“And If Your Head Explodes With Dark Forebodings Too”: The Dark Side of the Digital (Conference Review)

Posted on May 15, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

Thanks to David Golumbia (Virginia Commonwealth University) for writing this review, which appeared previously at Postcolonial Digital Humanities on May 9, 2013.

By David Golumbia

From May 2-4 the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee hosted a conference titled “Dark Side of the Digital” (Twitter: #c21dsd). The conference brought together scholars of media, literature, sociology, communications, law and policy, and the general orientation of the conference was to explore, in a relatively free environment, the worries and concerns scholars have about the digital transformation. While the conference was not directly about the Digital Humanities, and as far as I know no papers were given that addressed the “narrow” or “Type I” Digital Humanities; on the other hand, if one accepts the broader definitions of DH that some of us prefer, arguably the whole conference was about or was an example of DH–although not about the Dark Side of the Digital Humanities, in the sense that the MLA session by that name, also sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies, was about scholarly concerns about digital scholarly practices in the digital age, while this conference was for the most part about stuff in the world outside the Academy.

The conference was anchored by plenary speakers Lisa Nakamura, Greg Elmer, Sandra Braman, Andrew Norman Wilson, Rita Raley, Julie Cohen, micha cárdenas, and McKenzie Wark. In between these speakers were four breakout sessions of two, three, or four panels; given scheduling constraints that means all participants had to miss more of those sessions than they attended, here I’ll summarize the plenaries. This is in no way to discount the importance of the breakout session speakers (of whom I was one), but it didn’t seem fair to cover only the ones I attended–and this was getting long enough already. In what follows I’ve tried to summarize the main points of the plenary talks, in some cases to indicate some of the main themes in the discussions that followed them, and to include just a few of the tweets responding to the talks. For both the plenaries and the breakout sessions, I recommend reading through the entire Twitter stream under the hashtag #c21dsd. Though all the talks were terrific, as were the discussions following them, the talks by cárdenas and Nakamura were the ones of most direct interest to postcolonial studies, and the ones I’d first recommend to those interested in postcolonialism and who have the time to view the speeches on video.

Image by Rita Raley, https://twitter.com/ritaraley/status/330056348156952578/photo/1

The conference opened with a talk of particular interest to DHPoco readers, Lisa Nakamura (American Studies, University of Michigan; @lnakamur), “I Will Do Everything That I am Asked:” Spambaiting, Dogshaming, and the Racial Violence of Social Media” (video). Nakamura’s main subject was the culture of “scambaiting” or “spambaiting” that has developed around http://www.419eater.com/ and other sites dedicated to exposing and humiliating the perpetrators of so-called Nigerian Scams (the number 419 refers to the article of the Nigerian criminal code dealing with fraud). Nakamura showed a wide range of disturbing images, typically of Nigerian men, who are instructed by “scambaiters” (usually in Western countries) who pretend to be taken in by the scammers, only to manufacturer often-elaborate requirements of the scammer, in particular the creation of photographs and videos in which the aspiring scammers are made to hold embarrassing signs, pour milk on themselves, hold pickles in various positions, and many other tropes designed to humiliate the aspiring scammers in the eyes of those making the requests; the photos and videos are then posted online as objects of ridicule, in fora such as 419eater’s “Trophy Room.” Nakamura noted how infrequently discussions of racism are raised in these rooms and how persistent the scambaiters are, not appearing to realize at all the historical contexts in which these actions emerge, the power imbalances between rich Western countries and resource-exploited countries like Nigeria, and the ways in which spambaiting itself and the visual display of “trophies” perpetuates deeply-engrained forms of Western racism that do not seem obviated by the overt good the scambaiters claim to be doing–let alone the fact that it is not at all clear that those being targeted actually have committed any crimes. In the question period, several audience members raised more doubts about the provenance of the scams themselves (whether they actually come from Nigeria, and/or from the specific individuals identified in the scambaiters’ activities), and about the total inability of scambaiters to situate their actions in any kind of meaningful historical, political, or economic contexts. Nakamura explained that the images in the photos are almost exclusively of men, and showed one of the few images she has found of a woman, who holds what she sees as a relatively straightforward indication of the power relations encoded in scambaiting: “I will do everything that I am asked.”

 

 

 

 

 

spambaiting
Image from 419eater.com, http://forum.419eater.com/forum/album_showpage.php?pic_id=34.

The next plenary which ended the short first day of the conference, “Going Public: Accounting in/for the Internet” (video), by Greg Elmer (School of Media, Ryerson University; @greg_elmer), discussed the early history of accounting and double-entry bookkeeping, the notion of the “account” each of us has with websites like Facebook and how these might be related to other kinds of “account,” pointing out ways in which a social media account is not waiting to be “filled” and accessed solely by individual users, as opposed to the “bank account” which it appears to resemble. He discuses the notion of “going public,” of our engagement with social media as a form of “going public” not unlike a corporate IPO. In the question period, Julie Cohen asked Elmer whether “going public” might have positive as well as negative valences that deserved reflection, while Richard Grusin reflected briefly on other meanings of the word “account,” noting that we may be being made to account for ourselves (in public) today in a particularly invasive way.

 

 

 

 

On Friday morning, in “The Dark Side of Evidence: A Precautionary Tale” (video), Sandra Braman (Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) talked about the idea of evidence itself; the shifting ways that forms of evidence serve especially in the court system; the way that specific rules of evidence dictate that judges determine what is and what is not valid scientific evidence despite there being no requirement that they have any demonstrable competency in interpreting the methods or kinds of data used in that scientific practice; and suggested ways in which current surveillance technologies may be creating an environment of mandated surveillance and surveilling, in which participating in surveillance becomes a mark of or even requirement for citizenship–much the opposite of what advocates of “sousveillance” or using surveillance to watch for violations of law suggest. Braman’s talk was particularly dark and provocative, and seemed to build in interesting and unplanned ways on both Nakamura’s and Elmer’s talks, raising a wide range of questions about what counts as experience, as truth, as evidence of selfhood, and as proof of and qualification for citizenship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Norman Wilson (Independent Artist), “Movement Materials and What We Can Do” (video), showed a video he has made called “Workers Leaving the Googleplex.” Wilson briefly worked at Google and made a video of a particular group of workers who were part of the well-known book scanning project for Google books (called “ScanOps” inside of Google). To Wilson’s surprise, these workers were treated much differently from others at Google, and were not entitled to the same benefits given to other Google employees, and this was indicated through a special yellow badge. Wilson’s film was not particularly intrusive, yet he was fired simply for making it. The film deliberately echoes the Lumière brothers’ 1895 Workers Leaving the Factory, one of the most famous examples of early cinema and one that suggests a connection between new communications technologies and the documentation of labor practices.

 

 

 

 

 

Friday closed with Rita Raley (English, University of California-Santa Barbara, @rraley) speaking on “Courseware.com” (video). Raley traced the history of digital tools for higher education and drew attention to the close association between the digitization and corporatization of the university. Raley positioned herself as a supporter of digital tools used in the appropriate circumstances (and driven by the needs and initiatives of faculty rather than administrators or for-profit companies). Raley’s was the first plenary to suggest that faculty should resist that digitization without rejecting it altogether, even if these impulses sound contradictory; in discussion Ken Wark reinforced this as a call not to abandon entirely techno-utopianism to the corporate interests for whom it is a primary rallying cry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The presence of Julie Cohen (Law, Georgetown University; @julie17usc) was one of the major highlights of the conference for those of us who typically don’t get to interact enough with scholars of law. Cohen’s Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, 2012) is one of the more exciting and smartest books of the last few years, combining a rigorous and thoughtful attention to technological and legal problems with an unusually thick engagement with critical theory and science and technology studies. In “The Networked Self in the Modulated Society” Cohen built on this work, developing the concept of “modulation” as a way of understanding our varied engagements with various digital technologies and social networks, finding places of balance via both use practices and legal structures that can allow meaningful spaces for the private self to develop while not refusing digital technologies or diminishing our ability to make use of them. Cohen ended her talk with a couple of provocations, one of which was directed at the kind of critical-theoretical work engaged in by most of us at the conference, arguing that we need to develop more “translational” work (of which hers is an outstanding example) that puts insights from critical theory into forms that can be useful to policy and lawmakers. Conference organizer Richard Grusin pushed back on this a bit, noting that all disciplines, including law, have specialized vocabularies, that the charge of “making ourselves useful” is a persistent theme in attacks on the humanities, and that there is a value to “useless” critique that we should be wary of dismissing, most of which Cohen appeared to agree with. I took Grusin to be using “useless” in a particular sense, consistent with Heidegger’s occasional invocation, derived from his readings of Asian philosophy, of the story of a student calling the discourse of Zhuangzi (庄子, a follower of Lao Tze and considered a proto-Taoist today) “large and unusable,” like a “useless tree,” whose “branches are so crooked and twisted that one cannot shape them into circles and squares,” and that “stands in the way, but no carpenter looks at it.” Heidegger writes that Zhuangzi responds, “Neither hatchet nor ax has a premature end ready for it and no one can harm it. That something has no use: what does one need to worry about” (Heidegger, “Traditional and Technological Language,” Journal of Philosophical Research 23, 1998; page 131). The distinction is between having immediate use that is understood now (and often involves being seen as a resource for commerce) versus having some longer-term use that is harder to determine at the present moment, and seems outside of the circuit of capital.

 

 

 

 

 

micha cárdenas (Media Arts and Practice, USC; @michacardenas), presented “Local Autonomy Networks: Post Digital Networks, Post Corporate Communications” (video). She was the first to point out what I suspect many attendees were thinking: that using the phrase “dark side” to point to the negative aspects of digitalization implies, much as in the “Dark Side of the Force,” a deeply problematic sense of black-white hierarchy that it has been a signal job of cultural criticism to undo. cárdenas discussed several different projects in which she’s been involved & which focused on providing safety to the LGBT community, including a project to build safety/community-contact mechanisms into clothing, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, and projects to make it easier to get help in dangerous situations, like the Circle of 6 app. She also worked to destabilize the concepts of “the digital” and introduced the provocative notion of the “post-digital,” which several commentators and tweeters picked up on. cárdenas also presented a performance piece called “Healing Is Our Response” on Thursday evening of the conference, and showed a few clips and photos from the performance during her plenary.

 

 

 

To close the conference, McKenzie Wark (Culture and Media, New School; @mckenziewark) spoke on “Telesthesia: How Class and Power Work in the Post-Internet Age” (video), building on work in his recent book Telesthesia: Communication, Culture, and Class (Polity, 2012). In many ways this may have been the most provocative talk of the entire conference and as such was the perfect choice for the closing plenary. During many of the earlier discussions Wark (as some of the tweets above show) had been persistent in resisting the utility of “capitalism” as a rubric for understanding contemporary economics (as he asked several times, “what if it’s not capitalism? what if it’s something worse?”) and of “neoliberal” as a analytical term, and been one of the few conference participants to insist that critics not entirely abandon the utopianism evident widely in digital culture. Among the themes of his talk were the relationships between various kinds of investment and capital and their relations to communications technologies; Wark mentioned that it is the invention of the telegraph in 1848 that first allows information to travel faster than goods, and that this ability gave rise to more and more concentration of capital in industries that move wealth and information across territories and in determined directions (“vectors”), rather than being primarily interested in the production or sale of goods, even of information goods. Wark has long advocated the term “vectorialist” (or “vectoral”) class to describe the owners and workers in such industries, which today are typified by companies like Google and Facebook that make money primarily off of the creative labor of those not employed by the company, as opposed to so-called “creative industries” like movie or television production. He also culled this the “vulture industry,” drawing a contrast with what critical theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno famously called the “culture industry.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This summary does not attempt to do justice to the many wonderful participants in the breakout sessions, many of whom continued and expanded on the issues discussed here, and many of which featured scholars whose work directly or indirectly intersects with DHPoco. Mark Perry’s article in the Chronicle makes the conference sound too much like a set of grousing sessions on familiar tropes: surveillance, privacy, online education. It seemed to me very different from that: it struck me as the creation of a social space where scholars were free to talk, in as useful or “useless” a manner as we wished, about all the affordances and consequences of, possibilities for, and concerns we have about the rapid, society-wide transformations wrought by digitization. It is just a fact that much academic discussion of these matters is confronted so often with a loud and powerful utopianism based in commercial interests–accusations of “Luddism” thrown at iPhone/iPad using scholars, as if that contradiction invalidates any critical thought, as opposed to proving that the thinkers can’t possibly be Luddites–that most spaces in which humanities scholars discuss these issues become quickly mired in battles around defenses of “the digital” as a whole, and whether or not “it’s as bad” as critical scholars suggest. The effect of this is to make it very hard to pursue, as humanists and social scientists are familiar with doing in almost every other context, all the ramifications of social and human phenomena. In this sense, the “uselessness” mentioned by Grusin dovetails with a wider sense of “critique” or “critical” than people typically grant it–the sense of “critique” that Kant uses in calling his main three philosophical works Critiques, and that he sees as critical to the Enlightenment project that had a great deal to do with the birth of representative democracies in the West. (This is also why Rita Raley’s and Ken Wark’s injunctions not to resist technoutopianism entirely were very important as the conference went on.) The resistance to such critique has to be of great concern to anyone familiar with that long history, and as a longstanding critic of the digital, I can say with certainty that the resistance is profound.

Indeed, as I’m finishing this piece, a major scholar of the Digital Humanities has just called the proceedings of the conference “silliness,” based apparently on just reading the conference website and the Chronicle article. It is a mark of the need for projects like #DHPoco and #transformDH that such statements can be uttered by those in our own community; it is also a reason for optimism born of critique that conferences like this one, and efforts like DHPoco and #transformDH exist, and are garnering the amount of attention they deserve. One of the major misunderstandings of the digital world toward which Evgeny Morozov points us is that techno-determinism, by eliminating the power of human beings to affect our own futures, is actually a form of despairing fatalism; critical thinking, on the other hand, can be a mark of deep respect and even love for our most important values and institutions. As Richard Grusin noted in his opening remarks, this version of the “dark side” refers not to blackness as a negative–perhaps, to the contrary, invokes it as a positive–but rather, like the dark side of the moon, to that which is too easily hidden from view, but must be seen.

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Building Local Autonomy Networks

Posted on March 14, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

 Dark Side of the Digital conference plenary speaker, Micha Cárdenas, doesn’t simply query the ‘dark side’ of digital enthusiasm through her scholarship, she actively confronts the intersections of bodies, technologies, movement and politics through performance.  Milwaukee residents (and visitors!) and UWM students, faculty, and staff will have the opportunity to do the same during the “Building Local Autonomy Networks” workshop and performance that she will organize during the conference. In Micha’s words:

The Autonets workshop will engage participants in a discussion, using Theater of the Oppressed dance and performance exercises, of how we can form local networks of autonomy and solidarity in order to create community based responses to violences, which are personal, gendered or state sponsored. Join us for a four-hour workshop that will culminate in a performance where we will use Theater of the Oppressed to embody community based responses to violence. The workshop will invite participants to consider these questions: what kinds of violence you face on a daily basis and how can we respond as a community to prevent these forms of violence, with or without digital technologies. No experience is necessary to participate in the workshop and performance, as both rely on what our bodies already know.

Autonets: We Already Know and We Don’t Yet Know, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics VIII Encuentro, São Paulo, Brazil, January 2013, with Micha Cárdenas, Alessandra Renzi, Frantz Jerome, Benjamin Lundberg, Lily Mengesha, Aisha Jordan, Joana Fittipaldi and Tomaz Capobanco, photos by Macarena Gomez-Barris


The workshop will take place on Thursday, May 2nd from 9:00-1:00 at the Hefter Conference Center.  The workshop participants will then perform at 8:00 at the Pabst Brewery on Thursday, May 2nd. For more information, check out the flyer or email c21[at]uwm[dot]edu

 

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Some Preliminary Theses on MOOCs

Posted on March 13, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

Gerry Canavan, Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University, also participated in C21′s “What’s the Matter with MOOCs” event.  His contribution drew on his recent blog post which argues that MOOCs are an end of history fantasy.

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MOOCS: A Cautionary Note

Posted on March 13, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

By Gregory Jay

[Gregory Jay presented this paper as part of C21's "What's the Matter with MOOCs?" even on March 12, 2013]

For many years I have welcomed the growth of digital and internet technologies when it comes to research and teaching. While not the first adopter, I’ve been a fairly early one, and can’t imagine now teaching a course that doesn’t meet in a mediated classroom or one without a web site. It’s expected that when a difficult question comes up in class, I or someone else Googles the topic for clarification and we look for a moment at the screen to see what our research can find. Although the course web site is usually full of pdfs and handouts and YouTube links on day one, it continues to grow as students add things to it that they find, and I add to it as I research each week’s readings and discussions. Every semester I see my students become increasingly adept at mining the internet and our library’s digital databases for materials to enrich their learning, and I encourage them to do so in their presentations and projects. The latter is crucial, as we need to keep our focus on how to move beyond the delivery or acquisition of data and information and towards the arrangement of material into analysis, argument, and theoretical or conceptual breakthroughs. In sum, the digital revolution has put great pressure on us to justify the time students spend in class, since in the age of the internet it makes little sense to require they be there so we can give them the same information they can find through Google. Class time should instead be spent organizing projects, debating issues, doing collaborative group work, and reflecting on service learning or other community engagement assignments.

All of which is to say that my insistence on a skeptical reception of MOOC fever does not stem from a fear of technology or a lack of acquaintance with the virtues of the digital. Instead my concerns are political, pedagogical, economic, and infused with issues of social justice and the critique of neoliberalism. Not to mention the widely-noted intellectual property issues and logistical concerns: no one has a viable business model for MOOCs, even though they are often discussed as some kind of response to the budget crises in higher education. Then there are the sticky matters of plagiarism, identity fraud, peer grading, and a lack of creditable assessment of learning outcomes. Still, moving forward, institutions of higher education must and will continue to find creative and useful ways to incorporate digital technologies and internet resources into every aspect of their work. Governance and oversight of this evolving project, however, must remain primarily the responsibility of the faculty, who in the governance system have the sole authority to design and remake curricula. Curriculum is not the business of tech specialists or consultants or even academic deans, provosts, and chancellors. It belongs to the faculty, who rightly feel threatened when irrational exuberance about MOOCs appears to shift curriculum responsibility away from the faculty.[1] The attempt to outsource undergraduate education to private, for-profit companies is just another turn in the neoliberal wheel that has decimated the public sphere and transferred yet more power to financial, social, and racial elites. (See “Unthinking Technophilia,” Insider Higher Ed, January 14, 2013).  MOOC fever thus belongs to the larger effort to downsize and marginalize the faculty, as was done in the devolution of higher education over the last three decades that saw the proportion of instructional time shift from 65% tenure track across the nation to roughly 30% today. Our large lecture classes and sections staffed by TAs and lecturers are the predecessors of the MOOCs: they are massively oppressive on-campus courses that squeeze the most tuition dollars out of students with the minimal return on investment, and the least respect for just arrangements of academic labor. Continue reading →

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Sincerity, Cynicism, and Syria

Posted on January 18, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

By Matthew Boman

Who cares about ongoing violence in Syria? Apparently, The Onion, for one. Recently they ran a piece titled “The 6 Best Dresses At The Golden Globes” where, under pictures of the civil war going on in Syria, are captions mimicking the banal commentary of fashion magazines and celebrity news. While some have criticized The Onion for having gone too far or for making jokes with a political agenda, the piece at least causes us to question our society’s values.

What does it say about us when irony and sarcasm are the only ways to make a point, when the only media capable of providing honest cultural commentary are comedic magazines and faux-news television shows?

Is it that other news doesn’t cover important events or that we, as consumers, demand such insipid drivel? To the first half of the question the answer is both yes and no. While such events are covered, it is often difficult to find clear and reliable coverage of things happening outside of the US—especially for those who have not been taught where to look. The answer to the second half is, at best, cyclical: we demand what we are fed, which creates a market and higher demand. Often, catering to the lowest common denominator is cheapest and easiest—and who wants to think about serious issues after an 8+ hour day? Continue reading →

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Research collaboration with Muslim leaders: Common aspirations and compromises

Posted on January 17, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

By Anna Mansson McGinty

We often hear about the social and political importance of community collaboration and participatory research, but still fairly little has been written about the very predicaments and processes of such collaborations, including challenges, compromises, and negotiations. At least when it comes to the study of Muslims and Muslim communities in the West, there is a gap in the literature on the political, ethnic, and methodological questions that emerge throughout the research process itself—questions which have to do with access, providing feedback to the community, conflicting ideas and aims, and the negotiation of the participants’ positionality. The candid reflections of such questions usually don’t present themselves as neatly and well-ordered as the findings we present in our publications. Maybe one reason is that fieldwork is messy and entails a range of emotions and questions about the purpose of research, the scholar’s motivations, and ultimately her/his own identity and relationship to the ones s/he is collaborating with and studying.

In the early spring of 2010, Muslim community leaders from one of the largest mosques and Islamic centers in Milwaukee approached the UWM Development Office with an interest to fund a smaller scholarship for Muslim students at UWM, as well as to inquire about the possibilities to plan and fund a demographic study of Muslims in Milwaukee. Caroline Seymour-Jorn, Kristin Sziarto, and I were contacted due to our relevant research interests, and that’s how the initial contacts were made and how the Muslim Milwaukee Project came about. The project was, thus, initiated by the community leaders themselves and their strong wish to know more about their own community. However, Caroline and I already knew a couple of them, one from a previous collaboration and one was a former student of ours. Hence, importantly, we were able to start the project on a foundation of previous connections and trust.

It was first when we received a Research Growth Initiative grant (RGI) in 2011 that we were really able to launch the project and the demographic surveys with the expertise of the Center for Urban Initiative and Research (CUIR). Since then, we have had the opportunity to work with several Muslim leaders from different community centers located in different parts of the city to document a small but growing Muslim population in Milwaukee. Together with Muslim partners primarily from the two largest mosques—the Islamic Society of Milwaukee in south Milwaukee and the Islamic Da’wa Center located on the northwest side of the city—we have developed both a household survey and an individual survey, including questions that our Muslim collaboration partners have deemed most important for community building and planning purposes and that we scholars have found of interest for research purposes. Continue reading →

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The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities – Part 4

Posted on January 9, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

By Rita Raley

For “The Dark Side of Digital Humanities” (#s307), we were charged with producing 8-minute statements designed to stimulate wide-ranging discussion of the unsaid, understated, or under-theorized economic and political issues that are associated with, attend upon, or otherwise follow from the digital humanities as an institutional entity. In our respective prefatory statements we noted that we had been asked to provoke, but stimulate is closer to the thinking behind the roundtable. The formulation of the title of the roundtable is itself a provocation, however, and an exemplary instance of “behavioral priming,” to borrow a phrase from Katherine Hayles’ paper the following day. One imagines that even the addition of a question mark in the program copy might have produced a different affective response from the audience, among which there still seems to be a fair bit of indignation, at least insofar as one can glean the mood from Twitter and blog postings. That the indignant audience should now include many who were not even at the conference, much less at the session, can only confirm Teresa Brennan’s thesis on the “transmission of affect”— it was not simply biochemical response but also suggestion that produced the (contagious) affects of #s307.[i]

The upset seems in part to derive from a misunderstanding about our critical object: though our roundtable referred in passing to actually existing projects, collectives, and games that we take to be affirmative and inspiring, the “digital humanities” under analysis was a discursive construction and, I should add, clearly noted as such throughout. That audience members should have professed not to recognize themselves in our presentations is thus to my mind all to the good, even if it somewhat misses the mark. Indeed I would say that humanists above all else need continually to work to perceive and negotiate the institutional imaginary of informational technology so as not to fall into the trap of unconsciously adopting its optics. (My own cynicism about that institutional imaginary deepens with every administrative inquiry: I teach and write about digital media, so clearly I should want to participate in working groups and pilot programs for online education.)

// Begin presented text

Our topic today is the dark side of the digital humanities. Not quite the evil side, as Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey term it, but, one hopes, not entirely unrelated. Evil media studies pursues “practices of trickery, deception and manipulation”—one might even say tactics here—practices or tactics that endeavor “to escape [both] the order of critique” with all of its melancholic negativity, as well as “the postulates of representation,” with their moralizing insistence upon substance, essence, truth.[ii] The dark side might on the face of it seem to suggest precisely that “order of critique,” but our objective today is not to diagnose so as to circumscribe and pronounce upon the truth of things—not to uniformly fix what is after all a diverse set of techniques and activities within a singular frame and to seek out the hidden ideological core buried deep within it; not then to bring to light “the” dark side of “the” digital humanities. But it is to suggest that there are critical blind spots and assumptions that ought to be discussed before we triumphantly embrace the notion that the digital humanities is the only game in town worth playing or, even, the only conference sessions worth attending, not simply the ‘next big thing’ but the only thing. If, as sometimes seems to be the case, the digital humanities is the hill on which the humanities has chosen to stake its last claim for relevance, to fight its last battle for recognition, then we would do well to examine the field and identify not just the exploits but perhaps also the lines of escape. Continue reading →

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The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities – Part 3

Posted on January 9, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

By Patrick Jagoda

My remarks at the “Dark Side of the Digital Humanities” MLA roundtable (January 4, 2013) represent some preliminary thoughts and questions about games that I explore in much greater detail in a forthcoming essay (“Gamification and Other Forms of Play”) that will appear in boundary 2 in Summer 2013. My decision to include digital games in this conversation was not an attempt to claim the absolute centrality of games for the Digital Humanities. Additionally, my topic selection did not carry with it a necessary insistence upon a conflation between the “Digital Humanities” and “New Media Studies.” These disciplinary categories, and the boundaries between them, are porous. They are being considered and renegotiated by scholars through ongoing discussions.

For the purpose of the broad and inclusive conversation that Richard Grusin organized for MLA, I decided to work within a broad rubric of “Comparative Media Studies,” especially as it has been developed recently by Katherine Hayles in How We Think (2012). This inclusive category encourages conversations among scholars working in areas that include the materiality of print and digital productions (John Cayley, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and Jerome McGann); critical code studies (Wendy Chun, Matthew Fuller, and Lev Manovich); platform studies (Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort); technologically mediated forms of social interaction (Jodi Dean and Geert Lovink), information networks (Tiziana Terranova and Eugene Thacker), electronic literature and digital art forms (Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, Mark Marino, and Stephanie Strickland); the philosophical dimensions of digital media (Alexander Galloway, Richard Grusin, Mark Hansen, Friedrich Kittler, and McKenzie Wark); the cultural implications of digital technologies (Lisa Nakamura, Tara McPherson, and Rita Raley); the educational affordances of digital technologies (Cathy Davidson, Nichole Pinkard, and Katie Salen); and so on. This category also allows us to discuss a number of projects that include data mining, social network analysis, digital editions of print works, historical simulations, electronic literature, digital art, game design, and much more.

During our MLA roundtable, I was interested in producing a provocation and, briefly, introducing what is likely to remain one major problem of and for the Digital Humanities: the problem of games and gamification. The text that follows reproduces an augmented (though very slightly so) version of my informal notes for this session. It is meant as a starting point for a continued exchange. Perhaps, like the beginning of a game, it can be conceived as an invitation to play. Continue reading →

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The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities – Part 2

Posted on January 9, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

By Richard Grusin

[NB: The following paper is an expanded version of the paper I delivered at  #MLA13 #S307.  The text up until the row of asterisks is with only the most minor wording changes identical to my presentation at the roundtable.  The paragraphs following the break revise and expand upon a paragraph I had written before the session but eliminated in the interest of time.  These revisions are designed to clarify my argument in relation to issues raised in the response to the session in the Twitterstream during the presentations, the Q&A after the presentations, and the online and F2F discussions that have continued after the session.]

The proposal I submitted for this roundtable last Spring opened with the following questions:  “Is it only an accident that the emergence of digital humanities has coincided with the intensification of the economic crisis in the humanities in higher education?  Or is there a connection between these two developments?”  I began with these questions to help make sense of a feeling that has bothered me since MLA11—the incommensurate affective moods between panels on “digital” humanities and those on what might be understood as “crisis” humanities.  This mood did not appear suddenly in 2011 but has been emerging, largely unspoken or ignored, at least since the financial meltdown of 2008.  Nor has it gone away, as demonstrated by the current MOOC bubble, which generates digital utopian arguments about the remaking of higher education while intensifying the sense of precarity that has come to replace the security of tenure as the predominant affective mood of the academy. [FIG 1]

[FIG 1: “MOOC” search term trending for 2012]

The first convention held on the new January schedule, MLA11 had been premediated as something of a new start for the Association. This sense of a new beginning was accompanied in Los Angeles by a sense of loss evident in panels devoted to the crisis in the humanities that had bee produced by radical funding cuts in public support for education in Europe, Australia, and the US.  These cuts, and the concomitant transformation of the professoriate, have been under way for several decades now (particularly in the US) but in the recessionary aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, they reached a level unimaginable to most academics. Panels on the immediacy of the crisis in the humanities were accompanied by widespread historical critique of the devastating effects of the neoliberal university and its catastrophic legacy for the future.  The urgency of this new “critical university studies” was especially palpable in California, where the UC and CSU systems have only intensified their corporatism under continued funding cutbacks from the state. Continue reading →

Twitt
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The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities – Part 1

Posted on January 9, 2013 by The Center for 21st Century Studies

By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

***This talk was given on 1.4.2013 at the MLA.  It focuses on a paradox surrounding DH: the disparity between the hype surrounding DH and the material work conditions surrounding much DH (adjunct/ soft money positions, the constant drive to raise funds, the lack of scholarly recognition of DH work for promotions).  In it, I call for us to work together—across the various fields and divisions—to create a university that is fair and just for all (teachers, students, researchers).  I also call for us to find value in what is often discarded as “useless” in order to take on the really hard problems that face us.***   

I want to start by thanking Richard for organizing this workshop–I’m excited to be a part of it.  I also want to start by warning you that we’ve been asked to be provocative, so I’ll use my 8 minutes here today to provoke: to agitate and perhaps aggravate, excite and perhaps incite. For today, I want to propose that the dark side of the digital humanities is its bright side, its alleged promise: its alleged promise to save the humanities by making them and their graduates relevant, by giving their graduates technical skills that will allow them to thrive in a difficult and precarious job market. Speaking partly as a former engineer, this promise strikes me as bull: knowing GIS or basic statistics or basic scripting (or even server side scripting) is not going to make English majors competitive with engineers or CS geeks trained here or increasingly abroad (***straight up programming jobs are becoming increasingly less lucrative***).

But let me be clear, my critique is not directed at DH per se.  DH projects have extended and renewed the humanities and revealed that the kinds of critical thinking (close textual analysis) that the humanities have always been engaged in is and has always been central to crafting technology and society.  DH projects such as “Feminist Dialogues in Technology” a Distributed Online Cooperative Course that will be taught in 15 universities across the globe: courses that use technology not simply to disseminate but also to rethink and regenerate cooperatively education at a global scale—these projects are central.  As well, the humanities should play a big role in “big data” not simply because we’re good at pattern recognition (because we can read narratives embedded in data), but also and more importantly, because can see what big data ignores.  We can see the ways in which so many big data projects, by restricting themselves to certain databases and terms, shine a flashlight under a streetlamp.  Continue reading →

Twitt
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