Some Thoughts on Changing the Game

Following the observations and questions posed by Tom Scheinfeldt (in the keynote address at Brown) and Michael Satlow (in the previous post): how can we use modern technology in order to change the game we play in the study of ancient religion?

True to my own ancient religion, I would like to answer this question with another question: Is it only the study of ancient religion which is at stake here? Is there something inherent in ancient religion which poses a unique situation in comparison with, say, Chinese Art, South-American Literature, or the History of Baseball? Aren’t we all in the same virtual bucket together?

To give an example from the classroom: Inspired by Tom’s experiment in collaborative writing, I initiated a procedure in two conveniently small classes, which has the entire class take notes together on GoogleDocs. On the technical level, it is a marvel. Instead of having to read paper after paper and comment on style, punctuation and so forth, we had a quick run through the collaborative text in class, with each student picking up something and correcting it on the spot. We had the whole thing proof-read in a number of minutes.

On a more profound level, I’m wondering whether such collaborative work in class can be used to produce quality texts for publication (e.g., in a blog, wikisite, Wikipedia article). It’ll need more practice, I’m sure, but I believe it can be done. Just imagine how we can enrich the online learning community by producing a critical mass of high-quality articles and encyclopedic entries. Even in terms of revolutionizing academic publication practices, this can be a true game-changer.

Ancient Religion, Modern Technology Workshop: Reflections

We were fortunate to have Tom Scheinfeldt deliver the keynote talk and then offer some concluding reflections and lead a closing discussion.  Tom’s talk and reflections can be found on his blog, here and here.

In his first post, Tom provocatively discusses what “game changing” work in the digital humanities looks like.  An excerpt:

In his new book, Reading Machines, Steve Ramsay argues that the promise of digital technologies for humanities scholarship is not so much to help us establish a new interpretation of a given text but to make and remake that text to produce meaning after meaning. Here Steve looks to the Oulipoor “workshop of potential literature” movement, which sought to use artificial constraints of time or meter or mathematics—such as replacing all the nouns in an existing text with other nouns according to a predefined constraint—to create “story-making machines,” as a model. He draws on Jerry McGann and Lisa Samuels’ notion of cultural criticism as “deformance,” a word that for Steve “usefully combines a number of terms, including ‘form,’ ‘deform,’ and ‘performance.’” For Ramsay digital humanists “neither worry that criticism is being naively mechanized, nor that algorithms are being pressed beyond their inability” but rather imagine “the artifacts of human culture as being radically transformed, reordered, disassembled, and reassembled” to produce new artifacts.

This rings true to me. Increasingly, our digital work is crossing the boundary that separates secondary source from primary source, that separates second-hand criticism from original creation. In this our work looks increasingly like art.

For those of us trained in traditional humanities research, this is both exciting and frightening, and not only because tenure committees don’t yet know how to deal with it.  What does this mean for the study of ancient religions?  Can digital humanities change the game we play?

Welcome

On February 13-14, 2012, a workshop entitled “Ancient Religion, Modern Technology,” was held at Brown University.  The workshop brought together scholars working on digital projects that deal with ancient religion, primarily in the Mediterranean and West Asia.  Most of these projects were in early stages of development.  This collaborative blog is the follow-up to that workshop.  The purpose of the blog is to share our projects, create a resource for the application of the digital humanities to the study of ancient religion, promote dialogue, and to chart the progress of our projects – the successes as well as the challenges.  We welcome additional contributors and guest posters.  Welcome to our community.