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

has a database under it, you might be able to search for information across various fields.
But an archive, like Holly Shulman’s Dolley Madison letters, contains fully searchable,
tagged text. xxxii That archive contains thousands of letters, and theASCII text transcription
of all of the letters is tagged, marked-up, structured. Information about Madison’s social
and political life can be gleaned from that archive in a way that would be impossible in a
simple website.
Through the combined force of its descriptive and performative powers, a digital
metatext embodies and reinforces assumptions about the nature of knowledge in a
particular field. The metatext is only as good as the model of knowledge it encodes. It is
built on a critical analysis of a field and expresses that understanding in its organization
and the functions it can perform. The intellectual challenge comes from trying to think
through the ways the critical understanding of a field should be shaped or what should
comprise the basic elements of a graphical system to represent temporality in humanities
documents. The technical task of translating this analysis into a digital metatext is trivial
by contrast to the compelling exercise of creating the intellectual model of a field.
Models and Design
Structured data and metatexts are expressions of a higher order model in any digital
project. That model is the intellectual concept according to which all the elements of a
digital project are shaped, whether consciously or not. One may have a model of what a
book is or how the solar system is shaped without having to think reflectively about it,
but in creating models for information structures, the opportunity for thinking self-
consciously abut the importance of design is brought to the fore.
1.1 History / 3/2008 /
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