I really enjoyed Ramsay’s Reading Machines, and I think he’s done a good job pointing at something that is really fundamental to working in the digital humanities: as he says, algorithmic criticism is “simply an attitude toward the relationship between mechanism and meaning that is expansive enough to imagine building as a form of thinking” (85). This reminded me of something that happened at a recent talk given by a prominent member of the video essay community. After talking for an hour about the possibilities of video essays and showing us wonderful examples of the critical tools that they could provide, a professor began the Q&A with the offhand assertion, “well play can never be criticism,” before going on to his question, which the speaker handled quite well. But the thing that many of us in the room remembered was that simple fact, that somehow there are prominent academics who honestly believe that play and criticism are fundamentally separate activities.
When it comes down to it, criticism is play, and play is criticism. The questions that the digital humanities force us to grapple with carry with them the fundamental understanding that this is the case, and it’s easy for us to forget that this is a somewhat heretical position. For my DFR I did something very simple: a while back I proposed a paper that tackled the question of contemporary animation and simultaneity, pointing out the “many things at once”-ness of a particular anime series, so I just searched for “animation” and “simultaneity” and got 408 articles that mention both. I’m looking forward immensely to playing with this data, if only because I know that simultaneity is something that comes up all the time in animation, but that it’s not often thought of as a primary mode for understanding the medium. Figuring out where simultaneity comes up and within what contexts could be a hugely powerful heuristic for my project. This is something so simple, but algorithmic criticism allows me to study it in a unique way using resources that would otherwise take months to sift through.
Which is exactly the kind of thing that the video essayist was trying to get at. Putting things side by side, mapping them out, playing with them, applying some sort of algorithm to them — these actions bring us back into an understanding of close reading and analysis, not push us further away, which is obviously something essential to the very concept of this class.
Java,
As I was reading your blogpost, I began thinking about what you assert–that criticism is play. At first, I thought, “well, of course people will be resistant to that idea because it belittles criticism,” but then I realized that, in a way, you’re absolutely right. Play doesn’t mean doing whatever you want with the language of a text, for example–there are certainly rules that structure the play we do with texts through criticism. But criticism is productive and says something about the text and its role in the world–can play be productive in that way? I wonder what Ramsay would say about this, because I actually see algorithmic criticism as a kind of play. As much as he says it’s a scientific endeavor (or at least that it’s commonly framed that way), it strikes me as an exercise in “let’s see what would happen if…”, a kind of game where we try and learn something about a text by tallying up words/phrases/etc. The prize is when we find something interesting.
Thanks for bringing the idea of play into this–it helped me to rethink criticism–and algorithmic criticism in particular–in a productive way!
-H