Jones 2013

Johns, Steven E. The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2013.

maker lab culture – how to turn digital files into 3d objects, turning 3d objects back into digital files

William Gibson, “eversion” of the network

"I assume that today’s network is significantly different in various material ways from the Internet of the 1980s-1990s, in terms of scale, speed, access, and ubiquity. Some of the key differences were instituted 2004-2008. The most important effect of these differences is in the way people experience the network every day – in material terms, yes, as they use smartphones and cloud services and expect to be always connected, for example, but also emotionally and imaginatively, and this aspect of their experience is often revealed in metaphors, figures through which they think about and represent their experience. Those metaphors are collectively constructed and experienced, as they’re shared and altered in the sharing. So I take seriously the effects of the these new collective ‘’perceptions’’ of the network’s eversion, as well as perceptions that a new form of digital humanities has emerged as an academic field of study." (9)

"The sometimes world-weary and condescending skepticism common in some segments of the humanities often finds itself at odds with – and in fact deeply suspicious of – this kind of confident hacker ethos, which can seem naïve or deluded. But those outside DH often underestimate the theoretical sophistication of many in computing, who deal every day, for example, with gaps between complex datamining algorithms and the practical sources of those data, or with the production of multiple, sometimes contradictory, visualizations from the same dataset. They know better than many of their humanist critics that their science is provisional and contingent, and that the results of research require interpretive acts." (10-11)

11, DHers as “advocates instead for labs and workshops, a collaborative, hands-on model” instead of CMSs, MOOCs (11)

”For the DH scholar, the archival objects on which humanities discourse is based, the material things that, in a very real sense, prompt that discourse and afford that knowledge, were always already saturated in data.” (13)

”Digitization is a process for producing augmented data objects, spime-like combinations of material things and data, networked things that embody the already-hybrid nature of our overall experience of inter-networked technology in the era of the eversion. And the preoccupation of DH with building things, making things, even software things, is therefore a potentially serious form of theoretical engagement.” (15)