nineteenth-century digital humanities
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Presentation for Indiana University 10/20/2014TRANSCRIPT
Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities@RogerWhitson
Washington State University#c19DH
08/20/2014
“Spreadability assumes a world where mass content is continually repositioned as it enters different niche communities. […] As material spreads, it gets remade: either literally, through various forms of sampling and remixing, or figuratively, via its insertion into ongoing conversations and across various platforms. This continuous process of repurposing and recirculating is eroding the perceived divides between production and consumption.”—Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013)
http://bit.ly/1sAADTt
“A book of philosophy should be […] in part a kind of science fiction. […] [T]he history of philosophy should play a role roughly analogous to that of collage in painting. […] [C]ommentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximal modification to a double. (One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a mustached Mona Lisa.)—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968)“Vanguard artists, like their counterparts among
academiccritics, often base their projects on the important theoretical texts of the day. The difference between the two applications had to do with their respective mode of representation: the artists demonstrate the consequences of the theories for the arts by practicing the arts themselves, generating models of prototypes that function critically as well as aesthetically. The vanguardist does not analyze existing art but composes alternatives to it (or uses it as a step towards achieving alternatives). —Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994)
Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities• Nineteenth-Century as one conjectural system (among many).• Draws from cultural studies, literature, media studies, media
archaeology• Variantological: explores variants of technological history• focused on design methodology as well as narrative• (new) materialist• conjectural: treats historical knowledge as “a semiotic system
whose discrete units of information can be artfully manipulated into alternate configurations” for speculative ends.
“[F]raught issues of power and subjectivity (British as well as Indian) could best, perhaps sometimes only, be formulated by transposing them onto the conceptual domain of communications technologies and networks. […] [Further, there is] a […] narrative involving the conceptualization of the increasingly worldwide webs of nineteenth-century telecommunications—I mean the role played by information systems in helping to sustain fantasies of global racial unity, particularly of a kind which would repair the sundered bonds of Anglo-American brotherhood.”—Aaron Worth, Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination 1857-1918. (2014)
http://bit.ly/1zghMTC
“Design fiction is of an ecological scale and complexity beyond current design techniques. A design fiction constructs imaginative fictional realities, amplifying and extending the logic of the narrative. In Steampunk, it is a narrative in which the active construction and representation of fiction inform each other constantly and can be used to explore the implications of actual new design ideas on an imagined human society. —Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, and Ron Wakkary, “Steampunk as Design Fiction” (2012)
http://bit.ly/1ogW8KG
“Bantustan had been better known in my own world as South Africa. It had been one of the first colonies to make a bid for independence during those pre-war years when O’Bean’s inventions had released the world from poverty and ignorance. Under the leadership of a young politician of Indian parentage called Gandhi, it had succeeded in negotiating a peaceful withdrawal from the British Empire, almost without the Empire realizing what had happened.”—Michael Moorcock, The Land Leviathan (1974)
http://bit.ly/1umf7Qt
“The Emperors that followed led to its decline, and eventually, they were easily defeated by the British Empire with their airships and tanks. Perhaps if the Mughals had made more automatons to rid the Taj of its solitude, and kept them walking, they’d have kept this land too. They could have thrown airships from the sky, and crushed tanks under their feet. The Taj Mahal never walked again, folding into its rest by the banks of Yamuna, where to this day its empty tanks gleam like minarets on the horizon, its scalp and shoulders shorn of pennants.”—Indrapramit Das, “The Little Begum” (2014)
http://bit.ly/1wcBY4d
[Reflective design] helps us discover fault lines in the objects, artifacts, or systems being explored […] and in doing so allows us to imagine them otherwise: to see them as alterable rather than immutable; as possibility spaces rather than rigid, inherited structures. It is this dimension of design that allows us to envision ourselves as creative agents of change.”— C Hancock, C Hichar, C Holl-Jensen, K Kraus, C Mozafari, and K Skutlin, “Bibliocircuitry and the Alien Everyday.” (2013)
http://bit.ly/1sZ8fvV
“For having, in the natural history of this earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may from this conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded, that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, — no prospect of an end.”—James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1788)
http://bit.ly/ZJOY63
“The geology of media […] wants to extend deep times towards chemical and metal durations [and] includes a wide range of examples of refined minerals, metals, and chemicals that are essential for media technologies to operate in the often audiovisual and miniaturized mobile form as we have grown to expect as end-users of content.” —Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (2014)
“To touch stone is to place a hand on a substance alien to human duration. […] Something potentially combustive therefore unfolds at the moment of contact between mortal flesh and lithic materiality: the advent of a disorienting realization, no matter how inchoate or dimly perceived, that the world is not for us.”—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (forthcoming) http://bit.ly/ZJPelkv
“The body of the creature was a tangled, welded lump of congealed circuitry and engineering. All kinds of engines were embedded in that huge trunk. A massive proliferation of wires and tubes and outputs in its body and limbs, snaking off in all directions in the wasteland. […] The man approaching them was nude and horrifically thin. His face was stretched into a permanent wide-eyed aspect of ghastly discomfort. His eyes, his body, jerked and ticked as if his nerves were breaking down. His skin looked necrotic, as if he was submitting to a slow gangrene.”—China Mieville, Perdido Street Station (2001)
http://bit.ly/1poMiRP
“The emphasis in DH on making things is not a flight from theory (or, anyway, it’s not usually that, in my experience, and it’s certainly not necessarily that). In fact, DH making can be profoundly theoretical, a way of resisting what many see as enervating and disenfranchising ideologies of cyberspace, media and social ideologies based upon the supposed immateriality of the digital.” —Steven Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014)
“And we may need to dwell with extinction, each of us professionally and privately, just a little more than I have forced us to, tonight.”—Bethany Nowviskie, “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene” (2014)
http://bit.ly/1rky7wP
Thanks!@RogerWhitson
http://www.rogerwhitson.net#c19DH