“The world is on fire,” is, by now, a familiar phrase. It is often used when we feel overwhelmed about escalations in geopolitics or in response to the catastrophic effects of climate change. Humanists are human, including the “digital humanists”, and the weight of crises is a reminder to making our scholarly work “count”.
In Jo Guldi’s recent visit to the Sawyer Seminar, this desire to do meaningful work was a consistent topic of conversation. We have touched upon questions of making archives public in other visits, such as that of Richard Marciano in the Fall. During this most recent visit however, we spent more time discussing what it means to “democratize” information. For example, how making records “public” relates to the goal of making information more “democratic.”
Personal and Professional
One argument against treating publically available records as a solution to the problem of democratizing information is the fact that even available information is not guaranteed to reach the “public” or be legible to most. Fortunately, contextualizing and creating a narrative from dispersed evidence across a variety of records is a skill with which humanists are well prepared.
What role does activism play in the articulation research stakes within scholarly endeavors? While scholars may also identify as activists, there is a tension between the role of an activist and that of the researcher — concerns about how enthusiasm might affect the quality of one’s work. Scholarly rigor and passion can seem at odds, particularly valuing dispassionate rationality over emotionally grounded arguments.
Nevertheless, extended scholarly engagement with a topic must be motivated by something, be it a desire to affect positive change or individual and esoteric love of study. Topics and methods should be responsive — critiqued in relation to social concerns. For instance, in response to a dissatisfaction with external or hierarchical production of records, the “ladder of citizen participation” allows record creation to be more distributed and allow for communities to create and participate in processes such as record production. The effects of examples like this seem tied to the human desire for belonging and able to tap into the potential of investment.
There is a curious form of investment acrobatics required of researchers. In order to argue for the importance of their work (for example, to procure funding to do one’s work), they must make a human appeal. This type of connection is also key when articulating the findings at the end of a project, such as in the narrative of a book. However, in the middle of the process, when the research happens, the values of connection to the subject of study becomes inverted. A cool dispassion is valued, so as to not skew the process of human judgement.
Information Overload and Infrastructure
In our recent conversation with Jo Guldi, digital humanists were framed as a community of infrastructure builders who should attend to theorizing. In this instance, theory was articulated as a critical investigation of the stakes of knowledge production and reproduction that aims to make human labor apprehensible.
Both infrastructure and theory are terms and actions related to issues of “democratizing” information, in part because they are methods of contending with information overload. Human attention is limited, a fact emphasized in popular terms like “attention economy.” Being overwhelmed by too much is not a new phenomenon, though our current moment is unique in a variety of ways. In fact, many of the features that are unique to humans (as opposed to other animals) are strategies that help mitigate the potential to be overwhelmed by structuring and categorizing in order to focus on what needs to be addressed. This narrowing down allows us to navigate our world and tackle those things considered to be important at any given time.
This deluge of information can be framed as an opportunity for democratic access. However, more information also has “baked in” hierarchies and exclusions. A central concern of this seminar has been the way that inherent bias has shaped the data available (be it in historic archives or born digital big data). In the face of vast power structures, it can seem as though unbiased facts are being presented. This is especially true when the data is presented as neat rows of numbers. Nevertheless, it has been made clearthat we humans embed our viewpoint into whatever we make. The increasing number of available records both lend themselves to making arguments about long narrative arches and are liable to replicate problematic biases. Ignoring the information available to us is not the answer to addressing power laden consequences of information structure or distribution.
There are many benefits to making mindful use of data, even if they were gathered for other purposes. Digital tools are particularly well suited for tracking big change over time.They can aid in finding moments where narratives change. One way to mitigate the partial record (produced by those in power) is by pairing longue durée narratives with the stories of marginalized communities. This type of scholarly agility allows for the exploration across larger scales (of time, populations, ideas) while grounding such abstractions in the specific experiences of real people’s lives. Each case requires earnest reflection to ensure respectful and responsible handling. It requires embedded specialists. Building narratives is a process of communication, it is an argument about the importance of a topic of study — and therefore an assertion of attention-worthiness. What is covered, counts.
Future generations might look back and question why “x” was studied when the world was in crisis. If there was ever a time to research frivolously, that time has passed. However, even the most esoteric seeming topics can be relevant to contextualizing the past and navigating the present. Not everyone needs to write books about government, but the question of stakes (regardless of research topic) feels more urgent than ever before. Re-contextualizing and critically restructuring our own scholarship and pedagogy is not about bowing to “political correctness.” Rather, it is an opportunity to reflect on the consequential stakes of humanistic inquiry.
Our conversations in the Sawyer Seminar have brought together specialists with a variety of skills, interests, and disciplinary viewpoints. It is encouraging to witness each subfield and discipline reflecting on the challenges we face together, collaborating on problems that would be too big to face alone.