Beyond the Word:
Immersion, Art, and Theory in Environmental and Digital Humanities
PrototypingHanna MusiolNorwegian University of Science and
Technologyhanna.musiol@ntnu.no
Hanna Musiol is Associate Professor of Literature at the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology, and a founding member of NTNU
Environmental Humanities and NTNU ARTEC. Her interests include
transnational American literature, transmedia storytelling, and critical
pedagogy, with emphasis on migration, environmental justice / political
ecology, and human rights. She publishes on literary and transmedia
aesthetics and justice and collaborates regularly with grassroots
initiatives and nonacademic institutions on city-scale curatorial,
public humanities, and civic engagement projects. https://www.ntnu.no/ansatte/hanna.musiol
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000557015214 August 2021article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyMinor revisions of sentence syntax and
puntuation.Beyond the Word explores the entanglements of
Digital and Environmental Humanities (D&EH) with the word and textuality —
but also beyond the word and text — with bodies, art, and digital
apparati at its center as narrative, speculative, performative, and immersive
instruments. Specifically, this article details efforts to incorporate mixmedia
immersive literate, sonic, and visual art as a vehicle for teaching critical,
speculative D&EH at a time of global ecological and digital transformations.
Using two transdisciplinary humanities initiatives developed at the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology as test cases, this text focuses on
pedagogical prototyping experiments that encourage nondeterministic uses of, and
thinking about, digital tools as vehicles for poetry, transmedia environmental
storytelling, critical theory, ethics, and immersive archival reimagining. The
article covers the design process and sample activities incorporated to
transform the multimodal literature and theory classroom into inclusive,
immersive commons, and it concludes with a reflection on the ethical
ramifications of such D&EH work.
This article examines the overlapping characteristics of Digital and
Environmental Humanities.
I . . . approach the computer as a theatre machine.
—Nancy Mauro-Flude (2016) . . . text mining . . . usually begins with The Word. We
extract The Word; we count The Word; we stem The Word to its root; we parse
The Word; we name The Word; we disambiguate The Word; we collocate The Word;
we count The Word again; we apply an algorithm that allows us to reconstruct
the world of The Word as one we can visualize as a list, as a line graph, as
a histogram in small multiples, or on big screens. We use the view this new
world provides us to interpret The Word. —Tanya Clement (2016, 534) The surface of the body is a thinking, feeling surface. . .
I cannot stop touching the speech of the body. —Erin Manning (2007, 9)
Beyond the Word: Immersion, Art, and Theory in
Environmental and Digital Humanities Prototyping
Neither language, nor poetry, Amanda Ackerman (2014,
n. pag.) reminds us, can be be entirely, and
only, human. Unlike Digital Humanities (DH) theorists who mainly
explore the entanglement of human and computer languages, Ackerman and her
collaborator, Dan Richert, the American transmedia poets and artists behind the
2017
Unknown Giants poetry installation, produce
poems together with algorithms, humans, and nonhuman living
organisms such as plants (Figure 1). Ackerman and Richert, the poetic duo, have
long experimented with electronic, biosensing poetry, exploring, for instance,
words as well as the ability of plants, measured through technological
mediation, to respond to poems being read to them by humans. Thanks to their
unique sensitivity, called capacitance, plants interact
with electric impulses that human bodies, and sound, specifically, generate
(Richert in Ackerman 2014). In their poetry installation exhibited as part of
Et Nytt Vi / A New WeHereafter cited as
A New We. (2017) at Kunsthall
Trondheim (KT) in Norway, Ackerman and Richter (2017) reintroduced these
unlikely collaborators and poetry co-designers, fellow human primates as well as
magnolia, picae, and eucalyptus (Figure 1). In this installation, the plants’
response to human proximity was recorded using volatile organic compound (VOC)
sensors measuring terpenes levels. The exploratory, creative, and protective
response of plantsAckerman argues that the threat-linked interaction was
not intended as a focus on the work (personal communication, May 15, 2018).
A plant’s protective response is nonetheless, at least partially, wired into
its biophysical reactions (D. Richert, personal communication, June 20,
2018). — terpenes shield plants from insects — was translated into
textual-poetic phrases in English, displayed on a TV, and timestamped and saved
for future use. The result of this machine–human–plant encounter was a
situational poetic immersive text,Ackerman (2014) observed in her previous
work with various plants and poetry that plants’ poetic responses are not
dictated simply by biological determinism, as each
plant seemed to have exhibited poetic preferences and
subjectivity, its own syntactical signature and . . .
emphasis on certain cadences, words, or phrase
recursions. a techno-somatic archive of intimacy, fragility,
and danger.Ackerman deemphasizes the fear factor, yet it is nonetheless
part of the plant’s somatic response. Digital technology operated in
their work as a Form of Art [Antonisz, quoted in Kordjak-Piotrowska
2013] but also as an art of living, binding different poets together — artists, this
author, students, magnolia, and algorithms, helping different poetic
stakeholders symbiote and create.
Ackerman and Richter’s expansive, multi-agential biosensing
Unknown Giants poetry has yet to be routinely taught in American
literature or DH studies survey courses, but such multimodal, interactive
digital-sensorial literature will certainly arrive there eventually. At the
moment, however, few literary studies and theory classes engage in training in
and interrogation of critical, poetic, and speculative affordances and uses of
digital technology as a vehicle for non- or postprint, new media literature and
critical theory — paradoxically so, since multimodal cli-fi or electronic,
biosensing, or electronic theatre, and AI-generated literature are not new, and
calls for critical and comparative media interrogations of their different
modalities and affordances, of entangled histories of expressive
languages and their aesthetic variables at
the time of print literature’s waning dominance, are more than a decade old . In that context, Warren Sack’s (2019) call for an institutional reclamation of
liberal arts [my emphasis] as the foundation of
software arts and a rethinking of DH’s marginalization
of aesthetics, specifically, sounds as belated as it is urgent. Critical digital
bio art and media studies practitioners model such reclamations and often challenge the
monstrosity of [institutional] monocultures. Literature and literate arts programs,
especially at the undergraduate levels,See Risam et al. (2017). can learn from them how to
restore the focus on aesthetic practice and digital humanities ethics within the
institutional setting.
Beyond the Word is an empirical and experimental
case study, exploring such practices and pedagogies in the work undertaken by
the author, her collaborators, student participants, and partner institutions
between 2017 and 2018. The article details our efforts to prototype immersive
art-centered D&EH instruction that emphasizes nondeterministic, creative,
and reflective approaches to digital tools, which involved designing new syllabi
and coordinating and teaching courses at Norwegian University of Science
Technology (NTNU); developing public programming curricula — public talks,
screenings, workshops, and co-curated immersive exhibits events — for
undergraduate students in the Literature, Cultural Studies, and Teacher Training
programs at NTNU, Trondheim-based migrant community members, and the general
public; and, collaborating closely with several city and university partners:
KT, Trondheim Kommune / The Trondheim Municipality (TK), and NTNU ARTEC.
Redesigned literature courses discussed below engage thematic and practical
considerations in DH & EH — transmodal creative forms, preservation,
archives, speculation, and collaboration and ethics. This article traces their
entanglements with the word and textuality — but also moves beyond
the word and its capture and measurement — with art, digital apparati, and
bodies used as narrative, speculative, immersive, and performative instruments.
Ultimately, Beyond the Word reflects on what can
happen when digital and environmental humanities come into close
contact, if not touch, in the contemporary literature and theory
classroom, and, often, when the art(ist) is literally present,This is a
play on the title of the 2010 MoMA retrospective of the work by the
performance art pioneer Marina Abramović . to reveal the poetic, speculative, performative, and ethical
contingencies of digital tools.
Background: A D&EH Landscape
Despite the limited presence of art-centric D&EH literature curricula,
techno-organicist preoccupations with aesthetics and environments, with the
living and mechanistic, are not absent from DH and EH projects and scholarship.
They are common in, for instance, virtual worlds preservation work, alternate
reality game (ARG) collaborations, and the examination of the deterioration and
disappearance in technology and ecology in an era of the Anthropocene . Ursula Heise (2002) and Margret Linley (2016,
410–37) theorize how nature metaphors shape digital architectures and
discourses,Linley (2016) observes that
digital realms are imagined and built as environments, natural landscapes,
populated with viruses, worms, and other things being born, albeit
digitally, replicating a particularly cultural
understanding of nature and culture. while others address the social,
gendered, racialized, and colonial thinking that undergirds our understanding of
nature and digital environments.See Alaimo (2010), Haraway (2008, 2016), Mauro-Flude (2014, 2016, 2019), and Nowviskie
(2019). Feminists and scholars of
critical race, postcolonial, or disability studies have long exposed the
effects of misogynistic, racist, classist, colonial, and ableist bias baked
into the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and institutional
infrastructure and archives . Roopika Risam (2016, 2019) documents the telling
concentration of DH centers in former colonial metropoles. Some of the most
obvious discriminatory aspects of DH projects and digital environments,
their inaccessibility for users with the most common physical impairments,
are pervasive. At a November 2019 NTNU DH event, none of the
tested public university websites were designed with basic digital
accessibility in mind. Other well-documented cases of racial,
gender/sexuality-, linguistic-, and class-based exclusion derive from this
geopolitical distribution of, and limited access to, DH laboratories,
software, expertise, and funding . The reasons
for such a retreat from concerns about equity and accessibility in digital
design, especially in Norway, are hard to ascribe. They may be tied to
short-term funding models, or to lack of scrutiny of DH projects’
inaccessible architecture and research outcomes, but the absence of
mandatory training in critical theory, media literacy, and digital
accessibility across disciplines is also a contributing factor.
Importantly, EH, like critical media studies committed to the entangled
materialist critique and aesthetic analysis, is explicit about
seeing nature and technology as
ideological and historical formations and as living, biophysical, aesthetic,
organic and nonorganic, or machinistic objects .The impact of environmental digital art and
EH is particularly important here, not simply thematically but methodically.
EH foregrounds the need to engage with nontextual archives, local knowledge,
and attends to diverse, often nonlogocentric forms and genres of observation and storytelling from across disciplines
. DH’s institutionalized focus on precision-defined models of scaling and its messy institutional
realities, on the other hand, often preempts a
similarly complex understanding of its aesthetics and politics. This leads some
to worry that instrumentally deployed digital methods,
algorithmic criticism among them, may ero[de] our most
unique facility in the humanities, such as the
aptitude for fine-grained and careful interpretive observation,This concern and arguments against algorithmic visualization and
analysis, Nowviskie (2019)
argues, are not . . . fueled by nostalgic scholarly
conservatism, but rather emerge across the political
spectrum. its capacity for contemplation,Again, critical media studies
can offer useful models here. See Fusco and Dominguez (2003), Mauro-Flude (2016, 2019), and Mittell (2019). and, in particular, its engagement with aesthetics and
performance.
In Norway, as worldwide, as ecological and digital crises intensify, digital and
environmental concerns do seep into the university curricula and research labs,
often under the rubric of sustainability and
digital transformation research foci.See the
largest funding schemes at the Norwegian Research Council (NFR) at https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/call-for-proposals/. Art
projects are funded by a separate agency, Arts Council Norway, at https://www.kulturradet.no/english. However, DH and EH,
and DH and art, are still segregated into different university and external
funding, certification, and instruction schemes, and the national commitment to
the extraction economy makes funding and sustaining critical
liberal arts-based D&EH initiatives challenging.2019 is a watershed
moment for EH in Norway, marking the official establishment of a four-year
nation-wide Environmental Humanities Doctoral consortium program, called
NoRS-EH. See https://prosjektbanken.forskningsradet.no/en/project/FORISS/299199?Kilde=FORISS&distribution=Ar&chart=bar&calcType=funding&Sprak=no&sortBy=date&sortOrder=desc&resultCount=30&offset=30&Fag.3=Marin+teknologi.
Locally, NTNU, the well-funded and largest research university in
Norway,Its 2019 budget is 9.6 billion NOK. See https://www.ntnu.edu/facts. is an institution with
technological and sustainability foci but minimal contemporary critical theory,
DH, or digital/media literacy instructional tradition as of 2019. Moreover, and
paradoxically, NTNU offers minimal DH infrastructural and practical tech and
humanities project-development support.The particular type of humanities
collaboration in Norway with computer science in DH training and project
maintenance is also reflection-worthy. Those who teach Python or GIS to
humanists (mainly linguists and literary scholars) do not share the same
commitment to or interest in cultural critique on which electronic arts,
critical internet studies, or critical design practice are built, and their
role in collaborative projects is often reduced to out- or insourcing of
computational skills on a contingent, nonreciprocal basis. Moreover, at
NTNU, purchases of hardware and software are always prioritized over
investment in transdisciplinary critical humanware. Thus,
the way in which powerful digital tools and platforms
arrive in the humanities means also the stealth arrival of a particular form
of collaborative practice, and promoting faith in the transparent and
innately positive agency of technology. This, in turn, transforms the
humanities toolbox but also displaces its few ethical methods practices in
place that were laboriously fought for by artists, humanists, theorists, and
designers since the middle of the previous century. Thus, when Safiya
Umoja Noble (2019, 27–28) invokes Audrey Lorde’s,
Roopika Risam’s, or Kent Oto’s work, or when Miriam Posner (2016, 41) contends that scholarly expertise in critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and
other interrogations of structures of power is the most complicated, challenging computing problem [my
emphasis] of DH, locally, the absence of a critical humanistic and
DH curriculum prevents students and junior DH practitioners from even seeing
computing and critical theory as interrelated, let alone from seeing computing
dilemmas through a critical theory lens. In that landscape, and in
contrast, new media, art, design and EH initiatives in the region that extend
beyond the university are often sites of unapologetic experimentation with
critical theory and liberal and software arts. Trondheim’s own cultural infrastructure — with at
least five contemporary art institutions explicitly dedicated to contemporary
and, thus, digital/electronic artAmong these are Kunsthall Trondheim (a
contemporary art gallery/center), Rockheim (Norway’s national immersive
museum of contemporary popular music), Trondheim Kunstmuseum (a fine-arts
museum), Trondhjems Kunstforening (a contemporary art association and
gallery in Trondheim), and Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst (the regional
Center for Contemporary Art). — provides a robust collaboration
ecosystem, unparalleled, perhaps, by most standards for a city of under 200,000
residents. Institutions such as KT, with an official mandate and resources to
engage with environmental and mixmedia art and the public, can easily expand the
university classroom and open possibilities for interactions with new forms of
digital and biosensing storytelling, theorizing, experimentation, and
reflection.
Together with our collaborators, we assumed that literary studies students and
scholars in training, familiar with interrogating and playing with
aesthetics, with literary techniques and technologies, would welcome
explorations of the performative and poetic approaches to digital narrative
tools. Thus, when preparing our courses, we relied heavily on the external art
networks that support such work. The first elective course,
Literature, EH, and The Arts of Living on a Damaged
Planet (LEHALDP),See the full LEHALDP syllabus at
https://www.asle.org/teaching_resources/environmental-humanities-transmedia-syllabus/.
The TALS syllabus has yet to be included in the full text repository.
was developed in close partnership with KT’s A New We
(2017) transspecies and transmedia storytelling exhibit co-curated by
from the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (2019), the NTNU ARTEC, the NTNU
Academic Guest Network / NTNU for Refugees, and the resettlement/integration
unit of TK (the Trondheim Municipality). Our advanced theory course, Theoretical Approaches to Literary Studies: A Toolbox for
Literary Analysis (TALS), also relied on these partnerships, if only
for shorter D&EH modules (in 2017 and 2018). Both initiatives promoted
inclusive teaching and transmodal D&EH scholarship, with a focus on
environmental digital literature and art practices, and performative, creative,
and reflective uses of digital tools. Since both courses were imagined as
university D&EH initiatives as well as community-engagement resources, they
required a rethinking of what and where the classroom is and what it does — and,
also, who is included and welcomed to be part of it. Creating an inclusive
commons, then, as an immersive space for observation, performance, storytelling,
experimentation, and reflection, was a practical and ethical precondition, one
requiring intense preparation and multiple stakeholders.For a detailed
discussion of the class and the administrative challenges to inclusion work
at NTNU, see Musiol (forthcoming
2021). The extensive urban digital art infrastructure helped us
grapple with this conundrum. Although the NTNU literature program (ISL/HF) was
an official pedagogical base, with its traditional classroom, the library, and
reading lists, most of our work happened at and with KTKunsthalls (art
halls) are contemporary art institutions in Europe with an explicit
community-engagement mission. rather than in the university
classrooms and its digital or media labs. KT, which transformed into a
human–machine–multispecies salon (Figures 1–2) with its immersive storytelling and
installations co-curated by Ida Bencke and Dea Antonsen from the Laboratory for
Aesthetics and Ecology (2019), was
integrated into our weekly assignments, gallery visits, public writing and
creative digital storytelling and DH workshops, as a context for and
objects of our work (Figures 1–4).
There were also several other reasons, beside those outlined above, for a close
collaboration with KT. All classes at NTNU and all external programing (at KT or
other partner institutions, such as the Falstad Human Rights Center) were open
to students and to Trondheim’s permanent and temporary or transient residents,
free of charge and without bureaucratic barriers.Access barriers,
especially for students with physical impairments, are always there.
However, the fact that we could invite nondegree, unenrolled migrant
participants to the initiative and reward them with an official NTNU
certificate of attendance without fees or legal and bureaucratic barriers
was a major achievement. However, access to NTNU’s digital
environments (hardware and software, DH training, tech support, library
services, and even basic university student discussion platforms), while free in
Norway, reinforces the digital divide, as it is restricted to registered
students in ways that purely physical access to the classrooms and libraries in
Norway and most of Europe never is.Limits placed on who can participate in
digital environments at an otherwise very public public
university confirms what DH scholars and digital rights activists have been
saying for a long time: new technology distributions and copyright law
reinscribe, not fix, social inequality. KT, on the other hand,
literally allowed all interested participants — registered
students, invited guests, residents, (im)migrants, asylum seekers, one-time
lurkers, and other participants of various abilities — to play with, perform,
and observe nonconventional use of digital technology in its environmental art
installations. Finally, the immersive exhibition setup encouraged the use of
multiple senses and did not privilege ocular, or monolingual or textual
proficiency. This was important for some community members whose mother tongue
was neither English nor Norwegian, and to neurodiverse participants with
different narrative preferences, and digital, or physical access needs.
Collaborative Course Design
The Public Classroom
Prior exposure to and learning from critical internet practitioners at local and national conferencesAmong the
influential inspirations are a Futurescapes symposium in new media,
technology, and the humanities, with exhibits and artist-led lecture
sessions, including Kari Kraus’s ARG participatory design workshops and
her digital enchantment and decay work (2019) and Nancy Mauro-Flude’s spectral-digital performance;
and a subsequent Technology & Emotions conference co-organized by
NTNU ARTEC with the Oslo-based Polyteknisk Forening (a national
engineering association) and an i/o lab bioart curatorial collective
from Stavanger. was instrumental and emboldened us — the
art-literature-new media collaborators based at NTNU, within the
municipality, and at local art institutions — to seize the opportunity to
experiment with D&EH to incorporate digital, immersive, bio-, and
electronic art into the undergraduate literature classrooms in lieu of more
instrumentalist DH training.Note that as of 2018, some creative
practices are now officially recognized as artistic
research, a form of knowledge-making and an academic field
in Norway. We consulted EH and DH scholars, artists, curators,
and practitioners on the syllabi and public programming in order to spur
critical reflection and creative work using transmodal art. Some of our
collaborators — Krista Caballero, a US-based mixmedia artist, exhibiting at
the time at KT; Sissel Bergh, a Trondheim-based mixmedia artist mapping the
South Sámi culture in the region; Marco Armiero, an environmental historian
and the founder of the Toxic Bios digital archive at the Swedish Royal
Institute of Technology (KTH); Henry Mainsah, an Oslo-based digital media
scholar, designer, and speculative prototyper; Lisa Dush, a US-based new
media and rhetorics scholar; and Carl Faurby, a curator and educator at KT —
co-designed or guest-taught portions of our courses. Drawing on Brennan’s
(2016) public DH work, together with the KT team, Carl Faurby and Helena
Holmberg, we also collaborated on linking our literary and theory studies
curriculum to public digital environmental art programming and film
screenings. Crucial for the inclusive format of the courses was the
practical support of Adria Sharman, the official of TK, who successfully
advocated for a 75% reduction in textbook pricing for refugee academics; the
NTNU Humanities Faculty’s small pedagogical grant, which covered
transportation and D&EH workshop costs; and the decision of KT’s then
director, Helena Holmberg, to ensure fee-free entrance to KT on all days to
all participants, regardless of their immigration or student status.
Pedagogical Toolbox
Aside from required literary studies skill, we wanted to foreground the
aesthetic and reflective potential of digital tools. Each week, we paired
print literary and theoretical texts and specific interactive installations
at KT with EH and DH keywords (symbiosis, collaboration, and postprint
immersive literature; species extinction and conservation and digital
preservation and archives; biosocial toxicity, digital waste, and ethics,
etc.) and experimented with performative, immersion, prototyping, and
theory-making workshops. We felt that experimentation and prototyping can
help us reappraise . . . the utilitarian design
of DH , and we aimed to combine the speculative inventiveness of design and the critical interpretation of the humanities to imagine
what might be accomplished with digital tools that don’t yet
exist. In the process, we had to draw from
diverse critical pedagogy and disciplinary traditions — public humanities,
postcolonial studies, DH, EH, design studio and art pedagogy, and critical
media/internet studies — and developed a series of interconnected
reiterative activities, some deriving from the traditional print-based
literary studies and others from multimodal writing and the design pedagogy
toolbox . The multi-genre and multimodal activities
enabled a recognition of neglected forms of nonprint post/decolonial
storytelling and meaning-making and speculations.For a discussion of
new, transmodal tools and (as) postcolonial theory method in this and
other NTNU initiatives, see Musiol (2020, forthcoming 2021).
The aim was to build on and enrich our own and our students’ DH
and literary studies training — involving critical reading, watching, deep
listening, aesthetic and cultural analysis, curriculum design, and so forth
— with performative, immersive, enacting co-creation activities
and collaborative methods common to critical making, performance studies,
and speculative design.
Embodied Contemplation/ Immersion as
Reflection
Importantly, our activities and experiences were not simply hands-on but, often,
words-off, other-senses-on, with a focus on reflection and immersion, an
approach that warrants its own entry. Against better advice, we centered on
continuous meta-reflections on the learning processes and specific encounters
with texts, artifacts, and living organisms, foregrounding epistemological
ruminations on analog and digital technology and D&EH art and literature in
each class, exhibit visit, or workshop activity. In that sense, we reversed the
order of Hayles and Pressman’s (2013) dictum
making, critique, by beginning,
counterintuitively, with theory and critical reflection. Ryan Cordell (2016, 460) warns against such meta-discussions . . . [that] too often preclude engagement
with its projects and theoretical engagements. He suggests that
students, unlike administrators and professionals, are not invested in the
debates about the field or the disciplines (460–61) and implies that these
conversations should follow, not preempt, the examination of case studies. We
had heeded his advice in earlier practical workshops, and it had served us well.
That time, however, we wanted to experiment with foregrounding theory, ethics,
and reflection as missing foundations of [D&EH]
design and to address the absence of critical theory in our
institutional setting, specifically. We knew that we could take advantage of our
unique immersive environment to generate instantaneous critical
affect, that is, to make bodies feel critically, as
well as to think critically. To this end, we used immersive
multisensory environments at KT to engage with biodigital, physical, and
political touch of multimodal storytelling, in spaces
literally oversaturated with competing human and nonhuman bio and digital
stimuli, enhanced by interactive digital tools such as algorithms, VOC terpene
sensors, digital screens, the ambisonic sound system, and more (Figures 1–4).Moreover, our participants
represented diverse fields and came from different administrative levels and
functions in the university, cultural heritages, and urban ecosystems: we
worked with students, senior scholars, junior and veteran artists, curators,
DH guest-speakers, university-unaffiliated migrants, and high-powered
administrators of academic or cultural institutions.
The corporeal-reflective impact of this immersive method, engendering
multisensory, machine-mediated somatic interactions and unleashing
affect as an epistemic and critical tool, exceeded our
expectations . It resonated strongly
with participants, challenging many assumptions about what students/participants
want, know, or prefer. [C]omputational technologies do not
only reveal new insights about postdigital culture, observes Nancy
Mauro-Flude (2019, 219), they also transform propensities for embodied
contemplation, a subject at the heart of humanities scholarship [emphasis
mine], and, in our experiences, immersive art installations
facilitated precisely such corporal humanistic reflections. Initially, our
literature and humanities students, mostly newcomers to EH and DH, and to
contemporary art, were more comfortable with the dominant role that ocular
sensations, words and reading specifically, play in the process of learning and
interpretation. As Cordell (2016) predicts,
they were not troubled by disciplinary limits that a literature class may
impose. However, as they encountered environmental print theory and fiction,
alongside experiencing postprint work and immersive ecological art praxes
spatially and in other, nontextual, somatic ways, their very understanding of
possible modes of embodied storytelling and knowledge-making expanded, too.
Temporarily taken aback by the force of sensory affects and disciplinary
bordercrossings, participants soon found the techno-biologist poetic exchanges
of affects and capacities between human bodies, machines, plants, animals, and
archives both visceral and meaningful . Many
were literally and metaphorically touched by, for instance, how
intertwined literature, digital art, and biology are, or how, for instance,
digital technology made plants speak to them in
Unknown Giants (Vegard Ruud, November 8,
2017All references to participants’ public writing / blog work are
cited in text only and used with permission.). Some also noted, with
fascination, that digital technology became a literary prosthetic and
translation platform, which, for instance, serve[d]
as a voice for the plants, and g[ave plants] the ability to tell
stories [my emphasis], allowing us, humans, to hear them (Ida Tevik
Haugen, October 31, 2017). Moreover, participants often focused on how digital
tools enabled the co-authoring and co-archiving role of the
audience, spurring further reflection. The way the artists
used the natural scent emitted by flowers in conjunction with technology in
order to (re-)create poetry is in itself amazing, wrote one
participant of Unknown Giants (2017), but the fact that the spectators also contribute to the
process elevates the installation above the others (Mats Øien,
October 29, 2017). To Mats Øien, and others, the collaborative and performative
character of Unknown Giants (2017), which always show[s] unique and personalized output based on the
observer(s) present, demonstrates that each
individual is unique but also reminds us that
humans are not the only kids on the block (Mats Øien, October 29,
2017).
Archival Reimagining
Archival practices and preservation technologies have grave implications for the
nonhuman kids on the block, for our understanding
of nonhuman history, species extinction, and for imagining transspecies futures
(Mats Øien, October 29, 2017).Ursula Le Guin, and other speculative
fiction writers, is credited not only as a novelist but as an important
environmental humanities thinker in Tsing et al. (2017) and in the documentary Donna Haraway:
Storytelling for Earth’s Survival (2017). In previous
courses, we had frequently exposed students to literary digital archives, their
preservation missions, feminist or postcolonial ethical considerations,
archiving and metadata curation methods, or exhibition techniques.Much
radical recovery work aims to resist the destruction or concealment of
cultural productions by colonial subjects, women, LGBTQI+ persons, or
persons of color. See Bernstein (2011),
Lowe (2015), Stoler (2010), and Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman in
the ACT UP Oral History Project, for instance. This class acknowledged their
work, but it engaged specifically with the absence of the nonhuman
voice in cultural heritage archives. Given
our thematic interest in 2017 in EH, we wanted instead to explore how artists
grapple with archival heritage futures of nonhuman extinct
animal lore .
To this end, we turned to one of two archival digital art projects exhibited at
KT, Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg’s
Birding the
Future: Lab Series (2017), a mournful project on avian storytelling
and species extinction (Figures 4–5).For a discussion of another nonhuman
species extinction archival installation by Heldén and Jonson (2017), see
Musiol (2020, 269–72). This archival
installation used visual projections and an ambisonic speaker setup to
spatialize extinct and nonextinct bird sounds (Figure 3) which enveloped
visitors in an imagined, impossible sonic landscape of zebra finches — common
lab birds of our era — and of the extinct Hawaiian Kauaʻi ʻōʻō honeyeater birds.
The installation also activated multiple senses — sight, touch, hearing —
immersing visitors in historical and speculative sounds within this archive and
a transmedia elegy for the biodiversity, soundscape, and cultural lore lost. For
instance, participants watched oversized, looped footage of distraught finches
handled with lab instruments in an ornithological laboratory (Figures 3–4) while
immersed in the archival and speculative soundscape. But while the video
projection was consumed more passively, visitors also played with vintage
stereoscopes, examining Krista Caballero’s composite cards and their different
visual and tactile handling of human-avian stories (Figure 4).Each card
displayed images of different bird species, and ornithological and cultural
information about them — including poetry and other cultural lore associated
with different migratory birds in the different regions through which they
migrate. This transformed the gallery into a historic and imaginary,
multisensory, dynamic, participatory archiveMany digital archives are
participatory and crowdsourced. However, here the participation, while
collective, was also corporeal, intimate, and individual first.
eliciting different ways of hearing, feeling, reading about the transspecies
entanglements (see Figures 4 and 5).
Like
Unknown Giants (2017), Birding the Future’s (2017) archive depended on various digital and
new and old media technology, such as hearing- and vision-enhancing analog and
digital tools — video projectors; vintage stereoscopes; composite illustrations
based on images taken with digital cameras and then processed with Adobe Pro,
Photoshop, and Illustrator; as well as the vector-based amplitude panning
algorithm; a multichannel audio (ambisonic) sound spatialization system; and a
Raspberry Pis setup — to collapse the temporal distinctions between the
irreversible past, the now of the exhibit, and the anticipated future. But their
use of sound, visual, and computer technologies was not simply functional and
prosthetic — enhancing human vision and hearing — but epistemological,
speculative, performative, and scriptive. To Bernstein (2011,
12, 69–91), archival work is often a feat of forensic and
performative imagination about how historical objects were and
might have been used. If what no longer is can only be imagined
and speculated about, the installation reminded us that imagination and
performance are also indispensable, if neglected, research skills,
and that technology can enable this complex understanding of research.
Such complex, multilayered, conflicting use of technology made students
instantaneously aware of its obtrusive presence, of technologies’ histories, and
of their speculative power in this archive (something we had been trying to
expose in other DH classes, but with less success). Eirik Klakegg Thorsen wrote,
for instance, that the installation offered a great example
of how technology can both be a distraction and the only possible way to
really imagine a historical moment [my emphasis]. He
continued: I thought that the stereoscope took some of the
focus away from the extinct birds and drew the focus more over on the actual
technology itself. If the speakers and video were . . . placed in a dark
room where one could have focused solely on the sound and picture (or only
sound), and tried to imagine the significance of why they [birds and their
sounds] are gone, and not get distracted (by the first pair of stereoscopes
I have touched since my childhood), I think the experience would have been
even more powerful. But then, the artwork would have been much darker,
without much hope, and the story would have been completely different. The
digital sound and video of the birds show how digital technology may be the
only possible way to archive some types [of] historical moments
[my emphasis]. One could probably argue that it would be possible to paint a
lifelike picture of the birds and maybe even describe a sound by the use of
words and musical notations, but I would argue that, at
least for the sound, it would not be possible to do the imagination
without the technology . . . (Eirik Klakegg Thorsen, November 1,
2017; my emphasis)
While DH often engages in more positivist forensic archival work, in this
installation, vintage and new technology (stereoscopes and turn-of-the-century
recordings) in particular operated as scriptive historical
objects , inviting audiences to touch and use them
to imagine ways in which they had been used historically, replicating ways of
seeing and hearing nature at the beginning of the previous
and in our century. Just as our students did not initially consider that
storytelling might take on transmedia forms, or that algorithms and magnolias
can become poetic partners in crime, their initial understanding of
history-making and archives derived from their trust in an objective and static
textual record of human experience.Of course, our Norwegian students had
different understandings of the objectivity of archives than did Indigenous
Sámis or (im)migrant participants of our classes. Stereoscopic
technology challenged such views; it produced a sense of archival
multidimensionality and embodiment as it layered different genres and realms of
touchable knowledge (science, cards, visual art, and transnational poetry)
across time but also encouraged a performative, multisensory,
digital-tools-mediated engagement with the archive (Figure 4).
Like
Unknown Giants, Birding
the Future activated an embodied historical, fleshy, archival
sensorium; foregrounded multipurpose and multimodal affordances of digital and
analog technology and art; and revealed the critical force of affect produced by
immersive visual, sound, and digital tools. Moreover, participants also became
attentive to the challenges of creating non- or trans-human stories archives,
wondering how one can acknowledge the agency and voice of
nonhuman others when these extend beyond human cognitive
capacity. Moreover, this archival installation managed to raise with course
participants the important questions in literary and D&EH studies about
access and presence in archives. Who belongs in a heritage
future? How can we preserve, display, care for nonhuman
lore, without using violent practices and instruments of captivity (Figure 4)?
We also wondered what constitutes ethical collaboration,
storytelling, archival evidence, or historical heritage in
that context. Ultimately, students and community residents came away from the
installation with a different understanding of the role they can play in the
archives and in the networks of ecological preservation, interpretation, and
care.
Prototyping Theory DesignsHenry Mainsah contributed to the drafting of
this section and led the workshops described herein.
Experiential prototyping, according to Nancy Mauro-Flude
(2017), is a
dynamic and performative practice
that sits at the intersection of hands-on practice and
critical making (167). It is a
creative community-building practice, and it allows us to examine the material,
futuristic, and ethical consequences of technological design. During the
concluding sections of our courses, we re-turned to reflection in participatory
prototyping workshops, following models by Ackerman and Richert (2017) in their biosensing poetry and art,
Caballero and Ekeberg’s (2017) audiovisual
speculative archive, and biotechnological blurring in Lee (2017). Led by Henry Mainsah, we experimented with
critical design prototyping to speculate about ideas and things which do not yet exist. In order to achieve that, we borrowed elements
of design studio pedagogy, especially the format of design
charrettes, intensive and scaffolded
activities designed to help with giving material form to
theoretical ideas, and developing and critiquing proposed solutions.
In his previous work, Mainsah had engaged in such critical digital design
thinking and co-making, using in his pedagogical work with students, for
instance, speculative Twitterbots, which aimed to disrupt debates about the
environment and climate change denial on Twitter. He also incorporated WATCHA, a
fictive disobedient wearable object [my
emphasis], which plays with the quantified
self, the internet-of-things, and self-surveillance culture. Using WATCHA, a
design fiction artifact
that tracks time not as we know it as a
man-made construct, but as a feeling, introduced students to
speculative methods of research, helping them investigate the relations between humans and technological products [in] their everyday
use, and reflect on different understandings and
sensations of time (Henry Mainsah, personal communication, July 28, 2021).
Similarly, his prototyping D&EH workshops at NTNU aimed to explore the
reflective and the speculative capacity, as well as the community-building
potential of the prototyping process. Mainsah drew specifically from the work on
provotypes, that is, prototypes that aim to make
cultural claims, interrupt people’s thinking, and
astonish or disturb them .
In the first workshop, we worked with course themes, texts, and exhibition
keywords (symbiosis, transspecies storytelling, extinction, toxicity, time,
extraction, etc.). First, we gathered textual and physical materials on the
subject. Its delightful list of D&EH ephemera included a humanoid robot’s
Norwegian citizenship test, initiated by Minh Chau Pham; a toxic concept Fake news [my emphasis], which,
Arnt Furunes argued, embodies the
technological manipulation of data, misrepresentation of
fact, rhetoric and speculation, to make up falsehoods, twisted truths,
monsters and ghosts out of voices [my emphasis]; Karoline Johansen’s
pair of socks (!), called
The second workshop, with a different group, focused explicitly on theory, and
the task was to prototype futuristic theory devices, some eerily reminiscent of
Slavoj Žižek’s theory glasses, that could instantly generate a radical analysis of a cultural
text.Prototyping Digital Humanities Brief handout. In
both, we followed Burdick’s (2015, 15)
invitation [t]o identify processes or methods specific to
the challenge of designing Digital Humanities’ futures and to blend
the generative — methods that look forward, asking
what if? and the reflective ones
that reveal or critique what is. In Burdick’s (2015, 15) view, participants can do both at the same time when they draw from two seemingly divergent conceptual domains, future
visioning and critical theory.
In both workshops, hackneyed tech buzzwords — rapid prototyping, innovation,
invention, disruption — so cliché and common in DH, at NTNU and beyond, as well
as ephemeral concepts, tools, and environmental concerns, were brought together
and played with critically, tongue-in-cheek. As participants scrutinized and
challenged them in their provotypes they also reflected on the questions their
speculative inventions invited or suppressed, the potential users they would
gain or lose, and the troublesome issue of legal and commercial ownership.
Again, the emphasis on experimentation and its consequences was key, enabl[ing] students to unravel[]
the tangled mess of ideology, narrative, and possibility and to
reflect upon their learning, diagnose their design
process, and map their impact as designers. The workshop evaluations supported Ward’s
observations and included numerous meditations not simply on the prototyped
object or concepts but on the importance of the process and the playful and
grave ramifications of speculative designs.All were included in an
anonymous DEH Discussion + Workshop Reflection assessment conducted between
October 30 and 31, 2017; results are publicly available at NTNU.
Participants also noted the expanded understanding of the impact of digital
technology on their disciplinary and theoretical vocabulary, and on their
interpretative practices. Foregrounding the speculative, poetic, critical, and
philosophical potency of digital tools concretized for us and course
participants the idea that ethics and theory are digital building blocks — and
that they are the building blocks that are often missing. Ultimately,
speculative prototyping, a workshop activity enabling creative, transmodal
(sonic, somatic, tactile, kinetic, and textual) practices, became a framing
metaphor for our pedagogical work within DH , giving a name to our byzantine D&EH
teaching efforts and this article itself.
Reflection
In our context, institutionalized, semi-normal[ized] DH,
unlike in critical internet or media studies, which celebrate new textual
modalities, immersive, transmodal narration, and the poetics and theatre of the
digital , semi-normal[ized]
DH in our institutional context often excludes emergent twentieth- and
twenty-first-century digital art, poetry, and storytelling from the curricula
. Critical media art has much to teach
word- and print-focused DH literary analytics, then, especially in terms of
fostering noninstrumentalist experimentation with aesthetics and appreciation
for creative exuberance and innovative form. Moreover, Risam et al. (2017) are right to point out the public mission
obligation, especially at public-mission-oriented institutions, to attend to the
digital and media literacy needs of undergraduate students. Institutional DH
infrastructure, when available at all, is often built so as to neglect the needs
of students whose career paths lie outside doctoral research and are instead
often in cultural sectors, in public education classrooms, and local
communities. DH’s focus on logocentric practice[s] and on systematic and deliverable
projects is, of course, warranted, needed, and should not be avoided, but the
somatic, affective, creative, poetic, or speculative digital design practices
that often escape the precision-nested scales of DH
deserve attention and space, too . And so
does the emphasis on theory, as a design element. And on artistic practice and
performative methods. Engaging in critical design processes and art-centered
pedagogical activities re-centers on the theoretical, methodological, and
ethical dilemmas of the humanities, including digital and environmental ones, of
liberal arts, and makes these matter in an undergraduate classroom
and in the community .
Moreover, if theory and ethics are to shape design, we must make more room for
them, if little of both is available at the undergraduate and pre-PhD levels
elsewhere in our institutional setting in DH, humanities, more broadly, and in
computer / information science training, alike. After all, scholars and academic
and industry practitioners insist that critical race, disability studies, queer
theory, or environmental justice praxis are foundational to digital literacy and
are computing or design problem[s]
themselves yet to be tackled . Wachter-Boettcher (2017) writes explicitly of lethal threats of
toxic tech, of biased algorithms and
racist and sexist apps, and such toxic tech is seen as a direct human rights and social
justice threat . If, in practice, safety and ethics are specialties, rather than the foundations of . . . design for [s]oftware engineers, who still believe they just need to learn to code, change the world, disrupt
something, without the responsibility that
comes with building things . . ., we should acknowledge that, locally,
critical theory and ethics often are the scarcest and most frequently missing
resources in DH . If we are to explore the noninstrumentalist
potential of D&EH, we have to make it our central pedagogical focus.
Agonizing over inaccessibility of DH infrastructure — hardware, software, DH
tools training, library access, tech support availability, digital
accessibility, and more — is a crucial consideration. But if we decide to
explore and nurture the speculative inventiveness of
design, we cannot forget that critical theory
instruction within DH matters, too, and that it is often absent — its absence a
building block of toxic hardware that we build and the DH projects we fund.
Critical design and mixmedia art practices already tackle the human–machine
interaction through the lens of critical theory and art, often literate and
performance arts, and engage with ethics, reflection, social critique, and
the speech of the body, as foundational, not
peripheral, components of knowledge-making .
For us, Mauro-Flude’s (2019) digital
practice-based theory of performing the internet,
proved essential. In her view, nondeterministic, disobedient use of digital
tools it requires shifting away from the notion of use of
digital tools to the practice of, in our case, biodigital, speculative,
immersive-reflective performance. Understanding digital
tools as performative and sensorial instruments, or as Antonisz did, seeing
technology, broadly, as an expressive form of art,
we have realized, may be another aspect of digital literacy and theory we are
not teaching, but we should . If we open
D&EH pedagogy to embrace the ephemeral, immersive, performative, questioning
uses of technology, we may be able to imagine and cocreate other, noncorporate
models of digital arts of living and embodied and
meditative bio-sociality .
Our D&EH initiatives depended on existing art and knowledge networks of
collaboration, within and outside academia, to fulfill this utopian
aspiration, while also addressing specific and practical institutional needs and
gaps . Therefore, using art modes of immersive
inquiry within D&EH knowledge- and theory-making might not work in other
institutional contexts, and with different literature, art, critical theory, or
DH instruction traditions; we certainly do not propose it as a replacement for a
more instrumental DH curriculum. However, prototyping immersive D&EH has
opened unexpected portals for us, which itself may be instructive for educators
and scholars interested in digital aesthetics and the noninstrumental potential
of D&EH. Working in the immersive environment at KT, for instance, brought
debates about the place of ethics, theory, and transmedia aesthetics back into
to the D&EH literature classroom. It also helped students recognize that
these conversations take place outside the university, too, and that they
themselves can play an important part in them. Moreover, pushing
beyond the word led us to explore digital
technology and the human/nonhuman body as thinking,
feeling interfaces, and experience viscerally,
collectively and individually, the expressive affordances of D&EH. This, in
turn, emboldened us to further experiment with contemplative trans-human
co-creation . Ultimately, as dutiful
students of critical and public pedagogy ourselves , together with Caballero, Mainsah, Armiero, Faurby,
Dush, KT, and student/participants, we nurtured the expanded classroom as a
complex ecosystem: not only as a skills and content transit zone, but as an
enchanted social space, a playful and a serious stage,
a multispecies salon, a sensorial bio-cultural
laboratory in which the creative practices of knowledge-making, care, archival
research, collaboration, can be felt, rehearsed, performed,
contemplated, and reimagined .
Acknowledgements
I thank Kari Kraus, Radhika Gajjala, and Nancy Mauro-Flude for modeling creative,
critical DH at Futurescapes in 2016 and beyond; Kunsthall Trondheim (KT)’s
Helena Holmberg, Carl Faurby, and Katrine Elise Pedersen, for their generous
collaboration on D&EH curriculum; Dan Richert, Amanda Ackerman, Krista
Caballero, and Frank Ekeberg, for generously sharing their art production notes
and reflections; Marco Armiero, Stephanie Le Manager, Kyle Whyte, and Elaine
Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt, for inspiring the 2017 EH
experiments and syllabus; Armiero, Sissel Bergh, Caballero, Henry Mainsah, and
Lisa Dush, for their onsite workshops; the NTNU for Refugees / Academic Guest
Network and Adria Sharman and the Trondheim Kommune, which supported inclusion
of refugee/immigrant academics, and secured course book access; NTNU’s
Humanities Faculty, for the pedagogical innovation grant that brought Henry
Mainsah’s D&EH prototyping workshops to campus; Henry Mainsah, for his work
on the povotyping part of the article; NTNU ARTEC’s Andrew
Perkis, for supporting transmedia humanities bordercrossings and public
workshops; and most important, students Eirik Klakegg Thorsen, Arnt Skoge
Furunes, Ida Tevik Haugen, Gulabuddin Sukhanwar, and Mats Øien, for sharing
their work in this article, and, Leila Arghavani, Øystein Bjørklund-Lassen,
Ingrid Hareland Bustad, Du Cheng, Eira Larsen, Arnt Skoge Furunes, Birna Ósk
Gunnarsdottir, Leni Hansen, Rasha Hasan, Tuva Holthe-Berg, Synne Pedersen
Kåsbøl, Karoline Johansen, Daniel André Johansen, Sunniva Kennedy, Viktor Okpe,
Minh Chau Nguyen Pham, Sondre Sæterbø, Nina Vitashenkova, and other NTNU- and
Trondheim-based writers, artists, and participants, for theorizing and
prototyping D&EH together.
Ackerman, A. Getting Plants to Write Poems.Poetry Foundation, October 31, 2014, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/10/getting-plants-to-write-poems
(accessed April 26, 2018).Ackerman, A. and
Richert, D. Unknown Giants [installation].
Kunsthall Trondheim (2017).Alaimo, S. Bodily
Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana
University Press, Bloomington (2010).Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S.
J. (eds). Material Feminisms. Indiana University
Press, Bloomington (2007).Algorithmic
Justice League (2020), https://www.ajl.org/ (accessed September 14, 2020).Armiero, M. and De
Angelis, M. Anthropocene: Victims, Narrators, and
Revolutionaries.South Atlantic Quarterly, 116.2 (2017):
345–62.Bernstein, R. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery
to Civil Rights. NYU Press, New York (2011).Biesenbach, K. Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York (2010).Brennan, S. A. Public, First, in Gold and Klein (2016), pp. 384–89.Bonsignore, E., Hansen, D., Kraus, K., Visconti, A. and Fraistat, A. Roles People Play: Key Roles Designed to Promote Participation
and Learning in Alternate Reality Games, in Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in
Play, October 16, 2016, pp. 78–90.Bonsignore, E., Hansen, D., Pellicone, A., Ahn, J., Kraus, K., Shumway, S.,
Kaczmarek, K., Parkin, J., Cardon, J., Sheets, J., Holl-Jensen, C. and Koepfler,
J. Traversing Transmedia Together: Co-designing an
Educational Alternate Reality Game for Teens, with Teens, in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on
Interaction Design and Children, June 21, 2016, pp. 11–24.Burdick, A. Meta! Meta! Meta! A Speculative Design Brief for the Digital
Humanities,Visible Language, 49.3 (2015): 12–33.Burdick, A., Drucker, J.,
Lunenfeld, P., Pressner, T. and Schnapp, J. Digital
Humanities. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2012).Caballero, K. and
Ekeberg, F. Birding the Future: Lab Series
(2017).Chun, W. H. K., Grusin, R., Jagoda,
P. and Raley, R. The Dark Side of the Digital
Humanities, in Gold and Klein (2016), pp. 493–509.Clement, T. E. The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining, in Klein and Gold (2016), pp.
534–35.Cordell, R. How
Not to Teach Digital Humanities, in Klein and Gold (2016), pp.
459–74.Donna
Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival [film]. Dir. F.
Terranova. DVD (2017).Dunne, A. and Raby, F. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social
Dreaming MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London (2013).Fiormonte, D. Toward a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities, in
Klein and Gold (2016), pp. 438–58.Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum (1993).Fusco, C. and Dominguez,
R. On-Line Simulations / Real-Life Politics: A Discussion
with Ricardo Dominguez on Staging Virtual Theatre.TDR, 47.2 (Summer 2003): 151–62.Gardner, L. Can
Design Thinking Redesign Higher Ed?,Chronicle of Higher Education, 64 (September 10,
2017).Galey, A. and Ruecker, S.
How a Prototype Argues.Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25.4 (2010):
405–24.Gil, A. The User, the
Learner and the Machines We Make (2015), http://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.Giroux, H. Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning
Praeger (1988).Gold, M. K. (ed). Debates in the Digital Humanities 2012. University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis (2012).Gold, M. K. and Klein, L. F.
(eds). Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2016).Gold, M. K. and Klein, L. F.
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2019).Haraway, D. Otherworldly Conversation, Terran Topics, Local Terms. In S. Alaimo
and S. J. Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington (2008), pp. 157–188.Haraway, D. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham,
NC, Duke University Press (2016).Hayles, N. K. How
We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. University
of Chicago Press, Chicago (2012).Hayles, N. K. and
Pressman, J. (eds). Comparative Textual Media: Transforming
the Humanities in the Postprint Era. University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis (2013).Heise, U. K. Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Environment in Media
Theory,Configurations, 10 (2002): 149–68. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/con/summary/v010/10.1heise.html.Heise, U., Christensen, J. and
Niemann, M. (eds). The Routledge Companion to the
Environmental Humanities. Routledge, London (2017).Heldén, J. and Jonson, H.
Encyclopedia. Exhibited at Kunsthall Trondheim
(2017).Holmes, B. Affectivist Manifesto: Artistic Critique in the 21st Century
(2008), https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/the-affectivist-manifesto/
(accessed December 10, 2018).Howard, Z. and
Somerville, M. M. A Comparative Study of Two Design
Charrettes: Implications for Codesign and Participatory Action
Research,CoDesign, 10 (2014): 46–62.Hunter J. The
Digital Humanities and Critical Theory: An Institutional Cautionary
Tale, in Gold and Klein (2019), pp. 188-194.Kirksey, E. The
Multispecies Salon. Duke University Press, Durham, NC (2014).Kordjak-Piotrowska, J. (ed). Antonisz: Technology for Me
Is a Form of Art. Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw, Krakow
(2013).Kraus, K. 2019. The
Care of Enchanted Things, in Gold and Klein (2019), pp. –.Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (2019).
http://www.labae.org/ (accessed
July 20, 2019).Lee, R. Symbiotic
Sound [installation]. Kunsthall Trondheim (2017).Linley, M. Ecological Entanglement of DH, in Gold and Klein (2016), pp.
410–37.Liu, A. Where Is
Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?, in Gold and Klein (2012), pp. 490–509.Lowe, L. The
Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, Durham, NC
(2015).Manning, E. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2007).Manovich, L. The Language of New MediaT. MIT Press, Boston (2001).Mauro-Flude, N. Occult Computing for Artists: An Introduction.UnMagazine, 8.2 (2014): 1–12.Mauro-Flude, N. Divination: A Romantic Mutiny in a Maelstrom of Data
[Performance-Lecture] (2016). https://livestream.com/internetsociety/radnetworks/videos/141149701
(accessed December 20, 2018).Mauro-Flude, N. Methodologies of Risk and Experimental Prototyping, in
C. C. Baker and K. Sicchio (eds), Intersecting Art and
Technology in Practice: Techne/Technique/Technology, Routledge,
London (2017), pp. 169–81.Mauro-Flude, N. Performing the Internet: Post Internet Folklore, in S.
R. Wong, H. Li and M. Chou (eds), Digital Humanities and
Scholarly Research Trends in the Asia-Pacific (2019), IGI Global,
Hershey, PA, pp. 200–27.McDonough, J. P.,
Olendorf, R., Kirschenbaum, M., Kraus, K., Reside, D., Donahue, R., Phelps, A.,
Egert, C., Lowood, H. and Rojo, S. Preserving Virtual
Worlds Final Report. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Rochester Institute of
Technology, Stanford University Libraries, and Library of Congress National
Digital Information Infrastructure for Preservation Program. (2010).McPherson, T. Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the
Histories of Race and Computation, in Gold and Klein (2012), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29 (accessed March 22,
2016).Mittell, J. Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method, in Gold and
Klein (2019), pp. 224–42.Morrison, A, WATCHA (2015). https://designresearch.no/news/watcha (accessed April 2,
2021).Musiol, H. Metaphors of Decryption: Designs, Poetics, Collaborations, in R. S.
Restrepo (ed), Decrypting Power, Rowman and
Littlefield, London (2018), pp. 157–78.Musiol, H. Toxicity, Speculation, and Rights: Political Imagination in Mixmedia,
Literary, and Cinematic Futurescapes, in S. Pinto and A. Schultheis
Moore (eds), Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign
Approaches to Human Rights and Literary Studies, Palgrave, London
(2020), pp. 330–57.Musiol, H. Spaces for Other Ways to Learn: Postcolonial
Environmental Fiction, Media, and Pedagogy in the North of the Global
North. Special Issue, MLA Teaching Postcolonial
Environmental Literature and Media, C. Iheka (ed) (forthcoming
2021).A New We / Ett
Nytt Vi. Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2017), co-curated by Helena
Holmberg, Carl Faurby, and Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. https://kunsthalltrondheim.no/en/utstillinger/et-nytt-vi (accessed
September 14, 2020).Noble, S. U. Toward
a Critical Black Digital Humanities, in Gold and Klein (2019), pp.
27–35.Nowviskie, B. Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene.Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30 (2015):
4–15.Nowviskie, B. Reconstitute the World: Machine Reading Archives of Mass
Extinction (June 12, 2018). http://nowviskie.org/2018/reconstitute-the-world/ (accessed November
22, 2016).Nowviskie, B. Capacity through Care, in Gold and Klein (2019), pp.
424–26.Posner, M. What
Is Next: The Radical Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities, in
Gold and Klein (2016), pp. 32–41.Posner, M. Sample
| Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality |,
in Gold and Klein (2019), pp. 101-122.Raley, R. Tactical
Media. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Rappaport, J. Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography as
Theoretical Innovation.Collaborative Anthropologies, 1 (2008):
1–31.Risam, R. Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black
Feminism, in Gold and Klein (2016), pp. 359–67.Risam, R. New
Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and
Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, Evanston (2019).Risam, R., Snow, J. and Edwards,
S. Building an Ethical Digital Humanities Community:
Librarian, Faculty, and Student Collaboration.Library Faculty Publications, 1 (2017), https://digitalcommons.salemstate.edu/library_facpub (accessed
September 14, 2020).Ruecker, S. A
Brief Taxonomy of Prototypes for the Digital Humanities.Scholarly and Research Communication, 6 (2015):
1–11.Sack, W. The Software
Arts. MIT Press, Boston (2019).Sandlin, J. A., Schultz, B.
D., Burdick, J. (eds). Handbook of Public Pedagogy:
Education and Learning beyond Schooling. Routledge, New York
(2010).Simanowski, R. Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text
Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations. Electronic
Mediations 35. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2011).Smith, N. D. Design
Charrette: A Vehicle for Consultation or Collaboration? Paper
presented at Participatory Innovation Conference (PIN-C), Melbourne, January
12–14, 2012.Stoler, A. L. Along the Archival
Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ (2010).Swanson, H. A., Tsing, A. L.,
Bubandt, N. O. and Gan, E. Introduction: Bodies Tumbled
into Bodies. In A. L. Tsing, H. A. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt
(eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and
Monsters of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis (2017), pp. M1–M14.Thurston, N. Of the Subcontract: Or Principles of Poetic Right. Information as
Material, London (2013).Tsing, A. L. On
Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested
Scales,Common Knowledge, 18 (2012): 505–24.Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H. A.,
Gan, E. and Bubandt, N. (eds). Arts of Living on a Damaged
Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2017).Vaidhyanathan, S. Techno-Fundamentalism Can’t Save You, Mark Zuckerberg,New Yorker, April 21, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/techno-fundamentalism-cant-save-you-mark-zuckerberg
(accessed May 2, 2018).Wachter-Boettcher, S.
Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and
Other Threats of Toxic Tech. Norton, New York (2017).Ward, M. Rapid
Prototyping Politics: Design and the De-material Turn. In W. Jonas,
S. Zerwas and K. von Anshelm (eds), Transformation Design:
Perspectives on a New Design Attitude, Birkhäuser, Basel, (2015),
pp. 227–45.Whyte, K. P. Our
Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the
Anthropocene, in U. K. Heise, J. Christensen and M. Niemann (eds),
The Routledge Companion to the Environmental
Humanities, Routledge, New York (2016), pp. 206–15.Underwood, T. Digital Humanities as a Semi- Normal Thing, in Gold
and Klein (2019), pp. 96-98.Vinsel, L. Design
Thinking Is a Boondoggle. Its Adherents Think It Will Save Higher Ed.
They’re Delusional,Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2018.Zunger, Y. Computer Science Faces an Ethics Crisis. The Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Proves It,Boston Globe, March 22, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2018/03/22/computer-science-faces-ethics-crisis-the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-proves/IzaXxl2BsYBtwM4nxezgcP/story.html
(accessed June 22, 2018).Zylinska, J. AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. Open Humanities Press
(2020).