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

The ideological implications of diagrammatic forms have been neutralized by
their origins in empirical sciences and statistics where the convenience of grids and tables
supercedes any critique of the rhetoric of their organization. But are all arrival and
departure values in a railway timetable really the same? Is each simply one among many
choices in a column where their order emphasizes their similarity over their difference? Is
that dark, cold, clammy pre-dawn moment of a 4:45 am departure really commensurate
with the bustling activity of a midday holiday afternoon’s 3:30 pm train from the same
platform? What, in such an example, constitutes the data? Formal organizations ignore
these differences within the neutrality of their rational order.
The cultural authority of computing is in part enabled by that neutrality. Likewise,
the graphical forms through which information is displayed online are shot through with
ideological implications. The grids and frames, menu bars and metaphors of desktops and
windows, not to mention the speed of clicking and rules that govern display are all ripe
for a new rhetoric of the screen analysis. The graphic form of information, especially in
digital environments, often is the information: design is functionality. Information
architecture and information design are not isomorphic. Therein lies another whole
domain of inquiry into the rhetorical force of digital media.
When design structures eliminate any trace, or possibility, of individual inflection
or subjective judgment, they conform to a model of mathesis that assumes objective,
totalizing, mechanistic, instrumental capability readily absorbed into administering
culture. Why is this a problem? Because of the way generalizations erase difference and
specificity and operate on assumptions that instrumentalize norms without regard for the
situated conditions of use. Collective errors of judgment constitute the history of human
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