DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2018
Volume 12 Number 2
Volume 12 Number 2
Introduction to the DHQ Special Issue: Digital Technology in the Study of the Past
Abstract
This is the guest editors' introduction to the Digital Humanities Quarterly special issue on Digital Technology in the Study of the Past.
Introduction
Digital technology is transforming the assemblage and dissemination of
historical information. Museums, libraries, archives, and universities
increasingly modify their digital research infrastructures in order to make data
open and available (see [Crane, Seales, and Terras 2009]; [Smithies 2014]; [Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte 2013]; cf [Foka et al. 2017]). The imminent
assessment and representation of historical data has admittedly challenged the
boundaries of historical knowledge and generated new research questions [Drucker 2013]
[Nygren, Foka, and Buckland 2014]
#nygren2016
[Westin 2014]
#westin2015
[Chapman, Foka, and Westin 2016]
[Foka and Arvidsson 2016]. The process of reconstructing, visualizing and
rendering historical data has equally developed together with technology [Westin, Foka, and Chapman 2018]. This is the case in both academic and heritage
contexts and in less immediatedly obvious popular uses, such as the increasingly
significant presence and use of history within videogames [Chapman 2016]. Regardless of specific context, as this collection
of articles shows, the process of digitally capturing and representing
historical data is often analogous to and determined by the digital platform
used.
Scientific visualisation emerged in the fifteenth century as an important method
through which to record, to transport findings by turning them into inscriptions
that could be then shared and analysed [Latour 1990, 6].
Digitally reconstructing is the active part of what has been termed as a
“knowledge representation”
[Favro 2006]
[Dunn et al. 2012]. This is in effect “a visual manifestation of the physical and digital
archive documentation, and a process of knowledge acquisition and
evaluation”, with visualizations and reconstructions composing a
research method and a series of questions - a process of extracting information
while simultaneously developing a model [Westin and Claesson 2017, 116–129]. Reconstructions are occasionally “frowned upon as inherently
inauthentic imitations of real monuments, i.e those that have survived
the test of time”
[Silberman 2015, 2] (cf [Westin and Claesson 2017, 116–129]). While the ocularcentric
tradition of visual cues is dominant within humanities research [Howes 2005, 14]
[Classen 1997, 401–12] more immersive platforms open up new
sensory possibilities. It is commonly believed that intangible artefacts, such
as dancing or soundscapes for example, leave no traces or evidence, meaning they
cannot be reproduced in their entirety (see [Foka and Arvidsson 2016]). However,
this special issue argues that the lack of evidence is in fact present in any
historical research, sensory or not, as western intellectual tradition has shown
a marked preference for vision as the figure of knowledge (see [Evens 2005, ix]).
First conceived at the international conference Challenge
the Past / Diversify the Future[1], individual contributions examine both the opportunities and challenges
that digital technology poses in the study and dissemination of the past. Five
articles focus on the processes that lead to visualizing/rendering intangible
historical data within the disciplines of classical studies, environmental
archaeology and historical science more generally. “Intangible” is often
defined by large initiatives (UNESCO) as the term that replaced “folklore”
as referring to aspects of cultural heritage that are non-physical, estimated,
incorporeal, unembodied, and disembodied. In this special issue, in using the
term intangible, unless otherwise stated, we mean the historically
invisible or complicated to render by digital means, the incomplete and the
intangible in cultural or environmental, social or ecological terms.
Beyond reconstructions, and because of innovative digital tools,
visualizations/renderings for historical disciplines can, more generally, vary
from simple graphs to word clouds and geospatial, time-interactive maps. Early
digital visualisations have accordingly provided insight into aspects of urban
development and have facilitated critical discussions of the application of
digital tools within the context of museology, conservation, urban planning, or
the narratives of digital heritage [Vitale 2016]. Early digital
visualizations also made evident how existing digital tools and related models
carry assumptions of knowledge as primarily visual, thus neglecting
interactivity with the user/observer or, for example, sensory data. As it
emerges from this special issue, current technological developments, such as
augmented, mixed, or even virtual reality, can inspire new modes of
representation that call for new scientific questions and methods/solutions.
Joshua L. Mann’s paper, How Technology Means: Texts,
History, and Their Associated Technologies, begins from the premise
that technologies used to study and represent the past are not hermeneutically
neutral: the main question that the author aims to explain relates to the ways
in which associated technologies convey meaning. Mann examines textual history,
using biblical texts as a case study. The thrust of this study is that older,
future and contemporary textual technologies may capture or obscure material
history. The author examines and compares the non-digital book and its familiar
digital counterparts. Further, the article considers ways in which augmented
reality and virtual reality have already been used and might be used in future
to render historical texts. New technologies then appear to trespass the
boundaries of previous book technologies in capturing a text’s history. In
conclusion, the author makes practical suggestions in relation to reading,
studying, or producing digital textual objects.
Helen Slaney, Anna Foka and Sophie Bocksberger’s piece, Ghosts in the Machine:a motion-capture experiment in distributed
reception, similarly tackles the question of digital reconstructions
of classical antiquity as the “sensory turn” in historical
scholarship moves beyond vision. The article concentrates on kinaesthesia, or
the sense of self-movement in Roman Pantomime. The article concludes that
kinaesthetic engagement can also contribute to formulating conceptions of the
ancient past, and that virtual reality is “an ideal tool for fashioning this analogical
relationship”. The objective is recreating Roman Pantomime to examine
how the dancers’ kinaesthetic translation of ancient data pertaining to orchēsis would be affected by the additional factor
of digital interaction. Motion Capture and the creation of 3D avatars of the
dancers is discussed thoroughly, while resulting videos enable each dance piece
to be analysed from any angle in the context of a virtual ancient theatre
environment. The authors conclude that this experiment inspired both questions
of a humanistic and of a technological nature.
Eleni Bozia’s Reviving Classical Drama: virtual reality and
experiential learning in a traditional classroom discusses how a
scholar and a student are to perceive Classical Drama, the theatrical place, the
distances between the actors, the chorus, and the audience, the logistics of the
performance, and the cultural aspects at play. Bozia advocates the use of mixed
reality as a way to promote experiential learning. Mixed reality promotes
traditional edification methods, virtually recreating a stage, with the Magic
Mirror Theater, a web application designed to help students understand Classical
Drama. The author first makes an account of all the attempts at reviving the
circumstances of performance in the actual physical place; then it discusses a
mixed-reality environment as an ideal solution for the study of ancient drama,
allowing the user to “be” in the theatrical space, and
experience the performance.
Claudia Sciuto, in Recording invisible proofs to compose
stone narratives, focuses on how the history of human-environment
interaction is embedded in stone. Sciuto discusses how the intangible life story
of an artefact is partially registered in its primary material properties and
its physical alteration from contact with other bodies. The article concentrates
on two methods: chemical imaging and portable spectroscopy; these quick and
non-destructive remote sensing techniques can be used to collect empirical data
and track production and use of stone artefacts over time. With the Mobima
project carried out by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and chemists
at University of Umeå, Sweden as a case-study, the author first reviews Near
Infrared Spectroscopy as a method for geochemical characterization of stone
artefacts and as a tool for provenance studies. The author concludes by making
an account of archaeometry as a new method with multiple purposes, from rock
paintings to medieval stone walls to soil composition and pedagogical training.
The digital tools have been adapted to the specific purpose of each study,
offering reliable support for understanding geologic materials and their
context.
Finally Philip I. Buckland, Nicolò Dell'Unto and Gísli Pálsson’s contribution,
“To tree, or not to tree”?: On the Empirical Basis
for Having Past Landscapes to Experience, provides an overview of
some of the complex issues involved in reconstructing and visualizing past
landscapes. Empirical data, as the authors argue, creates the need for
humanistic terminology that is borrowed by the natural sciences. The authors
analyse this from the perspectives of environmental archaeology, archaeological
theory and heritage management as well as relating this, briefly, to the broader
context of archaeological theory, practice and research data infrastructure. The
article provides a point of reference for those examining past landscapes,
understanding their relevance in archaeological visualisation.
Taking into consideration that the process of digitally rendering the past,
indeed, ought to be documented, explicit and transparent in order to be
scholarly validated [2], all contributions describe
and analyse the thought processes and further activities around conceptual
rendering methods they have used within research projects. Contributions here
discuss the complexities of landscape studies (see Buckland et al. in this
issue); how provenance tracked and visualized may reveal past conditions and
uses of stone artefacts (see Sciuto in this issue); how the sensory may be
re-experienced and reflected upon within a virtual reality Roman pantomime
performance (see Slaney et al. in this issue); how conceptual 3D renderings may
be further implemented as an experiential learning tool in the classroom (see
Bozia; Slaney et al. in this issue); and the possibilities that new technologies
may open for the study of old texts (see Mann on biblical texts). Individual
contributions here focus precisely on interactive and embodied renderings of the
past, including attempts to experience the past rather than just gaze upon it
(see Slaney et al; Bozia in this issue). New forms of digital ekphrasis (see
#lindhé2013) are shaped with technology, making technology
“good to think with”, to paraphrase Levi Strauss. Visualizations appear
affected by our interpretative choices concerning the (often incomplete) data at
hand and digital technologies with limiting rendering capacities.
Contributors and editors agree that regular and canonised assessment of the
processes of visualization/rendering the past is deemed pivotal for any
scholarly activity [Vitale 2016]. Visualizations evidently can
lead to novel epistemological questions through the process of making, the
real-life applications for pedagogical and public dissemination purposes, and
the feedback on what technology can and cannot do at this moment. This
collection of articles then, rather than concentrating on the properties of
digital representations as such, encourages historians to think in terms of
transduction, the conversion of energy from one form to another. Ultimately, new
possibilities can be found for creative research and expressions which integrate
affective history with more traditional modes of understanding [Turkel 2011]. To grasp the importance of how technology may
interrupt the flow of information, the following articles target visualizations
in order to discuss technology as fragmented in its mediation of an already
fragmented past. In this light, the ultimate aim of this collection is to
reflect upon the validity of technology as a digital research infrastructure for
the humanities where ideas may be realized, communicating the past
to a large and diverse audience and inspiring new questions in the process of
making. With this issue we aim at foregrounding the role of digital, historical
visualizations. This research strand takes as its starting point the digital as
a resource to formulate a critique of our understanding of the past.
Notes
[1] The conference was funded by
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and was a collaborative effort of the Department
of Conservation and the Centre for Digital Humanities (University of
Gothenburg), Visual Arena in Gothenburg, as well as Humlab, the Digital
Humanities Laboratory at the University of Umeå. The event was hosted by the
Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg.
[2]
[Vitale 2016, 147–68]
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