIGITAL HUMANITIES Miriam Posner Digital humanities, a relative newcomer to the media scholar’s toolkit, is notoriously difficult to define. Indeed, a visitor to www.whatisdigitalhumanities.com can read a different definition with every refresh of the page. Digital humanities’ indeterminacy is partly a function of its relative youth, partly a result of institutional turf wars, and partly a symptom of real disagreement over how a digitally adept scholar should be equipped. Most digital humanities practitioners would agree that the digital humanist works at the intersection of technology and the humanities (which is to say, the loose collection of disciplines comprising literature, art history, the study of music, media studies, languages, and philosophy). But the exact nature of that work changes depending on whom one asks. This puts the commentator in the uncomfortable position of positing a definition that is also an argument. For the sake of coherence, I will hew here to the definition of digital humanities that I like best, which is, simply, the use of digital tools to explore humanities questions. This definition will not be entirely uncontroversial, particularly among media scholars, who know that the borders between criticism and practice are quite porous. Most pressingly, should we classify scholarship on new media as digital humanities? New media scholarship is vitally important. But a useful classification system needs to provide meaningful distinctions among its domains, and scholarship on new media already has a perfectly good designation, namely new media studies (as outlined in Chapter 24 in this volume). So in my view, the difference between digital humanities and scholarship about digital media is praxis: the digital humanities scholar employs and thinks deeply about digital tools as part of her argument and research methods.
    [Show full text]
  • Collaborative Approaches to Digital Humanities Projects
    CHAPTER 2 TITLE Computing and Communicating Knowledge: Collaborative Approaches to Digital Humanities Projects AUTHORS Lisa Spiro OVERVIEW Two cultural and technological transformations are influencing the move toward collaborative digital humanities scholarship: (1) the abundance of data and (2) Web 2.0, or “the participatory web.” This chapter provides compelling examples of how humanities researchers are responding to these transformations and illustrates different approaches both to collaboration and to digital humanities research. Case studies of HyperCities, the Tibetan and Himalayan Library, the Orlando Project, and The Mind Is a Metaphor are presented based on semi-structured, hour-long interviews conducted with project leaders as well as analyses of articles and Web sites associated with the projects. In the chapter’s final section, the author examines the challenges that collaborative humanities researchers face and suggests how to better support this sort of work. TAGS collaborative, community, data, digital, humanities, information, knowledge, participatory, projects, research, scholarship, web 2.0 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Lisa Spiro, director of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education Labs, works with the liberal arts community to explore emerging educational technologies and develop collaborative approaches to integrating learning, scholarship and technology. As part of her passion for tracking emerging educational technologies and analyzing their implications for research and teaching, she edits the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki and authors the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog. Lisa’s recent publications include a report for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) analyzing the prospects for an all-digital academic library (with Geneva Henry), another CLIR report evaluating archival management software, and an essay examining how scholars use digital archives in American literature and culture (with Jane Segal).
    [Show full text]
  • Game Studies' Material Turn
    Game studies’ material turn Citation: Apperley, Thomas H and Jayemane, Darshana 2012, Game studies’ material turn, Westminster papers in communication and culture, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 5-25. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.145 © 2012, The Authors Reproduced by Deakin University under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence Downloaded from DRO: http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30097395 DRO Deakin Research Online, Deakin University’s Research Repository Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B WESTMINSTER PAPERS VOLUME 9 ISSUE 1 / OCTOBER 2012 GAME STUDIES’ MATERIAL TURN Thomas H. Apperley The University of Melbourne Darshana Jayemane The University of Melbourne This article argues that among the burgeoning approaches to game studies there is a crucial re-imagining of digital games in their material contexts across different scales and registers: the machine, the body and the situations of play. This re-imagining can be seen in a number of approaches: platform and software studies, which examine the materiality of code and/or the technological infrastructure through which it is enacted; critical studies of digital labour; and detailed ethnographic studies that examine the cultures of online worlds and situate gaming in relation to everyday practices. The article traces these three strands, focusing on how they demonstrate a heightening of the stakes in game studies research by providing access to scale and connecting digital games research to wider interdisciplinary contexts. KEYWORDS digital labour, ethnography, game studies, materiality, media ecologies, platform studies THOMAS H. APPERLEY: The University of Melbourne DARSHANA JAYEMANE: The University of Melbourne 4 55 WESTMINSTER PAPERS VOLUME 9 ISSUE 1 / OCTOBER 2012 GAME STUDIES’ MATERIAL TURN Thomas H.
    [Show full text]
  • Hybridizing Learning, Performing Interdisciplinarity: Teaching Digitally in a Posthuman Age
    Hybridizing Learning, Performing Interdisciplinarity: Teaching Digitally in a Posthuman Age Elizabeth Losh University of California, Irvine Humanities Instructional Building 188 U.C. Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697 USA 01-949-824-8130 [email protected] ABSTRACT students and learners perform knowledge work that appeals to the This paper discusses how Southern California serves as a site of broader public. regional advantage for developing new hybridized forms of Although many examples of interdisciplinary pedagogy come interdisciplinary pedagogy, because networks of educators in from studio art or computer science programs that combine art higher education are connected by local hubs created by and science paradigms of technê rather than epistêmê, there are intercampus working groups, multidisciplinary institutes funded also a number of notable local efforts in the “digital humanities” by government agencies, and philanthropic organizations that that bring students and teachers from many departments and fund projects that encourage implementation of instructional majors together from disciplines traditionally associated with print technologies that radically re-imagine curricula, student culture and the classical trivium. interaction, and the spaces and interfaces of learning. It describes ten trends in interdisciplinary pedagogy and case studies from For example, archeology and architecture students have explored four college campuses that show how these trends are being a life-sized computer-generated 3-D model of ancient Rome in a manifested.
    [Show full text]
  • Five Principles of New Media: Or, Playing Lev Manovich by Madeleine Sorapure
    Five Principles of New Media: Or, Playing Lev Manovich by Madeleine Sorapure Introduction In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich proposes five “principles of new media”—to be understood “not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization.” The five principles are numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. I focus on Manovich’s work because I believe it effectively examines the materiality of new media—that is, the influence of the computer’s interface and operations, its logic and ontology, on the production, distribution, and reception of new media. This article offers an interactive explanation and demonstration of the five principles of new media, particularly as they apply to teaching writing, and drawing on work done by students in my Winter 2003 “Writing in New Media” course. Students in the course worked on three projects—two in Photoshop, one in Flash—and they wrote three project reports in which they commented on their own work as well as on theories of new media that we were reading and discussing in class. Text and images are included here with the students’ permission, along with links to some of the Flash projects they composed. The menu to the left allows you to navigate through the article. On all of the screens, you can rollover and/or click on buttons and images to make things happen and to make text visible. Directions at the top of each screen should help you determine how to proceed. 1. Numerical representation Because all new media objects are composed of digital code, they are essentially numerical representations.
    [Show full text]
  • Warner.Review-1 Computable Culture and the Closure of the Media Paradigm William B. Warner Director, the Digital Cultures Projec
    Warner.review-1 Computable Culture and the Closure of the Media Paradigm William B. Warner Director, the Digital Cultures Project Department of English University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 [email protected] Review of: Lev Manovich, _The Language of New Media_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. [1] Most scholars of modern media now agree that the shift of symbolic representation to a global digital information network is as systemic and pervasive a mutation, and as fraught with consequences for culture, as the shift from manuscript to print. Any one who wants to think clearly about the cultural implications of the digital mutation should read Lev Manovich’s new book, _The Language of New Media_. This book offers the most rigorous definition to date of new digital media; it places its object of attention within the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan; finally, by showing how software takes us beyond the constraints of any particular media substrate--paper, screen, tape, film, etc.--this book overcomes the media framework indexed by its own title. _The Language of New Media_ leads its reader to confront what is strange yet familiar, that is, *uncanny*, about the computable culture we have begun to inhabit. [2] Before characterizing Manovich in greater detail, it is helpful to say what this book is *not*. Pragmatically focused upon the present contours of computable media, Lev Manovich is neither a prophet nor doomsayer, peddling neither a utopian manifesto nor dystopian warnings. Manovich also eschews the conceptual purity of those cultural critics who set out to show how new digital media realizes the program of…Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida (insert your favorite theorist).
    [Show full text]
  • Envisioning the Future of Computational Media the Final Report of the Media Systems Project Convening Partners
    Envisioning the Future of Computational Media The Final Report of the Media Systems Project Convening Partners Convening Hosts For videos of talks and more, visit mediasystems.soe.ucsc.edu Envisioning the Future of Computational Media The Final Report of the Media Systems Project Report Authors NOAH WARDRIP-FRUIN Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science Co-Director, Expressive Intelligence Studio Director, Digital Art and New Media MFA Program University of California, Santa Cruz MIchAEL MATEAS Professor, Department of Computer Science Co-Director, Expressive Intelligence Studio Director, Center for Games and Playable Media University of California, Santa Cruz © 2014 Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas. Published by the Center for Games and Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For more information on this license, see http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Images are copyright their respective creators and not covered by Creative Commons license. Design by Jacob Garbe in InDesign using Nexa Bold and Arial. This material is based upon a workshop supported by the National Science Foundation (under Grant Number 1152217), the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities (under Grant Number HC-50011-12), the National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Program Innovation, Microsoft Studios, and Microsoft Research.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material
    [Show full text]
  • Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms Rob Kitchin NIRSA, National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
    INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2017 VOL. 20, NO. 1, 14–29 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154087 Thinking critically about and researching algorithms Rob Kitchin NIRSA, National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY More and more aspects of our everyday lives are being mediated, Received 30 September 2015 augmented, produced and regulated by software-enabled Accepted 10 February 2016 technologies. Software is fundamentally composed of algorithms: sets of defined steps structured to process instructions/data to KEYWORDS Algorithm; code; produce an output. This paper synthesises and extends emerging epistemology; methodology; critical thinking about algorithms and considers how best to research research them in practice. Four main arguments are developed. First, there is a pressing need to focus critical and empirical attention on algorithms and the work that they do given their increasing importance in shaping social and economic life. Second, algorithms can be conceived in a number of ways – technically, computationally, mathematically, politically, culturally, economically, contextually, materially, philosophically, ethically – but are best understood as being contingent, ontogenetic and performative in nature, and embedded in wider socio-technical assemblages. Third, there are three main challenges that hinder research about algorithms (gaining access to their formulation; they are heterogeneous and embedded in wider systems; their work unfolds contextually and contingently), which require practical and epistemological attention. Fourth, the constitution and work of algorithms can be empirically studied in a number of ways, each of which has strengths and weaknesses that need to be systematically evaluated. Six methodological approaches designed to produce insights into the nature and work of algorithms are critically appraised.
    [Show full text]
  • How to Follow Software Users
    How to Follow Software Users Lev Manovich softwarestudies.com March 2012 “Big data” is the new media of 2010s. Like previous waves of computer technologies, it changes what it means to know something and how we can generate this knowledge. Thanks to the efforts of Digital Humanities Office1 at National Endowment of Humanities (U.S. National funding agency for humanities research) which together with other agencies organized Humanities High Performance Computing program in 2008, and Digging Into Data competitions in 2009 and 2011, as well as the few pioneering projects by individual humanities researchers and their labs, big data paradigm has now entered the humanities. An article in New York Times from November 16, 2010 (part of their Humanities 2.0 series) boldly stated: “The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.”2 While digitization of historical cultural artifacts seemingly produces such data, representing cultural activities as data which can be analyzed with computers is a challenge in itself. So far, all big data projects in digital humanities that I am aware of used digitized cultural artifacts from the past. If we want to apply the big data paradigm to the study of contemporary interactive software-driven media, we are facing fascinating theoretical questions and challenges. What exactly is “big data” in the case of interactive media? How do we study the interactive temporal experiences 1 (http://www.neh.gov/odh/. 2 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html. of the users, as opposed to only analyzing the code of software programs and contents of media files? This article provides possible answers to these questions.
    [Show full text]
  • Journals 2017 Catalog Contents
    MIT Press Journals 2017 catalog Contents Table of Contents General Information iii Advertising iv Package Prices v Selected Books 38 Ordering Information 40 Subscription Form 41 Publishing with the MIT Press 42 Science & Technology Artificial Life 1 Computational Linguistics 2 Computational Psychiatry 3 NEW Evolutionary Computation 4 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 5 Linguistic Inquiry 6 Nautilus 7 Network Neuroscience 8 NEW Neural Computation 9 Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science 10 NEW Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 11 The Arts & Humanities African Arts 12 ARTMargins 13 Computer Music Journal 14 Dædalus 15 Design Issues 16 Grey Room 17 JoDS: Journal of Design and Science 18 NEW Leonardo 19 Leonardo Music Journal 20 The New England Quarterly 21 October 22 PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23 TDR/The Drama Review 24 International Affairs, History & Political Science Global Environmental Politics 25 International Security 26 Journal of Cold War Studies 27 The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 Perspectives on Science 29 Economics American Journal of Health Economics 30 Asian Development Review 31 Asian Economic Papers 32 Education Finance and Policy 33 The Review of Economics and Statistics 34 Idea Commons About Idea Commons 35 ARTECA 36 MIT CogNet 37 On the Cover © Penousal Machado and Tiago Martins, Untitled, 2014; a nonphotorealistic rendering of a flamenco dancer created by an ant species evolved using Photogrowth. See article in Leonardo 49:3 by Penousal Machado et al. New for 2017 FOUR additions to our Open Access program H i JoDS: Journal of Design and Science p. 18 “JoDS is about both the design of science, and the science of design.” —Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab Computational Psychiatry p.
    [Show full text]
  • Towards a History of Electronic Literature
    CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 16 (2014) Issue 5 Article 2 Towards a History of Electronic Literature Urszula Pawlicka University of Warmińsko-Mazurski Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, and the Other Arts and Humanities Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Pawlicka, Urszula. "Towards a History of Electronic Literature." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5 (2014): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2619> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 1359 times as of 11/ 07/19.
    [Show full text]
  • Software Studies: a Lexicon, Edited by Matthew Fuller, 2008
    fuller_jkt.qxd 4/11/08 7:13 AM Page 1 ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• S •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••new media/cultural studies ••••software studies •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• O ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• F software studies\ a lexicon ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• T edited by matthew fuller Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• This collection of short expository, critical, Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• W and speculative texts offers a field guide Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of to the cultural, political, social, and aes- London. He is the author of Media ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• thetic impact of software. Computing and Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and A digital media are essential to the way we Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• work and live, and much has been said Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
    [Show full text]