Bridging DH and humanistic HCI

Abstract

Bowker’s Age of Potential Memory describes a new era characterized by a culture of knowledge production that fosters and stifles certain forms of statements depending on the logics that subtend them. Through processes of ubiquitous data collection, analysis, and feedback, individuals are increasingly reduced to users; users are re-created as data doubles or data doppelgangers, post hoc, through the aggregation and analysis of their data traces. This discursive transformation of the human that will arise in relation to living alongside and through these doubles or doppelgangers is difficult to understand within the framework of extant disciplinary silos. And yet methods that connect disciplines are emerging. To realize these connections, translational work is required. This paper explores the complementarity of digital humanities (DH) and humanistic human-computer interaction (hHCI) through the lens of distant reading. I focus on distant reading—topic modelling in particular—because of its methodological popularity and relation to discourse. I argue that distant reading comprises a useful connection between these two young domains: a pivot that allows for the inter- or transdisciplinary study of the future human through the analysis of its potential sociotechnical, discursive compositions.