Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities

Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities
@RogerWhitson
Washington State University
#c19DH
08/20/2014

http://bit.ly/1qQlFp6

“Spreadability assumes a world where mass content is
continually repositioned as it enters different niche communities.
[…] As material spreads, it gets remade: either literally, through
various forms of sampling and remixing, or figuratively, via its
insertion into ongoing conversations and across various
platforms. This continuous process of repurposing and
recirculating is eroding the perceived divides between production
and consumption.”
—Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable
Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture
(2013)
http://bit.ly/1sAADTt

http://bit.ly/1qQnRgz

“A book of philosophy should be […] in part a kind of
science fiction. […] [T]he history of philosophy should
play a role roughly analogous to that of collage in
painting. […] [C]ommentary should act as a veritable
double and bear the maximal modification to a double.
(One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a
philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way
as a mustached Mona Lisa.)
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968)
“Vanguard artists, like their counterparts among academic
critics, often base their projects on the important
theoretical texts of the day. The difference between the
two applications had to do with their respective mode of
representation: the artists demonstrate the consequences
of the theories for the arts by practicing the arts
themselves, generating models of prototypes that function
critically as well as aesthetically. The vanguardist does not
analyze existing art but composes alternatives to it (or
uses it as a step towards achieving alternatives).
—Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994)

• Nineteenth-Century as one conjectural system (among many).
• Draws from cultural studies, literature, media studies, media archaeology
• Variantological: explores variants of technological history
• focused on design methodology as well as narrative
• (new) materialist
• conjectural: treats historical knowledge as “a semiotic system whose discrete
units of information can be artfully manipulated into alternate configurations”
for speculative ends.

http://bit.ly/1FiAMl6

“[F]raught issues of power and subjectivity (British as well as
Indian) could best, perhaps sometimes only, be formulated by
transposing them onto the conceptual domain of
communications technologies and networks. […] [Further,
there is] a […] narrative involving the conceptualization of the
increasingly worldwide webs of nineteenth-century
telecommunications—I mean the role played by information
systems in helping to sustain fantasies of global racial unity,
particularly of a kind which would repair the sundered bonds
of Anglo-American brotherhood.”
—Aaron Worth, Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and
Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination
1857-1918. (2014)
http://bit.ly/1zghMTC

“Design fiction is of an ecological scale and complexity beyond current
design techniques. A design fiction constructs imaginative fictional
realities, amplifying and extending the logic of the narrative. In
Steampunk, it is a narrative in which the active construction and
representation of fiction inform each other constantly and can be used
to explore the implications of actual new design ideas on an imagined
human society. —Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, and Ron
Wakkary, “Steampunk as Design Fiction” (2012)
http://bit.ly/1ogW8KG

http://bit.ly/1umf7Qt
“Bantustan had been better known in my own world
as South Africa. It had been one of the first colonies to
make a bid for independence during those pre-war
years when O’Bean’s inventions had released the
world from poverty and ignorance. Under the
leadership of a young politician of Indian parentage
called Gandhi, it had succeeded in negotiating a
peaceful withdrawal from the British Empire, almost
without the Empire realizing what had happened.”
—Michael Moorcock, The Land Leviathan (1974)

“The Emperors that followed led to its decline,
and eventually, they were easily defeated by
the British Empire with their airships and tanks.
Perhaps if the Mughals had made more
automatons to rid the Taj of its solitude, and
kept them walking, they’d have kept this land
too. They could have thrown airships from the
sky, and crushed tanks under their feet. The
Taj Mahal never walked again, folding into its
rest by the banks of Yamuna, where to this day
its empty tanks gleam like minarets on the
horizon, its scalp and shoulders shorn of
pennants.”
—Indrapramit Das, “The Little Begum” (2014)
http://bit.ly/1wcBY4d

http://bit.ly/1FiBTkS

[Reflective design] helps us discover fault lines
in the objects, artifacts, or systems being
explored […] and in doing so allows us to
imagine them otherwise: to see them as
alterable rather than immutable; as possibility
spaces rather than rigid, inherited structures. It
is this dimension of design that allows us to
envision ourselves as creative agents of
change.”
— C Hancock, C Hichar, C Holl-Jensen, K
Kraus, C Mozafari, and K Skutlin,
“Bibliocircuitry and the Alien Everyday.” (2013)
http://bit.ly/1sZ8fvV

http://bit.ly/1tBUMMD

“For having, in the natural history of this
earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may
from this conclude that there is a system in
nature; in like manner as, from seeing
revolutions of the planets, it is concluded,
that there is a system by which they are
intended to continue those revolutions. But
if the succession of worlds is established in
the system of nature, it is in vain to look for
anything higher in the origin of the earth.
The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry
is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, —
no prospect of an end.”
—James Hutton, Theory of the Earth
(1788)
http://bit.ly/ZJOY63

“The geology of media […] wants to extend deep times
towards chemical and metal durations [and] includes a
wide range of examples of refined minerals, metals,
and chemicals that are essential for media technologies
to operate in the often audiovisual and miniaturized
mobile form as we have grown to expect as end-users
of content.”
—Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (2014)
“To touch stone is to place a hand on a substance
alien to human duration. […] Something potentially
combustive therefore unfolds at the moment of
contact between mortal flesh and lithic materiality: the
advent of a disorienting realization, no matter how
inchoate or dimly perceived, that the world is not for
us.”
—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the
Inhuman (forthcoming) http://bit.ly/ZJPelkv

“The body of the creature was a
tangled, welded lump of congealed
circuitry and engineering. All kinds of
engines were embedded in that huge
trunk. A massive proliferation of wires
and tubes and outputs in its body and
limbs, snaking off in all directions in the
wasteland. […] The man approaching
them was nude and horrifically thin. His
face was stretched into a permanent
wide-eyed aspect of ghastly
discomfort. His eyes, his body, jerked
and ticked as if his nerves were
breaking down. His skin looked
necrotic, as if he was submitting to a
slow gangrene.”
—China Mieville, Perdido Street
Station (2001) http://bit.ly/1poMiRP

http://bit.ly/ZJPuAZ

“The emphasis in DH on making
things is not a flight from theory (or,
anyway, it’s not usually that, in my
experience, and it’s certainly not
necessarily that). In fact, DH
making can be profoundly
theoretical, a way of resisting what
many see as enervating and
disenfranchising ideologies of
cyberspace, media and social
ideologies based upon the
supposed immateriality of the
digital.”
—Steven Jones, The Emergence
of the Digital Humanities (2014)
“And we may need to
dwell with extinction,
each of us
professionally and
privately, just a little
more than I have
forced us to, tonight.”
—Bethany Nowviskie,
“Digital Humanities in
the Anthropocene”
(2014)
http://bit.ly/1rky7wP

Thanks!
@RogerWhitson
http://www.rogerwhitson.net
#c19DH

Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities

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Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities