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

standard-gauge rails, or suggest that perhaps transportation and interpretation are
necessarily subject to different regimes. Because of the rhetorical force of digital
instruments, I suggest the latter approach.
Discussion of tags is a bit of a red herring, as they may disappear into historical
obsolescence, replaced by sophisticated search engines and other analytic tools. But the
problem raised by XML tags, or any other system of classifying and categorizing
information, will remain: they exercise rhetorical and ideological force. If is
not a tag or allowable category then it cannot be searched. Think of the implications for
concepts like or . A set of tags for structuring data is a powerful
interpretative grid imposed on a human expression that has many ambiguities and
complexities. Extend the above example to texts analyzed for policy analysis in a
political crisis and the costs of conformity rise. Orwell’s dark imaginings are readily
realized in such a system of explicit exclusions and controls.
Sinister paranoia aside, the advantages of structured data are enormous. Their
character and content makes digital archives and repositories different in scale and
character from websites, and will enable next generation design features to aggregate and
absorb patterns of use into flexible systems. The distinction between an archive or
repository and a website is distinction between a static or fixed display and a dynamic
archive. Websites built in HTML make use of an armature for organizing information.
They hold and display it in one form, just as surely as work in a display case or shop
window. You can pick a path through it, read in whatever order you like, but you can’t
repurpose the data, aggregate it, or process it. A website with a collection of book covers,
for instance, might contain hundreds of images that you can access through an index. If it
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