“Aliens to Armoires: Philosophical Carpentry”
www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2012/05/29/aliens-to-armoires-philosophical-carpentry/

One of my favorite exercises when starting a workshop about how to use digitized materials in teaching or research is to hand out copies of this or that library item, whatever content it is that is going to start our discussion, and then ask the group to describe what we’re looking at. Inevitably it’s a business card from 1850 or a 1930s photo which they figure out based on the clothing–but, inevitably, no one in the group describes the thing in her hand as an 8 1/2 x 11 inch piece of 20 lb white paper with an image printed on it. As a culture, we just skip that mediation step. So, it makes a great opening to stop and talk about the actual artifact–a piece of paper, a computer screen, whatever the thing in the room with us actually is–before we get to its representational content that’s our actual interest.

For those who haven’t seen it, take a look at Trevor’s recent post on the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation Blog: “All Digital Objects are Born Digital Objects” at blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/05/all-digital-objects-are-born-digital-objects/. As I mentioned to Trevor when I read it, In libraries and museums I’d love to see us cataloging the surrogates we create–photograph, microfiche, digital scan, whatever–as if they are objects in their own right. By not doing that we perpetuate the idea that mediation is invisible and/or transparent and/or inconsequential when we all know much better the moment we stop to think about it. For scholarly DH projects I’d hope it was a given that we’d factor in the mediation, but sometimes its even less present than it was on a repository site.

So yes, there’s an important conversation to have here re. mediation, and thanks to Trevor for initiating it. I guess, for me, all culture and all cultural artifacts are mediated, whether or not they’re digital, so I just want to make sure we learn from the accumulated wisdom about non-digital objects as well.

Susan
@footnotesrising

One last thing that comes to mind, and is evident in our faculty, is that material culture crosses over from humanities into social and even natural sciences (esp. anthropology and archaeology), so we should consider the breadth of the impact of those disciplines when considering objects as well.

I think there is likely loads of stuff from material culture that is on point for bringing into this conversation. What is really exciting about some of the new media studies stuff here is that it’s focus on mediality and materiality of digital objects opens a door to thinking about digital material culture. That is, digital objects are things on a range of levels (inscriptions on physical media, interactions between physical objects, bit level representations, source code, files in file systems, etc).

I am not necessarily pushing Object Oriented Ontology, just trying to stir the pot and see what kinds of studies of objects we might think about working to stitch together. I kicked off with my list, but I think we have already seen a great list in the comments of other areas and fields that have ways of studying the thingyness of things and I am excited to have a bit of a roving conversation that can keep using this discussion thread as a place to pull together and stitch some of these different thing focused study approaches together.

trevor, would you be up for a conversation about the potential importance of materiality and objects to the digital humanities and the ways in which that is or isn’t inter/cross-disciplinary (and which disciplines it touches upon or draws from)–and what people’s basic questions are–as well as a free-for-all bibliographic exercise? as someone who is as much (or more) a material culturalist as a digital humanist, i’d certainly benefit from a better understanding of what dh folks most need to learn from material culture, as well as what they tend to take away from their intellectual encounters with things, stuff, objects, artifacts (all of which mean something slightly different, btw) as well as from the scholarship they’ve encountered to date. i’m sure folks who are only now beginning to think about materiality would benefit from such a conversation as well.

(i’d hate to be perceived as sounding like i’m defending turf or attempting to pull rank–yeah, people do get phds in this stuff & the winterthur program is 60 years old this year– but on the other hand, i’d hate to see dhers try and reinvent the wheel rather than hack it to greater perfection.)

susan
@footnotesrising

Knappett, Carl. Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005.

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed: It’s a great exercise in asking how a state “sees”.

Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West remains such a touch stone and Latour defines it as compatible with Actor Network Theory

Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities has a lot of focus on objects.