In Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities, Todd Presner, following Alan Liu, argues that the digital humanities remains caught in a materialist epistemology that focuses on the activities of building and making that seems to put it at odds with the humanistic tradition of critique. The focus on new digital methods of humanistic work has taken a privileged place over “attention to the conditions of their possibility, their social and culture contingency, and finally, their transformative potentiality” (Presner, 59). He points out that technical tools and methods are always situated within organizations of power that set the limits of resistance and accommodation in what is or is not allowed in the scientific practice at hand. Thus, we need some form of interpretation and that passes through modes of analysis like Foucauldian genealogy and Frankfurt school critical theory to scope out the limits of what we do in the digital humanities, a scoping out that not only limits, but also reveals new possibilities for the digital humanities that would not have been possible before.

Since Presner published this chapter in 2015, it seems like there has been a lot more work done in this spirit. In the successive editions of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, from 2012 to 2016 to 2019, there has been a shift to a more culturally critical lens. It seems as though the field is no longer content with merely tacking questions of power, race, and gender onto to discourse on the field after the fact, but rather is making a critique based on these vectors central to the field itself. There are lots of writings about how digital tools and methods reaffirm structural biases or contribute to state surveillance or do violence toward indigenous people through archiving their culture.

There seems, at this point, to be an abundance of thinking through the digital humanities in light of critical theory. What appears to be missing the first part of the the culture of critique that Presner writes is missing from the field. He writes of the “Marxist-inflected social and cultural criticism”, “deconstructive critique”, and “Enlightenment ideals of rational subjects engaging in critique”, but it is only the first two that I see serious thought put into (Presner, 55). It seems like a problem with the humanities as a whole is a neurotic focus on the social conditions of experience and what we have lost is a more phenomenological epistemology that investigates the somatic and spiritual dimensions of life. Any epistemology and critique of digital humanities work would be incomplete without both of these parts of the critique: the socio-historical and the phenomenological. The structures of power are obviously essential, but we must understand how they produce and reproduce behavior through understanding how the psychosocial circuits they construct actually work.

This bears resonance with the points made by Bernard Stiegler in a lecture on the digital humanities that he delivered in 2014. He argues that we need to rethink the digitalization of knowledge in light of the Husserlian phenomenology of knowledge, especially since the Derridean critique of Husserl. Even the distinction Presner makes between the materialist epistemology of building and making in DH and the mental work of interpretation and critique reflects a repeating of the binary between mind and body that Western philosophy has been deconstructing since Hegel. It reflects the lack of a deeper engagement with the history of philosophy that might reveal that all academic and theoretical work has been conditions by technical constraints, and that digitalization would only appear as a transformation of that relationship. I think that Presner opens up an important conversation here, but one that needs to be taken further. This is obviously beyond the scope of this blog post, but it is one I believe to be essential if the digital humanities is to be able to rethink “the public sphere and knowledge systems…while also imagining possibilities for meteorological knowledge rooted in an ethic of participation without condition” (Presner, 56).

Stiegler’s lecture: https://www.academia.edu/12692243/Bernard_Stiegler_Digital_Humanities_2014_

For my final project, I chose to propose a distant reading of two texts by the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. It is proposed to be a vector semantic analysis of the concept of value in the context of the Anthropocene in his texts. It will establish a distributional relation among the concepts as well as use an analogical operation to uncover new semantic possibilities in the text that might allow us to rethink political economy. I chose to do this project following three threads most important to me during the semester studying digital humanities.

The first was inspired by Ryan Cordell’s How Not to Teach Digital Humanities. The most important takeaway from that piece for me was his assertion that we digital humanists need to approach research and pedagogy from the perspectives of our own special disciplines. He argues it is best to not approach digital humanities as a monolithic enterprise, but rather seek how digital techniques and tools can be incisive and decisive in specific humanistic disciplines. Until reading this piece, I was feeling somewhat discouraged about the field. I had yet to discover what I thought was so exciting about doing digital humanities, and this discourse made me realize that the burden was on me to investigate what kind of work I thought was important to do.

The second thread is intimately related to the first for me. It is that initiated by Michael Witmore’s Text: A Massively Addressable Object, which formed much of the theoretical backbone of my project proposal. In this blog post, he situates distant reading as both continuous with previous forms of reading while also considering what is different about it. He has inspired me to think about the way in which and the scales at which we address text in the philosophical world. I believe it is only by doing this that we could think about how text could be massively addressed via computation. Thus the overlap with Cordell’s point. I began to think about the way that philosophy has always addressed its history since at least Hegal and how that history can be addressed computationally.

The last was a thread that I felt was an undercurrent throughout the entire semester, which was the playful hacker ethos of the digital humanities. I changed the method of distant reading I was going to be working with only two weeks before the deadline for the final project. In this two weeks, I had to submerge myself in the world of vector semantics and word embeddings and start to play around with these new ideas and methods. I had to stumble around in the dark and become familiar with something completely other to me. During this process, I experienced something that I also experienced while doing the praxis assignments. It felt like digital humanities was less a field of digital and humanities experts, but rather humanists who were digital explorers. This is an ethos I would like to continue to chase throughout the rest of my time in the program.

What is the digital humanities’ role in the realm of digital education? What contributions can digital humanists make to increase the likelihood that the future of digital education will not be dystopian?

Mary Aiken is a cyberpsychologist who, in part of her research, studies the effect that digital technology has on human beings psychologically and behaviorally. She does this from the standpoint of environmental psychology, resting on the premise that, with the advent of digitalization, it is the environment of education that changes, and it is this new environment that calls us into questioning these changes. At the 2021 CUNY IT Conference, she was posed with the question of the conference’s theme: is the future of digital education utopian or dystopian? She answers by disagreeing with the formulation of the question in the first place. She argues that digital technology can either be used well or poorly by humans, and that the same is true concerning digital technology in higher education. It is in this openness, this radical ambiguity between the two poles of the potential within digital space, that the digital humanities can and must intervene in productive ways.

The question of whether the future of digital education is utopian or dystopian is essentially, according to Aiken, up to us. Thus, we need to ask ourselves the question, “how can we get the most out of the educational process in this rapidly changing environment?”. Aiken’s research has shown that digital technology has a tendency to amplify the behavior of people interfacing with it. This means it has the capacity to make people more altruistic, but it also has, as in the case of internet trolls, the capacity to make individuals more narcissistic, Machiavellian, sadistic, and psychopathological in other ways. So what are the ways in which digital technology can make education specifically more dystopian? She argues that education was moving in a trend towards digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this trend. In this acceleration, these threats have been made more apparent to us. Here were the main drawbacks she laid out as obstacles we need to address:

• Digital technology adds to students’ already excessive screen time
• Not all students have equal access to technology
• Devices can be distractions that can disrupt the learning process
• Data privacy issues
• Greater potential for cheating in the classroom
• Digital technology can disconnect students from social interactions
• Institutional lack of IT support makes it hard to evaluate and implement new classroom technologies
• May diminish cognitive development and reduces problem solving skills
• Maintaining modern technology is expensive
• Requires labor-intensive lesson planning
• Heavy institutional demands on IT systems.
• Less employment, underpayment, potential replacement of teachers through automation

It is in the context of such concerns that digital humanities can contemplate some of these things, as well as devise technical solutions. Furthermore, there is something that Aiken mentioned in passing that I wish to take note of for digital humanists (and humanists more broadly). In talking about the benefits of digital technology (she did not only speak of drawbacks), she mentioned that it lends itself to professors being guides or facilitators rather than content experts. And this, she claimed, is reason for us to re-consider what it means to educate in the first place. This is not just a question for psychologists, university administrators, and actors in the EdTech marketplace to answer. These are the kinds of bigger questions about the non-quantifiable elements of life that humanists have always been tasked with. In a world that devalues the humanities, this is an opportunity for humanists to reevaluate the values of their own disciplines while intervening in real-life local situates that have immense social and political consequences.

However, if anything was clear from Aiken’s talk, it is that we do not yet have the research we need on the effects of digital technology on learning, and it is only through this research that we can resist the destructive tendencies of digital technology and transform education for the better. Aiken says that we need an evidence-based approach that can inform future uses of technology. Once we have better data (and better access for students around the globe), we can better implement tools and strategies for the digital world. Part of this project involves predicting new technologies and how they would be best implemented us. She reminds us that the COVID pandemic revealed the necessity of this, for we found ourselves in a situation we academics were not ready for. In this realm, she points to the revolutionary capacity of virtual reality technology. Virtual reality situates a computer-generated educational environment that is believable, immersive, and interactive. This kind of technology could address many of the concerns surrounding remote learning.

The job of the digital humanities, then, is to utilize this research in light of our own native humanities disciplines to address these new digital techniques in tools as they relate to humanities questions like truth and justice. The digital humanities’ transdisciplinary nature is perfect for this work.

What Ted Underwood and Michael Witmore both call us to consider are the ways in which the practice of distant reading is continuous with practices that long precede the introduction of computational tools into the academy. Underwood is concerned with a very specific social-scientific way of reading literary texts that dates back to the sociologically and anthropologically-influenced projects of Raymond Williams and Janice Radway. This is an interesting and seemingly important historical tracing that can help distant reading position itself in the humanities. However, Witmore is concerned with a much broader genealogy that addresses some more general philosophical issues that I believe the digital humanities must grapple with if it is to becomes effective as a discipline. He gives us an epistemological framework, but it is one that I argue must be thought in relation to different organological scales (to use his own word), particularly that of the neuroscientific and the educational.

Witmore shows us that distant reading allows us to think something much deeper and overarching about the act of reading (and the technical constraints that have always conditioned it). It allows us to think distant reading as simultaneously continuous and discontinuous with hermeneutics as it preceded digitalization. He points to the fact that reading, as an addressing that can take place at many different levels, is always a historically and disciplinarily contingent mode of attention wherein a discipline, over time, determines what its object of attention is. This object of attention consists (ideally) over different scales. Witmore shows us that text can be addressed at the level of the book, genre, words, lemmatizations, and I might argue there are an infinite number of other ways it could be addressed. He also emphasizes the power of reading to read different texts and different scales together. In this way, different scales of text form the material basis for a mode of attention (a reading as a multiplicity of addresses) whereby meaning is produced. A mode of attention is what he calls the dispositif that the reader creates (as well as learns and transmits, in my opinion), creating connections between elements of the texts in/with the imagination.

Witmore calls for “a phenomenology of these acts [of reading], one that would allow us to link quantitative work on a culture’s ‘built environment’ of words to the kinesthetic and imaginative dimensions of life at a given moment.” However, we need to go beyond a mere phenomenology to construct what Bernard Stiegler calls an organology of reading, one that takes into account the biological organs, the technical organs, and the social organizations that condition the phenomenon of reading in the way that Witmore conceives of it. His analysis includes at least part of the technical and social dimension. For instance, he writes that addressing text at the level of the word “is itself an artifact of manuscript culture, one that could be perpetuated in print through the affordances of moveable type.” He also calls for a thinking of how the technical innovations of digital computation change the limits of what kinds of reading are possible. He hints at the biological when he references the kinesthesis of reading, but this leaves out the neuronal and the synaptic, which are essential in understanding how new connections can be made among textualities by creating new connections in the brain. The main thing I believe he leaves out, however, is a core social component, the most important social mechanism at play in reading being education. The dispositif that the reader uses to address textuality are constrained/produced by many differential forces of power, but the most important one in a post-Enlightenment world is the psychopower of educational institutions. The scalar concentrations of a reading are determined within the context of a discipline over the course of its history, between the play of the generations and all the contradictions therein. How to choose what elements of a text to capture and what to do with them follows rules established by the discipline that are then passed on to and eventually re-formed or trans-formed by students. By calling for an ontology of digital objects of address, Witmore is laying out for us what these rules need to be for those of us studying, teaching, reading, and writing in the digital humanities. What are the objects of our inquiry and how do our technical apparatuses change the conditions of our inquiry. What possibilities of address are opened up by the digital turn of distant reading and what dangers must we warn against? These are the questions that must be asked when we consider distant reading within the history of texuality, a history that is constituted by technical innovations and shifts in thinking, reading, writing, and teaching.

For my praxis assignment, I chose to use Mallet to perform topic modeling on some texts by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The texts I used were essays from his 2018 collection The Neganthropocene. I chose these essays because, according to editor and translator Daniel Ross, they mark a shift in the philosopher’s thinking, and were published together before any full-length book during this period of his thought. Therefore, they are posited as representative of the state of his conceptual framework by the time of his death in August 2020. The question I wanted to pose was whether or not the topics modeled could provide us with something like a constellation of concepts important for understanding his philosophical project.

I only ran the topic models on two of the thirteen essays contained in the volume because I wanted to use these specific texts and they do not already exist as data anywhere on the internet. Because of the time-consuming nature of turning the essays into something Mallet could work with, I was only able to get to two. This means that the project was not particularly fruitful and was not able to produce something actually meaningful, but it was an excellent foray into text analysis and is something I would like to continue working on in the future. To make the essays into files that Mallet could read, I copied the text from the PDF versions of the essays in the book into a .txt file in TextEdit. This was easy enough in itself, but the practice that took the most time was dealing with the way the text was formatted as a PDF. There were 60+ instances in each essay where words were broken up by a line-break, and so I had to go through each essay and correct them. This was important because Mallet would read “memory” and “mem-ory” as two different words and would thus throw off the model. One important lesson from this was just how tedious and time-consuming the process of text mining can be.

Mallet is “a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text.” I chose to use Mallet for my topic model because of its ease of use, and given I already have some experience with Python, I wanted to try something new. Mallet does not have its own GUI, so once you download the software, you have to use it from within your Terminal or Command Prompt. Once I had my .txt files prepared, I saved them to a folder within my Mallet directory so Mallet would be able to draw on them. One benefit of Mallet is that it has many capabilities built in that can do powerful things with your texts. I was able to turn my small corpus into something Mallet could work with by formatting it in the same sequence as the original texts while removing punctuation and stopwords, such as articles. Upon viewing the stopwords that Mallet removes by default while writing this blog, I realized there are some problems with it. It removes certain words such as “becoming” and “already”, which are actually important concepts for Bernard Stiegler (for whom, following Heidegger, being is becoming and Dasein is structured by the “already-there” of its historical past, and following both Heidegger and Derrida, many things are “always already” many other things). In doing future work with Mallet, this list of stopwords is something I would have to address.

Because of my very small number of texts and my lack of time to do a close reading of the texts with the topic(s) in mind, I did not produce anything that may actually be meaningful, but I do have some thoughts about topic modeling moving forward. It seems that one of the more difficult parts of topic modeling is deciding what is the right amount of topics for the data you are working with (I would also like to mess around with how many tokens make it in to a topic, but I did not know how to adjust that parameter with Mallet). It seemed to me that working with such a small number of texts (either one or two) required the amount of topics to be small to get anything meaningful. I used Mallet to produce two documents for myself. One was the list of keywords that listed out what the topics actually were, and the other was the composition that was a table of the likelihood of the topic to come up in a given text in the corpus. When looking for a larger number of topics with one or two texts (I started off with 10), the likelihood of each topic coming up in the texts was very small. As I incrementally lowered the number of topics, the likelihood of appearance in the texts went up. However, I still struggled to optimize my topics for the two texts. Even when I only searched for two topics, every time I ran them, there was basically one topic that was more related to one of the texts and another that was more related to the other. I might have been better reading with a highlighter.I know that, in the future, I will have to do two things. I will have to expand my corpus to at least the 13 texts in the book. I will also have to learn more about adjusting the parameters in Mallet in order to optimize my topics. When I ran the model for one topic, these were my results:

• question
• fsmilli
• knowledge
• organological
• anthropocene
• protentions
• life
• form
• collective
• noetic
• negentropy
• retentions
• technical
• l\’e
• future
• psychic
• fact
• digital
• time
• vi-strauss

This group of terms do provide an interesting point of departure for a potential future close reading of these essays. They are concerned with an approach to all theoretical and academic work which would situate them in their context of the Anthropocene from the standpoint of digital organology which produces new collective retentions and protentions, understood as the possibility of negentropy. It would be interesting to expand the number of texts to include the whole collection. In his newest book Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis, Daniel Ross claims a systemic explication of Stiegler’s thought has yet to be done and is highly necessary. Perhaps some text analysis work could be part of this project.

Another obvious obstacle that I faced was the appearance of nonsensical words in my topics. The ones listed above (“fsmilli”, “l\’e”, “vi-strauss) were found in the topics no matter how many times I ran it and no matter how many topics I trained the texts on. I combed both my texts to make sure there were no mistakes. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was mentioned many times, but none of these words themselves existed as tokens in my corpus. Upon doing a concatenation of the Mallet file I created, I realized this was the source of the mistakes. For some reason, running the following command created these nonsense tokens:

./bin/mallet import-dir –input TheNeganthropoceneData –output neganthropocene.mallet –keep-sequence –remove-stopwords

Somewhere between importing the directory containing my texts and plugging it into Mallet, these tokens were created. This is another point where better knowledge of how Mallet commands work would come in handy. If I had more time, I would have troubleshooted this further.

Other than this small hiccup, the project was a lot of fun and, as already mentioned, something I look forward to continue working on in the future. Stiegler himself is a profound thinker of technology and a passionate advocate for taking up digital tools as new powers of reading and writing. He teaches us that digital tools can create new revolutions in science, politics, and art, so long as their capacities for automation are not limited to mere analytic operations of calculation, but that also lend themselves to the synthesis of new knowledge, which always requires a human mind to take such leaps. I believe that something like topic modeling could individuate such knowledge, provided that we think through exactly what it can do and what that tells us.

The Project
I learned recently that Spotify displays the top five cities where listeners for a given artist are located. When I started poking around the various artists I listen to, I noticed that there were a lot of repeat cities, Chicago in particular. When prompted to create a map for the class, I thought it would be fun to map where the heaviest concentration of listeners of my favorite artists are located. This map would not give much space any kind of analysis or comparison, but would be fun for me to see.

Software choice
I chose to use Tableau for two reasons: first, it has a very user-friendly interface, with being able to easily drag and drop features and attributes into the map and very easily toggle symbolizations like size and color. Second, I have never made my own dataset before, and I liked how easily Tableau can work with messy data and let you work with the data within the software itself once the data was already connected. For instance, I did not have geographical data in my dataset and was able to link my cities to points of latitude and longitude in Tableau itself.

The Data
Using a service called mytopspotify.io, I was able to pull the top ten most played artists of all time on my Spotify account. They were David Bazan, Milo, Pedro the Lion, Mount Eerie, Aesop Rock, The Front Bottoms, WHY?, Open Mike Eagle, Immortal Technique, and Built to Spill. I then referred to each individual artist’s Spotify page to pull the top five cities that each of these artists are listened to on the platform, along with the number of listeners in each city (it is worth noting that there could be and likely are crossover listeners for multiple artists, so my numbers are probably thrown off by the same user being counted more than once in the total count for a given city). The dataset I made was as such:

Making the map
The process of making the map was relatively simple. I set the latitude and longitude for each city in Tableau and dragged the data for my cities into the X and Y axes to create my map. I dragged the data for the artists and the amount of listeners into the details for each point so each particular city would display the data linked to it. I set the point for each city to be visualized as a pie chart so show what portion of each city was made up by listeners of what artist, with each artist having its own unique color. Lastly I dragged the data for the mount of listener for each artist per state into the size featuring for each point. This made it so that cities with more listeners of my artists would be larger in proportion to cities with less overall listeners of my top artists. The result was the following map:

Link to project

Conclusions
The results of the map were not surprising or all that interesting (it makes perfect sense that listening habits of fans of these indie artists are concentrated to large cities), but was a great exercise in practicing mapping and thinking through all the necessary steps to visualize the data. I think there would be many more decisions to choices to explore, but this was an excellent introduction.

In many discourses and practices, maps seem to play the role of transparent bearers of objective truth. They seem to present to us a universal view of different levels of the cosmological landscape that allow us to do different things within this cosmos. How to Lie With Maps complicates this by showing us how maps are always already distortions of the landscapes they attempt to represent, and there is an intimate and direct relationship between the way a map gets created (in/as distortion) and what it is to be used for. As Mark Monmonier shows, the cartographic paradox is such that “to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies” (Monmonier, 1). At the level of projection, the map must distort three dimensional shape, size, angle, and direction in order to plot these dimensions on a flat surface. Maps must use necessarily inadequate symbols. The smaller the scale of the map is, the more details will have to be left out in order to make relevant details legible. Because of these reasons, maps are always “white lies”, but this structural gap leaves an opening for them to become “real lies” through “ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice” (Monmonier, 2).

It is through this structural opening in mapmaking that maps have been historically enmeshed with sovereignty and colonialism. In the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, our current post-Enlightenment framework for sovereignty was established: “The traditional philosophy of sovereignty…poses that national governments hold supreme authority over their internal affairs and that other states should not intervene under exception of threat or obligation of alliance” and that this authority is “absolute, territorially confined, and vertically rooted in the apparatus of the state” (Bonilla and Hantel). In Visualizing Sovereignty, Yarimar Bonilla and Max Hantel point to the fact that global maps, as they traditionally depict nation-states, existed before this treaty and were a part of the shaping of insular sovereignty that centralizes power in the state apparatus. The symbolization of strictly drawn borders and the naming of territories lent themselves to an assemblage of power which was the condition of possibility for modern ideas and practices of sovereignty. Whether unconscious or conscious, malicious or not, these maps helped make these ideas possible and laid the grounds for colonialism. 

What Bonilla and Hantel also show us is that these conceptions of sovereignty begin to break down once we consider a region like the Caribbean. The societies of the Caribbean are depicted in the same way as the independent self-contained nation-states of the Global North, but according to Bonilla and Hantel, power is not so neatly organized there: “the majority of societies in the Caribbean are not independent nation-states but rather protectorates, territories, departments, and commonwealths…the Caribbean also holds a large number of nonsovereign enclaves: military bases, privately owned islands, semiautonomous tourist resorts, free-trade zones, tax havens, wildlife preserves, satellite launching stations, detention centers, penal colonies, floating data centers, and other spaces of suspended, subcontracted, usurped, or imposed foreign jurisdiction” (Bonilla and Hantel). By looking at a normal map of the area, one would never perceive the supranational forces that traverse it at many levels. It is entangled in a global politics that upsets anything resembling the Westphalian conception of insular self-governing. In addition to having borders which are actually porous and interconnected, these societies and their borders have histories that could never be captured in a static two-dimensional map. This is where the benefit of spatiotemporal technology comes into play: “Through the use of time lapse maps, scholars are able to convey shifts and changes over time, unsettling our views of contemporary borders and political relationships”. They are thus able to show how, in the supposedly “postcolonial” era, outside influences continue to force themselves upon the Caribbean. They also navigate a lot of the choices that Monmonier points out as going into mapmaking in order to tell a story. They utilize color to demarcate what foreign powers play a role in these societies, they use time-lapse to show at what point in the timeline these powers exert their influence; they edit the scale to represent each society as the same size, so as to not introduce biases about importance; and they do not choose one projection to create the illusion of transparency and objectivity, but instead choose to organize each society in a map-as-infographic.

What is truly transformative about this project is the way its engagement with ideas and histories of sovereignty make us question sovereignty, not just in the context of the postcolonial Caribbean, but as such. As Bonilla and Hantel write, “claims to sovereignty have always been fractured, layered, negotiated, and contested” (Bonilla and Hantel). I would argue this is even truer in the context of the Anthropocene, where the planet has been thoroughly globalized and the sovereignty of nation-states has been liquidated by hyperindustrial capitalism. The behavior of political and citizen actors has been regulated and programmed by what Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governmentality. I do not agree with their prescription for what they call a nonsovereign archipelago. Instead of abandoning the concept of sovereignty altogether, I believe this project provides us with the opportunity to deconstruct and reconstruct sovereignty according to values such as international democracy/contribution, knowledge, and care for the other. However, their concept of prophetic cartography can give us new ways of looking at what it means to be part of a global community in a context wherein there is so much backlash against “globalism” and in the face of imminent climate crises that will uproot countless innocent people. Rooted in an international sovereignty of hospitality, such mapmaking potentials could intervene directly in such crises and be tools in local political struggle, as was shown in The Puerto Rico Mapathon for Hurricane Relief conducted by the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities at Columbia University. It is shifts in the technical system of humanity such as these that needs to be seized to resist what Derrida has called the tendency toward the Worst, which we see manifested on a daily basis.