Hall: Digitize This Book!

Cover of BookDigitize This Book! by Gary Hall is an interesting book at the intersection of cultural studies and humanities computing. The book seems to be addressed mostly to the cultural studies crowd arguing that “do cultural studies writers, thinkers, and practitioners not also need to experiment with ways of being ‘militant’ in a positive, innovative, creative, and constructive fashion in their own situations, institutions, and places of work?” (p. 206) The book is a sustained defense of the Cultural Studies e-Archive (CSeARCH) and other computing projects that Hall has initiated. He is trying to make space in cultural studies for projects we would recognize as humanities computing projects. To do this he argues against “transcendental politics” which assume a commitment to a particular political analysis in order to open room for actions, like starting an open archive, that cannot be demonstrated a-priori to be in support of capitalism or not. He ends the book with,

A fixed, pure and incorruptible institution could only be a violent, transcendental, totalizing, and totalitarian fantasy. One could even argue, after Derrida, that it is precisely the structurally open and undecidable nature of the situation – the fact that an institution or archive can be used to facilitate the forces of capitalism and globalization – that gives it ethical and political force. (p. 214)

Now I tend to shudder when I read phrases like “the forces of capitalism”, partly because I don’t understand the tradition of thought that takes such things as givens, but I don’t, as many colleagues do, believe we should therefore shun cultural studies or other forms of post-modern thought. Hall is interested in something important and that is the ethics and politics of digital work. To avoid discussing the ethics and politics of what we do in the university or as developers of digital works is to ascribe to a naive and unexamined ethic. Many avoid politics because the discourse has been politicized by second rate cultural studies folk who think shaming others for not being militant is a form of engagement. Hall is trying to open room for a form of politics beyond politics (or hyperpolitics) where we can act without knowing for sure what the consequences of our actions will be. That is the heart of ethics for me, acting (or not, which in turn is a form of acting) in the face of insufficient knowledge or ability. We always do things without being sure, ethics is knowing that and trying to deal thoughtfully with the ignorance.

Part of what I am saying here, then, is that certain forms, practices, and performances of new media – including many of those associated with open-access publishing and archiving – make us aware that we can no longer assume that we unproblematically know what the “political” is, or what sorts of interventions count as political. (p. 196)

Hall in his actions (like CSeARCH and the Open Humanities Press) and in his writing is trying to reach out to those in open access circles and in computing circles. We who are too buried in the techne should reach back.


You can find earlier versions of sections on CSeARCH like The Cultural Studies E-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy), but, ironically, I can’t, find a copy of Digitize This Book!. No one has bothered to digitize it, no doubt due to the copyright notice as the beginning (p. iv) that states,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. (p. iv)

Is there a contradiction between the injunction of the title (“Digitize This Book!”) and the copyright notice? What is the status of a title when it comes to rights? Should I digitize the book?

To be fair to Hall, the chapters of his previous book, Culture In Bits are available on CSeARCH and I assume he will make Digitize This Book! also available after a suitable interval. Perhaps someone knows him and can update me or point me to a digitized version already open.

Note: since writing this someone passed on a note to Gary Hall who kindly pointed me to online copies of other chapters. See my more recent blog entry with the links.


Hall makes an interesting move at the beginning of the book to position open access as a middle way for the university between the commercialization of the university and the (impossible elitist) return to whatever it is we think we were doing in the humanities in the good old days. I find it interesting that Hall believes “cultural studies has for some time now arguably been the means by which the university thinks about itself …” (p. 13). I’ve seen no evidence of this – cultural studies to me seems to want to position itself as outside the university critiquing it in the Socratic gadfly tradition rather than taking a role acknowledged by the university. It would probably come as a surprise to most university administrators that cultural studies is doing this for them and somehow represents the university’s institutionalized reflection. And therein lies the promise of Hall’s book – that there is type of creative activity we can all engage in, through which we can imagine the university by modeling it. We don’t need approval to set up open works. We can use the technology to become a way for the university to think about itself.

Singularity University: Exponential Silliness 2.0?

Ray Kurzweil, who has been predicting “spiritual machines” (AI) for a while now, has been appointed Chancellor of the Singularity University. The Singularity University is based at the Nasa Ames and supported by Google (and Moses Znaimer, another visionary wannabe.) It’s mission is to focus on exponential advances leading to singularities where you get a paradigm shift. The Overview describes the aims of the University thus:

Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.

The University thus seems dedicated to a particular, and questionable view of technological development which looks to a future of dramatic paradigm shifts triggered by these singularities. For example, the goal of the Academic Track “Future Studies & Forecasting” is “cultivating the student’s ‘exponential intuition’ — the ability to fully grasp the magnitude of possible outcomes likely to arise in specific domains.” No room here for modesty or skepticism.

The University is not really a University. It is more of an institute funded by commercial partners and providing intensive programs to graduate students and, importantly, executives. I’m surprised NASA is supporting it and legitimating something that seems a mix of science and science fiction – maybe they have too much room at their Ames campus and need some paying tenants. Perhaps in California such future speculation doesn’t seem so silly. I guess we will have to wait until about 2045 when the intelligence singularity is supposed to happen and see.

But what is the Singularity? The Wikipedia article on Technological Singularity quotes I. J. Good as describing the “intelligence explosion” that would constitute the singularity thus:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The key for an intelligence singularity (as opposed to other types) is the recursive effect of the feedback loop when a machine is smart enough to improve itself. That is when we go from change (whether accelerating exponentially or not) to the independent evolution of intelligent machines. That is when they won’t need us to get better and we could become redundant. Such dramatic shifts are what the Singularity University prepares paying executives for and trains graduate students to accelerate.

It is easy to make fun of these ideas, but we need to be careful that we don’t end up confidently predicting that they can’t happen. Kurzweil is no fool and he bases his prediction on extrapolations of Moore’s law. Futurology will always be risky, but everyone has to do it to some degree. For that matter there do seem to be moments of accelerating technological change leading to dramatic paradigm shifts so we shouldn’t be so sure Kurzweil is wrong about the next one. I should add that I like the proposed interdisciplinarity of the Singularity University – the idea is that dramatic change or new knowledge can come from ideas that cross disciplines. This second organizing principle of the University has legs in this time of new and shifting disciplines. We need experiments like this. I just wish the Singularity University had had the courage to include academic tracks with the potential for critical engagement with the idea of an intelligence singularity. Why not a “History and Philosophy of Futurology” track that can call into question the very named premise of the University? After all, a real university should be built on an openness of mind we would call intelligence, not dogmatic certainty in a prediction.

Federation: The Brief to Government on Technology

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (known as the Federation) has some interesting briefs for government up on its site. One brief, the Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology: Regarding Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage (PDF 65KB) April 2008 is a response to the federal government’s science and technology strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage. The response, authored by Noreen Golfman, President of the Federation, points out how the humanities and social sciences, “have long contributed in direct and meaningful ways to the achievement of the priorities of the government. The Federation believes that our research contributions are invaluable not only to the economy and the science and technology strategy but also to the cultural and political prosperity of Canada.” (p. 1)

The argument in the response starts with “Creativity and communication are at the heart of our disciplines in humanities and social sciences” and then moves on to show how creativity and communication play out in three “advantages” called for:

  • entrepreneurial advantage
  • knowledge advantage
  • people advantage

It is always strange to read documents that are not about advancing knowledge for everyone, but achieving national advantage. Didn’t they get the “nationalism is out” memo? Of course, that is the game of national policy and I’m sure the academic games appear just as dated from the outside. (“Didn’t they get the idealism is out memo?”) Golfman tries to engage the policy on its own terms and show how the social sciences and humanities are important to the advantages sought. Where I disagree with Golfman is about creativity. I don’t think we actually do a very good job in the humanities and social sciences developing creativity. The arts, especially when practiced, do a much better job. We probably do a better job at “critical” than “creative.” At least that what we tell each other.

Interestingly the response mentions TAPoR at the University of Toronto and IBM under “entrepreneurial advantage” on page 3. TAPoR is one of two examples of projects that have partnered with companies to everyone’s advantage. One of the ways that projects like TAPoR engage creativity and communition is through a particular type of thinking through technology that involves developing technologically rich objects as part of our practices. We don’t just read and critique, we design and craft as they might in the arts. But lets not forget what is important,

The end game is as much about a better Canada as it is about a more economically competitive
Canada. (p. 1)

A Digital Humanities Manifesto

The UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities has come up with a A Digital Humanities Manifesto which is worth reading. It starts with,

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

I am reminded of the Victoria Manifesto that a bunch of us put together at the University of Victoria. Manifestos are a particular type of document that can be used to convey a call for change.

Project Bamboo

Bamboo LogoI attended Workshop 3 of Project Bamboo in Tucson Arizona this week. I think I’m beginning to understand it, though understanding what Bamboo is was one of the favorite subjects of conversation of the meeting (so I’m conscious that . There is a deliberate ambiguity to the project since they are trying to listen to the community in order to become what we want rather than what we suspect. Some of my takeaway thoughts:

  • It is being structured as a consortium. Thus the long term sustainability model is that universities (and possibly associations and individuals) will contribute resources into the consortium and get back services for their faculty. This seems the right way to get to a level of broad support.
  • One thing Bamboo will do is develop shared services that participating universities can use to deliver research support.
  • One of the challenges is figuring out how to listen to the community. The stories are the mechanism being used for this. Scholars are contributing stories of what they do and what they want to do. In some cases the stories are being contributed by people who talk to faculty.
  • Recipes (like those we developed for TAPoR) will be a key way to connect stories to the shared services. A recipe is a way of abstracting from a lot of stories something that can be used to identify the tools and content needed by researchers to do useful work.
  • Bamboo probably won’t build tools, but they will build and run services with which others can build tools. Bamboo may be the project that runs SEASR as a service for the rest of us, for example. We can then build tools with SEASR for our research projects.
  • Bamboo is talking about running the shared services in a cloud. I’m not sure what that means yet.

Beyond Analogue: Current Research in Humanities Computing

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Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing is a conference being organized by the Humanities Computing graduate students at the University of Alberta on February 13th. Daniel O’Donnell from U of Lethbridge and Paul Youngman of U of North Carolina-Charlotte will be the keynote speakers. If you are grad student you might want to submit a proposal for a poster or paper. Either way you are welcome to attend the full day conference if in Edmonton that day.

News Overview Inline Listing – MacArthur Foundation

Poking around the MacArthur Foundation site I found an interesting recent study on Teens, Video Games and Civics by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The full report has too much to summarize in a blog entry. Here is their list of “Summary Findings at a Glance”:

  • Almost all teens play games.
  • Gender and age are key factors in describing teens’ video gaming.
  • Youth play many different kinds of video games.
  • The most popular games played by teens today span a variety of genres and ratings.
  • Gaming is often a social experience for teens.
  • Close to half of teens who play online games do so with people they know in their offline lives.
  • Teens encounter both pro-social and anti-social behavior while gaming.
  • The most popular game genres include games with violent and nonviolent content.
  • Parental monitoring of game play varies.
  • There are civic dimensions to video game play.
  • The quantity of game play is not strongly related to teens’ interest or engagement in civic and political activity.
  • The characteristics of game play and the contexts in which teens play games are strongly related to teens’
    interest and engagement in civic and political activities.
  • Playing games with others in person was related to civic and political outcomes, but playing with others online
    was not.
  • Teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing
    to discussion boards), re more engaged civically and politically.
  • Civic gaming experiences are more equally distributed than many other civic learning opportunities. (p. viii)

This study brought in the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) who have released a White Paper on The Civic Potential of Video Games (PDF) which discusses the social and civic aspects of gaming. One interesting result (also found in the Pew summary) is that it seems that teens who play games socially in person “are more likely to be civically and politically engaged than teens who play games primarily alone.” (p. 18) Online gaming seems to be “a weak form of social interaction” (p. 20) compared to in person social gaming. Another finding that contradicts the accepted (parental) wisdom that gaming is bad for youth is that,

The stereotype of the antisocial gamer is not reflected in our data. Youth who play games frequently are just as civically and politically active as those who play games infrequently. (p. 24)

Orion: Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Orion conference Powering Research and Innovation: A National Summit on a panel on Cyberinfrastructure on “Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Back to Supercomputing.” Alas Michael Macy from Cornell, who was supposed to also talk didn’t make it. (It is always more interesting to hear others than yourself.) I was asked to try to summarize the humanities needs/perspectives on cyberinfrastructure for research which I did by pointing people to the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure report “Our Cultural Commonwealth.” One of the points worth making over an over is that we have a pretty good idea now what researchers in the humanities need as a base level of infrastructure (labs, servers and support). The interesting question is how our needs are evolving and I think that is what the Bamboo project is trying to document. Another way to put it is that research computing support units need strategies for handling the evolution of cyberinfrastructure. They need ways of knowing what infrastructure should be treated like a utility (and therefore be free, always on and funded by the institution) and what infrastructure should be funded through competitions, requests or not at all. We would all love to have everything before we thought of it, but institutions can’t afford expensive stuff no one needs. My hope for Bamboo is that it will develop a baseline of what researchers can be shown to need (and use) and then develop strategies for consensually evolving that baseline in ways that help support units. High Performance Computing access is a case in point as it is very expensive and what is available is usually structured for science research. How can we explore HPC in the humanities and how would we know when it is time to provide general access?

Convocation 2008

Photo of the Chancellor’s Chair Monday we had convocation (and I took pictures.) I was right behind the Chancellor’s chair. Deepa Mehta was the speaker and she talked about multiculturalism in Canada. She talked mostly about how she is treated by customs and immigration every time she comes back to Canada (she gets pulled aside and questioned).

This was my last convocation at Mac – the last round of students. Like every year, I was blessed with exceptional students. It was good to see them one last time in their moment of celebration.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute

DHSI LogoI am now at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria where I am going to present an Institute Lecture tomorrow. I have been updating a small Conference Report (that is in progress and covers mostly the lectures.)

In particular it was interesting to hear how Synergies has evolved into a truly national knowledge-mobilization project with good ideas about how to make SSH research accessible to the broader public.