Engl507

Class Notes: Meeting 11

"Arguing with Computers" was constructed with an investment in how the very practices of literary and cultural criticism are mediated: how we are distanced from texts, immersed in them, distracted by them, overwhelmed with them, surrounded by them, or frustrated with them. These questions have a long legacy in criticism, and are only complicated by the integration of computers and computational methods into our methodologies. With mediation as our starting point, defining "digital humanities" or "digital literary studies" became less important to the seminar than understanding how our relationships with computers and computational methods shape the research we do, under what assumptions, and to what effects. Where our research is concerned, we started the seminar by unpacking the state of hermeneutics, such as it is. For instance, through computation, how do we practice hermeneutics differently? When do some features (e.g., depth models, suspicion, or the unconscious) of hermeneutics face their limits? Can you conduct hermeneutics persuasively at scale? Across a variety of media? With surprise or unexpected results in mind?

We then transitioned into how new media are defined, with some attention to how media differ from mediation. For instance, Wendy Chun underscores memory as the defining characteristic of new media. Meanwhile, Lev Manovich gives us the following characteristics: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. By scholars such as Tara McPherson, we are also urged to think through new media (e.g., multimodal scholarship) rather than reducing them (perhaps coldly) to our objects of inquiry. And of course Benjamin reminds us how, at once, media aesthetics are politicized, and politics are aestheticized through media. These discussions brought us to one key point: how people interact with new media is not somehow built into media themselves. That is, mediation cannot be reduced to media's formal properties. Rather, we must understand mediation (including the practice of literary and cultural criticism) as relational, recursive, and contingent upon a variety of material and phantasmal conditions.

This discussion helped us navigate toward the notion of "data models" or "data modelling" in the humanities. To be sure, models (especially "models of") face a variety of interpretive limitations (e.g., "mere description"), and they are often read as deterministic (e.g., the positivist reduction of literature to data). However, work by Drucker, Nowviskie, and Kraus, among others, highlights how "models for" (e.g., speculative and conjectural models) create a space for not only comprehending how models process (or help us process) content but also treating models critically as mediations—as frameworks for navigating, interpreting, compiling, visualizing, and archiving our research materials. The question of how and when these models are standardized simultaneously highlights why we need (or want) such standards and how materials are classified (e.g., through mutually exclusive categories), regulated, and linked to protocols and norms.

Here, our considerations of models and mediation necessitated a serious consideration of procedure, including Bogost's work on procedural rhetoric, or processes making arguments about processes. During these considerations, we noted (following Kirschenbaum's medial ideology) how important it is to understand the particulars of procedures and transduction, without reducing "how this becomes that" to a conceptual or abstract matter. Yet, at the same time, we noticed how difficult it is to recover or unearth procedure from the materials at hand. In that sense (returning to Chun for a moment), there is always something about procedure that escapes: how it is compiled, by whom, when, and on what platform are all, to some degree, ephemeral. The question, then, is how that ephemerality endures.

During the middle of the semester, we started applying these discussions at the intersection of the humanities and computation, with (again) an emphasis on how criticism is also mediation. Here is a quick list of the different modes or methods we studied, including their relation to mediation:

• Forensics as mediation, or the impulse to understand the technical particulars of texts, media, and platforms, with an emphasis on storage, inscription, and physical differences across matter.
• Memory as mediation, or the interest in examining how compiling or "re-membering" at once endures and differs from one instance to the next.
• Procedure as mediation, or an attention to how processes make arguments about processes, through machine and operator actions.
• Speculation as mediation, or highlighting the irony, ambivalence, embodiment, and heterogeneity of texts, while also recognizing that they could have been composed or expressed differently (e.g., "what if?" scenarios and counterfactuals).
• Distance as mediation, or underscoring how reading more texts does not alway give us more persuasive answers, and that expressing a large quantity of text or texts through graphs, maps, and trees helps us better understand their relations, tendencies, and emergence.
• Immersion as mediation, or the importance of illustrating instead of explaining, experiencing instead of dissecting, letting be instead of problematizing.
• De- or transformation as mediation, or the premise that manipulating or playing with materials gives us a stronger sense of how they were made, under what assumptions, and through what forms, structures, techniques, or the like.
• Surface as mediation, or a tendency to thoroughly describe materials (computationally or not) in order to see what surprises or curiosities pop up.

During the last third of the semester, after discussing your own research projects and listening to other graduate students talk about how they've transferred work from 507 into other contexts, we have been attending to two more aspects of mediation in our current moment: interface design and digital labour. How are the above modes of criticism designed with audiences or participants in mind? How is scholarship expressed, used, and repurposed? And to what degree does digital labour (or the server economy) shape our understanding of exchange, justice, review, and openness in networked environments, including environments premised on the interpretation and circulation of scholarly communications? To be sure, these issues should not be peripheral to our designs or projects. They should be fundamental to them.

Our last step of the semester? Three public panels on "Arguing with Computers." See you there!