The critical view of the digital humanities
From time to time institutions specialized in education show the careers of the future are completely crossed by digital technology: data analyst, cybersecurity specialists, robotics, big data, artificial intelligence … they are part of a list and infographic of a neutral tone, although crossed by the concept of technoscience. Science and research at the service of technology and the future in progress.
However, on the one hand, no technology is neutral: gender, race, and language biases inhabit it. We already know about soap vending machines that don’t recognize black skin and the invisibility of languages other than English on the Web. Also, although the future always comes, it does not do it in the same way for everyone.
To take an example, while in Latin America we find indigenous communities that, out of necessity, have had to learn to manage their digital communication networks, as is the case of the Tic-Tac project, and we are witnessing a growing interest in the methodologies for using cell phones in the classroom — and the lack of computers and wifi — , in the Global North or in the most developed urban areas of our planet, it expands, from the smallest gestures — such as lighting a lamp, driving a bus, asking for a taxi or find a partner on social media — the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).
It is very likely, then, that we will find the jobs of the future in digital technology and artificial intelligence companies and that their success will lead us to unprecedented levels of productivity and, at the same time, automation and lighting.
The paradoxical prophecy of the future says that fewer employees will be needed, but unemployment and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few will grow. Faced with this panorama in which the automaton machine will be part of the revolution that has been hitherto faster, more massive, and at the same time unequal, would the aid of the Humanities serve?
The question is almost impossible to answer, but I am interested in stopping here at a place of reflection at the crossroads of the Humanities — as Human Sciences — and technology.
God’s finger
For that, first of all, I am going to tell a brief story: in 1950 an Italian Jesuit priest named Roberto Busa had finished his doctoral thesis on the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas and was interested in making a lemmatization of his texts, something like this like a great glossary.
Given the enormity of this textual corpus, Busa understood that the titanic task could not be carried out from a human point of view and decided to contact the IBM company, which by that time had begun to venture into the field of computational linguistics. From this crossing came what is considered the project that gave rise to what we now call digital Humanities: the Index Thomisticus, today Corpus Thomisticum.
The analytical and quantitative work of Busa and his team on more than 22 million words in 23 different languages and nine alphabets was such an exceeding task that the Jesuit summarized it, as a good believer, in these three words that refer to the digit, which it can be both the machine and the human: “Digitus Dei est hic!” (God’s finger is here!).
Today the digital Humanities are an increasingly entrenched field in the field of scientific research and university teaching and, in short, and by bridging the Busa project, they still seek to explore the most diverse corpus with digital tools: texts old or modern, already digitized or in process, images, sound …
The critical view of the humanities
Through the use of a certain digital resource, digital Humanities undermine this corpus and seek to see knowledge beyond the text, moving us from the data to the text or the work. In their practice — because if there is something that defines them it is practice — they also teach us to be critical. Critical because we can delve into the guts of texts and because to practice them before we have to think about technology: not all tools are used for the same thing; nor are they all the same. Working with purchased software — or proprietary software — is not the same as working with free and free technologies.
Although Digital Humanities are not positioned on one side or the other, they open the door for us to choose how we want to share our knowledge. They also teach us to be critical because digital Humanities, in that intersection they propose, make Humanities a group workspace. In the Digital Humanities project, we can investigate together with our peers, but also with the help of programmers, computational linguists, librarians; we learn from and with others.
Thus, if the technological-social evolution that we are approaching seems to be somewhat dehumanized, at least a shared critical view can always help. Let us then approach it from the digital Humanities.
In 2018, new U.S. government zero tolerance immigration policies had separated more than 2,300 children from their families. Alex Gil, a digital humanist and librarian at Columbia University, knew that his day-to-day work — helping people find information in the library using technology — could help. Together with the historian Manan Ahmed and a large group of collaborators from the most diverse disciplinary branches, they installed a chat on Telegram, shared a spreadsheet and began to search for data that was openly and publicly available — government immigration records, tax forms , job listings, Facebook pages — in order to locate and identify detention centers where children could be housed.
The future always comes but not in the same way for everyone
The result of this research is the Torn Apart / Separados project and interactive site, in which, thanks to the structuring and mining of this data available on the Web, we see the enormous apparatus of migratory execution in the States scattered on a digital map United, approaching the possible shelters where the children could be housed.
Women Minority
Using the social network Twitter, Jennifer Isasi, a specialist in data curation, showed in several tweets and through different graph visualizations how in the universe of literary awards women are still in the minority although, paradoxically, the data indicated that a large group of authors had been awarded several times.
The human gaze
Nothing that the Digital Humanities show us is completely unknown to us, however, the differential element that they bring with them is to allow us to see beyond the human reception of texts or images. Here are the data — massive, hidden, or intuited — that emerge and dialogue with the texts and with us through technology, but that through our human gaze construct meaning.
In Digital Humanities projects, unlike what happens with reading a book or an article, we no longer passively receive the knowledge of a specialist, but we assume it, at the same time, in an active role: we interact with the keyboard and the screen and with the data or the corpus that are shown to us and, through them, we build our knowledge or simply ask ourselves questions.
Even knowing that neither technology nor science is divided equally in our world and, therefore, neither research in digital humanities, the critical gaze and the construction of knowledge with technological tools that they bring with them are a good example to understand better. the past and the present and, why not, the future.
A human gaze on machines that do not seek to answer, as in the Turing Test all questions, but that can at least know, as the magnificent Ursula K. Le Guin said, what are the impossible questions to answer.
