Tara McPherson: Scholarship In and Beyond the Database

...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 oral 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 Scalr 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 Scalr
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 Scalr
and you click

through the interactive interface
into a Scalr 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 piece, you enter
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 improvisations King
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 Knotted Line
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 Scalr books represents
a key area for ongoing research

The software that underpins Scalr
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 aesthetic and information design.

Scalar is now seeking to integrate
these methodologies

at the level of software design.

Scalr 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.

Scalr 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.

Scalr 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.

Scalr 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.

"Scalr 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)