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.
