The Age of <i>Datum</i> or Data as a Methodological Paradigm

ABSTRACTThis article illustrates how, like photography in the late nineteenth century, data often possesses an alluring appearance of objectivity which gives it affordance. It reflects on how data has altered methods of investigations and, while rejecting its use as a mere indexical trace of information that leads to unequivocal conclusions, advocates for the humanist’s intervention in directing how data is collected, prepared, used, and displayed. The article explores and illustrates three platforms: MediaWiki and its applications, including the Semantic Web; IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), a tool designed to replicate traditional image-comparative methodologies within a digital realm; and FromThePage, a text transcript platform. Finally, the conundrum of web archiving and data preservation is analysed, to reflect on how data has marked a paradigm shift in our perception, expectations, and understanding of methodologies in the humanities.SOMMARIOQuesto articolo illustra come, similmente a quanto accaduto con la fotografia nel diciannovesimo secolo, i dati sono spesso circondati da un’aurea di oggettività che garantisce la loro validità. Si riflette su come i dati abbiano cambiato i metodi di ricerca e, pur escludendo che portino a risultati inequivocabili, auspica un intervento delle ricercatrici e dei ricercatori nella realizzazione degli strumenti digitali attraverso i quali i dati vengono preparati, usati e mostrati. Sono esplorate tre piattaforme: MediaWiki e le sue applicazioni, incluso il web semantico; IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), uno strumento che replica in ambito digitale il tradizionale metodo comparativo delle immagini; FromThePage, una piattaforma per la trascrizione dei testi. In conclusione si riflette sulla questione inerente all’archiviazione online e alla conservazione dei dati, per capire come questi abbiano segnato un cambiamento di paradigma nella percezione, nelle aspettative e nella comprensione delle metodologie in campo umanistico.KEYWORDS: dataSemantic Webdata visualizationdigital methodologiestechnological obsolescencedigital preservationPAROLE CHIAVE: datiweb semanticovisualizzazione datimetodologie digitaliobsolescenza tecnologicaconservazione dati Notes1 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 23 and 27.2 The digital revolution (or turn) has also been called ‘the computational turn’. As noted by Schäfer and van Es, ‘[t]his turn began in the 1950s with the introduction of electronic computers and continues unabated today.’ See Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Karin van Es, The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), p. 13.3 Porter writes that ‘[q]uantification is a social technology.’ Porter, Trust in Numbers, p. 50.4 See Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).5 ‘Data’ will be considered throughout the article as a singular word, since the article explores the ‘condition of data’ as a phenomenon, rather than ‘data’ as a series of single pieces of information in a dataset.6 The significance of the algorithm in today’s social context is eloquently described in Taina Bucher’s book, If … Then: Algorithmic Power and Politic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For an analysis of data as a key factor of a system of control over the user’s action through computational technology, see Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).7 Bucher’s main subject of analysis is the algorithm which reads as well as produces data. Bucher, p. 35.8 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2007), p. 72.9 Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 5.1 (2011) <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html>. All online sources were verified on 14 October 2022.10 The project was released publicly in 2013. There is strong emphasis on the word ‘RAW’ (all caps) in the ‘about’ page of the project’s website <https://www.rawgraphs.io/about>.11 See ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron, ed. by Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).12 See illustrations in Manovich, Cultural Analytics, pp. 6, 179, 225, 237.13 Johanna Drucker, Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), p. 39.14 See Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War (Washington, DC: Philp&Solomons Publishers, 1865), in particular ‘Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter’, Gettysburg, 1865 (albumen silver print).15 Bucher, pp. 52 and 60. In a similar vein, the Internet, the algorithm, and machines in general are surrounded by an aura of magic and incomprehensible knowledge. See also Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).16 The computational metaphor refers to the ‘psychological metaphor’ according to which the computer and the human relationship should be seen as a symbiosis rather than as a prosthetic relationship. The ‘psychological metaphor’ is attributed to two computer scientists: Vannevar Bush, who refers to it in ‘As We May Think’ (first published in The Atlantic Monthly (1945)), and J. C. R. Licklider, who refers to it in his paper ‘Man–Computer Symbiosis’ (first published in IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, March (1960), 4–11). See Paola Castellucci, Dall’ipertesto al web. Storia culturale dell’informatica (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2009), p. 82. At the same time, the word ‘magic’ is often used to refer to the work of machines, algorithms, or the Internet. The professor of Internet law Jonathan Zittrain recently wrote: ‘The web, like the internet, is a collective hallucination, a set of independent efforts united by common technological protocols to appear as a seamless, magical whole’ (emphasis added). Jonathan Zittrain, ‘The Internet Is Rotting’, The Atlantic, 30 June (2021) <https://web.archive.org/web/20210717185114if_/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/>.17 See MediaWiki <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki>; IIIF <https://iiif.io/>; FromThePage <https://fromthepage.com/>.18 According to Morozov (p. 17), the rhetoric of the infallibility of digital tools implies what he called ‘solutionism,’ a tendency to believe that the Internet can solve all problems.19 See Zittrain.20 ‘Relation’ refers here to the possibility of interrelated datasets as known since the 1970s. A relational database is ‘a number of tables connected through shared elements (e.g. MySQL)’. Manovich, p. 132.21 This approach is indebted to more recent discussion on the ‘decolonial turn in data and technology’, as eloquently highlighted by Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejais, ‘The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology Research: What Is at Stake and Where It Is Heading’, Information, Communication & Society, November (2021) <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986102>.22 One aspect that does not receive enough attention here concerns the topic of data and accessibility or assistive technology.23 Crystal Hall, ‘Digital Humanities and Italian Studies: Intersections and Oppositions’, Italian Culture, 37.2 (2020), 97–115.24 Gyuda Armstrong and Emanuela Patti, ‘Italian Studies and the Digital’, Italian Studies, 75.2 (2020), 194–208.25 Umanistica Digitale <https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/index>.26 Research Methods for the Digital Humanities, ed. by lewis levenberg, Tai Neilson, and David Rheams (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96713-4>.27 As illustrated in the introduction, this special issue stems from the experience of the Summer School in Digital Humanities ‘Tran(s)missions’, whose intent since its inception has been to explore interdisciplinarity and multimediality within the field of Italian studies in a broad and open sense. See <https://multimedialitysummerschool.github.io/transmissions/Index.html>. For a report of the first meeting, see Giuditta Cirnigliaro and others, ‘The “Tran(s)missions” Summer School at the Digital Humanities Lab in Roma Tre: How Multimedia Shapes and Reforms Interdisciplinary Research in the Field of Italian and Visual Culture’, Umanistica Digitale, 11 (2021), 177–97. <https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13705>.28 Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations, 40 (1992), 81–128 (p. 81).29 Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 35.30 ‘Noninterventionist’ or ‘mechanical’ objectivity is the description given by Daston and Gallison to the prevailing idea of the time that mechanic devices are neutral (p. 82) (emphasis original).31 Porter, p. 13.32 Ibid. pp. 14–15 and 23.33 The quote is from the introductory text by Anne Wilkes Tucker for the exhibition catalogue War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, MFA Houston (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 2.34 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 2.35 The Stanford University Library holds much of Eadweard Muybridge’s work. Details on this event can be found at <https://web.archive.org/web/20210712134220/https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-man-who-stopped-time>.36 Daston and Gallison, p. 81.37 The phrase referring to ‘raw data as a bad idea’ is by Geoffrey C. Bowker. See Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, “Introduction”, in Raw Data Is an Oxymoron, ed. by Gitelman, pp. 1-14 (p. 1).38 Ibid.39 According to Manovich, ‘supervised machine learning approach and neural networks […] started to replace more traditional algorithms after 2013’ (p. 139). At the same time, ‘computer scientists are actively working on methods to reverse-engineer deep learning models to understand what and how they are learning.’40 ‘Programmed’ as a word to define the mechanism of devices, data, and algorithms is frequently used and adopted here with the same scope. See Bucher, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).41 Bucher (p. 47) argues against the use of ‘algorithm’ in the singular form, and suggests thinking instead about the software through which several algorithms operate, which is ultimately the work of a team. In a similar way, Morozov (p. 17) has argued against the use of the ‘Internet’ as a singular representative ‘catchall term’ used to ‘bypass any serious and empirical debate altogether.’42 Bucher.43 See Ontotext <https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/linked-data-linked-open-data/>.44 See The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) <https://web.archive.org/web/20210613205115/https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html>.45 One of the largest repositories of Linked Open Data is DBPedia, which ‘is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects’. <https://web.archive.org/web/20210711101608/https://www.dbpedia.org/about/>.46 A good example of this practice can be found on Atlante Calvino: Literature and Visualization. The page dedicated to the making of datasets is titled ‘Capta’ <https://web.archive.org/web/20220718150248/https://atlantecalvino.unige.ch/capta?lang=en>.47 Philip Agre, ‘Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy’, The Information Society, 10.2 (1994), 101–27.48 Zuboff (pp. 187–8) defines datafication as ‘the application of software that allows computers and algorithms to process and analyze’ data. According to a dictionary entry on Vocabolario Treccani online, the term ‘datificazione’ (or ‘dataficazione’) appeared in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica as early as 1986 <https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/datificazione_%28Neologismi%29/>.49 Agre, p. 109 (emphasis added).50 Ivi, p. 113.51 Hall, p. 105.52 Michele Mauri and Paolo Ciuccarelli already noted that ‘[l]a necessità di trovare nuove forme di rappresentazione diventa prioritaria nella costruzione delle interfacce’. Michele Mauri and Paolo Ciuccarelli, ‘Il ruolo dell’Information Visualization nella progettazione di interface per archive digitali eterogenei’, in Digital Humanities: progetti italiani ed esperienze di convergenza multidisciplinare (Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice, 2014), pp. 73-88 (p. 75).53 Armstrong and Patti, p. 195.54 As indicated in the introduction, this special issue stems from the experience of the Summer School in Digital Humanities ‘Tran(s)missions’, whose intent since its inception has been to explore interdisciplinarity and multimediality within the field of Italian studies. See n. 27.55 Couldry and Mejias, p. 6.56 Bucher, p. 58.57 A valuable example of how to plan for the sustainability of a web-based digital project is laid out in ‘The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap’ by the Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh <https://sites.haa.pitt.edu/sustainabilityroadmap/getting-started/>.58 Bob Nicholson, ‘The Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Possibilities of Digital Newspaper Archives’, Media History, 19.1 (2013), 59–73 (p. 65).59 Bob Nicholson, ‘DIGITAL FORUM: Counting Culture; or, How to Read Victorian Newspapers from a Distance’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17.2 (2012), 238–46 (p. 240). The growing popularity of the field can be observed in the success of initiatives such as The Day of DH on Twitter, or by looking at the increase of academic programmes which, in the US alone, went from fewer than five in 1991 to 37 in 2015. <https://web.archive.org/web/20210713155746/https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/a-survey-of-digital-humanities-programs/>.60 Drucker, p. 94.61 See Chun; Anne-Sophie Lehmann, ‘Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture’, in Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice, ed. by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel and others (Bristol: Intellect, 2009), p. 40.62 Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, ‘Digital Methods and the Study of the Art Market’, in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. by Kathryn Brown (New York: Routledge, 2020), p. 169.63 ‘A Database Is an Argument’, interview with Anne Helmreich. The interview is part of a podcast series titled In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing, by the Clark Art Institute, available at <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-foreground-conversations-on-art-writing/id1528227046?i=1000511349043>.64 Nicholson, ‘The Digital Turn’, p. 61.65 Yaron Koren, Working with MediaWiki (WikiWorks Press, 2017).66 See MediaWiki website <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki>.67 Observations on MediaWiki and its applications are based on first-hand experience working with the software and with software engineers on a digital project called History of Early American Landscape Design (HEALD), as part of my postdoctoral appointment at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, from November 2019 through August 2021. See <https://heald.nga.gov/>.68 See the information page of the History of Early American Landscape Design <https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php?title=Home&action=info>.69 A similar ‘process’ has been highlighted by Mauri and Ciuccarelli in describing the making of the Luciano Baldessarri archive. Michele Mauri and others, ‘Weaving data, slicing views: A design approach to creating visual access for digital archival collections’, CHItaly '13: Proceedings of the Biannual Conference of the Italian Chapter of SIGCHI, 21 (2013), pp. 1-8.70 See MediaWiki initiative site <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Core_Platform_Team/Initiatives/IIIF_API>.71 IIIF member page <https://iiif.io/community/consortium/members/>.72 See Maria Männig, ‘Bruno Meyer and the Invention of Art Historical Slide Projection’, in Photo-Objects: On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives, ed. by Julia Bärnighausen and others (Berlin: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.34663/9783945561409-17>.73 The platforms through which it is possible to use a IIIF Manifest include Omeka <https://omeka.org/> and Storiies <https://storiiies.cogapp.com/>.74 Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, p. 65.75 Carolyn L. Kane, ‘Programming the Beautiful: Informatic Color and Aesthetic Transformations in Early Computer Art’, Theory Culture Society, 27.1 (2010), 73–93 (p. 88).76 See FromThePage <https://web.archive.org/web/20210726072823/https://fromthepage.com/about>.77 Since I started to gather information for this article in July 2021, FromThePage has gone from 1,241,125 to 1,422,369 to 1,642,411 pages. See FromThePage <https://web.archive.org/web/20210720095638/https://fromthepage.com/>, and <https://web.archive.org/web/20220718133310/https://fromthepage.com/>. The various stages of the tally were recorded via Webarchive.78 FromThePage <https://web.archive.org/web/20210726072823/https://fromthepage.com/about>.79 As pointed out by Tiziana Terranova, the Italian post-Marxist group Autonomia defined this process as the ‘social factory’. See Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 74. A similar argument is offered by Terranova in an earlier paper in which she notes how ‘the triangulation between cybernetics, labor, and capital’ is evident in a ‘digital economy’. Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text, 18.2 (2000), 33–58 (p. 34).80 E.g. Alexander Brey has recently compiled a list (constantly growing) of digital tools currently in use in the field of digital art history in the English world. Alexander Brey, ‘Digital Art History in 2021’, History Compass (2021), e12678 <https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12678>.81 Terranova explains how those working with digital platforms produce ‘cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large’. See Terranova, ‘Free Labor’ (p. 33); More recently, Couldry and Mejias (p. 3) noted that ‘data practice today would represent not just a continuation of colonialism/capitalism, but a distinctive new stage of colonialism that lays the foundations for new developments in capitalism’.82 Paradigm (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) <http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/> (emphasis added).83 Gail Truman, Web Archiving Environmental Scan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Library Report, 2016), p. 4.84 This section was compiled taking into consideration the following sources: The Internet Archive <https://archive.org/web/>; Conifer <https://conifer.rhizome.org/>; Fedora <https://fedora.lyrasis.org/>; The DOI System <https://www.doi.org/>; The Library of Congress Web Archive <https://www.loc.gov/programs/web-archiving/about-this-program/>.85 A case in point is the dismissal of Adobe Flash Player, which Adobe stopped supporting after 31 December 2020. See Adobe website <https://web.archive.org/web/20210725170226/https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html>.86 More details on the Semantic Web and definitions can be found on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) website <https://www.w3.org/RDF/Metalog/docs/sw-easy>.87 As noted, HEALD is a project of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC <https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php/Home>.88 MediaWiki software has incorporated the possibility of using the Semantic Web among its several applications and extensions <https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki>.89 Further details can be found on the Digital Approach and Vision page of HEALD <https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php/Digital_Approach_and_Vision>.90 See ‘The Socio-technical Sustainability Roadmap’ <https://sites.haa.pitt.edu/sustainabilityroadmap/getting-started/>, and note 57.