Centre for Internet and Society

Towards Critical Tool-building

sara — 2013-07-31T11:56:55Z

The last blogpost focused on the importance of design for digital humanities research and on the concept of universal design to make research work more inclusive as well as more accessible, the visual being something that digital humanities stress the importance of in their work. But research work has always been put into form, so aesthetics have played a role in traditional humanities work. What has changed and why is there a self-proclaimed shift towards design in the digital humanities?

In previous blog entries, I have thought about the digital humanities as a field, with its own set of values, which may or may not at times conflict with more traditional humanities research and perspectives. Blogposts preceding this one have explained the concept of the archive in digital humanities studies and how the importance of design has increased. Digital Humanities therefore have to begin theorizing aesthetics, one of the suggestions being the universal design proposal explained in the last blogpost. However, this assumes that design is only something which takes place with given knowledges, putting those into visual perspective. One must be clear that not only is the data itself something that is being produced and in a larger sense 'designed', even before the humanities took a turn to visualizations, textual work was being put together according to a perception of aesthetics.

The production of knowledge has always been intertwined with making it accessible, making it visible, so to say, so that it can actually be established as knowledge. So producing knowledge is always a matter of 'putting it out there', which happens through the organization of that knowledge in a certain format. As was established before, the organization of knowledge not only structures the format but actually influences the content of it as well, so that it is produced just as it is arranged to be consumed. Still, more often than not, design is seen as a kind of “accessorizing exercise, a dressing-up of information” (Drucker), after the 'real work' has been done. As Gary Hall has stated, it is difficult for digital humanists to “understand computing and the digital as much more than tools, techniques, and resources” (Hall 2012), which is why their work of building tools is often considered to be “naïve and lacking in meaningful critique (Liu; Higgen)” (Hall 2012). The circumstances under which tools are built and technologies implemented should be scrutinized closely, so as to see where and how they are building meaning and what knowledge production this leads to.

Arguing with Derrida, there is no real difference between language and the world, as all 'world' is perceived through a descriptive process and “there is nothing outside of the text”(Derrida 1976:163). This does not mean that there is nothing existential outside of language, however, it does mean that all perception happens with the help of the technology of text and therefore language. Using this argument, Spivak goes on to say that text is part of the world, just as media and technology are not separate things, but intertwined as technologies of language – and therefore productions of 'the world' (Spivak 1990: 129). Building tools can only happen within the terrain that has been defined by language. Technology, as it is grasped and developed with language, is therefore inherent to the conformities of language. Data, according to that statement, is a part of the technology of language as well, just as the code that inscribes or develops it. Within this statement lies the implication that data is not a given, but must be constructed and created as well, just as the codes that might be writing this data are a product of human technological and social development. What we take for granted in databases such as GPS mapping devices is actually not simply there as a representation of the world, but a complex translation and interpretation through language and code (Drucker 2011). Code itself therefore is considered more than just a tool of building, as digital humanities researchers urge to see not only the technical jargon of coding, but also its social impact on humanities agency (Donahue 2010). With code and computer interfaces come digital databases, and they have definitely taken their place in the digital humanities realm. Lev Manovich introduces the database to be the language of New Media, implying that this is what constructs digital media knowledges.

Knowledge design – even if only in a sense that the text is formatted – has always been a principle in humanities work, as it organizes knowledge, which only then can be incorporated into 'the world'. However, today's increased focus on design can probably be explained by the increased usage of the internet and the construction of databases that comes with it. According to Lev Manovich, a database represents a “cultural form of its own” (Manovich: 2001 ), as it is curated model, which undergoes selection and production of cultural knowledges. Just as the word 'curatorial' suggests, these dispositions have an underlying aesthetic, according to which they are organized. This aesthetic, however, is not an emotional aesthetic as it was perceived to be in romanticism, but has – and must have – a theoretical basis.

More importantly than that, they overcome the forced chronology of narrative, which has a beginning, a middle and an end. Not only are databases without beginning or end, they are “collections of individual items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search. The user experience of such computerized collections is therefore quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site. Similarly, literary or cinematic narrative, an architectural plan and database each present a different model of what a world is like” (Manovich: 2001). Within a database, the creation of meaning is interactive, as it is up to the user to develop relations between otherwise loosely arranged cultural objects. The database therefore is a deconstruction of the hierarchical position text and narrative are perceived to have over other knowledge production processes. According to Manovich a narrative always requires a narrator, while databases can be approached completely free of prior organization through an obscure other. However, database design always requires a certain framework, which Nigel Cross describes to be the “design problem” (Cross 2007). Design problems are the way of asserting the framework of a certain situation, while at the same time being vague and open to interpretation (Dorst 2010: 135). But how do these new ways of viewing knowledge creation really matter to humanities work, apart from being tools? While it has been suggested that digital humanities, still being in a developing phase, should not necessarily be all about answering questions of humanities agency and politics at this stage, the way of addressing technological problems through critical approaches implies that the technological and tool-building work itself is impacting those questions (Hall 2012). This proposal ignores the previously explained situation that language, meaning and technology are interwoven and can therefore not be seen as separate. Building tools always is building meaning, therefore it is and always should be political. To ignore these circumstances of representation of knowledge means ignoring its process of coming to being and therefore obscures the ideology behind knowledge production. Johanna Drucker (2011) tries to overcome the blur of visualizations by suggesting the linguistic transfer of data to capta, from something that is inherently there, that is a given, to something that is taken. The shift implies the acknowledgement of the

“constructed-ness of the categories according to the uses and expectations for which they are put in service. Nations, genders, populations and time spans are not self-evident stable entities that exist a priori. They are each subject to qualifications and reservations that bear directly on and arise from the reality of lived experience” (ibid.).

This constructed-ness of data does not only apply for simplifications (like for example excluding data that falls out of the normative range in statistics) but also for the categories itself upon which the data is built. While usual statistic data is confined into lines, curves, bars etc., traditional humanities have taught us, that categories are not rigid. Much rather they are processual, they overlap each other, or their borders are not entirely defined. It is essential for digital humanities work, to accept these parameters and apply them when designing, selecting or processing visual data.

In that sense, data as capta is a concept which tries to show the construction – and therefore ideology – behind all types of information, not only the information in social sciences. The digital humanities tools are lacking critique only because humanists refuse to see them as agents of change. Technology needs to be understood in the same constructed, non-objective way, as the knowledges it is producing. Once we start seeing even statistical data, visualizations and apparently objective tool-building with this concept, it should be possible to build tools which understand and work towards the agency of humanities work. Digital humanities can and should therefore be building tools as well as questioning the way in which they are being produced theoretically.

Literature:

Cross 2007 Nigel Cross: “Designerly Ways of Knowing” Basel: Birkhauser

Donahue 2010 Evan Donahue: “A 'Hello World' Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program), accessed 12^th July 2013, http://hastac.org/blogs/evan-donahue/hello-world-apart-why-humanities-students-should-not-learn-program

Dorst 2010 Kees Dorst: “The Nature of Design Thinking”, accessed 12^th July 2013 http://dab.uts.edu.au/research/conferences/dtrs8/docs/DTRS8-Dorst.pdf

Drucker 2011 Johanna Drucker: “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display”, accessed 12^th July 2013 http://athanasius.stanford.edu/Readings/Drucker.pdf

Hall 2012 Gary Hall: “Has Critical Theory Run Out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship?”, accessed 12^th July http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/14

Manovich 2001 Lev Manovich: “The Language of New Media”, accessed 12^th July 2013, http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf

Scheinfeldt 2010 Tom Scheinfeldt: “Where's the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions?” accessed 12^th July 2013, http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/05/12/wheres-the-beef-does-digital-humanities-have-to-answer-questions/

Spivak 1990 Gayatri Spivak: “The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues”

Sarah Harasym (ed.), New York/London: Routledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/towards-critical-tool-building

Theorizing the Digital Subaltern

sara — 2013-08-06T07:20:41Z

As digital humanities research at CIS proceeds, a number of critical positions have arisen, making it possible to reconcile questions of humanities with the digital realm. This blog entry focusses on race as a factor of research and how it is displayed in the digital.

Digital humanities has been criticized for a lack of content when compared with research in the traditional field of humanities. While humanities work deals mostly with subalternity, politics and what it means to be human, it has been established that a lot of digital humanities work revolves mainly around questions of providing access. Access is a good thing and focussing on it can be helpful. Nonetheless, as has been stated by Nishant Shah, simply providing access only works in an ideal world, where all have the gadgets and knowledges of making use of the research made available through digitalization (Shah: 2012). The internet is not the discrimination-free, post-gendered space that cyber-enthusiasts hoped for it to be. As a matter of fact, as Lisa Nakamura describes, the internet is a space of racial and gendered re-embodiement (Nakamura: 2007). Her argument is that in relation to the advancing biotechnologies, ubiquitous surveillance and pre-emptive profiling, 'racio-visual logic' is reconfiguring the body online (ibid.). Even if there is actually visibility of marginalized groups online, it is not always something that actually results in fruitful engagement with the paradigms of racial discrimination. This means that social inequalities and racial discrimination marginalizing people offline are reproduced online. Nakamura exemplifies this in an example by investigating the website alllooksame.com, where users are encouraged to participate in racial profiling by labeling pictures of Asians to be Korean, Chinese or Japanese. A majority of users falsely label the faces, which shows how the social construction of race can wrongly be mainstreamed to accommodate visual perceptions of eastern stereotypes. In this case, as the obviously problematic title of the website already suggests, simply making spaces for perceived minorities is more harmful than good. Nakamura also exemplifies how race is otherwise fetishized online, for example in video games like Grand Theft Auto, portraying non-white protagonists as thugs, or even all-time favorites like Street Fighter or Tekken, appealing to the western image of Asians as martial arts superpowers.

Therefore, the question of the quality of that access and visibility concerning subaltern groups should be vitally important to work in the digital humanities, more than the mere quantity of knowledges available. As Moore-Gilbert explains in his work on digital subalternity (Moore-Gilbert: 2000), it is not mainly access and digitalization, which will be equalizing factors in the digital age. The subaltern is a concept by Antonio Gramsci, which tries to describe the marginalized groups of people that do not have access to hegemonic spaces in society. Gayatri Spivak adds to that concept by saying that not only do the subaltern not have access to hegemonic power structures, also this denial of access makes it impossible for the subaltern to express their own knowledges, as they need to adopt Western ways of knowing to be heard. A subaltern's own cultural knowledges are therefore omitted from the discourse and a subaltern can never truly express oneself (Spivak: 1988).

Summarizing subalternity as the oppressed and dispossessed, Mike Kent (2008) defines a new digital divide, which is opening between people with access to the internet and abilities to operate a computer, and people to whom, for some reason, that description does not apply. These people may simply not own or have access to computers on a regular basis (or at all), but also may be excluded from a digital discourse, because they have been marginalized in that discourse from its analog beginnings. One of the examples was shortly addressed in one of the digital humanities blogposts, where it was explained that many people in India seem to believe that the digital is naturally for the english-speaking world and not available in local languages. These are therefore excluded in the building of gadgets and internet infrastructure, leading users to believe that the internet is a hegemonic space with male, white, western, or at the very least english-speaking dominance. Therefore local Indian languages are marginalized and the digital becomes a realm, which marginalizes non-hegemonic culture and people with different language priorities have difficulties finding their way into. The problem with subalternity is that these people are not visibly excluded, and might not even be aware of their exclusion (Kent: 2008). Providing Indian language Wikipedia, for example, is part of the solution, but definitely not all of it. When doing digital humanities work, archiving or creating access through digitalization, the digital divide grows and does so even more, as it is not, and cannot be addressed in such a way that the people being marginalized are put into a position of realizing the disproportion of knowledge access.

So merely providing information online will not result in the diminishment of the priorly addressed knowledge gap. Even when addressing this gap, it happens in terms of academics, intellectuals and people with online access speaking on behalf of people who do not have access to the discursive space in which these gaps are discussed. The experiences of the subaltern are only addressed from the outside and without their presence. This summarizes subalternity under one large, obscure category, ignoring that the subaltern might need to be addressed individually, according to race, class, gender, etc., to be able to gain the knowledges needed to participate in the discourse evolving around questions of digital humanities. Is it therefore substantive to include subaltern positions into digital discourses, even if this means speaking on behalf of certain positions at first to raise awareness. However, the awareness of speaking for someone else should also exist within the discourse and if there is any way of including subaltern positions directly, they should do so.

Within the work field of digital humanities, many projects are discussing the infrastructure and ways of dealing with online knowledges. The project Digital Humanities Q&A (http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/, or @DHanswers on twitter) offers a platform to ask questions regarding anything concerned with digital humanities. The community quickly tries to help the poster to overcome whatever difficulties s_he might be having in 'building'. And even questions of politics and ethics are discussed in the forum. This is an important infrastructure for discourse happening outside of classical academic forms and certainly retains authority through the amount of other work the researchers participating in the project are publishing online and off.

What seems to be missing, however, is the acknowledgement that the digital is not simply something apart from humanity, and is not something simply extractable and usable as a tool without affecting what it means to be human. Technology forms our very being from the first moment of creation in our mother's wombs. It is intrinsic to every life form in human society and even a complete lack of technology surrounding someone (if that is even possible), is technological in a sense that it is perceived as a lack thereof. This does not necessarily mean that all research work results to digital humanities, but it does point to the impossibility of leaving questions of the social, of race, of gender, aside when dealing with technological development.

To make an analytical example, the technologically focussed concept of the 'Internet-Geek' or the 'Hacker' gives an outlook on how questions of race are handled within a digital space. The terms hacker and geek are being used interchangeably, even though the concepts might differ. Not all geeks are hackers, however, they occupy the same space in the mainstream discourse and when speaking of an internet-geek it is often the assumption that they hack as well. While the term geek bore negative connotations for years, it seems to have shaken these with the rise of the digital realm marking the turn from 'geekism' to 'hacktivism', and with that, geekism as a new type of expertise. Geeks are no longer seen as friendless mavericks, who spend their time obsessing about one subject, which the mainstream culture seems to have little interest in or use for. Much more, the internet-geek is a political figure, which is often said to have the best survival skills in the digital age and is able to navigate through the digital realm like 'a fish takes to water'. The discourse around geek-ism focusses on the geek as an anti-intellectual figure, which overcomes classical academia, as “it's unnecessary to get a college degree in order to be a great coder” (Sanger 2011). However, debates around intellectualism are as old as the concept of the intellectual itself. Historically, the discourse on intellectualism has always been paired with antisemitism and the concept of the intellectual was first used as a derogative term to attack the left wing group defending the jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus in late 19^th century France. The captain was sentenced to life imprisonment for the wrongful accusations of having communicated french military secrets to the German embassy. His accusation and life sentence served the sustenance of French national values and enforced nationalism through the 'Othering'¹ of the jewish captain. Anti-intellectualism therefore historically springs from structural antisemitism and it is worth looking into how that concept has been employed in today's digital culture. Unfortunately, dwelling on the concept of the intellectual is not possible within the frame of this short exemplary analysis. The ambivalence of the concept should, however, not go by unnoticed. This polemic of the discourse is lost in the digital age and there seems to be little engagement with historical perceptions, which may lead to essentialists perceptions of knowledges.

In embracing the priorly addressed values of the internet, the figure of the geek is in most discourses portrayed as anarchic and dismissive of any form of singular authority, therefore undermining power-structures and hegemonic knowledges. While these discourses engage in questions of authority and freedom, it is difficult to find engagement with the categorial inequalities existent in the digital realm. The political engagement, which is supposed to be a key feature in the identity of the hacker, limits itself to questions of freedom of data and open-source. As has been described before, these technological concepts restrict themselves to data accessibility, but do not engage in questions of the quality of access to that data, or the quality of that data itself. The work of the geek or hacker is therefore not subversive per se. Rather, hackerism saw the freedom of internet usage as a right, not a privilege, thereby essentializing a 'survival of the fittest' mentality, which benefits and excuses aggressive behaviour and therefore alienating more sensitive positions. This usually results in re-justifying patriarchal structures and affirming the white, male, heterosexual norm.

Within the last couple of years geek feminism blogs and websites have been springing up on the web in an attempt to overcome the existing knowledge gaps, but the linguistic and theoretical reference seems always to be more along the lines of feminism in an online space and how much these discourses actually impact hetero-normative hackerspaces is questionable. Geek feminists therefore seldom perceive themselves to be part of the hacker-identity, but move in the realm of feminist theory, where intersectionality with other categories, such as race, has been established to be a key factor of analysis. In the hacker-realm, however, when referring to color, what is mostly being addressed is the ethical direction, in which the hacker is performing his*² task, as a short search-engine review of the topic implies. So the political questions the geek or hacker faces, evolve around cybersecurity, privacy and open spaces on the internet, but do not engage in what it means to be of a certain race, gender, etc. when writing code, hacking technologies, or processing knowledges online. This practice of obscuring categories of inequality does not make them any less effective, but, as has been shown above, enforce shallow and often fetishized depictions of online spaces and the users occupying them. This results in a naturalization of the white, male perspective and implies every other position to be an aberration. It is often implied that people of color simply don't want to participate, instead of seeing the possibility of the spaces not being inclusive and inviting enough. It has often been said that hackerspaces are alienating towards women, but the stereotypical depiction of any ethnic group influences the notion of the hacker to be of a certain class and race as well. While one might perceive that Asians occupy a great amount of online space, this does not necessarily mean fruitful engagement in a critical discourse around race in cyberspace.

So even if there is no direct racism in online spaces or within the notion of the hacker, the lack of theorizing race as a category which is still being seen as inferior leads to informal discrimination and reinforces a norm that marginalizes people of color. Research and the building of infrastructure follows these normative interests and marginalizes interests of groups that do not fit into the privileged categories. The notions of free internet usage implies a choice which is not always available, especially within marginalized communities. So it is necessary to engage with the questions of freedom, for whom they apply online, and where freedom and access stop being choices.

To reference Marshall McLuhan, the medium may not necessarily be the message, but it does inseparably intertwine itself, so that it is impossible to tell where medium stops and message begins. If we accept the premise that we are all cyborgs and digital technologies are inscribed in our bodies, a mere quantitative approach to these is not possible and believing technology to simply be a methodology, a means to end is not either. It is necessary to find a way to deal with the technological, the data and, in the end, the internet as a cultural phenomenon which forms our society just as other media does, but also creates reality in a more accurate and impacting way than any medium has done before.

Therefore when taking a turn towards visualizations and design, one should remember what it means to visualize and what is being left out in the process. Of course, articulating something is always a process of marginalizing something else, as it is simply impossible to include all positions. However, the necessity to clarify ones own position, vital in humanities, seems lost in the transition towards digital humanities. The necessity of critical digital humanities has been stressed in the past and a number of critical projects have arisen, a number of which are summarized on the design for digital inclusion homepage from the Washington University: https://depts.washington.edu/ddi/research.html. It is necessary to critically engage with concepts that occupy the digital space and this short analysis of the hacker may serve as a starting point for future research.

Annotations:

1'Othering' is a concept introduced by Edward Said, saying that the construction of a norm usually develops through the demarcation of what they are not. In this case, the french nationality was built upon a notion of anti-semitism and the concept of treason as the biggest offense to the nation state. The concept of 'othering' has also been employed by several other theorists and subaltern researchers, amongst them Gayatri Spivak. See Said: 1977, Spivak: 1985

2Unless explicitly feminist, most literature still addresses the hacker as a male figure. Although of course there are several female hackers, the concept is still connoted as a male identity. In following, this connotation will be applied, however the * indicates the critical engagement with the concept, mirroring the differential gap of power and authority according to the concept of hegemonic masculinity.

References:

Deleuze, G./Guattari, F. (1993): A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: U of Minnesota Press.

Gold, M.K. (2012): Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition

Kuhn, T. S.(1996): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press. 3^rd edition.

Kent, M. (2008): Digital Divide 2.0 and the Digital Subaltern. In: Nebula 5.4, 2008. Accessed July 26^th 2013:http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/Kent3.pdf

Moore-Gilbert, B. (2000): Spivak and Bhabha, In: Schwarz/Ray (ed.), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000, p. 453.

Nakamura, L. (2008): Digitizing Race. Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minnesota: U of Minnesota Press.

Said, E. (1977): Orientalism. London: Penguin

Shah, N. (2012): The Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia. Accessed July 26^th 2013: http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. " Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271-313.

Sterne, J. (2000): Computer Race goes to Class. How Computers in Schools Helped Shape the Racial Topography of the Internet. In: Kolko/Nakamura/Rodman (ed.): Race in Cyberspace. New York/London: Routledge. Accessed 29^th July 2013: http://sterneworks.org/ComputerRaceGoestoClass.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/theorizing-the-digital-subaltern

Mapping the field of digital humanities

sara — 2013-07-03T09:40:01Z

This blog is the first in a series of blog entries evolving around digital humanities. As the research proceeds, arising questions will be addressed and attempted to map out, so that we are left with an annotated bibliography of the field which will help create parameters on how to approach research in that sector. In this first episode of the blog series, the introductory volume simply called Digital_Humanities (Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp) will be combined with Patrik Svensson's Landscape of Digital Humanities, so as to assert what it is, we're dealing with, when talking about digital humanities.

Entering into the field of digital humanities, it quickly becomes clear that pinpointing an exact definition will be a difficult thing to do. Evolving from the traditional field of humanities, it still does not seem to be compliant to the same standards or discuss the same issues. The attempt to map out the field, hence, is just a collection of definitions which have no pretence of being overarching but do include some of the more cited authors, who have attempted to define the terms of research that digital humanities are based upon.

The recently published volume Digital_Humanities (Burdick et. al.: 2012), which is available freely online in an open-access edition^¹, provides a very well structured overview of the shift from humanities to digital humanities. The book states that, contrary to popular belief, humanities is not so much a field in crisis, but rather a field which is evolving to become more inclusive and thus relevant to everyday life. Within humanities research there has been a “fundamental shift in the perception of the core creative activities of being human, in which the values and knowledge of the humanities are seen as crucial for shaping every domain of culture and society” (Burdick et. Al: 2012) The book argues that with the digitalization of human life, the humanities have taken a turn away from mere text-based information and included media which allow for more collaborative and generative work in which the visual is fundamental.

While this book has interesting case studies and addresses questions of authorship, collaboration and alternative publishing, it serves well as an introduction into the field, but does not give a satisfactory overview of authors working on these topics.

So possibly more worthwhile from a theoretical perspective as opposed to the practical approach Burdick et. al. take, is Patrik Svenssons essay on The Landscape of Digital Humanities. This essay was published in 2010, prior to the Digital_Humanities volume, which might explain Svenssons need to elaborate on the new ways in which digital humanities are perceived. Svensson argues that digital humanities are a field in a loose sense, and inclusive in a sense that the field covers different activities in the intersection between humanities and digital technologies.

In an attempt to map out the sectors of the field, Svensson mentions Tara McPherson's (2009) differentiation between computing humanities (which mainly use digital tools, infrastructure and archives), blogging humanities (focussing on networked media and peer-to-peer reviews and learning) and multimodal humanities (which use scholarly tools, databases and networked writing all combined in visual and aural media). Davidson (2008) offers another aspect of differentiation, distinguishing between humanities 1.0 and 2.0 in accordance to the development of the internet itself as the central medium of digitalization. “Humanities 2.0 is distinguished from monumental, first-generation, data-based projects not just by its interactivity but also by openness about participation grounded in a different set of theoretical premises, which decenter knowledge and authority" (Davidson 2008, 711–12). What can be derived from both of these approaches is a shift towards interactivity, non-arboric knowledge growth and multimedial presentation.

This very vague categorization provides the problem of different research projects or institutions dealing with different aspects of digital humanities might have to compete for funds, as they are perceived to cover one field while actually working on very diverse topics. Svensson (2009a) argues that humanities computing provides the core, while digital humanities includes the various disciplines. This binary shows up the problems of telling the history of humanities computing as digital humanities. So the connection between the disciplines and the core is somewhat difficult because of the epistemic investment humanities computing has in technology as a tool and method, which defines it as a field. Digital humanities are not always institutionalized, and institutionalized fields like games studies etc. do not necessarily see themselves as part of digital humanities. This results from traditional ways of seeing academics, which has difficulties grasping the emergence of alternative ways of the digital. Digital humanities however, become a place for change and action, as Svensson argues with Davidson (2009). So digital humanities can be seen as 1. a developing field which lets humanities embrace the digital and create new tools to analyze it in an emergent nature or 2. a set of tools which implement technologies to make new knowledge from cultural inheritance (which is far more static, also according to Svensson).

However, research areas such as cyberculture studies and critical digital studies (digital culture and the cultural construction of information technology as a study object) are excluded from digital humanities studies, which often centralize around libraries, as they evolve around alternative ways of teaching and spreading knowledge.

Digital humanities according to Svensson has five fruitful parameters of engagement, which can be analyzed: information technology as a tool, as a study object, as an expressive medium, as an experimental laboratory and an activist venue. So there are general ways of categorizing the field, although, as this article suggests, it could be difficult to include all research aspects by mapping the field too closely.

continue reading on the topic: values in digital humanities

Literature:

Burdick et. Al 2012 Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp “Digital_Humanities”. MIT Press 2010. accessed 1 June 2013. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf

Davidson 2008 Davidson, Cathy N. "Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions". Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 123:3 (2008), 707-717.

Davidson 2009 Davidson, Cathy N. "Innovation AND Tradition". HASTAC Discussion Forum on the Future of the Digital Humanities, 03 February 2009. Accessed 1 June 2013. http://www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/future-digital-humanities.

McPherson 2008 McPherson, Tara. "Dynamic Vernaculars: Emerent Digital Forms in Contemporary Scholarship". Lecture presented to HUMLab Seminar, Umeå University, 4 March 2008. http://stream.humlab.umu.se/index.php?streamName=dynamicVernaculars.

Svensson 2009 Svensson, Patrik. "Humanities computing as digital humanities". Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3:3 (2009).

Svensson 2010 Svensson, Patrik. “The Landscape of Digital Humanities”. Digital Humanities Quarterly,4:1 http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html

1http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/mapping-the-field-of-digital-humanities

Girls in ICT Day at Mitra Jyothi

sara — 2013-04-28T11:14:20Z

The Centre for Internet and Society organized the first Girls in ICT Day in association with the Mitra Jyothi Trust in Bangalore on April 25, 2013. Sara Morais who participated in the event shares her experiences in this blog post.

The International Girls in ICT Day is an initiative backed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and their member states to create a global environment that empowers and encourages girls and young women to consider careers and actions in the growing field of information and communication technologies (ICTs).

International Girls in ICT Day is celebrated on the 4^th Thursday in April every year since 2010. This year CIS, having recently become a sector member of ITU-D, hosted a Bangalore Girls in ICT Day on the April 25 at the Mitra Jyothi Trust, which uses information and communication technologies to empower the visually impaired and help them integrate into mainstream society.

As ICTs are an important tool for personal empowerment, it was in CIS and ITU's interest to include people with disabilities on Girls in ICT Day and hence holding the event at a centre which inspires people with visual impairments. This was an important step towards including girls in the ICT sector in India, where according to a Times of India article, resides the worlds largest blind population.^¹ Nirmita Narasimhan invited Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, a social media expert at CIS, to give a talk, reaching out to the visually impaired girls at Mitra Jyothi and encouraging them to use ICT.

Around 30 to 40 visually impaired girls and boys came to listen to Dr. U.B. Pavanaja explaining the possibilities of using ICT with a visual disability in India. With Kannada being the local language in Bangalore, the focus was on applications available in Kannada. The talk also was given in Kannada mixed with English.

After an introductory round, in which the founder and managing trustee Ms. Madhu Singhal gave thanks to Nirmita Narasimhan for organizing the event, as well as to Dr. Pavanaja, for taking the time to speak, one of the girls opened the event with an inaugural song.

Following that Dr. Pavanaja began his speech with a brief history of font technology, focussing on the problems and incompatibilities the Kannada language faced in the development of new applications for the visually impaired. A short non-representative survey he had made before, left him with the general feeling that girls use ICT mostly to simplify daily procedures like shopping, banking and communicating. Most of the websites mentioned were not accessible to the visually impaired, which explains the reason many members of the audience were unaware of these every day online experiences. He went on to introduce the audience to important apps and gadgets, which make using ICT easier for the visually impaired, some of which are also available in Kannada. This included GPS bracelets and walking sticks, braille displays and live-scribe Echo pens, as well as apps like Fightback, which can be especially useful for women when confronted with a violent attacker or similar.

As the girls and boys in the audience had little or no experience with digital media and ICT, the talk gave insight on several ways of using ICT, which were previously unknown to the listeners. There were questions like finding the right operating system for the visually impaired as some already have integrated audio prompt programs, while others require an additional installation. Also, the audience took interest in fonts with which Kannada voice prompts could most easily be implemented. Additionally, the discussion revolved around important ICT accessibility tools, standards and technologies such as the importance of Unicode for regional languages, text-to-speech in Kannada language and available inbuilt and third party screen reading software which come with different mobile phones and operating systems on computers.

The gender balance was more or less equal, although the male members of the audience seemed to be more eager in asking questions. This may reflect different attitudes towards ICT according to gender conceptions. However, it is important to remember that the male members of the society have to play their part in the path to inclusion, being actors of change in empowering girls and women to use ICT. The exchange was vital and several of the girls stated in the following informal round that the talk had opened them towards using ICT in spite of their visual impairment. As their two-month training in ICT had just started a week earlier, Dr. Pavanaja's talk gave the listeners an opportunity to get to know information technologies, which they would then be able to explore further within their following time of training.

CIS thanks Mitra Jyothi for the valuable cooperation and will continue to work on inclusion for girls and the visually impaired in ICT, hopefully hosting another successful Girls in ICT Day in 2014.

1See the Times of India, October 11,2007: http://bit.ly/yuls4i

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/girls-in-ict-day-mithra-jyothi

Girls in ICT Day

sara — 2013-04-27T09:12:37Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/GirlsinIT004.jpg

Digital Humanities Talk at CIS

sara — 2013-08-01T06:55:16Z

In an attempt to contextualize the digital humanities work within the CIS network of projects, Sara Morais held a talk on the advantages and problems in doing digital humanities work. Following is the transcript of the talk with a video of the presentation.

Digital humanities is a broad field which is difficult to summarize. However, this is an attempt to map out the field and make it accessible, so that it can possibly be used interdisciplinary as a tool and a value statement for other work happening at CIS. Starting from the term itself, digital humanities suggests a connection with the field of humanities research. So firstly I'd like to look at recent developments in traditional humanities, that may or may not have caused an evolution towards the digital prefix.

Humanities itself is a field that has undergone various forms of criticism in the last years. Some of them include people claiming that there is a lack of relevance in humanities work, and that it includes to much ideology or relativism, to say everything is a cultural perception. Others have said that humanities has sacrificed the quality of its research work for mere quantity and it has been said that enrollments in humanities fields have gone down a lot, mostly in accordance to an increase in enrollments in sciences. For maybe all of those reasons there has been a claimed lack of funding for humanities projects and researchers are finding it harder to make their research available to the public. Many humanists have therefore proclaimed the humanities to be in crisis.

Whether or not this is true can be debated, however, I would like to look at the definition of a crisis according to Thomas Kuhn as he describes it in The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962). Now the picture in the background is an illustration Kuhn uses to make his point. As you can see, depending on how you look at the picture, it can show a rabbit, or a duck. Kuhn uses this image to explain how the crisis merely introduces the beginning of a paradigm shift. A paradigm is something that is believed to be true at a certain time by the majority of the scientific community. It includes not only the theory itself, but the very worldview into which the theory is made existent. As we broadly accept knowledges to be submissive to change, the paradigm can come into crisis, when a large number of researchers have reason to believe that it can no longer be valid. Once this crisis is overcome, a paradigm shift has taken place, which can make the very same information to be seen in a different way. Going back to the illustration, this means that if everyone priorly believed for it to show a duck, they now see that it actually shows a rabbit. The crisis, therefore, is merely the rethinking of knowledges and information and is something fruitful to the development of knowledge production.

So if we accept that the humanities are in crisis, the question is: can the digital humanities provide a way out of the crisis?

The question is firstly, what is this thing called digital humanities. The difficulty that comes with mapping out this still emerging field is, that researchers are still reluctant to even summarize it in such broad terms. As it arises from a generally postmodern acceptance of diverse identities, the digital humanities themselves cannot agree on being summarized as one discipline. Rather, researchers agree for it to be a multi-disciplinary field, or even non-field, as one might say. For the sake of simplicity I will address it as a field, however it is important to state that it incorporates many disciplines that may or may not see themselves as part of the digital humanities, like games studies, librarianship, archival work, etc.

Then, looking at its historical development we can see, that digital humanities are derived from something that was called humanities computing. According to David Berry, humanities computing was often seen merely as technical support to the 'real' humanist work. So the computer was first mainly seen as a tool. With the discoursive transition to digital humanities, there was a suggestion of dividing digital humanities into waves, the first wave incorporating mainly the digitization of analog content and increased use of ICTs as tools, as has been suggested. With the second wave, the internet became the domestic and central medium, influencing research work to become more generative, producing online content and using web 2.0 as an interactive and more collaborative way of sharing knowledges. This includes looking at research objects that are 'born digital', as one would say, and therefore it is said that the second wave of digital humanities embraces the values of the internet. It remains to be seen if this division will be useful for future reference, however it has been suggested that possibly the digital humanities are entering a third stage.

This is yet to be seen, however it has become clear that current digital humanities research takes the computational and digital turn for granted, which means that technologies induce the very grounds on which theories are conceived. This has induced an increased focus on 'building' and access through digitization of work, as I have explained priorly. This building includes the creation of infrastructure for the digitizations, and revolves around tool-building for digital content. Therefore, digital humanities have put a large focus on multimedial forms of knowledge production and mostly try to lessen the textual input into knowledge productions.

Digital media aesthetics now play a big part in the production of knowledges and digital humanities put a lot of effort into designing their projects to include videos, graphs and data that can be examined through non-textual media.

With this new form of knowledge production, new values have been declared for the digital humanities, to conform to the working ways of the internet. These values include openness, collaboration, diversity and experimentation, to accommodate the main question which is: what happens at the intersection of computing tools with cultural artefacts?

Now the first problem I have with this question stated in the digital humanities quarterly magazine, is that in my opinion the computer and computational tools are cultural artefacts themselves. But lets first have a look at what digital humanities do and are doing with these suppositions. During our digital humanities consultation 2 weeks ago it was suggested that digital humanities work can roughly be clustered into four different research areas. One, concerning modes of scholarship and academia, one creating knowledge repositories and archives, then as a research modality or methodology, and lastly as a set of skills, with which questions of the humanities and what it means to be human can be regarded with.

As one can see, a lot of these suggest digital humanities to be creating knowledges outside of traditional academic structures, and creating tools to reproduce these knowledges online. The question is therefore, is digital humanities only about building infrastructure? Or more harshly phrased: Where's the content?

According to what I have said up until now, the main activities of digital humanities seems to be archiving and digitizing content for the sake of increased accessibility. While doing so, digital humanities are deconstructing the hegemony of text over the visual and giving designers an equal position as co-authors, thereby changing the perception of authorship as it has been used in academia and for textual work. So the perception of a single author is deconstructed, as designing and publishing your work in some way adds to the way knowledges are perceived. This of course impacts on the way credit needs to be given to authors, which is why the traditional academic notion of granting credit is being challenged. So a lot of the questions evolve around acknowledging alternative knowledges that are being produced outside of the classroom and within its new digitized realms.

As we have seen, however, a lot of the proceedings of digital humanities up until now have made questions arise. Is there really a connection between traditional humanities and DH? Is DH all about infrastructure? From these and many other questions, a critical way of reviewing the digital humanities has arisen, which articulates the problems when doing digital humanities work.

First of all, many digital humanists in teaching positions have articulated difficulties in curricularizing the field. As it is constantly changing and evolving and the digital itself is a very contemporary medium, summarizing it as a course curriculum is not an easy task. This is a minor complication which gives rise to many other questions, like whether or not the digital humanities are really something new in a sense that their values, the values of openness, collaboration, experimentation and diversity might suggest novelty. Stating for example collaboration to be a value, implies that before knowledge was not being produced

in a collaborative way before. But then, no knowledge is created from the genius of one single author, humanities have always called upon priorly existing knowledges to state their case and tried to make their own points openly accessible to a broad spectrum of people. Placing diversity as a value, too, can be problematic, as diversifying always implies that there is a norm from which one is straying. The same can be said about experimentation, as it implies a laboratory sense of knowledge production. Within the laboratory and the sciences that work in those, experimentation is a try and error procedure, which hints at there being an objective truth, which needs to be found. In that way the values proclaimed by the digital humanities are either not necessarily new values, or actually take a step back towards seeing knowledges as a given and not a construct.

Also, there has been the claim that merely providing access in form of producing content online, will not resolve social inequalities. It is the quality of access that needs to be scrutinized and also that one cannot simply provide gadgets but must look at the social structures which allow or prevent people from being included in the digital discourse.

Furthermore, building implies a lack of theory, in a sense that digital humanists are just creating content, building websites and making videos, without really theorizing why it is they are doing so and what needs to be accomplished with this building. If building is the main goal of digital humanities, are only people allowed to be DH if they can code? And surely, if it is not possible to summarize the digital humanities as a field, how can there even be theory on it?

As several of these discussions are held online, the question of longevity of knowledge is also an important one. When using twitter to have a DH discourse, how does one preserve this knowledge for the future? Is it legitimate to quote a twitter feed?Within the digital realms it is very difficult to achieve the authority priorly obtained through citation and textual publishing. Online, one cannot perceive who produces what with what authority, and there is little or no engagement with what has been left out for what reason. Also, a lot of the metadata created is not available to human reviewers, as it is only read by computer algorithms. What to do with that data, when one cannot just read it but should not simply ignore it as it is creating the very realms within which discourse takes place. What does this created metadata mean for humanity and for the social or the political? /slide

Mike Kent has claimed that a new digital divide has come up, which summarizes all subalternity under the umbrella of people who cannot use digital technologies (properly). Properly is in brackets, as using digital technologies without a proper awareness of what one is doing and creating can not only exclude a person from a discourse but can also make that persons technological infrastructure fail through for example viruses or cyberattacks of which one might not be aware without proper computer literacy. We are using computers, although many of us do not understand them properly. Therefore computer literacy is very limited and many of us cannot say we are literate as we would be with books we read. Other than that, of course there are many people who do not feel the need to go online, or cannot for lack of infrastructure. The subaltern – which is being summarized by Mike Kent to include all oppressed and dispossessed – therefore becomes one diffuse category, which makes it even more difficult to create an equal environment, as the understanding of what it is those people need is lacking. Moreover, this exclusion is not visible and people being excluded might not be aware of their position, as the knowledge distribution happens somewhere they do not have access to. The only possibility of addressing this, therefore, is speaking on behalf of the subaltern, which never really gives them a possibility to speak for themselves, and addressing the issues of others always means something or other will be omitted, mainly race, gender and class as categories of inequality. This reaffirms the perception that the internet is a male-dominated, white and western space, which is mainly english-speaking. These beliefs are mirrored in the capitalistic production of infrastructure, as computers are not being produced with for example Indian language keyboards or language options and people have little reason to think of the internet as a space in which their local language is represented. With this come the problems of translation of meaning and so it is difficult for digital 'intellectuals' – to use that word with care – to fill the existing knowledge gaps.

Some of these problems have however been articulated within the community and the one or other solution has been proposed. For one, George Williams has proposed the concept of universal design to become more inclusive on the technical side. Universal design proposes to view all technology as 'assistive' and therefore designers should include not only visual material but see their work as overcoming all barriers one might have, be it visual or other impairments.This breaks with the normative perspective of the body functioning in a certain way and deconstructs the understanding of disabilities as an aberration of the norm. Universal design therefore benefits not only disabled people, but all people. As Williams puts it, “whether in a physical or digital environment, designers are always making choices about accessibility. However, not all designers are aware of how their choices affect accessibility. Universal design is design that involves conscious decisions about accessibility for all, and it is a philosophy that should be adopted more widely by digital humanities scholars”.

Johanna Drucker suggests a linguistic transfer from data to capta, to include the notion that data is something that is being produced and to stop the naturalization of data. With that she suggests a change in the way e.g. graphics are produced, so instead of using a bar diagram one should consider making those bars more fluent to include the possible overlapping of research categories.

Also, once we have accepted the fact that we are all cyborgs and no one exists without technology, it is impossible to view the digital apart from humanity, or humanity apart from the digital. So mere tool-building and the dismissal of content as something we'll worry about later in DH, is and should not be possible. It is important to engage in critical tool-building, activism, content and theory.

Therefore we need to find a way to deal with data, and the complex relationship it has with reality. Data is producing this reality we are moving in and therefore inseperable from it, and yet we cannot see or engage with it. We must however accept that it is one of the main things constructing online reality and data development has great impact on social development, the two are inseparable.

So, to summarize, there is not necessarily a direct development from humanities to digital humanities. Digital humanities may and may not include questions of the social, the political and the human. Tool building in digital humanities should, however, always be critical, social and political. It is important to get minorities actively using digital tools, and awareness to the social inequalities preventing them from getting access is a first step. So digital citizens should not only consume but also produce knowledges from their perspective and add to the online discourse.

Designing Change? Gatekeepers in Digital Humanities

sara — 2013-07-02T08:33:54Z

After defining the archive as one of the important concepts for digital humanities research, the question arose, whether or not a redefined archive still functions as a gatekeeper. This blog entry follows the question, if the digital humanities have overcome gatekeepers of knowledge, or if there has simply been a shift in what is doing the gatekeeping.

The last digital humanities blog entry finished on a rather resentful note, arguing that perhaps the difference between humanities and the digital humanities were feigned – and badly at that – and if the digital humanities would stop worrying only about infrastructure, there would no longer be a difference between the two. This insinuates that if only digital humanities would drop the digital and go back to humanities research and include digital technologies into it, all would be well and resolved. However, it is obvious that this generalization was slightly exaggerated, as generalizations tend to be. Nonetheless, the hypotheses is that archives have served as gatekeepers to traditional humanities research in the past. As they suggest a literary canon, they contribute to shaping the field according to certain discursive perceptions. If something is archived, it is considered important enough at the time, to serve as a representation for future reference. This constructs a hierarchy of written work over others, and especially publicized work over written text without publication. Therefore archives serve as a gatekeeper of knowledge, which, if one remembers the circumstances under which books are and were published, is mostly not necessarily representative of important topics but mainly boils down to capitalistic preferences. These preferences are not made transparent and often they are not questioned.

As one could see in the last post, the digital humanities have a reviewed concept of the archive to encompass a more contemporary memory of discourse. This changes the function of the archive, which leaves the question, whether the gatekeepers have changed as well, or even completely dissolved. In traditional humanities, archives served as more of a historical perspective of discourse, which could only be accessed from a temporal distance, for a better understanding of discursive perception at the time. As a matter of fact, Derrida stresses the point that archives are not possible without exteriority and that they are always a protheses to memory, but also to reproduction (Derrida: 1998: 14). So in fact they are not only not supposed to be live, but are always highly technological transformations of events. If the archiving process “produces as much as it records the event” (ibid.: 17), then that change from archival work to live-archives is fundamental to understanding the digital humanities. As the time restrictions, the materiality and the function of the archive has changed, so must the field it is archiving. Nonetheless, as included in the citation, the archive is also a technology of reproduction and every reproductive process changes what is being reproduced incessantly, so that what was there before is not available anymore (ibid.:26). Which means that archives are not historical at all, but constantly changing themselves, as the media that contains them reproduces them.

The archives being produced nowadays therefore might be a lot more representative, as the medium of the internet in itself is ever-changing and therefore makes the repetitive and transformative process of archival work visible. Another fundamental difference in archival work, apart from the 'right-here-right-now' stance of modern internet archives, is that prior archives were mainly text-based. Up until now, the written word has been perceived as progressive as it is one of the main features of western advanced civilization (Stein 2006). This marginalizes populations who do not or cannot do research work in latin alphabetic writing. According to Vilém Flusser, writing is also a form of structuring knowledge in a one-dimensional manner, aberrations that do not fit into a flow of writing are not easily included into literary pieces (Flusser 1990). Research phenomena get a direction and a structure, just as writing is structured on a page. Text-based knowledge production therefore reproduces the “official reasoning of occidental culture” (Flusser 1999). This literary structure is closed, in a sense that a text portrays a meaning and once the text is over, its meaning will have enfolded itself completely onto the reader. It is therefore a closed train of thought without derivative. This narrative framework constructs historical consciousness as something linear. Going back to Foucault's conceptions around the archive, however, we see that history is never linear and never singular, but always a subjective fragment of the whole (Foucault 1969). Overcoming the structure of textual flow through visualizations and design could therefore mean overcoming supposed linearity and becoming more open towards diverse narratives of histories or knowledge.

The symbol for the ladies washroom exemplifies how design could be more generative to meaning than a purely textual format. The schematic depiction of a female via a dress implies that only females should enter the room beyond. It works internationally and does not need to rely on language or latin letters to portray its meaning. At the same time, women all across the world feel included by the sign, even though they do not match its proportions, or may never have worn a skirt or a dress, let alone one similar to the usual depiction. The depiction of the female body is completely fictional and has no relation to biological reality. The sign, just like Derrida's archive, is a repetition of the ideal of being female, just as any other female body is a repetition of this ideal, an ideal which does not have a 'real' existing counterpart. As Judith Butler explains, all embodiments of categories such as gender, but also race and class or any other category, are repetitions of this fictional ideal, and in their repetition they prove the ideal to be non-existent (Butler 1990). As no biologically female person would agree to the sign being a representation of womanhood, at least in this instance one could imagine a more open context within that sign to include people, who feel just as badly or well represented by the crude depiction, as any strictly biological female. The pictorial representation is a good example of how having only text-based information can often narrow perspectives and choosing design over text can open knowledge production to become more inclusive.

Nowadays digital technologies allow for multimedia documentation, in fact design has been identified as a key feature in digital humanities work, up to a point where designers, coders and artists are seen as equal to textual authors when collaborating on work (Burdick et. Al 2012: 12). This is a step towards deconstructing the hegemony the written word has over alternative forms of knowledge production. Visualizing what has been written and produced before, or even producing knowledge in a not solely textual form increases the openness of knowledge and makes it more accessible for people before marginalized by the latin phonetic alphabet, thereby overcoming conceptual barriers of nationality and dominant languages. Sure enough, giving credit to non-textual authors' contributions to text is sensible, as the way the output is shaped influences accessibility, readability and finally the content itself. So overcoming the hierarchy between text and non-textual knowledge production surely is something digital humanities should work on, it surely is not achieved yet, although some might claim otherwise. Especially in academia, a certain amount of written text is important even in visual departments such as an art academy, to show that ones productivity is not completely random, but justified. Still, design is becoming more and more relevant, just as packaging is important to sell a product.

However, the question is, if design counts as a main feature in research work, does it then function as a new gatekeeper? The hypotheses is, that just as publication and academic structures were limiting the knowledge being produced, needing a designer, a coder or any visual artist to actually produce and publish work can be just as limiting. If you need someone to visualize your work so that it can be comprehended, it will be just like needing a publisher – work will again be produced according to capitalistic preference and design just helps put your (intellectual) product on the market. Putting something in pretty packaging can sometimes obscure the production process, as it adds value to the final form, while hiding any ugly obstacles that were to be overcome along the way and could serve as a learning for future research. Design and visuality being more able to display affirmative information, such obstacles and learnings could be difficult to visualize. Also, given the timely limits one is faced with, there is reason for critics to believe that a nice form is valued over 'proper' or 'good' content. The problem lies within defining what is 'good' and what is 'proper'. Digital humanists like Ramsay would argue that “doing” is more important than reading (Ramsay 2011). However, by overcoming the hierarchy between written and non-textual knowledges, content and form cannot be separated but should be seen as two intertwined facets of one bundle of research output.

Another problem with the rising importance of design is that people with visual impediments are marginalized from knowledges that rely on optics and design to get their point across. So when design reaches new importance, researchers creating output must also take into consideration in what way this output is marginalizing people and how to overcome this marginalization. It is one of the main insights of disability studies that disabilities are “not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (Garland-Thomson 1997). Just as the phonetic alphabet, visualizations are therefore conceptualizing knowledge around a norm which implies functionality of vision. One way of overcoming that barrier is including screen-reading software onto visually appealing websites like it is described by George H. Williams (2012). The concept of inclusion is called 'universal design', instead of 'assistive technology', and is based on the perception that technology is always assistive, not only in the case of e.g. screen readers for the visually impaired (Williams 2012). This breaks with the normative perspective of the body functioning in a certain way and deconstructs the understanding of disabilities as an aberration of the norm. Universal design therefore benefits not only disabled people, but all people. As Williams puts it, “whether in a physical or digital environment, designers are always making choices about accessibility. However, not all designers are aware of how their choices affect accessibility. Universal design is design that involves conscious decisions about accessibility for all, and it is a philosophy that should be adopted more widely by digital humanities scholars” (ibid.). At the same time this intentional inclusion may be difficult to follow at times. Especially when considering that technology itself can be seen as co-authoring a text in the form of programs, algorithms and code, it might become difficult to impose the philosophy of universal design on non-human authorship. This implies that technology, too, should be theorized, a thought that is being suggested throughout more critical approaches of digital humanists and humanities (see e.g. Earhart 2012). As has been stated in prior blog entries, the digital humanities are trying to move away from theorizing, which might be the reason for the problems arising within the field. The deconstruction of text-based hegemony should not take place in favor of establishing new hierarchies. The written word and the visual underly a complex power/knowledge complex, simply trying to reverse it will not work. The category 'nation', or 'nationality' portrays the ambivalence of this case very well. While in some cases, like a national constitution, the written word will be more powerful than a pictorial or designed description, in others, like a national flag, the visual and symbolic materiality of a knowledge product is a lot more powerful than simple text. Instead of moving from reading to doing, as has been suggested (e.g. Ramsay), the digital humanities need to find a balance between the two, so as to incorporate questions of race, gender and other categories of human agency into their research. Especially when it comes to postcolonial studies and research in cultures and languages other than those of western dominance, digital humanists should not only consider themselves as consumers, but as actual producers of knowledge resources. This counts for producing work as much as it does for archiving, as the productive process of today remain the archives of tomorrow, or even of simultaneously happening research projects. Design can be a factor to help overcome these barriers, if the concept of universal design is incorporated into digital humanities work. All too often, however, design is still a concept that marginalizes, often unknowingly, so as to serve as a gatekeeper to knowledge production, benefiting capitalistic values.

Butler 1990 Butler, Judith: "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity". New York/London: Routledge

Derrida 1998 Derrida, Jacques: "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression". Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Earhart 2012 Earhart, Amy E.: "Can Information be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon". Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. accessed June 28th, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/16

Flusser 1990 Flusser, Vilém: "Does Writing have a Future?" U of Minnesota Press. 2011

Flusser 1999 Flusser, Vilém: “Into the Universe of Technical Images” U of Minnesota Press. 2011

Foucault 1969 Foucault, Michel: “The Archeology of Knowledge” translated by Allan Sheridan, New York: Harper and Row, 1972

Garland-Thomson 1997 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie: "Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature". New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Ramsay 2011 Ramsay, Stephen: “On Building” accessed June 20^th 2013, http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.

Stein 2006 Stein, Peter: "Schriftkultur. Eine Geschichte des Schreibens und Lesens". Darmstadt: Primus

Williams 2012 Williams, George H.: "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities". Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. accessed June 28th, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/44

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/designing-change-gatekeepers-in-digital-humanities

Archive Practice and Digital Humanities

sara — 2013-07-03T09:44:40Z

After trying to define the field of digital humanities in two prior blog entries, one mapping the field, the other defining its values, the third blog entry in the digital humanities series looks at a reoccurring keyword of digital humanities research, namely at the concept of the archive. The following article touches upon how it is being used within research of digital humanities and how that relates to traditional humanities archival work

Within the digital humanities readings, values and topics have been established, which are constantly discussed in different ways. Something that kept on coming up is the way the concept of the archive is included in digital humanities research. As digital humanities deal with building tools for knowledge distribution, it is interesting to look at what the archive did in traditional humanities research and how it is being implemented by digital humanities.

The process of archiving has been central to intellectual work and several political and cultural theorists have written on it since modernity. As Marlene Manoff notes in her essay titled Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines, theoretical formulations have emerged in trans-disciplinary work in the past decades, creating a large and diverse body of literature (Manoff 2004). The archive has been said to be central to political power and plausibility in the works of humanities. Yet, the archive is not simply a storage space for historical documents and artifacts. Archives have been known to form national consciousness and be used as a weapon in ethnic struggle, as well as many other political and scholarly realms (ibid.: 11).

According to Michel Foucault the archive is not a place where history is found and historical knowledge is preserved, but a lot more and exactly the opposite (Foucault 1969). For Foucault the archive represents the memory about a certain discourse (for more on Foucault's discourse theory (Foucault 1969). Foucault argues that the systems of thought and knowledge are governed by rules not only structurally, but operationally in the consciousness of individual subjects (see: Gutting 2013). This means that all knowledge is being produced with boundaries and constraints of thought which apply only to the period in which that knowledge is being produced. Returning to the archive, this means that what it stores is always subjective and mirrors only the concepts and knowledges of the time it was produced in. Archeological work was and is important, as it shows how societies have thought and acted in prior situations, which may differ from the knowledges about the same things that are perceived as 'truths' today. In this way, Foucault argues, a process of knowledge creation is made visible, which on the one hand cannot be thought as a separate from our contemporary knowledge production mechanisms, while at the same time it is isolated from them, as the archive only shows the memory of knowledges at that time for that time. Foucault goes on to create the method of what he calls a 'genealogy', which enables humanities and research in general to follow up on the process of changing knowledge repositories, discourse and norms (see Foucault 1969) . Genealogy is not just simply a critical look at history, but allows for several recounts of histories, discourses and norms which are felt to have no history, like for example sexuality or body issues, which are often portrayed as to have “always been that way”. Genealogy, therefore, is not a linear praxis, instead it seeks to show contradictions and pluralism within histories, hence deconstructing the term's supposed essentialism.

One of the main things one can derive from Foucault in this context is that he sees history not as a given, unchangeable thing, but accentuates its multiplicities, which is why this text mostly speaks of histories in a plural sense. At the same time, Foucault's goal was not to enforce the term history, but to go against supposedly rigid narratives of ideas and historical sciences, to explore the sociopolitical rules under which knowledge is generated, produced and revised.

It becomes quite clear that the political implementations of archival practice are essential to the way in which history is perceived, and even more so in which histories are being told, as it is always a selective process. One must remember that most archival work done in prior years and probably up until the present day is mostly done by people in the so-called 'West', first and foremost by white, middle class men. So it is no surprise that revising existing archives can be fruitful to changing the perspective on a certain discourse or analyzing its political power at the time. As Kate Eichhorn explains in an interview, reviewing even apparently empowering archives of political discourse and their documentation can modify the way a certain movement is portrayed. Her research on feminist archives and her documentation of feminist and queer activism brings new acknowledgement to the Riot Grrrl movement with an “intellectual and aesthetic lineage” it was not being associated with before (Eichhorn/Gwendolyn 2011). So, although the actual practice of archiving is merely a methodology, its technology influences the agency and the politics of the discourse it is serving as a memory for.

It has been argued that the archive is for humanities, what the laboratory is for the sciences (see Manoff 2004: 13). This analogy works well, as it describes the materiality of archives as a place of knowledge production. However, it implies a certain affirmative understanding of this process, as laboratories in sciences are used not to create discourse, but to affirm or deny a certain hypotheses, which could deny the social influences taken on archives. At the same time, research done in science, technology and society studies has made it very clear that even laboratory work underlies certain social constraints and is not an objective method of creating knowledges (see eg. Latour/Woolgar 1986, Hackett et. Al 2008). Nevertheless, it is true that the building of the archive is a technological process, as Jacques Derrida points out (Derrida 1994: 17). Therefore, it is important to remember that technology does not only incorporate the digital, but also analog mechanisms, like the mere act of inscription or documentation. Technologies should not and cannot be separated from the methodology of 'archiviation', as they are inherent to the way the documentation is taking place. Based on the example of Freud's psychoanalysis, Derrida argues that the access to technologies such as tape recorders or computers would have “transformed the history and development of psychoanalysis 'in its very events' (Manoff 2004: 12, emphasis in original).

This point seems even more valid in a discipline which sees one of its main features in making knowledge accessible through archival work on the internet, as it is the case in the digital humanities according to many of the practitioners in the field (see eg. Svensson 2009). A large amount of work in the digital humanities has been going into making previously published work available online, as well as publishing new work in several languages or formats such as visualizations of data. The technological development of the last years has enabled not only text-based data to be visualized, but event podcasts to be uploaded and activist operations to be documented in virtual space. However, as Kate Eichhorn states in reference to the Occupy Movement, just because a discourse is occupying a space online, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is successful in promoting its cause or even granting access to it (see Eichhorn/Gwendolyn 2011), let alone helping it stand the test of time. Even more so in the digital humanities, where a shift has taken place, encouraging digital humanists to do less reading and more “doing” (see Ramsay 2011). Discussing this separation clarifies what might be one of the main problems within digital humanities, which is the attempt to separate technology from what is human, and thereby from what is social. “Doing” things translates into a purely technological activity, which implies that there is no theory to back up one's actions. This “Doing” can be translated into a positivistic understanding of knowledge construction, much like the ways laboratory experiments are used to affirm or deny a specific theory, as if it were knowledge being objectively created and has been criticized in the digital humanities to do exactly that (Cecire 2011). If that is the case, digital humanities that are concerned with making knowledge more accessible are actually providing a very restrictive type of access, as archival work is being done first and foremost on existing works that are considered to be important by the people doing the documentation, hence greatly influencing the shape of discourse around these topics, while suggesting objectivity in this building of infrastructures. The digital realm, especially the internet, very easily marginalizes this fact, as it hides the circumstances in which work is being published, just as it obscures censorship or the deletion of data, when content is simply removed from the internet or sites are taken offline. However, this “Doing” also translates into alternative understandings of authorship and archival work, as the archive itself is no longer necessarily text-based. Instead, as designers, coders etc. contribute to the shape of the work being done as co-authors, they also change the ways in which archives are produced. The internet is a legitimate option for archival work to take place, however, questions arise about the longevity of the resources that are produced online. It has been lamented that fruitful discussions in the digital humanities take place on microblogging platforms and are therefore lost in cyberspace after some time (see Spiro 2012). Documentation is vital to realizing and understanding historical processes in their relation to todays social development, so such a loss of information is very regrettable. However, literary archives can work as gatekeepers in traditional humanities work, as they not only establish literary canons, but also define what authors receive recognition. Archives in the digital humanities have become contemporary ways of storing a discourse, instead of being a long-term source for knowledge around that discourse. This deconstructs the importance of a literary canon, but also the possibility of tracing knowledge production and the process of social development. Hence, it is necessary to come up with archives that can accommodate the new modes of publishing and knowledge production that are arising through digital humanities.

Also, it is important to remember that categories such as 'race' or 'gender' are intrinsic to narratives and histories. Tara McPherson exemplifies this point, by showing how technological organization of information in the 60s greatly responded to social struggles for racial justice and democracy in America (McPherson: 2012). These categories, just as any other social categories, are intertwined with any social development, including technological development. So their obscurity or absence reaffirms the narrative of a 'white', male and western norm. Alternative publishing projects are still mostly led by western 'white' men, even if it is collaborative work. Especially as these categories are privileged, it is important to remember ones own privilege when talking about a field that tries to be inclusive. More often than not, the subjectivity of one's knowledge around a discourse is not questioned in digital humanities, but taken for granted and alternative perspectives are neglected. The argument is therefore, that what is central in traditional humanities is being shirked in its supposed development to digital humanities. The digital humanities should therefore stop archiving just for the sake of it, but return to archival practice as a method of analyzing discourse and returning to the question of what it means to be human. It should discuss what it means to be a human not only born into a technological environment but being human as a technological being. This includes possibly stopping to distinguish digital humanities from traditional humanities work, as studying what is human will always include studying technology, which is becoming more and more digital. Only by overcoming this fraudulent separation between something being technological or digital and someone being human, can it truly fulfill the humanities cause. The way archiving is done in digital humanities is an indication that this process has not fully taken place.

continue reading: gatekeepers in digital humanities

Literature:

Cecire 2011 Cecire, Natalia: “Introduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities”. Journal of Digital Humanities. Vol.1.1, accessed 20^th June 2013: http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/introduction-theory-and-the-virtues-of-digital-humanities-by-natalia-cecire/#to-introduction-theory-and-the-virtues-of-digital-humanities-by-natalia-cecire-n-24

Derrida 1995 Derrida, Jacques: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press: 4, note 1.

Eichhorn/Gwendolyn 2011 Eichhorn, Kate; Gwendolyn: “The Scholarly Feminist. Archiving with Kate Eichhorn”, accessed 20^th June 2013: http://feministing.com/2011/12/19/the-scholarly-feminist-archiving-with-kate-eichhorn/

Foucault 1969 Foucault, Michel: “The Archeology of Knowledge” translated by Allan Sheridan, New York: Harper and Row, 1972

Foucault 1980 Foucault, Michel: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gutting 2012 Gutting, Gary, "Michel Foucault", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), accessed 19^th June 2013: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/foucault/

Hackett et. Al 2008: Hackett, Edward J., Amsterdamska, Olga, Lynch, Michael and Wajcman, Judy, eds. “The handbook of science and technology studies”. 3rd ed., The MIT Press, Cambridge, USA.

Manoff 2004 Manoff, Marlene:” Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” In: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2004), pp. 9–25. Copyright © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 21218. accessed 19^th June 2013: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/35687/4.1manoff.pdf?sequence=1

McPherson 2012 McPherson, Tara: “Why are the Digital Humanities So White? Or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. Accessed 24^th June 2013

Ramsay 2011 Ramsay, Stephen: “On Building” accessed June 20^th 2013, http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.

Spiro 2012: Lisa Spiro “This Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. Accessed 24^th June 2013. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/13

Svensson 2009 Svensson, Patrik. “Humanities Computing as Diigital Humanities”. Digital Humanities Quarterly,3:3, accessed 19^th June 2013: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/archive-practice-and-digital-humanities

A suggested set of values for the digital humanities

sara — 2013-07-03T09:41:19Z

In a prior blog entry the CIS has started mapping out the field of digital humanities. Subsequent to these first thoughts follows a review in several parts of an alternative publishing project edited by Matthew K. Gold of New Yorks Technology College. It is presented online as a hybrid print/digital publication stream, enabling viewers and readers to comment and highlight sections as they please. In the introductory passage, Matthew Gold addresses questions burning at the back of the research communities mind: Does digital humanities even need theory? Does it have politics?Is it more accessible than other scholarly fields? Does new media usage trivialize the professionalism of DH research?

In an attempt to answer these questions, which have mostly been discussed on microblogging platforms, making them nearly impossible to follow up on (Spiro: 2012), Lisa Spiro has drafted a first set of values, which could be of use for further discussion. She clearly states that her proposition is supposed to be exactly that, a work in progress, open to changes. At the same time it marks a necessary starting point for organizing arguments and conversations happening around the digital. Spiro suggests a values statement, which is broader than an ethical guideline, so that institutions and researching people can set their own emphasis according to what is important to them. With this, Spiro articulates what for her, and many others in the field, presents itself as one of the important set of values when working with digital humanities: openness, transparency and collaboration, putting aside classical values of academia, like professionalism and scholarly authority through specialization. These traditional values clash with the collaborative crowdsourced approach of the digital humanities field. With Tom Scheinfeldt, Spiro argues, the digital humanities community operates much like a “social network,” nimble and connected: “Digital humanities takes more than tools from the Internet. It works like the Internet. It takes its values from the Internet” (Scheinfeldt 2010). So while in many ways the internet and its hyperlinked, visual approach justify the way digital humanities work, there is little or no way of assuring the professionalism of digital humanities research. Spiro notes the difficulties that might arise in dropping those classical values of academia, as a lot of academic institutions object to the motives of open publishing and also find it difficult to assign credit to individuals when projects are collaborative. In this sense, the field of digital humanities is influencing the very way in which academia works, wiling it, to rearrange itself.

Just like the field itself is a hybrid, its value statement should consider the values of the disciplines it has evolved from. Spiro's value statement suggests a convergence of values including those of humanities, libraries, museums and cultural heritage organizations, as well as networked culture. At the core, all of these fields aspire to spread advanced knowledge, foster innovation and serve the public. Digital humanities therefore should have a claim to those values, while at the same time rejecting essentialism, as “values reveal the ideologies and interests of those who hold them” (Spiro: 2012). Spiro suggests openness, collaboration, diversity and experimentation as the core values, when working in the digital humanities. Openness and collaboration go hand in hand, just as digital humanities go hand in hand with internet methodology. Experimentation makes space for open methodology and leaves room for trial and error. Combined with openness and collaboration, this creates valuable learning opportunities for the whole field of digital humanities. By holding on to a value of diversity, Spiro means to make a note of the fact that, contrary to popular belief, equality has not yet been achieved in many social fields and one should remember that although ones own reality might seem to include everyone equally, others might have different stories to tell.

Remembering that no position has a claim to be objective, digital humanities can certainly go forth to become a inclusive way of spreading knowledge to those, who have up until now been kept from it by diverse gatekeepers. At the same time, “situated knowledge”, as Donna Haraway called the concept of remembering your own ideologies and speaking position (Haraway: 1988), a dialog can take place more easily, without having to claim ones own experiences to be able to speak for all.

Still, one should not assume that the field of digital humanities is a candy-coloured wonderland of anything goes. These values all are criticized in some field or other, which reminds us that the digital humanities have far to go. Creating knowledge in open space does not mean that it is equally accessible to all. So basic community and access work must go hand in hand with steady open source research collaborations.

In summary, Spiro's opening commentary on values in digital humanities will and has surely already been helpful as a reminder, and maybe this is as defined as one should get when it comes to a set of values that is supposed to be applicable to such a large and diverse field. However, all work in digital humanities often faces the problem of justifying their work, once professionalism and expertise is no longer regarded as a proof of worth. So, getting back to the questions at the beginning of this article, yes, digital humanities has politics, just as every research has politics. And it is one of its values and challenges, to make these transparent without failing to prove a point and add to the creation of knowledge, online and off.

continue reading on the topic: archivial practice in digital humanities

Literature:

Gold 2012 Mathew K. Gold “The Digital Humanities Moment” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. Accessed 13 June 2013. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates

Haraway 1988: Donna Haraway “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of

Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599- Accessed 13 June 2013 http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~ewa/Haraway,%20Situated%20Knowledges.pdf

Scheinfeldt 2010: Tom Scheinfeldt “Stuff Digital Humanists Like”. Accessed 13 June 2013. http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/12/02/stuff-digital-humanists-like/

Spiro 2012: Lisa Spiro “This Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. Accessed 13 June 2013. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/13

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/a-suggested-set-of-values-for-the-digital-humanities