ITH - Centrum för studier av IT ur ett
humanvetenskapligt perspektiv och
Center for Collaborative Innovation vid Högskolan i Borås
8:2
[Artiklarna är sparade som PDF]
- Editorial: Towards a Digital Humanities
Base
- Lena Karlsson
Acts of Reading Diary
Weblogs [Refereed article]
- Eva Kingsepp
Immersive Historicity in
World War II Digital Games
[Refereed article]
- Dong-Hee Shin WITHDRAWN ON THE
AUTHOR'S REQUEST
Information Technology
for Community Development
Broadband Public Networks
Computers and the
Humanities passed away about a
year ago. The journal’s final issue (#38.4) marks the closure
of an impressive and immensely important forum in the
development of humanities computing, spanning almost four
decades. Browsing through its tables of contents gives you a
fair idea of the tremendous width, depth and growth of this
cross-disciplinary field over the years. Joseph Raben and the
other editors of Computers and the Humanities have
significantly shaped this field, along with its journal
‘sibling’ Literary and Linguistic Computing and their
respective affiliations, ACH (The Association for Computers
and the Humanities) and ALLC (The Association for
Literary and Linguistic Computing).
Interestingly, the
closing down of the journal seemed to trigger the immediate
need for an heir (which makes you wonder as to the rationale
of the closing decision in the first place), and quite soon
the birth of a new journal was announced: Digital
Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), its first issue being
scheduled for release in March 2006. The launching of DHQ is
timely and symptomatic for at least three reasons. Firstly,
its prompted launch suggests the vitality of the field and the
continuing need for publishing arenas, where Human IT
hopes to make at least a Nordic mark. Secondly, the decision
to launch DHQ as a peer reviewed open access journal is a
response to the vital international ‘open’ movement, to which
Human IT has committed itself since 1997. Thirdly, the
very name of the new journal reflects a current trend to
designate this scholarly field as ‘digital humanities’ (rather
than, say, ‘humanities computing’). Note for instance how
Blackwell’s publication last year of the 600-page and perhaps
most impressive scholarly anthology of the field for years was
entitled A Companion to Digital Humanities.
If digital humanities
has come to be a recognised field historically and
internationally, with fairly established communities, journals
and conferences, its position in Sweden has been less clear
and its acting members relatively few and much more loosely
organised than is the case internationally (this was by the
way the propelling force to launch Human IT in the
first place). As an amending initative, a national conference
for digital humanities, Digitala Dimensioner (Digital
Dimensions), was organised in Uppsala in 2003, its perhaps
chief objective being to bring Swedish digital humanities
scholars together. Several of its papers and presentations
were published and reported in Human IT #6.4. Two years
later, 17-18 January 2005, a sequel was organised by HumLab at
the university of Umeå in the scenic north of Sweden (and a
third conference is scheduled for 2007 at Blekinge Institute
of Technology in southern Sweden). Den teknologiska
texturen (The Technological Texture) was a well attended
and equally well organised two-day conference in the inspiring
digital humanities laboratory facilities of HumLab, and the
present Human IT issue is proud to include two lengthy
articles that stem from presentations at this conference, both
of which have been subjected to subsequent peer review and are
published in the refereed section of the journal.
Lena Karlsson,
firstly, reports from her large investigation of diary
bloggers, where she for years has observed, surveyed and
interviewed a large numbers of bloggers of mainly Chinese
descent in the US and Australia. Drawing on the sociological
school of genre theory (rather than the linguistic or literary
schools), she aims at an understanding of the social role of
diary weblogs, how readers engage with the blog and how they
seem to conceive of the genre. Karlsson particularly
highlights the relation between its writers and readers, the
function of the diary weblog vis-à-vis the offline diary or
the other blog genres, and the characteristics of its
audiences and producers. I write ‘audience’ and ‘producers’
here, because in searching for the genre and media
affiliations of the diary weblog, Karlsson points to
similarities between its logic and that of the TV soap. One
further notes her observation that the diary weblog does not
at all exhibit the much spoken-of interactivity to the degree
that blog theory generally and almost by compulsion attributes
to blogs. The weblog diary is a hybrid genre, she concludes,
rather than a remediated or emerging one.
Eva Kingsepp’s
article, secondly, bears some
affinity to Karlsson’s in that it discusses remediation and
users’ engagement with digital genres. It also continues what
has come to be a prominent theme in Human IT: digital
game studies. In brief, Kingsepp looks at computer and video
World War II games, and in particular the crucial issues of
immersion, simulation and representation, where the fresh
concept of ‘immersive historicity’ is central to her
discussion. The games enable users to reenact history while
being able to change its outcome. Kingsepp picks up a couple
of threads from Bolter and Grusin’s book on remediation to
spin a fascinating web around WWII games, noting for instance
how sound signs are used to create immediacy. She also
suggests Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality and simulacra
as analytical tools in WWII game studies, as these games
display simulations that do not represent an artefactual
reality but rather a mythological conception of reality. At
the conference presentation, someone in the audience suggested
that the users of these games will end up with a twisted sense
of history as a result of the set of potential variants, one
as ‘real’ or plausible as the other. Personally, I would
hesitate to ascribe such an automatical ahistoricity to users.
On the contrary, the games might trigger users to get
acquainted with “the real” history and to find out what indeed
happened during WWII.
This issue is also
happy to include a third article, by Dong-Hee Shin, on
the implementation of broadband public networks in the US.
Using theories and concepts from the SCOT tradition (Social
Construction of Technology), as formed by Wiebe Bijker and
others, Shin focuses on how the implementation was perceived
and framed by users, agents and relevant stakeholders. Who
gets to decide and have a say in this kind of major changes in
the technological infrastructural landscape, and how do the
different actors’ perspectives and preferences match one
another? SCOT studies have so far rarely looked at ICT
artefacts, and this article attempts to contribute to SCOT
empirically while also discussing its theoretical
underpinnings from a critical point of view.
Let me for the
remainder of this editorial provide an overview of the rest of
the Umeå conference (web site at
<http://www2.humlab.umu.se/TT2005/default.htm>).
The idea was to bring
junior and senior digital humanities researchers together in a
non-intimidating setting, and this was certainly accomplished.
Several of the presenters were quite young researchers, while
senior researchers provided subsequent discussions, chats and
networking in an amicable and constructive manner. The
programme and events were varied both content-wise and
format-wise, with e.g. art events breaking up the more
traditional offers. Not least appreciated was an occasion
where both students and researchers at HumLab presented
posters and project demos, and where the conference attendants
were given the opportunity to stroll between, interact with
and play with recent technology stations. The sight of
an elderly humanities professor turning to an eager 10 year
old kid in front of a haptic interface reinforces the
observation that we would do well to find more ways to
technological insights by engaging and indeed playing with the
technology.
A handful of widely
acclaimed international scholars in digital humanities were
invited to the conference. Jay Bolter (Georgia Institute of
Technology) presented a talk that continued his excellent 2003
paper on theory and practice in new media studies, and called
for a more thorough technical understanding, beyond the mass
media understanding, of new media. The key, Bolter claimed, is
to focus on the materiality of new media and to lay a firmer
ground for materiality studies while avoiding the obvious
essentialistic or deterministic traps. Jeffrey Schnapp
(Stanford University) suggested that the humanities maintain
its interpretive, critical scholarship and bring it to ICT
studies to complement the retrieval and infrastructural
scholarship so far dominant within digital scholarship. I
think this strikes a cord with John Unsworth’s comment in his
2005 Lyman Award talk that a hallmark of humanistic research
is that it opens up and explores problems rather than
supplies definitive solutions to them, and with Bolter’s 2003
distinction between pragmatic and critical theory. Schnapp
further noted that institutions such as HumLab (both the one
in Umeå and the one with the same name at Stanford) can help
dissolve the unfortunate distinction between applied and
theoretical research. Henry Jenkins’ (Massachusetts Institute
of Technology) humorous and catchy talk was a sample from his
forthcoming book on media convergence. “You can’t just think
of and discuss digital media,” Jenkins noted, “but need
to think of them and traditional media together, in
convergence.” This will help avoiding what Jenkins called the
black box fallacy – the idea that all media will amalgamate
into one box. Convergence will rather be an interplay between
older and new media: a process, not a product. Further, I
appreciated Jenkins’ observation that where films produce
stories while TV produces persons and characters, cross-media
produce worlds and settings. At the end of the conference,
Jenkins engaged in a debate with Espen Aarseth (IT University
of Copenhagen) on computer game studies. The debate was
recorded by the organisers and can still be streamed at
<http://www2.humlab.umu.se/events/arkiv/streamat.htm>. As
we’re talking about digital humanities, I noted Jenkins’
comment that American film studies have suffered from too much
distance from the production world and fan world of films.
This is partly the result of a deliberate detachment on the
behalf of scholarly film studies in an effort to attain
academic status by imitating literary and art scholarship.
Computer game studies are thus warned, if I read Jenkins
correctly.
The majority of the
presenters were Swedish. Patrik Svensson, head of HumLab and
the conference, opened up the events by addressing the rather
marginal position digital humanities has in Sweden. Students
are e.g. seldom given the chance to play an active role in the
creative processes when implementing ICT in education, but are
seen as mere recipients. Similarly, ICT units at universities
are regarded as little more than service units, while Svensson
suggested they be more integrated in R&D. ICT itself, finally,
should be regarded not as mere tools but as research objects
in themselves to a much higher degree than is currently the
case. Magnus Bergquist (Göteborg University) presented his
research on open source culture (including open access and
creative commons) and concentrated his talk both on the
historical roots of open source culture and on how the public
sector increasingly has come to embrace it. Helena Francke (UC
of Borås) gave us equal amounts of empirical and theoretical
observations from her ongoing dissertation work that includes
looking at open access journals, their structure, texture and
architecture. She made valuable distinctions between
information architecture and document architecture, as well as
a clever suggestion that layout is part structure and part
texture. Erik Stolterman (Umeå University) talked about
philosophical aspects of technology. Referring to Virilio’s
famous statement that every technology carries its own
disaster, Stolterman discussed the hidden rationalities in
technologies, be they conceived as deterministic or socially
constructed.
Compared to the 2003
conference in Uppsala, this was a considerably more
international event. A significant proportion of the
attendants were from abroad, all the talks and discussions
were in English, and a definite majority of the comments,
questions and follow-ups after the presentations were made by
the foreign guests, making the perspectives and comparisons
international rather than national. Perhaps the young Swedish
audience was, after all, somewhat intimidated by the presence
of the invited guests. While I certainly appreciate the
benefits of inviting names such as Bolter and Jenkins and
having the Swedish scholars engage with them in discussions,
questions and chats, one could not help observing how the
national perspective thereby was put in the background.
Considering the origins and stated purposes of the conference,
this was a little unfortunate. All in all however, this was a
pleasant conference with several thought-through talks and
comments. Many thanks are due to HumLab and its indefatigable
head, Patrik Svensson, for the successful conference and for
their impressive efforts to push digital humanities ahead in
Sweden. Despite Svensson’s somewhat gloomy but probably
correct assertion of the current state of Swedish digital
humanities, there were clear indications of increasing depth
and breadth at the conference, and reasons to be quite
cheerful in anticipation of the follow-up conference in 2007.
In the meantime, we will always have Human IT.
Borås in
February 2006
Mats Dahlström
References
Bolter, Jay David (2003). “Theory and Practice in New Media
Studies.” Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and
Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains. Ed. Gunnar
Liestøl, Andrew Morrison & Terje Rasmussen. 15–33.
Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin (1999). Remediation:
Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jenkins, Henry (forthcoming). Convergence Culture: Where
Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press.
Scheduled for release August 2006.
Unsworth, John (2005). New Methods for Humanities Research.
National Humanities Center. Webcast talk at the Richard W.
Lyman Award Reception. <http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/newsrel2005/prunsworthwebcast.htm>
