Introduction
It has been more than five years since Johanna Drucker issued this challenge to the emerging field of digital humanities, suggesting that it was incumbent on scholars to deepen and broaden their practice to include not only strategies of computation when undertaking data-driven research and publication, but the design and development of digital tools as well. The argument, in some respects, seems all but self-evident. Of course tools matter; the basis for much that drives cultural critique and ideological analysis rests on theorizing underlying causes and systems (value systems as well as class, economic and technological ones) that drive cultural practices and artifacts. Why wouldn't humanists automatically adopt a critical stance toward the tools for their stock-in-trade, especially those that shape basic practices of researching and writing? The answer lies in a technologized extension the "two cultures" bifurcation articulated by C.P. Snow more than half a century ago. Already in 1956, Snow had identified "a gulf of mutual incomprehension" that had ceased to even warrant a "frozen smile across the gulf" between the intellectual life of humanists and scientists (Leonardo 169; orig. 1959) in the academic cultures of Britain and the United States. For Snow, the stakes of this divide were nothing less than the intellectual vitality of the western academic establishment.If humanists are interested in creating in their work with digital technologies - the subjective, inflected, and annotated processes central to humanistic inquiry - they must be committed to designing the digital systems and tools for their future work.
- Johanna Drucker
Chronicle of Higher Education (2009)
Today, a great many humanists remain alienated from the hardware and software upon which their work has grown increasingly dependent. Obvious exceptions exist, but the convergence of digital technology with the practices of humanism has often been an uphill struggle - one that continues to this day, with battles taking place in tenure, promotion, publication and hiring committees as much as in the classroom. A promising antidote has emerged in movements with names such as "critical making" (Ratto 2011), "critical design" (Dunne and Raby), "reflective design" (Sengers 2006), "reflective HCI" (Dourish 2004), "critical technical practice" (Agre 1997), "value-sensitive design" (Friedman 1996), "reflective practice" (Schön 1978) and other combinations of similar words. Each of these movements takes a slightly different approach to reaching its intended audience, which ranges from designers to consumers to technologists. What they all have in common is a shared interest in developing strategies for merging theory with practice; thinking with making; values with materials.
This essay explores the question of whether "making" in the material world is the sine qua non of transformative scholarly practice and, if so, why this should be the case. What is it about getting one's "fingernails dirty" (Hertz 2012) that makes these movements worthy of note? Are the insights gleaned from physical making categorically different from those associated with the code literacy advocated by a parallel (and sometimes congruent) movement? Does the impulse to defamiliarize the tools of digital scholarship - to go "under the hood" - work on a metaphorical level or only a literal one? Is there a danger that the fetishization of material practice reifies a binary long ago unraveled by the logic of historical materialism - i.e., that physical circumstances and human labor are always already foundational to the production of technology, culture and ideology? This essay argues, by example, that the payoff of the intervention marked by critical making may take place in the comparatively ethereal realms of software and ideation as well as physical making and that a particularly productive point of convergence may be found at the intersection of technology platforms, user interfaces and data structures.
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- Critical Interfaces Steve Anderson