Borrowing from my experience making House of Leaves of Grass, I want to advocate for a poetics of non-consumptive reading in the digital humanities. Scholars and students of art, literature, history, and culture ought to transform more of our non-consumptive research into expressive objects. Nonexpressive use of texts is a dead-end for the humanities. A computer model surrounded by a wall of explanatory words is not enough. Make the computer model itself an expressive object. Turn your data into a story, into a game, into art. Call it aesthetic empiricism or empirical aesthetics. Call it whatever you want. But without a poetics of machine reading, there is nothing.

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RDF: Resource Description Failures & Linked Data Letdowns, a project briefing from CNI’s spring 2013 member meeting by Robert Sanderson of Los Alamos National Laboratory, is now available on CNI’s video channels:

Watch Video Here.

Check out Metadata Games Here.

The positivistic bias in favor of Big Data (a term often used to describe the quantitative data that is produced through analysis of enormous datasets) as an objective way to understand our world presents challenges for ethnographers. What are ethnographers to do when our research is seen as insignificant or invaluable? Can we simply ignore Big Data as too muddled in hype to be useful?

No. Ethnographers must engage with Big Data. Otherwise our work can be all too easily shoved into another department, minimized as a small line item on a budget, and relegated to the small data corner. But how can our kind of research be seen as an equally important to algorithmically processed data? What is the ethnographer’s 10 second elevator pitch to a room of data scientists?

…and GO!

Big Data produces so much information that it needs something more to bridge and/or reveal knowledge gaps. That’s why ethnographic work holds such enormous value in the era of Big Data.

Lacking the conceptual words to quickly position the value of ethnographic work in the context of Big Data, I have begun, over the last year, to employ the term Thick Data (with a nod to Clifford Geertz!) to advocate for integrative approaches to research. Thick Data uncovers the meaning behind Big Data visualization and analysis.

Thick Data analysis primarily relies on human brain power to process a small “N” while big data analysis requires computational power (of course with humans writing the algorithms) to process a large “N”. Big Data reveals insights with a particular range of data points, while Thick Data reveals the social context of and connections between data points. Big Data delivers numbers; thick data delivers stories. Big data relies on machine learning; thick data relies on human learning.

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This is a rich and multifaceted discussion. I just want to add one observations that it has made me ponder.

The discussion has made me think about the metaphor of “tools” in digital humanities work. This makes sense, because the word “tools” is full of all kinds of associations. It is most of all a way to imaginatively bridge the troubling gap between the individual and the machine, between older modes of production and autonomy and newer ones. It alludes to the romantic vision of handicraft labor; it hints at masculinized visions of work (in ways that Natalia Cecire convincingly proposes are profoundly gendered); it offers a way to overcome questions of scale between the individual and larger, overwhelming, and dehumanizing structural forces (tools are held in the hand, safe and under control, mastered; machines are scary, semi-autonomous, out of control things, watch out, it’s Frankenstein!!); tools are at once something from the deep past, often conceptualized as what makes us human–as in it is our species nature to create and use them–and they are also somehow futuristic, key to a cyborgian vision of humans fusing with machines; tools are a way of mediating between, navigating between, compromising between culture and counterculture (I’m thinking of Fred Turner’s great work here on Stewart Brand in From Counterculture to Cyberculture), as in tools sound are ostensibly small and mobile enough that they can be wielded in an oppositional way by the marginalized, oppressed, impoverished even though it takes the massive infrastructure of modernity, military-industrial style, to create them; and while we’re at it, let’s make a bad joke about tools and all the sexual innuendo therein.

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In 2007, Martha Nell Smith observed:

When I first started attending humanities computing conferences in the mid-1990s, I was struck by how many of the presentations remarked, either explicitly or implicitly, that concerns that had taken over so much academic work in literature—of gender, race, class, sexuality—were irrelevant to humanities computing. For those not held back by the sentimental and simplistic question of whether books would be displaced by electronic media, the field of humanities computing brought the models and rigors of science to the intellectual work of literary and artistic criticism and theory, and in that fulfilled some new critical dreams of bringing objectivity, rational thought, and aesthetic purity to departments of English.Scientific matters of mathematics and computation, objective and hard, do not seem to be subject to the concerns of gender, race, or sexuality. 2 + 2, so the reasoning goes, always equals 4, whether you are black, a woman, a queer, a straight, or whatever. HTML, SGML, XML—the codes that make words and images, texts, processable—and TEI conformancy are supposedly gender-, race-, class-neutral.The codes always work, and the principles always apply, whatever one’s personal identity or social group (or so many seemed to believe). It was as if these matters of objective and hard science provided an oasis for folks who do not want to clutter sharp, disciplined, methodical philosophy with considerations of the gender-, race- and class-determined facts of life. After all, in the wake of the sixties, the humanities in general and their standings in particular had suffered, according to some, from being feminized by these things. Humanities computing seemed to offer a space free from all this messiness and a return to objective questions of representation.” (4)

Martha Nell Smith, “The Human Touch Software of the Highest Order: Revisiting Editing as Interpretation.” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, 2(1):2007, 1-15. Full text available for free here.

In your view, how much of this has changed since Smith’s article was published, if anything?

• What is your perspective on the intermingling of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability and the digital humanities?
• What are your “core” texts of the digital humanities, and how do they engage with race, class, gender, sexuality and disability?
• How are cultures of technology implicated in imperial projects? Is there existing DH work on digital colonialisms?
• How would you write a genealogy of the digital humanities?
• How should the digital humanities adapt and change, if at all?

Please add your comments below.

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I asked Heather Champ to join me to talk about the subject because aside from having thought about creating and nurturing community based projects for a long time and having been (essentially) the public face of Flickr she is also the person responsible for enshrining the words Don’t be creepy in a legal document.

Piotr Adamczyk is technically ex-still-sorta museum people having spent years at the Met and now managing the data side of things for the Google Art Project. The reason I asked Piotr is that I had the pleasure of seeing him speak at the National Digital Forum in New Zealand, last year, where he compared the Art Project to a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. Google, he said can show you the shape of the inside of your institution.

Which is a fascinating way to think about what Google does and yet it is so rare that we ever hear big companies speak about themselves that way. Which is why I thought it would be good to have people from business on the panel to talk about the tensions of putting forward a public face. Piotr had to pull out just before the conference and Dan Hon was gracious enough to fill in at the last minute.

Over breakfast the morning of the panel, Dan described some of the work that they do at Wieden+Kennedy as helping organizations form an opinion about themselves which nicely sums up quite a lot of the issues latent in the panel’s subject. Dan also wrote the quote above and, more recently, a proper good essay on the tyranny of digital advertising. Most of the panel was a discussion between the three of us and the audience but I did a short talk to try and frame some of the issues around the idea of humour and institutional voice.

The talk itself is a re-telling and a stretching-out of a duet that Seb and I did in March at the ArtsTech Meetup in New York City.

At the time that we were putting together the slides for that talk I imagined somehow working in a piece I had just written about digital public spaces and measures of success for the Future Everything conference in Manchester. I still think about doing that some day and it’s still better that I’ve not tried but I’ve included the full text of that essay below if you’re interested.

This is what I said, instead:

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And then someone asked @CHNM on Twitter, if we were archiving the coverage of the Boston shootings.

As I considered the prospect of starting another unfunded collecting project in response to current events (see: Occupy Archive), I began to question if Internet users would still come to digital memory banks, as we know them. (Since the time I started drafting this post, we’ve learned that Northeastern is working on something.)

In 2013, sharing personal stories, photographs, generating memes, posting videos, is commonplace for many Americans. According to the Pew Internet and American Life survey, sixty-seven percent of Internet users use some type of social networking site.¹ People are sharing quite a bit within their own networks, and within networks that have specific terms of service. Will they want to share again in another web space?

Don’t get me wrong, I still see value in the practice of collecting online and in building non-commercial, open resources that are filled with first-person accounts and reactions, and memories to tragic and celebratory events that individual contributors still own and maintain control over use. As Internet users access many different platforms and use the Web in more ways, people are much more comfortable sharing online with their own social networks. There are many places to react and emote immediately, as a result, there is much more noise on the Web. Finding a digital collecting site seems much more challenging. The question remains, how can we best save those reactions for historians and other researchers to access in the future? Conversely, should we try to save all of those reactions?

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1. Vision

Through embracing digital activity and skills across the organisation Tate aims to use digital platforms and channels to provide rich content for existing and new audiences for art, to create and nurture an engaged arts community and to maximise the associated revenue opportunities. We will achieve this by embracing digital activity and developing digital skills across the organisation.

2. Digital principles

Tate’s audiences will have digital experiences that:

• increase their enjoyment and understanding of art
• provoke their thoughts and invite them to participate
• promote the gallery programme
• provide them with easy access to information
• entice them to explore deeper content
• encourage them to purchase products, join Tate and make donations
• present an elegant and functional interface whatever their device
• take place on the platforms and websites they use
• minimise any obstacles they may encounter

To achieve this, we will take an approach that is:

• audience-centred and insight-driven
• constantly evaluated and enhanced
• well designed and architected
• distributed across multiple platforms
• open and sharable
• sustainable and scalable
• centrally governed and devolved across the organisation

3. Content

Given audience demand for high quality online arts content, Tate has an opportunity to become a more significant digital publisher.

Tate already has considerable strengths in this field, notably in publishing Tate Kids, Tate Shots, Tate Papers, Tate Etc. as well as the online collection and learning resources. We shall co-ordinate, extend and promote these activities to better serve our audiences, and intend to focus on the following four areas of new content production:

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Listen to podcast here.