[NetBehaviour] Iteracy And The Digital Humanities

[Helen Sloan]

This is a very interesting strand.

I wish poetry or code were easy for me and I'm on draft 5 of this response
so lists aint easy either...

Firstly, and I'm surprised, I feel myself largely drawn to Doug Rushkoff in
this instance. As someone who probably has the Digital Bildung (and an
uncanny knack of understanding some simple code due to my maths background
and a little bit of BASIC, Cobol and Pascal in the old days - was never any
good at any of it), in any contemporary context I am  largely programming
illiterate. Not what Ruth called for really.

As a curator who surrounds myself with artists who program, hack (in the
broadest sense of the word so it could be toys or cameras as much as
software) and generally work in the context of reconfiguring to suit their
needs, I am disappointed to find that not only is programming largely
ignored at statutory education level, it is often ignored at higher
education level. Whilst some people will always break through, this is going
to be a decreasing number as people are only taught the rudiments of
proprietary packages in a very formulaic way. As James W pointed out, this
is what many corporates, ISP Providers and so on want to maintain dominance.

As technology proliferates, I have three questions that have been playing on
my mind that relate to programming as much as anything and ask about
our/humanity's/people's relationship with technology and programming and
vice versa. They are very broad but I think they are relevant to the
discussion:

1) Is it as Transhumanists and Posthumanists suggest, the next step of
evolution either enhancing people or making people subservient to
technology? Computational programming might look very different in those
contexts and not just in terms of Deleuze.

2) Is the technology there to help people live on their terms?

3) Is technology contributing to the gradual decline of the dominance of
people since it relies (like so much of what we do) on unsustainable
resources? 

I always advocated question 2 but now I am a bit resigned to question 3. 1
concerns me greatly but I watch the debates with interest. There are of
course other questions and hybrids of those.

At the end of it we need to understand what we are up against. This list is
the converted and I really do think that understanding programming is
something everyone needs to be taught. The catholic church kept everyone at
bay with Latin - is this not the same?

So now, my thought is do I go back to my garden and learn to grow vegetables
for subsistence (which I've spent some months working on) or do I sign up
for that Java/C course I've been meaning to learn for 10 years? Both I
suspect will be great skills to have now and in the future.

All the best
Helen



On 13/10/11 19:55, "Rob Myers" <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:

> On 13/10/11 19:16, Andreas Maria Jacobs wrote:
>> 
>> but apart from being able to oversee the more complex structures dealt
>> within and surrounding the coded environment, programming skills are
>> more a starting point than a goal in itself
> 
> It's an important step. And one that can disrupt later steps.
> 
>> I also was dissapointed by the meager observations your previous link
>> led me to i.e. the introduction of the term 'iteracy' more or less a
>> word play with 'literacy' and 'iteration' a much used softeware practise
> 
> I enjoy word play and the possibilities it opens up. When it's
> recognized as such.
> 
>> I honestly think that oppositional thoughts regarding the establishment
>> and societal future influences of studying and trying to define 'Digital
>> Humanities'  is necessary and certainly valuable not only for its
>> eventual progress but also for the pitfalls it implies
> 
> The critical techniques of the digital humanities are being critiqued by
> those who are otherwise silent on the efficacy and social context of
> critique. My concern at present is that academic politics mean some of
> the threatened middle management of the humanities are trying to
> strangle what they view as a more successful rival for funding in the crib.
> 
>> For instance the connection between computing and voting is nowadays
>> common practise in almost all 'democracies' , although in India a Dutch
>> scientist is prosecuted because he proved the system to be easely
>> forged. In the EU a Dutch minister fought for the introduction of open
>> source software replacing the MS dominated softwares used before, she
>> succeeded!
> 
> I really recommend "The Philosophy Of Software" by the same author for
> this. :-)
> 
> Certainly, being able to read the code used by voting machines is a very
> direct link between programming literacy and democracy. The
> techno-progressive consensus on voting machines is currently to *reject*
> them. This might appear counter-intuitive to the non-programming public.
> 
>> Software Studies as a science to investigate and explore the broader
>> ways in which people, corporate power and individuals use software on a
>> more or less daily basis sure looks interesting enough to undertake as
>> research subject the connections between software and politics but to
>> say that it is a distinctive and wholy seperated field of study is not a
>> reality
> 
> I am someone who was at art school during the height of its colonization
> by the bureaucracy of the humanities and who embraced code as a means of
> resistance to this. It would take string theory to construct a violin
> small enough for me to express how sorry I am at the blowback of machine
> learning and data visualization into the humanities.
> 
> I also think that however minor and open to question the achievements of
> the (resurrected and rebranded) digital humanities are so far, there is
> definitely something there and the immune reaction to it is in itself in
> need of critique.
> 
>> As I am more inclined to express myself in a more hermetic kind of
>> language I conclude with a piece of experimental poetry I wrote a couple
>> of weeks ago:
> 
> I do envy people who can express themselves through poetry. I wish I
> could. :-/
> 
> - Rob.
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