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.

We must be unfortunately aware of the ways in which different minorities are undermined either through extreme visibility or extreme invisibility, unrepresented or represented in ways that don’t correspond to their identities nor their idiosyncrasy as individuals. As we all know, the history of moving images was decided by people who had the money and power to shape the social imaginary through big, expensive tools and big, expensive budgets. However, as the tools for image making became smaller and easier to reach, many people, especially artists from underrepresented and oppressed group, could take upon the new access to some media and make a stand for who they are, their bodies and their history. And now, in an era when digital fabrication is the new tool by which the master shapes our idea of our bodies, ourselves and others, artists take these new (media) tools to dismantle the master’s house.

This paper will analyze the possibilities of 3D and VR technology as an artistic tool to explore the body and identity outside of the normative ideas imposed upon it. By allowing artists and digital users to create new ways in which a body could exist and be represented, 3D in contemporary art has a powerful political potential. Many artists are currently using CGI and other new media means of expression, but this essay will focus only on a group of artists coming from social groups that have suffered and still suffer from oppression. 3D and VR technology allows these artists to represent themselves and their stories in new ways that help them resist and repair the endured oppression and gives them freedom to find unique identities for themselves and/or their social groups. At the same time, 3D technology used in this critical manner enables artists and users to place these digital bodies within a virtual space where traumatic events (personal or/and historical) can be depicted, described and lived within the protection of virtuality. I will argue how in the digital realm, bodies and identities can exist, tell their stories and meet others through the protection of a proxy element – the avatar – and a spatial and temporal distance – the virtual – that allows them to think, dialog and express hard experiences without being directly exposed to them. Avatars allow artists to choose whether to represent or camouflage themselves, to hide or show - or to hide showing, to show while hiding. in any case, to take power back to their representation and to the way they tell the stories that were unheard or heard to with pain.

As a widely used, popular medium, digital games successfully circulate a variety of narratives, discourses, and practices among highly diverse audiences. While games are often riddled with references, players sometimes encounter narratives that draw on recent or more distant pasts or that engender connections with contemporary issues and topics. This paper explores how digital games may be read, studied, and crafted as cultural texts. I argue that games have the potential to address and document topics and concerns that are contextual to, and reflect discourses which are prominent in the public imaginary. I first discuss some examples, such as the experience of living with anxiety and depression as portrayed in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), and Red Dead Redemption 2’s (Rockstar Games, 2018) interpretation of racial and ethnic discrimination in the US during late 1800’s. Then, I draw on my ongoing textual analysis and ethnographic research of the game The Elder Scrolls Online (Zenimax Online Studios, 2014). I focus on examples that are woven into the narrative architecture of the game, whereby quest narratives are reminiscent of real-world testimonies linked to collective traumatic pasts, or where the dynamics between different types of characters bear familiarity with current debates and perspectives surrounding climate change emergency. Finally, I propose some of the ways through which digital humanities scholars and practitioners could consider engaging with digital games and the constellated bodies of knowledge they produce through various channels. Throughout my discussion, I draw on Sanford et al.’s (2016) expanded definition of intertextuality as they exemplify some of the ways through which game texts connect to a wide range of other types of texts and could enable the development of pedagogical frameworks for fostering a literacy of intertextuality. While digital games are slowly finding their way into the classroom as pedagogical support, much like films, literary texts, and other media, digital humanities practitioners may tap through several ways into this still-young medium for addressing pressing issues and to explore solutions that could help us to create a more equitable and sustainable world.

Gamergate – the infamous anti-feminist “born-digital” movement (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016) thinly disguised as activism for ethics in gaming journalism – was comprised of dozens of harassment tactics, hundreds of individual figures, and an expanse of interactions across multiple platforms and several years. While the online hate and harassment campaign began to proliferate through the gaming subculture back in August 2014 following accusations of adultery between a prominent game developer and games journalist (Dockterman, 2014), Gamergate remains relevant today. The movement has had a marked impact as the precursor to modern-day reactionary movements such as MAGA and QAnon, offering digital humanists the complex yet important challenge of unpacking its vast network of events, individual agents, ideological submovements, and their constituent tactics (Mortensen, 2020). This challenge is intensified when researchers are interested in tracing the ontology of particular memetic threads –such as the emergence of transphobia or white supremacy– given the complexity of the web and the cascade of relevant data from multiple social media platforms.

Developed in response to these challenges, the Interactive Gamergate Network is an open-source web-hosted utility created using the network software Gephi (Bastian et al, 2009). The project is designed to allow users to visualize, parse, compare, and interact with specific subsets of the Gamergate movement, including temporal events, important figures, relevant media platforms, and Gamergate-adjacent concepts such as specific harassment tactics. Specifically, we approach the Gamergate quagmire from a standpoint informed by network science (Brandes et al, 2013), parsing the above categories into a series of divergent nodes joined through weighted edges based on extent of participation and interrelationship, ultimately aimed at mapping the complex interconnectedness of the movement. The resulting system benefits from the traditional boons associated with network analysis, including measurements of centrality and betweenness for various figures, events, and ideas (Borgatti, 2009). We additionally integrate a temporal element by utilizing Gephi’s ability to create dynamically ‘phased’ network analyses, featuring research done by our sister team on the different ‘phases’ of Gamergate as informed by multiple means of textual analysis on Gamergate-related tweets (Rockwell & Suomela, 2015). Through this lens, Gamergate can be both understood and analyzed as a movement which was far from static and monolithic, but one which morphed, fractured, and reinvented itself across time.

In the context of this paper, we demonstrate the possible applications of the interactive network through an examination of a specific case study; the development and propagation of transphobic rhetoric and transphobic conspiracy across Gamergate. With this in mind, the tool assists in revealing how transphobia gradually manifested itself within the Gamergate movement as the intersectional culmination of several malicious patterns defined by researchers to be at the ideological crux of Gamergate; namely misogyny, conspiracy, anti-progressivism, paedophilia, and ‘militant meninism’ (O’Donnell, 2020). Ultimately, we believe our project can connect and share methods with other researchers investigating contemporary hate movements and the unique ways they propagate in virtual spaces, drawing a roadmap for future research aimed at combating online bigotry.

Galatea, a piece of interactive fiction (IF) by Emily Short, begins by presenting your player character (PC) – an art critic – with an exhibit of Galatea, a statue-like woman who has come to life. This piece of interactive fiction does not contain any puzzles or quests. You cannot move into other rooms, interact with other non-player characters (NPCs) besides Galatea herself, and there is no clear winning state. There is only conversation between you and Galatea. The narrative of Galatea is driven solely by the dialogue, resulting in a story that reflects your choice of prompts. Interactivity and narrative is closely tied together in this sense – Galatea’s gameplay is centered around discovering and writing a story.

This paper argues that the driving force of the narrative comes from the interactivity of the work itself. This is achieved by virtue of Emily Short’s non-player character (NPC) design in the character of Galatea herself. As Montfort (2003) describes, Galatea is essentially a “chatterbot with a more sophisticated architecture for behaviour than had been seen in IF before”. Galatea’s responses vary based on multiple factors that the game keeps track of. These statuses, along with the current topic of conversation, all interact with one another to make conversation flow more realistically. By examining Short’s NPC design and the current state of NPCs in interactive fiction, the paper argues that the design of Galatea creates a “desire to confide in her” (Galatea).

I argue that this is what drives the narrative of the story – the “desire to confide” in what we logically know to be only a computer. This paper claims that it is the interactivity itself that creates the narrative. Many scholars have spoken about the contentious relationship between interactivity and narrative, with some claiming that the two cannot exist simultaneously without working against each other. However, this ignores the unique storytelling capabilities of mediums like interactive fiction.

By centering its entire gameplay on developing and telling a narrative, Galatea is able to explore a multitude of themes that would have been difficult to express through another medium. I argue that it is the combination of NPC design, the rewarding dialogue and writing, and the relationship of interactivity and narrative that highlights the strengths of the interactive fiction genre, with Galatea being an especially pertinent example.

References

Galatea. Self-published by Emily Short, 2000.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press, 2003.

Les écritures numériques, en ce qu’elles façonnent l’espace dans lequel nous évoluons, doivent être considérées comme composante indissociable dans une réflexion pour une reconfiguration de l’avenir. Plus particulièrement, comment inclure l’importance croissante du numérique (et ses implications épistémologiques) pour envisager une réinvention des institutions, figures d’autorité pour la transmission des savoirs ?

Notre table ronde proposera quelques pistes de réflexion ; nous explorerons les formes de collaboration qui se déploient dans plusieurs projets de recherche en humanités numériques. Très divers dans leurs objectifs, tous ces projets envisagent le travail collaboratif de façon innovante et dynamique : de l’édition collaborative ouverte à des ateliers spécialisés entre étudiants et professeurs, en passant par la conceptualisation théorique de la dynamique du pouvoir ou encore la considération de la reconnaissance dans le processus collaboratif de production de connaissances.

Nous interrogerons le développement de projets de recherche articulés autour de l’équipe TalEN – nouveau regroupement de chercheur·e·s pour les théories et approches littéraires des écritures numériques – , en nous concentrant sur les formes de collaboration au sein même des projets. La constitution de l’équipe, subséquente à la plupart des projets qu’elle enveloppe, se fonde sur un désir et un besoin de déborder des cadres institutionnels et des disciplines respectives des professeur·e·s et des étudiant·e·s participant aux divers projets énoncés. Elle a notamment pour objet de réimaginer des modes de collaboration et de déstabiliser la hiérarchisation qui caractérise le monde de la recherche, en sciences humaines.

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.

Historical Social Network Analysis: The Apprenticeship Networks of London Brewers, 1530-1800

This paper represents one part of a larger project about the history of beer and brewing in London. Our research group is building a social network of the Brewing Guild's apprenticeship training program in the years from about 1530 to approximately 1800. During this 270-year period, the Worshipful Company of Brewers, first established by Henry VI in 1438, logged nearly 10,000 records of (mostly) young men being apprenticed to master brewers in order to learn the craft. At first glance, the apprenticeship records look somewhat unpromising, but with some clever deduction and analysis, they collectively become an illuminating dataset that shows not just an important "Who's Who" of the brewing industry but also the waxing and waning of England's brewing culture and how it responded to important British historical events.

At first glance, the catalogue of brewing apprentices and their brewing masters is a remarkably sparse dataset rife with symbols and codes. For example:

Briggs Thomas s Henry, Skipton, Yks, husbandman† to William Pistor 16 Jan 1581/2

This record tells us that Thomas Briggs, son of Henry Briggs (deceased), a husbandman from Skipton, Yorkshire, was apprenticed to William Pistor on the 16th of January 1581 (Old Style Date, or 1582 New Style Date).

The Briggs family does not appear again in the records. However, we can learn a good deal about William Pistor (or Pystor or Pister or Pistar), who first took on an apprentice from a Mr. Peltar in 1563. Between the years 1565 and 1584, William Pistor took on fifteen more apprentices. By the fall of 1584, Pistor's health began to fail and he died in the first half of 1585. By combining records, then, we can begin to draw portraits of various individual's brewing careers. Simultaneously, we can construct a social network of the various relationships detailed in the records.

The argument of our paper, then, is twofold: a) an exploration of what we can learn about the historical social networks of England's brewing industry using sparse records combined with modern social network techniques, and b) a methodological question of reconciling record matches across disparate datasets, especially during those times when our data overlaps with other rich resources such as London Lives (1690-) or the Old Bailey records (1674-). Which of these actions can be automated via digital techniques, and which must still be done "by hand"?

Toward that end, we seek to answer the following research questions:

• how did the apprenticeship program rise and fall over the course of this time period? --Who are the most important people in any given time period?

which masters attracted the most apprentices and why?

• how long were careers in the brewing industry? Did many apprentices later become masters of other apprentices?
• to learn more, can we contextualize these records against other record sets (marriage, birth, death, criminal proceedings) and what might those records tell us about England's brewing industry?

Among the books owned by Lord Byron and sold in one of the two sales of his library – 1816 and 1827 – was the 1800 English translation of Joseph Alexandre Pierre, Vicomte de Ségur’s Women: Their Condition and Influence in Society (from which the title quotation is taken). Finding Ségur’s three volumes of research amongst Byron’s books is not overly notable, but the presence of women in the roles of authors and editors of the books that Byron owned and prized is formidable. In transforming Byron’s library sale lists into a database comprising the books’ constituent metadata and fulltext, women feature as some of the most prominent authorities of canonicity, from Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s fifty volume The British Novelists to Elizabeth Inchbald’s 25 volume British Theatre and 7 volume Collection of Farces. In Macroanalysis (2013), Matthew Jockers experiments with stylistic analysis to detect the author’s gender in nineteenth century novels, revealing the relative ease of this, but also noting that “far more interesting […] is an examination of which authors get misclassified as being of the other gender” (95). With anonymity and pseudonymity a relative norm for first editions of novels in the Romantic period, an author’s gender was often unknown to the public with the launch of their work. Byron, in contrast to many literary figures in the period, openly acknowledged his love of novels. Taking Byron’s library and the representative database and network, how might stylistic analysis aligned with metadata on roles beyond simply authorship reveal the influence of women in Byron’s books? Moreover, what influence might these women have had upon Byron’s works, as visualized in Euclidean distances and network graphs? To further this experimentation, might the inclusion of further works by women – works not catalogued as part of Byron’s library, but works by authors of whom he owned a single work – might these reveal close stylistic proximity to Byron’s works such that we might conjecture that Byron had read or even owned these works? Comparing this corpus of Byron’s books by female editors or authors to some of Byron’s most important poetical works – like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Manfred, and Don Juan – raises the questions about methods used to stylistically compare prose and verse, editors and writers, and the complexities of gender. However, ultimately this experiment reinforces the convictions of scholars like Paul Douglass, that “Byron’s reading of several thousand works of popular fiction (most of it by women), certainly impacted his work” (“Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction” Romanticism on the Net, vol. 43, 2006, p. 2) or as Peter Cochran describes it in the case of Charlotte Dacre’s influence upon Byron, “[her] books had sunk into his subconscious, whence he had, in his own idioms, regurgitated them” (“Byron the Vampire, and the Vampire Women.” Newstead Abbey Byron Society Website. http://newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org/works/downloads/vampires.pdf, Jan. 23, 2023, p. 9).

As internet overtakes most aspects of modern life, the impact of internet protocols exceeds the limits of the virtual world and becomes intertwined with ethics and justice. As illustrated by Peter J. Wilson regarding the analog world (1991, p. 153), structures and architectures have direct effects on the power dynamics between the groups using them. In this presentation, we will show how internet protocols have the same impact on human societies as architectural elements (Vitali-Rosati, 2020), and shape disparity within communities of users.

Internet protocols can either involve equal partners or unequal partners. However, even when putting aside the physical infrastructures that support the Internet, most interactions between equal partners include a third and unequal party (Galloway, 2004, p. 142). Top-down and bottom-up structures imply vertical pipelines and the concentration of informational and structural power within select hands.

Furthermore, security concerns around such systems are split between two unequal players with widely different tasks. Few protocols such as BitTorrent, DAT, IPFS treat users as nodes without the overview of a corporation or government. All three of them are open source free protocols designed for sharing files from a client. These peer-to-peer standards allow one to make available for or to download files from many users at the same time, to reduce the uploading stress of users.

While DAT and IFPS prescribe a radical decentralization of the network by abolishing trackers -- which assist communication between peers in BitTorrent -- torrenting is by far the most widely used of the three. In fact, BitTorrent takes a non-negligible part of worldwide internet traffic. For instance, in 2013 (before the streaming burst), it represented 3.35 percents of all bandwidth (Paloalto Networks, 2013).

Hence, our presentation will put the emphasis on BitTorrent, its architecture and effects on communities of users, and its structural ethics.

Are peer-to-peer protocols a bottom-down alternative to the more usual top-down and bottom-up Internet traffic, as some research has argued since the early 2000s (Oram, 2001)? And if so, what are the implications of BitTorrent and its many clients (both open source and corporate) in terms of accessibility, equity and reduction of control? How to explain the impact of "what seems to many the intrinsic vitality" of a bottom-up approach on the organizations and culture that it supports (Terranova, 2004, p. 120)?

This presentation covers some of the most discussed issues on the subject, such as pirating and malware, but focuses mainly on the intrinsic and structural consequences of peer-to-peer protocols.

Bibliography

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol. How Control Exists after Decentralization. Leonardo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

Oram, Andy, ed. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. Beijing ; Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2001.

Paloalto Networks. 2013. https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/app-usage-risk-report-visualization/#. Last consultation: 01/19/2023.

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics For the Information Age. London ; Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2004.

Vitali-Rosati, Marcello. « Pour une théorie de l’éditorialisation ». Humanités numériques, nᵒ 1 (1 janvier 2020).

Wilson, Peter J. The Domestication of the Human Species. Revised ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

How to understand the cultural impact of computer technologies? What theoretical tools does our humanistic tradition offer us? This talk will present the conditions for developing a hermeneutics of matter. Our reflections will then be applied to the analysis of one of the most used protocols for today's web services: the de-facto REST standard and its most popular applications, the REST APIs.

Milad Doueihi (2012) has shown that theoretical methods must adapt to the nature of their objects of study. In continuity with Doueihi's philosophy, we stress that rethinking the hermeneutic tradition is useful and necessary for the future of Digital Humanities and for our understanding of the intrinsic characteristics of contemporary information technologies.

Originating in ancient Greece, the hermeneutic tradition defines the interpretive act as a practice and method, or - starting from Heidegger - as a way of being, in the ontological sense. Emphasis is placed on the interpretation of human languages and artifacts, considered as cultural objects. According to the hermeneutic perspective, the impact of such objects does not depend on who created them, but on how they are understood, used, experienced, reproduced. Hermeneutics is about human inscriptions, in the broad sense of the term.

Similarly, protocols, computer languages and source codes are cultural objects (Marino, 2020) and exist as they are inscribed on a material support. As material and cultural entities, the same inscriptions affect our reality. They describe, model, thus define the analog world (Vitali-Rosati, 2020).

Consider the case of REST, which enables the production and dissemination of much of the information online. REST proposes to establish a difference between the resource and the representations of the same object. It forces us to think about the actual object (the resource), and to define its specifications (the representations). This modelisation clashes with the dominant tendency of the western thought which puts the accent on the identity of the objects and does not describe them as assemblages of traits and characteristics (Gracia, 1988).

Architectures such as REST depend on human needs and ideas, but also on the material nature of the machines that make them possible. Such systems are both human and machinic forms of thinking(Levy, 1999). It is therefore necessary to renew our hermeneutic tradition to make it a method of analyzing the agentivity of machines. To do so, I propose to integrate concepts from three methodological fields to philosophical hermeneutics: post-structuralism, which detaches the definition of text from human production; new materialism, which emphasizes the transformative agentivity of matter; and critical code studies, which stress the cultural significance of code. Starting with the case study on REST, the presentation will detail some principles for a hermeneutic approach adapted to digital technologies and their material and cultural influence.

“Code is speech!” From the Electric Frontier Foundation to the CryptoParty Manifesto, one of the rallying cries of cyberlibertarians is that machine speech—the algorithm, the google search, code—are protected by the First Amendment on Free Speech. My talk addresses the labyrinthine ‘culture war’ and multi-layered mosaic of arguments surrounding whether the Google search engine constitutes speech, and is therefore protected under the First Amendment. One theory in the affirmative is the “Editor Theory,” which argues that the search engine's editorial judgment is comparable to a newspaper editor's judgment. Lawyer Eugene Volokh portrays search engines as editors of content who enjoy the same shield extended by the First Amendment to editors of newspapers. In opposition to this, the Conduit Theory paints search engines as neutral digital architecture, merely existing as conduits "to carry the speech of others" with "little or no speech interests of their own." The Conduit Theory argues that search engines are assumed to be objective and thus are legally liable if they are tainted by bias. The Advisor Theory breaks the Manichean binarism and argues that there is both a denotative (neutral, fact-based) dimension to the Google Search as well as a connotative one (subjective) whereupon the Google search takes on a role akin to an advisor, and it is the latter that can claim the status of speech.

One case that Google won on this matter is “Search King, Inc. v. Google Technology.” The website Search King alleged Google maliciously decreased the ranking it had previously assigned to Search King. However, the court concluded that Google’s ranking of pages were subjective results that constituted “constitutionally protected opinions” entitled to “full constitutional protection.” Curiously, after years of insisting the Google search was unbiased and objective, Google now vociferously claimed the Google search was an expression of opinion, thus blithely dropping the bomb on the “objective Google Search” utopia.

However, many dismiss the argument that the Google search constitutes speech as naive folklorism. Derived from Thurman Arnold’s term “the folklore of informationalism,” it refers to the specious assumption that because communication generated by machines as part of functional processes meets a technical definition of speech, it is the same as other social practices involving speech and therefore merits the same constitutional protection. Finally, the dark side of the “Google Search is Speech/Code is Speech” doctrine is that it is emblematic of the neoliberalization of the First Amendment—that is, the weaponization of the Free Speech First Amendment into a pretext for capitalist deregulation. “Code is speech” is a runaway escape clause for corporations to avoid government regulation as long as the corporate actor takes action using programming code, leading to bizarre scenarios such as Apple being hailed as a civil rights hero for successfully litigating the “Code is speech” doctrine. Like the Citizens United case (i.e. ruling that corporations are people), it marks the pernicious expansion of corporate personhood and the coalescing of corporations as the foci point of constitutional rights.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest among many digital humanities practitioners, especially those rooted in computational literary studies, to adopt a mixed methodology of distant reading and close reading. Distant reading, as the name suggests, engages with texts from a distance, thus offering the possibility of analyzing a large number of texts simultaneously. Close reading, on the other hand, involves a more in-depth analysis of individual texts or passages. By combining these two approaches, researchers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of literary and cultural texts. So far, a number of DH scholars have championed this approach in their works (e.g., Hermann 2017; So 2017; Sá Pereira 2019; Eve 2019), and some of them have coined terms for their proposed mixed methodologies; example terminology includes “computational hermeneutics” (Piper), “scalable reading” (Mueller), and “parallax reading” (Sample). This paper presents a survey of theoretical DH works of recent years that have presented a framework for and ultimately adopted mixed methodology in text analysis.

The methodology of this survey adopts a mixed approach, similar to the methodology that it aims to survey. First, the abstracts of recent annual ADHO DH conferences are analyzed to identify references to a mixed methodology. The goal of this step is to get a sense of the general state of the field and how the use of mixed methodology has evolved over time. Secondly, individual attempts at defining a new methodological paradigm are pinpointed. This is done by searching for articles and books that discuss mixed methodology in digital literary studies and reviewing them to see how different scholars understand and define the concept. Finally, the usage of this mixed methodology is showcased in example projects. This involves identifying projects that have used mixed methodology and analyzing their results, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

The use of a mixed methodology in digital literary studies is a relatively new and exciting development, and its future looks promising. However, despite the growing popularity of mixed methodology, the number of “successful” projects that use it is still relatively small. There are several challenges associated with using a mixed methodology, such as the need to balance the benefits of distant reading with the importance of close reading. Nevertheless, the potential benefits of mixed methodology are significant, and researchers in the field are continuing to explore and refine it. As digital humanities continue to grow, the use of mixed methodology is likely to become more widespread and refined, allowing us to gain a deeper understanding of literary texts and literary history.

Words Are Hard: Untangling Understandings of How Places were Important in REED London’s London

We introduce the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) by outlining crucial design considerations informing this intersectional feminist project, and provide an overview by means of a representation based on the classic London Tube Map diagram of what LINCS offers to scholars interested in using Linked Open Data (LOD) for cultural research.