Book review: Reading Machines
Jul. 14th, 2013 21:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Main Argument: Ramsay calls for an "algorithmic criticism" that "seeks, in the narrowing forces of constraint embodied and instantiated in the strictures of programming, an analogue to the liberating potentialities of art. … It proposes that we channel the heightened objectivity made possible by the machine into the cultivation of those heightened subjectivities necessary for critical work" (x). Furthermore, Ramsay argues, "scientific method and metaphor (or, more precisely, the uses of these notions within the distorted epistemology we call 'scientism') is, for the most part, incompatible with the terms of humanistic endeavor" (ibid).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter, Ramsay reviews the origin story of digital humanities, Roberto Busa's late 1940s computerized concordance of Aquinas, and notes that what is now called "text analysis" has become a key practice of the discipline. However, "criticism derived from algorithmic manipulation of text" (2, emphasis original) has not yet really emerged, and it is for this algorithmic criticism that Ramsay argues, noting that contemporary critics who rely on scientism-derived schemas talk "as if everything under discussion is a rhetorical object except the 'data.' The data is presented to us--in all of these cases--not as something that is also in need of interpretation, but as Dr. Johnson's stone hurtling through the space of our limited vision" (5, emphasis original). In fact, this is far from the case, and moreover, rather than dwelling in the realm of experimentally derived results that is the domain of science, "literary criticism operates at a register in which understanding, knowledge, and truth occur outside of the narrower denotative realm in which scientific statements are made" (7). Rather than endeavoring to arrive at hypotheses that are verifiable or falsifiable, the goal of criticism is and should be "disagreement and elaboration" (16). Furthermore, "the irreducible tendency of the computer towards enumeration, measurement, and verification--is fully compatible with the goals of criticism" because "critical reading practices already contain elements of the algorithmic" (ibid). As Ramsay concludes, "any reading of a text that is not a recapitulation of that text relies on a heuristic of radical transformation" (ibid). (And, with Borges and Pierre Menard, we might add that even a recapitulation of a text is a radical transformation of a text.)
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter seeks to position a methodology that is "an illumination of a philosophical point of intersection between scientific and imaginative endeavor" (20). Relying on the works of Lucretius, the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, the thought experiments of 20th century science and the maker-surrealism of the work of the Oulipo group, Ramsay discusses using various formal and mechanical operations to expose the alternate potential texts that lay within texts, eventually concluding that "form, in other words, is both a means of poetic communication and an enunciation of possible procedures for analyzing that communication" (30). Ramsay argues that all of these "gesture toward a critical vanishing point at which the distinction between art, criticism, and science dissolve" (31). Providing an important note of caution to technophilia, Ramsay concludes that "the computer revolutionizes, not because it proposes an alternative to basic hermeneutical procedure, but because it reimagines that procedure at new scales, with new speeds, and among new sets of conditions" (ibid).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples In the middle of this chapter I had to stop and think about whether time actually exists ((recall that Fra Jad in Anathem certainly doesn't think so). I was forced to conclude that temporality may be an effect of cognition, rather than the other way around. Ramsay, however, is discussing "potential readings," at one point consulting the I Ching on the outcome of this very book, in order to highlight the fact that deforming a text according to certain prescribed patterns (in other words, an algorithm) betrays the fact that "the minute someone proposes to explain the meaning of a narrative--to speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, or shout abuse at it, whether in the privacy of one's thoughts or in a critical journal--the narrative changes, because we are no longer able to read it without knowledge of the paratextual revolt" (41). The I Ching is notable because its form and the procedure it encodes make visible "these narrative interventions and struggles for control" (43) between reader and text, not that they are uniquely part of that text, and "call attention to the always dissolving boundaries between creation and interpretation" (45). Offering a reading of a text as something, as Ramsay notes, is a way to rewrite the meaning of that text, and there is no pretending otherwise. Once the deformalizing nature of criticism is recognized, the only innovation of algorithmic criticism is to transpose those deformations into a computational environment.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter uses the examples of the Turing test and the ELIZA experiments as an entry into considering moving "from the already potentialized valences of dialogue to ruminations about the origins of that dialogue" (58). Algorithmic criticism is by its nature a highly constrained process, but Ramsay argues that "the goal of such constraint is always unexpected forms of knowing within the larger framework of more collective understandings … the hermeneutics of 'what is' becomes mingled with the hermeneutics of 'how to'" (63). As the ELIZA test demonstrates, the computer and its code cannot replace human cognition, but "the computer, if it is to participate at all, can only serve to broaden that potentiality [of criticism]" (67), because unlike the sciences, which search for experimentally verifiable fact, "in literary criticism, as in the humanities more generally, the goal has always been to arrive at the question" (68).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at various forms of text analysis including WordHoard, TAPoR, and HyperPo as examples of what Franco Moretti has called "distant reading" (i.e. opposite to "close reading"). The point of these algorithms is not the, to the critical human eye, weird and possibly recondite "bare facts" of the text that they reveal, but that "they are capable of presenting the bare, trivial truths of textuality in a way that allows connection with other narratives--in particular, those narratives that seek to install the text into a network of critical activity" (79). Since computer programs can analyze text so much more quickly than humans can, they allow us both to step back and analyze a much broader "document space" (for example, all of 19thC English literature) and to cut new paths through it, "which in turn allows us to reread and rethink" (80). As algorithmic criticism becomes more familiar, it will also seem less of a thing, "for by then we will have understood computer-based criticism to be what it has always been: human-based criticism with computers" (81).
Postconditions: Argument, Sources, Examples In this brief meditation on the nature of the digital humanities Ramsay argues that what makes digital humanists digital humanists is that "nearly everyone in the field [is] involved, in one way or another, with building something" (84). "Humanists concern themselves with the study of the human experience; digital humanists find that building deepens and enriches that engagement. …in the end, it [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).
Critical assessment: This little book is a thought-provoking read and a good introduction to the digital humanities. I read it as part of my work with Prof. Gail de Kosnik on internet and fandom history last summer, and it's no accident that many of Ramsay's conclusions about digital humanities inquiry are ones we learned, so to speak, in our own bodies: first and foremost, the data by themselves are not sufficient to tell the story.
Further reading: Neal Stephenson, Anathem; Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura; the I Ching
Meta notes: "If code represents a radical form of textuality, it is not merely because of what it allows us to do but also because of the way it allows us to think" (66).
Main Argument: Ramsay calls for an "algorithmic criticism" that "seeks, in the narrowing forces of constraint embodied and instantiated in the strictures of programming, an analogue to the liberating potentialities of art. … It proposes that we channel the heightened objectivity made possible by the machine into the cultivation of those heightened subjectivities necessary for critical work" (x). Furthermore, Ramsay argues, "scientific method and metaphor (or, more precisely, the uses of these notions within the distorted epistemology we call 'scientism') is, for the most part, incompatible with the terms of humanistic endeavor" (ibid).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter, Ramsay reviews the origin story of digital humanities, Roberto Busa's late 1940s computerized concordance of Aquinas, and notes that what is now called "text analysis" has become a key practice of the discipline. However, "criticism derived from algorithmic manipulation of text" (2, emphasis original) has not yet really emerged, and it is for this algorithmic criticism that Ramsay argues, noting that contemporary critics who rely on scientism-derived schemas talk "as if everything under discussion is a rhetorical object except the 'data.' The data is presented to us--in all of these cases--not as something that is also in need of interpretation, but as Dr. Johnson's stone hurtling through the space of our limited vision" (5, emphasis original). In fact, this is far from the case, and moreover, rather than dwelling in the realm of experimentally derived results that is the domain of science, "literary criticism operates at a register in which understanding, knowledge, and truth occur outside of the narrower denotative realm in which scientific statements are made" (7). Rather than endeavoring to arrive at hypotheses that are verifiable or falsifiable, the goal of criticism is and should be "disagreement and elaboration" (16). Furthermore, "the irreducible tendency of the computer towards enumeration, measurement, and verification--is fully compatible with the goals of criticism" because "critical reading practices already contain elements of the algorithmic" (ibid). As Ramsay concludes, "any reading of a text that is not a recapitulation of that text relies on a heuristic of radical transformation" (ibid). (And, with Borges and Pierre Menard, we might add that even a recapitulation of a text is a radical transformation of a text.)
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter seeks to position a methodology that is "an illumination of a philosophical point of intersection between scientific and imaginative endeavor" (20). Relying on the works of Lucretius, the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, the thought experiments of 20th century science and the maker-surrealism of the work of the Oulipo group, Ramsay discusses using various formal and mechanical operations to expose the alternate potential texts that lay within texts, eventually concluding that "form, in other words, is both a means of poetic communication and an enunciation of possible procedures for analyzing that communication" (30). Ramsay argues that all of these "gesture toward a critical vanishing point at which the distinction between art, criticism, and science dissolve" (31). Providing an important note of caution to technophilia, Ramsay concludes that "the computer revolutionizes, not because it proposes an alternative to basic hermeneutical procedure, but because it reimagines that procedure at new scales, with new speeds, and among new sets of conditions" (ibid).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples In the middle of this chapter I had to stop and think about whether time actually exists ((recall that Fra Jad in Anathem certainly doesn't think so). I was forced to conclude that temporality may be an effect of cognition, rather than the other way around. Ramsay, however, is discussing "potential readings," at one point consulting the I Ching on the outcome of this very book, in order to highlight the fact that deforming a text according to certain prescribed patterns (in other words, an algorithm) betrays the fact that "the minute someone proposes to explain the meaning of a narrative--to speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, or shout abuse at it, whether in the privacy of one's thoughts or in a critical journal--the narrative changes, because we are no longer able to read it without knowledge of the paratextual revolt" (41). The I Ching is notable because its form and the procedure it encodes make visible "these narrative interventions and struggles for control" (43) between reader and text, not that they are uniquely part of that text, and "call attention to the always dissolving boundaries between creation and interpretation" (45). Offering a reading of a text as something, as Ramsay notes, is a way to rewrite the meaning of that text, and there is no pretending otherwise. Once the deformalizing nature of criticism is recognized, the only innovation of algorithmic criticism is to transpose those deformations into a computational environment.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter uses the examples of the Turing test and the ELIZA experiments as an entry into considering moving "from the already potentialized valences of dialogue to ruminations about the origins of that dialogue" (58). Algorithmic criticism is by its nature a highly constrained process, but Ramsay argues that "the goal of such constraint is always unexpected forms of knowing within the larger framework of more collective understandings … the hermeneutics of 'what is' becomes mingled with the hermeneutics of 'how to'" (63). As the ELIZA test demonstrates, the computer and its code cannot replace human cognition, but "the computer, if it is to participate at all, can only serve to broaden that potentiality [of criticism]" (67), because unlike the sciences, which search for experimentally verifiable fact, "in literary criticism, as in the humanities more generally, the goal has always been to arrive at the question" (68).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at various forms of text analysis including WordHoard, TAPoR, and HyperPo as examples of what Franco Moretti has called "distant reading" (i.e. opposite to "close reading"). The point of these algorithms is not the, to the critical human eye, weird and possibly recondite "bare facts" of the text that they reveal, but that "they are capable of presenting the bare, trivial truths of textuality in a way that allows connection with other narratives--in particular, those narratives that seek to install the text into a network of critical activity" (79). Since computer programs can analyze text so much more quickly than humans can, they allow us both to step back and analyze a much broader "document space" (for example, all of 19thC English literature) and to cut new paths through it, "which in turn allows us to reread and rethink" (80). As algorithmic criticism becomes more familiar, it will also seem less of a thing, "for by then we will have understood computer-based criticism to be what it has always been: human-based criticism with computers" (81).
Postconditions: Argument, Sources, Examples In this brief meditation on the nature of the digital humanities Ramsay argues that what makes digital humanists digital humanists is that "nearly everyone in the field [is] involved, in one way or another, with building something" (84). "Humanists concern themselves with the study of the human experience; digital humanists find that building deepens and enriches that engagement. …in the end, it [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).
Critical assessment: This little book is a thought-provoking read and a good introduction to the digital humanities. I read it as part of my work with Prof. Gail de Kosnik on internet and fandom history last summer, and it's no accident that many of Ramsay's conclusions about digital humanities inquiry are ones we learned, so to speak, in our own bodies: first and foremost, the data by themselves are not sufficient to tell the story.
Further reading: Neal Stephenson, Anathem; Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura; the I Ching
Meta notes: "If code represents a radical form of textuality, it is not merely because of what it allows us to do but also because of the way it allows us to think" (66).