Cultural heritage is a universal good; it is not called the heritage of all humanity without reason. Nevertheless, as a product of the global organisation UNESCO, it is a brand, often embattled and associated with not inconsiderable monetary activity. And even if participation plays an increasingly important role in heritage management, the direct involvement of the immediate heirs is often only idealistic and less real. Traces of colonialism can still be found when it comes to preservation and development, but interpretation finds expression in the concrete approach, even if it is merely museumisation, which makes actual and above all natural, uninfluenced, unencumbered use difficult or even impossible. Here, digitisation offers possibilities to counter this dilemma in two ways. On the one hand, dealing with cultural heritage can be done completely virtually, not only non-invasively, but above all asynchronously and heterogeneously from completely different perspectives, thus also with completely different cultural premises. On the other hand, in a form that goes beyond the concrete and searches for possible motivations, intentions, aims of the creators, not only verbally as usual, but also visually. The focus on visuality quite literally opens up new perspectives, it allows for the targeted consideration of even individual aspects of cultural heritage, the universality of which only becomes visible in scientific representations such as those developed in the Digital Humanities, namely when other aspects are deliberately masked out. For such a form of focussing on the architectural structure, namely the spatial layout, the authors, in cooperation with the respective cultural and scientific institutions, have developed the method of the visualisation of uncertainty. In this, instead of buildings, the spatial architectural design idea is shown with a clarity that gives architecture a universality that neither the surviving fragments nor a speculative life-like representation could ever achieve. In this way, ethnic distortions or folkloristic misinterpretations are being avoided. An undistorted view of architecture enables marginalised groups in particular to highlight the qualities of their cultural heritage. Examples are the royal city of Naga in Sudan, the metropolis of Ctesiphon in Iraq, the metropolis of Pergamon in Turkey and, in comparison, the imperial palaces on the Palatine in Rome as well as the German former Roman metropolis of Cologne around the building history of Cologne Cathedral. The paper will use these examples to illustrate how abstraction can bring architecture of different cultural contexts into a state of architectural comparability. The projects shown were created in collaboration with the institutions responsible for their preservation or their research and were exhibited partially as permanent installations in Cologne Cathedral, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Egyptian Museum in Munich, among others.

(Please note that there should be a strikethrough the character "r" in every instance of the word "Whrite," including in the title of this abstract.)

In this paper, I argue that we—digital humanities (DH) scholars, practitioners, educators, and especially those of us in dominant groups—must engage in symbolic projects to rename information and communication technologies (ICTs) in ways that announce their racial politics. Language describing ICTs deployed by Big Tech, turning on reductive and misleading metaphors, often enacts real harm on minoritized individuals. By way of renaming, we can recast ICTs in terms of what they do to individuals as opposed to what Big Tech maintains they do for individuals.

My specific intervention is to rename Google’s word-prediction AI, called Smart Compose, as “Whrite.” While it alludes to the AI’s function—writing— Whrite also draws attention to the identities the AI privileges. I make this argument based on a counterdata project I carried out with Whrite in my doctoral work. Counterdata projects challenge assumptions that data collection and datasets are generally complete (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). Rather, they acknowledge that data collection is often done by dominant groups for dominant groups (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). As such, they “cal[l] out missing datasets… and advocat[e] for filling them” (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020, p. 34). My counterdata project consisted of transcribing more than 30,000 words from five texts into Google applications, meticulously documenting where and how Whrite intervened. The results of this work corroborate claims Rashmi Dyal-Chand (2021) has made about autocorrect and Halcyon Lawrence (2021) has made about Siri: language technologies make implicit suggestions about the communities for whom language technology is designed, and to whom language belongs.

As such, symbolically renaming ICTs serves as one important step toward an anticolonial technology praxis. When we—members of dominant groups for whom technology is best designed—continue to work, without resistance, with ICTs as they are marketed and deployed, we become complicit in and tacitly accept their politics. I argue that DH community members belonging to dominant groups with a stated interest in social justice have a responsibility to intervene in normative narratives surrounding ICTs. Symbolic renaming is one way to carry out this intervention.

References

D’Ignazio, C. & Klein, L. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.

Dyal-Chand, R. (2021). Autocorrecting for whiteness. Boston University Law Review, 101(1), 191-286.

Lawrence, H. (2021). Siri disciplines. In T.S. Mullaney, B. Peters, M. Hicks, & K. Philip (Eds.), Your computer is on fire. MIT Press.

The isolation and distance created during the COVID-19 pandemic have increased the use of distance learning services worldwide. According to UNESCO (2020), the education system found over 1.5 billion children and nearly 60.2 million teachers out of their classrooms globally. Despite the initial struggle, institutions adopted remote learning services to continue educating students. Post-pandemic, these services remain highly important, particularly in remote communities that lack education resources and funding. This paper documents the design of a culturally appropriate distance learning platform for students from the Tlicho region of the Northwest Territories.

Existing literature on distance learning, design, Tlicho and Indigenous research practices provided background research. In addition, three case studies were conducted on current distance learning services in remote communities as examples of practical adaptations. Furthermore, I identified gaps in knowledge and a lack of a specific design problem. For instance, I did not precisely know the community's technological conditions, target audience or subjects they wanted to be taught. Lastly, the visual design of the platform required inputs and insights to create a suitable design language that connects with the community.

The solution to these gaps required the involvement of Tlicho citizens in the design process. A human-centred design (HCD) approach was adopted since it prioritizes human needs, capabilities and behaviours and then creates designs to accommodate those factors. HCD uniquely avoids narrowing the pain points for as long as possible but instead iterates upon repeated approximations. This design process involves rapid testing of ideas and building upon the feedback of each test to constantly modify and improve a solution (Norman, 2013, p.8-9).

I conducted three user testing sessions for 90 minutes each (distance learning model, medium fidelity mockups and high fidelity prototypes) with four participants from the Tlicho Government. Various design alternatives were shared with the participants, and they offered their insights and selected their preferred approach. As a result, problems were discovered and narrowed through repeated trials, producing a distance learning service that genuinely meets the needs of the people. The research showcases the design and development of 50 interfaces of a Distance Learning platform, Hoghadeeto (learn in Dogrib). The website was built with the support of personas, scenarios, wireframes, sitemaps and low/medium and high fidelity prototypes tested at every stage by Tlicho Government representatives.

I was aware of the hesitancy and stress that comes with studying online for people who are not comfortable working in a digital environment. However, from my first experience speaking with the participants, they were deeply enthusiastic about creating a Distance learning platform as a means to preserve Indigenous knowledge for future generations. This study documents the insights offered throughout the research, such as; the importance of sustainability, accessibility and visual storytelling through symbolism. Lastly, this research discusses the importance of establishing trust with the community through active listening and flexibility in the design process.

References

Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things. MIT Press.

Education: From disruption to recovery. (2020, March 4). UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponseˆ

Illness narratives, or autobiographical accounts of the lived experience of pathology or disability, have been established as an effective therapeutic intervention for responding to emotional well-being related to illness (Couser, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2009; Frank; Hartman; Hawkins; Irvine & Charon; Kleinman; Mintz; Sontag). The scholarly field related to illness narratives is currently grappling with the medium’s expansion from the traditional book to digital-born narratives, however, there is limited research analyzing illness narratives built through literary hypertext. Literary hypertext is a form of digital story writing that calls on the reader to participate in the narrative’s unfolding by selecting hyperlink options which branch the narrative into nonlinear directions. There has been a revival of scholarly and public interest in literary hypertext in the past decade, owing to the genre’s culture of free production and distribution (Anthropy; Harvey). This project questions how women and nonbinary individuals with the endocrine disorder hyperandrogenism can use hypertext technology to write illness narratives that construct positive relationships between their identities and the world. Ten participants with hyperandrogenism completed a pedagogical module on building hypertext illness narratives. The corpus of this research, including participant narratives and interview transcripts, was analyzed through a feminist new materialist theoretical framework and a novel methodology called Critical Discourse Analysis for Digtial-Born Narratives. The findings of this research argue that literary hypertext technology was used by participants to visually map and manually chart experiences through the practice of hyperlinking in order to create a structure perceived as best suited for therapeutic reflection.

When Digital Humanists envision the future of Digital Humanities, Linked Open Data (LOD) often features prominently. First conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and collaborators in the World Wide Web Consortium, LOD is the connective tissue of the Semantic Web (Gracy, Maeda, Verborgh and van Hooland, Berners-Lee, Niu). Its key innovation is an ability to link data across disparate sources; its central promise is to connect data that has been hitherto siloed, and only storable and searchable in bespoke forms (W3C Consortium). In our own practice as digital humanists who lead the AdArchive Project, we have explored the potential for LOD to enrich our understanding of the complicated networks that sustained feminist periodical publishing in the 1970s. AdArchive is an LOD experiment that represents components of feminist periodicals in RDF; its goal is to build a digital archive of feminist advertisements in order to digitally represent a rich ecosystem of relationships that existed between a range of disparate entities within a larger movement (publications, publishers, editors, organizations, and authors). Using LOD, we set the groundwork for representing the connections among feminist datasets and enriching understandings of the histories of feminist cultural production.

Insofar as they both lend themselves to a decentralization of knowledge and a rejection of hierarchy, there are some clear points of harmony between feminist epistemologies and the networked logics of the Semantic Web. Nevertheless, like other classification systems, LOD is not inherently feminist. This paper argues that the feminist orientation developed in the AdArchive project can contribute to reimagining LOD’s future in digital humanities. We make this argument through a detailed description of five practical principles for authoring data in ways that align with feminist orientations. These principles include:

1) Describe everything - data democracy

2) Description is interpretation

3) Vocabularies and ontologies should not conceal data

4) Embrace messiness

5) Hold space for absence

Drawing on feminist digital humanities scholars including Catherine D’Ignacio and Lauren F. Klein, Joanna Drucker, and Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, and considering the work of Martha Nell Smith, Susan Brown, and Julia Flanders, we approach LOD data authoring as an active practice of remediation that requires careful reflexive and open-ended practice. It is vital for us to be clear that our goal is not to author feminist data, but to author data in ways that align with feminist methods, ethics, and projects. We view feminism as a practice and an orientation, not as a static quality of things, objects, artifacts, or even individual researchers. Our practice involves applying feminist principles when we author RDF triples for LOD. By outlining the principles that guide our project - and complementing them with practical descriptions of the work - we hope to provide encouragement for other researchers to participate in the praxis of imagining the equitable digital spaces of the future, digital spaces that complement humanistic and feminist thought.

This paper uses the interdisciplinary analytical methods of feminist technoscience to reveal discrepancies between Apple’s public-facing Inclusion and Diversity commitments (which report their improvement in more inclusive and diverse opportunities and corporate representations) and its design of blatantly biased software, with a focus on Apple’s AI assistant Siri. While Big Tech corporations evoke efficiency, modernity, and innovation, they also repeatedly raise concerns about exclusion and a lack of diversity through the design of products with demonstrable bias toward underrepresented groups (Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016). In particular, by mimicking and reproducing limited concepts of gender through embedded design, Siri sustains a vicious cycle of reinforcing gendered stereotypes in technoculture and to users en masse.

By combining methodologies from critical discourse analysis, critical software/code analysis, and critical design analysis, this paper draws upon the interdisciplinary approaches of feminist technoscientists who analyze artifact and platform design to reveal underlying ideologies and potential biases of technologies; specifically, we draw upon the methods of Anne Balsamo (2011), Daniela K. Rosner (2018), and Judy Wacjman (2004; 2010). Our paper contributes a comparative analysis of Apple’s proposed diversity in its workforce and its investment towards such initiatives with how Siri has evolved in design to see if these actions are mutually constitutive. In other words: are the money and efforts Apple invests into inclusion and diversity being reflected in the products they put out?

Our close reading of Apple’s Inclusion and Diversity commitments reveals the following data: from 2014 - 2021, Apple’s overall workforce improvement is a generally static pattern, with women being in the minority, and an overall 4.8% increase of women over eight years. Apple’s technology workforce had similarly minimal improvement, with men vastly dominating and a 4.4% increase of women. We compare this data with our qualitative critical code and design analysis of Siri’s available code scripts, which reveal that the software has been minorly tweaked over the years. The Anglo American software was originally voiced as female, programmed to sometimes perform “wifely” duties and even respond flirtatiously. While Apple has since removed some more flagrant traits and offensive responses, developers have not offered standardized guidelines against sexist representations (UNESCO 2019; Fan 2021), thus excusing themselves from changing other problematic design decisions unless called out by the public.

We argue that, while Apple’s more recent UX/UI design decisions reduce the immediate association of Siri’s utterances with women, Siri still presents a binarized notion of gender, showing that Apple has not done enough to mitigate their biased language models. As Big Tech companies pledge corporate social responsibility yet create technologies that diverge from these promises, this paper concludes that it is important to maintain critical discourse on harmful user effects, their mitigations, and social considerations for equitable technological development. Our identification of discrepancies among technological products’ theoretical design, company values, and product applications is ultimately in an effort to hold Big Tech companies accountable for their public-facing commitments, toward creating meaningful policy, challenging gendered systems, and creating more equitable products.

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.

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.