Technology in Theory and Practice: "Technology and Critique"
Response by Ted Underwood

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

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"The alien is already in here with us"
[On April 2, 2012 the Unit for Criticism held its annual Graduate Student event. This year it was a panel of three graduate students on the topic of Technology in Theory and Practice. Below is the text of a response given by Ted Underwood (English), the first of two posts on the event.]


"Technology and Critique"

Written by Ted Underwood (English)

I’d like to thank the organizers of this event, Mike Black and MC Anderson; also, of course, Lauren Goodlad and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. It is a pleasure to be here to respond to these great papers, and this is an exciting moment to be discussing technology in relation to critical theory.

The papers we heard tonight were extremely diverse. They come from different disciplines, and even from different colleges. Some of them consider technology primarily as an object of study — Mark Keitges looked, for instance, at “designed learning environments” like those designed by Vilém Flusser in order to assess their educational potential. Others considered technology primarily as a means of study: Mel Stanfill was interested in software as a tool that facilitates scholarly inquiry into other topics. Safiya Noble combined both approaches; she is studying the way search technology represents black women and girls, but she also critiqued the tools that are available to carry out that study.

I’m dwelling on the diversity of the papers because diversity of this sort can’t be taken for granted. The very existence of this panel suggests that we collectively believe technology is an emergent theme in the humanities and social sciences; in other words, something is happening now in relation to the topic. But the papers made clear that there is no single thing happening. In fact, our disciplinary home bases may still define what it even means to engage technology as a topic.

For some disciplines, like literary studies or history, this is a relatively new phenomenon and one that has not been easily assimilated. As a result, scholars from those disciplines who engage deeply with digital technology have tended to constitute themselves as an extradisciplinary community that goes by the name “digital humanities.” An extradisciplinary community is much less necessary for scholars in disciplines like communications, where electronic technology has long been a central object of study. I’m drawing attention to these contrasts mainly to emphasize that we’re talking about pragmatic responses to a problem that presents itself differently depending on your social location. There are not, in my opinion, very clear methodological boundaries between media studies, critical code studies, and digital humanities. Intellectually, these are overlapping projects: all of them consider technology at times as an object of study and at times as a means.

Now, in way this is a dull conclusion to reach, because it means that I’m not going to be able to construct a clear taxonomy of different “methodologies” or “schools of thought.” There are real divisions out there: not everyone is enthusiastic about the term “digital humanities,” for instance. But I believe those divisions are at bottom social rather than methodological. If you try to define “digital humanities,” you rapidly discover that it’s a tactical coalition lacking a single methodological center — perhaps best defined by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum as scholarship transmitted by a particular, very lively Twitter network.

Of course there is something self-reflexive about that, because Twitter is itself a technology. So perhaps it is not dull after all to say that these scholarly projects are divided socially rather than by conflicting methodologies. That also means that they are divided in large part by different technologies of scholarly communication. Journals, blogs, Twitter, conferences, unconferences, discipline-specific indexes of secondary literature — are precisely the things that define scholarly communities. So this is a third aspect of technology that needs to be factored into our discussion: technology as an object of study, and as a method of study, but also as a mode of communication that organizes study by defining scholarly institutions. And this third category interestingly complicates what it means to reflect critically on technology.


“Theory” is a slippery word that I hesitate to define. But Alex Reid has usefully observed that when humanists talk about the intersection of “theory” and “technology,” they are often concerned more specifically with “critique,” and especially with a kind of critique that has at its core a monitory or gatekeeping function. In this model, we need critique to decide how much and what kind of technology we should allow into our disciplines. The goal is to distinguish useful kinds of technology from kinds that would coarsen our discourse, making it reductive and positivistic. Imagined in these terms, the value of critique springs from the fact that it can preserve a necessary reflective distance on technology. Possibly other social institutions have already been corrupted by intrumental rationality, but we can still count on critique to watch technology skeptically, and close that gate when necessary.

I imagine that you can see where I’m heading with this. If, as I suggested, our scholarly institutions are already defined by particular technologies of communication, then this model of reflective distance may entail a bit of wishful thinking. Our institutions of critique are already pervaded and shaped by specific technologies — like say, Kritik, the blog on which you're reading this response. The depressing way to put this would be to say: it’s too late to close the gate. The alien is already in here with us, and if you seal that airlock, you’re merely sealing us in with him.

But actually I don’t see this reflection as depressing at all; I see it as opening up an alternative and rather useful model of critique. We might say, I’m here, technology is over there, let me critique it before it gets any closer. But there is also a model of critique closer to hacktivism. I am — we are — already embedded in technological systems, so how might we edit those systems? What tempting points of reflective leverage are opened up by the the technological constitution of our own discourse? How might we tweak the infrastructure to make the game itself more interesting? In this model, the technology pervading scholarly life becomes a handle that gives us a grip on otherwise tricky reflexive problems of self-remaking.

I don’t think we have to make a final choice between these models of critique. All of the papers we heard tonight expressed some concern that technology could be used in reductive or deterministic ways. But all of them were also engaged in a critical project that resembled hacktivism. Mark’s emphasis on reflective design made the hacking dimension of his project very explicit, but I would say that Safiya was also, implicitly, proposing to redesign search technology. Mel is arguably using data analysis software to hack scholarship itself. I would add that scholarly communication is yet another thing we can hack: in reflecting on technology we are opening up a possibility of reshaping our own institutions to become livelier, more innovative, or more equitable. I’m encouraged, for instance, by the scholars who recently organized a boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier to protest its extortionate pricing, and by the scholars at PressForward, who are redesigning peer review to foster a more open and more interactive kind of scholarship.

Of course, imagining critique on the model of hacktivism raises some puzzling questions. As presently constituted, critical theory involves knowledge of a particular intellectual tradition. How would we graft new technological practices onto that tradition? Is it possible to link Michel Foucault to software design — and if we try to do that, won’t contact with the sciences inevitably put us at a disadvantage? Obviously, I can’t offer a full answer to that question in the paragraph that remains. But tonight we heard Mel Stanfill link queer theory to data analysis, and I doubt that roping in The Archaeology of Knowledge would prove any more difficult.

Personally, I suspect that academic humanists have been too diffident in relation to science and technology. We should go ahead and plunge in when necessary, just as we would plunge into a field like sociology if we needed to understand a particular problem. Humanists are smart people; I don’t think we’ll be at any disadvantage. In the domain of text mining, at any rate, my experience has been that the math is not especially difficult. The difficulty comes in interpreting the results. For instance, computer scientists have designed a set of algorithms that do what they call “topic modeling,” but I suspect that these algorithms often identify patterns that are closer to “discourses” than to “topics” in our ordinary sense of the word. In cases like this, the sciences need what we can contribute intellectually. And we, in turn, need them politically. To make critique matter, we are increasingly going to have to crack open some black boxes, figure out how they work or could work, and rebuild them appropriately. It’s a challenge, to be sure, but an exciting challenge, and one that our panelists tonight are already engaging. Read more

Technology in Theory and Practice: "Hack This! Contesting Technological Neutrality at Technology in Theory and Practice”
Guest Writer: Mel Stanfill

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[On April 2, 2012 the Unit for Criticism held its annual Graduate Student event. This year it was a panel of three graduate students on the topic of Technology in Theory and Practice. Below guest writer Mel Stanfill, one of the panelists, writes the second of two posts on the event.] 


"Hack This! Contesting Technological Neutrality" 

 Written by Mel Stanfill (Institute of Communications Research)

The consensus was clear at the Technology in Theory and Practice graduate student panel: across the various disciplinary homes, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches of the participants, technology is not a neutral tool that can magically solve our problems without any input from us.

Mark Keitges (Education Policy, Organization, & Leadership) critiqued the idea that education can be optimized through carefully controlled design. In particular, he used Hans-Georg Gadamer's idea of “being pulled up short” to highlight the role of uncertainty and surprise in education. Because being jolted out of our complacency and worldview is a productive experience, “improving” designs to make the learning process  smooth isn't an improvement at all. Instead of “distributed cognition," in which some of the work of thinking is relocated into the technology, Keitges seeks recognition that the capacity for learning doesn't reside in the technology but in the interaction. He called for an “ill-structured design” that affords such moments of disjuncture.

Safiya Umoja Noble, (Graduate School of Library & Information Science) was similarly interested in disrupting narratives that claim that technology cures what ails society. Noble was concerned with the ways “black girls” appear when these search terms are “Googled,” finding that the results that appear first, far from ushering in a new era under Stewart Brand's slogan “information wants to be free,” operate entirely within the orbit of old stereotypes that reduce African-American women and girls to their sexuality. She was particularly concerned because Google search is typically presented as not only neutral but also a “public good” that improves life by making information available to the masses.



Noble was critical of the ways Google has at times specifically disclaimed responsibility and identified objectionable results as “the algorithm's fault”--even when such results are produced by gaming their system, as in neo-Nazis Googlebombing the word “Jew” or, to add a lighter example, Dan Savage's campaign against Rick Santorum.

My own presentation for the panel, which derives from my work in communications research may seem to diverge from these perspectives by arguing for the usefulness of data analysis software to critical research. However, my work nevertheless resonates with that of my co-panelists: like them, I believe that the software is only as good as what the user puts into it. With insightful interpretation on the part of the researcher, software can turn micro-level analysis into macro-level insight by showing patterns in how social categories are understood—in my case, sports and science fiction fans, but the principle is portable—across disparate cultural locations.

Within these three papers, despite their great variance with respect to topic and discipline, then, a number of commonalities emerged. Keitges and Noble are both interested in the ways that technology's design renders certain uses more or less possible in ways that then affect the world (as, in other work, is Stanfill). Noble and I want to expose and contest the ways in which certain ideas get produced as the reality of the categories in our research and how this helps perpetuate unequal power relationships. And, while Noble and I disagreed about the usefulness of data analysis software, ultimately our points are similar: analytical software is helpful when (and only when) researchers need to keep track of large bodies of things.

This combination of commonality—in seeing technology as an important site of interrogation—and divergence—in how the presenters approached it—formed the heart of the faculty response, provided by Ted Underwood, who identified the panelists as participating in a form of critique that he compared to “hacktivism”: Keitges was hacking design, Noble was hacking search, and I was hacking research.

In place of the disciplinary silo effect, or even inderdisciplinary silos such as the contemporary movement for Digital Humanities Underwood called on his listeners to hack scholarly communication itself. This starts, of course, with bringing such a panel and audience together in the first place.

However, Underwood also called for hacking scholarship by recognizing that the technologies that organize us as scholars are no more neutral and independent of human action than Google or educational interfaces or data analysis software. The academic publishing system, for example, is a technology, and recent activism to contest scientific publisher Elsevier's pricing practices, resistance on the part of academics to the Research Works Act, and broader initiatives for open-access publishing (and for recognition of open-access publications as legitimate) are also modes of hacking scholarly communication.

And indeed, Kritik itself is part of the hacking all of the panel's participants ultimately find necessary—in providing a public forum, this blog works to contest the common sense about what technology is for, how to use it, and what will be seen as a legitimate way to get knowledge about the world.

If, as the panelists argued, technology is only as good as what we do with it, let's do something with it. Hack this post. Remix it. Transform it.

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"The place of human interaction in the digital humanities": John Unsworth's Call for Collaborative Humanities Research"
Guest Writer: Jenelle Grant

Friday, March 9, 2012

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Title page of Bacon's Instauration Magna (1620). The Latin inscription at the bottom reads "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."
[On Friday, March 2, 2012, John Unsworth, former Dean of the Graduate School for Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, spoke at a lecture sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The below contribution is from Jenelle Grant]

"The place of human interaction in the digital humanities: John Unsworth’s Call for Collaborative Humanities Research"

Written by Jenelle Grant (French)

Following the digital turn and the subsequent imperative to digitize, humanities scholars find themselves in a gold-mine: billions of images, sounds, and pages of text… digitally-stored and digitally-born "objects" awaiting investigation. In the most utopian of knowledge temples, a Digital Humanities Center, physical barriers between researcher and collections of libraries, archives, and museums around the world would dissolve in an instant. Yet the very size of virtual collections and their labyrinthine infrastructures can hide glittering objects from view, obscuring humanities scholars’ paths. In addition to non-profit collections, such as the HathiTrust which stores the fruit of Google’s scanning project (10,103,655 volumes as of Friday March 2, 2012), commercial digitization also continues: eight hours of content are uploaded every minute to YouTube, for example. Such rapid collection and production of digital cultural artifacts places nothing less than a "computational imperative" on you.

Yes, I said you. Whether you simply need to print a recent journal article from JSTOR or are ready to immerse yourself in Franco Moretti's method of analytics, computational analysis dawns essential to venturing into the obscure, unexplored regions of this digital new world. It may even be fair to say it is the latest form of “light” that Francis Bacon, 17th-century Englishman and father of empirical science, describes here:
…if a man could succeed […] in kindling a light in nature, a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so, […] should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world, that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race. ("Prœmium," Of the Interpretation of Nature [1603]).
Exactly how such a light is best kindled in our era was the theme of Friday’s Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities address by digital humanities expert, and former dean of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, John Unsworth in his talk "Merchants of Light, Depredators and Pioneers: I’ll take my digital humanities with Bacon!"


John Unsworth
Unsworth began by questioning the impetus to streamline and centralize the creation and curation of digital collections at the cost of losing the personnel necessary to navigating these collections. He disagreed with conclusions in Diane Zorich’s 2008 survey of Digital Humanities Centers, illustrating how she privileges collectively maintained virtual "resources" over locally managed research “centers” or institutional libraries. Unsworth proposes instead that digital resources must maintain ties to physical place and that they need to be structured in order to respond to local researchers’ collective practices. In this way, large repositories of digital objects ("Big Data") will necessarily reduce duplication and become increasingly accessible, a point on which he agrees with Zorich. But for Unsworth as opposed to the top-down Zorich, this task must be accomplished through demand-driven creation of resources and computational tools: that is, resources are only as valuable as the researchers committed to using them and taking them into their classrooms and studies.

This research- and researcher-motivated approach, he continued, is only possible in an environment of informed collaboration between experts with variable skill-sets—domain expertise, collection management, information technology. The future of digital humanities depends on disrupting current institutional hierarchies that separate faculty in academic departments from library and information science specialists and computer analysts. In order to imagine such a function-driven model of collaborative research in the humanities using digital resources and tools, he turns to a liberal reading of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), in which the writer envisions a new kind of university centered around performing and analyzing experiments.

Unsworth sees in Bacon’s movement away from the Aristotelian structure of the early- modern university a parallel to an epistemological shift that he seems to believe is currently taking place in the humanities: the "End of Theory." Both, he implied, call for a rejection of a search for ontologies, taxonomies, and hypotheses, and a turn toward the observation of patterns and correlations. (Unsworth did not define what he meant by the "End of Theory": the parallels listed on his PowerPoint slide led me to believe he equated Bacon’s move toward empiricism with certain digital humanities scholars’ move away from some schools of critical theory—particularly, perhaps, close reading.) In the place, then, of "theory" to structure and cohere researchers’ work in the humanities, Unsworth puts forth the possibility of scholarly communities formed out of the observing functions performed by the researchers.

He adapts Bacon’s vocabulary describing distinct but interdependent roles in the New Atlantis’ utopian "Solomon’s House" (roles that include "Merchants of Light," and "Depredators") where each member contributes to the joint advancement of knowledge. Unsworth imagines contemporary researchers and librarians similarly working together on research projects in a range of roles: e.g., accessing and analyzing previous work, designing new projects, gathering the desired elements from the repositories of "Big Data," performing experiments, finding how new methods can be applied to other domains, and distilling and disseminating the new knowledge gleaned. He adds that new roles would, of course, have to be created to accommodate contemporary issues of intellectual property rights and the integration of commercial and non-profit digital resources.

So, how would we implement a shift toward such re-division of academic labor? Well, says Unsworth to humanities researchers, you don’t have to learn to program fluently (though you should probably learn some), but you do need to stop thinking of librarians as merely the care-takers of books owned by the university, and start thinking of them as your Virgil in a quest to accessing and doing work with objects stored in a variety of digital repositories. And information science specialists: he says it’s time to meet researchers in the fields they’re excited about and stop waiting for them to come to you with questions.

While Unworth’s idea that doing work in digital humanities could undo hierarchies in the research university system may seem only slightly less utopian than Bacon’s island population of scholars, his call to underscore the human element as the guarantor of future success of work in digital humanities is both inspiring and important. This is especially relevant in Illinois’ current environment of increased centralization, often at the cost of the specialists that make it possible to use our valuable resources. Furthermore, the benefit of collaboration across vastly diverse disciplines is exhibited by the existence of programs such as Illinois’ Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory the IPRH and even accidentally interdisciplinary environments such as MIT’s Building 20 (see Jonah Leher’s recent article in the New Yorker for more examples of the productivity of collaborating with people who see problems differently).


Hans Holbein the younger, The Ambassadors. 1533. The National Gallery, London. Click here to see the gigapixel-sized digital copy, courtesy of the Google Art Project.
Yet later while reflecting on Unsworth’s talk, even as I basked in the glow of the digitized pages of first-edition books I could consult in the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s collection without having to abandon my cat and dreamed of collaborating on a database that would make all 19th-century slang dictionaries searchable for diachronic and synchronic comparisons, something about the "Merchants of Light" made me uneasy. It was the term "merchant": defined simply as "a buyer and seller of commodities for profit." As Unsworth pointed out, digital humanities scholars cannot ignore the importance of commercial involvement in the creation of these "big data" resources, even if they are accessed and managed locally by non-profit educational institutions and independent centers. But his parallel with Bacon almost disguises an important effect of this commercial provenance. Bacon’s researchers observed the natural world; digital humanities researchers, however, observe data that has already been processed at least once by an interested party. What one "sees" is entirely dependent on how one looks, and how one looks in the digital humanities depends, at least in part, on the algorithms established by commercial entities: on the search terms entered, on the way objects are tagged and classified as they are entered into the repository.

Unsworth amusedly pointed out Bacon’s description of gilded luxury and the quasi-sanctified status surrounding the Head of his imagined university, the one to whom all the other functionaries report. But he failed to point out how this leadership figure, perhaps there by virtue of being a very successful merchant of "light," effectively reinstates a hierarchy even as he lauds its collaborative nature, or how such a Head might find his contemporary parallel not in the university, but in the commercial sector.

So in the end, I’ll "take my digital humanities with Bacon" as well: his 1603 description of such a bringer of new light contains an indication of its inherent threat. The citation abridged in at the beginning of my comments continues, "if a man could succeed […] in kindling a light in nature […] that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race, the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities." I underline the power wielded by the one to provide light not to suggest that I fear librarians may one day conquer the university and subdue creative, independent, scholarly research. But I do fear that Google certainly could if it wanted to. Unsworth trusts in the fact that it is not in Google’s economic interest to do so. I, however, will remain vigilant. Read more

9/13 Author's Roundtable 1: Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic
Guest Writer: Michael Simeone

Thursday, September 16, 2010

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[On Monday, September 13, the Unit for Criticism held the first of its Fall 2010 Author’s Roundtables, hosting Kathleen Woodward who discussed her book, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Emotions (Duke 2009). Below guest writer Michael Simeone provides an overview of the event. (A second post below includes the work of all three respondents]

Written by Michael Simeone (English)

One of the most gratifying aspects of Woodward’s recent work is its inclusive mode of argumentation. During the September 13, 2010 presentation and following discussion, there was a current that went through the room as audience members and respondents alike began connecting their own experiences and observations with Woodward’s overall framework of emotions, subjectivity, and statistics. Woodward mentioned repeatedly that the tone of her book was not so much an assertive argument meant to displace an existing perspective, but rather one that would be associational, inviting, and agglomerative. It seems to have worked.

But one connection between Woodward’s work and the present tense tended to repeat: the conventions of scholarly publishing. Academic writing has become increasingly emotionless and de-personalized, she argued, consonant with the impoverishment of human emotional interiority in the face of neo-liberal capitalism. For Woodward, there are no emotions in articles, no sense of personal stakes in books, making up a pervasive aesthetic of “professional cool.”

Once published by university presses, books and articles go back into university libraries, where they remain guarded from the non-academic public. Accessing an article on JSTOR or checking a book out from the main stacks requires a University ID number. That number costs a considerable sum. Even walking into a library resembles walking into airport security; checking items in lockers, scanning identification cards, and passing through a gate of scanners. The end result is a depersonalized discourse accessible to a dismal fraction of the population, which itself may not even enjoy or even prefer the continued banishment of the personal from academic writing.

All of this makes for a discouraging kind of reversed alchemy, where passion and enthusiasm turn into boredom. Scholars who so frequently enjoy what they read, or are so fascinated they commit years of their lives to its study, produce writing that is demanding to produce, gray, and joyless. Woodward’s work suggests that the drain of affect from academic writing is related to the statistical panic of the future of the humanities, brought about by dismal figures that reference anything from short-term job prospects to long-term departmental budgets. Emptying out emotion from academic writing as a response to statistical panic helps produce a binary relationship between reason and affect, a way to combat the empirical persuasion of statistics with the cool power of academic sterility.

But where to go from here, if here is in fact no longer a place where there is less and less human livelihood?

Woodward mentioned alternative forms of publication such as Vectors and NINES, as possible ways to think outside of current configurations of publication. And while there was little time for her to elaborate, I want to suggest that these forms of publication, forms where authors submit, design, curate, annotate, and publish content online by themselves or through collaboration, not only help to make scholarship more accessible, they also help to reconnect authors with the enthusiasm that motivates their scholarly interest in the first place. Statistical panic in academic writing is a version of the same kind of Cartesian thought about information that motivates (and has motivated) much of U.S. thought about information: information is immaterial, pure, and incorruptible; bodies are immediate, messy, and full of inconvenient or unpleasant emotions.

Sterile academic writing, in light of Woodward’s juxtaposition of statistical panic and scholarship, is a version of digital transcendence, the scholar’s version of Neo disappearing gaining immortality as pure data in the networks of the Matrix.

Perhaps, then, it is possible to work backwards. Maybe scholars who produce digital scholarship emerge from anonymity as the personal force that organizes and presents an online exhibit, multimedia article, or annotated collection. Instead of sliding away from view as the cold voice of reason, they are visible as the human force of inclusion, design, and significance. Thus, before they revolutionize the kind of work we do, new forms of publication and scholarship may first revolutionize the way we feel about that work.


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