What Lies under the Petites Mains: Reconsidering the Traditional Model of the Humanities
Margot Mellet - Université de Montréal
@mellet_m
« Fingers and
toes are the most fundamental digital computing device. »
(Landmarks in Digital Computing, Kidwell & Ceruzzi, 1996)
« Most fields cannot point to a single progenitor, much less a divine one,
but humanities computing has Father Busa. »
(Uncovering ‘hidden’ contributions to the history of Digital Humanities: the Index
Thomisticus’ female keypunch operators, Nyhan and Terras, 2017)
« While the punched card operators relied on the input of the scholars to guide the transposition of the text from container to container, so the scholars
relied on the keypunch operators to reify the Index Thomisticus and related texts as scalable, computable artefacts. One could not properly do their work without the other; both played fundamental roles in the process of data capture and dataset elaboration. »
(Hidden and Devalued Feminized Labour in the Digital Humanities: On the Index Thomisticus Project 1954-67
, Nyhan 2022)
An optical and epistemological configuration
a Documen(t)
« The introduction of microcomputers has produced hackers' societies [...]
almost entirely men's and anti-girl. [...] The hacker has become the ideal model of the
computer scientist. Not only does this career no longer match with the image that girls have
of themselves, but it even appears to be frankly hostile to them. »
(La
disparition des filles dans les études d'informatique : les conséquences d'un
changement de représentation, Collet 2004, personal
translation)
« [...] just because women were involved in this work, and that their work has been suppressed, it does not mean they should be celebrated as feminist heroes. The work these women did had serious and damaging consequences in the real world, and I cannot talk about them without talking about the appalling impact of their work. » Crystal Bennes on Klara and the Bomb 2022
« Many of the archival recovery efforts in the early years of DH deployed a similar additive logic, despite their good intentions. When these efforts focused on adding race or gender to digital archives and data sets, there was an implication that simply adding new data as content is all that is needed to get at some truth about race or gender. While it is hard to argue against, for example, including women authors in a database of nineteenth-century writers, such an approach is more additive than integrative or relationnal. »
Feminist in a software lab Tara McPherson, 2018« There is no artificial intelligence, only the work of someone else's click. »
Casilli, T-shirt slogan