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Articulating Futures
Curating Memory
the armies to businesses and natural sciences like weather
prediction and now gradually also to the humanities, so-called
Digital Humanities, and I would add, to the GLAM-sector.
As collections become digitized and as new collections
increasingly contain born digital material, our entire cultural
heritage will soon become Big Data. Analogue records can be
treated statistically, but only digital data can be treated as Big
Data. Analogue records (documents) must first be digitized to
become data. Datafication is a prerequisite and from the archival
perspective the handwritten documents can be digitized, but not
dataficated yet. The National Library of Norway will most likely
be the first library in the world to digitize a nation's entire book
collection. The job should be finished by 2017.
We will soon be at that revolutionary moment when computers
can read, assess and exhibit the nation's cultural heritage in a
new way. And this is where the librarians and the archivists of the
future come in as the new creative expertise: they can articulate
the questions, the input we feed into the computers, and assist in
assessing the results.
How do computers "read" Big Data? We move from "close
reading" of a small number of documents to "distant reading" of
large quantities of information. Franco Moretti has prophetically
stated: so far humanists have concentrated their analytical efforts
on only about 1% of the texts of the world (the canon), Digital
Humanists will, with help from computers, be able to read the
rest. While armies, businesses, data brokers like Google and
Facebook and surveillance agencies have succeeded with the
introduction of Big Data analytics, the results from the humanists
so far has been meager. Most of the Digital Humanities projects
have only been able to confirm what historians of the fields had
already predicted. However, and most Digital Humanists know
this, the results from computational readings are always only
preliminary. We need to move on, and this is where librarians and
archivists have to be creative. Few people know as much about
national collections as the professionals. Many Digital
Humanities projects need inspiration and help with the
conception and content (corpus) of a project and with the
articulation of the good questions.
Computers are never stupid, humans are. Computers (usually) do
what humans tell them to do. It has been said that programmers
are the new sovereigns because they are able to use the only
language (codes and algorithms) which is executable: it actually
does what it says. But programmers alone should not be in
charge of this language alone. Indeed, programming languages
are becoming the most important language of our times.
Humanists, librarians and archivists need to have a say in
articulating the problems computers should solve for us.
Computers cannot articulate problems, only humans can.
Programmers and humanists need to work together. What are
the unsolved questions, problems, enigmas and lacunas we need
to explore to understand our culture, actions and decisions even
better? And how can we articulate these questions in a way
computers can "understand", i.e. how can they execute these
questions as programs? These are some of the key question of a
new ethics of programming. Who and how do we co-articulate
the actions of computer programs? Librarians and archivists need
to put their heads together and be in the forefront of such
articulations.
Curation is no longer simply something curators in art galleries
do. In their new book Digital_ Humanities (downloadable at
