This panel examines the ways in which media archeology is an effective research methodology for Digital Humanities (DH) scholarship, as its simultaneous focus on larger media infrastructures, such as globalised corporate entities networking with nation states, alongside the detailed histories and bureaucratic materials generated by specific media technologies and their data structures, make visible and legible the production and circulation of power within contemporary networks of media technologies. Extending from DH scholars such as Alan Liu (2012; 2013) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (2013), this panel examines how media archeology is crucial to reckoning with the historical and ongoing targeting of marginalised and vulnerable individuals and populations, in particular those who are racialized and gendered, and sourcing what Ezikiel Dixon-Roman calls “hauntings” (2017) of technical progress, funding, data practices and other historical trajectories within AI and AI-enabled technologies in 2023.

As outlined by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, media archaeology is cross-disciplinary and nomadic, and its nimbleness and tolerance for multi-pronged analysis allow for a greater understanding of digital media’s “interactivity, navigability, and digital representation and transmission” (3; 2012). This flexibility and simultaneous attention to the invisible and visible, material and immaterial, make it well suited to understanding the particular data-driven algorithmic processes that define contemporary digital media and DH scholarship. The genealogies of power revealed through media archeologies, resulting from rival technologies vying for control, trace how the hegemon came to be, and ascend to the pole position of the socio-technical apparatus (Monea and Packer 2016). Media archeologies understood thus enables DH scholars to engage in inter-/cross-disciplinary conversations with scholars in science and technology studies, philosophy of science, DH and other disciplines.

Machine Translation and Politics: Mapping the media genealogy of digital humanities collaborations and opportunities

Arun Jacob

This paper will shed light on the legacies, logics, and cultural techniques that have shaped and formed the early collaborations and opportunities in digital humanities projects in machine translation research and computational linguistics. The media history of the machine translation project led by Léon Dostert, the Director of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University in collaboration with IBM, helps unpack how war is the motor-force of history. By tracing the lineages of the machine translation media technologies, i.e. their discursive formation, the networks through which the discourse was circulated and the apparatuses that were formed in the process. We are able to gather how these instruments of knowledge production render the world knowable and representable through the production, storage, and distribution of particular kinds of data, shaping knowledge creation and producing and sustaining power relations. Alex Monea and Jeremy Packer’s media genealogical intervention insists on suturing questions of power’s genealogies and subjectivation to the media archaeological mode of analysis. This approach enables me to consider the agential potential and embeddedness of media technologies operationalized in digital humanities vis-a-vis relations of power. My analyses will show how the institutional systems that work to gather, collect, store, transcribe, and distribute the data of machine translation are inconspicuously tangled in relations of power.

“Reconstructing the Constellations of Technical, Political, and Representational Protocols within Facial Recognition Technologies via Media Archeology”

Aaron Tucker

This presentation outlines how a multi-pronged media archeological methodology is an incredibly effective way to reckon with the complex centuries of racist and misogynist history related to the development of facial recognition technologies (FRTs). Such a media archeology leverages the fact that FRTs have long and well-documented technical histories of their computational vision and visualities. In turn, documents and developments related to the technical protocols contain within them the mappings of FRTs representational and political protocols. Likewise, materials related to the representational and/or political protocols often describe the necessary technical protocols needed to operationalize such logics. Knowing this, a three pronged media archeology effectively illustrates FRTs’ development: tracing FRTs in the context of Wolfgang Ernst’s understanding of the operative moment helps to reconstruct the evolutions of technical protocols; utilizing Lisa Gitelman’s framing of digital media as structured, maintained and controlled by hegemonic bureaucratic functioning reveals FRTs’ political protocols; and Anna Munster’s work, wherein intense attention is paid to the flux of relationships forming and unforming in durational and dynamic pulses within the image-making of technological-biological networks, recreates how FRTs’ representational protocols are formed. This paper will illustrate the value of a three-pronged media archeology by examining the specific example of the Woodrow “Woody” Bledsoe’s archive, a man considered to be the “father” of FRTs. Evaluating the materials in the archive via a media archeological methodology showcases the complex interactions of protocols within Bledsoe’s work while simultaneously pointing backwards towards past histories of the technology that his work aligns with, while also highlighting the influences Bledsoe has had on contemporary FRTs.

Genealogies of Pain: Wounded Attachments and the Queer/Trans Archive

Kanika Lawton

Leelah Alcorn’s death, in particular the suicide notes she left on her Tumblr and in a handwritten letter, is the focus of this paper. A trans teenager who died at 17, Leelah was subjected to conversion therapy while alive and sustained misgendering and deadnaming by her parents in death. Her online suicide note, which named her parents as the cause of her death and pleaded that “My death needs to mean something,” was deleted at her parents’ request, while a handwritten suicide note was also destroyed. Working with objects that only exist in the traces of digital archiving (as screenshots, news sites, and social media platforms), how can media archeology make Leelah’s death mean something without bringing her back to a life rendered unbearable?

In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka argue that “on the basis of their discoveries, media archaeologists have begun to construct alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media-cultural condition as their ‘perfection’” (2011, 3). A “rummaging” methodology that takes as its objects the deadened, the cast-aside, and the “bad,” media archeology is an apt means of thinking through incomplete media histories— especially in the ephemeral, contested space of the digital archive—as well as the suppressed, neglected, and forgotten histories of queer/trans people and the media objects they produce.

This paper argues for media archaeology’s value as a DH and queer/trans methodology of sitting with the painful histories, encounters, and feelings that permeate the queer/trans archive and its disproportionate collection of violence, suicide, and anger. Drawing from Wendy Brown’s concept of “wounded attachments” and Heather Love’s argument that “queer history is, in a sense, nothing but wounded attachments...[which] just might be another name for the practice of history” (2007, 42), such attachments to a “genealogy of pain”—which entangles the past, present, and future in non-teleological encounters with debilitating histories—attempts to fill the gaps endemic in the queer/trans archive while drawing attention to the painful conditions that brought them about.

How, then, can sitting with the wounded attachments to Leelah that have festered in my own encounters—I was active on Tumblr during her death—make queer/trans archival work both difficult yet all the more essential? Media archeology provide ways to sit with such bad feelings that are nevertheless conducive to present and future historical and historiographical work.

Patents and Problematization -- A Digital Humanities Approach

Paula Nunez de Villavicencio

This paper offers a novel approach to patent research as a site of cultural discourse for the production of subjectivities through modes of problematization. It considers patents produced for wearable technologies and their imagined solutions for shaping human information practices. Using patents produced by major technology companies such as Amazon, this project considers the ways in which we are always already conditioned to certain information practices and cultures of productivity.

This paper examines modes of subjectivation produced through wearable technology as imagined by Amazon and presented in their patents for a labouring system. Delfanti, Pottenger, and Struna and Reese critically examine the labor processes that are currently practiced in Amazon warehouses and distribution centers. These sources among others note the ways in which the human is made to work at breakneck paces, how the labourers are currently surveilled, directed, and encouraged to ensure a level of efficiency demanded by consumers and upper management alike. Amazon has made changes to the material labor system following in the steps of Taylorism, Ford, LEAN, and Industry 4.0 in their drive to optimize the process and rid themselves of the obstacles in their path toward perfect productivity. This paper is a response to this argument, and seeks to analyze how Amazon problematizes labor processes, and produces technological solutions that shape the future of work through modes of subjectivation.

With well over 2000 patents produced in the last 10 years, this paper uses a mixed method approach of distant reading, stylometry, and produces a media genealogy of the cultural artefact, to determine imagined modes of governance and the role of wearable technology as the imagined solution to the problem of human deficiencies in a digital network and labour process. This paper highlights the potential of digital humanities and patent research to examine contemporary cultural perspectives and future uses of digital technologies.

A significant number of (largely non-digital) Humanists resist the idea that they “have” data. This translates into critical scepticism to the role of data in humanities research and the loss of the essence of what characterized humanistic objects and their treatment (see Marche 2012, Sinykin, 2021). This scepticism reflects a failure to recognise and understand the implications of a fundamental use of data in the Humanities, which we call “representational data.”

“Representational data” — the collection, analysis, and especially dissemination of cultural materials in the form of mediated research objects such as scholarly editions, curated museum or gallery catalogues, facsimiles and models — were not easily processed using the early systems of humanities computing. For this reason, the work of these early computational projects was often quite distinct from its analogue counterpart.

Much of the resistance to data in the humanities comes from an intuitive and largely unarticulated sense among analogue researchers that this primary use case has been overlooked, i.e. that debates about the definition of “data” ignore or deemphasise how such data have been used in the humanities. Here, we examine how the use of ‘representational data’ illuminates some of the issues involved in both the resistance and adoption of data in humanities scholarship.

Analogue humanists speak of “sources.” “Primary sources” are texts, objects, and artefacts they study; “secondary sources,” the work of others with whom they engage. Research objects such as editions of historical texts or models of artefacts can be both “primary” and “secondary”: proxies or representatives of the original objects and works of interpretation and analysis that can be engaged with by others in their own right depending on the use given to them at a particular time.

Computers, in the 1950s, understood data: the processing of “given things.” Busa’s Index Thomisticus was an ideal early application precisely because its textual nature and its end use were something that took full advantage of the computer’s capacity to process information.

Joanna Drucker’s influential suggestion that Humanists don’t have data (“given”) but rather capta (“taken”) separates what is recorded (data) from was is constructed (capta) (Drucker 2011). Although Father Busa was passively using data, the spirit of his work was not that of constructing an interpretation but of building tools to allow the navigation of Aquinas’ works. Computation historically forced scholars to talk about data in ways that seemed alien to analogue Humanists.

We conclude, based on the case of representational data, that the way analogue humanists think has not been fully understood by research data management specialists or infrastructure developers, whose practices have been developed almost entirely with a different understanding, in which “data” are things to be counted rather than represented and which are generated through experiment, observation and measurement. This explains the poor support such infrastructure provides for humanities research objects that work with representational data. It provides an agenda for a Humanities-informed approach to research infrastructure that can address the resistance to data that is still widely felt among Humanities researchers.

That the humanities has ‘a data problem’ is now a common refrain amongst many communities. Humanists often argue that humanities data is a problem because they don’t have or work with data (Borgman, 201. Librarians and information professionals, by contrast, believe that humanists have data, but assume they don’t realize it — meaning that the problem is that they must be trained to appropriately recognize and work with data (Flanders, Julia, and Trevor Muñoz, 2012; Ikeshoji-Orlati, Caton, and Stringer-Hye, 2018). Digital humanists know that they have data but believe that their data are special and that these data require special strategies and techniques as a result (Drucker,2011; Schöch,2013). Each premise informs a mélange of assumptions, advice and best practices that comprise the emerging literature on research data management (RDM) in the humanities (Gualandi, et. al, 2022; Thoegersen, 2018).

We argue that this focus on the discovery and definition of what is “special” about humanities data is a mistake. Humanities data are not special because of what they are, but rather because of how they are used (Borgman,2017; Leonelli, 2015), and hence how data are designed and structured by systems to meet particular ends. Data are data whether they are produced and used by scientists or humanists. The “problem” with humanities data lies in the use-case, or the system requirements of the scholarly tool or infrastructure that shapes data for particular purposes.

Our argument draws on evidence and analysis derived from a series of comparative case studies exploring the development of scholar-led data intensive projects over time. We examine how humanists conceptualize data as they build, navigate, and utilize research infrastructure for scholarly purposes. Originating in software engineering, use-case modeling (Jacobson et al. 1992) is a means of specifying, validating, and eliciting system requirements. Models describe, communicate, and facilitate all the ways a user interacting with a system or product may work to realize a desired end. We highlight how these models mediate between user-agency, the purpose of a scholarly project, and the ‘infrastructural work’ necessary to meet a project's goals.

In fields where use-case modeling are less well explicit, as is the case in the Humanities, humanists have worked far more improvisationally (Ciula, 2022), experimenting and innovating by designing and building infrastructure that have specific requirements, but often without clear requirements modeling. As a result, humanists often create custom information systems, data infrastructures or tools and interfaces developed by researchers for the collection, analysis, and presentation of their own data. The problem in humanities RDM is not that humanists don’t have a common understanding of what data are, it is that they don’t recognize the degree to which they are using these data for common ends or in generalizable ways.

In conclusion, we point to some ways to shift the conversation away from ‘the problem of humanities data’ and towards developing and interfacing with scholarly use-cases, the scenarios and problem-sets scholars are concerned with, and engage with the custom infrastructural strategies they have developed to speak to them.

"Archive of the Digital Present for Online Literary Performance in Canada (COVID-19 Pandemic Period)" is a research and development project that arose out of the need to address foundational, practical and theoretical research questions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and attendant social disruptions and restrictions, on literary communities in Canada through the collection of information about organized literary events as they occurred from March 2020-March 2022.

Our paper will first present some of the design and development work pursued in building a searchable, open access database and directory – The Archive of the Digital Present (ADP) – to allow scholars, literary practitioners, and the public to gain knowledge about the nature and significance of events that occurred (mostly online) during the pandemic period, through the collection and structuring of metadata, and limited additional assets.

Our discussion will then focus in on the work in data collection and structuring we have pursued to bring content to the directory site. The ADP project necessarily began with questions about the data we were seeking to collect. In February 2021 we performed a preliminary analysis of online and social media postings for listings of literary events hosted in Canada. This revealed 77 discrete organizers of over one thousand (1,011, to be exact) literary events between 20 March 2020 - 31 December 2020. This list served as the starting point for an expanded catalogue of events, and for team discussions about the nature and number of metadata fields we would use. We proceeded by adapting extant categories of the SpokenWeb metadata schema that has been designed for the description of historical literary audio recordings. This allowed us to repurpose the backend of the Swallow Metadata Ingest System (Swallow), built for metadata management of historical research collections, through the development of a crosswalk that best serves the goals of data collection for ADP. Data fields we have shaped for this project include categories related to Title, Creator/Contributor, Language, Production Context, Genre, Duration, Date, Location, Online Platform, and Contents, among others.

As we now have a live site, even as data continues to be added, our presentation will recount our ongoing methods of discovering events to be included in the ADP database, explain the rationale of our selection of metadata categories and our approach to structuring those fields, rehearse some of the philosophical and ontological questions that have arisen in the process of abstracting the complex and mediated literary activities of the pandemic period into categories of searchable data, and will end with reflections on the relationship between quantitative data and the qualitative data we are now collecting in the form of interviews from the organizers of the events we have catalogued. Drawing upon our experience of data collection from a diverse range of literary organizations and communities, our paper concludes with an argument about the value of thinking about quantitative and qualitative data as functioning productively in an ongoing dialectic of data curation, presentation, and community consultation, and suggestions for methods of realizing such an approach.