In the digital humanities we often talk about distant reading and big data. In the more traditional humanities we often talk about close reading and the importance of small details. But it seems to me that both approaches to cultural material—distant, close, big, small—fail to reckon with what it means to change the scale of things.
The premise of this proposal is that changing the scale of something is one of the most transformative modes of producing knowledge. I’m thinking of actual, visual scale. Imagine a short passage from literature, blown up to fill an entire poster board, which students take turns annotating. The words in the story, once lost in a sea of text, become a separate entity, manipulable in an entirely new tactile way. Or take a panel from a graphic novel or a historical photograph, and zoom, zoom, zoom using a document camera. What do we see now that wasn’t there before?
As I said, I’m thinking of visual scale, but certainly there are other magnitudinal changes to consider. The size of a textual corpus is another obvious scale adjustment, but what about the other senses, like touch or sound? I’m drawn personally to theorizing closeness—to seeing the world in a grain of sand—but it’s just as crucial to rethink the distant and far.
In this session we’d discuss tools and techniques for changing the scale of things, what changing the scale of things means for teaching and research, and in general strive to move beyond the binary distinction between distant and close in order to think about scale in new and inventive ways.
SOLD!
This is something that comes up a lot for Archives and digitizing images. Researchers and even casual users WANT that ability to zoom, zoom, zoom. History aficionados LOVE Shorpy’s– even though it’s problematically based on making a profit on stuff that public funding has made available. Because it only bothers with the highest-quality images.
Meanwhile archival “best practices” for scanning DPI are hardly future-proof– I think current standards will be seen as woefully insufficient in less than ten years– and many archivists are worried about loss of archival control of the image if they give it away at full size.
The big image transforms the image into something with added value. The “web standard” 72dpi or what have you actually transforms the image by REDUCING value to users.
Perhaps this session could take place near the 3D printer to also discuss scale of physical objects? Not totally the point, but it could relate. One thing I’ve been fascinated about for awhile is how scale of a reproduction (3D or representation in a photo) of a physical thing influences our interpretation of that thing. Photographs of a painting might be very large and taken at a high resolution so as to increase our ability to zoom, but the actual canvas might be very small.
Then how does the viewer/screen/page that we see things out of scale also change our interpretation (mobile device, projected on a large wall, the Little Printer, et al).
Great idea!
Lots of possibilities from both research & pedagogical perspectives.
Great topic. Along the lines of what Sheila says, I saw Lev Manovich talk a couple months back, and it was eye-popping to see a painter’s entire oeuvre displayed as a data set, and on a huge screen, no less. The shrinking and rearrangement displayed patterns that just weren’t easy to see at their normal scale. Along the same lines, and kind of the flip of what Sheila said about reproduction, is that we get used to seeing some paintings in books, ads, etc., but in person (Pollock, etc.) the size can have its own effect that is entirely absent in small copies. How can we consciously play with/leverage that scale shift to do something interesting?