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Bridging DH and Humanistic HCI

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Sustainable Digital Communities (iConference 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12051))

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Abstract

Bowker’s Age of Potential Memory describes a new era characterized by a culture of knowledge production that fosters and stifles certain forms of statements depending on the logics that subtend them. Through processes of ubiquitous data collection, analysis, and feedback, individuals are increasingly reduced to users; users are re-created as data doubles or data doppelgangers, post hoc, through the aggregation and analysis of their data traces. This discursive transformation of the human that will arise in relation to living alongside and through these doubles or doppelgangers is difficult to understand within the framework of extant disciplinary silos. And yet methods that connect disciplines are emerging. To realize these connections, translational work is required. This paper explores the complementarity of digital humanities (DH) and humanistic human-computer interaction (hHCI) through the lens of distant reading. I focus on distant reading—topic modelling in particular—because of its methodological popularity and relation to discourse. I argue that distant reading comprises a useful connection between these two young domains: a pivot that allows for the inter- or transdisciplinary study of the future human through the analysis of its potential sociotechnical, discursive compositions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am not a sociologist and am therefore ill-equipped to engage in a mechanistic analysis of how one might alter modes of scholarly communication and validation in such a way as to foster an easier transdisciplinarity. For those interested in pursuing this issue, I recommend the work of Becher and Trowler [9] as a starting point.

  2. 2.

    Further, discussion of the epistemic roots of LDA and its relation to archive theory allows us to sidestep the (important) issue of data visualization, which can be seen as an obfuscating, but primary motivating factor for the use of digital methods [24].

  3. 3.

    The treatments of DH and hHCI presented here are purposefully broad. While they will likely not satisfy specialists in either DH or hHCI, to seek a middle ground is always to fail in satisfying disciplinary purists.

  4. 4.

    That design implies reconstruction is a primary impetus for the design practices referenced.

  5. 5.

    I do not hold the position that humanistic analysis is out of date or outmoded, but rather make this statement as it appears to be the elephant in the room whenever DH comes up at non-DH conferences.

  6. 6.

    That discourses are present or materialized in texts at the moment of writing does not imply their stability. The text, therefore, constitutes a heterotopia combining both the historical a priori condition in which it was written and the analogous condition in which it is read. It is doubly temporal; doubly historical.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    John S. Seberger

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  1. John S. Seberger
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway

    Anneli Sundqvist

  2. OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway

    Gerd Berget

  3. University of Boras, Boras, Sweden

    Jan Nolin

  4. OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway

    Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad

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Seberger, J.S. (2020). Bridging DH and Humanistic HCI. In: Sundqvist, A., Berget, G., Nolin, J., Skjerdingstad, K. (eds) Sustainable Digital Communities. iConference 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12051. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43687-2_72

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43687-2_72

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