Digital Environmental Humanities

Lo studioso di discipline umanistiche oggi non può più prescindere dalla conoscenza e dall’utilizzazione degli strumenti e delle risorse messe a disposizione dalle Scienze dell’Informazione. Ma per poter condurre le sue indagini scientifiche in ambiente digitale, l’umanista deve conoscere bene, anche dal punto di vista storico e teorico, poteri e limiti degli strumenti e delle risorse informatiche. Attraverso la lettura di questo manuale, egli sarà in grado di rispondere ad alcuni quesiti fondamentali: che cos’è l’Informatica umanistica, che cos’è internet e che cos’è il web, quali sono i linguaggi utilizzati nel web, che cos’è un ipertesto e che cos’è l’ipermedialità, come si svolge la codifica e la rappresentazione dell’informazione, che cosa sono e come si sono sviluppati i motori di ricerca nel web, che cosa sono e come funzionano i cataloghi, gli archivi e le library digitali, quali sono i sistemi di ricerca bibliografica avanzata, come si svolge la ricerca umanistica in rete e, soprattutto, quali sono le fonti scientifiche in ambiente digitale. Il fine ultimo del volume è dunque fornire allo studente e allo studioso di discipline umanistiche gli strumenti e il metodo di ricerca necessari per l’indagine scientifica in ambiente digitale, e contribuire così a trasformare l’umanista in umanista informatico.

What can the creation of artificial habitats to replace old-growth forests tell us about the process, value and future of design? This chapter takes a concrete and provocative example and uses it to rethink design as a gradual, ecological action. To illustrate this understanding, the chapter begins with a description of a proposal to provide artificial habitats for wild animals such as birds, bats and invertebrates. The controversial idea to replace rapidly disappearing old-growth trees with artificial structures puts in doubt habitual assumptions about the clients, procedures and goals of design. This example is of relevance to all design because the need to provide artificial habitats to nonhumans will be increasingly common under the influence of such phenomena as global warming or urbanisation. … The invention of artificial structures in place of natural habitats is described in this chapter as an incitement that highlights the need for further research into values, participants and methods of design. This discussion concludes with a proposal for an attitude of modesty in the face of increasingly overwhelming volumes of information as well as in the presence of an even greater ignorance about the futures of nondeterministic, volatile and incompletely controllable natural systems. The dilemma of design in these conditions is in the tension between its remit to act and the uncertainty that inescapably underlies any creative endeavour.

This is a piece on what matters for feminist scholarship, today at large. I describe here the need for a critical and creative research endevour that moves beyond the confines of humanistic humanities and deploys a relationa ethics appraoch to the more-than-human. Such environmental, post- , multispecies-, and /or technohumanities depicts the co-constitutive aspects of embodied and environed subjectivity in the postnatural situation often called the Anthropocene. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's multi-minoritarian approach, the artist and scholar Mirko Nikolic defines a minor ecology that I find most instructive for such practices of feminist posthumanities (Nikolić i).

What does analyzing a text, or media, as a part of an 'ecology' actually mean? In advancing this question, Pringle emphasizes the historical role of the concept of digital information in the development of the term 'ecosystem.' As a hybrid term melding the study of the environmental-organic flows of biophysical reality (ecology) and the mechanisms of networked cohesion (system), ecosystem offers a way to theorize how machines mimic the animate and productive forces of life, while accounting for the automatic conversion of natural resources into energy, commodities, and waste through repetition and self-regulation. Ecosystem, Pringle argues, is a term of media that holds a strategically valuable historical relationship to proximate concepts, including economy, the psyche, apparatus, and digital information. Exploring these relationships provides a way to synthesize the animate qualities of life's cascade--ecology--with the automated patterns of production both defining energy flow in nature and giving the capacity for modes of work in the economy. The ecosystem, Pringle maintains, is a term of media advantageously positioned as a machine that maps the recursive traffic between the mediations of ecological and economic systems. https://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9783957961488-Machine.pdf

AI and face recognition were used to source digital traces of Rembrandt’s sensibilities and techniques hitherto locked in his paintings in order to realize a new work the master neither contemplated nor ever saw (Fig. 1). This text, proposes structurally coupling the mechanics of The Next Rembrandt’s AI and face recognition with another artificial intelligence — AlphaZero — to contemplate face recognition, AI, and machine learning as steps toward artificial consciousness. The ensuing coupling (metaphorical marriage) creates a dialectical unity underpinning living technology and non-invasive surveillance as consistent with Autopoiesis and Cognition. That theoretical coupling bridges biological intelligence and phenomenal sensibilities as entangled harbingers of human-built intelligent machines occupying the category of biological extended phenotypes.
To jump-start a dialectic examining machine intelligence and artificial sensibility I reformulate elements of Hal Foster’s 2018 critique examining Trevor Paglen’s environmental art. The reformulation begins in a discussion of machine proliferation and surveillance. I then contrast Foster’s position on the spectacle of surveillance with AI and face recognition in The Next Rembrandt. To do so, I cite some of Paglen’s views on surveillance Foster uses to anchor his own suggestion to revise the “standard critique that contemporary society is swamped by spectacle, by images directed at us.” Here then is a grounding for the polarity — good AI / bad AI. I use the resulting dialectical friction to reorient debate where, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” as the Situationist Manifesto emphasized.
Foster writes of machines that make images for other machines as post-spectacle artifacts proliferating in the age of surveillance, AI, and face recognition (I agree). However, existing critique paradigms based in that post-spectacle, do not account for Facebooklike or Amazonlike pernicious surveillance pushing the critique to the verge of irrelevance. Ironically, the society of the spectacle’s former ubiquity might be reinvigorated if inverted to confront images looked at — analyzed — by machines for machines — if that deployment turned, for example toward the eradication of airborne/waterborne toxins or toward environmental bioremediation.
As a self-appointed matchmaker, I present The Next Rembrandt and AlphaZero as generators for environmental and climate remediation duties long ago underwritten by Alan Turing’s theories of thinking machines, AI, and algorithmic plant simulations. In sum, I consider fledging concepts of artificial sensibility and consciousness as emergent components of ALife in which facial recognition and AI self-learning are products of collective human endeavors, reformulated as ecological analysts and actuators.

Situated at the intersection of the arts and sciences, Humanities GIS (HumGIS) are contributing to new knowledge systems emerging in the digital, spatial, and geo-humanities. This article discusses the conceptualization and operationalization of two HumGIS models engaging the cartographical and discursive tools employed by James Joyce to compose Ulysses ([1922] 1992). The first model is used to perform a visual geo-literary historical analysis by transposing Homeric and Dantean topologies on a spatialized narrative of Joyce's work. The second model integrates Ulysses within a social media map to interpret Bloomsday 2014 digital ecosystem spatial performances in Dublin and globally. This article suggests that HumGIS models reflecting human contingency, idiosyncrasy, and affect, drawing on literary, historical, and social media tools, sources, and perceptions, might offer GIScience, neogeography, and big data studies alternative spatial framings and modeling scenarios.

This hybrid art-theory article discusses "Indeterminate Hikes," a smartphone app and performance created by ecoarttech, my interdisciplinary eco-art and theory collaborative. The work was originally conceived for a Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition and subsequently performed on the High Line in NYC and the M.I.T. Media Lab, among other places. My essay theorizes the ways in which "Indeterminate Hikes" contributes to discussions of new media art, environmental thought, and performance art, including its relationship to Fluxus "happenings." Excerpts from this text have been presented at the M.I.T. Media Lab, University of North Texas, Indiana University, and--forthcoming in 2012--at the annual College Art Association conference in Los Angeles.

A brief genealogy of the term "ecosystem" in the context of the term's use in recent media discourse. This genealogy re-examines the term beyond the ideology of self-organization present in tech-utopianism, tracing and emphasizing how Jan Smuts’s idea of holism—and the racially segregated organizational structure it implies—has stayed the course alongside the history of the term.

Interdisciplinary Symposium on Empathy:
http://languages.utah.edu/events/Empathy%20Symposium%20Program2.pdf

See this link to view this presentation and its accompanying slides and video (it’s found under Friday Panel 4, 18:30 into the video): https://eq.utah.edu/u/items/c3412803-358e-44e3-a601-3e863402218a/6/viewcontent?_sl.t=true

Öz
Bu makale İngiliz yönetmen Yousif Al-Khalifa'nın kısa çizgi filmi End of an Era (2012)'yı insan-ötesi kuramcılık merkezinde incelemektedir. İnsan-ötesi kuramcılığın özünde insanı merkezden uzaklaştıran bir yapıya sahip olduğu ve bu kuramcılığın, kültürel araştırmalar alanındaki en yeni ekolojik paradigma olduğu savıyla başlayan makale, daha sonra çizgi film türü ile insan-ötesi kuramcılık arasında bağıntı kurmaktadır. Çizgi filmleri, insan-ötesi söylemleri betimlemek için çok uygun araçlar olarak gören bu çalışma, hem insan-ötesi kuramcılıkta hem de çizgi filmlerde insanın ve insandışı varlıkların denk olarak görüldüğüne dikkat çekmekte, Al-Khalifa'nın çizgi filminin insan-ötesi kuramcılık kapsamına nasıl girdiğini analiz etmektedir. İnsan-ötesi kuramcılığın kendiliğinden ekolojik mesajlar taşıması nedeniyle, filmin ana mesajı insan-ötesi kuramlarla bağdaşmaktadır. Karanlık bir mizah tonuna ve ekolojik farkındalığa sahip olan End of an Era insan-ötesi kuramcılığın distopik bir boyutunu sunmaktadır. Bu boyut, bildiğimiz anlamıyla insanlığın sonu anlamına gelmektedir. İnsan-ötesi kuramlardan pek çoğunun bu kuramlar bütününü insanın sonu olarak görmekten kaçınmasının bir sonucu olarak, bu durum ilk bakışta tezat oluşturuyor gibi görünmektedir. Ancak, bu çizgi film insan türünün yaşamadığı bir dünya örneğini bilinçli olarak kullanmaktadır. Bu yolla, Al-Khalifa insan türünün sonunun diğer türlerin sonuyla birebir bağlantılı olduğunun altını çizmektedir. Dolayısıyla, film temelde insanı insan dışı varlıklardan ontolojik ve psikoanalitik olarak ayrı düşünen görüşlere karşı çıkmaktadır. End of an Era insansız bir dünyayı gözler önüne sermekte, ancak bunu insan-merkezcilik sorunsalını irdelemek, insanı merkezden ve sözde tahtından uzaklaştırmak amacıyla yapmaktadır. İnsanların yerine hamamböceklerini koyarak, bu çizgi film insanlara atfedilen akıl yürütme, hissiyat, dil kabiliyeti, iki ayaklılık, kültürel üretim gibi özellikler ile zevk ve korku gibi duyguları sorgulamaktadır. Jurassic Park (1993) filmindeki insan-dinozor karşıtlığının yerine hamamböceği-insan karşıtlığını koyarak durumu tersine çeviren End of an Era, insan-ötesi kuramcılıktan beslenen bir çerçeve öyküdür ve bu anlamda önem arz eden bir örnektir.

Abstract
This article analyses the British director Yousif Al-Khalifa's short animation End of an Era (2012) through a posthumanist lens. It opens with the argument that posthumanism is intrinsically disanthropocentric and that it can be considered the most recent ecological paradigm in cultural studies. Then, it briefly builds analogies between the animated film genre and posthumanism. Considering animations as viable tools to portray the posthumanist discourse, in which the human and the nonhuman are horizontally aligned, the article examines how Al-Khalifa's environmentally oriented messages fit into the scope of posthumanism. As posthumanism is inherently ecological, the primary message of the film echoes posthumanist theories. Darkly comic and ecologically aware, End of an Era presents a dystopian sense of posthumanism, which signals the end of humanity as we know it. As many theoretical formulations of posthumanism object to viewing the posthuman as the demise of the human, this might

Guest-edited with co-authors Elena Glasberg and Laura Kay. The entire issue is online at: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ice/index.htm.
The works featured in "Gender on Ice" demonstrate the way historical and contemporary representations of the poles are far from gender neutral, and in fact, beg for feminist critique and perspective to dismantle, or at least disrupt, the older histories that have formed public and scholarly imaginations to date.

In the twenty-first century, we are challenged with a transformation in human collective intelligence. The key features of this transformation involve the “digital” replacing the “analogue”; design thinking and post-secularism supplanting tradition, and human perception and agency emerging as the main drivers of planetary change. The Digital Anthropocene is defined by the twenty-first century confluence of the digital revolution, global warming and social, economic, and political conflict. The digital environmental humanities can be seen as an academic response to these challenges. This chapter contends digital and geographical information science (GIScience) approaches to “Humanities Big Data” in conjunction with multidisciplinary studies on oceans and cities will be crucial in coming to terms with global climate change. This chapter defines and describes digital environmental humanities practices by featuring two case studies in this emerging field. First, the digital/GIS work-in-progress component of an Environmental History of the North Atlantic 1400–1700 project will be discussed, followed by the Imagineering of SmartCity Lifeworlds as urban-cybernetic dimensions of the “Digital Anthropocene.” Lastly, the chapter argues that literacy in the digital environmental humanities will be necessary to tackle the global humanitarian and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

En el presente artículo se analizan las principales métricas de comportamiento y sentimientos utilizadas en el entorno digital y su incidencia en la gestión y producción de contenidos audiovisuales. Los objetivos son: 1) identificar las métricas e indicadores empleados para detectar experiencias y sentimientos de los consumidores; 2) categorizar los indicadores utilizados; y 3) observar en qué medida dichos indicadores inciden en la gestión y producción de contenidos. Para ello se han seleccionados las principales herramientas de medición, se han identificado los indicadores utilizados en cada una de ellas, se ha evaluado las aportaciones que realizan y se han catalogado en atención a los servicios que prestan. La conclusión es que las métricas de comportamiento y sentimientos aportan una nueva manera de entender la capacidad de influencia de los contenidos en los usuarios o espectadores, repercutiendo en aspectos esenciales a la hora de producir contenidos con cierta predicción de éxito.

Abstract (DE): In Anbetracht einer verstärkten Beschäftigung mit Computerspielen aus der Perspektive des Ecocriticism („Green Game Studies“), bietet der Artikel ein kritisches Analyseschema zur Repräsentation und Wahrnehmung von Klima und Wetter in Computerspielen an. Der Artikel baut hierzu auf einer medienästhetischen und medienökologischen sowie einer existenzial-ludologischen Perspektive auf; verbunden werden die methodischen Zugänge mit Begriffen der Klimatologie. Durch den Methodenmix können die Autor_innen Vorschläge machen, wie durch einen Blick auf das Klima als Akteur im Spiel für die Computerspielforschung neue Analyseebenen in verschiedenen populären Computerspielen gewonnen werden. Erprobt wird das Betrachtungsschema an Spielen wie No Man’s Sky, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, das Artgame Walden und die Serious Games Block’hood und Stadtklima Architekt.

Abstract (EN): In view of an increasing number of works dealing with computer games from the perspective of ecocriticism (“green game studies”), this article offers a critical analytical schema regarding the representation and perception of climate and weather in computer games. The article draws from perspectives from media-aesthetics and media-ecology as well as from existential-ludology and combines them with concepts from climatology. This mixed-methods approach renders possible to analyze climate as an actor in computer game research and thereby gains new layers of analysis for popular computer games. The critical analytical schema is being tested with popular games such as No Man’s Sky and Zelda: Breath of the Wild, artgames such as Walden as well as serious games such as Block’hood and Stadtklima Architekt (Urban Climate Architect).

The paper analyses media consumption in Russia and media business strategies. The authors describe the media environment and identify the central trends typical of the transition to digital communication in society. The research approach implies evaluating the volume and distinguishing features of information consumption using the main media resources (the Internet, television, radio and print media). The information and empirical base of the research include the data of the Mediascope analytical agency, the statistical data provided by the Russian Federal State Statistic Service (Rosstat) and the results of research studies performed by consulting companies for the period of 2003-2017/2018. The paper presents the dynamics and specificity of transformation in the media environment and discusses a range of trends in media consumption: such as communication technology development; changes in the structure of media consumption; an increase in online advertising; a gradual transformatio...

This essay evaluates visualization practices in data science and the digital humanities by drawing on the resources of the environmental humanities. I show how certain conceptions of ecology and natural systems have provided constitutive metaphors in the design and theorization of data visualization practices. This genealogy of the visual culture of data science began with the professionalization of graph theory in the nineteenth century. Ecological analogies were also a prominent feature in twentieth-century computer and network design, and they have continued to inform many of the layout algorithms that generate present-day data visualizations. This history of ideas and practices shows how ecological metaphors have naturalized information systems in ways that obscure the material and social realities of those systems.

""The Inscribing Environmental Memory Research Initiative"

Presented by Steven Hartman

Research clusters within the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES), the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA), in cooperation with partner networks in the USA, the UK and the Nordic countries, have undertaken a major interdisciplinary research initiative that aims to examine environmental memory in the medieval Icelandic sagas, with a prominent focus on historical processes of environmental change and adaptation. The medieval Sagas of Icelanders constitute one key corpus, among other literary and documentary corpora, to be investigated in this initiative.

Anchored in traditional fields of study (e.g. saga studies and various medieval-studies fields) as well as newer and emerging fields (e.g. integrated history and historical ecology, ecocriticism, digital and environmental humanities, etc.), the initiative brings together literary scholars, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, geographers, digital humanities specialists and environmental and life scientists in a coordinated set of sub-projects.

The initiative seeks to foreground evidence of changing environmental conditions in Iceland, Greenland and Scandinavia from the late Iron Age through the pre-Industrial period, with a guiding focus on long-term human ecodynamics and the relations among ecological change and adaptation, on the one hand, and resource management, social organization/conflict and resilience on the other.

In response to a call for preliminary abstracts, 28 IEM sub-project proposals were submitted in fall 2012. Not all of the sub-projects proposed will be part of the final IEM program; many will be consolidated into a more manageable number of sub-project nodes and some may not move forward as prioritized focuses of the IEM initiative in the immediate future. We anticipate this will largely be a process of self-selection.

Numerous IEM workshops organized by NIES, NABO, GHEA and various university networks are taking place in 2013 in Sweden, Scotland and Iceland. IEM project development work in 2013 is expected to culminate in several major bids for research funding to be submitted to research financing agencies in various national and international contexts between fall 2013 and summer 2014. This talk briefly sketches how this initiative began and how it has developed over the past year. More importantly, it looks ahead to where we expect IEM to be heading in the next year and beyond."

Fronteras: Congratulations on the publication of the book Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscapes of Time and Place (Springer, 2020), which you coedited with Francis Ludlow and Ferenc Gyuris. What is GIS and what are some of the ways that your book’s chapters use it to understand historical events and geography?

CFP - Petrocultures 2018 - Transitions: Glasgow, Scotland, Aug 29-Sep  1st.
2018 International/Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Oil Culture and  Energy Humanities. https://petrocultures2018.wixsite.com/transition 
http://petrocultures.com

Might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe; some lasting glow or echo of Earthly humanity; some interplanetary sign that once we were here? [1] The recent burgeoning interest in digital archives brings what may have been a somewhat limited grey and dusty enterprise to every facet of a culture coded with constantly shifting and proliferating information. In this epoch, the archive achieves a kind of immaterial liveliness that elevates it from the mouldy yellowing pages of crypt-like store rooms of historical societies and museums. Through promising re-animations of decaying archived matter, be they Shakespeare's manuscripts or personal photos, original primary material form becomes secondary to its digital dispersal. The digital archive thus promises new death-defying feats. Alongside this celebrated story of an ever-lively immaterial archive, however, is a hauntingly material story of unprecedentedly rapid bio-planetary change and proliferating reminders of a petroculture archiving its own decline. This ecological morphology of a quickening nature disrupts cultural imaginaries of Earth in balance in the service of human-progress time, and simultaneously feeds into the question of human legacies at the heart of the archive. Weisman's question above from the best-selling book The World Without Us , hints at a certain kernel of trauma that conditions archival thought. What might remain of 'us, ' [2] individually and collectively in the short and long term and how might 'our' own creations condition these legacies in unanticipated ways? The urgency of this question is intensified by the dual pressures of shortening generational iterations of technology produced within a capitalist logic of ephemera and relatedly, increasing material signs of civilizational detritus that is proving far from ephemeral as far as its effects on our own bodily cells and wider planetary ecologies. Thinking of the archives in a new digital or technological key must go beyond the application of digitality to conventional archives and engage with circuits of critical complexity involving contemporary material ecologies and stories. If one of the imperatives of archiving is to capture what is fleeting, then surely contemporary light-speed technological changes, coupled with the unprecedentedly rapid planetary changes create specific new forms of what Derrida called mal d'archive ("archive fever").

EdibleEcologies is series of social sculptures that work collaboratively with local communities (human, microbial, ecological) to resuscitate endangered food practices in an effort to remediate a cultural memory disorder that we call “industrial amnesia.”
More info: www.ecoarttech.net

| This article revisits McLuhan's well-known phrase " the message is the medium, " and it asks: What if the medium is an animal? McLuhan's understanding of his own phrase was profoundly anthropocentric, as critics have noted. But his legacy in mediation theory combined with the insights of interdisciplinary animal studies make it possible to expand the possibilities of the phrase. Media history also challenges the anthropocentric concept of the medium or the mediation process. While the use of animal as medium predates the electric media with which McLuhan was concerned, early computer devices and later mobile technologies have pursued users' engagement through didactically visible identification with/as animal spirits. Animals have become " naturalized " along with the indispensability of these devices as essential mediators of connectivity. In contemporary media arts, we see animals mediate and metaphorically stand for the vitality of mediated connectivity. Recognizing animal figures as mediators of mediation shifts the balance, the affect, and the price of what McLuhan called our " shared media situation. " They are both luring enchantments into digital connectivity and anxious premediations of rising challenges to anthropocentric humanism and its destructive blind spots which continue to shape the world.

I possess a wide range of experience critiquing and editing academic literature including abstracts, articles, book chapters, proposals and thesis drafts. I have edited ESL work from international scholars and international PhD students from Brazil to Romania to Germany. I am currently Co-editing a Festschrift project from proposal to final manuscript, incorporating input from authors, consultants and reviewers. My editing services include copy editing, content editing, style editing and proof reading. Topics of expertise include, but are not limited to, Humanities Computing, Philosophy, History, Religion, Digital Humanities, Information Ethics, Philosophy of Information, Digital Citizenship, Global Citizenship, and Intercultural Information Ethics. Services available at www.jaredbielby.com