The Digital Object of Desire
Amlan Das Gupta and Subrata Sinha [School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University] “The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded”. (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades, N 3,1) The paper comes out of the experience of working at the School of Cultural Texts and Records of this university. As such it reflects opinions and insights of our fellow-workers, past and present. We have worked for nearly a decade in building – along with some others – a digital archive of North Indian classical music. In a more tangential way, we are also involved with other deployments of digital technologies in the humanities: archiving, databasing, metadata creation, electronic editing, textual encoding, and so on. Archiving and editing are fairly innocuous activities in themselves: they might be thought of as useful, or at least harmless drudgery, appropriate to those of the academic persuasion. Yet as we immerse ourselves pleasantly in the minutiae of manuscript and typescript, printed book and ephemera, shellac discs and magnetic tape, photographic prints and moving images, we find that our undoubtedly disparate fields of activity are united in the single respect that we are engaged in translating these cultural entities into computer readable data. The Humanities in the Age of their Digital Operability Let us start by alluding to a controversial blogpost made earlier this year in the New York Times by the well-known literary scholar Stanley Fish. Fish is in general taking issue with the claims of the “digital humanities”, but his quarrel appears to be with the new umanista, not those who can just about access articles on JSTOR. Many of us find ourselves silently accepting our place within the expansive empire of DH. We did not arrive nor were we converted: we simply acquiesced. As a label DH appears to have largely supplanted “humanities computing” and taken over much of the “new media”. But then, are there digital humanists and digital humanists? Do we recognize ourselves in the Twitter happy digital “insurgents” that Stanley Fish describes in his “tri(blo)gy” on the digital humanities? Fish takes a half-playful dig at humanities’ digital turn (NY Times, 26.12.2011-01.02.2012), noting incidentally that English departments are turning out to be the new battle grounds. [There are] two visions of the digital humanities project — the perfection of traditional criticism and the inauguration of something entirely new — correspond to the two attitudes digital humanists typically strike: (1) we’re doing what you’ve always been doing, only we have tools that will enable you to do it better; let us in, and (2) we are the heralds and bearers of a new truth and it is the disruptive challenge of that new truth that accounts for your recoiling from us. It is the double claim always made by an insurgent movement. We are a beleaguered minority and we are also the saving remnant. Fish’s digital humanist, thus, must be the maker rather than the user: almost none of us engaged in the academic practice of the humanities and the social sciences can escape the fact that the disciplines increasingly exist in the condition of digital operability. But one guesses from the way that the argument progresses, the digital humanist is more digital than humanist. The argument is about the sophistication of the tools that allow us to process and visualize. Fish’s conclusion, however, is fairly definite: But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play. Nothing ludic in what I do or try to do. I have a lot to answer for. (NYTimes, Jan 23) Fish is pointedly disregarding here the possibility that the deployment of digital tools might result in the perception of new problems for purely human consideration: that the near-limitless powers of aggregation and consolidation that computers provide might in fact locate another – or many – of such singularities that he bases his critical practice on. Making and Using Perhaps we should say that the true digital humanists are those who are makers as well as users: at any rate, not just users. The tools themselves are also in general made available for others: digital humanists (by and large) are nothing if not generous. but the nature of the tool is that it is suited to particular ends. Knives are knives and hammers, hammers: one rarely suffices to perform the task of the other. and if one finds that one really needs a stapler, then neither is of much use. Let us give an example from music archiving. As part of our efforts, we have the unexceptionable task of converting analogue sound to a digital signal and then storing it in a manner which facilitates cognition and access. We use commercial software packages which convert the digital signal into the appropriate storage format as demanded by internationally approved archival standards. Most of the functions of the (highly expensive) software packages (such as Adobe Audition or Sound Forge) are of little use to us as archivists of course: but in case a particularly noisy recording needs to be cleared up for some non-archival purpose, one can use a number of very broad based functions that anticipate most of the needs that one may have. There are also collaborative free-source softwares that we might have used if we were just digitizing an analogue recording for our personal use. Instead of spending large sums of money buying an Adobe package, we could just download Audacity: