1.1 From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing - UCLA ...

equired elaborate coding in an earlier era of digital work. xxv The value of any
computational analysis hangs, however, on deciding what is able to be parameterized
(subject to a quantitative or otherwise standard assessment). The terms of the metric or
measure according to which any search or analytic process is carried out is framed with
particular assumptions about the nature of data. Questioning what is considered data,
what is available for analysis, is as substantive a consideration as what is revealed by its
analysis. I am not just making a distinction between what can be measured easily
(because it is discrete and lends itself to digital processing, such as counting the number
of e’s in a document) and what cannot (calculating the white space that surrounds them).
Rather, I am intent to call attention to the difference between what we think can be
measured and what is outside that conception entirely (e.g. the history of the design of
any particular “e” as expressed or repressed in its form). The critique of post-
structuralism posed to structuralist formalisms exposed assumptions based in cultural
value systems expressed as epistemological ones. The very notion of a standard metric is
itself an ideology. (The history of any “e” is a complicated story indeed.) The distinction
between what can be parameterized and what cannot is not the same as the difference
between analogue and digital systems, but between complex, culturally situated
approaches to knowledge and totalized, systematic ones. xxvi
Metalanguages and metatexts
The automated processing of textual information is fundamental to digital humanities,
but, as stated earlier, so is the creation and use of meta-texts used as description and
enhancement of information, but also, as performative instruments. As readers and
1.1 History / 3/2008 /
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