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October 19, 2005
The Digital Humanities
Via the MITH list-serv: Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has some interesting reading this month.
In "Here's Looking at Casablanca," my former colleague at Georgia Tech, Janet Murray, writes about a collaboration between the American Film Institute and Georgia Tech on a digital critical edition of Casablanca. Her essay raises some interesting questions regarding the role of digital technologies in teaching and studying film. On my old blog, I briefly reflected on the role of DVDs in reshaping film studies (primarily in the comments section), but I haven't thought about this issue nearly as much as I should have, especially given my interest in the intersections between film and digital media. The project sounds really enticing and much more flexible than a standard DVD. To name one example, using this critical edition, one could search for all uses of the song "As Time Goes By" over the course of the film. In a sense, it's treating Casablanca as a kind of database that might support certain kinds of scholarly projects. At the same time, the critical edition is a prototype for dealing with the strict copyright regulations that limit how films (or even short segments of films) can be re-used.
Of course, Murray's passing refence to the experience of watching Casablanca at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge makes me wonder what is being lost in the transition to digitization. The cinetrix has been talking about the Brattle's struggles to stay afloat financially when fewer people are going out to the movies (here's Ty Burr on the Brattle and the cult of Casablanca). Burr's article and the cinetrix's comments also convey the degree to which the Brattle and othe repertory movie theaters function as a community or subculture (as the Brattle clearly does in Boston). I realize that the intent of a digital critical edition is to democratize access, but my inner cinephile doesn't want to see the disappearance of these repertory houses and the communities they support.
In "Democratizing Knowledge," Martha Nell Smith discusses the Dickinson Electronic Archive as an example of democratizing access to primary materials, in this case the manuscripts of poems by Dickinson, Blake, Whitman, and others. I've known about the Dickinson Archives for some time (as will many of the Wordherders), but Smith makes a great case for the ways in which digital technologies can enhance a humanities course (she also cites blogs, wikis, and other course management tools).
Also worth noting: Gregory Crane's "Reading in the Age of Google," whihc discusses the "active reading" driven by search engines such as Google.
Posted by chuck at October 19, 2005 1:12 PM
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