SPAH Seminar Series Week 30: David M. Berry

The Philosophy and Art History Research Seminar meets weekly in term time on Thursday afternoons to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

Critical Theory and the Digital Humanities 

David M. Berry, Professor in Digital Humanities, University of Sussex

By drawing on critical theory, in this paper I examine computation, knowledge and data as a historical and material phenomenon. That is, that as the dominant mode of thought increasingly expressed through computationalism disguises partisan interest, material factors are a repressed factor. This matters because the application of computation in the arts and humanities is not merely a neutral act of switching to a new medium, say from paper to digital, or even AI (e.g. ChatGPT). The digital and computation carries with it an imposed selectivity on how knowledge is transferred into data and in many cases the communicative capacities of digital networks can distort the data transmitted or stored. In addition, computation forms a political economic network which forms real material interests. Whilst digital humanists have been exemplary in thinking critically about issues such as inherited, and sometimes contested, classifications, absences, encoding and metadata, they have paid less attention to the ideology or political economy of an inherent instrumentality in computation.

Biography

David M. Berry is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex. His most recent book is Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. His forthcoming research is Reassembling the University: The Idea of a Digital University. He is now working on early AI as part of a collaborative international research project examining the recently unearthed original ELIZA source-code, its cultural significance, and the emergence of the Chatbot. 

The seminar will be in person, but if you would prefer to join via Zoom, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk to request the Zoom link.