social relations

WHITE PAPER FOR THE NEH OFFICE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES:ROSE DIGITAL HUMANITIES START-UP GRANT (LEVEL 2) HD-51433-11(9/1/2011 TO 9/30/2012)

Alan Liu, Rama Hoetzlein, Rita Raley, Ivana Anjelkovic, Salman Bakht, Joshua Dickinson, Michael Hetrick, Andrew Kalaidjian, Eric Nebeker, Dana Solomon, and Lindsay Thomas

We report in this paper on a project we advanced from an initial prototype to beta stage in 2011-12 with a NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant (Level 2). We aim not just to narrate grant objectives, activities, and results but also to surface some of the larger digital humanities issues-- inextricably humanistic and technological, theoretical and practical--that we engaged. The project is called RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment), an online knowledge exploration environment for humanities scholars and students developed in the Ruby on Rails programming environment on top of a MySQL database. Accessed through a Web site (http://rose.english.ucsb.edu), the system includes the following main content and interface features: • an extensive set of bibliographical metadata (but no full texts) machineharvested from Project Gutenberg, YAGO, and SNAC (Social Networks & Archival Contexts); • an initial set of user-entered metadata (including "relationships" and "keywords") added to the pre-existing data; • a user interface with search and editing functionality modeled as a social network site with "profile pages" for each author, work, and user; • interactive visualizations in several styles to facilitate navigation and understanding; • "history"-tracking and "collections"; • "storyboards" to shape visual arguments; • and user documentation, including a "Quick Start Guide" and demo video.

The basic idea of RoSE is that a bibliography of humanitiesrelated knowledge can be modeled as an evolving “social network” of people and works. Bibliography thus acquires a social face, becoming not a set of "records" but a participatory network of relationships between, for example, an author’s colleagues, friends, lovers, imitators, critics, and later scholars and students (or a work's similar influences on and relationships with other works). We position RoSE as a contextual discovery tool for the formative stages of learning about a topic. When beginning to research an author, work, or idea, users (our target audiences are undergraduates, graduate students, and more advanced scholars) can explore RoSE to find clusters and pathways of relationships situating their topic in its intellectual context; and they can add entries and relationships as part of the very process of advancing their understanding of that context.

(Source: Introduction to the white paper)

Social science in general and anthropology in particular has long attended to core concerns with the structure and form of societies, and with the constant interplay of individual and collective elements. These concerns are obvious: how we understand the emergence and form of human worlds necessitates an approach to creative agency alongside the conditions under which that agency is exercised. As Marx famously wrote in 1852, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. But recent scholarship in the field of anthropology has taken theorising beyond the familiar impasses of structure and agency through an emphasis on practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977) and on to the embodied and improvisational nature of knowledge and social action (e.g. Ingold 2000, Hallam & Ingold 2007). Creativity is central here. But creativity conceived not as individual genius (an approach that generates questions about how the individual and the collective collide; one clearly linked to other assumptions Westerners make about the bounded-ness of individual minds, and the proprietary nature of the self), but creativity as an emergent (and necessary) aspect of social relations.

As anthropological study is based in a deep engagement with the potentialities and differences between human life-worlds (e.g. Descola 1994, 2005; Vivieros de Castro 2009, 2010), much of the best anthropological work has taken as its inspiration (and guiding its methodology) ideas and concepts generated in the ethnographic encounter with other traditions, traditions where those concepts of individual boundedness and self-propriety do not dominate. At present this approach is well represented by the work of Marilyn Strathern, whose reformulation of the problems of western epistemology in dialogue with the detailed practices and understandings of people in Melanesia has shown the possibilities not only for understanding other ontological systems, but for this understanding to illuminate core theoretical assumptions and approaches within western society, and in anthropology itself (e.g. Strathern 1988, 2005 etc.). So alongside the recent turn in theorisation, a long standing tradition of questioning assumptions that lie behind our theories is adding to the need to re-think creativity as more than the work of exceptional individual minds.

What this anthropology has made possible is the formulation of conceptual approaches that move us outside and beyond the recurrent divisions between persons and objects, individuals and society, creative genius and slavish replicators.

(Source: Author's introduction)

Starting by questioning why digital games and networks can help us to change reality and generate concrete changes in social environments we will research the application of playful techniques and spaces to address the challenges of our present world. We will state that these strategies can be useful to scrutinize specific and real questions. Using social game examples such as Investigate your MP’s Expenses (2009), World Without Oil (2007), Superstruck, Invent the Future (2008), Evoke (2010) and Playing with Poetry (2010), the aim of the paper/presentation is to promote and expand the field of experimental alternate reality games (ARGs) in a broader context. We will analyze some social games such as Farmville or Mafia Wars, derivatives of Facebook networking social programs, and the aim of the work is to research questions like why can players become addicted to this kind of simulation even if these playable environments are monotonous, boring and obvious? Why every day millions of people plant vegetables and flowers in a predictable platform on the web? Each day the mechanics of these games rewards players in terms of scores and that particular function can be responsible for the fact that we return them over and over again. Unlike reality Facebook games give us something controllable and organized. Our Mafia friends keep on coming back and send us gifts and energy packs and in Farmville our ducks are properly fed and our land is fertilized with enriched manure by our community of neighbors. Focusing on recent research from Jane McGonigal (2011), Sherry Turkle (2011), Jesper Juul (2010), Mary Flanagan (2009) and Edward Castronova (2005), as well as classical authors such as Henri Bergson, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag, Hal Foster, among others, the paper/presentation will debate why as we become addict on accumulating experience points and several digital objects on the web it seems that reality is uncomfortable for most people. At present times jobs of most individuals are boring and don’t give them high expectations, they not contribute to their social progression or pose any intellectual challenge. However, in the world of Facebook representations life is controlled, organized and work efforts are rewarded with points, status bonus and experience. Alone we live the illusion of connectivity, exchange, sharing and the lost community (Turkle, 2011).

author-submitted abstract:
What effect are the current profound changes in global communications, transport and demographics having on language and its readers and writers, those defined through their engagement with and as a function of language? What happens to our identity, as linguistic beings, when the means of communication and associated demographics shift profoundly? What is driving this? Is it the technology, the migration of people or a mixture of these factors?

Language is motile, polymorphic and hybrid. Illuminated manuscripts, graphic novels, the televisual and the web are similar phenomena. The idea that the ‘pure’ word is the ultimate source of knowledge/power (a hermeneutic) was never the case. Don Ihde’s ‘expanded hermeneutics’ (1999), proposes, through an expanded significatory system, that what appear to be novel representations of phenomena and knowledge are, whilst not new, now apparent to us.

Fernando Ortiz (1947) proposed the concept of ‘transculturation’, which may offer possible insights in relation to these questions.

“I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation.”

The suggestion here is that in a communications saturated world of highly mobile people’s we are all engaged in a complex interplay of cultural interactions and appropriations. Language, a technology fundamental to the human condition, is the primary means by which this process occurs. The demographic implications here give rise to the question; are we creating a ‘neo-pidgin’ or are our cultures fragmenting further into linguistic ghettoes?

People define themselves through language and create their own sub-cultural linguistic fields, their own ‘tribal’ codes, in order to establish their identity and be identified by other members of their ‘tribe’. This can be done through the clothes they wear, the language they employ and the means through which they transmit their messages. This is an iterative process where people evolve new dialects that in turn define self. Transculturation functions not only within the established context of the colonial but also the post-colonial, where human migration has proceeded, for multiple reasons, in multiple directions.

Does creative work with language, that employs digital media and exposes necessarily the dynamic processes of signification, lend itself to reflecting upon the technological, social and linguistic changes enveloping us?

References:

Ihde, D (1999); Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science; Northwestern University Press, USA.

Ortiz, F (1947), Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar; Re-published 1995, Duke University Press, USA.