Title: SpecLab
First published: 2009
Description: Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia's SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists' Books Online to the as yet unrealized 'Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker's contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.
Subjects: Humanities, Information storage and retrieval systems, Research, Data processing, Digital techniques, Digital libraries, Image processing, Metadata, Art, Computer Technology, Nonfiction, Science, Humanities, research, Image processing, digital techniques, Information storage and retrieval systems, humanities, Humanities, data processing
LC classification: AZ105 .D785 2009