...and sort of debate and discuss all the things she brings up.
- So, Tara McPherson! - Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
I told my graduate students I was coming to the DH mothership, so...
(audience laughs)
It feels good to be here.
And I've obviously followed the work that comes out of this space
for a very long time, so it's nice to be here.
I kind of break what I understand to be protocol here a little bit
by doing a mix of talking and reading,
because I'm working through some new ideas
and I actually find writing and reading still really useful for that
as well as in the kind of context of making.
And the title has changed a little bit, because I was supposed to be here
last fall, doing a talk on databases, but hurricane Sandy had other ideas!
I was not here.
And I'm really happy to have finally made the program.
So...
I'm going to talk in a vein that characterizes some of the recent work
I've been doing, in an attempt to hold together
my schizophrenic identities.
And primarily that's a deep commitment to forms of theoretical inquiry
and post-structuralist scholarship
with an interest in the making and doing of the digital.
And I've been engaged in trying to force these different parts of myself together
for a little while,
and I'm kind of continuing in that vein.
In his very kind of purposefully provocative essay
that first was on the blog and then later included
in the Debates in the Digital Humanities book here in its digital form,
Alan Liu really argues "the digital humanities are noticeably missing
"in action on the cultural critical scene. Where the digital humanists
"develop tools, data and metadata, critically,
"rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society,
"economics, politics or culture."
And these debates aren't entirely new.
Liu first delivered a kind of pacifist at the MLA in Los Angeles,
but your own Martha Nell Smith has for quite awhile been interested
in variations of many of these questions.
And Martha has narrated a particular history of humanities computing,
you know, as the field was known for many years before it was rebranded,
under the sign of the digital humanities, as a kind of reaction formation
to "the concerns that had taken over so much of academic work and literature
those of gender, race, class and sexuality."
Today I want to consider some recent variations on this debate,
which is longstanding and ongoing,
around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities
and its close analogs.
And in order to argue for a theoretically explicit form
of digital praxis within the digital humanities.
And in doing this I also take seriously recent claims by colleagues in the UK
like Gary Hall, that the very goals of critical theory
and of quantitative or computational study might in fact be incommensurable.
He's recently written a very interesting piece
that'll be in a special issue of American Literature
that I co-edited this winter,
making precisely that argument.
And the goals of critical theoretical inquiry
in the humanities interpretive traditions are not compatible
with computational analysis that they proceed from.
And while I don't agree with him entirely, it's an interesting
and provocative argument.
And he goes on to conclude that their productive combination
will require far more time and care than has been devoted to that endeavor
thus far.
As such, I ask what it might mean to design from the very conception
digital tools and applications that emerge from the concerns
of cultural theory.
And in particular from a feminist concern for difference.
This need to attend with more time and care
to potential intersections of theory and the digital humanities
has been the subject of recent and often heated online discussions,
conference panels, various publications, Twitter wars, you name it.
Groups of emerging scholars have organized
under such rubrics as "Transform DH", "In DH Poco",
in order to catalyze just such exchanges.
And have recently formed the FemTechNet organization.
If you're not aware of FemTechNet, it's a kind of anti-MOOC
underway right now, being taught with a very large list
of feminist collaborators under the leadership of Anne Balsamo
and Alex Juhasz.
One online forum initiated by Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam
on the postcolonial digital humanities in May 2013
fostered a lively and sometimes heated debate in response to the question:
is DH a refuge?
I'm not even sure what that meant, exactly
but from race, class, gender and sexuality.
I'll not attempt to summarize the conversation that transpired here.
If I were to scroll down it would go on almost infinitely.
And Adeline and Roopika have already kind of storified it
in a variety of ways,
so you can find their summary elsewhere.
Including an interesting experiment on a shared Google Doc
where folks could critique how they summed up their own statement.
I do want to zero in on a few points in this exchange
to stage the beginnings of a claim for a particular mode
of enacting the digital humanities.
Or following Katie King, one might say "re-enacting the humanities".
Entering into the--
I don't know if you'll be able to read this,
but I'll summarize some of it for you.
Entering into the forum's fray by in his words
"tapping on his cell phone"
meaning that there weren't really considered keyboard-linked responses,
but still pretty hefty responses to be doing it from your cellphone keyboard,
Ian Bogost wrote "On the one hand anyone who believes computational platforms
"are transparent doesn't really understand those platforms,
"but on the other, a blind focus on identity politics
"above all other concerns, has partly prevented humanists
"from deeply exploring the technical nature of computer systems
"in order to grasp those very understandings."
Bogost's insistence that we must explore the technical nature
of the computer resonates with various formulations
in the digital humanities,
even though I don't think Ian himself would necessarily claim membership
in the tribe of DH...
Although he might, you never know on a given day.
It aligns as well with a good deal of digital media studies
including hardware and software studies, where end research has been prolific
and important.
It's an insight that's also fueled my own work.
In the conversation that then spools throughout the thread,
as you scroll down here,
Ian goes on to observe that "doing hardware and software studies
"sometimes requires one to bracket identity
"even if just for a moment, in order to learn something
"in the latter's service.
"But those of us who do that work are frequently chided
"for failing to focus all energy and all attention at all times
"on the accuser's notion of what comprises the entire discourse
"of social justice."
I find two things especially curious in this formulation.
First, it's interesting that a forum originally framed quite broadly,
it's about the intermingling of race, class, gender and sexuality
and disability in the digital humanities,
quickly moves to a discussion of identity politics
as the natural or likely terrain for such concerns.
Later in the forum, Anne Balsamo observes that there are certainly
many ways to address questions of feminism and of difference
that do not narrowly default to identity politics.
And she points the forum to the work of feminist philosopher
Karen Barad.
In her book, Designing Culture, Balsamo builds upon Barad's theory
of intra-actions,
in order to develop a complex model of design practice
that understands the relationship between materiality and discursivity
between objects and subjects
and between nature and culture
to be fluid, open-ended and contingent.
In such a model, design of technologies, of software, of code,
proceeds from an acknowledgement of our messy entanglements
with matter and with each other.
For Barad, to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another,
it's in the joining of separate entities,
but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.
Given this formulation, a second element of the forum exchange
from this website stands out.
The notion of the bracketing of identity, or of other things,
other aspects of culture that might prevent one
from accessing properly the technical nature of the computer.
Similar ideas surface in a number of moments across the discussion.
For instance, Andrew Smart observes the "Digital technology
"at its lowest level relies on the physical laws
"of how information is represented in voltage.
"The way computers and networks work is determined,
"or may be very constrained by the laws of physics."
Is this you, Travis?
(Travis) Yes, it is.
I had no idea you were here!
Sorry, but here we're going to go for a little bit into Lambda the Ultimate.
When you introduced yourself
my ears went PING!
The tendency to describe computation as a series of levels
increasingly abstracted from culture, surfaces in other online venues as well.
A further interesting example is found at Lambda the ultimate,
a site that "deals with issues directly related to programming languages
"and is largely populated by programmers."
On May 5th 2010, Travis Brown, here in living flesh,
created a forum there
under the heading "critical code studies", asking the Lambda community
to reflect on the idea of critical code studies
as articulated by new media scholar Mark Marino,
including a link to a CFP and essay by Marino,
as well as to essays by Katherine Hayles and Rita Raley.
The ensuing discussion lasted several days.
While a few contributors were intrigued by the possibility
that cultural theory might be useful in the study of code,
including Travis,
many were skeptical,
or rejected the idea pretty much out of hand.
So, these are some fairly typical comments gleaned from this forum.
This is actually an essay forthcoming in the feminist journal Differences
and I attend to some of the other comments from this forum in that list as well.
But I bet you never imagined when you posted this
that it would end up in the pages of Differences, right?
(Travis) No!
The comments begin to kind of replay a lot of the same kind of argument I think,
that code at the end functions or it doesn't,
and at some level, if it's going to function
it really can't have that much to do with culture and society.
It's functional or it's not functional, as one commenter says,
"what I mean is that the sociological aspects of code
"are not in the code itself."
And I think that is actually something we don't know for sure,
and I would hold that as an open question,
that perhaps there are ways that we might come to understand culture
as quite deeply embedded in our systems, infrastructures
and code.
In these examples, code functions much as Andrew Smart imagines it does.
In a realm determined by math, physics, or reason,
apart from the messy realms of culture.
This tendency to frame computational technologies in "levels",
you know, kind of nested layers,
is also reflected in the description of the bulk series "Platform Studies"
published by MIT Press, with editors Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort.
In the website that describes the Platform Studies series,
Bogost and Montfort offer a chart delineating the five stacked levels
of analysis of new media studies.
So, we move from "reception and operation" to "interface", to "form and function",
to "code" to "platform".
And most of the cultural stuff happens up here
in the ways those descriptions are understood.
Some of you may be flashing back to Jameson,
if you ever had that past, right?
The nitty gritty technological, really important stuff
in the framing of book series happens down at the level of platform.
And, potentially at the level of code as well,
but there's a very particular kind of system
of privilege built in to the way the analysis operates.
Platform is framed as the foundation layer "an abstraction layer beneath code."
And even in the title of the series Platform Studies
it's obviously given primacy.
A later revision of this chart in their book Raising the Beam
encloses these five levels, following some critique of this diagram.
It encloses these five levels in a chart labelled "culture".
(audience laughs)
A box encloses those layers,
and the authors stress "we see all of these levels
"not just the top level of reception and operation"
which on this website is where culture is located,
"as being situated in culture, society, economy and history."
Yet the very model of discreet boxed layers,
neatly enclosed in the larger box of history puts into place
a conceptual framework that undervalues entanglements
and interactions,
encouraging a focus on individual layers rather than a focus on the complex ways
in which the layers themselves come into being,
delineate particular possibilities and boundaries
and foreclose potential futures and becomings.
Obviously we need to focus our scholarly attention somewhere,
on particular themes, processes or ideas,
but the models we work from are important.
To follow Barad, if matter matters, how we focus on matter also matters.
Despite this critique, I value and learn from the work
of code and Platform Studies, in particular from Ian's work
and careful examinations of particular platforms.
And from the digital humanities practices more generally.
I too have written at length how hard it is
to entangle examinations of code with cultural critique.
How easy it is to get into the lure of the bracket.
I've called for humanity scholars to take code seriously
and to learn to make things.
Maybe not as vociferously as Stephen Ramsay,
(audience laughs)
but certainly loudly!
But I also worry that the digital humanities
code and platform studies,
all too often center computation and technology
in a way that makes interaction hard to discern.
In fact, I've argued that this conceptual bracketing,
this singling out of code from culture, is in itself part and parcel
of the organization of knowledge production
that computation has disseminated around the world for well over 50 years.
In an essay that tracks the entangled historical moment
that produced new racial codes and new forms of computation,
I maintain that the development of computer operating systems
mid-century installed an extreme logic of modularity that black-boxed knowledge
in a manner quite similar to emerging logics of racial visibility and racism.
An operating system like UNIX works by removing context
and decreasing complexity.
Early computers, from 1940 - 1960 had complex interdependent designs
that were pre-modular.
But the development of databases would depend
upon the modularity of UNIX and languages like C and C++.
We could see at work here the basic contours
of an approach to the world that separates object from subject.
Cause from effect, context from code.
I am suggesting that there's something particular to the very forms
of digital culture that encourages such a partitioning.
A portioning off that also played out in the increasing specialization
of academic fields,
and even in the formation of mini modes of identity politics after World War II.
We need conceptual models for the digital humanities
and for digital media studies that do not rely upon the bracket,
the module, the box, or the partition.
Feminist theory, particularly theories of difference,
has much to offer in this regard.
Participants in both the DH Poco and the Lambda forums,
and in the digital humanities more generally,
call on humanist scholars to learn to code,
or at the very least, to require advanced technological literacies.
I agree, but I would also issue a reciprocal call
for coding humanists to engage feminist phenomenology,
postcolonial theory, and theorizations of difference.
Gender, race, sexuality, class, disability might then be understood
not as things that could simply be added to our analyses, or to our metadata,
but instead as operating principles of a different order,
always already coursing through discourse and matter.
And if we cannot study all discourse and all matter at once,
Barad offers up not the bracket, but the agencial cut,
a kind of movement, a fluid movement
as a method through which "in the absence of a classic ontological condition,
"of exteriority between observed and observer,
"we might enact a local, causal structure among components of a phenomenon."
And here I think there are analogies to be drawn between Barad's work
and, say, the work of Bruno Latour.
A lot of ways to begin to think about theorizing systems
that don't depend upon the bracket.
If bracketing tends to recapitulate the modularity of code,
treating difference, either at the level of content,
and here, difference becomes the thing we fill our archives with,
we build neutral archive platforms, but we have one about women,
and one about scholars of color, and one about Native Americans.
Or difference functions in the background.
i.e. that box that wraps around the different levels of technology.
The cut as a methodological paradigm is fluid and mobile,
even as it recognizes the constituitive work of difference.
As Barad notes, cuts are part of phenomena that they help to produce.
Sarah Kember and Johanna Zylinska in their recent book Life After New Media
have highlighted the dual ontological and ethical dimensions
of Barad's agencial cut, observing that the cut is a causal procedure
that performs the division of the world into entities,
but it is also a decision.
That is, where and how we focus matters.
This concept of the cut resonates, if unevenly and imprecisely,
with tension with a number of feminist conceptual paradigms.
Including Katie King's re-enactments, Chantal Mouffe's articulations
Chela Sandoval's differential consciousness
and Jane Bennett's vital materiality.
While these theoretical models are as different as they are alike,
they each offer ways to understand relation between object and subject
between discourse and matter, between identity and difference.
So, that was very long-winded and not very DH-y.
How might any of this matter at all for the digital humanities?
Alan Liu mantains that the appropriate unique contribution
that the digital humanities can make to cultural criticism at the present time
is to use the tools, paradigms and concepts of digital technologies
to help re-think the idea of instrumentality.
If a core activity in the digital humanities
has been the building of tools, we should design our tools differently,
in a mode the explicitly engages power and difference from the get-go,
laying bare our theoretical allegiances and exploring the interactions
of culture and matter.
And I just want to, in the background, have some slides up
illustrating what I think are kind of people already engaging this work,
including Kim Christen, who was one of our Vector scholars years ago
and has been funded by the likes of the NEH
and IMLS to do a lot of work that's really rethinking database structures
and ontologies from an indigenous perspective in fairly radical new ways,
kind of putting her theoretical inclinations
as a HisCon student at Santa Cruz to practice in new forms
of database and archiving technologies.
This is...
Sorry...
This is just one out of many projects from our practice-based PhD program
which integrates theory and praxis.
And this is by a young woman Susana Ruiz, a video game designer,
who produced years ago, an award-winning videogame
on genocide in Darfur,
who's now doing a series of projects around...
card play, strategy games.
This is sort of like the kids' game Apples to Apples,
but it's meant as a social infrastructure to wrap around a series
of documentaries on women, girls, and social justice.
So, it extends the moving into a transmedial space
and connects back up to social networks.
So, she's thinking about feminist game design
and how game mechanics need to incorporate activist mentalities.
She's doing a lot of really fantastic work with her collaborators.
Other feminist scholars offer models of how practice-based work might unfold,
including Martha Nell Smith, Anne Balsamo, Marsha Kinder,
Sharon Daniel, Susan Brown, Bethan Nowviskie, Alex Juhasz,
Julia Flanders, Jackie Wernimont, Misha Cardenas and Mary Flanagan.
And not all those names usually cohere under 'DH',
but I want to argue they're all DH in profoundly important ways.
Now I want to shift gears a little bit and read at you much less
and talk a little bit about the ways and the collaborative practice
of my own workspace at USC.
We've tried to think about what it actually means
to build feminist systems for knowledge production
and circulation
and show you some examples of that work.
So, this is the journal that I...
originally edited and now I co-edit with my colleague Steve Anderson,
at USC,
it's a very experimental project.
It looks almost nothing like what we imagined a journal to be.
And it began really as a set of experiments at the interface
to try to understand how new screen languages
might afford scholars new ways to work with the materials
from their evidence and archives.
So, I'll really quickly just show you one project from Vectors.
It's open access, it's available for free online,
you can find it and see it for yourself, but...
We were very interested, besides looking at screen aesthetics,
also thinking about multi-sensory engagement
and what it meant to have truly multi-modal composition
for scholarly materials, and what kind of impact that might have
on how scholars understood their relationship to their work.
I'm at a very big screen resolution here, so we'll see if it all fits on!
Oh, no sound...
Let me know if this sound is turned on...
(audience member 1) The best thing to do might be to crank up your laptop
as loud as it'll go.
I always forget to ask about sound!
Actually I think I'll show you another piece, real quick,
that we talked about in the launch, because it doesn't need sound.
Would not be entirely fair to Sharon's piece
to show it without sound.
So, this is the very first issue
and it included a project called The Stolen Time Archive
by Alice Gambrell.
And it's probably an appropriate project to show in the space of MITH
since there's so much interest here in widening technologies
and the history of those technologies, because this project
is a digital...
performance of the central arguments of a written book project
called Writing is Work
that's interested in the material practices of writing
and the ways this practice has changed quite substantially
across the early 20th century,
from being masculine to feminine occupations
and the kind of cultural anxieties that were produced around that.
So, the project is basically an eclectic small archive
of hundreds of documents that somehow relate
to this kind of material status of writing and exchanging conditions
that you interact with through this interface.
Do people know what these are?
(a few audience members) Shorthand.
So, these are the...
What they mean sort of refract the different personalities of the scholar
and the designer she was working with.
So, "toy" I would attribute to Alice,
and "abuse" I would attribute to Reagan Kelly.
And the interface plays with, esthetically with the tension
between those dimensions.
So, to clock in, because the piece is getting you to think
about the structuring of employment and time.
You have to practice your shorthand.
All those orange things are mistakes.
You don't really have to do it, you could just clock in.
But people tend to do it anyway.
And what you gradually begin to do as you move through the piece
is to explore Alice's eclectic archive
that's the unacknowledged infrastructure for her book.
And you can read through her glosses on the materials.
The words on the project are probably equivalent to a small book,
but they're deliberate in these kind of smaller sections.
We quickly realize although we thought we were interested in the surface
of the screen, that we were working with databases, almost immediately,
as we meant to build these lovely bespoke, unsustainable Vectors projects.
So, the first iteration of the database structures,
we would go on to work with, came out of these projects.
So, you can move through the...
I'm not going to tell you a lot about the project,
but it's full of everything from didactic materials
produced for office workers and secretaries
to cartoons, to contemporary zines.
Stolen time is what you do at work when you're on Zappo's buying shoes
instead of the work you're supposed to be doing.
And that's the conceit that organizes the piece.
As you move through it, if you click on Alice's glosses,
you start to build a composite of where you've been.
This was very early, this was 2004 when we built it.
It's still pretty, I think.
And lovely to spend time with, but it's not doing a lot of things
the networked web is interested in doing.
The early projects were all done in Flash, so they're kind of hermetically sealed.
The very early ones, you can't even get the data out of.
There were problems with the way the work unfolded in some ways.
But it was also an experiment that we learned an enormous amount from.
In terms of what we might want to do next and where we can move.
We learned about screen language, but also database design,
about open access publishing, and I think probably most importantly,
about collaboration
with scholars with very particular theoretical and activist commitments.
Our projects were speculative in the sense that Johanna Drucker describes,
"committed to pushing back against the cultural authority
"of rationalism in the digital humanities and in digital design."
They were also centered on critical and theoretical questions
that motivated the scholars with whom we worked.
Humanities scholars interested in questions of memory,
race, gender, embodiment, sexuality, perception, temporality
ideology and power."
While Vectors projects began as experiments at the surface of the screen,
they soon led us to building tools,
in particular we began to grapple with the database as an object
to think with and to think against.
We found that the constraints of much relational database software
were not particularly well-suited to the ways in which humanities scholars
think and work.
And, in particular, to interpretive humanity scholarship,
which is often narratively-driven.
And we wanted to think about how the database
might be amended somehow to perform differently.
Through the guidance of our information design director,
Craig Dietrich, the team developed a customized database tool
that allowed more flexibility in how scholars could iteratively work
within our middleware.
The scholars each built out their own infrastructure,
while the designer worked on the front end.
This is from a project by Minoo Moallem
looking at the function of the Persian carpet
in the American imaginary.
She's a feminist postcolonial scholar at Berkeley.
And she did that with Eric Loyer.
So we began to explore several things, including the ways
in which the interface design
might mitigate the database's relentless logic.
So, the Vectors projects were very much toddling
between the rigid structures of the database
and...
a very designed, estheticized front end that performed in ways quite different
than most database structures.
We were interested in really refusing the tyranny
of the template.
But obviously we're still using computational materials
that physics still had to work, that voltage still had
to course through the machine.
In exploring relations of form to content,
we privileged particular kinds of content.
Choosing to work with scholars interested in questions of gender,
race, affect, memory and social justice.
And those concerns were at the core of our research.
Those intellectual questions.
And they profoundly continued
to shape the way we design technological systems today.
Now, over the past five years, I've worked with a number of colleagues
from across the country, in the UK,
around the emergence of the new kind of organization
that grows out of the Vectors work, really trying to think
about how we might work with digital materials held in archives,
in new ways.
And this work has been supported by Mellon and by the Office of Digital Humanities
at NEH,
and roughly, models a new kind of workflow for scholarly materials
from digital archive through a set of archive partners like the Getty,
and Shoah and the Internet Archive
and Critical Commons,
all the way through to university press partners
like MIT, California, Oxford, Cambridge, Michigan, Duke and...
I'm missing somebody...
California, right, so...
We're interested in how scholars might work with digital archival materials
and publish them in interesting and lively new ways.
And really begin to think about how we can activate the archive
as more than a neutral, objective repository for materials
and instead think about the archive as a space for argumentation,
a space for point of view,
even while it can maintain, under another interface,
its own objectivity.
So, we're interested in theories of difference
activated in the archive in a variety of ways.
And to really begin to push toward new forums of publication.
We also are committed to ethical issues around open access and to fair use,
and one of our archive partners is Critical Commons,
which was founded by my colleague, Steve Anderson,
and is a sort of YouTube for media studies scholars
to put commercial media and to use it in emerging genres
of digital scholarly publishing.
And we mostly work through prototyping and iteration,
not always rapid iteration!
I think there may be a lot to rapid prototyping,
but the first project was with feminist activist scholar Alex Juhasz,
who wanted to do a book about YouTube
in the form of YouTube,
and this was peer-reviewed and published open access
by MIT Press a few years ago.
And it was the prototype through which we began
to build the software system that I want to talk to you
a little bit now, called Scalr.
And her work has always evolved from trying to understand with
want and need,
and then building systems to support that work.
Both conceptually and practically.
So, Scalr is an authoring platform, it connects to archival resources
as well.
It allows you to render your views as well, in many different ways
so it not only...
Well it feels in some ways when you're authoring in it,
like Wordpress, it's radically quite different from Wordpress.
It's infinitely more flexible.
It's horizontal, it's non-hierarchical.
It also connects to archival materials and we're building out
that set of archive partners.
So, when you're working in a Scalr project,
you could connect to the native search function
of the archives you're interested in and pull the metadata
associated with those objects as you bring them in
to your Scalr book or project with the object from the archive.
So, that careful metadata record is not lost
as scholars begin to work with the material.
And down the road, we're interested in what you add
in the layer in Scalr roundtripped back to the archive,
and that allows the archive to build out that.
So, really it's a kind of management of workflow
from archive to article, to digital project.
Because it's not like Wordpress, it allows you
to do some very funky things with structure if you choose to.
You could build a Scalr project that's a linear path of 30 pages,
1 - 30, just like a chapter,
but you can also begin to allow multiplicity and multivocality
intersecting points of view to seep into the project
in a variety of ways, because its structure is quite malleable.
Scalr understands technologically all of its components,
a media object, a path, a page, a tag, an annotation, to all be the same thing
and that allows this kind of flattening out of the structure
which is not really possible in a platform like Wordpress.
So when I say we've intentionally designed a system
which values the cut, fluidity, intersectionality,
that is reflected in the kind of conscious design decisions
made about Scalr.
I'm going to quickly walk you through several different projects,
but in a little more detail, this one,
which is a project by Nick Mirzoeff to extend his book
The Right to Look
which is a long history of visuality and counter-visuality and power.
And in this project, after he'd turned his book in to Duke,
the Arab Spring happened, which was very relevant
to the book Nick was writing,
and he wanted to kind of address in some detail that in an extension to the book.
So, this is not really dealing with material from the book,
as much as it's extending the argument of the book to the present.
And it's actually got a fairly complex structure.
What I'm going to show you now is a series of screenshots
that are all the same page rendered in different views
through the technology that's just sort of off-the-shelf,
built into Scalr.
So, you could explore the whole structure of the project
through visualizations that come from the jQuery library
you could see the kind of structure of its organization, its paths and pages
You could explore it through media or through tags and a variety
of different visualizations.
You could look at the metadata for the object you're seeing
on the page we looked at.
These are all the pages rendered on the fly
through the View button automatically into a new dimension.
Nick has said that this project was really intended
to illustrate the new possibilities of a kind of horizontal writing,
and the way that he's talked about that resonates, I think quite interestingly,
with work by both Jane Bennett and Karen Barad.
It incorporates a rich set of multimedia examples,
but it also structures the piece along multiple intersecting pathways
in a manner that serves to reinforce his larger theoretical arguments
about the value of the demonstration or the meeting point
as a theoretical model.
So, here, much as in the Vectors project, although less obviously I think,
form and content merge in compelling ways.
Other scholars have used the platform for a variety of things.
This is a project by Matt Delmont that is very straightforward
and simply incorporates all the media
that couldn't obviously go in his print book,
into a website that's organized through Scalar.
And the argument of his project is about looking at American Bandstand
as a way to understand the struggle for civil rights in a particular locale,
so there's a lot of media material but also advertising and other images
collected in this piece.
Diana Taylor from the Hemispheric Institute
is one of our archive partners, but also one of our scholarly
research center counterparts.
We're now partnered with eleven humanities centers around the country,
and Diana is basically using Scalar, in this case they're doing five books,
to remediate a book that she did years ago that didn't sell very well,
but it's about relatively unknown, experimental Latin American women
feminist performance artists.
And what she's able to do in the context of the Scalar book
is incorporate all the media of those performances
that might allow the material to circulate in different ways.
It's also a trilingual book.
Trying to reach the different audiences
that he works with.
This is a project that began as a dissertation at NYU,
by Deb Levine,
who, in her dissertation, spent a lot of time and care
theorizing the methods of activism of Act Up in New York.
And a lot of time in the archive of oral history materials.
So, this project brings together many hours of that testimony
of world history, activism,
with a theoretical argument about Act Up's model
of affinity organizing, which was a flat, non-hierarchical...
differential consciousness mode of organizing.
So, she uses the platform to model that flat structure,
by allowing to tag the key players in that history
and see their shifting relationship to different groups and organizations
over a chunk of history.
Lesbian feminist scholar Kara Keeling
is working with one of her graduate students
who has a long history as an activist in third world organizations,
to bring together all the archival materials
from an early 21st century digital storytelling group
called Third World Majority that was founded.
All their archival materials
are being collected on the internet archive
and pulled into a Scalar book.
And twelve scholars are now writing critical pathways through that archive.
So, the book will exist at once as the archive of the materials
and as narrated pathways through the material,
when you might come or go through it either way.
Oops!
This was a project that was taken live this spring.
It's an edited volume of essays interacting,
illustrating database narrative.
And many of the pathways or chapters are themselves database narratives
that have interesting information structures
as part of their design.
This project went live this summer.
It's a virtual exhibition
as part of the College Art Association's
CEA Reviews journal.
It was their first attempt to actually review an exhibition
multi-modally.
So, it includes photographs, a video walkthrough,
floor plans, very expansive
and high-quality professional photography of the exhibits,
as well as a review of the exhibit itself.
So, the platform is fairly flexible
and could be taken in a lot of different kinds of directions
This project went live about a year and a half ago,
by the artist and activist Evan Bissell, and our creative director Erik Loyer.
It's an interactive exploration of the history of imprisonment
and incarceration in California.
Roughly asking over hundreds of years why California's become
the prison capital of the world.
And it uses a feature of Scalar that's an open API,
so that the front end is done in one version for OS
and one version in Flash,
but the content is driven by Scalar and you click
through the interactive interface into a Scalar book.
This is a recent collaboration which just went live last month
in celebration of the march on Washington, its anniversary.
If you haven't seen this piece, I'm not going to show it,
because I haven't got the sound,
please go look at it, it's gorgeous!
It's...
as you enter the archival text of the speech
of the march on Washington, with audio playing,
and as the audio plays, you can scroll down the page
and see the improvisation made on the fly
that left his script and that he chose to omit,
and then you can click into a variety of information
that builds out the context in history and lingering ramifications
of that moment.
There are hundreds of pieces of media in here,
and both this and the [?] are meant to be teaching platforms,
primarily to use in after-school and in various kinds of youth groups.
So, we're really trying hard to think about how a platform
might allow us to mediate a lot of kind of binaries
of the digital humanities.
Within a single project, we can glimpse research
operating across scales, with scholars able
to move from the micro level of a project,
perhaps a single image or video annotation,
to the structure of the entire project
and its integrated media.
The researcher can create careful close readings within a project
of many components.
They could also be instantly represented as a whole collection.
Thus moving beyond the artificial binary of distant versus close reading
that often characterizes our conversations.
The result richly combines narrative interpretation
with visualizations that are automatically generated via the semantic elements
of the platform.
These visualizations allow an author or reader to see the larger structure
of a project they have been building up more organically, piece by piece
while also allowing iterative refinements to the information structure.
They could also allow a user to access and explore
specific elements of a project.
Including tags, media files or narrative pathways.
Thus, the visualizations are not merely illustrative,
they're also powerful interpretations that present a project's structure,
evidence and interpretations in new ways.
They bring narrative and analysis together with the database
enriching each.
This method of researching and writing across scales
now predominantly unfolds within a given scale or project
with the possibility of reporting these modes of analysis
back to archival partners, larger holdings,
in between Scalar books represents a key area for ongoing research
The software that underpins Scalar was born of the frustrations
our scholars often experience working with traditional database tools.
Vectors engaged intersectional, political, and feminist work
at the level of content, but also integrated form and content,
so that the theoretical implications of the work were manifest
in both esthetic and information design.
Scalar is now seeking to integrate these methodologies
at the level of software design.
Scalar takes our early experiments
at hacking the database for Vectors projects
to a different level, by wrapping a relational database
in a very particular semantic layer.
In effect, we wanted to build a system that respected and extended
the research methodologies of the scholars with whom we work.
Scalar resists the modularity and compartmentalized logics
of dominant computational design, by flattening out the hierarchical structure
of platforms like Wordpress.
While relatively easy to use,
it also moves beyond the template structures
that frequently characterize the web, allowing a high degree of customization
with cascading style sheets or through its API.
Thus it mediates a whole set of binaries,
between close and distant reading, author/user,
interface/backend,
macro/micro,
theory/practice,
archive/interpretation,
text/image,
database/narrative,
human/machine.
Scalar takes seriously feminist methodologies
ranging from the cut to theories of alliance,
intersectionality and articulation,
not only in support of scholars undertaking individual projects,
but in our very design principles.
As authors work with the platform, they enter into a flow of becoming
through the creation of a database on the fly
and through an engagement with the otherness of the machine.
Scalar respects machine agency, but it does not cede everything to it.
As Anne Balsamo reminds us:
"Every interaction that constitutes a technology
"offers an opportunity to do things differently.
"Scalar offers a way to explore the rich interactions
"that link matter and discourse, to engage the alterity of technology,
"and to cut through plentitude with ethical intent.
"Our goal is to build technology
"in order that we might better understand it
"and its entanglements with culture.
"We aim to bend the digital to our desires,
"and to use it in our utopias, if only in the instant.
"In theories of difference, we already find bountiful ways
"in which we might rewire these circuits.
"Feminists have long brought together those who value hybrid practices
"artist theorist, activist scholars, theoretical archivists, queer failures,
"[inaudible] cyborgs.
"I ask you, who better to turn the digital against its darkest logics?"
Thanks
(audience applauds)