Between the Digital and the

Analogue in the 21st Century

History, Technology & the Liberal Arts

by Rachel Leow

Faculty of History, Cambridge University

version 2.1

A talk presented at Rochester University

February 2015

I. The heuristic

I want to start with a heuristic and run with it into unwarranted terrains.

Hands up if you are wearing a wristwatch today.

Leave your hand up if you are wearing a wristwatch which has digits on it, not hands.

It's interesting that when I did a search for "clocks" and "wristwatches", the images

Google displayed to me were all analogue clock faces, even though weve had digital

watches since 1970, and certainly since 1985which is the year that this particular

digital watch is from. For those of you that don't recognize it, this is the great movie

Back to the Future, 30 years old this year. Here is Marty McFly, immortalised for all

time in this iconic movie poster staring earnestly at his digital watch.

2

The Antikythera Mechanism (c. 200-100 BCE)

The original division between the digital and analogue has to do with a category

distinction in electronics and computing. Of course weve had analogue computers

since arguably 2000 years ago. But the electronic revolution made it necessary to

distinguish between analogue computers, which rely on continuous values, like

hydraulics or scale measures, and digital computers which use discrete values1s

and 0sfor their computational processes. In information technology, analogue

information is in the continuous form of waves of sound and light, while digital

information consists of discontinuous data or events. So in one sense, the analogue

world of light and sound is the real world we live in, while the digital world is

abstract, articial.

And so an analogue clock is one in which time is represented by the hands that spin

and point to an approximate location on that spectrum, while a digital clock displays

exact abstract integers.

3

Which one is more accurate, better? Like any tool, it depends on what you want

to do with them. We seem, as a society, to prefer analogue clockfaces, though. But I

would guess pretty much everyone in this room is literate in both technologies. We

can glance down at our wristwatches and estimate that we are about a semicircle

away from lunch, or look to the corner of our screens and read that its 12:02pm. We

are versed in both the digital and the analogue.

I want to suggest that this sort of multiple literacy is the key to the future.

To do that, I want to talk about cyborgs, ip-opping, and a whole lot of other

things. And I invite you to come and run along with me and my audacious heuristic.

4

II. Cyborg world

Much of my thinking on cyborgs was stimulated by a wonderful web project by Tim

Maly called 50 Posts About Cyborgs, which ran back in 2010 on the 50th anniversary of

the coining of the term cyborg.1 Tims introduction to that series literally makes

you see cyborgs everywhere. You think a cyborg is just the Terminator? Robocop?

The Borg? Brains jacked into computers, bodies twisted into metal until theyre

barely recognised as human? No way, says Tim. Cyborgs are products of any non-

hereditary technological intervention that changes the course of your biological

existence.

Drink caeinated drinks? Wear glasses? Use a cellphone? Youre a cyborg.

1.Tim Maly, 50 Posts About Cyborgs

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Used an axe to cut something you would otherwise not have been able to kill and

eat? Congratulations, says tech writer Kevin Kelly, your ten million year old ancestor

and his articial claw was a cyborg.2

I appreciate this unintuitive denition, because I think it's the right way to think

about the world we live in today: both unexceptionally and exceptionally

revolutionary at the same time. It's important not to underestimate continuities from

earlier times: the ways in which we have perceived ourselves to suer from

information overload for much longer than our present moment of information

explosion; the way new technologies have always fundamentally transformed our

social practices and our knowledge systems.3

But I do also think that we live in a uniquely cyborgian age.

2.Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants.

3.Books in this vein: Carla Hesse, 'Books in Time', in Georey Nunberg ed. The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ann Blair, Too Much to

Know (New Jersey: Yale University Press, 2010).

6

William Gibson, a science-ction novelist who has been called the noir prophet of

cyberpunk, coined the term cyberspace back in the 1980s to denote a space that

was distinctively elsewhere: one we visited periodically, he wrote, into which we

peered from the familiar physical world.4 Now, he said, cyberspace has everted:

turned itself inside out, colonised the physical.5

(Here, somewhat ttingly, is a cigar-box miniature printer made by some

enterprising netizen. It prints only William Gibsons tweets. He must be so proud).6

4.William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984).

5.William Gibson, 'Google's Earth', 31 August 2010 NYT

6.'Cigar-box thermal printer that prints William Gibsons tweets @GreatDismal'

7

We inhabit a world that is profoundly everted. We still talk about the web like its

not everywhere and everywhen that we arelike its not the real world. But the

reality of it is that the web is everywhere we are. The advent of Google has allowed

us to create an enormous external brainthe latest iteration of human neocortex

evolution, if you take Ray Kurzweil at his word.7 Smartphones have allowed us to

take the web out of the computer room (who among you still have computer

rooms?) New media forms now allow us to project ourselves outward into the

world, in a huge fuzzy cloud of blog posts, tweets, Spotify playlists, Whatsapp

messages, digital footprints.8 New technologies allow us to extend ourselves inward,

into new containers of the self: our disk drives, devices, our wearable tech, our

arrays of networked things.

7.Ray Kurzweil, 'The Hierarchy in your Brain', TED Talk, March 2014

8.Adrienne LaFrance, 'The Web is the Real World', The Atlantic, 22 December 2014

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Press a virtual button on your phone and the real world around you changes, with

astonishing speed: real food appears on your doorstep, or an Uber comes to your

very location to pick you up. Astronauts 3D-printed a socket wrench in outer space

this year. In the Harvard Bookstore, you can print over 5 million e-books on demand

for around $8 a piece.

We're creating a world that seamlessly shapes itself to human desire.9 And it is less

and less easy to distinguish between the machine and the human, when we plant

pacemakers in our hearts and nano-bots in our bloodstreams, remake our sick and

broken with aluminium and titanium, and send our most intimate souls in bits and

bytes across the criss-cross of ber-optics to touch a friend, perhaps even a lover,

whom we have never met. We live in a world strung wonderfully, joyfully,

terrifyingly, between the digital and the analogue. We live in a cyborg world.

9.Alexis Madrigal, 'Smart Things in a Not-Smart World', The Atlantic, 23 July 2014

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III. Suggestive etymologies: The Two Cultures

Who coined the term cyborg? It was this man, Manfred Clynes, in conversation

with his interlocutor Nathan Kline. Clynes was a rare breed, a renaissance man of

both the arts and the sciences, a neuroscientist and musician. His work

systematically combined the two of them into a career that spanned from

performance recordings of Bachs Goldberg variations all the way to patent

inventions in the elds of neurophysiology, ultrasound, data recording and wind

energy. Clynes was obsessed with the science of the emotions, and founded a whole

eld about it, called sentics: the scientic study of waveforms of touch, emotion and

music.

10

I think its no coincidence that the inventor of the term cyborg was in a sense a

hybrid being himself. Hybrid, that is to say, along the axis of the sciences and the

humanities. These have frequently been seen as two houses divided, since C. P.

Snow gave his two cultures lectures at my university, in Cambridge -- just one

year before Manfred Clynes coined the word "cyborg", in 1959. Snow said, then,

speaking in an age and society still reeling from the devastating moral weight of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two

polar groups Literary intellectuals at one poleat the other scientists... Between the two a

gulf of mutual incomprehensionsometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and

dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.10

10.C. P. Snow, Rede Lectures, 1959.

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Snows concerns were directly linked to the nuclear moment, the recognition of the

immense power of science to make and destroy, and the urgent need for everyone,

not only scientists, to apprehend and argue with that power, to temper the cans of

technology with the shoulds of informed reason.11 He wrote:

I believe the industrial society of electronics, atomic energy, automation, is in cardinal

respects dierent in kind from any that has gone before, and will change the world much

more.This is the material basis for our lives: or more exactly, the social plasma of which we

are a part. And we know almost nothing about it.

In a way, Snows call has not really yet been met. We now nd ourselves fty years

after Snow launched this appeal for an integrated arts-science culture and

curriculum a matter on which, in his view, the very future of Britain and the world

depended - and, it seems not very much closer to it.

I am completely unqualied to oer any comprehensive proposal for what that

curriculum should look like, though a few of us got together some time ago and

thought about it in fun speculative ways.12 And I think the way forward will be

eventually to encourage more of the same.

11.Lisa Jardine, 'C. P. Snow's Two Cultures Revisited', C. P. Snow Lecture 2009, reprinted in Christ's College Magazine 2010

12.New Liberal Arts (2009); see

12

What I would like to suggest, though, is that continuing to educate students into this

dualistic STEM/humanities disciplinary model is not going to be enough. But I also

think, speaking realistically, that a mass revamp of curricula is only one way, and

perhaps the most institutionally dicult way, to go about eecting these changes.

So I think its most immediately useful to ask, of you the student: why do you want

education? And to ask, of you the educator: why do you educate?

IV. Suggestive etymologies: The Flip-op

The "ip-op" was originally articulated by a self-styled media inventor, novelist

and long-time internet compadre of mine, Robin Sloan, who has all his ngers on the

pulse of the directions of new media and journalism today. Heres his denition:

the ip-op (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the

digital world and back again maybe more than once.

What does that look like? Heres an example.

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1. Sculpt eight dierent vases. (PHYSICAL)

2. Take photos of those vases. (DIGITAL)

3. Find those photos and combine them somehow into a single vase. (DIGITAL)

4. Print that new vase in plaster with a 3D printer. (PHYSICAL)

5. Take photos of that new vase. (DIGITAL)

6. Make an animated GIF! (DIGITAL)13

13.Robin Sloan, 'Dancing the Flip-Flop'

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Let me tell you what I take from this idea. First of all, what is produced out of the

ip-op is a hybrid product, something which is impossible without the input of

either. That is to say, the thing which is produced in the end lies not solely within the

realm of possibility of either the digital or the analogue. By playing on the frontiers,

the combination of the two has expanded the realm of possibility of action and

creation.

Secondly, the act of production and creation could have happened by two people,

one of whom was a sculptor and the other a computer artist, entering into

conversation and joint creation together.

But maybe what we really need, what we are moving towards and perhaps must

move towards, is the amalgam of the analogue sculptor and the digital creator in one

being.

What I take from this, therefore, is a call for exibility. An injunction to play at the

borders. And to become someone who can play at the borders.

15

If you want the utilitarian rationale, its just good business sense. As Paul Sao at the

Institute of the Future said, If you want to innovate, look for the edges. The fastest

way to nd an innovation is to make a connection across disciplines that everybody

else has missed.14 In this talk, I'm suggesting that one of those edges, the gigantic,

elephant-sized opportunity that's running along the edge of most elds, is

technological in nature.

But if you want the real argument, and luckily for me the two are fundamentally

aligned, its that and I will get to this at the end given the world we are living

in and building around us, I dont think we can aord not to be ip-oppers.

14.Paul Sao, quoted in Mark Stek We Digital Sensemakers in Bartscherer & Cover, Switching Codes (2011), p. 41.

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V. Frontiers and Edges in the Humanitas Digitas

Im going to talk mostly about technological advances within the realm of the

humanities, since thats what Im most familiar with, but my argument may well be

scalable to other elds.

The digital humanities today encompass an enormous range of of disciplinary and

methodological approaches, as Stephen Ramsay said: from media studies to

electronic art, data mining to edutech, scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while

inviting code junkies, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians

and edupunks under its capacious canvas. Its proponents call for a radical,

revolutionary expansion of the eld of humanistic inquiry to leverage the power of

data sets, computational analysis, design-centered thinking, transmedia

argumentation and interpretative work that exceeds the cognitive or analytical

abilities of the single or traditional humanist.15

I think its no coincidence that the digital humanities have arisen at this time, at a

kind of global conjuncture.

15.Anne Burdick, Johanna Druckner, Peter Luneeld, Todd Presner, and Jerey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

17

The past few decades have seen the exponential expansion of technology out of the

hands of the select few into the realm of mass consumption.

They have seen the exponential increase in the worlds proportion of educated,

literate and urbanised, and with this, the increases in demand for media, for

information, for new products, new communities, new habits and opportunities of

material and immaterial consumption.

The humanities and social sciences have experienced a profound historiographical

shift in the last 20 years, towards modes of study which pay new attention to the

connectivities of our age. We have shifted our scale to the transnational, and to the

global, moving away from the silos of national history which characterized our 19th

and 20th century scholarship.

18

These paradigm-shifting pressures are pressing scholars towards large-scale

comparative histories that require mastery of regions, languages, archives and

theoretical and scholarly literatures simply beyond the capacity or scope of one

individual. Or towards large-scale longue duree, macroscopic histories that are

perfectly aligned with our new capabilities for processing big data.

And the nal prong of the conjuncture: since the 1980s we have slowly moved into

an age of free-market orthodoxy and its handmaiden, neoliberal austerity. Higher

education has become a buyer's market whose rationale for existence is to act as a

guarantor of employment, prestige and wages. College and welfare budgets alike are

under sustained nancial, social and moral attack. The humanities, especially, has

felt increasingly embattled and imperilled.

In this way, and in agreement with prominent DH practitioners like Matt

Kirschenbaum and Ted Underwood, Ive thus found it most useful to think of the

Digital Humanities as a kind of tactical coalition rather than a single intellectual

project. This captures the sense of the DH as arising at the heady, opportunity-lled

frontier born out of this highly convergent moment.

19

So let me explore some of the frontiers we can nd in the humanitas digitas, in the

following areas.

1. Digital communications: As a transformative condition of the way scholars

communicate with the public

2. Little DH: As part of a transition toward new research practices, an upgrading of

the humanists craft

3. Big DH: As a means of analysis and interpretation in itself, a radical upgrading, if

you like, of the humanists methodological toolbox

4. Digital futures: Where we are headed

V.I. Digital communications

Perhaps the most visible impact that technology has had on the humanities is that it

has created enormous possibilities for communicating scholarship to the public. We

now have more possible formats than ever in which we can create and disseminate

scholarship, and we can now reach wider potential audiences than ever.

20

In this respect, academia has much to learn from watching innovations in journalism.

Journalists have had to adapt incredibly quickly to the reshuing of faultlines in our

content landscape between print and digital platforms, and they are equally invested

in the project of reaching audiences. In journalism and academia alike, the

"message", the "argument", the "story", can now be designed and repackaged for

dierent content platforms, which interlace text and hypertext, sonic and graphic,

animated and static.

As the authors of Digital_Humanities suggest, "To design new structures of

argumentation is an entirely dierent activity than to form argumentation within

existing structures that have been codied and variously naturalized." How we

design scholarship for a multimedia age is one of the key frontiers in what we call

the digital humanities.16

16.Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities, p. 12.

21

The ipside of this communications revolution is the rapid reconstitution of the

place of the print book, both in academia as well as in society. I don't really want to

get bogged down in the discussion of whether or not the book is dying, which is and

continues to be an endless and passionate debate, represented by Clay Shirky,

batting on the 'death to the book' team, and Nick Carr, on the 'death to the bookless

philistines' team.17

What I do want to do is use the future of the book to suggest a distinction between a

frontier and an edge.

The frontier in the reimagination of the book is a rapidly shifting, exciting one.

People have already begun to think and dream on the uncanny frontier between

electronic and print. Challenges to the traditional publishing landscape have

precipitated a owering of new formats and web platforms. In particular, we are

rethinking how books get made in an age of multimedia, multimodal and multivocal

publishing.

17.Recommended: Clay Shirky's blog and Nick Carr's blog

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The rst edition of the printed text of Debates in the Digital Humanities was published

in 2012 by University of Minnesota Press.18 From the start the printed book was

intertwined with an online platform which was open for contributors of the volume

and outside peer reviewers to comment and annotate the text, before it was

published as a print book, which we can take, in this sense, to be a kind of

snapshot of a conversation in progress. Indeed that conversation continues - the

book has now been ip-opped back onto an open access platform that will enable

social reading experiences through a ne-grained commenting system and markup

tools. Books are no longer static, unchanging objects.

Interacting with Print was conceived as an exercise in collaborative authorship.19 It

brings together 22 writers in on- and oine contexts to produce a multigraph, as

opposed to a monograph, over the course of a year on the history of print. Seeking to

historicize the idea of interactivity as a concept that spans both old and new media,

they are also, in the process, exploring the act of writing and publishing as a

networked, multi-authored activity.

18.Digital Humanities debates

19.Interacting with Print

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What is a book when it could look and function more like a database? Robert

Darnton, the great historian of eighteenth century France, imagines an e-book

composed of many layers arranged like a pyramid, the topmost layer of which

represents the ordinary monograph which may be printed and bound, but the

subsequent digital layers of which can be clicked through to dive into its embedded

supplements: media-rich primary sources, bibliographies, appendices,

historiographies, bodies of documents. Eventually, he says, readers will make the

subject their own, trace their own reading pathways through it, and may even, in a

sense, read an entirely dierent book each time.

And just the other day, James Patterson released his latest novel, Private Vegas, a

thriller e-book which actually self-destructs in 24 hours from the point of rst

reading.20 A book which vanishes in your very hands, so that if you don't read fast

enough, racing against the clock alongside the protagonist of the book, you will be

left forever in the dark about the ending.

That is the frontier: a heady, exciting place. May it be full of exploding books.

20.James Patterson, Private Vegas

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What is the edge?

Here's an edge, though not the only one. I see the digital as being dierently bodied

from the analogue.

Human beings are creatures of embodied cognition. As George Lako and Mark

Johnson have argued, we are not just disembodied minds oating around, and we

dont actually take well to environments which assume this.21 So much of our

cognition arises from profoundly embodied, pre-linguistic interactions with the

world. The spatialities and embodiments of our human experience show up

constantly in our metaphors of even the most abstract thinking.

The replacement of the page by the screen creates a certain sense of dislocation in

usand just look at those words! Replacement, dislocation. At a level more

fundamental than we might recognize, the screen uproots our deeply-evolved sense

of where we are, what spaces we occupy.

21.George Lako and Mark Johsnon, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and the Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

25

Craig Mod, one of my favourite thinkers about the future of the book, talked recently

about how we are increasingly wrapped in digital thinness. We have folders in our

physical ling cabinets, and folders on our virtual desktopslook how the language

of our computers mimic those of the real world. But a folder in a ling cabinet has

edges, it has weight and body. A folder on the screen looks exactly the same whether

it contains one item or a billion items.

The cloud model to which internet copy culture is movingin which we have a

single master copy held in a corporations data centre which is eectively projected

temporarily onto our screenscreates an even greater sense of dislocation.

The desire for weight and embodiment of the digital generates artistic creations like

these, James Bridles book cubes, which in his terms are touchstones, souvenirs,

counterweights, to the thinness and invisibility of our web readings.22

22.James Bridle's bookcubes

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Its the spirit behind the Library of the Printed Web, which consists, as its proprietor

Paul Soulellis puts it, entirely of stu pulled o the Web and bound into paper

books.23

There is an exhaustion with the endless scroll of the ever-burgeoning stream, an

embodied, human unease with innity.24 There is a sense of too much, too fastgiving

rise to the counterpoint of slow news, slow food, slow journalism, long reads, and

yes, even the resurrection of festina lent and a renewed faith in the codex. To Craig

Mod, this dislocation has precipitated a small countermovement, a desire to do

real stu with our hands, a renewed momentum around craft and physicality.25

23.Library of the Printed Web

24.Alexis Madrigal, 'The Year the Stream Crested', The Atlantic

25.Craig Mod, 'The Digital-Physical: On Building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives'

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I see this sentiment among a loose cohort of early adopters of the web, among whom

I would count myself, who in our pioneer enthusiasms arrived at a kind of

saturation point with screens, who have caught glimpses of the limits of what the

digital can, cant and wont do. And I believe that while some of those frontiers

represent the limits of our technological capacities at the moment, at least some of

those frontiers also run along the blurry edges of what it means to be human itself.

Yet this is not a call to retrogression. Again, I think its an error to think in terms of

zero-sum. Rather, its precisely those in whom this unease is evoked who should be,

in a way, most obligated to pack their bags and head to the frontiers of the uncanny.

We cyborgs and media ip-oppers are the ones who should be running our ngers

along those edges, probing and pressing to see what gives and what needs to stay. A

dance, a ip-op, if you will, between the abstraction of the digital and the

physicality of the analogue. Or perhaps to repurpose Francis Bacon for the 21st

century, between the analogue hand and the digital intellectfor as he said so long

ago, Nec manus, nisi intellectus, sibi permissus, multum valent. Neither hand nor

intellect left each to itself is worth very much.

We need hybrid, cyborg, ip-op imaginings, to imagine the frontier world of digital

print which will suit us as pioneers, scholars, as readers, as writers, as teachers and

studentsbut also, to know where our edges are, as humans.

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V.II. Little DH

I owe the term little DH to a dear friend, cyborg and colleague of mine, Konrad

Lawson, with whom I ran a digital humanities workshop at Harvard a couple of

years ago, along with another cyborg compadre, Javier Cha.26 We were talking about

how to get the fearful and the self-consciously untech-savvy to get on board with our

scheme to have a wide conversation about the digital humanities. And Konrad

suggested that we make a distinction between big DH, which I think at the time he

characterised as big scary code and mathematical graphs and stu, and little

DH, which were the daily practices of scholars, researchers, students and teachers

whose creative practices were being enriched by the advent of new technologies of

writing, reading, archiving and note-taking. (I should say that Konrad, a historian, is

also an accomplished coder himself, and no fearful rabbit when it comes to Big DH. )

At any rate, I nd the distinction a useful one, because I think it is a good indicator of

the scale and scope of the digital humanities revolution.

26.The Historian's Craft in the 21st Century

29

Technology has utterly transformed the way historians work. We now have an array

of tools which are altering the thought environments in which historians write, take

notes, conduct research, collaborate and communicate with each other. The frontier

in Little DH is tool culture, squarely in the eld of praxis: the proliferation of apps,

software, methodologies and hacks for writing, reading, productivity, project and

time management, archiving, and teaching. These are being innovated and

developed every day, although not reliably in conversation with humanists.

The way we approach our sources has changed. Digitisation lets us root through

archives, primary and secondary literature from the comfort of our homes (sofas). Or

we perform blitzkrieg-like raids on archives, armed with personal camerasI own

huge swathes of British Foreign Oce les in a device the size of my thumb.

The way we are reading is under decisive transformation: thanks to the contributions

of Google Books and other mass repository-scanning endeavours, it is becoming

entirely possible for one to conduct research without setting foot in an actual

library, and this was simply unthinkable and impossible even just 10 years ago.

The web is encrusted with writing, collaborative editing and citation software tools

that have revolutionised the way we write and cite: Scrivener, Ommwriter, Google

Docs, Mendeley, Papers, Zotero, Refworks, Sente and so on.

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The way we communicate and create academic communities has changed. Twitter,

for example, has helped to democratise the hierarchies between professor and

student, between the eminent scholar and the breathless fanboy and fangirl. It has

become a conference backchannel, a space for generating sparks of contact,

collaboration and encounter that were simply impossible before.

The way we take notes is dierent. Keith Thomas, the great historian of early

modern England, wrote in the LRB some time ago about what he refers charmingly

to as his dinosaur practices. His notetaking habits were rened in an era of

handwriting, typewriters, carbon-copies, and yes, scissors. He would write out

quotes and facts on slips of paper, or literally gut sections of books with his scissors,

and stu them into topical envelopes. Filing, he wrote mournfully, was for him a

tedious activitybundles of unsorted notes accumulate. Some of them get loose and

blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion. It

would be unthinkable, he said, to transfer his lifetime of slips of paper, his cellar,

stued with cardboard boxes and dog-eared folders, and littered with loose slips

which have broken free from overstued envelopes to wiki software that can be

used to develop a personal research database."27

27.Keith Thomas, 'Diary', LRB

31

I think this raises an interesting question about the extent to which technological

changes are not only making obsolete certain entrenched practices of discipline or

eld, but perhaps also devaluing skills and abilities which society has once

honoured.

And this is not just happening in history or even the humanities, of course. As Isaac

Kohane at the Harvard Medical School put it, Who today is the better doctorthe

one who can remember more diagnostic tests? or the one who is the quickest and most

savvy at online searching for the relevant tests? Does bedside manner really matter

more than the ability to interact competently with a database? We are going to be

uncomfortable, he said, with some of the answers to these questions for many

years to come.28

No coincidence, by the way, that Kohane is a paediatric endocrinologist, a PhD in

computer science, and a librarian. Another cyborg.

28.Isaac Kohane, quoted in Jonathan Shaw, 'Gutenberg 2.0'

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Cyborg experimenters know where the edges are. Take the case of the creation of

online scholarly communities, which is where little DH has also had a huge impact.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the author of a wonderful book on publishing and the future of

the academy has been a huge advocate of the opportunities of web to create and

build scholarly communities.29 She has worked tirelessly to enunciate these views

both in theory and in practice. And thats why it is people like her who are most

aware of the challenges and limitations, the edges of technology.

She wrote about the example of Twitter, which developed a huge academic user base

during its early years, roughly 2007-2012 or so, but which recently has seen a

palpable falling-o of scholars and writers who were once very active on twitter, and

have now begun withdrawing. In most cases, they've been impelled to silence by the

ways in which technologies have not adjusted to correctly accommodate the scales at

which scholars want to communicate with each other and with their audiences.

Here's Frank Chimero, a self-confessed "early adopter", writer and designer:

Heres the frustration: if youve been on Twitter a while, its changed out from under you.

Christopher Alexander made a great diagram, a spectrum of privacy: street to sidewalk to

porch to living room to bedroom. I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch our

space, our friends, with the occasional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we

gained followers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street.

29.Blog and book, Planned Obsolescence

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And became what Alan Jacobs, a humanities professor at Baylor, called "Big Twitter".

"I just want to sit here on the porch and have a nice chat with my friends and

neighbors," he said. "But wait. Im not on the porch anymore. Im in the middle of

Broadway. So Im doing what, it seems to me, many people are doing: Im getting

out of the street."

This is a problem, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick correctly says, not with technology itself,

but with its human edges: with the social systems and interactions that have

developed around it. If we are going to take full advantage of the aordances that

digital networks provide facilitating forms of scholarly communication from those

as seemingly simple as the tweet to those as complex as the journal article, the

monograph, and their born-digital descendantswe must focus as much on the

social challenges that these networks raise as we do on the technical or nancial

challenges.30 And I think this holds true for technology as a whole.

30.Kathleen Fitzpatrick

34

A last thought for Little DH. Ive also been thinking here of Andrew Abbotts recent

book Digital Paper, which is an incredible primer, manual and a practitioners

meditation on doing research in a digital-analogue world.31 The biggest takeaway

from that book, though, is that however much you master the digital, there is no

machine shortcut. Writing and research are still slow, iterative, circular, artisanal

practices, full of cul-de-sacs and unavoidable ip-ops between the digital, the

analogue, and the limitations of your own mental and physical faculties.

Intellectually, research will continue to be a somewhat mysterious process of piecing

together insights from being immersed in your sources. Logistically, it will continue

to be a fundamental battle against the ever-present entropy and erosion of biological

memory and the integrity of your physical and virtual ling systems. The digital, it

turns out, does not "cure" this state of aairs, and it isnt even clear if it is something

that needs curing. Apparently, even at the edge between digital and paper, this is

just still how humans create researched things.

31.Andrew Abbott, Digital Paper (2014).

35

V.III. Big DH

What Konrad and I think of as Big DH has been the more visible, exciting and

well-funded realms of the digital humanities, characterised above all by the shift to

the macro-scale: a function of the explosion of data and the tools with which to

analyse it. Big DH projects are frontier celebrations of new scales in humanities

projects: new abilities to derive sensible patterns out of the data of the past through

practices of distant reading.

Big DH appears to be nearly all frontier. With new methodologies like geographic

information systems, text mining, topic modelling, social network analysis and data

visualisation tools, we are able now to read patterns across enormous datasets of

land, language, people and social groupings, letters, shipping routes, climate trends

and more. These have until now been simply beyond the scope of a single person.

We also have new curation and archiving capabilities, new scanning and digitization

practices.

These tools are being developed in the wake of an undeniable information explosion

of our digital age. We live in a world today where physical space is no longer a

relevant or even possible constraint on the amount of information that is being

produced and stored.

36

No one knows how much data there is out there, and some estimates suggest that

90% of all data in the world today has been created in just the past few years. If you

were to print out Wikipedia alone, you would have around 2000 Encyclopedia

Britannica-sized volumes. Someone printed out the edits to the entry on the Iraq War

from 2004 to 2009, and that came to 12 volumes on its own. In the 15 minutes

between now and the end of my talk, 720 hours of Youtube videos will be uploaded,

Google will have received 30 million search inquiries, Twitter will grow by 1.5

million tweets, and we will have sent an additional 3 billion emails. We can't even

begin to print this, let alone comprehend it.

More and more archives are being digitized, and they are enabling scholarship and

lines of inquiry that we would never have thought feasible. We now have an

astonishing range of Big DH projects.

37

One of the most established and richest ones is the Republic of Letters project at

Stanford, which traces the networks of correspondence, scholarly community and

intellectual exchange in the world of Enlightenment France.32 We have network

representations of the Dutch Republic of Letters,33 data visualizations and interactive

web animations of the Atlantic slave trade,34 intimate social network visualizations of

life in an eighteenth century French village,35 GIS maps of the spatial patterns of

modern urban cultural change in Republican China,36 incredible soundmaps of 1920s

New York,37 and more.

32.Republic of Letters

33.Scott Weingart, 'The Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th Century Dutch Republic'

34.The Atlantic Networks Project

35.Angouleme in 1764

36.A Historical GIS Dataset of Urban Cultures in Republican Beijing

37.The Roaring Twenties

38

I also love the Old Bailey Trial archive, where the visualization of large-scale

patterns in nearly 200,000 pages of criminal court proceedings from early 19th

century London have enabled historians to investigate lines of inquiry which are

fundamentally dierent from those they had been pursuing earlier, because

historians have until now been focused on the sparser and therefore more humanly

manageable archive of the 18th century.38

As more and more of our data is born digital, these tools and early frontier

explorations will and must become part of the landscape of the historian's craft. For

quite apart from opening up new ways of examining old historical material, it will be

impossible for historians of the future to curate, preserve and understand the

historical material we are producing at astronomical rates in the late 20th and early

21st centuries without them. Historians must retool.

That's the frontier. What is the edge?

38.Old Bailey Trial Archives: With Criminal Intent

39

At least one edge is in the attened, deceptively inclusive "we".

There are over 7 billion people on the planet, and of that 7 billion, 4.4 billion of them,

or 62%, are not online. 84% of the US has internet access, but that's still 50 million

Americans who are not actually part of the "we" that data scientists talk about, when

they say "we live in a hyperconnected, networked, all-access world". An

overwhelming percentage of those 50 million oine Americans are - just like the rest

of the global oine population - rural, low income, illiterate, female.39 Global

internet penetration is a mere 15% in places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria,

maybe 20% in Egypt, Philippines, and Thailand. 15-18% in Indonesia, the largest

Muslim country in the world with a population of 250 million.

39.Pew Research Internet Project; Report by McKinsey & Co, 'Oine and falling behind: Barriers to Internet adoption', , accessed September 2014.

40

The "we" embodied in that iconic global phenomenon, Wikipedia, masks the fact that

it is a phenomenally gendered enterprise -- its content creators and knowledge

producers are 80% male. It is also disproportionately Anglo-American. Here is a

chart of Wikipedia articles correlated with world population, and as you can see, the

situation for Asia versus Europe is starkly reversed: Asia represents 60% of the

world's population and less than 10% of Wikipedia's articles, while Europe

represents about 11% of the world's population and nearly 60% of Wikipedia articles.

In terms of proportion, North America punches way above its weight in terms of

ratio of population to number of articles.

And as the studies by Mark Graham at the Oxford Internet Institute have shown, the

Middle East and North African (MENA) regions are astonishingly unrepresented:

with only about 260,000 articles in Arabic out of 9 million total Wikipedia articles,

few languages have more speakers and fewer Wikipedia articles than Arabic. As

Mark Graham says, "This relative lack of MENA voice and representation means that

the tone and content of this globally useful resource, in many cases, is being

determined by outsiders with a potential misunderstanding of the signicance of

local events, sites of interest and historical gures."40

40.Mark Graham, 'How Well Represented is the MENA Region in Wikipedia?'

41

In other words, a kind of Orientalism for the digital age. Edward Said, we are not

done with you.41

It turns out that despite the promises of the openness and egalitarian spirit of the

web, despite the supposed ubiquity of data and the "everything is available" rhetoric

of the internet, the online and oine worlds are not separate. As Astra Taylor said,

the digital is not distinct from 'real life', it's not a realm where analogue prejudices

are somehow magically abandoned."42

The massive digital archives of our recent past will require as much critical reading

as our non-digital archives. Maybe even more so, given the pernicious promise of big

data methodologies to allow us to eortlessly read everything - but really, only the

everything that is digitally available. Historians, probably especially historians of

the non-Western, non-English-speaking world, know that many archives of our non-

digital distant past will never see the light of digitization. And, in an age of big

digital data, that this may well scale up into histories we will never write, the

attention will never pay, and the empathy we will never cultivate, to the dark,

analogue edges of available human knowledge.

41.Edward Said, Orientalism. "The Orient and Islam have a kind of extra-real, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western

expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself."

42.Astra Taylor, The People's Platform, p. 108.

42

I am reminded of what Samuel Arbesman said about dinosaurs.43 In 1858 the rst

known American dinosaur was found in New Jersey, the hadrosaurus. This sparked

what is hilariously called the Bone Wars, the great dinosaur rush: a period of intense

speculation, exploration and discovery roughly 1877-1892 during the American

gilded age. Huge amounts of work were undertaken primarily at two dig sites: the

Hell Creek formation in Montana and Como Blu in Wyoming, chosen mostly

because there were just so many fossils there, and they were really easy to work at.

And the dinosaurs that were easiest to nd in these two places were: the

stegosaurus, the triceratops, and the tyrannosaurus rex.

Today, these dinosaurs have a disproportionately large presence in our collective

knowledge, not because theyre the most "important", but because they were the

most available: they are the "convenience sample". Convenience samples proliferate in

a data economy that aspires to innite convenience: information wherever and

whenever you need it. But will we be in increasing danger of making too much out

of the low-hanging fruit? As you hear the latest claim about big data and its

promise, its OK to be excitedjust keep in mind that we may be nding the

triceratops, and thinking we understand everything there is to know about

dinosaurs.

43.Samuel Arbesman, The Half-Life of Facts. See also Samuel Arbesman, 'Big Data: Mind the Gaps',

43

What do we know about humanity? At the heady frontiers of the age of

informational convenience, do we wish to care about its inconvenient and less

available edges? Can we? Should we?

V.IV. Digital Futures

This brings me to our digital futures, and to the can and the should. The frontier, and

the edge.

When I watch videos of tech conferences these days, Im sometimes reminded of

what Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, supposedly used to say: I only do

kernel space. I dont do user space.44 I watch talks from computer scientists

showcasing their inventions and amazing feats of data interpretation and I see how

widespread this is. We can recognise your face from this bunch of blurred pixels

using new techniques of compressed sensing and machine learning classication; we

can predict your gender, your race, your political leanings, your sexuality, based on

basic linguistic and network analytics; we can spread happiness and sadness through

micronudging Facebook user feeds.

44.Quoted in Tim Carmody, 'Memory to Myth',

44

Yes we can. Should we? Shoulds arise out of politics, of ethics, of philosophy - out of

sustained conversation, of reection on and investigation of ourselves as a society.

As eminent tech journalist Doc Searls put it, politics is in user space. Justice is in

user space.

Thesis #1. User space is the domain of the humanities.

45

When he said that, Doc Searls was speaking from a place of profound sadness and

disquiet: a memorial service for a remarkable man called Aaron Swartz, who hanged

himself on 11 January 2013. Aaron was a cyborg: a computer programmer, a political

activist, a moral philosopher, writer, business entrepreneur, an architect of social and

technological standards for sharing information, a reader and writer of extraordinary

range. All his life, he fought battles which spanned both kernel and user space. He

played, for example, a critical role in the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act and

Protect Intellectual Property Acts in 2012 that posed a fundamental threat to internet

freedoms; he lead an unprecedented wave of citizen activism that, as he put it,

killed the bill dead, so dead that when members of Congress propose something now that eventouches the Internet, they have to give a long speech beforehand about how it is denitely notlike SOPA; so dead that when you ask congressional staers about it, they groan and shaketheir heads like it's all a bad dream they're trying really hard to forget; so dead that it's kindof hard to believe this story, hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing, hardto remember how this could have gone any other way.45

45.Aaron Swartz

46

Finally, he fought the battle of why only certain people at certain well-funded

institutions got to read online scholarship which was in theory funded by

everybody. He wrote scripts to download something like 4.8 million journal articles

from behind JStors paywallsnot exactly to distribute them freely, as his

prosecutors would later argue based on a legally ungenerous reading of Aaron's

infamous Open Access Guerrilla Manifesto, but simply to make a point.46 And he lost

this battle, though others have taken up his war. Faced with 13 felony charges, the

prospect of $1 million in nes and 35 years in prison, he was hounded by the FBI for

two years, literally, to his death. He was 26.

That is why Doc Searls said, at that memorial service: justice is in user space. And

that is why Aaron's long-term partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauman asked the

audience at that memorial service the profoundly uncomfortable hard question

lurking at the centre of Aarons story: If youre in the tech sector," she said, "why

are you there? What do you really believe in? If you believe that technology is

making the world a better place, why do you believe that? Do you really understand

what makes the world a bad place to begin with?

Thesis #2. Uncomfortable hard questions are the domain of the humanities.

46.Aaron Swartz, 'Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto' . For a nuanced account of the

prosecution, watch the excellent posthumous documentary on Aaron, The Internet's Own Boy

47

All technology has its ip-sides, its dystopian edges. In all places and times,

technology has been created which was put to uses never intended by their

originators: their Janus-like quality is written deeply into their nature as tools.

Yes, Twitter enabled the Arab spring, but Twitter also enabled #gamergate and the

victimisation of online women.

Yes, the web has allowed small businesses like Etsy to achieve an international reach

previously unthinkable, but it also confers the same advantages to identity thieves in

a world of poorly-managed corporate security.

Yes, social media has enabled photo sharing, instantaneous and always-on

communication and other connectivities we have never known before. But our very

connectedness has enabled a surveillance state much more thorough than any

government could have dreamed of during the Cold War, and surveillance has

become the business model on which the internet rests.47

47.Mike Loukides, 'The Computing of Distrust'

48

The end-to-end design of the networks that make up the internet, in a way, produce

its neutrality. The network is value-neutral or content agnostic in its treatment of

packets of data that move across it, because it in eect leaves it to the applications

located at the networks ends to determine how the data should be interpreted. The

trouble is that, of course, the content of what passes over the networks is not value

neutral. Its not the bits and bytes - its not the digital - but what comes out and gets

interpreted, judged and valued in an analogue interface that really matters.

Thesis #3. Value, judgment and interpretation are the domain of the humanities.

Yet the amount of data that is passing over the network has meant that increasingly,

we are relying, have to rely, on algorithms to make those judgments and

interpretations for us. Google tells me these search results are most relevant;

Facebook tells me that these are the most important posts today in my feed.

But what is relevance? What is importance?

49

We are, as Zeynep Tufekci said, entering the era of judging machines: machines that

calculate not just how to quickly sort a database, or perform a mathematical

calculation, but to decide what is best, relevant, appropriate, or harmful.'

Such algorithms will improve our lives innitely for the better. We want better

algorithmic and statistical interpretation of metadata in clinical studies. It will help

us to predict who, for example, will respond badly or well to new cancer drugs. With

algorithmic pattern-matching, Google can predict with astonishing accuracy an

impending u outbreak simply by analysing frequency of searches conducted

around common u symptoms.

50

But these algorithms also confer enormous powers. They permit depersonalized

personalization. Micro-targeted advertising based on macro-scale trend

aggregations. Target knowing you're pregnant, and sending you vouchers for

discount diapers. Who is in charge when algorithms are in charge? "Algorithmic

judgment," Tufecki observes, "is the uncanny valley of computing."48 Google's auto-

completion algorithms, in their earnest attempts to be helpful, auto-complete search

queries that begin "women should..." with "stay at home", "be slaves" or "be in the

kitchen". Through the work of algorithmic judgment, Google ends up aggregating

and perpetuating awful stereotypes.49 And it is the fault of everyone and no one at

the same time.

And the dark side of personalization is discrimination. The algorithms which will

tell you which cancer drugs to take can also help, for example, credit companies

predict your racial prole simply from things which someone like you tends to buy,

and can deny you loans or adjust your credit on the basis of this information.50 In this

way, the algorithmic, depersonalised use of data can become a highly personal civil

rights issue.

48.Zeynep Tufecki, 'The Year We Get Creeped Out By Algorithms'

49.'Google's Autocompletion: Algorithms, Stereotypes and Accountability'

50.Alistair Croll, 'Big Data is our Generation's Civil Rights Issue And We Don't Know It'

51

Thesis #4. Civil rights issues are the domain of the humanities.

There is something deeply abstractive about the digital world, something dierently

bodied. Humans don't do well with innity. Distance and scale create new ways of

reading patterns in our lives beyond our individual comprehension. Over time, they

divulge patterns of cultural migration, of economic exchange, of the spread of

epidemics and other meaningful aggregations of societys ows and movements. But

they also mask, even distort, the textures and scales at which we live our actual lives.

I love the way Scott Weingart put it in his talk on the Networked Society in at the

DH Forum in Kansas last year.

When you zoom out far enough, everything looks the same. Occupy Wall Street; FergusonRiots; the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge; the Iranian Revolution. Theyre all just grassroots con-tagion eects across a social network. Rhetorically, presenting everything as a massive net-work is the same as photographing the earth from four billion miles: beautiful, sobering, andhomogenizing...

I challenge you to compare network visualizations of Ferguson Tweets with the ALS IceBucket Challenge, and see if you can make out any dierences.

I couldnt. We need to zoom in to make meaning.51

Thesis #5. Meaning is the domain of the humanities.

51.Scott Weingart, 'The Moral Role of DH in a data-driven world'

52

At this point, I am about to run the risk of making an egregious and unwarranted

Leap. But we have already run my starting heuristic so far into the realm of

indulgence that I feel I need only ask for an iota more of your patience.

Thesis #6. If the sciences are at the digital frontier of the humanities, maybe the

humanities are at the analogue edge of the sciences.

And I would say that this, here, is a qualitatively dierent meaning of the digital

humanities: which is to say, the question of how to be human, and conceptualize

(and ensure) humanity's human-ness in a digital world. Being, in other words, digital

humans. Its not what we traditionally think of as DH; it's certainly not what DH

departments are putting in their job notices. But let us extend our tactical umbrella

just a little further. Because I believe there are few things more critical to a liberal arts

education, and to being a citizen in our networked world.

So now we are back to C. P. Snow, and his unease with a bifurcated world. And we

are back to the question I began with. Students, why do you want education;

teachers, why do you educate?

53

VI. Heuristic provocations

In our world today, we live strung out between the digital and the analogue, the

online and oine world, the fast and the slow, the bodied and the dierently-

bodied, the machine and the human. The lines between these are less clear today

than they have ever been. We are past the dominion of what Bruce Sterling called

steam-snorting wonders of the Victorian age. We are past the age of massive

infrastructural projects and atomic energy programs of the mid twentieth century. In

our world, our technologies "stick to the skin.52 They serve as proxies for, and may

eventually become indistinguishable from, our minds and our bodies.

Marx composed these words in precisely that age of steam-snorting wonders.

Technology, he said, "discloses mans mode of dealing with Nature, the process of

production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of

formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that ow from

them.53

How much truer, in this, our great age of unbelievably intimate technologies.

52.Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades.

53.Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I, Chapter 15.

54

We cant aord to draw lines between ourselves as scientists vs humanists, between

kernel-space and user-space, the online and the oine, the can and the should. We

live in a blurred and blurring realm between the digital and the analogue, and we

must make our way through it, understand it, live it, and eventually, determine what

it can, should and should not become. And to do so, we all need to become cyborgs.

So I say to you, the student, that the purpose of an education is to become a cyborg, a

digital human, and I say to you the educator among whom I now, very recently,

count myself that the purpose of an education, in fact its duty, is to produce

cyborgs.

Let me go back to what Craig Mod said about technology.54

I believe technological change is like a freight train of a certain unstoppable momentum, and

we have two broad choices:

1. Stubbornly stand in front of the train and try to push it back

2. Accept the train and be a force laying railroad ties which place it on a nourishing course.

The right course of action is #2. But in order to be those engineers of our future, we

need to be humanists and scientists, ip-oppers, cyborgs.

54.Craig Mod, 'About'

55

To see the frontiers, to make the unexpected connections, to drive innovation. We cannot

know the landscape of the future. And it's probably a mistake to think that a college

education should guarantee that future in any way. Nothing intrinsic to a marketing

degree from 1990 could have prepared its graduate for the world of social media. Nothing

in Keith Thomas's history PhD prepared him for the wiki. There was no such thing as a

data journalist or data scientist 10 years ago. We do not know what dreams may come.

Being exible, and living on the frontier, gives you an edge. It's good business sense.

But we also need to patrol the edges of our humanity.

To guide the direction of the unstoppable train of big data to the right, ethical places.

To guide the development of the book, the new architectures of our scholarship, the

modes of our audience engagement -- to place these on nourishing courses, which ensure

that the qualities we value in them translate into new environments.

To innovate and develop technologies which are in line with values society wants to hold.

Perhaps these, then, are the 'new liberal arts': the arts that all men and women can and

should know, if they are to be free humans in a digital world. Let the generation of

Manfred Clyneses, ip-oppers and cyborgs be raised now, in this incredible space

between the digital and the analogue. Let the generation of the in-betweeners begin our

dominion, for we are inheriting the earth.

56