The promises and perils of a digital geohumanities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Crang, M. (2015) 'The promises and perils of a digital geohumanities.', Cultural geographies.
This intervention asks to what extent to developments of digital media offer new objects that demand new methods, and to what extent they create new methods that might be applied to older cultural fields creating a digital humanities. It argues that digital media sometimes reanimate older debates and issues not only in what we study but how we do so, and their significance may be less in new techniques than altering the general tools of our trade in cultural geography. The paper looks at both new digital cultures, such as gaming and new converging media, and new methods, be they analysing the data exhaust of digitally mediated social lives, or using new software in literary analysis. Profound tensions exist between quantitative imaginaries of a massive stock of texts yielding determinate meanings and deconstructive visions of texts yielding indeterminate and proliferating meanings. Big data sits uneasily with big interpretation. The paper suggests a materialist semiosis is needed to attend to the permutations where new digital techniques may form affective technologies conveying meanings as much as effective analytical tools.
2020
This paper set out to investigate physical geography as represented in online cartographies and asked whether<br> they relay all that we need to know about the humanity of space as described in literary narrations. Using<br> critical reading approaches to digital geospatiality, it argues that digital treatments of space are narrowed<br> down only to their virtual essentials but say little about space as a spiritual value in terms of intuitive<br> knowledge, and in the light of space as human time, as well as space as passage of volume, as a literary<br> "affect." This gives the reader to appreciate the concept of literature as not only "scripted" but also oral and<br> experienced. Space is not just a physical representation on a physical screen or on the printed page of a map; it<br> is also a literary narrative and a colonial and postcolonial habitus of (hi)story. Just like literature, it is not<br> created in a va...
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd Edition, 2020
Spatial and digital turns in the humanities during the 20th Century have influenced human geography applications in geographical information systems (GIS), landscape, text, and cultural interpretation and representation, in addition to historical and contemporary modeling, network and spatial analysis methods. By the late 1930s and 1940s, the humanities were engaging with computer-based methods. A concordance to the writings of Thomas Aquinas was created by the Jesuit priest Roberto Busa and English scholar Josephine Mills, in consortium with IBM. In the 1950s, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss outlined the “three humanisms” of Western history (the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman; the repurposing of the humanistic perspective; and the discovery of everyday experience); in the 21st Century, a fourth trope digital humanism has been coined by Milad Doueihi to describe a “type of society” in which multiple types of media and texts (books, maps, multimedia, social media, games, augmented reality, 3D printing, etc.) cannot be fixed in space or time. This type of humanism has emerged in the three waves of the digital revolution and has led to a dissolution of epistemological boundaries between science and technology studies, the arts, and humanities. The first wave (1980–2010) witnessed the digitization of historical, cultural, literary, and artistic collections facilitating online research methods and pedagogy, which dovetailed with its second wave (2002–12) that largely manifested (as the quantitative revolution did in geography) in humanities computing quantification exercises, coding, digital parsing, analysis, and visualization projects. Currently, as we approach the third decade of the 21st Century (2013–25) a third wave of this revolution is cresting, with ontological tides turning, as humanities and arts discourses and tropes are now beginning to shape coding and software applications, and methodological frameworks for computing and multimedia platforms. In the first two decades of the 21st Century, the digital humanities have produced bodies of work that include digital archives, quantitative analyses, tool-building projects, the visualizations of large data sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, social media and hashtag activism and analysis, and the virtualization of literary, dramatic, and cultural texts. The spatial turn in the humanities has produced works such as Paul Carter’s, The road to botany bay: An essay in spatial history (1987). Concerning the colonization of Australia, Carter makes a clear epistemological distinction between the geographer’s space and spatial history. Franco Moretti’s distant reading and Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical tech- niques plotted the cartesian coordinates of philosophical, aggregated, real, and fictional spaces in literature. Native American writer William Least Heat-Moon (a.k.a. William Lewis Trogdon) employed a discursive, stratigraphic literary heuristic to explore the “sense of place” of a Kansas county on the American plains in PrairyErth: A Deep Map (1991). As a result, the Spatial Humanities and Deep Mapping emerged as tropes as humanities scholars engaged geospatial theory and technology. The aims of these scholarly pursuits were to transform geospatial technology’s framing of humans as entities or data points; understand the bilocality of texts in metaphorical and geographical space; and more closely consider scaled conceptions and narratives of place that are nuanced, nonreductionist, and deeply contingent.
The Discursive Construction of Place in the Digital Age, 2023
This collection calls for greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds. The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social afordances evoke placemaking as a collaborative endeavour which allows users to create and maintain a sense of community around place as shareable or collective experience. Taken together, the chapters argue for a greater emphasis on the ways in which users employ discourse to manage this physical-virtual interface in digital interactions and in turn, produce "remixed" cultural practices that draw on diverse digital semiotic resources and refect their everyday experiences of place and location. The book explores a wide range of topics and contexts which embody these dynamics, including livestreaming platforms, mourning in the digital age, e-service encounters, and Internet forums. While the overlay of physical and virtual information on locationbased media is not a new phenomenon, this volume argues that, in the face of its increasing pervasiveness, we can better understand its unfolding and future directions for research by accounting for the signifcance of place in today's interactions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, digital communication, pragmatics, and media studies
This paper addresses how geographers conceptualise cultural artifacts. Many geographical studies of cultural objects continue to depend heavily on an approach developed as part of the 'new cultural geography' in the 1980s. That approach examined the cultural politics of representations of place, space and landscape by undertaking close readings of specific cultural objects. Over three decades on, the cultural field (certainly in the Global North) has changed fundamentally, as digital technologies for the creation and dissemination of meaning have become extraordinarily pervasive and diverse. Yet geographical studies of cultural objects have thus far neglected to consider the conceptual and methodological implications of this shift. This paper argues that such studies must begin to map the complexities of digitally-mediated cultural production, circulation and interpretation. It will argue that to do this, it is necessary to move away from the attentive gaze on stable cultural objects as formulated by some of the new cultural geography, and instead focus on mapping the dynamics of the production, circulation and modification of meaning at digital interfaces and across frictional networks.
New media & society, 2007
New Digital Cartesianism' investigates the socio-material power inequities embedded in text-based, computer-mediated communication (CMC). Is the body really transcended in text-based computer-mediated communication? This article summarizes software and hardware advertising 'hypes', cyber-enthusiast 'hopes', and the 'actualities' of CMC which contradict this virtual dream of pure minds communicating. Marketing hypes and cyberhopes mythologize disembodied CMC with promises of anonymity and fluid identities. However, the actualities of how users interpret and derive meaning from text-based communication often involve reductive bodily markers that re-invoke stereotypes of racialized, sexualized and gendered bodies. Ironically, despite claims that CMC achieves Descartes' dream of 'pure minds' and the transcendence of body, users frequently rely on stereotyped images and descriptions of bodies in order to confer authenticity and signification to textual utterances. In digital Cartesianism, the body actually functions as a necessary arbiter of meaning and final signifier of what is accepted as 'real' and 'true'.
This introduction [ii] will propose six basic principles as the foundation for a new sub-discipline -Digital Anthropology. While the principles will be used to integrate the chapters that follow, its larger purpose is to spread the widest possible canvas upon which to begin the creative work of new research and thinking. The intention is not simply to study and reflect on new developments but to for humanity that may help us to conceptualise the consequences of the digital. Just like the digital, money represented a new phase in human abstraction where, for the first time, practically anything could be reduced to the same common element. This reduction of quality to quantity was in turn the foundation for an explosion of differentiated things, especially the huge expansion of commoditisation linked to industrialisation. In both cases, the more we reduce to the same the more we can thereby create difference. This is what makes money the best precedent for understanding digital culture and leads to our first principle of the dialectic.
On the road toward a cultural history of digital interconnectivity, there are many potholes. It is not easy to define the digital culture itself and what a cultural history of the digital means. It is unclear what we have in mind with the digital (often used in an oversimplified sense to simply mean the Internet): The geographical horizon of this culture is unclear, and lastly the main trends are unclear. What is more, too many aspects of the contemporary digital landscape are taken for granted, as if “natural”, while they are historically determined. This is the reason why history is so helpful in reconstructing the origins, the changes, the main trends of digital media, simply because it shows how they came into being and they were metabolized by the cultures. This discussion aims to clarify these elements or at least discuss them critically, whereby“critically” is meant first of all in the etymological sense of differentiating, second in the sense of not accepting prima facie what is generally considered to be obvious. This will be only a preliminary contribution that, far from being exhaustive, will aim to start a reflection on the role and benefits of cultural history in analyzing the digital.
The Poetics and Politics of Digitization
2017
to whom, in what context? That data-or more accurately, that metadata-is not provided in the 1965 volume on anthropology, computers, and the emergent field of new data, methods, and theories. A quick and easy search of the Internet in 2015, however, turns up. .. only a reference to this very 1965 volume, in an informative series on the history of computers in anthropology by Nick Seaver, written for the important, long-running blog-experiment in digital anthropology Savage Minds (2014). We learn a great deal about the long history of computers in/and anthropology there (well worth reading but which we cannot recap here), but nothing further about the Levi-Strauss utterance. This Levi-Strauss quote points to important differences marking the contemporary period in this history of computers in/and anthropology, as well as some enduring features. What we would today call the provenance of the Levi-Strauss quote is lost in the 1965 publication. The individual articles in that volume present fascinating accounts of early anthropological experiments with computers, in some cases complete with elaborate fold-outs of machine diagrams and programming matrices, along with finely crafted summaries of the wide-ranging and at times probably heated discussions that took place in 1962-but not actual transcripts that would allow us now, in their future, to attribute and reconsider exact phrasings, or to re-interpret the interactions, exchanges, and movements that occurred between the presentations. The socio-technical infrastructure that could make that kind of data archiving and sharing possible, and thus desirable, both for anthropological work and for anthropology itself, is only now becoming available. So at this very different infrastructural moment in the human sciences, we can nevertheless reiterate Dell Hymes' earlier conviction that "the computer" offers an opportunity for "heightening the quality of work" in anthropology. As it was then, it is now an opportunity that demands "increased attention" to two things. The first is "the logic and practice of quantitative and qualitative analysis," the second "the forms of cooperation and integration needed to make our stores of data systematic, comparable, accessible to each other and to theory. .. The story of the computer in anthropology will be the story of how these two demands are met" (Hymes 1965, 31). It is a remarkable and enduring insight. We continue the story here, heeding the same call to attention but now shifting the demand away from how "the computer" of 1962 (when "the" IBM 790 or 7090 was indeed becoming increasingly common, but nevertheless remained "the" singular machine on a small number of major campuses) asked anthropologists to rethink their forms of analysis and cooperation, and turning to the more multiple, omnipresent, and interlaced digital technologies of the contemporary moment-no doubt an even more plentiful situation than Levi-Strauss might have imagined, but a situation calling, still, for attention to how anthropology might be rewritten in this roomy space filled with new digital technologies, new logics and practices of analysis, and, perhaps most importantly, new forms of data. Paying attention now means remaining open to new forms of theory and new ways to collaborate. It also means re-scripting, rewriting, or redesigning the digital platforms, or cyberinfrastructure, to support those new collaborations and theories. Digital anthropology has taken and continues to take many forms: writing experiments in the form of blogs (e.g. Savage Minds 2), video mashups (e.g. the work of Michael Wesch 3), online ethnographies as well as ethnographies of the online (e.g. Chris Kelty, 4 Gabriella Coleman, 5 and Tom Boellstorff 6), multimedia-enhanced journal portals (e.g. culanth.org 7), new publishing collectives (e.g. limn 8), and various forms of hypertexts and "enhanced media" projects (e.g. Povinelli and Cho 2012). All of these writing experiments are enabled in part by new forms of technical writing, new codes and languages from XML to WordPress, tools that are written in or into rather than simply on digital media. Such experiments in digital
ANTHROPOLOGY OF DIGITAL WORLDS
Against All Odds: Ethnology and Anthropology between Theory and Praxis, Еdited by Ljupcho S. Risteski Ines Crvenkovska Risteska, 2017
Over the last three decades digital games and their universes , as parts of the wider digital culture, have become the reality (in front of and behind the monitor) and will undoubtedly play a greater part in the daily organization of life of an increasing number of people of all ages,with very different levels of education and social status, around the world. The games rapid spreading has provoked a continuous review of the current understanding of reality, and thus became the basis for the establishment of completely new identities and new cultural heritages. These are bound, obviously and inevitably, to overcome the current limits of national states, ethnic and local communities, and to build new communities based on genuinely shared experiences and memories (assumedafter all, for all the existing communities). Anthropology as a discipline is challenged by the modern times to engage in studies and observation of this process. At the same time, and for the first time in the history of discipline, a possibility to establish a true shared anthropology became an optionthat in turn could help to level out the status of anthropologists from small and poor countries (such as Serbia and Macedonia) in regard to their counterparts from the Western world.