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

While every model embodies interpretative attitudes expressed as formal
structures, many information structures have graphical analogies, and can be understood
as diagrams that organize the relations of elements within the whole. A tree structure
with its vocabulary of parent-child relationships, for instance, is set up with very distinct
assumptions about hierarchy. Matrices, lattices, one-to-many and one-to-one
relationships, the ability to “cross walk” information from one structure to another, to
disseminate it with various functionalities for use by broadly varied communities, or to
restrict its forms so that it forces a community to think differently about the information –
these are all potent features of information architecture.
All of this work, whether it is the design of a string search or the graphical
presentation of a statistical pattern, the creation of a set of metadata fields, tags, or the
hierarchical or flat structure of architecture for data, is modeling. It is all an expression of
form that embodies a generalized idea of the knowledge it is presenting. The model is
abstract, schematic, ideological and historical through and through, as well as discipline-
bound and highly specific in its form and constraints. It is also, often, invisible. An
alphabetical ordering is a model. So is a tree structure or a grid. All have their origins in
specific fields and cultural locations. All carry those origins with them as an encoded set
of relations that structure the knowledge in the model. Model and knowledge
representation are not the same, but the morphology of the model is semantic, not just
syntactic. On the surface, a model seems static. In reality, like any “form” it is a
provocation for a reading, an intervention, an interpretive act to which it gives rise—
these statements are the core tenets of SpecLab’s work.
1.1 History / 3/2008 /
40