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

iographical portrait? A memoir and first-person narrative? Or a historical fiction?
Should the small, glyphic figures in William Blake’s handwriting that appear within his
lines of poetry be considered part of the text? Or simply disregarded because they cannot
be rendered in an ASCII symbol set? x At every stage of development, digital instruments
require such decisions. As these are made, the cultural legacy that becomes available in
digital form is shaped through interpretive acts.
Because of this intense engagement with interpretation and questions about the
presumed foundations of epistemology, the field of digital humanities extends the
theoretical questions that came into focus in deconstruction, post-modern theory, critical
and cultural studies, and other theoretical inquiries of recent decades. Basic concerns
about the ways processes of interpretation constitute their objects within cultural and
historical fields of inquiry are raised again, and with another level of historical baggage
and cultural charge attached to them. Who, after all, will hold the power over the
decisions for modeling the classification systems for knowledge in digital
representations? What does it mean to create ordering systems, models of knowledge and
use, or environments for aggregation or consensus? The next phase of cultural power
struggles will be embodied in the digital instruments that will model what we think we
know and what we can imagine.
Digital humanities is an applied field as well as a theoretical one. xi The task of
taking these meta-considerations into application puts assumptions to a different set of
tests and also raises the stakes with regard to outcomes. Theoretical insight is constituted
in this field in large part through encounters with application. The statistical analysis of
texts, creation of structured data, and design of information architecture are the basic
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