High-Tech and the Humanities
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Dirda
William Mohawk
P.O. Box 1612
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(310) 585 - 2634
Marrying High-Tech and the Humanities
Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for the Washington Post Book World. He received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Computer technology may seem an unlikely research tool for a literature professor hoping to better understand William Shakespeare’s plays or for an artist creating a painting. Increasingly, however, computers and software are becoming essential tools for literary criticism, academic publishing, music composition, and sometimes even for the creation of fine art. In this article, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Dirda explores the cutting edge of this unlikely combination of computer-based technology and disciplines such as art, literature, and music.
The dancer jumps and bends and pirouettes across the stage. Instead of being watched by an audience, however, she is monitored by a computer, which inputs data from her every move.
In an experiment by Joseph Paradiso, principal research scientist and director of the responsive environments group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, a dancer's shoes are fitted with sensors that measure pressure points, bend, tilt, height off the stage, kicks, stomps, and spin. This information is then transmitted via a radio link to a computer programmed to change the data into images or sounds. In this way the dancer could simultaneously create a musical composition and a visual light show as she performed, perhaps to be combined as part of a multimedia piece.
A flight of fancy or a glimpse of the future? Computers and digital technology are rapidly expanding to influence every aspect of human activity at the end of the 20th century. The ageless urge of the human species to produce works of art is no exception to this. Technology is becoming so important in so many categories of the arts that we seem to be in the midst of a new Renaissance.
The examples of this flowering are everywhere. Powerful new computers are allowing more and more data to be created and stored digitally, that is, in the binary code that makes up the basic language of computers. Artists manipulate images to generate complex digital collages and exhibit their digital and nondigital art on the World Wide Web. Novelists create branching narratives called hypertext fiction, stories that are explored as much as read. Literary scholars exchange ideas through online discussion groups and use computers to discover the author of an unsigned poem hundreds of years old. Composers employ synthesizers and computers to generate sounds never heard before, while librarians and museum curators digitize entire collections of art and literature to be accessed online from anywhere in the world. As these activities become more and more the standard rather than the exception, technology and art will be further paired and enmeshed.
Computers have aided in the study of humanities for almost as long as the machines have existed. Decades ago, when the technology consisted solely of massive, number-crunching mainframe computers, the chief liberal arts applications were in compiling statistical indexes of works of literature. In 1964, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) held a conference on computers and the humanities where, according to a 1985 article in the journal Science, "most of the conferees were using computers to compile concordances, which are alphabetical indices used in literary research."
Mainframe computers helped greatly in the highly laborious task, which dates back to the Renaissance, of cataloging each reference of a particular word in a particular work. Concordances help scholars scrutinize important texts for patterns and meaning. Other humanities applications for computers in this early era of technology included compiling dictionaries, especially for foreign or antiquated languages, and cataloging library collections.
Such types of computer usage in the humanities may seem limited at first, but they have produced some interesting results in the last few years and promise to continue to do so. As computer use and access have grown, so has the number of digitized texts of classic literary works.
The computer-based study of literary texts has established its own niche in academia. Donald Foster, an English professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, is one of the leaders in textual scholarship. In the late 1980s Foster created SHAXICON, a database that tracks all the "rare" words used by English playwright William Shakespeare. Each of these words appears in any individual Shakespeare play no more than 12 times. The words can then be cross-referenced with some 2,000 other poetic texts, allowing experienced researchers to explore when they were written, who wrote them, how the author was influenced by the works of other writers, and how the texts changed as they were reproduced over the centuries.
In late 1995 Foster's work attracted widespread notice when he claimed that Shakespeare was the anonymous author of an obscure 578-line poem, A Funeral Elegy (1612). Although experts had made similar claims for other works in the past, Foster gained the backing of a number of prominent scholars because of his computer-based approach. If Foster's claim holds up to long-term judgment, the poem will be one of the few additions to the Shakespearean canon in the last 100 years.
Foster's work gained further public acclaim and validation when he was asked to help identify the anonymous author of the best-selling political novel Primary Colors (1996). After using his computer program to compare the stylistic traits of various writers with those in the novel, Foster tabbed journalist Joe Klein as the author. Soon after, Klein admitted that he was the author. Foster was also employed as an expert in the case of the notorious Unabomber, a terrorist who published an anonymous manifesto in several major newspapers in 1995.
Foster is just one scholar who has noted the coming of the digital age and what it means for traditional fields such as literature. "For traditional learning and humanistic scholarship to be preserved, it, too, must be digitized," he wrote in a scholarly paper. "The future success of literary scholarship depends on our ability to integrate those electronic texts with our ongoing work as scholars and teachers, and to exploit fully the advantages offered by the new medium."
Foster noted that people can now study Shakespeare via Internet Shakespeare Editions, using the computer to compare alternate wordings in different versions and to consult editorial footnotes, literary criticism, stage history, explanatory graphics, video clips, theater reviews, and archival records. Novelist and literary journalist Gregory Feeley noted that "the simplest (and least radical) way in which computer technology is affecting textual scholarship is in making various texts available, and permitting scholars to jump back and forth between them for easy comparisons."
Scholars can also take advantage of computer technology in "publishing" their work. Princeton University history professor Robert Darnton has written of a future in which works of scholarship are presented digitally in a pyramid-like layering. One might start, he suggests, at the top with a concise account of a subject, then proceed to detailed documentation and evidence, continue with a level of questions and discussion points for classroom use, and end with a place for reports and commentary from readers.
Using computers for high-level research such as textual scholarship became feasible as more and more literary works were digitized during the 1980s. But an important piece of the puzzle was missing: a way to easily distribute these texts and other digital data. As the 1985 Science article noted, "There is always the possibility … that students will be able to download both text and programs directly into the memories of their microcomputers, but it is difficult to imagine national centers able to distribute files to millions of students around the country."
This unlikely concept became a reality in the early 1990s with the development of the World Wide Web. In 1989 British computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee designed the Web for the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) so that scientists working in various locations could share research and collaborate on projects. But the idea of sharing information soon spread far beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Humanities scholars and students were quick to realize the potential of this technology.
Suddenly, a professor in India could post his latest paper about Irish writer James Joyce to be analyzed by other Joyce scholars around the world, and get quick feedback through e-mail messages. The Web also allowed a student writing a paper in her dorm room in California to access a rare original text on a computer in New York or Nigeria. Why bother actually going to a bricks-and-mortar library? "The World Wide Web has replaced the library, for many of our students, as the obvious site for conducting original research," Foster noted.
The rise of the Internet, the so-called Information Highway, has started to transform that cornerstone of academic research, the library. Increasingly, libraries are becoming places to visit online rather than in person. The New York Public Library, for example, "dispenses so much information electronically to readers all over the world that it reports ten million hits on [visits to] its computer system each month as opposed to 50,000 books dispensed in its reading room," wrote Darnton in the New York Review of Books in March 1999.
The Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, D.C., the unofficial national library of the United States, has long been a leader in the use of digital technology. Chief among these efforts is its drive to create a National Digital Library. Begun in the early 1990s, this vast, ongoing project aims to put much of the LOC's collections of historic and archival documents online. Some of these documents are too fragile to be handled by the public and were previously unavailable, but now even a 7-year-old can peruse them on the Web.
About 1.7 million items had been put up on the Web site by April 1999, with a goal of 5 million by the time the library celebrates its 200th anniversary in April 2000. However, library officials have a long way to go before reaching their ultimate goal of 80 million unique items online.
Recently the LOC received grants to digitize its collections relating to American inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel F. B. Morse. Library officials point with pride to the widespread use of its Web site, American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library, from which one can view extensive photographs and documents about the history of African Americans or a digitized collection of 2,100 early baseball cards from the years 1887 to 1914. Users can also search the library's enormous holdings or access reading lists for kids ("Read All About It").
More than just a revolutionary tool for indexing, analyzing, or transmitting content, digital technology is actually reshaping the creation of art and literature. "Just as film emerged as the dominant artistic medium of the 20th century, the digital domain—whether it is used for visual art, music, literature or some other expressive genre—will be the primary medium of the 21st," wrote New York Times columnist Matthew Mirapaul in early 1999. More and more writers, artists, and musicians are using computers and the Internet to enhance, animate, or completely remake their art, with unconventional and remarkable results.
Publishing, a print-based business that to some people is beginning to represent the past, is attempting to adapt to the new digital world. Marc Aronson, a senior children's book editor at the publishing house Henry Holt and a longtime student of the impact of changing technology on publishing, describes this impact as a kind of blurring or hybridization. "The keynote of the digital age is overlap, multiplicity, synergy. The digital does not replace print, it subsumes it," Aronson said. "Print becomes a form of the digital, just as the digital has a special place when it appears in print." Especially in books for young people, he notes, more authors and artists are trying books with multiple storylines or told from various points of view.
One strain of this new type of nonlinear writing is popularly known as hypertext fiction. At its simplest, hypertext fiction mimics the Choose Your Own Adventure books that became popular in the early 1980s. In these books, readers directed the story by choosing which page to turn to at key points based on what they wanted the character to do. In hypertext fiction, the reader explores different branches of a story on a computer by clicking on hyperlinks in the text. The result is a fragmented, slightly surreal narrative in which time is not linear and there is no obvious conclusion.
Michael Joyce, like Foster a professor of English at Vassar, is a leading theoretician and author of hypertext fiction. He wrote what is widely considered the first major work of hypertext fiction, afternoon, a story (1990). The piece consists of more than 500 different screens, or pages, which are connected by more than 900 links. afternoon centers on a man who witnesses a serious car accident that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and son, who may or may not have survived. Joyce has also published Twilight, A Symphony (1996), about a man estranged from his wife who is on the run with their infant son.
Joyce defines hypertext fiction as "stories that change each time you read them." He notes that "interactive narrative does not necessarily mean multiple plot lines, but can also mean exploring the multiple thematic lines or contours of a story."
Not surprisingly, hypertext has frequently come under attack from traditional critics. Perhaps the most powerfully simple critique, however, comes from Charles Platt, a contributing editor for Wired magazine and a prominent science-fiction writer and critic. "Could it be," wonders Platt, "that storytelling really doesn't work very well if the user can interfere with it?" People really want the author, scriptwriter, or actors to do the heavy lifting of narrative, he argues. On the other hand, Platt suspects that we have hardly begun to explore true interactive media and that it will be utterly different from fiction as we know it today.
Although the distribution of recorded music went digital with the introduction of the compact disc in the early 1980s, technology has had a large impact on the way music is made and recorded as well. At the most basic level, the invention of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a language enabling computers and sound synthesizers to talk to each other, has given individual musicians powerful tools with which to make music.
"The MIDI interface enabled basement musicians to gain power which had been available only in expensive recording studios," Platt observed. "It enables synthesis of sounds that have never existed before, and storage and subsequent simultaneous replay and mixing of multiple sound tracks. Using a moderately powerful desktop computer running a music composition program and a $500 synthesizer, any musically literate person can write—and play!—a string quartet in an afternoon."
"Serious music scholars and composers are also utilizing computers to forge new paths in music. A prime example is David Cope, professor of music at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who began developing a computer music program in the early 1980s. Cope originally wanted a program that would help him overcome mental blocks when he composed. Through years of tinkering, the software, called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), has become a full-fledged compositional program. Cope supplies bits of musical information to EMI, which has been designed to recognize a variety of styles and patterns, and the program then processes this material to generate pieces of original music.
The result is "disturbing," said composer Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). "You can actually get pretty good music."
Whereas many musicians use computers as a tool in composing or producing music, Tod Machover uses computers to design the instruments and environments that produce his music. As a professor of music and media at the MIT Media Lab, Machover has pioneered hyperinstruments: hybrids of computers and musical instruments that allow users to create sounds simply by raising their hands, pointing with a "virtual baton," or moving their entire body in a "sensor chair."
Similar work on a "virtual orchestra" is being done by Geoffrey Wright, head of the computer music program at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland. Wright uses conductors' batons that emit infrared light beams to generate data about the speed and direction of the batons, data that can then be translated by computers into instructions for a synthesizer to produce music.
In Machover's best-known musical work, Brain Opera (1996), 125 people interact with each other and a group of hyperinstruments to produce sounds that can be blended into a musical performance. The final opera is assembled from these sound fragments, material contributed by people on the Web, and Machover's own music. Machover says he is motivated to give people "an active, directly participatory relationship with music."
More recently, Machover helped design the Meteorite Museum, a remarkable underground museum that opened in June 1998 in Essen, Germany. Visitors approach the museum through a glass atrium, open an enormous door, enter a cave, and then descend by ramps into various multimedia rooms. Machover composed the music and designed many of the interactions for these rooms. In the Transflow Room, the undulating walls are covered with 100 rubber pads shaped like diamonds. "By hitting the pads you can make and shape a sound and images in the room. Brain Opera was an ensemble of individual instruments, while the Transflow Room is a single instrument played by 40 people. The room blends the reactions and images of the group."
Machover believes that music is in general poorly served in elementary schools and hopes to change this. His inventions, including some intended specifically for children, are designed to help bring music education and appreciation to a wider audience. Machover is convinced that computer science will eventually become a permanent part of regular musical training.
Machover's projects at MIT include Music Toys and Toys of Tomorrow, which are creating devices that he hopes will eventually make a Toy Symphony possible. Machover describes one of the toys as an embroidered ball the size of a small pumpkin with ridges on the outside and miniature speakers inside. "We've recently figured out how to send digital information through fabric or thread," he said. "So the basic idea is to squeeze the ball and where you squeeze and where you place your fingers will affect the sound produced. You can also change the pitch to high or low, or harmonize with other balls."
Computer music has a long way to go before it wins mass acceptance, however. Martin Goldsmith, host of National Public Radio's Performance Today, explains why: "I think that a reason a great moving piece of computer music hasn't been written yet is that—in this instance—the technology stands between the creator and the receptor and prevents a real human connection," Goldsmith said. "All that would change in an instant if a very accomplished composer—a Steve Reich or John Corigliano or Henryk Górecki—were to write a great piece of computer music, but so far that hasn't happened. Nobody has really stepped forward to make a wide range of listeners say, ‘Wow, what a terrific instrument that computer is for making music!’ "
The art world has also seen the impact of digital technology in varying degrees and methods. As is often evident in their work, many artists constantly push the boundaries of art and the tools and materials with which they work. New mediums are not burdened by the weight of history, and they provide the artist with a fresh means of expression.
Digital art can be generally divided into two areas: art that is either made with or relies on computers and can be printed out or is otherwise three-dimensional, and art that is completely contained within the digital world. Early physical pieces were mostly printouts from computer graphics programs, but a November 1998 show at the School of Visual Arts in New York City included elaborate interactive art.
One piece at this show, Office Plant #1 (1998), is a sort of mechanical flower that blooms or wilts—and even groans—in reaction to the contents of e-mail messages on an attached computer. Other pieces have audio soundtracks, video displays, and moving parts. Another show, the Boston Cyberarts Festival held in May 1999, included a wide variety of new technology art. One featured example was the work of French artist Christian Lavigne, who is a pioneer in the field of cybersculpture (virtual sculpture on the Web) and robosculpture (sculpture done with the aid of computer-controlled machines).
One unique approach to computer art is the path taken by British artist Harold Cohen, who became interested in computers and art as far back as the late 1960s. Cohen, a well-known abstract painter in his own right, has spent more than two decades creating and refining a "robot artist" he calls Aaron. Cohen has painstakingly programmed Aaron to draw and paint with a mechanized arm, from basic shapes to, more recently, human forms. Cohen has had to program the computer with data on proportion, depth, visual angles, color, and other concepts. No two of Aaron's paintings are alike, and the results are impressive enough to cause some people to wonder who is actually creating the art, the human programmer or the computer.
With the explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, much recent attention has focused on online art. In December 1995 art critic and writer Robert Atkins wrote in the magazine Art in America that the 1994-1995 art season would be known as "the year the art world went online." The first commercial art galleries opened on the Internet, and physical installations such as Antonio Muntadas's The File Room (1994)—a detailed look at the history of censorship—also went up on the Web. Other works soon followed that mixed Web-based design with artistic statements. Artists began to see the Internet not just as a means for publicity or distribution of art works but also as a medium of expression in itself.
A little over three years later, Atkins described in the same publication the growing number of "original, interactive works that can only be experienced on the Net, rather than the digitized images of paintings or photographs that characterize most gallery or museum [Web] sites. Many online pieces now capitalize on the burgeoning capacity of the Web to deliver video and sound, as well as text and graphics." Atkins points to one striking work, American Friederike Paetzold's I-Section (1998), in which the visitor "dissects" a torso, removing organs to reveal multiple layers of imagery and text.
By combining elements of hypertext fiction and computer music with visual media such as photographs and video, digital artists are breaking down old artistic barriers and producing works for all the senses. Science fiction and fantasy author Richard Grant sees this as the ultimate goal. "When I think of hypertext—and computer-driven art forms in general—these days, I think of opera. Specifically, I think of [German composer] Richard Wagner, his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work), a sort of Grand Unified Field Theory in which opera is seen as the final summation of all previous art forms: music, literature, drama, painting, sculpture (present in the construction of the sets), poetry, dance, public ritual, and sheer spectacle (or what would now be called special effects)." Increasingly, academic programs—such as the Consortium for Research and Education in the Arts and Technology (CREAT) at the University of Central Florida in Orlando—are bringing students from various disciplines together to generate such innovative multimedia pieces.
New technology has always led to innovation in the arts. After all, the favorite watchword of the poet, painter, or composer is "Make it new." For this artists can use new tools, and the computer is one of the most powerful tools in human history. As the digital future looms ever closer, the biggest difference may be that the artists of tomorrow will use digital tools as a matter of course. The next genius to reshape the world of the arts—the next Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pablo Picasso, or William Shakespeare—could be a 14-year-old just now beginning to experiment with her home computer. And she will not be alone. At the cusp of the new millennium, digital technology seems poised to make artists and creators of us all.
Atkins, Robert. "State of the (On-Line) Art." Art in America. April 1, 1999.
Cope, David. Experiments in Musical Intelligence (Computer Music and Digital Audio Series, Volume 12). A-R Editions, 1996.
Dewitt, Donald L. (ed.) Going Digital: Strategies for Access, Preservation, and Conversion of Collections to a Digital Format. Haworth, 1998.
Dodge, Charles, and Jerse, Thomas A. Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance. Schirmer Books, 1997.
Dodsworth, Clark, Jr. Digital Illusion: Entertaining the Future with High Technology. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Foster, Donald W. Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution. University of Delaware Press, 1989.
Holtzman, Steven. Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace. Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Joyce, Michael. afternoon, a story. Eastgate, 1990.
Joyce, Michael, and Synder, Ilana (eds.) Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Routledge, 1998.
Lovejoy, Margot. Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (2nd ed.) Prentice Hall, 1996.
McCorduck, Pamela. Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen. W. H. Freeman, 1991.
Spalter, Anne Morgan. The Computer in the Visual Arts. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
Theberge, Paul. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Wesleyan University Press, 1997.