as these slack pages load they show a really wide range of definitions of dh

i’m guessing that most people here see dh as a welcome reaction against the fashionable jargon of ‘criticism’

there’s something paradoxical about using inartistic language to discuss artistic language… but this applies in opposite ways to both jargon and code

code can express purity but art is never that simple; jargon can sound mysterious but it sheds no light

joyce aspired to a ‘scrupulous meanness’, an esthetic which surely applies to code as well, and which applies less directly to visualisations that may be more or less ‘tuftean’. (joycefans mostly seem to generate unscrupulous unmean personal interpretations)

another thing about the ‘jargon’ approach is that they have to pose as experts and present their views as generalisations/ conclusions, instead of acknowledging that understanding (eg) joyce is incremental

the backformation ‘analog humanities’ doesn’t seem derogatory enough to me to indicate jargon/theory/posturing

the graceful gestures of dancers and painters are the essence of analog.

is there analogous ‘digital math’ and ‘digital science’? vs posturing math and science? digital psych vs analog psych?

“The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, “What did that man pick up?” “He picked up a piece of Truth,” said the devil. “That is a very bad business for you, then,” said his friend. “Oh, not at all,” the devil replied, “I am going to let him organize it.” “

[battling hardware problems] i think dh should recognise we have to start with cliches

art is about transcending cliches but dh has to start with cliches as the buildingblocks under art

there is a universal human lifecycle that corresponds to the real or imaginary wikipedia biography template

such a template might have specialised forms, depending on when and where the subject lived

a cliche-generator could theoretically populate a 4-d virtual world with boring versions of all people in all places at all times

the more historical data it has to work with, the more accurate this 4-d clicheworld can become

if you then pick a real historical figure, creating their wikipedia entry (or whatever) could be as simple as re-editing the appropriate cliches for their particular time and place

http://tvtropes.org is an interesting repository of storypatterns that go beyond the simplest cliches but usually fall short of ‘art’

one of the great unsolved challenges of dh is indexing tvtropes or its equivalents, all the way back to roget’s 1000-category thesaurus

this is also a central challenge of natural language processing (nlp)

the same cliche-generator could generate primitive streams-of-consciousness from its character templates: “uh-oh, snake, hit with rock”

when we tag stream-of-consciousness passages in ulysses these are qualitatively the same

we could choose to switch between povs of multiple characters, as joyce does in the wandering rocks episode

visualising this is a moderately interesting problem: you show an overview of all characters in space, and highlight each as we overhear their stream of consciousness

but joyce makes this much trickier by concealing the relative timings, and inserting literarily-unprecedented ‘intrusions’ where a different pov briefly appears amid any character’s stream

youtube makes it pretty easy to hyperlink these intrusions… but i’m struggling to visualise these relationships in space and time on my overview map

(is it possible the only instances of encounters being presented separately from each person’s pov all involve the cavalcade (for joyce, a symbol of the State)? what would this imply?)

also, both a wikipedia-style biographical template and a thesaurus of tv tropes might benefit from attempts to express them with the limited vocabulary of emoji