Increasingly code and algorithms are techniques also applied in textual scholarship, giving rise to new interactions between software engineers and textual scholars. This book argues that much of... Show moreIncreasingly code and algorithms are techniques also applied in textual scholarship, giving rise to new interactions between software engineers and textual scholars. This book argues that much of that process and its effects on textual scholarship are still poorly understood and go unchecked by otherwise normal processes of quality control in scholarship such as peer review. The text provides case studies in which some of these interactions become more apparent, as well as the academic challenges and problems that they introduce. The book demonstrates that the space between code creation and conventional scholarship is one that offers many affordances to textual scholarship that until now remain unexplored. The author argues that it is an intellectual obligation of programmers and textual scholars to examine the properties of digital text and how its existence changes and challenges textual scholarship. Show less
This dissertation takes ambiguity as its main theoretical focal point. It illustrates how ambiguity is used strategically from many sides. Further it presents novel approaches to conceptualizing... Show moreThis dissertation takes ambiguity as its main theoretical focal point. It illustrates how ambiguity is used strategically from many sides. Further it presents novel approaches to conceptualizing ambiguous content and ambiguous relationships. In addition it is concerned with potentiality and temporality.The deliberate ambiguity of viral stories and the chaos surrounding them, elaborates on how to create an account while accounting for positioning in time as well as space. It elaborates on the way both ethnographer and informants simultaneously create accounts that are specific to their positions, and that these specificities must be considered as the ethnographer shifts between different modes of ordering while in the field, while analyzing, and while retrospectively accounting for past events. The dissertation takes a methodological stance towards embracing conflicts, discontinuity, and messy data as the source of understanding. Deliberately looking for temporalities, potentiality, and ambiguity encourages a focus on uncertainty, open ends, and multiple possible versions. Doing so is crucial when attending to matters that are both sudden, intensive, highly digitally mediated, and subject to massive attention.The dissertation provides methodological as well as practical concerns, valuable to researchers whose object of study is brief but intense, including the retrospective representation of it. Show less