For my final project, I chose to propose a distant reading of two texts by the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. It is proposed to be a vector semantic analysis of the concept of value in the context of the Anthropocene in his texts. It will establish a distributional relation among the concepts as well as use an analogical operation to uncover new semantic possibilities in the text that might allow us to rethink political economy. I chose to do this project following three threads most important to me during the semester studying digital humanities.

The first was inspired by Ryan Cordell’s How Not to Teach Digital Humanities. The most important takeaway from that piece for me was his assertion that we digital humanists need to approach research and pedagogy from the perspectives of our own special disciplines. He argues it is best to not approach digital humanities as a monolithic enterprise, but rather seek how digital techniques and tools can be incisive and decisive in specific humanistic disciplines. Until reading this piece, I was feeling somewhat discouraged about the field. I had yet to discover what I thought was so exciting about doing digital humanities, and this discourse made me realize that the burden was on me to investigate what kind of work I thought was important to do.

The second thread is intimately related to the first for me. It is that initiated by Michael Witmore’s Text: A Massively Addressable Object, which formed much of the theoretical backbone of my project proposal. In this blog post, he situates distant reading as both continuous with previous forms of reading while also considering what is different about it. He has inspired me to think about the way in which and the scales at which we address text in the philosophical world. I believe it is only by doing this that we could think about how text could be massively addressed via computation. Thus the overlap with Cordell’s point. I began to think about the way that philosophy has always addressed its history since at least Hegal and how that history can be addressed computationally.

The last was a thread that I felt was an undercurrent throughout the entire semester, which was the playful hacker ethos of the digital humanities. I changed the method of distant reading I was going to be working with only two weeks before the deadline for the final project. In this two weeks, I had to submerge myself in the world of vector semantics and word embeddings and start to play around with these new ideas and methods. I had to stumble around in the dark and become familiar with something completely other to me. During this process, I experienced something that I also experienced while doing the praxis assignments. It felt like digital humanities was less a field of digital and humanities experts, but rather humanists who were digital explorers. This is an ethos I would like to continue to chase throughout the rest of my time in the program.

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