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

eading intervened. Adopting their theories of probability and potentiality, we shifted
from mechanistic models of text to quantum ones. We conceptualized a “text” not as a
discrete and static entity, but a coded provocation for reading, a field of potentialities.
Constrained by those codes, thus not open to any and all possibilities, but it is formed
anew as an act of interpretative intervention. Here again the echoes of deconstruction are
perceptible, but with the difference that these are shifted into problems of modeling and
representing such activities within an electronic space. The n-dimensionality of texts, to
use McGann’s term again, also engages their social production and the associational
matrix through which meaning is produced in a heteroglossic network, combining the
dialogic method of Mikhail Bakhtin with influence from the thick readings of a
generation of French textual theorists. xxxviii But speculative computing is not a rehash of
poststructuralist theory, nor an advanced version of either dialogic or dialectical
approaches. Speculative computing is grounded in a serious critique of the mechanistic,
entity-driven approaches to knowledge that is based on a distinction between subject and
object. By contrast, speculative computing proposes a generative, not merely critical,
attitude towards knowledge.
My approach to graphical knowledge production came from the semiotic studies
of Jacques Bertin and the history of visual languages of form, work by MacEachren, and
an extensive and systematic reading of materials in information visualization, psychology
and physiology of vision, and cultural history of visual epistemology. xxxix This latter is an
enormously underdeveloped field, one that calls for serious study now in particular, when
visualization is becoming so ubiquitous within digital environments. Finally, our reading
of Charles Peirce provided a method of interpretation based in abduction as well as a tri-
1.1 History / 3/2008 /
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