Cambridge Conversations: Digital transformation - a revolution in the humanities?

[Music] well good afternoon everyone or good evening or good morning depending on where you are this is a cambridge conversation we all know from our own experience that human beings and technology can sometimes be an uneasy fit technological innovations are colossus of the modern world they reinvent the workplace the economy and the way we live and interact with one another technology is so pervasive it can seem like it's destined to supplant human interaction and even the human brain technologies are also paradoxically intimately bound up with our hopes for the future and sometimes with our deepest fears and anxieties we create digital technology with astonishing and positive societal transformations and blame it sometimes for the breakdown of structure and order but tech is famously neither good nor bad nor even neutral it simply reflects us and our cultures and societies in all our troublesome complexity the humanities by contrast can be described as the study of how people process and document the human condition they emphasize the interconnectedness of human thinking and broader experience in doing so they counterbalance those elements of technologies that isolate us from one another whether we're aware of it or not the humanities have always shaped our relationship with technology they continue to play an integral role in the way we understand and respond to global digital transformations and we instinctively know that however advanced digital technology becomes it cannot fully imitate human memory culture language or the infinite nuance of interpersonal relationships but digitization can enable people to do things differently and to think in new ways about how we learn experience and understand we can use the humanities to frame and comprehend the digital advances that are taking place as well as the centuries of transformation and mechanization that have brought us to this moment digital questions are human questions so when the digital meets the humanities what does their convergence create and allow what kind of interaction past present and future exists between the two we're here today to dive deeper into this unexpectedly symbiotic relationship our two panelists will help us to consider the very nature of digital humanities carolyn bassett is professor of digital humanities in the faculty of english the director of cambridge digital humanities and fellow of corpus christi college her research interests include digital media computational humanities ai and the transformation of knowledge cultures and technology and social power among others she's recently completed anti-computing a book exploring histories of resistance to computerized culture dr siddharth sunny is the isaac newton trust research fellow at cambridge digital humanities and an associate fellow at the faculty of english university of cambridge siddharth wrote his phd thesis at cambridge and on the short story form in india he's also a member of the university of cambridge open research steering committee following my discussion with the panel there'll be a q a of roughly 25 minutes so please do submit your questions now via the q a button at the bottom of your screen and of course continue to do so as the conversation evolves so now welcome to our panelists look it's great to have you here and i'm really looking forward to this conversation on such a fascinating topic uh i suspect that some members of the audience may be unfamiliar with the concept of digital humanities so maybe we should start there carolyn siddharth both experts in this area perhaps we'll start with you carolyn could you just tell us a little bit about what we mean by the term digital humanities explaining what the digital transformation does to and with the humanities over to you carolyn okay thank you i'll attempt to explain digital humanities a term which everybody quarrels about one way to describe digital humanities is to say it's an argument and actually i think that's a reasonably good way to define it but i think what it actually does is explore and seek to exploit what happens when a culture becomes technological in a new way so of course technology and culture have always clashed you could go back to print to gutenberg to various generations where that clash has taken place but in this case i think what we're thinking about is what happens when cultures become computational when the digital saturates our cultures when we live in and through information and when our cultures and our societies are mediated by knowledge and information technologies and that notion of a knowledge revolution which is rather an old-fashioned term but it fits is a really important way to get at a change in epistemic culture knowledge culture and a change in forms of learning a change in scale pace and direction and i think what digital humanities does actually is both to try and explore and understand that change but also to exploit what that change gives us so digital humanities is both engaged with the technological and investigates the technological so we're interested in generating new tools new forms of knowledge and of bringing new kinds of learning into the humanities to ask humanity's questions i think that's roughly what we do or some of what we do some of what you do and it sounds pretty complicated that even for the sum and and i love the idea that it's basically a disagreement or set thereof i'm going to stick with you for a moment caroline and i'll come to you siddharth in a moment uh look the humanities of course have always been a crucial uh means of understanding our society as as as human beings and that doesn't stop just because we've got this digital transformation i think you could even argue that humanities are becoming important even more important in understanding uh how increasingly automated societies function what it means for being human and how humans express themselves and also to tell us a little bit about how different cultures deal uh differently with technology could could you just expand on that a little bit i think that uh i think maybe the question is you know what what why is it that the tech that the humanities are needed to think about some of these questions that are arising and i think it it's a it's in in some ways it's a very obvious answer but but technology is human culture you know so if you look at for example the long long series of critical discussions around what technology is which begin with many people perhaps plato and come through heidiger and get through to the phaedras but really they're asking what is technology how is it human how is it inhuman and how can we think through that relationship and i think that um that question arises again and again in relation to new forms of culture and it's a question that humanities can address in ways that the hard sciences can't actually it's it asks questions if you're thinking about what happens when large language modelers come close to approximating human language you can say does that work and a lot of computational linguistics are saying does it work and improving how it works but how do we ask the question about what it means that smart agents are talking to human agents and having conversations that seem to be meaningful those kinds of questions are about interpretation about what we count as knowledge how we think and how we understand ourselves as humans and i think the humanities is very well placed to ask those questions and so the kind of engagement that digital humanities can enable between technologies and technological and technical subjects and humanities subjects can help us address those questions from the perspective of the humanities and from valuable perspective as well uh thanks carolyn and you you've given us a a practical or a specific example of how this works siddhartha in your work or the sorts of things that interest you any other examples you could offer of the kind of thinking the kind of approach that carolyn's articulating yeah absolutely i think within this very contested and expansive definition of what digital humanities is and what is the significance of raising humanities questions within within technological spheres within technological cultures that are forged out of this this collision or the symbiotic relationship as you characterize between automatic technological mechanical cultures and between what is considered by humanistic discourse is very very human very very humane very very humanistic i think there is a lot of there is a lot of uh purchase for for humanities uh one of the examples i always keep thinking about just how um you know the very short space of the internet yields uh to the formation of community and and this is this is something that we've been reckoning with in the entire 21st century so at the heart of that what is what is the question that we're asking how do communities form online and and this is at once very new but at the same time it in fact tags back at those questions that are at the heart of uh the humanities disciplines like social anthropology like cultural anthropology and like literary criticism which is that how communities form themselves and coagulate themselves and find identity uh in the fraud space of the internet in these spheres that technologies have provided to us and in an odd way what i think um raising these kinds of questions does is that it brings back uh you know the the the space of the internet as a very contested space and it challenges these discourses of global connectedness and platform enclosures and the you know the private internet and social media that sometimes presents to us very different ideas of what community is and so i think humanities questions have to be raised in those spaces uh frequently and and with a lot of rigor interesting so let's expand on that a little bit one of the great i suppose gifts of the humanities is as we deploy humanity's scholarship study thinking is how we understand cultural memory uh and also the continuity of transformation but also change and stability uh the the complex interactions there how do you think the humanities plays out not only in our present but also in our past and then i'm going to push you to to try to think through what it means for our understanding of futures as well but let's let's stick with the past yeah yeah i think i think one of uh one of i think the enduring logics of of humanity's discourse in the past has been uh that it is it is uncontested that this is a field that has accumulated its wisdom over centuries uh you know caroline made references to you know the discourses plato hydrogen all the way through and when i think about the humanities um i was looking through the sort of uh the conversations that we were having uh recently and when i think about the humanities i don't think of it as a discipline that necessarily needs a kind of revolution i think if it is an elderly guardian if you like you know a thousand-year-old tree that has been witness to just so many transformations in our culture that has been a custodian of our memory in the past that has so much accumulated wisdom uh and and so much critical discourse and conversation behind it that we have to harness to find the right kind of questions to find the right kind of framings to find new skills and perspectives for our for our thinking so certainly digital humanities uh in the sense that it brings to its methodologies and tools new skills and perspectives but through that kind of analysis also brings into the for digital as a subject digital and technological culture as a subject can afford to us um a way in which we can think about um our past which is often our very troubled past in our troubled history it's histories of colonialism histories of depredation histories of exploitation but also uh our great cultural triumphs histories of emancipation histories of um of human endeavor at the heart of every meaningful endeavor is the humanistic pursuit and i think we can harness the energies that digital humanities as a discipline has afforded to us to think through those categories and to think about the relationship of the field to our present to our past as well as to articulations of our future so you've now brought fully into the picture the the concept of time if i may put it that way and carolyn i'm wondering if you have thoughts on on how humanities and indeed the digital humanities helps us frame understandings of time or challenges our notions of time how does that play out in in the work that you do and and what you read in the in the digital humanities or experience i think one of the one of the things people often think about digital humanities is because it's about the digital it must be about the future in a particular way so it's turning its back on the knowledge we have the forms of life we had in fact i think one of the most profound transformations which digital humanities engages with is a transformation of our sense of time in the present and also it engages with the transformation of the techniques and the apparatuses through which we have stored and archived and redistributed our cultural memories so one of the most important sites really where digital humanities has been important has been around archiving and around this notion of cultural memory and that's both when you think about the idea that linking large connection collections across multiple countries can let you see those collections at different scales and find new understandings that's the idea of knowledge at scale there's also the notion that automation of memory produces it in new ways for new kinds of people and democratizes it in new ways but also perhaps threatens people's rights to their own memories so there's a lot of questions which become very practical at the level of archival politics archival collections and which actually do relate to this notion of a revolution because there's a transformation in the techniques and apparatuses of knowledge and people often think those are technical questions but they come down to matters of cultural memory and they come down to a kind of memory ethics i think but the other way or area that i think is important that dh thinks about digital humanities sorry i'm acronizing i think is about what it means to live in a technological culture where we are saturated in platforms in mobile phones in whatsapp in forms of life that mean we have instant access to information we never would have had before what does it mean to live in an archive what kinds of cultural productions happen when we live in an archive where we can write literature for example in relation to a sense of a corpus that we would never have had access to before when we have access so this notion of changing the pace and time and direction of human affairs and i more or less quoting mcluhan who said it about television right but that notion of a change in the sense of pace and time and scale of human affairs is something you can get at in the humanities but you actually need to think about that in terms of the information technologies you're using the infrastructures as well as around issues of representation and that's a way in which digital humanities is very material it's uh in the humanities it's thinking about things like literature and history but it's also thinking about the forms and the apparatuses and the mediums that we that help us to co-constitute our knowledge if you like and it's interested in engaging in those and i think time space the notion of space-time distantiation or contraction finds a new form if you like in digital humanities it's one of its one of the ways it can intervene to transform some kind of humanities engagement i think which has always been a fascinating topic in in science fiction writing for example uh it's it's really incredible how that sort of time space continuum if we may put it that way has always been a source of extraordinary fascination you mentioned that we are saturated with digital technology siddharth uh it seems to me we we love them we use them but we also in some ways hate them i i certainly do uh so there's both it seems to me the possibility of enchantment in all of this that you know all of these remarkable abilities and tools and new openings of information and sharing are there and also uh disenchantment that there seems to be undermining of many of our cultural traditions undermining of public discourse all of these issues that we we struggle with with uh platforms of digital technologies uh do you think that they've actually created a more level playing field across cultures uh what's the tension between uh enchantment and disenchantment with uh platforms and and networks and digital technologies generally yeah it's a very interesting question because um um enchantment and decision enchantment has always coexisted i think i was reading caroline's book not very long ago and there was a point where she mentions that you know in very recent potential history there was a league of league against computing which had about four thousand computers at the same time as there were four thousands then we had four thousand people at the same time as there were four thousand computers uh in the country um and so our relationship to to to technology has always had um uh both enchantment and disenchantment and it's not just our relationship to technology but it's also a relationship to the to what i might call the technological idiom it also has enchantment and disenchantment we are at once enchanted by the possibilities by the solutionism by the affordances of uh digital technology and we are disenchanted we are skeptical we are critical of it um and so where do we locate ourselves and has it done anything uh in a singular uh moment in in this kind of tunneling of uh the wheel uh that that will move this quarter of population or you know to either on the side of enchantment or on the side of disenchantment what my political position on on the question of enchantment and disenchantment is that you mentioned science fiction writing enchantment with the way in which digital the way in which the scientific the way in which the technological has structured our experience uh a fascination a certain captivation a certain enduring fantasy has been a a part of our culture it has been a part of our cinematic culture it has been a part of our legendary culture it has been a part of video games uh it has been a part of the way in which we think uh and create and approximate our world so there is nothing that can be taken away from that i mean that captivation is going to persist that captivation is going to remain disenchantment on the other hand i find uh to be a category with much more critical affordance because um to be disenchanted with technology and to be disenchanted with the technological idiom which is that the technology will change our world for the good for the better means that we can step away from this this idea that the unimpeded acceleration the unimpeded march of technology will one day redeem our world from its prejudices from its uh uh biases from its uh uh own exploitations extractions depredations uh and and it is in that disenchantment that i think we can find a possibility uh for reparation a possibility for restitution a possibility uh for stepping away and changing and this is where the humanities comes in because as i was using that metaphor of that elderly guardian that is being the custodian of our memory and that has been um you know the that has so much accumulated wisdom we can use all of that discourse and all of that knowledge or that contested terrain to step away uh to be disenchanted if you like with the technological idiom and to look at these ideas of technological solutionism with critical skepticism and i think this is where digital humanities affords to me uh um and to many of my colleagues uh the greatest uh political possibility so disenchantment skepticism uh carolyn you talked or you made brief reference earlier to the concept of revolution and of course this plays out in different ways there is this so-called digital revolution uh which is you know emerging i'd like first to think about whether that is a real thing is it a moment is it is it a series of events and actions and decisions or is it is it something that is a continuous process first point second point is there a counter revolution here that's possible uh a kind of resistance growing as a result of the disenchantment or or the uh lack of certainty about the evolution of digital technologies that may in fact creep in or may already be present in our society carolyn i think there's something really interesting uh about the idea of a computer revolution or an information revolution or a superhighway revolution or a cyberspace revolution so one response i would make to people who say we are now in a new computer revolution or an ai revolution for example would be to say when did the revolution start uh did it begin with norbert weiner did it begin in the 70s did it begin with the with the first computers with you know apple computer just declaring that there was technology for the rest of us did it begin with the internet did it begin with platforms and the reason i think that matters is that uh i think it's important to think not is this the revolution now but how do we think about uh technology as disruptive and how do we think about the difference if you like between the new and the promises it makes and the prof which often uh often disappoint us and the profound changes that information technology computational technologies knowledge technologies are making to cultures and to size societies and often we assume that the new and the revolutionary are the same and i don't think that they really are so i think there's nothing contradictory at all about talking about a long-standing disruptive change in fact i think that does begin to grapple with what the what the kinds of knowledge transformations digital humanities is engaging with i think it's not gradualist and i'm not sure that i think evolution versus revolution does it i think that to think about the degree to which technologies disrupt and produce if you like the chance of a break the chance to make something new but that chance tends to be stitched back into the context from which it arises so one of the things i think is important is to think historically about technology digital humanities is quite good at doing that uh partly because it comes from the humanities when it thinks about the technological sometimes because it insists that technological histories matter when you talk in the humanities about things like information so you know i always tell my students right now i'm not having the word cyberspace unless you tell me what date it began otherwise i think they're talking about the new but they're talking a process that began before they were born right so maybe i'll shift back to you siddharth for your thoughts on the possibility or even the uh descriptive utility of a notion of counter-revolution here which is rooted in the description that you've given of of doubt if i may put it that way uh and and is it possible to think in those terms without being accused of being a luddite and being sort of anti-technology uh yeah that uh absolutely i think that's a very interesting question because um uh often uh critical thinking about technology in those disenchanted terms in those distanced terms um often invites uh you know a certain kind of advocacy and often invites a certain kind of criticism as well which is that uh they are not ready for the new world they are you know that in fact the ethicists the philosophers the humanities scholars are not on this bandwagon they do not want to change the world because they want to set the lawn chairs and think about the world in those terms and the world has in fact moved whereas it is only the humanities scholars that are aware of uh the recurrence of this idea the perpetual newness of technology for centuries technology has always been the new idiom the technological agent has always gained its uh its power and it's gained its uh significance in this world by presenting itself as the perpetually new thing and yet as we are available technological solutions have created problems at the same time as they have created some solutions indeed and so this is not a right position at all my position is not a british position my position is that that invites um a collaboration in fact that invites conversation which i think is one of the great affordances of digital humanities and the way it has brought universities uh industrial technological sector uh libraries galleries museums and uh and and and so many um you know the creative and and the critical sectors under one roof to think about the way in which technologies are in fact not unfolding in front of our eyes in in these cataclysmic uh evolutionary moments but in fact is participating in in in a continuous process so what i do in fact think about is less doubt in in revolution i think about evolution in other terms but what i do think about is continuities and continuities are very important when we come when it comes to critical scholarship we have to trace the emergence of certain movements whether it is the cyber space whether it is platform enclosures whether it is the internet the industrialization of the world in long processes in in the long journey in the histories that are sometimes concealed from us and i think that is that is really the the it's god's work really that is the task of the humanities uh i might say so and and and this is this will be my defense of digital humanities and its importance uh today there's a big plan god's work that's wonderful thank you we're gonna go shortly to questions from the audience and they're rolling in now and please do add yours if you have any questions that you haven't put in the in the chat uh but carolyn before we do that uh just give us a brief sense of what you think is coming next at the digital humanities and particularly what is cambridge digital humanities focusing on for uh the next few years do you think what are the big issues what are the big opportunities i think the big issues in digital humanities as a field at the moment is to grapple with uh linking up if you like changes in technological shifts and changes with the social relations of technology on the ground and it's doing that in relation to itself as a field so digital technologies a few generations ago technological generations and maybe generations talked about digitizing stuff now it's interested in a whole new endeavor which is to try and remake what we have called the humanities in a sympathetic way to re to understand the new scales and forms that we live in and i think one of the things that's really interesting and i think siddharth's already got at it is to think about this new constellation of areas and activities material practice forms of thinking forms of collaboration that can be brought together to ask new questions in better ways and i think one of the reasons that's so important is because although continuity matters it's also the fact that if we're looking at culture on facebook for example we're talking about some billions of people so if we want to understand how globalism impacts uh globally if you like we do need large patterning tools new ways of looking and we need to understand the relationship between hermeneutics or the idea of interpretation close reading and looking at scale so i think the big question perhaps this is a cop-out actually there's two questions one we're looking at the consequences of new forms of highly new forms of more intelligent automation i i think that that is probably the question that we're addressing across a whole series of uh disciplines and areas and that's probably and the second uh question we're always entangled with really is this we're always arguing about the idea that technological change the technological change that's coming is inevitable because of the technology we've got at the whole of the project of digital humanities is actually quarreling with that and saying the technology we have in our culture in our society doesn't have to be this way it could be another way and it's experimenting with that and in that way i think we're properly utopian wonderful conversations so fascinating and and i think truly exciting and and i can see that it's generated some excitement amongst uh our our friends online so there are a few questions here let me start with what is a pretty punchy question which is um how welcome to techies are the questions posed by digital humanities in other words i guess can digital humanities reach into the space of people who are working at the coal face of technological evolution uh siddharth do you want to start with that yeah yeah absolutely i think um one of the things that i've always believed is that the questions that are at the heart of humanities are questions that can be expressed in ordinary language these are questions to do with human agency these are questions to do with human creativity uh human condition emotion affect histories memory these are not concealed and they are not drowned in theoretical discourses sure sometimes we need those theoretical discourses to keep peeling the layers off but when it comes to people who work in the technological industry if i might use that instead of the word techie it these are questions i was using the word of our colleague not i wasn't taking it out of course no of course absolutely well um well i you know if um if i may use the people who work in industry i think these questions are very inviting questions um that conversation that channel is very open yet it is true that there is a big barrier that is erected between um between the industrial sector between the technological sector and between their view of what ethics is which is extremely formulaic and very regimented and what our view of ethics is which is very philosophical and uh very meditative if you like and i don't think the barrier is in fact a barrier of language or a barrier of disciplinary inclinations sometimes i think these conversations are siloed off from each other because there are private stakes because there are corporate stakes but we because you know there are malign actors and i'm i'm very happy uh to say that because um i think uh the the party that benefits from that conversation is the public world you know every everybody benefits from that conversation between humanities ethicists philosophers critics um historians and between those who work in the industry and this is and this can be and this is sometimes an adversarial conversation this is sometimes a difficult conversation but anything that has ever brought good into this world has come out of difficult conversations and adversity so i think we have to be very open to that thank you carolyn uh we have a question from someone who says uh that he or she has worked in digital technol uh digital humanities for a decade or so and says that they're still undecided as to whether i believe the application of digital technologies has led to a qualitative change in how we approach and studies you study humanities or merely a quantitative one and so the actual question that's posed is do you think humanity scholars a hundred years from now would actually recognize our contemporary aims and methodologies in some ways i hope they wouldn't um but i think this might be the other side of the question that siddharth was asked so that if the question to sit off was are uh is our dh scholars welcome to techies this this way around the question really is can digital humanities actually say anything to humanity's questions and actually i think that um there's one answer which would be yes but i actually think there are really interesting and intractable negotiations between uh close reading and interpretation and the kind of forms of algorithmic uh and data algorithmic processing and data science and the kind of results they produce if you like and i don't think that there's a simple way to reconcile the two forms of knowledge that are being produced i think actually a task of digital humanities is to think about how those different kinds of knowledge production come together in almost everything we do so that there isn't a purely technical way of asking a question or a purely non-technical way so i think a big interest in digital humanities at the moment is around what is very ungainly called knowledge pipelines but in a in a more interesting way to put this perhaps a more comprehensible way would be to say so you think you worked on a big heap of data using an ai who chose the data who collected it was it part of the internet what's the internet it's a conversation amongst millions of humans who chose it so those questions of interpretation and instrumentalism come together and i think that argument between the quantitative and the qualitative is not reconcilable but has to be tackled and i think it will be tackled in new way new ways 100 years from now i suspect it will still be a question that's a good answer but that's my answer i always think it's good to imagine what the new questions and the big questions are going to be a hundred years from now it's one of the things that creates uh really uh open-spirited thinking it seems to me uh one interesting question here about whether digitization inevitably has led to cultural homogenization and the the real focus is can what is called digital imperialism be avoided siddharth i'll start with you yeah the the the very short and the very strong answer to that question is yes uh while there are really repetitive and emancipatory prospects to digitization what sometimes scholars have called the vectorization of the world which is to create algorithmic cultures out of things that exist within within the vector which is within the internet things that can be read by machines uh the vast expanse of human communication that exists on the internet and um and digitization of the printed cultural analog cultural record as well uh unfortunately what has happened and this is universally accepted within the humanistic scholarship is that it has retraced the steps uh that the production of the analog cultural record has already done which is that it's often very anglo-centric which is english is the the hegemonic language in which that record exists it is very metropolitan which is that there is about 10 times more information from just north america than from the rest of the world it is very um very wide and and that is a really big problem uh but can that problem be solved by diversifying the the record maybe there are some problems that can be solved by diversifying the record i am more interested in what this logic of uh of the algorithm this logic of digitization invites us to do and what it does to the age-old versions of decay of culture the age-old nation notions of serendipity you know the way in which we find information on the internet uh and and those questions uh which are connected in fact to the the fantasies that we've always had about you know creating the complete archive something that is digitized something that has no fixture or something that is no gaps no lacunae no no divisions no disruptions uh where does that fantasy come from and how old that fantasy is i think that would be a very interesting humanistic question to ask um when it comes to the the the when it comes to this phenomena which sometimes in the scholarship calls the great under edge or the complete archive um you know just to digitize everything and then what happens what comes out of that so a very interesting question i have to warn you that questions are just flowing in so i want to make sure that we try to get to quite a few so if you can be as succinct as you can i know they're big questions so that's hard um interesting question here about thinking of the humanities as the the writer says we often think of them in terms of institutions and categories of artifacts uh and the question is will the digital change the concept of the humanities itself perhaps opening it to a wider sensibility and a wider set of experiences carolyn i think the digital already has changed the humanities and one of the things digital humanities does is uh notice that fact somewhat obsessively actually i think you go back to i i've just um just produced a book and it looks like a book you know it has pages it has it's the right length it's the right length for a standard length for a standard publisher standard price horrendous the other one it is 90 a digital object i wrote it on a computer it will be circulated around networks it will be the page makeup has is 20 30 years old so in many ways it's already a digital object as a matter of fact it's available online as well so it is a digital object so that's a very small example but i think that the humanities has never been non-technological you know writing is a technology you know arguably and i think one of the things that digital humanities does is to try to take notice of that and ask when it matters and why it matters and what the import of that is so going back to the earlier question about digital technologies and new imperialisms i think the humanities in general has noticed that there was once an idea that the internet would make us free and might be beyond racing class everybody realized that was a ludicrous thing to hope for it suggested a technological fix and there's a lot of discussion and exploration in the humanities around what might be done to address that a lot of that has been about representation how to change how people are represented online how to change different forms of knowledge digital humanities is really interested in thinking about the infrastructures at lower levels in the technology that dictate that most of the internet is in english that that legislate for that if you like that so digital humanities is trying to think about the same issues but at a series of different levels if you like so i think that's a way in which it contributes to thinking through the kinds of transformations in the environment that is changing the humanities already going back to your question i doubt if someone 100 years ago would necessarily recognize the humanities today or yeah great thank you siddharth i know that you're very interested in archives and collections and what they represent but i have coming in perhaps more technical question about that which is uh how will historians of the future be able to access our our contemporary culture if most of its content or much of it is lost in obsolete technology and social media i know that unesco ran a big program on this a few years ago as a colleague of mine in another institution worked on you know 900 page volume about uh loss of loss of digital technology and the worry about that how do you think about those issues is it actually a real problem or can we can we overcome it it's absolutely a real problem but it's not a new one i think at the heart of it the questions of decay and the questions of the the degradation of information and the incompleteness and and and the fished nature of our of our archive and it's and the archives it's the the big ambivalent relationship of the archive the cultural memory itself uh these questions are age-old questions uh but at the heart of this new transformation this new digital transformation is the question what does the archive of tomorrow look like say there was a historian who was working on the arab spring a lot of the arab spring archive is digital archive said there was a historian working on um the hashtag metoo movement a lot of the hashtag meto archive is a digital archive sometimes there is a fantasy around the digital archive that it is supposed to material that it is post corporeal that it has transcended material existence but it's difficult to imagine but we have to always remember that at the heart of digital technology is something that is very material you know the digital archive is sprawled under our oceans it is based on glass and silicon there is something that is very material about it and in a way it hasn't stood the same test of time that the paper has uh over centuries so what are the questions of decay and the questions of access that are applied to the digital archive which certainly may be more effeminate but it's not post material it's not it has not transcended its own limit its own material limit and the question that i think is subsequent to that is the question of private enclosures if we tie the internet and the democratic imagination of the internet into bundles of private platforms which have different uh you know graph apis and this and that very different ways in which to extract information out of it what happens to sedentity in the archive what happens to openness what is the kind of archive that we are creating uh and and these questions i think are questions that have to be answered through different scales theoretical certainly philosophical you know meditation on on on exactly what is happening over the long journey as i said but also digital sociology and and digital humanities this particular granular approach to the way in which that archive can be studied using tools and methodologies that are algorithmic in fact so those questions are uh therefore to be on certain these diverse kinds of ways thank you we've we're really running out of time so i'm going to ask caroline one last question which i'm afraid you're gonna have to answer in about a minute or a minute and 30 seconds which is it's a big one are you optimistic or pessimistic about the impact on reasoning that digital platforms and technologies afford and here of course we're thinking about either the broadening of reasoning communities or the closing down of discourse in so-called echo chambers pause optimistic or pessimistic i'm hopeful i think hope is a little bit different from optimism i think i think it doesn't assume something will happen but seeks to find a way and a path and a route towards the kind of change that would make it possible i don't think i think it's very easy to become completely disenchanted with the internet as it is now with fake news with fake culture with the lack of trust i think it's really salutary to think back to the time there was a single white man in a in a dinner jacket standing at the top of alexandra palace broadcasting to the nation which was assumed to be white as a paternalistic voice of the people and the bbc is wonderful and should be supported but i think the internet actually did and does open up a form of communication that potentially can be superb and that we should engage with and we should also look forward to engaging with our alien agent friends as they develop forms of reasoning that we can work with so i'm immensely hopeful really because technology can do something really astonishing and can produce a just information world you know given human will you're going to have to team up with our colleagues at the lever whom institute for uh life in the universe like thinking about exactly your your last point it's fabulous i wish we could go on there's so much more to say but unfortunately we run out of time and it's very clear that the topic of digital humanities has engaged people very deeply and thank you very much uh for great questions i thought and and to our panelists uh really uh extraordinary contribution uh to i think some pretty deep thinking on on really important issues as our panelists have noted new technologies affect the time we live in and the way we live in time and digital humanities represents application of tools not only to our future but to our past and our present as well so thank you for participating thank you to professor carolyn bennett and dr siddharth sony for great insight and and for trying to help us think through what comes next this is my last conversation uh cambridge conversation as vice chancellor and it has been a great pleasure to participate with you in these events i'm delighted that all of you could gather virtually today and i hope that you will be able to attend a session in july when the topic will be neuroscience thank you very much everyone bye-bye [Music] you

2022-06-10 01:32

Other news