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

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iefly above, was the confluence of philosophical and mathematical approaches to the study of language that shared an enthusiasm for formal methods. The history of programming languages and their relation to modes of thought, as well as their contrast with natural languages, is yet another. All of these have a bearing on digital humanities, either directly (as tools taken up by the field) or indirectly (as elements of the larger cultural condition within which digital instruments operate effectively and gain their authority). Twenty years ago a giddy excitement about what Michael Heim termed “electric language” turned the heads of humanists and writers. xv Literary scholars influenced by deconstruction saw in digital texts a condition of mutability that seemed to put the idea of differential “play” into practice. xvi And the linking, browsing, combinatoric possibilities of hypertext and hypercard provided a rush to authorial imagination. Suddenly it seemed that conventions of “linearity” were being exploded through the manipulative possibilities offered by new media into rhizomatic networks that undercut the appearance of stasis attributed to the printed page. Text seemed fluid, mobile, dynamically charged. Since then, habits of use have encoded the once dizzying concept of links into daily activity in web browsers and the magic of being able to rewrite and rework texts on the screen is just the business of everyday life. But as the special effects “wow” factor of those early encounters has evaporated, the deeper potential for interrogating what a text is and how it works have come into view within more specialized practices of electronic scholarship and criticism. In particular, a new order of metatexts has come into being that encodes (and thus exposes) attitudes towards textuality. 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 27
Early digital humanities is generally traced to the work of Father Busa whose Index Thomisticus was begun in 1949. xvii Busa’s scholarship involved statistical processing (the creation of concordances, word lists, and studies of frequency). His repetitive tasks were dramatically speeded by the automation enabled by computers. Other developments followed in stylometrics (quantitative analysis of style for attribution and other purposes), string-searches (on texts as sequences of letters), and increasingly sophisticated processing of the semantic content of texts (context sensitive analysis, the semantic web, etc..). xviii More recently, scholars involved in the creation of electronic archives and collections have established conventional approaches to metadata (as Dublin Core standard information fields for electronic documents), mark-up (the TEI, or Text Encoding Initiative), and other elements of digital text processing and presentation. xix This process continues to evolve as the scale of materials online expands from creation of digital repositories (archives and collections), issues of access and display, to peer reviewed publishing, interpretative tools, and other humanities-specific activities that take advantage of the participatory, iterative, and dynamic properties of electronic environments. The encounter of texts and digital media has reinforced theoretical realizations that printed materials are not static, self-identical artifacts and that the act of reading and interpretation is a highly performative intervention in a textual field that is charged with potentiality rather than existing in a fixed condition. xx One of the challenges we set ourselves was to envision ways to show this dramatically, in a visual demonstration, rather than simply to assert it as a critical insight. The technical processes involved in these activities are not simply mechanical manipulations of texts. So-called “technical” operations always involve interpretation, 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 28
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Page 7: the lessons of deconstruction and p
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Page 23 and 24: cultures, when the scale at which t
Page 25 and 26: knowledge is always interpretation,
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Page 31 and 32: Electronic communication approaches
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