Digital Humanities describes a distinct approach to the humanities field, routed in technology but also the principles of public scholarship. It is a malleable term encompassing a broad range of methods and practices, with voices in the field often keenly describing it more in terms of ‘doing’ than ‘thinking’ (as is the language more generally used in the more traditional humanities). Emphasis in the digital humanities is often the medium: from studying and critiquing the material of the digital humanities, using digital tools and applying computational methods to humanistic study. The importance of this work is in recognising data structuring is political and its central intellectual problem then becomes how we algorthimise or digitalise a world that is infinitely human – fluid, evolving and subjective.
I think the way you crystallise what seems to be one of the central points of contention in DH, ‘how we algorthimise or digitalise a world that is infinitely human – fluid, evolving and subjective’, was really well put! It made me think about this PhD project from a student at the University of Virginia called ‘The Ghost in the MP3’. Essentially he takes the music file format of MP3 (the file format most music has been and continues to be shared and streamed in) and analyses the sounds that are lost when music files are compressed and turned into an MP3 from its original studio recording format. He also notes that the engineers who created this file format were all western European men, and that it was designed around their ears and listening tastes. He uses these lost sounds to make new compositions and highlight the musical and scientific complexities of file compression technologies.
I thought this was quite a potent example of how artefacts can change as they become part of a digital world and how this process of transformation can be analysed creatively and productively, rather than forming part of an oversimplified analogue vs. digital debate. It also exemplifies your observation about the politics of data structuring by creatively highlighting algorithmic bias and that technology is not neutral.
It’s explained way better at this link to the project, and the recordings of what sounds are lost during the process of file compression are quite spooky: https://www.theghostinthemp3.com/theghostinthemp3.html
Wow such a cool project, I’d love to know how you came across it. I find it so interesting how the analytic process seems to morph into something decidedly creative and ends up producing an artistic object in of itself. There is an uncanny sense of the music existing as autonomous and guiding the project with the student both an active composer and letting the material act as a strong guide. That sort of negotiation between interpretation and more ‘objective’ approach to ‘data’ (or the MP3 characteristics in this case) feels quite characteristic to the discussions going on in DH we’ve encountered so far. Thank you for sharing this Euan!
That’s such a cool project (and a great title too)! Thanks for linking to it here, Euan – I hadn’t come across it and am glad to know about it. As you say, what a good illustration of the way that thinking in terms of analogue vs. digital is an oversimplification. The accompanying video feels very fitting in this respect too, directing our attention to how the original footage might have been transformed (it took me a moment to figure out it was actually footage of a human being rather than some kind of data visualization). I also appreciate that you’ve found a project where digital humanities shades into digital art / digital music – that’s another disciplinary crossing that I would love to be able to spend some class time on, but can’t always find time to include. So it’s nice when students do it for me 🙂
I found your point about the difficulty of digitalising an “infinitely human” and subjective world really interesting. It made me wonder whether digital humanities is constantly striving to represent the complexity of the human brain (which, as you put, is “fluid, evolving and subjective”), or whether part of its value actually lies in revealing the limitations of computational systems when they encounter ambiguity or contradiction. For instance, methods like sentiment analysis can struggle with tones such as irony in literary texts. As such, digital models of textual analysis often flatten nuance, whereas humans performing textual analysis attribute significant value to things like tonal nuance as being able to entirely reshape a texts meaning or function. This encouraged me to reflect on what kinds of knowledge can, and cannot, be structured digitally. From a humanistic perspective, at least, theories of interpretation have long emphasised that meaning is contingent and shaped by context rather than being fixed or universal. From this lens, the limitations of digital tools foreground the kinds of ambiguity and contradiction that the humanities have traditionally sought to preserve rather than resolve. If we accept, however, that these limitations are not accidental but intrinsic to computational systems, then these confines of digital models begin to act as space for critical insight. In this sense, could the ‘failures’ of digital models be just as philosophically productive as their successes?