2012 6.2
Futures of Digital Studies: 2
Editors: Mauro Carassai and Elise Takehana
Front Matter
Introduction
Mauro Carassai, University of Florida; Elisabet Takehana, Fitchburg State University
The following contributions offer a comprehensive survey of the impeding turns in the scholarly agenda of digital studies. In so doing, they probe the future cultural scenarios looming beyond digital technologies and their related practices, concepts, and perspectives. Such a collective interrogation of our digital future investigates the full spectrum of the humanities. As a result, our notions of subjectivity, identity, consciousness, literacy, text, and medium emerge in these essays as significantly altered by the digital in unusual and unexpected ways. Papers scrutinize a variegated set of relationships between the human neurological network and the networked computer, real and virtual spaces, and subjectivity and procedurality. Scholars in this cluster re-envision such issues in the light of an all-encompassing ontological shift underway as a consequence of the increasingly pervasive presence of the digital in our relations with machines and their processes.
Articles
Web 2.0 and the Ontology of the Digital
Aden Evens, Dartmouth College
While much valuable scholarship on the digital focuses on particular artifacts or historical processes or subcultures, this essay offers a preliminary treatment of the digital in general, proposing that the digital has its own ontology, a way of being, and that this ontology is manifest in the technologies and human relations that define and surround the digital. In particular, the digital places a central emphasis on abstraction, and digital artifacts and culture demonstrate this ontology of abstraction even while remaining concrete. The kinds of social structures grouped under the label Web 2.0 exemplify the materialized abstraction of the digital, and this essay points out the formal and technical features of the digital that carry the abstract nature of the binary code into the human relations and behaviors of Web 2.0.
Graphic Sublime: On the Art and Designwriting of Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett
Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
This critical essay was written for the Prairie Art Gallery catalogue presenting Kate Armstrong's and Michael Tippett's Grafik Dynamo! Its argument, implied in the catalogue version, can be stated explicitly in the present scholarly format, namely that narrative, associated with the development of the modern novel in print, is distinctly unsuited to literary arts produced in and for the electronic medium. Narrative in the Dynamo! is not entirely absent, but its dominance is put into question. The same holds for the place of argumentation in critical writing. The Dynamo! develops episodically, haunted by the comics, and by the popular and literary narratives it samples; the essay develops similarly, in blocks of partly autobiographical, partly analytical text. Propositions emerge not sequentially or through feats of interpretation, but at the moment when a block of text encounters a cited image from the Dynamo!
Another collocation having implications for criticism, is the reading of Armstrong/Tippett's work in the context of a particular strain of contemporary fiction in print, which itself demonstrates that narrative was only ever a mode, one among many and not necessarily the dominant mode, in print literature itself. References are made to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, to Pynchon's (and Armstrong/Tippett's) modernist antecedent, Henry Adams, to non-linear, non-sequential narratives by Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and William Gaddis that are as open to innovation formally as they are expansive in subject matter. In this context, "Graphic Sublime" also introduces a major, as yet unpublished novel from the early 1970s by Phillip Wohlstetter, Valparaiso.
Webbots and Machinic Agency
John Johnston, Emory University
Malware and criminal operations performed by botnets on the Internet not only pose a new threat, but also point to our increasing reliance upon a new form of machinic agency, which I call the webbot assemblage. Whereas news media coverage of its operations considers only their human aspects, mostly in relation to crime and cyberterrorism, Daniel Suarez's recent novel Daemon provides a suggestive glimpse into how, in a webbot assemblage, new forms of human and machinic agency are complexly intricated. The significance of this assemblage becomes further evident when it is considered in relation to how the Internet is increasingly perceived: no longer as a neutral medium but as an ecosystem defined by netwar, software arms races, and the possible evolution of low forms of artificial life.
Stretched Skulls: Anamorphic Games and the memento mortem mortis
Stephanie Boluk, Vassar College; Patrick LeMieux, Duke University
From Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors to Robert Lazzarini’s skulls, anamorphic artworks explore the tension between mathematical models of vision and an embodied experience of space. After reviewing the ways in which anamorphosis has been deployed as a philosophical tool for investigating digital media in terms of human phenomenology, specifically through the criticism of Espen Aarseth and Mark Hansen, this paper analyzes how contemporary videogames like Sony’s Echochrome series, levelHead by Julian Oliver, and Mark ten Bosch’s forthcoming Miegakure technically, aesthetically, and conceptually explore anamorphic techniques. While The Ambassadors is famous for its anamorphically skewed skull, a classic memento mori, we propose that the anamorphic effects of videogames can be more accurately described as a memento mortem mortis: not reminders of human mortality, but of a nonhuman the death of death. By foregrounding the impossibility of ever fully resolving the human experience of computational space, the memento mortem mortis in these anamorphic games gestures toward experiential domains altogether indifferent to human phenomenology to create allegories of the beyond.
The Underside of the Digital Field
Terry Harpold, University of Florida
This essay takes as axiomatic that the subject of new media – which in other contexts we call the user, the reader, the writer (or in institutional contexts, the researcher, the teacher, the student…) – is a subject of language. This subject’s engagements with media and, by way of media, with other subjects, are determined by relations founded on language which French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan terms the social bond of discourse.
I propose that modes of critical engagement and teaching in the contemporary digital field, particularly as the field shifts towards a more unified disciplinarity and a more secure institutional footing, can be described in relation to the graphs of Lacan’s four discourses – of the University, Master, Hysteric, and Analyst. I conclude that deliberate reflection on structures of our research and pedagogy, mapped by the graphs, may lead us beyond the confidence games of the master and the University – on and by which our inquiries are founded and oriented, but also narrowed – to the side of the hysteric and the analyst, whose collaborations are more productive of new forms of knowledge.
Beyond Representation: Embodied Expression and Social Me-dia
Lissa Holloway-Attaway, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola
The contemporary digital media ecology is one of convergence and hybridity. As virtual
and technical interfaces intersect in increasingly complex formulations, the ability to
identify organic vs. technical forms has become problematic. Virtual environments
predominate within everyday cultural practice arguably limiting real or unmediated
human experience. The advent of social media artifacts and networks in particular — those
that create fusions of personal experience and communal activity and that support and
broadcast user-generated content as a foundation for media productions of real-life — have
made organic bodies and personal experience difficult to discern.
Extending Mark B.N. Hansen’s model for identifying embodied experience within
contemporary "mixed reality" culture, I argue that embodied expression is more, not less,
present in the contemporary media age. Organic expressions, those that emanate from
primal, tactile, and motile forces and that operate prior to formal mediatization, are at
the core of many social media artifacts circulated within the networks of contemporary
culture and operating outside the aesthetics of traditional semiotic representation.
Recovering the organic body and foregrounding its presence in such media asserts the
functional non-aesthetic principles at work in many social media forms, particularly in
those dependant on documenting the minutiae of real-life under-represented in mainstream
and traditional media. As personal and public spaces collide, situating the me or the
embodied subject within production is problematic. I identify such embodiment within
contemporary social media, particularly on YouTube, to illustrate that the human body does
not operate from a position of erasure within social media networks and artifacts, and
its expressive value is therefore central in much current user-generated me-dia.
Articles
The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Teaching the Digital Humanities through Virtual Research Environment (VREs)
Craig Bellamy, VeRSI, University of Melbourne, Australia
At the core of the work done within the digital humanities is a difficult interdisciplinary relationship between the at times divergent cognate fields of computer science and the humanities. This paper will explore some of the characteristics of the digital humanities and examine some of its hard interdisciplinarity relationships. It is the contention of the author that one of the central epistemological challenges within the field is to empower students to successfully manage the thorny interdisciplinary relationship intrinsic to technology and the humanities. Without understanding and managing this relationship, there is a danger that student projects lapse into exceedingly reductive pragmatism or overly theorised clumsiness. The author will suggest a model where this hard-interdisciplinary relationship may be taught and assessed through the critical use and analysis of digital objects within the framework of a Virtual Research Environments (VREs).
Towards a Conceptual Framework for the Digital Humanities
Paul S. Rosenbloom, Department of Computer Science and Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California
The concept of a great scientific domain broadens what is normally considered to be within the purview of science while identifying four such domains – the physical, life, social and computing sciences – and suggesting that the humanities naturally fit within the sciences as part of an expanded social domain. The relational architecture that has been developed to aid in understanding disciplinary combinations across great scientific domains then guides an exploration of the structure and content of the digital humanities in terms of a space of relationships between computing and the humanities.
From the Personal to the Proprietary: Conceptual Writing's Critique of Metadata
Paul Stephens, Columbia University
The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of new works of constrained and appropriated writing that prominently incorporate, and in turn investigate, metadata schemes. I argue that these works ought to be of considerable interest not only to critics of contemporary avant-garde writing — but also to media theorists, librarians and textual scholars. By emphasizing classification protocols, conceptual writing makes an implicit case for the interrelationship of these fields. Each of the four main books under discussion here — Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies, Craig Dworkin’s Perverse Library, M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! and Simon Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head — draws upon pre-existing textual archives. In doing so, these books suggest that processes of data storage, classification and transmission are key to how poetry is created, recognized and disseminated. Conceptual writing’s attention to information classification protocols offers not only a critique of contemporary models of authorship, but also of contemporary frameworks of personal agency and intellectual property.
Do You Want to Save Your Progress?: The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds
Kari Kraus, University of Maryland; Rachel Donahue, University of Maryland
Almost since the inception of the industry, the player community has been instrumental in preserving video games and other variable media art. Drawing on a combination of primary and secondary sources of information, including the Preserving Virtual Worlds project (an academic investigation into viable models of preservation for videogames and 3D virtual worlds based on a series of archiving case studies) and the results of a game documentation survey conducted by Donahue, we examine how players are taking responsibility for collecting, managing, curating, and creating long-term access to computer games. Because our interest lies with the contact zone between players and information professionals, we also describe and analyze how we and other scholar-archivists are collaborating with or relying on the user community to preserve virtual worlds, with an eye to how these relationships might eventually be codified within a larger preservation framework.
Old Ways for Linking Texts in the Digital Reading Environment: The Case of the Thompson Chain Reference Bible
Brent Nelson, University of Saskatchewan; Jon Bath, University of Saskatchewan
This paper will briefly survey the historical development of linking systems in the Christian Bible, from their theological foundations to their formation in the architecture of the printed book. It will then examine the apogee of intra-Biblical linking systems in the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, particularly its chain-referencing system for thematic linking between texts. Finally, it will use this mature print technology to consider the state of the hyperlink in current Web-interfaces. It will show that while in many ways modern attempts at a dynamic hyperlink surpass this elaborate linking system in functionality, in a few key functions this old print technology out-performs what is commonly and readily available in current Web-browsers. In pursing this comparative analysis we aim to demonstrate the importance of understanding the organization and navigational structure of the codex in designing digital reading environments that will meet and surpass the affordances of print.
Towards a Richer Sense of Digital Annotation:
Moving Beyond a "Media" Orientation of the Annotation of Digital Objects
John Bradley, Kings College London
Digital technology often gives us the chance to re-conceive common scholarly practices with the humanities, and one of these is the practice of annotation. Whereas many in the digital humanities look at annotation through the lens of social media, in this paper we consider annotation’s already established function in scholarship: to support the development of an interpretation of a body of material. It begins by applying a “software application” perspective to annotation and it notes that personal annotation sits at the nexus between the publishing application of the material being annotated, and an interpretation development application that aims to support the reader’s thinking. Once this application orientation is taken up, it becomes evident that it is useful to re-conceptualise aspects of annotation beyond the annotation-of-media focus which the World Wide Web has encouraged in all of us. The paper does this by considering annotation in an application that is not media oriented in nature, Northwestern University’s WordHoard, and it explores some of the significance of annotation where the application’s data model – with its inherent semantic significance – is available to be annotated. There is a growing interest in thinking of the WWW as a delivery mechanism for software applications rather than merely for documents, and thus many of the issues that this paper raises could apply to the work of web-oriented developers too.
Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham
Tim Causer, Bentham Project, University College London; Valerie Wallace, Bentham Project, University College London,and Center for History and Economics, Harvard University
This paper contributes to the literature examining the burgeoning field of academic crowdsourcing, by analysing the results of the crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, Transcribe Bentham. First, it describes how the project team sought to recruit volunteer transcribers to take part, and discusses which strategies were successes (and which were not). We then examine Transcribe Bentham's results during its six-month testing period (8 September 2010 to 8 March 2011), which include a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of website statistics, work completed by the amateur transcribers, as well as the demographics of the volunteer base and their motivations for taking part. The paper concludes by discussing the success of our community building with reference to this analysis. We find that Transcribe Bentham's volunteer transcribers have produced a remarkable amount of work – and continue to do so, carrying out the equivalent labour of a full-time transcriber – despite the nature and complexity of the task at hand.
Building Better Digital Humanities Tools: Toward broader
audiences and user-centered designs
Fred Gibbs, George Mason University; Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
Despite significant investments in the development of digital humanities tools, the use of these tools has remained a fringe element in humanities scholarship. Through an open-ended survey and virtual panel discussion, our study outlines the experience of historians using various digital tools. The results of the study reveal the variety of users interested in digital tools as well as their enthusiasm, reactions, and frustrations, including the expectations and confusion that has created barriers to tool use and to the wider adoption of new research methodologies. We suggest that an emphasis on cultivating a broader audience must be a concern not only for tool builders but also for funders to account adequately for the time and expense of quality interfaces and documentation.
In One's Own Hand: Seeing Manuscripts in a Digital Age
Anna Chen, The University of Texas at Austin
As museums increasingly place archival materials on display, a body of scholarship has emerged to provide practical advice for staff about exhibiting handwritten documents. However, there has as yet been little scholarship that problematizes the exhibition of manuscripts and the responses they elicit from their audiences. This essay, then, investigates the cultural perception of handwriting as an inherently unique and authentic embodiment of its writer, the assumption of which lies behind its display. Through a series of close readings of responses to the sight of the autograph, I examine the ways in which handwriting’s association with the human body has been historically shaped and interpreted; its current function as a locus for concerns about the loss or degradation of corporeal identity in an increasingly technologized world; and how multimedia museum exhibitions of handwritten documents — as digitally manipulable surrogates of original artifacts — expose, complicate, and break down the oppositions in this cultural discourse. Ultimately, I argue, digital interactives are part of a new exhibitionary paradigm, which not only offers new ways of considering an artifact’s essential meaning, but also refines and redefines our understanding of human effort, intentionality, and embodiment in a digital age.
Machine Enhanced (Re)minding: the Development of Storyspace
Belinda Barnet, Swinburne University of Technology
This article traces the history of Storyspace, the world’s first program for creating, editing and reading hypertext fiction. Storyspace is crucial to the history of hypertext as well as the history of interactive fiction. It argues that Storyspace was built around a topographic metaphor and that it attempts to model human associative memory. The article is based on interviews with key hypertext pioneers as well as documents created at the time.
The Design of an International Social Media Event: A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities
Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta; Peter Organisciak, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Megan Meredith-Lobay, University of Alberta; Kamal Ranaweera, University of Alberta; Stan Ruecker, Illinois Institute of Technology; Julianne Nyhan, University College London
A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community documentation project that brings together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, typically March 18. The goal of the project, which has been run three times since 2009, is to bring together participants to reflect on the question, Just what do computing humanists really do? To do this, participants document their day through photographs and commentary using one of the Day of DH blogs set up for them. The collection of these journals (with links, tags, and comments) is, after editing, made available online. This paper discusses the design of this social project, from the ethical issues raised to the final web of journals and shares some of the lessons we have learned. One of the major challenges of social media is getting participation. We made participating easy by personally inviting a seed group, choosing an accessible technology, maintaining a light but constant level of communication prior to the event, and asking only for a single day of commitment. In addition, we tried to make participation at least rewarding in formal academic terms by structuring the Day of DH as a collaborative publication. In terms of improvements, we have over the iterations changed the handling ethics clearances for images and connected to other social media like Twitter.
Author Biographies
