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

5. Discrete representations 5. Heteroglossic processes
(Static artifacts) (Intersubjective exchange/discourse fields)
6. Analysis /observation 6. Subjective deformance/intervention
(Mechanistic) (Probabilistic)
The digital humanities community has been concerned with the creation of digital tools
in humanities contexts. The emphasis in speculative computing is the production of
humanities tools in digital contexts. We are far less concerned with making devices to do
things – sort, organize, list, order, number, compare – than with creating ways to expose
any form of expression (book, work, text, image, scholarly debate, bibliographical
research, description, or paraphrase) as an act of interpretation (and any interpretive act
as a subjective deformance).
Now, here is a brief explanation of the binary pairs in the chart above:
1) Information/’Pataphysics: The use of information technology in digital
humanities supported development of tools for corpus linguistics: counting, measuring,
and thinking differently about the instances and contexts of word use. Other tools allow
for searching, storing, retrieving, classifying, and then visualizing data. All of these
procedures are based on assumptions of the self-identity of the object, rather than its co-
dependence on those processes. Computational processes constitute their objects of
inquiry just as surely as historical, scientific, or other critical methods. Informatics is
based on standard, repeatable mathematical and logical procedures. Quantitative methods
normalize their data in advance. These assume a norm and a system that conforms to
standardizable rules. Information conforms to statistical methods.
By contrast, ‘pataphysics derives from the study of exceptions and anomalies in
all their specificity and non-standard form. ‘Pataphysical methods take outliers and
deviation from statistical procedures. Only a punning method suffices, thus the invention
1.1 History / 3/2008 /
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