Towards a Mobilized Humanities: On Making Do and Nimble Tents (Video)

Transcript

It all begins — at least for me,
in terms of these types of projects
and socio-technical formations
that allow us to do the impossible
— when I and a team of others,
a group of others
decided that digital humanities--.
How many of you have heard
of digital humanities?
How many? Oh!
A good number of people.
Alright, cool.
So [Inaudible]
decided that digital humanities
community at a global scale
was representing itself
as being this kind of European,
and North American, Canadian,
and Australian formation
while the rest of the world
was being ignored.
There was a map done around that time
by Melissa Terras
and [Inaudible] really quick here.
Global DH,
should come up on Google Images.
Oh, map.
There it is.
There's this map is circulating
around the world
showing you where the centers
of digital humanities are.
So this is the only representation
at this particular time.
This is about eight or nine years ago.
That is giving you a sense
of how digital humanities
is being practiced around the world.
By focusing on centers, though,
it creates this huge, vast
landscape of yellow spaces
where apparently nothing's happening.
Now, of course, many of us go back home
and work with the global south,
we knew that that was not simply the case
That there was a lot
of digital humanities activity
that this map makes invisible
by focusing on centers.
Now the reason is that, well,
that's not exactly how digital humanities
is produced in the global south.
So we decided to do our own map.
And this one was the first time
I ever tried to do
one of these social experiments
where I was trying to latch on
to these kinds
of crowdsourcing formations.
But do it in a funky way
so that we could achieve what we want.
A representation of digital humanities
around the planet
that focused on the people
and the projects
that were being produced
around the planet. In order to do so,
I
sent out a tweet with a link
to a spreadsheet on Google Sheets —
Google Sheets was already around,
it's like eight or nine years ago
— asking my friends on Twitter to help me
fill out this spreadsheet
with the projects around the world.
There were several tasks on this parti--.
Each representing a region of the world,
and we use the categories defined
by the United Nations [Inaudible] list.
Stay away from trouble.
Identities can be a difficult subject
to discuss on social media,
as we all know.
So we just said
we're just going to grab
the UN [Inaudible]
to describe the regions of world.
The Middle East,
Australasia, South America, et cetera.
And well
that tweet then started circulating.
People started coming in.
I asked further
if somebody could help me translate
that tweet into other languages.
I myself could translate it
into French, Spanish, German
and Italian.
Others helped me
translate it into Arabic,
into Portuguese.
As my network,
I think, started growing,
the tweet started circulating
and then all of a sudden
this master spreadsheet
starts filling up.
Next thing you know,
I am sitting on 250 projects,
or something like this,
that are really good,
and they're all around the world.
And
obviously, I can't really represent
250 projects really well
and it's going to
disturb the equilibrium.
So I decided amongst the same people
that helped me fill it out,
I was going to create a pool of editors.
And they were each going to pick
eight projects.
It was around this time, also,
when I started seeing
that I needed a story.
So obviously I was saying, okay, let's--
a story that a lot of people know around
the world. This Jules Verne's
travel around the world in 80 days.
So I said we're going to do it like this.
So eight projects by region
and we're going to do it in one summer.
We're just going to visit one project
each day.
In that way,
the whole world will get a sense
of what is happening
in the rest of the world
because I knew that every time
one of these thoughts
popped up,
the people in that countries
were going to circulate the whole project
just to show that they too
had a project here.
And this happened in the summer of 2014
or something like that.
After the team selected
the eight projects,
we went around the world for eighty days.
And each day
a different project from around the world
was highlighted.
This, of course, was
an exercise in building
an impossible community,
a community of scholars
working in each of the continents
of the planet.
My favorite one is, of course,
the Online Dictionary of Cook Islands.
If you know
a little bit of geography,
Cook Islands are tiny.
But even in that island in the Pacific,
there were folks already
trying to do some digital humanities work.
Completely
ignorant of the sort of activities
that were happening around the world
and not anymore.
After we finish this project,
of course, I'm
a young graduate student
right now,
I believe that I am capable
of doing impossible things.
Which can be a dangerous thing.
Something I had to fight over the past
decade to tame my own arrogance.
We'll get to that.
Because I know, of course,
also that our society
was starting to be eaten away
by San Francisco arrogent code bros.
That was super evident at that time.
It is now, I think, mainstream knowledge
in our time.
But after this I
said, okay, so we need to start map
all of the world's knowledge.
That was part of the arrogance
that needed to be tamed down.
And I found other people
that actually were also interested
in mapping out
all of the world's knowledge.
We needed to understand
how the material record was constructed.
We were younger and graduate students
or junior faculty.
We've given up on the dreams of
mapping out the world's knowledge.
But obviously the world has some--
knowledge, has a material reality,
whether it's analog or it's digital.
There is a finite number
of documents in the planet.
There is a finite number of books
in the library here.
How many books that we have here?
AUDIENCE: Four and a half million.
Four and a half million books.
That is a finite number.
The aggregate number of books
in all the libraries of the world
is also finite,
and the digital is now less ethereal.
Sorry, no, it's not.
It's not more ethereal than this.
It's just as material as this.
There's a finite number of bytes
and files all around the world.
And if we're just
looking at PDFs or databases,
that is also a finite number,
and we know that that is where
the world's knowledge is held
and we wanted to map that out.
So we decided to do several things.
Several of us at that point —
I was transitioning to my first job
as a librarian,
which is the perfect place to work at
if you want to map out the world's
knowledge —
we became friends
with the pirate librarians.
We became--
this is a bunch of eastern Europeans
in Croatia
and Ukraine, Kazakhstan
and Tajikistan
that have built
libraries that are larger than ours
on the digital scale,
mostly by
taking or freeing, as they call it,
the knowledge held by what they call
the knowledge cartels.
Elsevier, Proquest, et cetera.
The best of kind is, of course, Sci-Hub,
who figure out that
you don't need the files.
All you need is the passwords of people
who already have access
to those documents.
So they created database of passwords.
Fantastic.
Now you can find anything
you ever needed there in those libraries.
So we started a series of conferences
to hang out with them.
They have--
one of my best friends speaks Russian,
which is needed
if you want to hang out
with the community of pirates.
The other community,
we wanted to hang out
was publishers themselves,
so we started hanging out
with a bunch of publishers
to understand what their game was like.
But the one project
we started to throw funding around
with the help of the Sloan Foundation
was one in which we wanted to understand
all the syllabi in the world.
If texts have a finite reality,
we wanted to
understand what texts were being taught
in English language.
So this project started around
six years ago, seven years ago.
At that time, we had like--
we sent out spiders
into the internet to collect,
it was at that point
1,000,000.2 documents
that came back to us.
Spiders are this little robots
that do this searching for you
instead of you going
and downloading a PDF one at a time.
These spiders just go out there,
find anything
that you
already told that "looks
like a syllabus" brings it back.
Obviously, it's
going to bring a lot of trash.
So we use a little bit
of machine learning.
It was early back in those days
to actually sort out the
trash from the wheat.
What do you get?
The wheat from the chaff?
Sorry, I'm not American.
I get the idiomatic expressions
all wrong.
So eventually we ended.
The original database
had 900,000 syllabi,
but once we had it,
then we did another process
that we know in digital humanities
called citation extraction.
Then we can get
what documents are being cited
in those syllabi,
eventually putting them all in a database
and allowing people then to
browse through them.
What you're seeing now
is the 2.0 version of this.
Much cleaner
than the one we made at the lab
and carried on by another team
but the same method and same idea.
This is the list of
the top texts being taught
in the English language.
If you click on one of these tags
so you can find out what
is being taught next to it.
So this is the Republic by Plato, it's
usually taught
next to these other texts
and tells you how many--
what is the score
or frequency of these texts being taught,
where they're being taught.
And my favorite thing about it, it
actually creates a map of knowledge.
So this is the Republic
right here, close to it
are the dots that are being taught--
anything-- any dot size in the case
that is being--
if it's big circle,
it means it's taught a lot.
The circles that are close to
it means they're usually taught with it.
So this-- around this area
cluster the ideas of
cluster, the other texts
that are being taught along with Plato
in an area we call philosophy.
The words obviously were added by, well,
the second team.
There was an earlier version
of this map in which we did work.
But
here is
kind of a sense of
at least human knowledge in English
and the texts that are being used,
the data still there and around.
But anyways
for us, for this story I'm telling you,
this was a process of making connections
that you were not making before.
And
since we were interested
not only in what was being taught,
but in everything else.
this was, of course, to be the prelude
of understanding the world's knowledge.
And in a sense, it involved
a really weird
combination of players in the team.
Because in order to get the data,
we had to combine a coder
with a librarian,
with a metadata librarian,
with a couple of faculty
focused on epistemology, and, of course,
the person who became the lead
of the second part of this,
a guy who works in communications.
All right.
Moving on.
By then,
by the time this is in the first stage,
which I cannot show you,
we've already formed what is called, now,
the Xpmethod Group
or the Group
for Experimental Methods
and Humanistic Research.
There are four founders to this.
But now the group has grown
to about eight moderators.
They're--.
The founders are me, the Russian guy.
He's not Russian, he's Moldovan.
He gets so angry
every time I call him Russian.
He's not Russian, he's from Moldova.
Dennis Tenen, me, Manan Ahmed,
who is a specialist of medieval
South Asia,
are the three founders that survive.
And now we have Francis Negron,
who focuses on Puerto Rico.
We have Kaiama Glover,
who does Haitian history,
and Durba Mitra,
who does sexuality in South Asia
as moderators.
And in the past seven years,
this has been the group
that grew out of these ideas
of understanding the world's knowledge
in experimenting with weird things.
By now has about
37 projects cataloged here done
both by the moderators
and by people
who have contributed to the lab.
This group meets every Friday
or has met every Friday
for the past seven years
from three to five.
Our secret — I will reveal the secret
as my story develops —
is the consistency of which we meet
and the fact that we
try to focus on prototypes,
which is now in the description of the
about page.
We focus on rapid prototyping.
Part of what has made us so productive
is the fact that we don't marry ourselves
to long term projects.
So even the open syllabus project,
which was really cool,
it was even being picked up by the
[Inaudible]
claiming that
the Academy and that,
of course, we're Marxist.
Marx's Communist Manifesto
is the fourth most taught text.
And Aha, we got you. This kind of thing.
Even though
that was actually getting
a lot of attention,
we needed to divorce ourselves from it
and pass it on.
So that we can remain nimble
so we can remain flexible
so we can move from one thing to another,
if we were going to pursue
our original mission.
To experiment,
to try to understand
the world's knowledge.
And
we still are
meeting every Friday from three to five,
I'm going to move on
to some of the other projects
that followed
after we decided
that we were going to stay nimble
and that we were going to stay minimal.
Two concepts
that actually make up the core of what
our philosophy has been come to known
minimal computing and nimble tents.
The future of the lab once the
founders, the two founders
who started the lab with me,
get tenure —
one of them already did
like about three weeks ago,
and we're hoping the second one,
Denis, gets tenure in this month
— we'll probably grow into a center.
And we'll probably change the name
to Group for Experimental and Mobilized
Methods in the Humanities.
And you'll see why in a second.
All right.
Around that time,
I continued exploring the pirates, and
that was around the time
when the
ideas of minimal computing
were being sort of explored.
This was around the time we met.
I was--
I traveled to Cuba
and I learned that they were doing this.
They had this really weird and surrealist
ecosystem for producing knowledge
and sharing it.
So, for example,
there were journals
that were being "published"
by circulating them in email chains,
and that was how
the journal was produced.
There-- the way they were getting access
to articles and essays in
their fields
was by having potluck parties
for people who came from outside Cuba.
This is before
the internet opens up.
At that point,
there was only 10% penetration
to the intranet,
which is an internet
that they built just for Cubans.
And there was 1% of the population
had access to the internet,
which is the internet we all know.
Now, people come from the outside
would bring-- they were
asked, like I was asked
when I visited, to bring USBs
full of essays from JSTOR.
And I would get a list
of themes and categories,
and I would just fill
my USB and I would arrive, and of course.
And then I'm welcomed into a party
and they do soup and the rum,
and then everybody brings their own USBs
and everybody gets the essays.
And this is how the library circulation
was operating in Cuba
at this particular moment,
especially for people
who are more leftist
than the Castros, the Black radicals,
the LGBT community, et cetera.
People for whom
the revolution was incomplete.
Now
coming back with this kind of exposure
to this strange system,
I started combining our ideas
of like global knowledge
with the differences
in global infrastructure.
I started understanding that everywhere
in the world, knowledge production,
learning and research,
happen in different environments,
and it was important for anybody
who wanted to understand
what the world
looks like in terms of its knowledge
to understand
how different
the material conditions of that knowledge
distribution is.
So, of course,
nobody anymore
does global without doing local.
So we needed to understand
what were the differences in New York.
And this is where the Rikers Bot
project comes from.
Rikers Bot was the
social-technical experiment
in which we partnered with social work
at Columbia University and Rikers Island
and the government of the city
to be able to go on Saturdays
to Rikers Island.
Where our young Black and Brown
kids are being unjustly imprisoned.
To teach them how to code enough
and tell stories enough
that they could do
bots on Twitter
to talk about their stories,
their lives within Rikers Island.
So of course,
the reason we're going
there is because we know that right
a few blocks right away from where
Columbia sits,
there's this place
where nobody has access to computers,
except for the cops, the authorities.
Where the kids
have zero technology
other than the memory of technology.
So we're teaching them
how to code on blackboards,
which they do have, and chalk.
And they're writing their code
and their tweets
in little notebooks with little pencils
that we brought.
So we have to wait.
The cycle is
they keep the little notebooks
for a week. And when we come back on
the next Saturday, we
pick up the notebooks.
We take them back to Columbia and our own
graduate students
transcribe them into into text.
And the code that they wrote
on their little notebooks,
they transcribe it into the computer
so they can be actionable.
We, of course,
clean up the code a little bit
because it is very hard to code
without actually seeing
what the results are of the code.
You can only see the results
after you put them in the machine,
but they were learning
and it wasn't that much tweaking
that we had to do.
What the bot did was,
of course, randomized
so that they would be anonymous.
So that
it was impossible for the authorities
to know who tweeted what.
We had to make some compromises
with the authority about some censorship,
like authorities
didn't want the kids to say anything
like fuck the police that directly.
They're really sensitive
about particularly that phrase.
Now what we get, though,
is a series of
critical tweets that actually,
they're reflective of the society,
reflective of the exercise,
critical of the prison system
and the judicial system,
combined with personal stories
of suffering and joy
within this very oppressive environment
in which we keep our Brown
and Black young kids.
Well, I hope that--
just so I make sure that these ideas
are accumulating with you
as the story progresses
because I'm using a frame of a story arc.
And now we have arrived at the moment
in which we understand different
infrastructures and different formations
that are possible
within both
a local and a global difference
in infrastructure.
And documents
and knowledge can be produced
from many different angles,
depending how you are clever
about going about
using the resources that you have at hand
and overcoming constraints.
All right.
So there are no computers
inside the prison.
Well, bring a notebook
and then we'll take out the notebooks
and then change the temporality.
And then
the kids will be able to tweet
if we do it this other way.
All right. Moving on.
I'm going to skip a bunch
of projects because,
like I said,
there are 37 projects up in here.
I'm going to move
right up to PR Mapathon,
which is only about three years old.
Let me see.
PR Mapathon NYT.
Here it is.
So this is a picture of the first one.
This is the one organized
at Columbia University Libraries.
What was PR Mapathon?
Well after Hurricane Maria devastated
the island of Puerto Rico and Dominica,
among others.
We were meeting
one of those Fridays,
three to five, in our lab,
and I'm talking to Moacir,
I'm talking to Manan and Jeremiah.
And in particular--
at that particular table
that weekend happened to be guys.
We have--
although we have,
we tried to have a balance,
that table consisted of a few guys.
So please don't kill me. Don't judge me.
Don't cancel me on Twitter.
And the guys were like,
we got to do something.
What are we going to do?
And I think it was Manan or Jeremiah,
I can't remember, saying,
you guys remember
how people got together
after the Tibet earthquake
and started using open street maps,
task manager to help rebuild?
We should do something like that
for Puerto Rico.
Then our conversation advances.
He says, Yeah,
but it shouldn't only be us
because then we're only going
to fix a small part of the map.
We need more than that.
Oh, by the way, thing is that
in these kinds of situations, the map--
you need reliable maps for the aid
workers, rescue workers
to be able to do their job.
My problem is
sometimes these maps fall out of date,
sometimes making the work
of relief harder.
So mapping is
something that is always needed
after a disaster.
There was a lot of mapping
happen around Katrina,
there's a lot of mapping happen
after most of the disasters of the world.
There's constant community of people
doing this kind of relief mapathon.
But what we came up with
was something that was not
particularly tried before.
So we know
the world,
the anonymous community
of internet
denizens come together
in times of disaster
to do this kind of thing.
But what we wanted to do
was actually take that same activity,
but organize
it all around the existing
infrastructure of libraries.
So what I created was a step
by step guide
while we were organizing ours,
getting a room, getting pizza,
getting posters.
We were trying to organize ours
in six days
because of course,
the Red Cross needs that yesterday.
So while I'm organizing mine,
I'm also sharing with colleagues
in other libraries
the step by step instructions
on how to organize it.
Things like talk to your administrator,
try to secure
support from administrator early
so that you can have
the communications office in your library
help you with the posters,
help you with securing a room, et cetera.
You know, common sense stuff,
but until you see it
all in one place, it's
not that common sense.
Talk on social media, learn the tool, or
talk to your GIS librarian.
They probably already know
how to use the tool,
bring them into the conversation,
et cetera.
And this document that I created starts
being shared on Facebook
and on Twitter by librarians.
Eventually, 25 universities
in the United States of America,
mostly libraries,
joined
to create the same event
we created at Columbia,
in their own universities.
And they all kind of look like this.
Ours had like about
150 people in two rooms of the library.
Here you can see
pictures of different teams
doing it in different universities.
This is 2017.
All around the United States,
people came together.
One of the things that connects
this narrative arc I'm building for you
is that
we were taking advantage
of structure that already existed.
We knew, yes, it's cool
to have anonymous internet
users fix maps.
What I think is even more powerful
is to convince
the whole professional institution,
a whole profession
that they already have
the infrastructure to do the same
and they can do it more effectively.
They have rooms,
they have communication offices,
they have a little budget for pizza.
That's something libraries always do
have.
And lo and behold, in one month
and a half, we had
rebuilt the whole map of Puerto Rico.
I was in communication
with the Red Cross in Puerto Rico
since this was being developed.
They were printing out the maps
we were making in big sheets because this
there's no internet in the places
they needed to go to,
so they needed to print out
everything we were doing.
They had just parked themselves
in the Univision
building in the center of San Juan.
They finally, eventually
thanked us in a footnote
on the report they made
about their rescue efforts.
All right.
So
again, and none of this was done
actually
by asking anybody to learn anything.
Even the workshops themselves
for how to use this tool
actually took advantage, leverage--
I'm starting to sound platonic, right?
Plato always said,
we never learn anything new,
we just remember what we already knew.
The workshop itself consists of teaching
like a room like about this
in all of like 10 minutes or 15 minutes,
how to fill out a form
and how to draw geometries on an image.
Because that's what
the mapping consist of.
You saying, this looks like a building,
so I'm going to draw a square
with a mouse, and that is it.
That is all that is
needed to do the work that is
needed to reconstruct maps.
On a conclude now with
Torn Apart/ Separados,
which I am sorry for those of you
who are already in the
workshop this morning
because you're already seen it
and everything I'm going to say now,
you already heard.
The idea here,
the project here was started--.
Actually, that's not the concluding one,
I'll have a final note about Lorgiafest.
This project was done in 2018,
in the summer.
And we started doing it
at the moment in which the images of kids
being separated from their mothers
and their fathers
and their cousins at the border
was circulating around social media.
And all of the United States,
right wing and left wing, were shocked
by what they were seeing and angry
and nobody wanted
those kids, that I know,
separated from their parents.
And of course,
the discourse about what caused
it was different,
perhaps, in different political spheres.
But the sentiment that this was cruel
and wrong was shared by most Americans.
And we knew that was a moment
in which we needed to act.
Had a similar conversation.
Manan, are we're going to do something?
Yes, let's do something.
In this particular case,
the social arrangement
that we set up was different.
In this one,
I put together a team of seven people,
three graduate students, one postdoc,
three faculty, and one librarian.
Two-- 1.5 librarians
because the postdoc
was working in a library.
So two librarians and
three faculty
and they all
had a role that I knew
they could play well.
I knew also that this team
did not need to be taught
how to do things.
And let me show
you a little bit about what
the project we built is.
And then ask you —
I did this exercise
already in the morning workshop,
so I won't bother those who already--
and please don't-- no spoilers.
The project consists
of a series of visualizations,
a series of essays
written by experts and scholars
who specialize in border
studies, migration studies,
a map of allies,
directory of allies
in the United States
that help immigrants, an essay written
by the team itself
reflecting on what we had just done.
It was done in three languages
and the point of the project
was to represent ICE
infrastructure,
especially the carceral infrastructure.
This has a volume two,
which does the ICE financial structure,
but this one was trying to figure out
the physical material reality of ICE,
immigration and control enforcement.
Now each of these orange dots
represents an ICE facility,
and there's data
behind each of the orange dots.
The blue dots represent
where the kids were,
where they had the kids.
As opposed to the orange dots
that were for adult populations,
we decided not to share
too much information
about where the kids were.
And we can talk about that
in the question and answer session.
This visualization, for example,
takes you to what
these places look like
in your neighborhood.
Do we get a lot of e-mails?
People were like,
I didn't know that in my neighborhood--.
Just to please our social scientist
friends-- .
Sorry. Charts.
Just to please
our social scientist friends,
we had this kind of your typical
social scientific data breakdown.
Here's the average daily population
of immigrants
being incarcerated in this country
just for being an immigrant,
at least in 2018.
Here
is a sense of the essays
that were written by experts,
their scholarly essays.
Here's our own essay
on the research we did
in which we included both reflections
about what we had just done
and also things that we
couldn't put into our final project,
For example, during our research,
it came up that people were using
Google Maps
and Facebook groups
to ask about their kids.
This is a lady on Google Maps,
on the entry for Southwest key
asking information about her daughter.
This is kind of information
we couldn't represent on the map,
so we wanted to include some of it
in there.
In any case,
all right, give me an estimate.
How long did it take to build this and
how much money did we spend building it?
Sorry, this is two with the money.
Let's just focus on one.
How long a team of seven people
with jobs?
I mean, there are people in the room
who know the answer to this.
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
Six weeks?
It's close,
in the number six.
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
Yeah, 6.5 days.
That last day coincided with a Sunday,
so we took a moment to breathe.
Respect the Lord.
They're a bunch of Chritians.
This was done in 6.5 days
with a budget of zero.
We didn't have money.
The factulty just stopped
writing their books,
the students stopped
writing their dissertations,
and me as a librarian,
you can close your ears,
I called in sick,
took a couple of days vacation.
Now this is what the workshop
this morning focused on.
And what was the secret?
How do you do this kind of thing
in six days? And the answer is complex.
And of course, those of you who
were in the workshop--
but it has something in common
with this narrative arc
that I'm trying to make.
The thing is that
most of our universities
actually reward people
to collaborate internally,
interdisciplinary through centers
or internal rewards like promotion
or tenure.
If you prove
that you can be interdisciplinary,
that's like a hot thing these days.
But then you have to work
with your own team inside the university.
That's not necessarily a bad thing,
but there are some projects in which
that's not going to be possible.
People do collaborate
outside the same university.
What we call
trans-- No.
What is the word? There is a word.
I can't remember.
But it's when you collaborate
in multiple universities,
those happen with the grants.
Usually, grants
reward you
for actually working with a team
that is working with
several universities.
What we don't have
is any mechanism of reward
to actually incentivize
something like this.
There is nothing that exists
that will incentivize
a team of seven people
from seven different universities
— well, two of us where at Columbia
and the rest were in other universities
— to come together
and drop what they're doing
to work on something like this.
Let me let me restate this.
This is also a scholarly project.
Some people
see this as a political project.
This is-- they were-- actually we know.
You know how we know
it's scholarly and not political?
Because at some point
people started asking us,
some activists
and immigration lawyers say,
but what do you feel we should do?
And we didn't feel like that was our job.
Our job as scholars,
not activists, scholars,
was to represent the present.
To tell the history of the present.
This is the data,
and this is what we're seeing.
Now, people, of course, draw
political conclusions from this
because nobody wants to
see that ICE is everywhere.
Nobody wants to realize
that this infrastructure
that is not beholden to the people
the same way that other
branches of the executive are,
is everywhere.
That immigrants are in a regime of fear
in all states.
That the border is not just this line
that divides
the United States from Mexico.
It is everywhere.
But this is scholarship.
And this piece of scholarship does--
cannot be produced
in the current redeems of promotion
and tenure.
Unless you're willing to
connect things that are--
have not been connected before.
I would argue that that is also
the only way that one can understand
what it's like
to be an immigrant here in this country.
If you don't connect
sort of
what's going on in your own locality
with the stories
you're hearing on the news,
then you're blind to what it is like to
be somebody like me.
I will finish
with the last
project-- with it because we just did it
like two weeks ago or three weeks ago.
And again,
I would argue the same thing for this one
because this one was also
seen as political.
And I would argue
this is just us being scholars
and doing what we do.
Scholarship.
This is the Ethnic Studies Rise Project,
which also had
a Twitter component called Lorgiafest.
The Twitter component
became what I--
as far as I know,
the largest book club
ever to have taken place
on Twitter around an academic book
until I'm disabused of that notion.
This project, Ethnic Studies
Rise and Lorgiafest arose
after the denial of tenure of Lorgia
García Peña at Harvard University.
Student protests ensued
and you see a picture
in Ethnic Studies Rise of the
of the student protests
that were demanding,
sort of hitting their heads
against the wall,
demanding that she would--
that the president would rescind
the denial of tenure.
Everybody in the field--
she had worn many awards,
everybody respected the book.
It was like an open and close case.
It was like
we expected this one to just go through
because she had done everything
that you can possibly do.
She's a Black Latina woman, though.
And that Black Latina
womanhood hit a wall at some point.
And it's not true that Harvard doesn't
give tenure to anybody.
That is simply not true,
although that is the myth
that was circulating.
Well, there we were,
she was denied tenure
and the students
were protesting, demanding
not only that she'd be reinstated,
but that the Harvard finally creates
an Ethnic Studies Department.
So we decided to do what we do.
In this case,
I was working with Raj Chetty
at San Diego
and Katarina Seligmann at Spelman.
I think it's Spelman.
I know this is being recorded,
sorry Katrina
if I don't remember your university.
I know [Inaudible] Columbia people.
So in a matter of a couple of weeks,
I called Duke Press.
I got into conversation with them, say,
Release the book open access.
And then I went on Twitter
and convinced everybody
to join us for one afternoon
to discuss the book.
I didn't say come and praise the book.
I say, let's discuss the book.
And Ken Wissoker
saw that this would be
a good gesture of solidarity
and support for their own author
because that is what a press
editor should do — support their authors.
So he opened the book at a--
possibly at a profit
loss, open access for just a month.
And then they gave the print version
a discount.
And then a lot of people got
their hands on the book,
and a lot of people read the book,
and people came to Twitter.
And joined us in
what became the lar--,
I have the full archive,
what became the largest book club.
Former MLA
president, a bunch of famous faculty
and everybody — again,
we did not say come and praise Lorgia.
Come and discuss
but what ended up happening was
that people were actually finding
enormous value in the book.
Scholarly,
finding a major
intellectual contribution.
I won't go into the details
of her argument. That's for her to do.
But it is a really good book.
It's that kind of stuff that
connects the unconnected for you.
And that kind of change--
makes you change your mind about the way
you thought about certain things.
In any case, the Twitter
fest, which is open to the public,
was then accompanied
by a scholarly discussion by experts.
So it's a little balance between
what the general public
and our general colleagues think
and what some of the most
prominent figures in the in the field
think about both the book
and about ethnic studies.
This is it.
This was the last one.
This week, I'm working on on a project on
Hollywood. Hashtag Hollywood's so White.
We're going to do a study
— again, neutral in the sense
that we're just being--
studying the evidence at hand—
a study of
diversity and gender in Hollywood,
the Golden Globes.
That's kind of like a little fun thing.
Except of course,
it tells a very serious story,
a story of representation.
To conclude, most of
these projects, perhaps not all, perhaps
not the open syllabus,
have a couple of things in common.
They are done
outside of the reward mechanisms,
traditional reward mechanisms.
They are done fast.
They are done by combining things
that you already know how to do.
They all--
all of them combined
both an understanding of society
and technology.
You can understand society
and not technology.
You won't be able to do this.
You can understand technology
without understanding society.
Nope, you're not going to have it.
So you need at least
some people in your team
that have a good sense of both
in order to do this,
as something
that all of these things have in common.
They have something in common
that I cannot get into too much detail,
which is minimal computing
because it takes a lot to explain
what is minimal computing.
What it--
how do you reduce
the amount of computation
while having the maximum impact
in the shortest amount of time?
It's a kind of a rather
technical conversation. But
actually all of these projects are.
The only thing I will say
about minimal computing
is that it is a way of doing
computing that takes into consideration
these different infrastructures
that I was talking about earlier.
All of these projects are very aware
of what is the precise
infrastructure that we're working
with at that particular moment.
And with that,
I will conclude
we can have a good conversation among us.
You can ask me questions
about anything that provoked you
while I was telling you this story.
Thank you.
[Audience Applause].
Here I'm going to put the--.
This is my own personal
professional page.
This is my avatar, the hummingbird.
Tiny little bird of war that moves
his wings really fast
so he can stay still.
I like it.
Some people call me a donkey, though,
so it depends who you ask.
Did you guys get the part
about mobilized in the end?
I mean, I did
promise you in the beginning
that I would explain to you why
it went from experimental to mobilize.
Obviously,
the last sort of projects
have always been about--
have now been about mobilizing quicker
a group of academics.
Librarians, students, or faculty.
It's getting scary
because people now
trust me to mobilize them.
One of these days
is going to go all wrong.
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
Ha!
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
Look, man, people have been killing
each other in dark
alleys over the past
20 years about what
the definition of digital humanities is.
So somebody made a bot for
everybody who has ever had a definition.
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
Yeah, but I can not remember
but I know that if I Google this.
It might be this.
What is Scotty that did it?
Might be Scotty.
He's a good friend.
Ha! I tricked you.
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
All right, I'll give you mine.
Just make sure the camera glitches
in this particular moment.
So
it's what happens when you got somebody
like me as a Ph.D.
in English
and comparative literature,
University of Virginia, decides
to learn how to code.
And
I am both going to apply everything
that I know about close
reading and critique and
everything I learn about culture
and my training as a humanist to
have it bear on technology.
But I'm also going to do the reverse.
I'm also going to use technology
in order to be able
to do
what I was trained to do
in a different key.
Not in a better key,
because I really hope that most of us
still just stay writing books
and writing essays
because I enjoy reading them
and they actually help me think a lot.
But some of us
actually can use that technology
to do things like what you just saw.
Now, for the most part,
it has been used,
originally,
as you saw in that first project.
It was affirmation
that started-- that grew out of--
as a brand
that grew out of
clusters of universities
with a lot of resources
in the North Atlantic world.
So it was one of those things
where, like when we did the around
DH map,
I was kind of like--
I was sort of inspired
by something the Comintern--
one of the legends of the Comintern,
is that when the Comintern formed in
Soviet Union
and they sent out
a bunch of Russian diplomats
around the world
to go preach the gospel of communism,
the first committee came back
and said they have communism!
They just don't call it that.
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
In where?
AUDIENCE: [Inaudible]
Oh, it's a good exercise.
So, for example, here's
where the humanities comes in.
It's not a bad way
to define digital humanities.
And I'm sorry, I have to do this
because a lot of people saw this
project and said,
that's not digital humanities,
that a map--
a political map of the current situation
in the United States.
This map is supposed to represent
[Inaudible] represents
where the kids are.
These are the-- mostly it's trying to
indicate number of kids
and region of kids
in different facilities.
But the one thing we don't want to do
and we didn't do this in the front--
in the home page
and we didn't do it
here is actually give you precise data.
The reason we didn't want to do
is we made an ethical decision,
political decision not to do so.
Even though
most of us are Anarcho-Marxists
or the work of the worst kind
like Bernie diehards, we did not feel
that the left was actually acting
in a particular-- in a way that was--
I think the left was
making some mistakes.
In particular
showing up at some of these places
to protest, therefore a) perhaps
attracting more state violence
to where the kids were.
It's a risk we didn't want to take.
Some fool does something stupid and then
military or police force
comes down to take care of it.
This is definitely not good for the kids
that are already suffering enormously
from the state violence that is
already being perpetrated on them.
Yeah, that was
mainly what we felt
the left was doing wrong
that we didn't want to contribute to.
Also, but we also wanted to
just also not prescribe activity, we felt
this is one way to make that data
not accessible.
But in this particular map,
that's the logic for why
there are dots in the front
don't give you the data.
But in this one, the dots move
every time
you try to hover your mouse around it.
What this is representing, though, comes
from a humanistic sensibility.
So a social scientist
who had the same ethical concerns
as we did
would've probably stopped at
we're just not going to share the data.
But then everything else
remains empirical and everything else
remains accurate to the to the truth.
But a humanist is actually thinking
also about reading
not only the reading of prose,
but the reading of images.
And what we're doing here
is actually representing,
in a humanistic way,
something that is happening
on the ground, which is that Trump
and the administration and ICE,
is actually moving the kids around
so that the immigration lawyers
and social workers can't find them.
And also because the overall project,
and some of the essays
touch on this,
is actually pointing to a fact,
which is that the immigration policies
of zero tolerance
of the Trump administration
tie directly to the concept
of the Zapatistas.
Of disappearances.
Which is important to anybody
who studies Latin America.
We have a--
there's a horrible history of people
who just disappear,
mostly intellectuals
from the left, activists from the
left, in many of the countries
of Latin America.
When the United States, we feel
there's a similar policy
to disappear immigrants.
Make us invisible.
Make ICE an invisible force,
but also one
that actually takes immigrants
away from visibility
so that the American public
doesn't see that we live here.
And this is one of the things
that this
graphic interface is trying to do.
It's actually trying to represent that.
Represent that
moment when you think you see something,
you can't grasp it.
There's a very similar--.
I didn't show you this one,
but this is a very--.
This is in volume two, which
handles the money,
and you can see
a social scientists
would never use categories like freeze
or rain.
Rain, for example, describes
how money is raining on this.
This is during the Obama era.
He was no saint.
He's no saint to my devotion
because he was just as much of a jerk
about this as Trump is.
Of course,
the investment in money explodes
in the Trump regiem by the tune of 900%
in 2018.
Who knows what it is now?
It's probably bigger,
obviously, since you see that
the rain is getting bigger.
Each of these circles represents
a contract and a company
and the tune of dollars.
Obviously, a human--
a social
scientists will not call this rain.
They come up with the most boring names.
[Inaudible] and social scientist,
I love you guys,
and I learn a lot from you.
But this is something also,
for example, that a humanist thinks.
This is lines.
Lines represents
the amount of immigrants
that are deported per exit point.
So this is, for example, Newark airport
by year.
So you can change the year here.
972 from Newark
in 2015.
But a humanist shapes this as rifts,
black rifts
that tear apart at the fabric of America.
So the choice comes from people
who have been reading literature
for too long.
And me personally,
I spent most of my life
reading and poetry
of the weirdest variety.
This is the result
of a digital humanities sensibility.
I'll give you another way
to understand this.
Recently,
they invited at Columbia University,
the President, Lee Bollinger.
Oh my god, I'm getting so fired.
He doesn't watch
the literature [Inaudible]
that a good thing.
A task force
on climate change
and they brought one humanist
into the group.
Actually, the colleague
that I'm working on the
project for Hollywood with.
And the scientists were there,
the economist, the finance folks,
the lawyers were there,
a bunch of faculty.
Their top, senior, the best,
superstars — all of them.
All on NPR or CNN.
And they're all here, the task force,
and they're going to--
there's like Columbia University
is going to solve climate change, right?
So the scientists —
I wasn't there at the meeting,
but the way it was described to me
is something
I can understand — scientists
talking about Yes,
and the technology will eventually,
you know,
be able to send little balloons
into the atmosphere
that will clean,
that will patch up the holes and
nuclear fission this and that.
And the finance
people are, of course, like,
Yeah, that sounds good.
That sounds good.
That sounds good —
because they're seeing dollars.
The economists are trying to figure out