Destaques

Rui Alexandre Grácio [2024]

“Thus, the argument of this book is that the digital humanities must be able to offer theoretical interventions and digital methods for a historical moment when the computational has become both hegemonic and post-screenic. ”

“ The digital humanities, as a field, is unique in being positioned between technology and culture and can therefore think critically about how these cadences of the computational are made and materialized.”

“ Finally, we argue that the humanities must also build theoretical understandings of computation in culture, just as much as humanists and media scholars have explored the role of writing, of image, and of the printing press. Otherwise, the humanities will make themselves increasingly distant from a society so reliant on ubiquitous digital technology, which might be better called a postdigital society (see Berry and Dieter 2015).”

“Digital humanities is, broadly speaking, the application of computation to the disciplines of the humanities.”

“We further believe that the digital humanities should continue to extol the traditional values of the humanities, such as concerns for history, for aesthetics, for language and culture, and for philosophical understanding of human life and thought.”

“By ‘Big Data’, we mean data that ‘pushes at the limits of traditional relational databases as tables of rows and columns, and requires new ways of querying and leveraging data for analysis . . . [and] big data is big to the extent that it exceeds and changes human capacities to read and make sense of it’ (Amoore and Piotukh 2015: 343).”

“We call this a critical digital humanities, and it comprises questions such as: how is knowledge transformed when mediated through code and software? What are the critical approaches to Big Data and digital methods? Does computation create new disciplinary boundaries? We argue that the computerization of humanities tends to change concepts and ideas as they are adapted to computational models. But the digital is not only about humanities research, it also permeates culture at large, and understanding digital technology and computational techniques is necessary to understand the human condition in a postdigital age. ”

“This is also connected to the remediation of culture that digitization presents and that ‘the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures’ ”

“We also want to set up the context for the later argument that digital humanities needs to widen and deepen its cultural critique ”

“Nonetheless, even as the term ‘digital humanities’ has solidified and entered into more general usage, we are keen to acknowledge that digital humanities is, and remains, a contested term.”

“In a previous work, Berry (2012a) argued that we might analytically divide the digital humanities: 1st Wave – Computing in the Humanities, computer archives and tools (1940–2001); 2nd Wave – Digital Humanities (DH), interfaces and the born digital (2002–9); 3rd Wave – digital humanities (dh), materiality and cultural critique (2009– ). The aim of this division is not to create closed concepts; rather, the aim is to develop analytical time periodization that is paradigmatic, or exemplars around which digital humanities work can be clustered during specific moments. Indeed, there was a lot of cross-over between these different modes of digital humanities activities, and they continue to inform each other.
This division broadly follows Schnapp and Presner’s (2009) identification of the first two waves of digital humanities. The first, in the late 1990s and early 2000s they argue, tended to focus on large-scale digitization projects and the establishment of technological infrastructure. The second wave, which they inevitably call ‘Digital Humanities 2.0’, was, they argue, generative, creating the environments and tools for producing, curating and interacting with knowledge that is ‘born digital’ and lives in various digital contexts (see also Davidson 2012: 476). “
These are different models for thinking about the trajectory of digital humanities projects and for helping us to understand the temporal and methodological grounds for the various aspects of digital humanities projects that continue to be debated in digital humanities today.
Davidson further argues that ‘Humanities 2.0 [or multimodal humanities] 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 2012: 711).”

“Working with digital humanities requires a new kind of critical approach to computational thought, which we call computational thinking. In this chapter, we will explore this kind of thinking and how it can be developed. We can think of this type of cognitive practice as related to a type of knowledge developed through a computational phronesis – that is, not merely a form of technical knowledge (techne) but the form of practical wisdom that emerges from action. It includes the ability to reflect on computation and computational practices as a whole. This form of computational thinking is therefore necessarily linked to a set of practices, or what we might call literacies, related to technical, and particularly algorithmic or computational, know-how.”

“First, we might observe that automation is the core of computing. ”

“This algorithmic shaping of behaviour is a key ethical question for computational disciplines (see Berry 2012b).”

“Programming is probably the only way truly to master computational thinking, as that kind of reasoning is characterized by viewing the world as problems that may be solved by computer programs.”

“As Jay David Bolter (1984) has argued that every age uses a central technology as the main metaphor for its explanations, we believe that objects, classes and instances will be used as metaphors in many theories in years to come.”

“Today, computation is increasingly not seen, obscured or ignored by virtue of its everydayness. Not only that, culture is itself transformed as the epistemic function of code grows when previous media forms are transformed into a digital substrate, being turned into software (or ‘softwarized’) in the process, and so the possibilities for using and accessing that culture change too. ”

“Digital humanists cannot pretend that contemporary contestation over automation, proletarianization and precarity are not relevant to their practices and discipline. Rather, as the vanguard of many of these new technologies and techniques, it is paramount that they are able to balance these powerful and new methods with the continuities required for ensuring that the ways of knowing developed in the humanities are preserved even as they are extended. ”

“By developing a disciplinary sensitivity to these wider concerns, through, for example, cultural critique, digital humanities can, in addition to producing new forms of knowledge and practice in the humanities, also contribute to a critical reflexive citizenry that can use its computational understanding in civil society, politics and academic knowledge generation for the public good.”

“Computational thinking has the potential to create a computational epistemology. ”

“ it should be very clear now that those who wish to act critically in an age of computational thinking and computational epistemology need to understand at least some of the workings of the computer. While we do not wish to take part in a simplistic ‘hack or yack’ debate, we believe we have shown that a critical understanding of computing at its different levels is a prerequisite for a digital humanist, and that this only can be built through active involvement with actual computer systems, combined with the theoretical insights provided by both material practices and philosophical reflections on the limits and implications of, and transformations made possible by, computation.”

“For those trained in close reading, a distant reading may seem less interesting. However, the coarser distant reading makes it possible to gain other kinds of knowledge and answer other questions. This is far from saying that close reading should be replaced by distant reading, but it may be supplemented by it. Rather, it is important to remember that methods, by necessity, cannot capture all details of their digitized collections. ”

“The difficulty of modelling these kinds of edge cases demonstrates that each data model (and associated encoding) will have specific strengths and weaknesses, and may even be inappropriate and misrepresent or undermine the very characteristics of an artifact or textual document that is being encoded.”

“The way in which the discipline of digital humanities is bound up into its infrastructures – that is, the digital materiality that makes possible its computational base – is both constitutive of, and in need of, greater theoretical and critical attention in future iterations of the discipline.”

“Material change and new types of inscription technologies also necessarily take the humanities far ‘beyond text’, to encompass audio-visual, performance and the whole sensorium, while the internet potentially connects each work to any other work. ”

“Indeed, their implementation and use raise the question of what is it to read and write culture when computationally enabled distant reading techniques encourage abstraction and data visualization that delegates close reading to an algorithm. ”

“The distinction between physical hardware and ephemeral software blurs upon closer inspection, however – firstly, as code needs to be written in some kind of physical medium to exist at all. ”

“Computer software is just as physical as a print book, although its materiality is different.”

“This middle state between hardware and software is regularly known as firmware. ”

“Thus, as the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred, to talk about the digital presupposes a conjunction in undertaking research that research infrastructures, and the design of these systems, have to take into account. And so, computation becomes spatial in its implementation, embedded within the environment and part of the texture of life itself which can be walked around, touched, manipulated and interacted with in a number of ways and means – research becomes mediated in and through the computal (Berry 2014). Indeed, in a similar way to how the distinction between ‘being online’ and ‘being offline’ has become anachronistic, with our always-on smartphones and tablets and widespread wireless networking technologies, so too, perhaps, the notion of a strong separation between physical and digital infrastructures needs to be reconsidered.”

“Compute then is not only abstract but lived and enacted in everyday life – it is part of the texture of life, not just as a layer upon life but as a structural possibility for and mediation of such living. But, crucially, compute is also an invisible factor in society, partially due to the obfuscation of the technical condition of the production of compute, but also due to the necessity for an interface, a surface, with which to interact with compute.”

“ To talk about software, processes, algorithms and code is then deficient without a corresponding understanding of the capacity of compute in relation to them, and is a key issue for thinking about the conditions of possibility that computation make available for our lives today."

“For example, a technique we might think about using is exploratory data analysis and data mining, where data mining is a general term for a variety of techniques that are meant to gain insight into a data set.”

“Modern digital culture can be said to be ‘programmed’ by algorithms, both in terms of the mediation of creation, distribution and consumption but also in the shaping of behaviour of the users.”

“This way of organizing knowledge through ontologies and shards of data stored in databases and networks is in sharp contrast to the way in which knowledge tended to be organized in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, when narrative was a basic conceptual schema used to convey knowledge of many forms. ”

“Our argument is that aesthetics of the interface, its look and feel, is increasingly important as the outside of devices disappears, and the inside becomes the place to display identity, class and ideals. If we do not analyse the visuals and the interaction styles of digital media, we will never truly understand their place in the everyday lives of billions of people.”

“A critical digital humanities continues to map and critique the use of the digital but is attentive to questions of power, domination, myth and exploitation. This is what has been previously discussed as the dark side of the digital humanities (see particularly Chun 2013; Grusin 2013; Jagoda 2013; Raley 2013). As such, critical digital humanities can develop into an interdisciplinary approach which includes: critical theory; theoretical work on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and class (see, for example, Earhart 2012; TransformDH 2013; Accessible Future 2015; Kim and Stommel 2015; Risam 2015); together with the historical, social, political and cultural contexts around digital transformations (Berry 2014) – that is, work that is both research- and practice-led, reflexive to its own historical context and theoretical limitations, and with a commitment to political praxis.”

“The question then becomes: what social force is able to realize the critique of computational society but also to block the real-time nature of computational monitoring? What practices become relevant when monitoring and capture become not only prevalent but actively engaged in? ”