Digital culture, social turn and critical perspective in the context of the Digital Humanities

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In this post I will discuss other important factors that define the Exhibitium project: its critical and social dimension.

Exhibitium has the general framework to approach the needs identified by the European Union’s digital culture, attending to the call to deploy technology infrastructures, new methods of analysis and at the same time, new ways of generating wealth in accordance with the parameters defined in the Horizon 2020 program. We remember that this program stems from the need to reshape economy and society to adapt to new technological changes, and has as its ultimate goal to achieve inclusive, sustainable and intelligent growth.  Within this program, a key element called Digital Agenda (launched in May 2010, although revised in December 2012), is directed specifically to promote the full integration of cultural institutions in the digital age and seek new models generating wealth and development.  In this regard, the recommendation of the 2011 EU, that remains integrated into the Digital Agenda, insists this: «Europe must urgently intervene to obtain the benefits of digitisation». If the member States don’t increase investment in this field, there exists the risk that the cultural and economic benefits of the digital change will materialise on other continents, but not in Europe […] The digitisation of cultural resources and the expanding access to these, offers enormous economic opportunities and is an essential condition for the further development of cultural and creative capacities in Europe and the presence of its industry in this field.

Exhibitium falls within the framework of these objectives,as part of its purpose is to make digital information accessible and reusable from multiple perspectives relative to art exhibitions, further generating new knowledge that can be reused for multiple purposes.

Now, this commitment of the European Union and the Horizon 2020 program toward an authentic social turn is closely related to a critical approach in the development of digital culture and in our particular case, to digital processes associated with artistic culture. In this context, spurred on by critical thinking and cultural criticism from a couple years ago, the result has been a new consolidated «Digital Humanities Review». This trend has raised an urgent need to review the established power structures as well as the new ones that are emerging and consolidating in the digital processes of production of meaning, knowledge building and establishment of socio-cultural dynamics (Lothian and Phillips, 2013; Dacos, 2013; Galina, 2013; Fiormonte, 2012; Liu, 2012; Higgin, 2010, GrandJean (2014), Rodríguez Ortega (2014), among others).  Thus, the field of Digitial Humanities is fully aware that there is a real risk of perpetuating the same problems in the digital world and in the practice of academic digital research, of marginalisation and subordination that characterised our «pre-digital» world. A risk materialises that in the sphere of artistic culture, among other things, a greater or lesser digital presence of certain artistic and cultural content; and additionally, a greater or lesser capacity of digital performance of cultural institutions.

The Critical Digital Humanities impel us therefore to think about which new marginalities are emerging as a result of digital development; how they affect the cultural process, the process of production and distribution of knowledge; and at the same time, develop tools and strategies that besides these visible marginalities, contribute to balance, using the potential of digital technology precisely and the «empowerment» possibilities they offer. Therefore, it is for this reason that the Critical Digital Humanities should also intervene in some Social Digital Humanities that intersect with Public Humanities (Belfiore and Upchurch, 2013).

Exhibitium proposes a firm commitment toward that new horizon to combine the process of producing highly specialised digital knowledge with others that are oriented toward society and are inclined to create social, cultural and territorial balance. Thus, one of the accomplishments of this project will be the GeoWave Exhibitions site, which has a clear vocation of socialisation produced from cultural content.  In this regard, we believe that Exhibitium will have the potential to balance certain «digital» inequalities, to the extent that will make feasible visiblity of all registered temporary exhibitions at the same level, regardless of their geographic location and the nature or media power of the organising centers. This means that Exhibitium can literally put exhibitions limited to a secondary context when not marginal, that still have interest and historic-artistic, academic-scientific and museographic quality, on the map. In addition, it will reveal the existing imbalance between the cultural institutions as to what presence and digital relevance refers, specifying which parameters influence these imbalances and which areas are affected.

Previous research by iArtHis_Lab showed the obvious imbalance existing between large metropolitan centres and small local centres in the autonomous community of Andalucía. Among the preliminary results we obtained the following thermal map: as can be seen, the «hot» centres coincide with the provincial capitals, the nuclear centre of the most important cultural institutions, whereas in their surrounding areas a clear periphery emerges characterised by a precarious and ineffective digital presence, independent of heritage or cultural interest that the surveyed centers may have (Cruces and Polo, 2013).  If we examine this perspective from the point of view of the dynamics of cultural tourism, it is clear that in one region where much of its GDP comes from tourism, this situation contributes to establishing unequal economic and social developments in the area.

Nuria Rodríguez Ortega

References cited

Belfiore, Eleonora and Upchurch, Anna (2013), Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets, Palgrave Macmillan.

Cruces Rodríguez, Antonio y Tenor Polo, Carmen (2013), «Análisis de la presencia de los museos andaluces en la Red. Consideraciones», en Historia del Arte, computación y medios digitales en España. ¿Dónde estamos, hacia dónde vamos?,  III Workshop Internacional sobre Historia del Arte Digital, Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, 20-22 de junio de 2013. En: http://historiadelartemalaga.es/seminarios/workshop/#home

Dacos, Marin (2013), «La stratégie du Sauna finlandais», in Blogo Numericus, mayo 2013. Disponible en: http://blog.homo-numericus.net/article11138.html.

Fiormonte, Domenico (2012), «Towards a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities», Historical Social Research – Historische Sozialforschung, Special Issue, no. 141, HSR vol.37 (2), pp. 59-76. Disponible en: http://www.cceh.uni-koeln.de/files/Fiormonte_final.pdf.

Galina, Isabel (2013), «Is There Anybody Out There?  Building a global Digital Humanities community». Keynote speech. Digital Humanities Annual Conference, Nebraska (EE.UU). Disponible en: http://humanidadesdigitales.net/blog/2013/07/19/is-there-anybody-out-there-building-a-global-digital-humanities-community/

Higgin, Tanner (2010), «Cultural Politics, Critique and Digital Humanities», en Gaming the System, 25 mayo de 2010. Disponible en: http://www.tannerhiggin.com/cultural-politics-critique-and-the-digital-humanities/.

Liu, Alan (2012), «What is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?», en Mathew K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press. Disponible en:  http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/20.

Lothian, Alexis and Amanda Phillips (2013),  «Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique»,  Journal of E-Media Studies, 3.1.

Rodríguez Ortega, Nuria (2014), «Humanidades Digitales y Pensamiento crítico», en Esteban Romero Frías y  María Sánchez, Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Digitales Técnicas, herramientas y experiencias de e-Research e investigación en colaboración, CAC, Cuadernos Artesanos de Comunicación, 61. Disponible en: http://www.cuadernosartesanos.org/2014/cac61.pdf

Network theories and data analysis

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Our proposal emerges from the convergence of a series of intellectual parameters, technological developments and social requirements which together warrant a reconsideration of the operating logics of cultural phenomena as well as the «applicable» knowledge that can be extracted. These parameters define the setup of our project in the overall context of contemporary thought, digital culture and the social challenges of the 21st century. In this post we refer to network theories and data analysis, as this is the theoretical and methodological framework in which the Exhibitium project falls.

Network theories discuss cultural phenomena as products of established interactions between different actants, interactions that lead to a changing system of complex networks and subnetworks. The cultural network analysis is presented as a rigorous and systematic methodology that seeks the construction of cultural ‘models’ through which social practices and behavior modes of groups, organisations or societies are defined. Cultural models derived from the network analysis are graphically represented as a network of concepts, beliefs and culturally shared values, that have a special influence on the key decisions that are adopted in a particular context (Sieck, Rasmussen and Smart, 2010). Network analysis then, registers the changes that occur in these relationships according to a space-time parameter, and analyses how these changes correlate with sociocultural practices of individuals and communities. Thus the network analysis has a descriptive-interpretive value, as they allow us to better understand – and even formalise – how social and cultural interactions «model» themselves from which the production of meaning is given; as well as, possess a prospective value, as long as they are capable of revealing trends and patterns of behavior.

Bruno Latour

In this context, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory (or ANT, recently renamed the actant-rhizome ontology), which is the fundamental theoretical base that defines our approach to artistic exhibitions, adds a very interesting point of view. The Actor-Network theory emerges as a sociological theory on Science and Technology (Latour, 1983), which describes the generation of knowledge as a result of the relationships established between actors. These actors, according to Latour, can be human (e.g.: scientists, technologists, managers, publishers, etc.) and non-humans (research centres, journals, descriptors, patents, etc.). Considering that the network actors can be of any nature, it establishes a kind of flat ontology in which hierarchies are not established. From this point of view, the network ceases to be configured according to the established interactions between individuals or communities according to the dichotomous subject/object, actor/system approach; on the contrary, all the actors in the network act as «mediators» that generate modifications leading to continuous redefinitions.

The Actor-Network theory has proved very useful to describe the complex relationships that are established in the technoscience networks (Echevarría & González, 2009), but is also being used to entirely redefine the thought (Latour, 2005; Bogost, 2012, among others). Despite the complexities that this theory has in itself, which in some cases it seems to be able to be resolved only in the field of intellectual speculation, its logic can also be applied to specific cases to model, analyse and understand cultural phenomena as a set of complex interactions where heterogeneous actors are continually redefined.

Thus, coming to our research subject, we can say that temporary artistic exhibitions, as cultural products generating meanings (cultural, social, political, symbolic), are the result of a series of relationships established between actor-mediators (human and nonhuman) that are constantly being redefined. Our investigation, therefore, is guided by the following questions: What are the actors that are part of the «temporary art exhibitions» phenomenon? Where are they from? How do they connect and interact among themselves? How does it affect the redefinition of the production of meaning networks? In what way are these network (actors and relationships) maintained (stability) or changed (dynamic) in the geo-temporal variable?

The concept of complex networks has joined two other key concepts that operate in the establishment of a new analysis paradigm: scale and complexity. The change of scale operated by the computational systems of extraction and data processing, as well as display models and mapping, allow us to obtain a comprehensive picture of certain phenomena. This change in perspective toward global and comprehensive, is what Franco Moretti (2005, 2013) calls the passage of close reading, the basis so far in the study of humanities (analysis of a set as representative of facts or elements they extrapolated in the interpretation to the overall) to the distant reading (analysis of the whole set). The interesting thing about this approach is that it allows a multiscale perspective: i.e., that at the same time gives us an overview of how cultural phenomena operates and configures, it also allows us to focus on unique and individual aspects, even those that go unnoticed in traditional historiographic readings not forming part of the mainstream, but which, can now make themselves visible, thanks to the potential of data mining to extract data repositories and connect them using complex algorithms. This multiscale approach allows us then, to analyse  a phenomenon in its entirety, while still paying attention to the unique, local, individual and/or «marginal» facts.

The combination of the technologies of data mining, network analysis, KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) and graph interpretation has proven to be a powerful tool for the analysis of certain systems of networks and subnetworks, becoming popular for the study of diverse cultural and social phenomena (Scott and Carrignton, 2011).

Nuria Rodríguez Ortega

References cited

Bogost, Ian (2012), Alien Phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing (posthumanities), University of Minnesota Press.

Echevarría, J. y González, M. I. (2009), «La Teoría del Actor-Red y la tesis de la Tecnociencia»,  Arbor Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura, n. 738, pp. 705-720.

Latour, B. (1983), «Give me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World», en Knorr-Cetina, K. and  Mulkay, M., Science observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, London: Sage.

Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Moretti, F. (2005), Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for Literary History, New York: Verso Books.

Moretti, F. (2013), Distant reading, New York: VersoBooks.

Scott, J. and Carrington, P. J. (eds.) (2011), The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis, Los Angeles: Sage.

Sieck, W. R., Rasmussen, L. J., & Smart, P. (2010), «Cultural Network Analysis: A Cognitive Approach to Cultural Modeling», en Verma, D. (ed.), Network Science for Military Coalition Operations: Information Extraction and Interactions, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 237-255.

iArtHis_Lab and analysis strategies based on computer technologies

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The iArtHis_Lab research group explores the possibilities of analysis strategies based on computer technology to analyse and visualise dynamically, the configuration of certain cultural and sociocognitive phenomena of contemporary society, creating thereby reusable knowledge unreleased by various agents and sectors, including social development and its transfer to industry. In the specific framework of this research, the Exhibitium project focuses on the phenomenon of artistic exhibitions held regularly by galleries, museums and art centres, analysing them in their capacity as complex cultural phenomena that result from the establishment of a set of relationships between a variety of actors, but also as strategic factors in generating social dynamics and economic movements.

What does analysis of temporary art exhibitions provide us with? The exhibitions are generated using a combination of very heterogenous and diverse data that is easily visible through quantitative analysis: demographic data for visitors; intra and transnational flows of public; the dominant flows in the process of artistic display; data on the greater or lesser presence of certain artists and artistic movements according to diverse geospatial contexts … Others are more difficult to visualise, and require specific analysis that interconnect multiple variables with each other to determine patterns of behavior and complex cultural dynamics, knowledge that is extremely interesting both from the critical-interpretive and prospective-strategic point of view.

The current situation offers us a favourable stage to analyse this data: in the first place, because a good amount of what we could call raw data is available online through the intstitutions (museums, art centers, galleries) own publication and digital broadcasting, so they are likely to be captured and compiled in an automated manner through technological surveillance systems. Secondly, the development of specific technologies associated with knowledge engineering (KE) and the computer processing of data on a large scale (data mining) allow us to analyse them from distinct perspectives (statistical-quantitative results, network configuration and operation (network analysis), geospatial distribution, etc.), which makes it possible that a same set of well structured data (dataset) will be able to get different results for different purposes.

In addition, our proposal is based on the conjugation of a series of computer technologies and analysis methodologies derived from technological surveillance, network analysis and KDD strategies (Knowledge Discovery in Databases), that allows us to capture, register, structure and process this data in a meaningful way; and extract unpublished knowledge based on quantitative and qualitative parameters (networks, clusters and patterns) to make them useful and reusable, by means of open and interoperable data systems.

The iArthis_Lab group won the spin-off prize from the Santander University Foundation for the best idea for a technology company aimed at the cultural sector in the 2013 convocation spin-off prize from the University of Málaga. The objective of the business idea was to make the research developed by  iArtHis_Lab useful for the cultural sector. This award has led to the creation of spin -off Culturacy , SL.