SpecLab – Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing - Hardcover

Drucker, Johanna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226165078 ISBN 13: 9780226165073

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Synopsis

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia's SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. Here she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists' Books Online to the as yet unrealized 'Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, "SpecLab" functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker's contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age - models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

About this title

About the Author

Johanna Drucker is the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of several books, including Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SPECLAB

Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative ComputingBy JOHANNA DRUCKER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-16507-3

Contents

List of Illustrations..............................................................................ixIntroduction: The Background to SpecLab............................................................xi1.0 SPECULATIVE COMPUTING..........................................................................11.1 From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing...............................................31.2 Speculative Computing: Basic Principles and Essential Distinctions.............................192.0 PROJECTS AT SPECLAB............................................................................312.1 Temporal Modeling..............................................................................372.2 Ivanhoe........................................................................................652.3 Subjective Meteorology: A System of Mapping Personal Weather...................................992.4 Modeling a Critical Approach: Metadata in ABsOnline............................................1092.5 The 'Patacritical Demon........................................................................1193.0 FROM AESTHETICS TO AESTHESIS...................................................................1273.1 Graphesis and Code.............................................................................1333.2 Intimations of (Im)materiality: Text as Code in the Electronic Environment.....................1453.3 Modeling Functionality: From Codex to e-Book...................................................1653.4 Aesthetics and New Media.......................................................................1753.5 Digital Aesthetics and Critical Opposition.....................................................1894.0 LESSONS OF SPECLAB.............................................................................197Notes..............................................................................................201Bibliography.......................................................................................219Index..............................................................................................229

Chapter One

From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing

Our activities in speculative computing were built on the foundation of digital humanities. The community at the University of Virginia in which these activities flourished was largely, though not exclusively, concerned with what could be done with texts in electronic form. Early on, it became clear that aggregation of information, access to surrogates of primary materials, and the manipulation of texts and images in virtual space all provided breakthrough research tools. Projects in visualization were sometimes part of first-generation digital humanities, but the textual inclination of digital humanities was nurtured in part by links to computational linguistics whose analyses were well served by statistical methods. (Sheer practicality played a part as well. Keyboarded entry of texts may raise all kinds of not so obvious issues, but no equivalent for "entering" images exists-a point, as it turns out, that bears on my arguments about materiality.) Some literary or historical scholars involved in critical editing and bibliographical studies found the flexibility of digital instruments advantageous. But these environments also gave rise to theoretical and critical questions that prompted innovative reflections on traditional scholarship.

The early character of digital humanities was formed by concessions to the exigencies of computational disciplines. Humanists played by the rules of computer science and its formal logic, at least at the outset. Part of the excitement was learning new languages through which to rethink our habits of work. The impulse to challenge the cultural authority of computational methods in their received form came later, after a period of infatuation with the power of digital technology and the mythic ideal of mathesis it seemed to embody. That period of infatuation (a replay of a long tradition) promoted the idea that formal logic might be able to represent human thought as a set of primitives and principles, and that digital representation might be the key to unlocking its mysteries. Nave as this may appear in some circles, the utopian ideal of a world fully governed by logical procedures is an ongoing dream for many who believe rationality provides an absolute basis for knowledge, judgment, and action. The linguistic turn in philosophy in the early decades of the twentieth century was fostered in part by the development of formalist approaches that aspired to the reconciliation of natural and mathematical languages. The intellectual premises of British analytic philosophy and those of the Vienna Circle, for instance, were not anomalies but mainstream contributions to a tradition of mathesis that continued to find champions in structural linguistics and its legacy throughout the twentieth century. The popular-culture image of the brain as a type of computer turns these analogies between thought and processing into familiar clichs. Casual reference to nerve synapses as logic gates or behaviors as programs promotes an unexamined but readily consumed idea whose ideal is a total analysis of human thought processes, as if they could be ordered according to formal logic. Science fiction writers have exploited these ideas endlessly, as have futurologists and pundits given to hyperbole, but widespread receptiveness to their ideas shows how deeply rooted the mythology of mathesis is in the culture at large.

Digital humanists, however, were interested, not in analogies between organic bodies and logical systems, but in the intellectual power of information structures and processes. The task of designing content models or conceptual frameworks within which to order and organize information, as well as the requirements of data types and formats at the level of code or file management, forged a pragmatic connection between humanities research and information processing. The power of metalanguages expressed as classification systems and nomenclature was attractive, especially when combined with the intellectual discipline imposed by the parameters and stringencies of working in a digital environment. A magical allure attached to the idea that imaginative artifacts might yield their mysteries to the traction of formal analyses, or that the character of artistic expressions might be revealed by their place within logical systems. The distinction between managing or ordering texts and images with metadata or classification schemes and the interpretation of their essence as creative works was always clear. But still, certain assumptions linked the formal logic of computational processes to the representation of human expressions (in visual as well as textual form), and the playful idea that one might have a "reveal codes" function that would expose the compositional protocols of an aesthetic work had a compelling appeal. At first glance, the ability of formal processing to manage complex expressions either by modeling or manipulation appeared to be mere expediency. But computational methods are not simply a means to an end. They are a powerful change agent setting the terms of a cultural shift.

By contrast, speculative computing is not just a game played to create projects with uncertain outcomes, but a set of principles through which to push back on the cultural authority by which computational methods instrumentalize their effects across many disciplines. The villain, if such a simplistic character must be brought on stage, is not formal logic or computational protocols, but the way the terms of such operations are used to justify decisions about administration and management of cultural and imaginative life based on the presumption of objectivity. The terms on which digital humanities had been established, while essential for the realization of projects and goals, needed to be scrutinized with an eye to the discipline's alignment with such managerial methods. As in any ideological formation, unexamined assumptions are able to pass as natural. We defined speculative computing to push subjective and probabilistic concepts of knowledge as experience (partial, situated, and subjective) against objective and mechanistic claims for knowledge as information (total, managed, and externalized).

* * *

If digital humanities activity were reduced to a single precept, it would be the requirement to disambiguate knowledge representation so that it operates within the codes of computational processing. This requirement has the benefit of causing humanist scholars to become acutely self-conscious about the assumptions under which we work, but also to concede many aspects of ambiguity for the sake of workable solutions. Basic decisions about the information or substantive value of any document rendered in a digital surrogate-whether a text will be keyboarded into ASCII, stripping away the formatting of the original, or how a file will be categorized-are fraught with theoretical implications. Is The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau a novel? The document of an era? A biographical portrait? A memoir and first-person narrative? Or a historical fiction? Should the small, glyphic figures in William Blake's handwriting that appear within his lines of poetry be considered part of the text, or simply disregarded because they cannot be rendered as ASCII symbols? At every stage of development, digital instruments require such decisions. And through these decisions, and the interpretive acts they entail, our digital cultural legacy is shaped.

Because of this intense engagement with interpretation and epistemological questions, the field of digital humanities extends the theoretical questions that came into focus in deconstruction, postmodern theory, critical and cultural studies, and other theoretical inquiries of recent decades. Basic concerns about the ways processes of interpretation constitute their objects within cultural and historical fields of inquiry are raised again, and with another level of historical baggage and cultural charge attached. What does it mean to create ordering systems, models of knowledge and use, or environments for aggregation or consensus? Who will determine how knowledge is classified in digital representations? The next phase of cultural power struggles will be embodied in digital instruments that model what we think we know and what we can imagine.

Digital humanities is an applied field as well as a theoretical one, and the task of applying these metaconsiderations puts humanists' assumptions to a different set of tests. It also raises the stakes with regard to outcomes. Theoretical insight is constituted in this field in large part through encounters with application. The statistical analysis of texts, creation of structured data, and design of information architecture are the basic elements of digital humanities. Representation and display are integral aspects of these activities, but they are often premised on an approach influenced by engineering, grounded in a conviction that transparency or accuracy in the presentation of data is the best solution. Blindness to the rhetorical effects of design as a form of mediation (not of transmission or delivery) is an aspect of the cultural authority of mathesis that plagues the digital humanities community. Expediency is the name under which this authority exercises its control, and in its shadow grow the convictions that resolution and disambiguation are virtues, and that "well-formed" data behaves in ways that eliminate the contradictions tolerated by (traditionally self-indulgent) humanists. The attitude that objectivity-defined in many cases as anything that can be accommodated to formal logical processes-is a virtue, and the supposedly fuzzy quality of subjectivity implicitly a vice, pervades the computation community. As a result, I frequently saw the triumph of computer culture over humanistic values.

Humanists are skilled at complexity and ambiguity. Computers, as is well known, are not. The distinction amounts to a clash of value systems, in which fundamental epistemological and ideological differences arise. Digital projects are usually defined in highly pragmatic terms: creating a searchable corpus, making primary materials for historical work available, or linking such materials to an interactive map and timeline capable of displaying data selectively. Theoretical issues that arise are, therefore, intimately bound to practical tasks, and all the lessons of deconstruction and poststructuralism-the extensive critiques of reason and grand narratives, the recognition that presumptions of objectivity are merely cultural assertions of a particular, historical formation-threaten to disappear under the normalizing pressures of digital protocols. This realization drove SpecLab's thought experiments and design projects, pushing us to envision and realize alternative possibilities.

Digital Humanities and Electronic Texts

Digital humanities is not defined entirely by textual projects, though insofar as the community in which I was involved focused largely on text-based issues, its practices mirrored the logocentric habits endemic to the academic establishment. Even so, many of my own convictions regarding visual knowledge production were formulated in dialogue with that community. Understanding the premises on which work in the arena of digital humanities was conceived is important as background for our design work at SpecLab-and to heading off the facile binarisms that arise so easily, pitting visual works against texts or analog modes against digital ones, thus posing obstacles to more complex thought.

Textual studies met computational methods on several different fields of engagement. Some of these were methods of manipulation, such as word processing, hypertext, or codework (a term usually reserved for creative productions made by setting algorithmic procedures in play). Others were tools for bibliographical studies, critical editing and collation, stylometrics, or linguistic analysis. Another, mentioned briefly above, was the confluence of philosophical and mathematical approaches to the study of language that shared an enthusiasm for formal methods. The history of programming languages and their relation to modes of thought, as well as their contrast with natural languages, is yet another. All of these have a bearing on digital humanities, either directly (as tools taken up by the field) or indirectly (as elements of the larger cultural condition within which digital instruments operate effectively and gain their authority).

Twenty years ago a giddy excitement about what Michael Heim termed "electric language" turned the heads of humanists and writers. Literary scholars influenced by deconstruction saw in digital texts a condition of mutability that seemed to put the idea of differential "play" into practice. The linking, browsing, combinatoric possibilities of hypertext provided a rush to authorial imagination. Suddenly it seemed that conventions of "linearity" were being exploded. New media offered new manipulative possibilities. Rhizomatic networks undercut the apparent stasis of the printed page. Text seemed fluid, mobile, dynamically charged. Since then, habits of use have reduced the once dizzying concept of links and the magic of being able to rework texts on the screen to the business of everyday life. But as the "wow" factor of those early encounters has evaporated, a deeper potential for interrogating what a text is and how it works has come into view within the specialized practices of electronic scholarship and criticism. In particular, a new order of metatexts has come into being that encodes (and thus exposes) attitudes toward textuality.

Early digital humanities is generally traced to the work of Father Roberto Busa, whose Index Thomisticus was begun in 1949. Busa's scholarship involved statistical processing (the creation of concordances, word lists, and studies of frequency), repetitive tasks that were dramatically speeded by the automation enabled by computers. Other developments followed in stylometrics (quantitative analysis of characteristics of style for attribution and other purposes), string searches (matching specific sequences of alphanumeric characters), and processing of the semantic content of texts (context sensitive analysis, the semantic web, etc.). More recently, scholars involved in the creation of electronic archives and collections have established conventions for metadata (the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative), markup (the Text Encoding Initiative), and other elements of digital text processing and presentation. This process continues to evolve as the scope of online projects expands from creation of digital repositories to peer-reviewed publishing, the design of interpretative tools, and other humanities-specific activities. The encounter of texts and digital media has reinforced theoretical realizations that printed materials are not static, self-identical artifacts and that the act of reading and interpretation is a performative intervention in a textual field that is charged with potentiality. One of the challenges we set ourselves was to envision ways to show this dramatically rather than simply to assert it as a critical insight.

The processes involved in these activities are not simply mechanical manipulations of texts. So-called technical operations always involve interpretation, often structured into the shape of the metadata, markup, search design, or presentation and expressed in graphic display. The gridlike structures and frames in Web browsers express an interpretive organization of elements and their relations, though not in anything like an isomorphic mirroring of data structures. Features such as sidebars, hot links, menus, and tabs have become so rapidly conventionalized that their character as representations has become invisible. Under scrutiny, the structural hierarchy of information coded into buttons, bars, windows, and other elements of the interface reveals the rhetoric of display. Viewing the source code-the electronic equivalent of looking under the hood-shows an additional level of information structure. But this still doesn't provide access to or reading knowledge of the metadata, database structures, programming protocols, markup tags, or style sheets that underlie the display. Because these various metatexts actively structure a domain of knowledge production in digital projects, they are crucial instruments in the creation of the next generation of our cultural legacy. Arguably, few other textual forms will have greater impact on the way we read, receive, search, access, use, and engage with the primary materials of humanities studies than the metadata structures that organize and present that knowledge in digital form.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SPECLABby JOHANNA DRUCKER Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0226165078
• ISBN 13: 9780226165073
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288