Winter Institute in Digital Humanities

My foray into the space of DH emerges out of my academic inclinations towards learning, design, technology and cognition at large. Does DH tie up these seemingly contentious topics into some coherence? What exactly are the definitions and possibilities of DH for me is the bigger question that I intend to track through this engagement. I am going to write a string of posts, titled ‘Towards a possible synthese’, as emerging out of conversations over the duration of the institute. I would primarily reflect from certain standpoints in design studies and learning sciences, which are my current locations, though divergences and indulgences would swarm in.

Jim’s talk on transnational history laid bare his research work using digital repositories. Putnam provided the necessary exposition. Rupture of power-centres towards the making of fluid scholastic spaces is the much-needed decolonial drive. The magisterial mandates of colonial powerhouses to grant a POC researcher to take a peek into the archives is not longer a necessity. The emergence of digital objects also means that the gaze can be returned back at the historical oppressor, even without his sanction. Such signifies the shift of the centre to the peripheries. And thus the boundaries are becoming the newer playgrounds.

How the digital sphere proliferated with Jim’s own investigative journey points to the scope of digital artefacts in the making of academia to come. The synthesis of various forms of visual data into his reading of history also points to an important skill for the humanities researchers— interpretive positions concerning visuality. Is it a good excuse to plug in some mandatory Tufte, if he has not already featured in relevant discussions? (And also, Mirzoeff from Media Studies domain)

There were some pertinent encouragement for my personal interest of vernacular and decolonial design history ideas, which I would detail in another post. However, some key concerns remain, which I would like humanities researchers to reflect upon.
(a) Would we still be over with the hierarchies of local/ regional historians/ cultural enthusiasts vis-a-vis researchers from Global North, given the reign of democratic digital objects?
(b) Whose authorship still remains of salience into making of local archives (based on which transcultural/transnational histories would be written/ narrativized)?
These ideas will be revisited, I suppose. But now I would use this space to flesh out in detail the comment I made in response to Atanu’s talk.

There needs to be a shift from the normative technocentric stance of using technology as a panacea. While critiques around this line exist aplenty, focus needs to be on the definition of learning that we derive from such tech instantiations. Is the fascination for an hitherto unexplored piece of artefact a marker of actual learning taking place, (apropos to Mitra’s body of research and similar projects, of which there are several critiques, just for starters)? Is social connectivity and app/device usage any indicator of either social development or personal epistemic growth? As for the Indian context, we need to be particularly careful (even of citing Hole-in-the-wall as an academic talk reference!) while deploying ICT4D initiatives for underserved communities and geographies, where the benign face of internet-enabled connected devices and services somewhat automatically mean transformation taking place. Humanities at large would debate with questions of criticality in the usage of the digital in the landscape of transformation. However, we also need to look at the aims of such interventions from the assumptions of ‘changes happening.’ Transformation in the realm of personal epistemic trajectory of a learner needs to adopt the cultural cognitive stance if it is to make itself relevant. The gigantic aspirations of technological philanthropy misses finer attention to cognitive underpinnings of the individual learner.

Further, we need to dwell on the question of what a technology can do and how best are we using them towards our purposes. What is the meaningful change that these technologies can afford? How best is any technical artefact utilising specificities and modalities of the technology? If the tech-enabled educator replicates the notes and definitions on the Google Slides, which the recipients are to copy a la old-school pen-and-paper style [1], is it worth calling technology-enabled learning? Would then digital learning be worth its name?

Notes:

[1] Peter De Bolla notes that “our primary engagement with the digital is at the level of its effects and affordances with respect to communication, information storage and retrieval, statistical inference and manipulation. And the overwhelming majority of us use the digital as if it were analogue: the interfaces we are comfortable with simulate analogue forms.” (Emphasis added) This is precisely the critique of the nature of technology adoption—continuation of same practices on different platform. Newer platform of the computational media brings newer modes of cognitive associations, which are rich to be leveraged. We are unable to elevate our imagination to accommodate the powerful dictum of ‘medium itself being the very core message’, h/t Marshall McLuhan.

The onset of the digital movement has lead to many developments such as Big Data, modern computational methods, digital archives for arts and humanities, digital and technological tools and much more. As consumers, a myriad of information, data, resources, facts, and tools are thrown at us. While it is easy to become seduced by the power, reach and depth of these, it is equally important to have the skill to navigate and creatively engage with them. The pedagogy of my undergraduate course Liberal Arts, is deep rooted in interdisciplinary studies, intensive academic research, fieldwork, and the integration of technology in classrooms, to name a few.  Attending these sessions has made me think critically of the media we consume and their evolution, evaluate the role technology and digitisation play in research, and examine new ways of forming and organising information. 

Professor Jatindra Kumar mentioned the importance of human sensibilities in studying literature, and similarly, Professor Jim Clifford’s assigned reading by Lara Putnam delved into the importance of fieldwork in creating experiential awareness in the humanities. This helped me understand the question of the value of human experience, emotion, and contextualisation in academic research. Then, both Professor Barbara Bordalejo and Professor Tannishtha Samanta used digital platforms and technology as floors for studying representation. In both lectures, one of the conclusions was that digital media also allows for more discourse on various disciplines that would have otherwise been neglected such as sociology, anthropology and feminism, that help theorise in humanities. An example of this is the contrast between women receiving rape threats online and cyber stalking, and with the new digital feminist activism. The latter can be exemplified through sending digital invites and creation of online events for movements such as the ‘Slutwalk’ in Toronto. Both of these opposing examples in the position and respect women are given, but are possible at the same time because of digital media. More debates arise in my mind about access, replicability, owners, and safeguards of information and content because of online and digital media. Professor Uttama Lahiri and Mr. Junaid Hashmi showed us the ways in which technology like AI and mobile apps could be tamed to cater to the needs and aspirations of the people. Lastly, the talks by Professor Peter Robinson and Professor K. P. Jayashankar helped bring forth the creation of new imaginations from historical texts and events. 

The scope of all of these lectures are broad and interconnected. The research conducted in digital humanities goes twofold: digital technologies are used to create knowledge in the humanities, and humanities question and build up on digital technologies. It can almost be said that the new form and nature of information being created by digital technologies can be integrated with humanistic theories and frameworks. 

Some interesting activities we are doing is engaging with what we are learning by doing readings before lectures and asking questions both inside and outside the classroom. On Twitter and on the WIDH blog, I am able to reflect and unwind on my daily experiences and how they contribute to a larger, more overarching understanding of the academic and even non- academic field.

With one more week to go, I am excited and nervous about what is yet to come. I hope I get the opportunity to develop newer processes, expressions, designs and research. 

Digital humanities is a field itself is the history and body of literature around humanities computing in the UK and US, which essentially explores the use of computational methods in humanities research and practice. Narrate it as “precisely the mechanization of every possible analysis of human expression, in the widest sense of the word, from music to the theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts” Instead, what I found a couple of questions/conflicts that seemed to be troubling about this concept to begin with.

1. Are ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’ really two contradictory terms that are being bridged together? Is this a reiteration of the ‘two cultures’?
2. What are the changes in the object of inquiry in humanities disciplines due to the advent of the internet and digital technologies?
3. What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects? How are these affecting the traditional methods of the humanities, Social science and Journalism?
4. Is Digital humanities confined academic phenomena, and can it be related to academic disciplines only? With several groups of practitioners appealing with questions and methods related to DH outside universities, how do we define its boundaries?
5. What are the new skills, ideas and tools/technology emerging with, and in turn defining, digital humanities practices in India?
6. Is changing of person behavior dew to digital humanities?
7. How digital humanities help in public health? How its make more assessable?
8. How digital humanities play vital role in journalism for advertisement? Now in India 10% of GDP comes from travel and tourism, how we can increase this by using digital humanities with the help of journalism?
9. How digital humanities is going to help in education sector?

Hey guys, this my take on the film The Matrix and how it aptly presents Techno-capitalist Desire and Power Structures in the Media

The central premise of the film is humanity enslaved in a virtual reality known as the proverbial “matrix” program. The explanation for the existence of the matrix is the classic story of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Humanity is already under the control of aliens. Or in this case machines, farming them for power in the Real world. These fields of humans represent the metaphorical ideological fields of techno-capitalism. A form of late capitalism grounded in corporate power and its exploitation of technological creativity.

Some humans can “wake up” and unplug from the matrix and those humans dedicate their lives to freeing others and defeating the machines. Is such an escape possible in the real world where society is under near constant surveillance by corporations and the media? Where information and technologies and the corporations providing them can virtually “plug in” to consumers lives without their knowledge or consent?

The role of machines in the film first appear as an accelerated representation of free-market capitalistic desires. Initially created to offload labour they also served an almost fetishistic purpose, in some cases as prostitutes and servants for human desire. The question is what, if anything, is natural about human desire? Like the machines themselves, human desires are artificial and desire itself is at the core of consumer culture. Arthur Berger affirms: “the infinite extension of desire is one of the pre-conditions for consumer culture to work effectively.”.

Bodies, images and consumption concerns have been interlaced with the media long before the rise of consumer networks. Desire is a ceaseless, energized drive to connect to different and better systems, it is the self-transcendent possibility magnified within the virtual sphere. Only when humanity fully relies on the “thinking machine” will it be confronted by the void of subjectivity. The ontological nature of this matrix like sphere that contains humanity is as Slavoj Zizek describes: a body without organs – perhaps even a machine.

The core of the power struggle between humans and machines reveals something Marxist. The machines – no longer simply machines – become imbued with a “soul” much like a business or corporation which enjoy the legal rights of human beings in today’s economic climate. These ensouled machines become an instrument of social control, producing the arrogant breed who become the masters.

Corporate executives – “the gatekeepers” – of the matrix are portrayed distinctly bourgeois. Morpheus describes them as: “(they are) everyone, and (they are) no-one.” White, middle-aged, nondescript male clones known only as agents existing completely stateless, operating via repetition and expansion. While the liberated humans who fight against them are multi-cultural, mixed race, gender and age. Agents will hack into any unliberated human connected to the matrix and control their mental capital, deadlocking the mental means of production in an authoritarian power structure of the ruling class.

The Matrix encapsulates the pessimistic horrors of a fully globalized world: class warfare and social difference framed visually within the core-periphery model. Social structures are present even in the nature of where the machines and humans live. Free humans live far out on the fringes of society whereas the machines dominate the surface. Initially observed by world systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein, according to core-periphery theory one race, ethnicity or religion becomes dominant creating a sphere of influence. This divides the world into a core and a peripheral in terms of their integration in the capitalism system. The machines represent a monolithic core in a world that isn’t just ubiquitously occupied by the media, but rather arguably is the media.

In the words of Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. The Matrix claims no originality in message – only method. In an interview on the film Baudrillard writes: “The message of The Matrix is its own diffusion by an uncontrollable and proliferating contamination. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.” American media marketing successes like The Matrix – a so-called counterculture artifact of mass media – are heralded as a critique of a system which massively promotes it.

Of course, not all media response was positive. Numerous shootouts and murders were alleged to have been linked to the release of the film, most notably the devastating Columbine high school massacre in 1999 just weeks after the film was released. The media not only has its tendrils firmly wrapped around the message of the film, but the narrative following it. In this way, it controls the mental capital, the very desire to consume media.

When Neo takes the red pill, he doesn’t just see the desert of the Real. He sees the dictatorship in democracy, suddenly aware of the invisible order which sustains his apparent “freedom”. At first glance, this ideology is framed as something blurring or confusing reality but ideology should be like a pill which distorts the view of the beholder. Likewise, the critique of ideology should be its opposite. Once he enters the matrix again, things appear as they really are: Not just a field of machines – a complex system of control and power structures streaming down in a series of zeros and ones.

As Neo witnesses a woman in a red dress transform into a ruthless enemy before his eyes, Morpheus explains the ideology of power structures:

“The Matrix is a system, that system is our enemy. When you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. Many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”

This is precisely the justified pessimism of The Matrix. Ideology like desire is not just simply imposed, but the spontaneous relationship to the social world. This, not unlike the matrix, is the ultimate illusion. People enjoy their ideology. Tearing away the ego from ideology is a deeply traumatic experience. They must be forced into freedom. Neo is aware he lives in a lie, that Morpheus’ red pill will make him see the painful truth and shatter the illusion. This is the paradox he must accept, the extreme violence of liberation: one must be forced to be free.

The ending of the film suggests that the antagonisms of social difference, power, class and ideology can only be resolved once the two spheres are harmoniously combined as the Agent and Neo are. Perhaps the matrix of ideology itself resides in the belief that outside of the core, the sphere, or the finite universe there is a Real reality that must be entered.

In this regard, The Matrix experiences a moment of truth: the alienated social substance of the capital directly taking over, colonizing inner life itself and using it as it’s lifeforce. Films like The Matrix signal the antagonisms of the late-technocapitalist social experience. Ontological couples like reality and pain, freedom and the system to illustrate a lesson: one (Neo) cannot coincide with itself, with pure difference.

Digital Humanities offers a several promising opportunities in India. Firstly, it is a great methodological intervention, as an integration of computational tools in Humanities and Social Sciences research. Secondly, it opens up an opportunity to ask different kinds of questions and employ requisite computational tools to answer them. Traditionally, several disciplines in Social Sciences demark their territory in terms of theory and method. But however, the available of digital tools redefined this notion and pushed scholars to think go beyond their disciplinary understanding. Moreover, in any research, the availability of data plays an important role. Lack of data always delimits ones understanding on several issues. With the help of Digital Humanities, one can build a strong digital archives and make data available to all otherwise it is limited to few. It is more or less a kind of web archives where several documents or resources in analogue mode made available through digitalizing them.

In Indian case, it has lot of advantages as most of the historical records largely still exists in Institutional setup and needs to be digitalized. For an example, some archival institutes in Indian started digitalizing historical newspapers and magazines which were in circulation in pre independence. This will help not only historians but also people from other disciplines who wants to analyze the material for their research. Apart from digital archives, the DH as methodological tool helps one to collect large amount of data and analyze them.

The real India resides in Villages. That,s why the Father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi gave call for “Go to Villages” during Indian Independence Movement. He knew, unless and until the independence movement reaches to the remotest corner of the India, it would not take the form of National movement.

The Indian villages are characterized by traditional, conservative society. The technology has not yet penetrate to the extent it has been in cities. According to Census 2011, 86% of Indian farmers are marginal farmers i.e. possesses/owns less than 5 acres of land. The rural India is facing the social issues like poverty, hunger, suicides, unemployment, health, education etc. The share of Indian agriculture sector in Indian economy at the time independence was more than 50%. It has gradually decline to mere 17% in 2018. Also, agriculture sector used to employ more than 90% population at the time of independence. Now, about 48% population of India engage in agriculture sector. The reason behind this is largely due to apathy of political leadership towards the villages, the traditional mindset of people and conservative way of farming. The large scale out-migration from rural to urban regions is rampant in India due to rise of unemployment opportunities in rural areas, the fragmentation of land, unproductive agriculture occupation due to various reasons like erratic behaviors of monsoon, overuse of fertilizers, pesticides, salinization of soil etc.

The one of the reasons behind bad condition of Indian villages is lack of technological penetration into hinterland of rural India. Even in 2019, only 5% of marginal farmers in India uses the mechanized farm instruments. Even today, large number of farmers use bullock driven wooden plough for ploughing. While big harvestors are available in market but marginal farmers cannot afford it as it is very costly. The green revolution which had started in 1970s has increased the agriculture productivity to large extent but due to irrational usage of pesticides and fertilizers made soil unproductive and barren.

Technology works hard to ease human workload. The prime reason behind the failure of crop is erratic behavior of monsoon. For this problem, the weather forecasting satellites has been deployed by the ISRO which forecasts the weather and informs the farmers about monsoon prior to agriculture season. Also, the ISRO has deployed the remote sensing satellites for measuring the crop patterns in India and accordingly provide information to farmers about the likely crop they should take. Apart from this satellite technology, the government is also giving the subsidies to farmers to buy mechnized instruments for agriculture. The Research and Development Departments of various government, non-government, private agencies are innovating new breeds of seeds which can give higher productivity despite unpredictable monsoon, for example, Genetically Modified Crops etc. The Genetically Modified seeds are the seeds which are processed in Biotechnology laboratories. At the same time, solar water pumps which runs on solar energy can also prove useful in long run as it will reduce the electricity expenditure of farmers.

While we are talking about technology in agriculture, the talk would be incomplete without mentioning the food processing technology as it is most important forward linkages to the agriculture sector. Food processing industry is very important for perishable items like vegetables, fruits etc. Especially the sugarcane industries in the states of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab. The food processing industries are proving boon for agriculture products.

Thus, we can say that, interlinking technology with agriculture is very important to revive the Indian Agriculture sector and uplift out 48% population in socio-economic setup.

“When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.” – Alexis De Tocqueville.

Going through a certainly interesting Winter School, I came across several views about how Digital Humanities are sabotaging the art and culture in some or the other form and this my take on this – using a popular game which describes how role of art will continue to be prevalent even if technology fully integrates with humanity.

In Eidos Montreal’s visionary game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the year is 2027 and the world stands at the dawn of a cybernetic Renaissance. Both man and machine and the real and artificial have merged and blurred countless barriers between the sciences, philosophy and art. In a familiar echo to the iconic work of Renaissance master Michelangelo in The Creation of Adam, Human Revolution tells the story of Adam Jensen – he’s dying.

A fatal terrorist attack on corporate biotech giant Sarif Industries leaves Adam with no choice but to be taken into the controversial post-human rapture. The first in-game animation depicts Adam lost in a blur of surgical machines and flesh, severed limbs and organs – the quintessential nature of Adam’s flawed humanity are replaced by the perfection of cybernetic technology. Within this mechanical fever-dream Adam sees himself as the subject of iconic Renaissance painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp. It’s unclear how much remains of his humanity and what it is he ultimately transcends to. What is clear is that Adam is caught in the crossfire of a transhumanism movement. Human Revolution carefully narrates the pace of technological development in its art direction with a Renaissance theme. People who support the advancement of human augmentations adopt a seventeenth century Italian Renaissance style and throughout the game gold and sepia colour palettes attempt to mimic historic Renaissance manuscripts. How can a historic seventeenth century art style become a symbol for this worldwide transhumanist movement? This essay shall attempt to understand humanities relationship with art and technology and how the future is envisioned by studying the past.

Robots, cyborgs, cybernetic, and the mechanized human are seen by many as purely the stuff of science fiction. But the movement of the cyber Renaissance in Human Revolution might be closer to a reality than not. Is it possible that humans are already indistinguishable from the machine? Perhaps from the moment man first wielded and fashioned a tool, an unbreakable bond was forged and humanity began a long and inescapable future with the machine. This concept of transcending our humanity is the foundation of what’s known as transhumanism. But what exactly is the role of art in mans inseparable relationship with machine? In order to understand, it’s necessary to learn a brief history of the Renaissance’s role in the rebirth of science and art, and why it became a crucial pillar for the future of transhumanism. Furthermore, how Deus Ex: Human Revolution stands as a visual interactive piece of art that mirrors the history of the Renaissance to help understand arts role in a world of technology both today and tomorrow.

The word Renaissance itself means rebirth, and indeed five hundred years ago a culture was reborn. The artists of the Renaissance were not merely artists but also scientists, mechanics, biologists, alchemists and botanists. Leonardo da Vinci perhaps best represents this cultural synthesis, the iconic artist known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supperis also the father of the first robotic humanoid. As an apprenticing artist da Vinci underwent the study of anatomy and in time he began to study the mechanical function of the skeleton and muscles, the precursor to modern biomechanics. His work produced the first mechanical man in a suit of armour capable of human movements, and in some cases the movements were even anatomically correct. Cultural rebirth on the scale of the Renaissance is the same vision within the cyber Renaissance of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Nineteenth Century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness”. E.H. Carr explains that the boundaries between the past and the future are crossed when people and culture begin to live outside of the present. History begins with tradition and tradition is the beacon that whether progressive or not carries the visions of the past into the future, without tradition the spirit within art remains in darkness outside of time. At the end of the Renaissance, art became a more human form and a revolution in thinking now saw beauty as something that might lie in the future rather than in the past. In Human Revolution the use of Renaissance art among those that revere augmentation conveys how some saw beauty in something more specific than the future: the post-human. However, the unique medium allows for something equally important.

When studying art, the relationship between the medium and the message is essential. There is imperative significance to how Human Revolution delivers its message through the media used. Depicted in art, film and literature as all shades between the dystopian and utopian Human Revolution indeed also asks if technology that alters the human condition equalizes society or divides it. However Deus Ex isn’t any single work of art, it’s a universe which in itself consists of novels, in-game literature, art, short films and interactive gameplay that specifically avoid taking a dedicated stance. Instead, this mixed media approach creates an effect unique to the medium of games by simulating the consequences of causality. The medium affirms the connection between man and machine, in order to fully experience the art form a human must interact with a machine in harmony. During the animation previously described where Adam Jensen becomes a cyborg to save his life, the method used to create the piece was yet another representation of this unifying concept. The animation is a seamless blend between live action filming and computer animation to express the blurred boundary between man and machine in a technological age.

When exploring revolutionary art styles, it’s not surprising that video games may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Even Einstein didn’t acknowledge the contribution of relativity to the cubism movement of the early twentieth century. However, from my perspective Human Revolution is part of an art style that may one day pave the way for the future of mixed reality. We may not be cyborgs on the level of Adam Jensen in our lifetimes, but advancements in prosthetic technologies and brain computer interfaces are bringing us closer to a post-human future. Regardless of the present stance on video games as an art form, it remains that Deus Ex invites audiences to attempt answering big questions such as what it means to be post-human themselves. Engaging in culture whether hate or activism becomes part of culture itself, the past remains a lens to the future and games such as Deus Ex will continue to triumph in the art world.

At the end of my lecture on Textual Scholarship on Wednesday 11 December, I asked everyone to turn on their phones, go to PlayStore or the AppStore, and find the “General Prologue” App. Everyone seemed to do so! Indeed, Google Play tells me that 21 people in Indian downloaded the App yesterday. Thank you! (Apple, through the App store, claims that no-one downloaded the Apple version, but I don’t believe them).

We would love some feedback on the App! Did you get it? Load it? Open it? Did it work? Did it make sense? Was it interesting, useful? Comments please.