The digital arts and humanities

Springer Geography Charles Travis Alexander von Lünen Editors The Digital Arts and Humanities Neogeography, Social Media and Big Data Integrations and Applications Springer Geography The Springer Geography series seeks to publish a broad portfolio of scientific books, aiming at researchers, students, and everyone interested in geographical research The series includes peer-reviewed monographs, edited volumes, textbooks, and conference proceedings It covers the entire research area of geography including, but not limited to, Economic Geography, Physical Geography, Quantitative Geography, and Regional/Urban Planning More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10180 Charles Travis Alexander von Lünen • Editors The Digital Arts and Humanities Neogeography, Social Media and Big Data Integrations and Applications 123 Editors Charles Travis Department of History University of Texas Arlington USA Alexander von Lünen Division of History University of Huddersfield Huddersfield UK and Trinity College University of Dublin Dublin Ireland ISSN 2194-315X Springer Geography ISBN 978-3-319-40951-1 DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40953-5 ISSN 2194-3168 (electronic) ISBN 978-3-319-40953-5 (eBook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2016945145 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 This work is subject to copyright All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland Preface The “Information Bomb” that Virilio (2000) described has washed like a digital tsunami through the humanities as much as the arts Online art, digital art, the digital humanities, environmental humanities and digital heritage—all are buzzwords and the jargon at play in early twenty-first century academia Yet—at least in the humanities—there’s a growing concern what the digital is supposed to deliver in terms of new insights for scholarship and pedagogy Ontological and epistemological shifts are indeed occurring Phillip Barron’s observation captures the consternation of a generation of academics native to analogue methods for which the digital is terrae incognitae: “for many of us trained in the humanities, to contribute data to such a project feels a bit like chopping up a Picasso into a million pieces and feeding those pieces one by one into a machine that promises to put it all back together, cleaner and prettier than it looked before.” (Barron 2010) For academics adopting the digital, Andrew Prescott’s observation that the digital humanities is becoming “annexed by a very conservative view of the nature of humanities scholarship,” (Prescott 2012) serves as a timely warning Too many digital humanities practitioners, he observes “have too often seen their role as being responsible for shaping on-line culture and for ensuring the provision of suitably high-brow material.” Prescott (echoing Virilio) states that “this is a futile enterprise as the culture of the web has exploded The internet has become a supreme expression of how culture is ordinary and everywhere, and there is a great deal for us to explore.” (Prescott 2012) The role of the World Wide Web (WWW) is just a starting point to begin addressing these challenges, and underlines the magnitude of the tasks ahead in facilitating rigorous, imaginative and innovative research and teaching initiatives The WWW acts as a basin in which the digital humanities, as Svensson (2012) argues, can […] serve as a laboratory, innovation agency, portal and collaborative initiator for the humanities, and as a respectful meeting place or trading zone for the humanities, technology and culture, extending across research, education and innovation This meeting place would normally extend far outside the humanities proper and could include the humanities as well as other academic disciplines, industry and the art world v vi Preface A main challenge facing scholars and teachers is to create and engage digital methodologies which reflect the strengths of the arts and humanities, rather than those which simply conform to engineered preconceptions of the digital tools employed The academy’s relationship with technology must be reconceptualized In contrast to interdisciplinarity, new paradigms are emerging which go beyond merely providing digital or social media links between traditional academic disciplines, groupings and networks As the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 recognizes: “the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries.” However, the revolution sparked by the digital arts and humanities “promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape.”1 Driven by cultural and technological changes occurring over the last half century, the digital transformations of the early twenty-first century have a precedent from the 1960s Marshall McLuhan provided forecast of sorts on the shift from the analogue to the digital by drawing upon a literary and dramatic arts metaphor […] today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society […] the Theatre of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action who appears not be involved in the action Such is the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett’s clowns (McLuhan 1987, 3–4) Indeed, one generation’s concept of absurdity becomes another generation’s zone of opportunity, and several observers commented on the analogue to digital shift occurring at the turn of the twenty-first century as Western ontologies and epistemologies were becoming “technologically disrupted” due to the mass proliferation of cybernetic assemblages Denis Cosgrove contended that thinking in science and technology studies was dissolving the epistemological distinctions between the arts and the sciences (Cosgrove 2005, 51) Donna Haraway observed that the emerging ubiquity of human interactions with technology were creating hybrid machine and organic “cyborgs.” (Haraway 1991, 151) Far from being deterministic or dystopian (as McLuhan’s metonymic Beckettian clowning), Haraway argued that “cyborg imagery” suggested a “way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves […] it means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships.” (Haraway 1991, 181) Nigel Thrift proposed that due to the intervention of digital software, the human body was becoming a tool-being in symbiosis with the new electronic time-space shaping social perceptions and experiences of the world (Thrift 2008, 2, 10) “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0.” 2009 http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_ V2.pdf Preface vii Over the last 20 years three overlapping waves have marked the evolution and innovation of arts and humanities digital scholarship and practice The first wave’s digitization of historical, literary and artistic collections coupled with the emergence of online research methods and pedagogy, dovetailed with a second wave of humanities and arts computing quantification exercises, and digital parsing, analysis, and visualization projects Currently, a third wave is cresting and the ontological tables are turning as arts and humanities discourses and tropes are now beginning to shape emerging coding and software applications, allowing digital practices to come into league with the visual and performing arts to force trans-disciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, bioinformatics, linguistics, painting, gaming, New Media, film, historical, literary, culture, and performance studies, painting and drama (Travis 2015) It is in such a manner that we need to “surf” the crest of third digital wave so as to harnesses digital toolkits and create models in service of the core methodological strengths of the humanities, such as attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation (Travis 2015) Willard McCarthy states that humanities computational models “are better understood as temporary states in a process of coming to know rather than fixed structures of knowledge,” and reminds us that “for the moment and the foreseeable future, computers are essentially modeling machines, not knowledge jukeboxes.” (McCarty 2004) Prescott (2012) contends that “If we focus on modeling methods used by other scholars, we will simply never develop new methods of our own,” and continues, […] if we truly believe that digital technologies can be potentially transformative, the only way of achieving that is by forgetting the aging rhetoric about interdisciplinarity and collaboration, and starting to our own scholarship, digitally A lot of this will be ad hoc, will pay little attention to standards, won’t be seeking to produce a service, and won’t worry about sustainability It will be experimental Invoking a somewhat radical, but nevertheless salient argument, Mark Sample contends that the “digital humanities should not be about the digital at all It’s all about innovation and disruption The digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities.” (Sample 2010) In this regard Svensson (2010) asks “would we expect digital humanists to become involved in pervasive gaming, flash mobs, and online installations or Twitter performances?” He argues that the digital humanities “has a set of embedded core values—including a predominantly textual orientation and a focus on technology as tool—some of which are challenged or diluted through an expanded notion of the field This should not be unnecessarily construed as a problem, but it adds to the sense of a field in a dynamic state.” (Svensson 2012) Does recognizing and rebelling against these core values by “thinking outside of the box” of orthodox humanities approaches allows us to consider a wide variety of engagements? viii Preface Can the arts provide assistance in this regard? Computer art, as it was called when it arrived on the scene in the 1960s, faced similar criticism that humanities computing—as precursor to what is now branded “digital humanities”—receives Computer art was perceived not to be art at all, but mere graphic design (likewise, humanities computing was/is seen as mere number crunching); all it offered were boring geometric patterns (detecting statistical relationships is named as the main benefit by many digital humanities advocates) However, Art, in this regard, is not too different Leaving aside the deliberate attempts to use art as a tool of propaganda, art schools were heavily influenced by contemporary science and technology, often reflecting wider social, cultural and political debates French art theorist Fernand Léger published a short essay in 1914, Contemporary Achievements in Painting In his text he laid out the impacts that modern science and technology were having on modern art such as Impressionism, and social and human agency in the early twentieth century:2 A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth century artist; so much so that our language, for example, is full of diminutives and abbreviations The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms, are the result of all of this It is certain that the evolution of the means of locomotion and their speed have a great deal to with the new way of seeing (Léger 1973, 11–12) One can discern the nature and influence of technology on art here But where else does the compression of space and time—if not their annihilation, as Karl Marx once quipped—become more visible in the twenty-first century than in the areas of the digital arts and humanities? The “diminutives and abbreviations” Leger referred to are most visible contemporarily in the social media worlds of Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, Flickr, YouTube, etc Likewise, the tropes of “speed” and “abundance” are permeating the arts, the humanities and geography alike Art was challenged by the ever-blurring boundaries between virtual and physical worlds when photography emerged to challenge established visual vocabularies—first iconicity and then authenticity—in the early nineteenth century The division of labour between art and the actual emerging out of the invention of photography— painting to depict the imaginary, photography the real—soon became brittle, as individuals grew suspicious of the claimed authenticity that photography claimed to possess The chapters in this book illuminate how digital methods by employing arts’ and humanities’ tropes and perspectives can navigate around the misplaced expectations and “analogue disciplinary orthodoxies” that hinder the paths to relevant scholarship and pedagogy This collection contextualizes the digital arts and humanities within disciplinary discourses such as history, performance studies, geography and geohazards, environmental humanities, indigenous and Irish studies, conflict See von Lünen’s chapter in this volume for a further discussion of Léger’s quote Preface ix transformation, urban mobility, social media, neo-geography and Big Data In doing so it offers case studies on how to facilitate digital literacy and research involving visualization, language, human behaviour, culture, society, time and place Arlington, Texas, and Dublin, Ireland Huddersfield, UK April 2016 Charles Travis Alexander von Lünen References Barron P (2010) Putting the ‘Humanities’ in ‘Digital Humanities’ Inside Higher Ed http://www insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/04/barron Accessed 15 Apr 2016 Cosgrove D (2005) Maps, mapping, modernity: art and cartography in the twentieth century Imagi Mundi 57(1):35–54 Haraway D (1991) Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature Routledge, London Léger F (1973) Functions of painting Thames and Hudson, London McCarty W (2004) Modeling: a study in words and meanings In: Schreibman S, Siemens R, Unsworth J (eds) A companion to digital humanities Blackwell, Oxford McLuhan M (1987) Understanding media: the extensions of man Ark, Toronto Prescott A (2012) Making the digital human http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/makingdigital-human-anxieties.html Accessed 15 Apr 2016 Sample M (2010) I’m Mark, and welcome to the circus Comment on HASTAC blog entry, http:// hastac.org/blogs/cforster/im-chris-where-am-i-wrong Accessed 11 March 2015 Svensson P (2010) The landscape of digital humanities Digit Humanit Q 4(1) Accessed 15 Apr 2016 Svensson P (2012) Envisioning the digital humanities Digit Humanit Q 6(1), http:// digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000112/000112.html Accessed 15 Apr 2016 Thrift N (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect Routledge, London & New York Travis C (2015) Visual Geo-literary and historical analysis, tweetflickrtubing, and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) Ann Assoc Am Geogr 105(5):927–950 Virilio P (2000) The information bomb Verso, London 190 C Travis and P Holm Big Data” and its potential for digital environmental humanities scholarship on maritime environments and urban areas It will then discuss the digital dimensions of a European Research Council funded project on an Environmental History of the North Atlantic 1400–1700 and the imagineering of SmartCity Lifeworlds as means to illustrate just a few dimensions of the Digital Anthropocene This chapter will argue that at the least, literacy in the digital environmental humanities will be necessary to address the challenges introduced to the human condition in the twenty-first century Humanities “Big Data” Information and Telecommunications, social media, digital technology, and especially the World Wide Web (WWW) have fundamentally transformed the way human cognition takes place and such changes will only accelerate However, the humanities are still overwhelmingly conceived and practiced as analogue sciences and still have to reap from the benefits of the twenty-first digital revolution Archives hold universes of human knowledge, still locked in parchment, paper, photographs, cartographical documents, paintings, micro-film, and artifacts, despite rapidly increasing digitization projects worldwide Digitization is still only the very first step into new procedures of inquiry, which will enable us to ask questions that would have been considered impossible at more than a speculative level only a decade ago One example is the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–19491 an interactive online platform which allows users to explore questions of landscape, identity and sense of place by drawing on geo-timeline collated Anglo-Irish literary and cartographical documents from the Trinity College Dublin Library collections (see Fig 11.1) Indeed, over the last quarter century, dissolutions of epistemological distinctions between science and technology studies, the arts, and humanities, have situated digital methods in the humanities within three overlapping waves of digital humanities evolution and innovation described in this book’s introduction Over the past decade, “Big Data” approaches in the humanities have emerged from the proliferation and interconnection of social media, mobile networks, cloud computing and new computing, tablet and telecommunications devices and technologies Ironically, “Big-Data” is seen as a poor term, but one employed in the sciences to refer to datasets “Big” enough to require supercomputers, but which now can be analyzed on desktop and tablet computers Though the current availability of data sets are often quite large, what “Big Data” really implies, is the ability to search, aggregate, and cross-reference large data sets (cf Bollier 2010; Boyd and Crawford 2012) However, insights from “Big Data” can be found at very modest scales Boyd and Crawford (2012, 670) The Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949 provides literary, historical, and cartographic perspectives on Ireland from 1922 to 1949 drawn from the works of fourteen Irish writers This project is based in the Trinity Long Room Hub at the University of Dublin and provides interactive mapping and timeline features for academics and the public at large interested in the intersection of Irish literary culture, history, and geography http://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/digital-atlas/ 11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? … 191 Fig 11.1 Poet-farmer patrick Kavanagh page of digital literary atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949 Source: Authors argue that the “size of data should fit the research question being asked [and] in some cases, small is best.” Despite claims about big data heralding the “end of theory,” apophenia (seeing patterns and connections where none exist) and mistaking correlations for causation, remains one of the most persistent problems in dealing with this new and untamed source of information (Boyd and Crawford 2012, 670) Theorizing and conceptualizing interpretive schemas to “tame” the volume, variety, and velocity of information will be essential to harnessing its potential and the humanities, which deal with contingency, context, uncertainty, and subjectivity and are well poised to contribute to this effort Indeed, big data and social media networks have become techno-epistemes and are not only changing the very objects of knowledge, but creating radical shifts in humanities research practices in how data is sourced, processed, and parsed from technologically mediated socio-discursive frameworks, human activity, and the environment Bollier (2012) juxtaposition of two types of “commons” illuminates the mental chasm to be bridged between natural and digital spheres: […] most people make a sharp division in their mind between natural resource commons (for water, air, land, forests, wildlife, etc.) and digital commons (free software, Wikipedia, Creative Commons-licensed content, social networking, etc.) It is assumed that these two universes are entirely separate and distinct, and have little to with each other But in fact, these two realms are starting to blur—and we should be more mindful of this convergence and the synergies that it is producing 192 C Travis and P Holm Fig 11.2 N-gram viewer: the occurrence of word pairs “medieval history,” “mediaeval history,” and “early modern history,” 1880–2000 in the Google corpus of English-language books: Source: Holm (2015) The first sense of how Big Data inquiries will possibly change humanities research arrived with the launch of “n-gram” search capabilities for the millions of books digitized by Google This algorithm reveals patterns of word use in the printed books of several major languages Findings, such as the relative use of the word pairs “medieval history” and “early modern history” (see Fig 11.2) need further scrutiny before we deduce anything from these correlations, but the important point is that this simple tool is certainly only a beginning step toward more robust humanities engagements with big data The Digging into Data Challenge2 originated in 2009 in a joint UK-US-Canadian funding initiative, and similar schemes in other nations have enabled a host of new data projects that build on existing digitized collections to enable research inquiries (Holm 2015) Examples of a large-scale multinational collaborative projects include The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,3 and the Sound Toll Records4 which opens up a national long-run series of digitized Danish customs records for international researchers The Digging into Data Challenge aims to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences http://diggingintodata.org/ The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries http://www.slavevoyages.org/ The Sound Toll Registers are the accounts of the toll which the king of Denmark levied on the shipping through the Sound, the strait between Sweden and Denmark They have been conserved (with gaps in the first decades) for the period from 1497 to 1857, when the toll was abolished From 1574 on, the series is almost complete http://www.soundtoll.nl/index.php/en/over-het-project/sonttolregisters 11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? … 193 Humanists in general, and medieval, early modern, and modern historians in particular, are faced with the challenges and opportunities of employing big data approaches Large corporations harness big data information systems to understand customer needs and preferences, and increasingly data generated by social media, sensors, and cameras are used to monitor human behavior, communication, and perception Leaving ethical and democratic concerns aside, the interesting result of this activity is the ability to mine and utilize enormous heterogeneous datasets In the age of big data, information managers are not asking for homogenous information but for any kind of information however informal and disjointed the sources This development is crucial to our ability to handle and interpret vast amounts of information from and about the past One such example is the Mapping the Republic of Letters,5 a product of Stanford Literary Lab, which creates a spatial analysis of “intellectual correspondence networks” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by using metadata about date, author, place of origin, and recipient Another example is the Down Survey of Ireland6 project engaging the seventeenth century cartography of William Petty and associated documents to visually narrate the Cromwellian Settlement in Ireland It seems likely that digital tools in the future will enable us to search and organize information across digital archives hosting pre-history, medieval, early modern, modern texts, and artifacts Clearly, a sensible use of such tools will rely on historians to understand the provenance of documents and institutional circumstances But it does seem likely that in coming decades, vast improvements in our ability to buttress qualitative as well as quantitative research with new research tools will emerge (Holm 2015) Digitizing the Fish Revolution 1400–1700 From 1400 to 1700 harvesting of fish by European fleets, particularly in the North West Atlantic, contributed to significant environmental and societal changes not only in Europe but also in North-America Within 300 years, fish as a commodity shifted from being a high-priced, limited resource in the late Middle Ages to a low-priced, abundant one by the Early Modern period Conditioned by market forces, the “fish revolution” of the 1500 and 1600 s reshaped alignments in economic power, demog5 Mapping the Republic of Letters: These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin They facilitated the dissemination and the criticism of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects http://republicofletters stanford.edu/ Down Survey of Ireland 1656–1658: The Down Survey of Ireland is the first ever detailed land survey on a national scale anywhere in the world The survey sought to measure all the land to be forfeited by the Catholic Irish in order to facilitate its redistribution to Merchant Adventurers and English soldiers Copies of these maps have survived in dozens of libraries and archives throughout Ireland and Britain, as well as in the National Library of France This Project has brought together for the first time in over 300 years all the surviving maps, digitized them and made them available as a public online resource http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/ 194 C Travis and P Holm raphy, and politics With acute consequences in peripheral Atlantic settlements from Newfoundland to Scandinavia, it held strategic importance to all the major western European powers While the fish revolution catalyzed the globalization of the Atlantic world, adequate baselines and trajectories for key questions of natural abundance, supply and demand, cultural preferences, marketing technologies, plus national and regional strategies need to be identified and studied This is the aim of a European Research Council study led by Poul Holm, Professor of Environmental History at Trinity College The North Atlantic Environmental History 1400–1700 (NorFish) project’s core questions consider what were the natural and economic causes of the fish revolution, how did marginal societies adapt to changing international trade and consumption patterns around the North Atlantic, and how did economic and political actors respond? The project hopes to explain the historic role of environment and climate change, how markets impacted marginal communities, and how humans perceived long-term change Cabot’s discovery of the NW Atlantic Grand Banks in 1497 had fundamental geopolitical implications In the next century marine products were among the first foodstuffs to be thoroughly exposed to globalizing processes Seasonal voyages across the Atlantic turned into permanent settlements and the Northwest Atlantic became the main supplier for European fish markets as well as newer markets further afield in North America and the slave plantations of the Caribbean Additionally, the project contends that the fish revolution is an ideal test case for the larger potential of multidisciplinary collaborations and integrations of maritime history, marine science in the field of marine environmental history The project is anchored by three main research questions what were the natural and economic causes of the fish revolution? How did marginal societies adapt to changes in international trade and consumption patterns around the North Atlantic? How did consumers, investors, and politics in the major European countries respond? Knowing and establishing the answers to these questions will help us understand the role of environment and climate change in the past, how markets impacted marginal communities, and how humans perceived long-term change Indeed, the fish revolution had dramatic consequences for peripheral settlements on both sides of the Atlantic and was of strategic importance to major European powers An Esri Storymap Geographical Information System (GIS)7 was created to visualize the Fish Revolution 1400–17008 hypothesis, communicate project aims, and disseminate knowledge and the works in progress of the project to researchers and the public and private spheres world wide (see Fig 11.3) The Fish Revolution Storymap visually narrates the project’s aim to understand the restructuring of North Atlantic fisheries, fish markets, and fishery-dependent communities in the late Environmental Services Research Institute (Esri) Story Maps allow users to combine authoritative maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content The user can harness the power of maps and geography to create spatiotemporal visual narratives https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/ Fish Revolution, 1400–1700: Storymap by Charles Travis and Poul Holm, https://ctravis.maps arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=ab7eb4d7263349caa19793282124c63c 11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? … 195 Fig 11.3 Fish revolution storymap slide Source: Authors medieval and early modern world The NorFish project is mobilizing a fully multidisciplinary, humanities-led approach to marine environmental history, (including the digital environmental humanities) to assess and synthesize the dynamics and significance of the North Atlantic fish revolution Equipped by methodological advances developed by Poul Holm, the NorFish will establish a robust quantitative framework of extractions, supplies, and prices, while also charting the qualitative preferences and politics that motivated the actors in the fish revolution as it spread across the North Atlantic Norfish Project Steps The first step of the NorFish analysis will be to build a database of regional fish extractions, landings and market prices in addition of paleoecological and archeological data An important second step will be to develop historical catch per unit effort (CPUE) and presence/absence indices on a regional and temporal basis The fish revolution occurred on the interface between boreal and temperate ocean fauna, where the occurrence of species was susceptible to climate variability These indices will be used for a multidisciplinary study of climate and ecosystem productivity, integrating established climate and oceanographic data The third step will be to map perceptions, representations, and responses to the fish revolution by building a NorFish Historical Marine Geographical Information System (NorFish GIS) The project will investigate the importance of international maritime connections that transcend national historical inquiries, and undertake a review of historical and cartographical archives and travelogs to refine the understanding of the interconnect- 196 C Travis and P Holm edness of North Atlantic fisheries The field of geo-narrative inquiry recognizes the importance of location, and context Subsequently, it endeavors to appreciate how observed phenomena are interpreted and the degree of significance people attach to them An example of a digital geo-narrative project is the state-of-the-art Historical Geographical Information System Trading Consequences9 which allows historically traded volumes of commodities to be filtered by geographical location This project is sourced from millions of digitized nineteenth-century British Empire documents (an example of “Humanities Big Data”) which allows users to view macro visualizations of trading patterns, as well as drill right down to scans of original documents in the online archive Identifying original source materials for the NorFish databases and GIS is essential to the success of the project A host of travelogues, correspondence, and fisheriesrelated documentation does exist and is in the public domain, but has yet to be subject to the systematic analyses that digital environmental humanities methodologies and techniques can offer Examples of online data sources include: David B Quinn and Selma Barkham’s separate collection of English, Spanish, and Basque documents related to North American voyages; Richard Hakluyt’s “Principal Navigations” and the Hakluyt Society’s10 series on voyages (e.g conducted by Cabot, Davis, Frobisher) in the seas abutting Iceland, Norway, and Spitzbergen provide crucial ichthyofaunal, geographical, and general maritime indicators An online archive of digitized manuscripts and cartography of the British State Papers chronicles a wealth of fisheries data relating to domestic law and foreign policy from 1509 to 1714 Quantitative contextualization of the growing fish markets of the period are provided by the Maddison Project11 which continues Angus Maddison’s legacy of compiling macroeconomic and population datasets covering medieval and early modern periods The medieval and early modern data Bank12 contains information and commodity prices (including fish) in the Low Countries and Germany, and the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP)13 project sources historical records relating to fishing catches and effort over selected places and periods The Trading Consequences project is a multi-institutional, international collaboration between environmental historians in Canada and computer scientists in the UK that uses text-mining software to explore thousands of pages of historical documents related to international commodity trading in the British Empire, involving Canada in particular, during the nineteenth century, and its impact on the economy and environment http://tradingconsequences.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ 10 Hakluyt Society: Founded in 1846, the society seeks to advance knowledge and education by the publication of scholarly editions of primary records of voyages, travels and other geographical material http://www.hakluyt.com/ 11 Maddison Project: Initiated in March 2010 by a group of close colleagues of Angus Maddison, with the aim to support an effective way of cooperation between scholars to continue Maddison’s work on measuring economic performance for different regions, time periods, and subtopics http:// www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm 12 The Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank provides straightforward database access to five sets of data on European currency exchange and commodities prices from the 13th through the 18th centuries http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/r/170/whm.html 13 History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP): An interdisciplinary research program that used historical and environmental archives to analyze marine population data before and after human 11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? … 197 NorFish GIS To create a GIS sourced from historical archives, collections, and texts, 70 % of the labor involved is identifying, classifying, assembling, and geocoding the platform’s digital database spreadsheet (Humanities GIS is a reiterative process, and in many ways constitutes a rhetorical exercise as much as the traditional geospatial techniques involving database visualization, spatial representation and analysis.) The NorFish study is a five-year project, and it is estimated that data identification, collection, collation, and management will occur during the first three years A live geospatial platform will be established during the first year to promote, communicate, and illustrate NorFish research in progress However the fruits of the GIS platform will be revealed toward the end of the project during the analysis stage The digital architecture of the NorFish GIS will be designed and constructed in three major phases A series of geo-databases will be created to store North Atlantic fishery and maritime information (landings, prices and indices of CPUE, climate and ecosystem productivity), collected in the first and second steps of the project Create terrestrial / bathymetric, sea-life and human agent-based models sourced from fishery and maritime geo-databases, digitized historical cartography and medieval and early modern archeological settlement studies Visualize integrated North Atlantic fishery/maritime geo-data and terrestrial/bathymetric agent-based models in a geographical information and timeline software digital atlas platform This online portal will act as a digital archive and interactive mapping platform to conduct time-series mappings, visualizations, and analyses of North Atlantic human/ocean life/environmental relationships, patterns, and dynamics The NorFish GIS will form a basis for the comparative investigation of the impact of the fish revolution on North Atlantic fishing communities and national perceptions The NorFish project will also illustrate how GIS applications managing, visualizing, and analyzing twentieth century coastal and maritime data sets can be employed to “hindcast” early modern social, economic, demographic, political, biotic and abiotic trends and patterns of the early modern North Atlantic The project will feature dynamic 3D digital elevation models produced from integrating remotely sensed (N.A.S.A.) images of North Atlantic coastal and maritime features and early modern works of North Atlantic cartography Such models allow historians to compare and contrast early modern and twenty-first century cartographical forms of perception, experience, and understanding Finally, the use of quantitative and qualitative (mixed methods) and social media components of the NorFish GIS will not only provide a visualization and analysis tool, but serve as a web-enabled online and smartphone App for communicating and disseminating the project’s findings on the historical contingen(Footnote 13 continued) impacts on the ocean became significant http://www.coml.org/projects/history-marine-animalpopulations-hmap 198 C Travis and P Holm cies, biotic/abiotic trends and patterns, social flows, vulnerabilities, adaptions, and resiliencies of North Atlantic maritime culture over the last 600 years The culmination of the NorFish project will be a new environmental history of the late medieval/early modern North Atlantic, its politics and culture, the importance of the fish revolution, and its impact on cultures and societies across the North Atlantic The digital/GIS dimension is one leg of the conceptual stool employed by the NorFish and will help emphasize the role of maritime agents and regional maritime dependencies in economic, political, and cultural contexts The horizons of the project will be broadened to encompass a comprehensive marine environmental history of the North Atlantic’s seascapes and coastscapes to identify how humans managed encounters with hostile oceanic and terrestrial environments in the late medieval and early modern periods SmartCity Lifeworlds In the Digital Anthropocene, twenty-first century human urban agency is symbiotically operating in “actual” and “virtual” milieus Social media, smartphones and wrist watches, X-Box, tablets, and laptops are transforming humans into living, breathing remote sensors, and unwitting cybernetic urban environmental actors The use of these connected devices, integrated with GIS and Global Positioning Systems (GPS), applications enable the visualization, analysis and experience of “digital” spaces and “active” places simultaneously In 1950, New York City became the world’s first megacity, as its population reached 10 million people, and by 2050, United Nation planners predict there will be 40 such megacities on the planet (Hotz 2015) Indeed, global population figures living in cities are now predicted to increase to 70 % by the middle of the twenty-first century, signaling a significant demographic threshold for humankind Urban populations are now growing faster than cities The megacities needed to accommodate such growth are expected to rival the size of Austria, and are devouring grasslands, generating their own climate zones, affecting rainfall and producing more greenhouse gases (Hotz 2015) New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, working with city managers and civic entrepreneurs is rewiring the “Big Apple” as a digital laboratory for SmartCity research By making digital data public, linking municipal computer networks, installing sensors to monitor urban life (from water quality, traffic and power use, to the sound of gunfire) researchers are hoping “to turn data generated every day by people in New York into a sustainable design for living that could become a template for digital cities world-wide.” (Hotz 2015) It can be argued in a phenomenological sense that urban inhabitants are dwelling in unmapped “Smart City Lifeworlds” of their own creation Globally, the planet is ablaze with “digital wildfires,” and threatened by rising “oceans of Big Data” expected to reach 1.6 zettabytes in volume by the year 2020 (Lenz 2015) Like the “Anthropocene,” the term “Big Data” has been adopted from the sciences by the humanities and social sciences and parsed variously as a cultural, 11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? … 199 technological, and mythological phenomenon As discussed in this chapter’s first section, Google analysts (who developed algorithms to track flu and unemployment patterns and trends) discovered that small samples of large data sets are reliable as proxies Generally one-third of a percent of the daily data concerning any phenomenon is needed to calculate aggregate statistics and identify patterns and trends Advances in cloud computing now allow “Big Data” to be processed remotely on desktop and tablet computers Research conducted on the 2012 U.S Presidential election discovered that geospatially tracking “tweet” communications reveals the social context of specific events and provided the means to analyze temporal and spatial relationships between short message strings and human behavior (Tsou et al 2013) The dynamic and roiling nature of social media activity can send “Big Data” storms rippling in “real-time” through the digital streets, neighborhoods, districts, and boroughs of laboratory cities like New York This phenomenon is ushering in the need for new types of Digital Environmental Humanities/GIS data gathering, visualization, analysis and interpretation techniques Deployed creatively “Mixed-Methods” (quantitative and qualitative) approaches can synthesize data sources as diverse as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), literary and historical schemas, phenomenology and “RadStats”14 to triangulate the origins, positionalities, temporalities, vectors, and socio-political-economic confluences of social media “Big Data” tsunamis flowing through and shaping the lifeworlds operating in public and private spheres (cf Elwood et al 2013; Kitchin 2014; Travis 2016) Reflecting on the 2008 global economic crash, John Liechty a Professor of Marketing and Statistics at the Pennsylvania State University argued for the necessity to gather data and conduct research on global markets, in the dynamic way they operate He pointed to the decade’s long process undertaken to create better hurricane models and their human, environmental and financial impacts Commenting on financial regulators’ inability to predict events of the global financial crisis, Liechty observed: “markets are at least as complicated and important as the weather, but we don’t have the equivalent of a national weather service or a national hurricane center, for the financial markets” (Liechty and Foster 2011) Liechty’s climatic metaphor can be applied to the Big-Data “Twitter Storm” of 24 November 2014 that erupted after a jury declined despite mass protests to indict a white police officer for the extra-judicial killing of a black youth in Ferguson, Missouri, U.S.A (see Fig 11.4 The “Twitter Storm” illustrates that social media activity 14 “RadStats” is the acronym for the Radical Statistics Group Also known as “Radical Statistics” the group is composed of a collective of statisticians based in Britain was founded in 1975 as a radical science movement associated with the establishment of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS) The RadStats mission statement states: “We believe that statistics can be used to support radical campaigns for progressive social change Statistics should inform, not drive policies Social problems should not be disguised by technical language.” RadStats working groups have focused on population studies, education, health, nuclear arms, ‘race’, and social indicators Only the population studies working group initiated in 2010 is active It is investigating debates relating to population and the environment which pose an “optimum population.” http://www.radstats.org uk 200 C Travis and P Holm Fig 11.4 Ferguson, Missouri, Twitter storm Source: Authors and the data it generates is dynamic, can be explosive, and is suited to “real-time” analysis on human language and communication, perception, and agency Social media data can be geospatially tracked in different scales and scopes, but a few issues still need to be addressed methodologically and technologically As data, it is not curated in the traditional sense, and therefore its reliability varies substantially In addition, its spatial distribution can be nonuniform and heavily skewed toward urban areas (rather than rural, remote and locations in under-developed countries) with access to advanced web based and telecommunications, infrastructure and coverage (Croitoru et al 2014) However, as a global phenomenon social media data and activity is not only becoming an object of study, but increasingly a potential agent for human change and transformation Social media enabled “micro-climates” originating in local grass roots networks are able to spin their digital webs to campaign 11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? … 201 on national and supra-national levels Examples include the #BlackLivesMatter15 (progenitor of November 2014’s Big-Data “Twitter Storm”) and the #OccupyTogether16 social protest movements In addition, the Mumbai Mall Terror Attack in 2008, the Hong Kong Democracy Protests and western African Ebola Crisis of 2014, and the Greek Euro Crisis of 2015 illustrate human agency increasingly enmeshed in the virtual realities of social media networks Digital ecosystems and cultures (hackers, hacktivists, gamers, bloggers, cyberpunks, politicians, pundits, performance artists, and combines like ANONYMOUS,17 etc.) have evolved into potent social movements ISIS’s terroristic redesign of a utopian Caliphate is sustained more as a digital territory and web with global reach by its social media activity as its terrestrial occupation in the no man’s land of eastern Syria and western Iraq is being degraded by Western military efforts The fact that ISIS’s cutting edge digital applications (the vehicles for a 5th century, medieval mindset) are largely scripted by disaffected young computer programmers from East London, and trained in the UK (and elsewhere within Western ICT training complexes) is not only ironic It is very much salient to the argument that fostering digital literacy to not only combat such cybernetic and media nihilism is urgently needed, but necessary for the development of SmartCity Lifeworlds, and understanding the “Senses of Place” emerging from the integration of “actual” and “virtual” human experience in the Digital Anthropocene In this regard, Roche (2015) observes that a SmartCity manifest in four ways: first as an intelligent city (social infrastructure); second as a digital city (informational infrastructure); third as an open city (open governance); and fourth as a live city (a continuously adaptive urban living fabric.) Within this context, Roche argues that a digital city comprises a network of places rather than areal spaces that can be accessed “through the analysis of the digital (spatial) activity generated by social media users.” “Sense of Place” (or platial) Geographical Information Science (GIScience) social media data and activity models of smart city development are facilitating a conceptual shift from a classical “layer-cake view of the world” to the digital “networked cupcakes view of the world” (Roche 2015, 6) The SmartCity Lifeworld concept is illuminated by Lerner (2014) theory of “urban acupuncture” in which the city is viewed as a living organism and possesses specific “neural” target points that can be targeted and engaged to reenergize its corpus Such a perspective digitally “reboots” humanistic geographer Anne Buttimer’s argument concerning developing consciousness toward the lifeworlds we inhabit […] if people were to grow more attuned to the dynamics and poetics of space and time, and the meaning of milieu in life experience, one could literally speak of the vocation and personality of place which would emerge from shared human experiences and the time-space rhythms deliberately chosen to facilitate such experiences (Buttimer 1976, 290) Smart city lifeword “scripts” and “narratives” enacted by digital “Sense of Place” GIScience enabled social media applications could help to dynamically regulate and 15 Black Lives Matter https://twitter.com/hashtag/blacklivesmatter Together http://www.occupytogether.org 17 ANONYMOUS https://www.youtube.com/user/AnonymousWorldvoce 16 Occupy 202 C Travis and P Holm manage situations, improve communication and facilitate public, NGO and private responses in urban milieus, during acute times of crisis and emergency Drawing on literary, artistic, historical and cultural sources, digital lifeworlds models can help to scale down and contextualize the volume, variety, and velocity of Big Data flows running through the “neural networks” of a digital city at given times and places: “like films” human activity in urban environments could “be scored by famous composerswith the soundtrack electronically edited, on the fly [with] everything of relevance at a particular location (for example, a historic site or a crime scene) might be retrieved and arrayed to provide a comprehensive, electronic mise-en-scne.” (Mitchel 2003, 123–124) Finally, Doueihi (2013) questions concerning digital humanism become relevant in considering the emergence and evolution of these new systems of human behavior, and organization in particular to the development of Smart City Lifeworlds: “what is the situation with the anthropology of this new inhabited earth, these new digital territories that are flexible, fluid and constantly moving? How should we think about them, analyze them, especially since geolocation and smart cities cannot be dissociated from our daily lives?” Conclusion The Australian physicist Michael Nielsen argues that humanity is now facing the second scientific revolution after Copernicus: “We are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years The internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world” (Nielsen 2011) This revolution may empower future humanities scholars to pursue research questions that a generation trained in an analogue world can only dream of (Holm 2015) The study of oceans and cities in the twenty-first century will need new humanities and social science methodological avenues to address the challenges facing life on the planet in the next 50 years But in order to enable such future pursuits, students need to be trained in radically new ways A sea-change needs to occur not just in the humanities and social sciences but in the natural sciences where researchers need to understand the importance of human perception, motivation and agency in the “creation of nature” in the Digital Anthropocene As Jørgensen (2014, 109), observes: Distant natures, those that are not experienced through the body but distributed through data and media, need different modes of analysis and storytelling Human interpretation and experience is still relevant, but we need to understand how it is mediated through machines and technologies, models and database structures If we think of technology as a set of relations social, economic, even epistemological the digital turn certainly embodies the same kind of relations Indeed, future environmental humanities research will consist of ex ante digital humanities in practice, and therefore the task is to develop and master as many digital technologies and research strategies as possible (Holm 2015) As Posthumus et al (2016) contend: 11 The Digital Environmental Humanities—What Is It and Why Do We Need It? … 203 By extending humanities interpretation to environmental issues [environmental humanities] and by creating new tools and methods for humanities research [digital humanities], both disciplines are advocating for a new way of thinking about the humanities Moving beyond traditional work in the humanities, the environmental and the digital humanities illustrate that the humanities can matter more broadly in a contemporary context Indeed, to address the issues of Digital Anthropocene, there is a primary need to develop digital and environmental literacy, as well as facilitate such collaborations across the broad spectrum of humanities and science disciplines Indeed, the gulf between natural and human sciences is less one of epistemology and more one of language, presentation, and preference for quantification (Holm 2015) However, even if both sides are committed to seeking evidence and truth (albeit how unstable and transient) though currently hampered by a host of methodological, institutional, and funding issues collaborations will probably occur in idiosyncratic ways and at grassroots levels As Prescott (2012) argues, […] if we truly believe that digital technologies can be potentially transformative, the only way of achieving that is by forgetting the aging rhetoric about interdisciplinarity and collaboration, and starting to our own scholarship, digitally A lot of this will be ad hoc, will pay little attention to standards, won’t be seeking to produce a service, and won’t worry about sustainability It will be experimental However, not all digital environmental humanities activities are operating in a fragmented, patchwork landscape dotted with solipsistic disciplinary silos Currently the Ant-Spider-Bee18 project at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany is the flagship of a global digital environmental humanities initiative with McGill University in Montreal19 and the Center for Environmental Humanities at Trinity College Dublin20 as part of an emerging flotilla By setting sails on Oceani Incognitae this consortium of international scholars will lead the exploration and help address the challenges of the emerging Digital Anthropocene Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation (2013–2015) and European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award (2016–2020) 18 Ant-Spider-Bee, Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany http://www.antspiderbee.net 19 Digital Environmental Humanities: Research, Analytic Tools, Features, McGill University, Mon- treal, Canada http://dig-eh.org 20 Center for Environmental Humanities, Digital Environmental Humanities Initiative, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland http://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/environmental-humanities/events/ IRC_DEHindex.php 204 C Travis and P Holm References Bollier D (2010) The promise and peril of big data http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/ 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Switzerland Preface The “Information Bomb” that Virilio (2000) described has washed like a digital tsunami through the humanities as much as the arts Online art, digital art, the digital humanities, ... create and engage digital methodologies which reflect the strengths of the arts and humanities, rather than those which simply conform to engineered preconceptions of the digital tools employed The. .. environmental humanities and digital heritage—all are buzzwords and the jargon at play in early twenty-first century academia Yet—at least in the humanities there’s a growing concern what the digital