Studying Media through New Media

The Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities is about researching media through new media: for example, playing games to better understand their politics and mechanics, exhibiting new media art to witness how people engage it, building stories to become more familiar with their structures and narratives, making wearable technologies to explore the overlaps between norms and fashion, or developing software to examine its relation to writing and literacy. In this introduction, I survey some tensions and overlaps between media studies and digital humanities and then focus on four key areas of analysis emerging from their intersection in this companion: moving beyond text in digital humanities research, foregrounding the importance of collaboration and laboratories outside of the sciences, underscoring the need for cultural criticism and social justice research when working with technologies, and expanding what "intervention" and "research contribution" mean in a moment obsessed with "doing," "making," and "hacking." I conclude the introduction with an outline and rationale for each of the Companion's five sections: Access, Praxis, Justice; Design, Interface, Interaction; Mediation, Method, Materiality; Remediation, Data, Memory; and Making, Programming, Hacking

Autoethnographies of Mediation

Humanities research with computing is frequently associated with three approaches to technologies: building infrastructure, designing tools, and developing techniques. The infrastructural approach is common among some libraries and labs, for example, where “infrastructure” implies not only equipment, platforms, and collections but also where and how they are housed and supported (Canada Foundation for Innovation 2008, 7). Tools, meanwhile, are usually designed and crafted with infrastructure. They turn “this” into “that”: from input to output, data to visualization, source code to browser content (Fuller 2005, 85). Techniques are then partly automated by tools. Aspects of a given process performed manually may become a procedure run by machines (Hayles 2010; Chun 2014). Although these three approaches are important to humanities computing, today they face numerous challenges, which are likely all too familiar to readers of this handbook. Autoethnography, which is by no means new to the academy. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner provide a capacious but compelling definition of autoethnography, and we adopt it for the purposes of this chapter: “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (2000, 739). Our only edit is minor: “multiple layers of mediation and consciousness.” For us, adding mediation to the mix of autoethnography is one way to engage computing (in particular) and technologies (in general) as relations. This means tools and infrastructures are more like negotiations than objects or products, and techniques are processes at once embodied (personal) and shared by groups and communities (cultural)

Prototyping Texts

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: In this course, Jentery Sayers invites both undergraduate and graduate students to push against notions of digital humanities as instrumental, ahistorical, or noninterpretive. Students perform “interpretation through alteration” of the texts under scrutiny by “prototyping” them in metadata, plaintext or markup, typography, forms, glitch, and repair. To alter, prototype, and iterate these texts, they “substitute words, change formats, rearrange poems, remediate fictions, juxtapose images, bend texts, and reconstitute book arts” (Sayers 1). In so doing, students learn how making and iterating can be a form of criticism and reinvigorate the now-depoliticized concept of iteration itself. Student examples include handmade books, overlapping Word documents, Twitterbots, and even a knitted interpretation of Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Student examples: Tiffany Chan’s Act Natural: Prototyping Autodidacticism, Forging the Self Allison Murphy’s Prototyping Personis

Mapping the Digital Humanities

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This course was the product of a collaboration between two graduate students at the University of Washington, Jentery Sayers (English) and Matt Wilson (Geography), supported to develop the course through a teaching fellowship. As the product of those two instructors, who had the luxury of additional time for development, it stands as an exemplar of an interdisciplinary, humanities-focused mapping course. The parallelism of having students work on “mapping” a geographical location as well as “mapping” a text is a novel structure that the collaboration affords. The modules and prompts have extensive and interesting commentary and suggestions for readings and ideas about mapping topics (cartographic generalization, data structure and organization, critical cartography, etc.). The course also provides an understanding of “geography” itself and doesn’t limit the geographical emphasis to only maps as a tool and outcome

Optophonic Reading, Prototyping Optophones

This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide testimonial fragments about individual use, 2D to 3D translation helps scholars to more broadly characterize optophone reading and understand technical affordances. See http://amodern.net/article/optophonic-reading/

On Literary Machine Listening and Pedagogy: The Praxis Studio with Julie Funk, Faith Ryan, and Jentery Sayers

Emma Telaro speaks with Jentery Sayers, Faith Ryan and Julie Funk about their work at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies at the University of Victoria. Here’s a peek into their innovative work: ‘literary machine listening’ and teaching audio in fiction in the classroom

Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies

In 2012-2013 a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), University of Victoria, in collaboration with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), developed three annotated bibliographies under the rubric of social knowledge creation. The items for the bibliographies were gathered and annotated by members of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) to form this tripartite document as a resource for students and researchers involved in the iNKE team and well beyond, iincluding at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013)

Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies

In 2012–2013, a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), in collaboration with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), developed three annotated bibliographies under the rubric of “social knowledge creation.” The items for the bibliographies were gathered and annotated by members of the Electric Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) to form this tripartite document as a resource for students and researchers involved in the INKE team and well beyond, including at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013). Gathered here, the result of this initiative might best be approached as an expeditious environmental scan, a necessarily partial snapshot of scholarship coalescing around an emerging area of critical interest. The project did not seek to establish a canon, but instead to provide a transient representation of interrelational research areas through a process of collaborative aggregation. The annotated bibliography is purposefully focused on the active, present, and future “social knowledge creation” instead of the passive and past “social construction of knowledge,” in which its roots lie. The difference in emphasis signals a newfound concern with (re)shaping processes that produce knowledge, and doing so in ways that productively reposition sociological and historical approaches. Taken together, the three parts of the bibliography connect contemporary thinking about new knowledge production with a range of Web 2.0 digital tools and game-design models for redesigning knowledge processes to better facilitate collaboration

The Care Work of Access

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access—the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) noninnocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities

Fabrications, or How to Lie with Computer Vision

Keynote Talk. Digital Humanities Forum: Return to the Material. University of Kansas. September 14, 2013: http://idrh.ku.edu/dhforum2013 Full slidedeck available at: http://uvicmakerlab.github.io/conferenceMaterials/kansas2013/keynote Jentery Sayers is at the University of Victoria.Since its initial role in artificial intelligence research during the early 1970s, computer vision — defined, for the purposes of this talk, as the automated description and reconstruction of the physical world (including its subjects and objects) through algorithms — has grown increasingly accessible to a wide variety of audiences through a broad range of consumer electronics. For instance, consider the number of cultural heritage projects relying extensively on optical character recognition. Or, in commonplace apps like iPhoto, note the use of face detection techniques for image description and searching. Elsewhere, web-based repositories such as Thingiverse are housing museum collections (e.g., at the Art Institute of Chicago) of 3D scans and print-on-demand models generated by both staff and patrons. And now Kinect hacks are practically ubiquitous on the web, with people regularly repurposing the sensor to create games, build DIY robots, and construct playful interfaces. Unpacking these phenomena across academic and popular domains, this talk highlights the need for digital humanities practitioners to not only engage how computer vision is embedded in our research but also explore how it actively transduces our materials, with an emphasis on the production of prototypes — or “fabrications” — that do not yet exist in the physical world. Here, the talk draws examples from recent research conducted by the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria, where — through its “Z-Axis” research initiative — practitioners are conducting experiments in stitching (i.e., translating 2D photos into 3D models), decimation (i.e., reducing the polygon count of models), and displacement (i.e., pushing and pulling the geometry of models to generate depth and detail) in order to articulate new-form arguments about literary and cultural histories. The Lab’s Z-Axis methodologies develop existing digital humanities research in speculative computing (Drucker and Nowviskie), geospatial expression (Moretti), data visualization (Manovich), algorithmic criticism (Ramsay), and ruination (McGann, Sample, and Samuels) in order to: 1) build persuasive objects that, like written essays, function as scholarship, 2) explore the potential of 3D techniques, desktop fabrication, and critical making for humanities research, 3) open material culture and history to unique modes of perception and interpretation, and 4) resist quotidian assumptions that computer vision affords neutral, high-fidelity replicas of our lived, social realities. To “lie” with computer vision, then, is to tinker with its default settings and transductions, reconfigure them, and mobilize them toward novel and unanticipated forms of scholarly persuasion