Chapter 1

Between Bits and Atoms: Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication in the Humanities
Jentery Sayers, Devon Elliott, Kari Kraus, Bethany Nowviskie, and William J. Turkel

Humanities scholars now live in a moment where it is rapidly becoming possible – as Hod Lipson
and Melba Kurman suggest – for “regular people [to] rip, mix, and burn physical objects as effortlessly as
they edit a digital photograph” (Lipson and Kurman, 2013:10). The practice of making things think, sense,
and talk articulates in interesting yet murky ways with our various disciplinary pasts. With this context in
mind, physical computing and desktop fabrication techniques underscore not only the convergence of
analog and digital processes but also the importance of transduction, haptics, prototyping, and surprise
when conducting research with new media.
One popular approach to introducing hands‐on making in the humanities is to start with construction toys
like Lego. In the case of Lego, the original bricks had studs on the top and holes on the bottom. They stacked
to form straight walls, but it was difficult to make things that were not blocky. It is easy to study how people
make things with Lego – both fans of the toy and the company’s designers – because many of them do
what Chris Anderson (2012:13) calls “making in public.” At the edges of Lego design, people can experiment
with the “small batch production” afforded by 3D printing (Anderson, 2012:78). That said, Anderson’s point
about rendering traditional manufacturing accessible (at least in terms of materials and expertise) should
still be taken seriously.
According to Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, “[p]physical computing is about creating a conversation
between the physical world and the virtual world of the computer. The simplest microcontroller inputs are
components such as push‐button switches, but many more complex components can be used: dials or
knobs, temperature or humidity sensors, proximity detectors, photocells, magnetic or capacitive sensors,
and global positioning system (GPS) modules. Arduino has arguably become the most popular
microcontroller‐based platform. It began as an open‐source project for artists, who wanted to lower the
barrier to programming interactive artifacts and installations.
In the spirit of speculation and conjecture, humanities practitioners can also prototype designs and
fabricate objects using machine tools controlled by personal computers. At the heart of desktop fabrication
are precise, computer‐controlled devices. Generally referred to as CNC (computer numeric control), these
machines bridge the gap between CAD (computer‐aided design) and CAM (computer‐aided manufacture).
A variety of 3D printer models are currently available, and the technology continues to be developed.
Initiated by the RepRap project and popularized by MakerBot Industries (a commercial innovator), early
desktop 3D printers incorporated microcontroller boards into their systems.
One particularly rich source of physical experiments in the humanities has traditionally been analytical
bibliography, the study of books as material artifacts. Closely associated with physical bibliography is the
art of literary forgery. Derived from Latin fabricare (“to frame, construct, build”) and fabrica (“workshop”),
“forge” is etymologically related to “fabricate.” Historically, the figure of the bibliographer has often been
implicated in forgery, either as a perpetrator or as an unmasker, and sometimes as both. Thomas J. Wise,
the most notorious literary forger of the past two centuries, is a case in point. As varied as they are, many
of the undertakings described here share the common goal of using historically accurate tools, models, and
materials to reconstruct history, while acknowledging what Jonathan Sterne claims in The Audible Past:
“History is nothing but exteriorities. Nearly every discipline has developed one or more methodologies
designed to help us do this work: to unlearn what we think we know, to denaturalize perception and
epistemology, to yield genuine surprise in our research. Often the products of haptic inquiry are overlooked
in the humanities because they fall below the waterline of published scholarship. Design‐in‐use has also
flourished in what are often collectively called the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
professions.
Physical computing and desktop fabrication often flourish in a shared, collaborative space anchored in the
use and reuse of shared materials. By extension, the ethos and every day of makerspaces are imbricated
with questions of labor, including the labor of an increasingly casualized academic workforce. While online
modes of social organization no doubt lend themselves to social justice research, the cultural climates of
makerspaces and their dedication to place‐based organizing, trial‐and‐error investigation, haptic
engagement, and learning alongside others foster an inimitable kind of embodied community building,
which does not always manifest through the avatar or the social network. In this area, Fashioning Circuits
– directed by Kimberly Knight at the University of Texas, Dallas – is an inspiring example project. As
Fashioning Circuits suggests, one way to achieve a recursive relationship between makerspaces and
academic institutions is to underscore why making things in the space between bits and atoms matters
right now. More important, we are only beginning to comprehend the assumptions, effects, and
trajectories of these technologies.

Terms:
 Humanities, Transduction, Haptics, Prototyping, Lego, Microcontroller
Humidity sensors Proximity detectors, Photocells, Capacitive sensors Platform,
Bibliography, Forgery, Denaturalize, Epistemology, Makerspaces, Digital photograph,
Computer-aided Design, Computer-aided Manufacture, Global Positioning System
 Chapter 2
Embodiment, Entanglement, and Immersion in Digital Cultural Heritage
Sarah Kenderdine

Museum visitors gaze through lenses that have been refined over many centuries. Finding
“presence” (or literally “being there”)1 in virtual environments is the result of traversing the histories of
technologic immersion; generations of ’orama, sensoriums, and all manner of optical devices. The visual
cultural theorist Jonathan Crary, in his analysis of nineteenth‐century ocular devices and modernity,
observed that “techniques of the observer” involve an array of perceptual and spatial expansions. The
purpose of this chapter is to examine immersive virtual environments and how they support embodiment
for cultural heritage interpretation in museums – with broad implications for digital humanities research.
A close reading of embodiment also helps us re‐envision the applications we might want to build at the
pivot of human–computer interface (HCI).
A broad range of work undertaken is used to contextualize this chapter. This research acts as a proposition
for the reformulation of digital narrative and digital aesthetics through virtual embodiment – bringing
cultural heritage experiences into the public domain, specifically in museums.
One research area that can be framed by IIVE is the reuse and re‐articulation of digital archives (so‐called
“cultural data sculpting”: see Kenderdine and Hart, 2011; Kenderdine and McKenzie, 2013). The Living Web
(2002) by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, a CAVE‐ based interactive and immersive
installation, was a pioneering attempt to explore the potential of the Internet as interactive and immersive
data and information medium. The interactive installation CloudBrowsing (2008–2009) was one of the first
works to be developed and shown in ZKM’s PanoramaLab, and it takes another approach to harnessing
Internet data in the form of a spatial narrative (Lintermann et al., 2008a). ECLOUD WW1 (2012) by Sarah
Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw was designed for a custom designed 9‐metre wide by 3.5‐metre high
interactive 3D projection environment and developed by the Applied Laboratory for Interactive
Visualization and Embodiment (ALIVE), City University of Hong Kong, in partnership with Europeana’s 1914–
1918, a crowdsourced web‐based archive (Kenderdine and McKenzie, 2013). In situ and in‐the‐round,
mARChive (2014) is the new interface to Museum Victoria’s collections, resulting from an Australian
Research Council Linkage grant with iCinema Research Centre University of New South Wales and the
museum (Morris, 2014).
As noted, the panorama has been at the core of the visualization paradigms described in this chapter as a
conjunction of virtual reality technologies. In current media practices, the re‐emergence of the panoramic
scheme as “the new image vogue” (Parente and Velho, 2008:79) is based on the desire to design virtual
spaces and places that can be inhabited by the viewer — maximizing a sense of immersion and ultimately
“presence.” In a discussion of contemporary panoramic form, it is important to introduce works by media
artists and engineers that also exploit panoramic imaginary. These works are of interest because they all
re‐enact cinematographic devices by the use of video sequences. The use of the panorama in virtual,
immersive environments provides a lexicon for navigable space that is “not only a topology, geometry and
logic of static space” but is also transformed by “new ways in which space can function in computer culture”
(Manovich, 2001:280).
A series of museum‐based works have been created by the author since 2000, interpreting significant
cultural precincts using a variety of IIVE, including the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Olympia, Greece;
Angkor, Cambodia; the monuments at Vijayanagara (Hampi) and the Fort of the Hooded Cobra in Nagaur,
Rajasthan, India; Dunhuang, China; and numerous sites throughout Turkey. Embodiment theory is used in
this chapter to examine two world‐touring installations that integrate a single archaeological dataset into
two distinct interfaces, with unique outcomes. The modalities of embodiment in the Pure Land projects
can be described as forms of prosthetic vision, acoustic immersion, kinesthetic activation, telepresence,
augmentation, inhabitation, revealing, flying, dwelling, traveling, and walking. Embodiment theories
attempt to understand the mind as a set of physical processes derived from the brain and body of a human,
that ultimately serve his or her action in the physical world. A discussion on theories of embodiment
includes several broad fields of inquiry and analysis. The wellspring of scholarship dealing with cognitive
aspects of embodiment includes understanding the neural processes of message transmission and learning,
which enables individuals to think and act. The embrace of embodiment theory also continues to drive a
proliferation of research in aesthetics, linguistics and anthropology, and in specializations of philosophy
including pragmatism, phenomenology, and ecology (Johnson, 2007:264; Shusterman, 2012).
The body carries time into the experience of place and landscape. Any moment of lived experience is thus
orientated by and towards the past, a fusion of the two. Following Mark Johnson, it is possible to conceive
a fivefold framework for the embodied nature of the Pure Land projects.
1. The biological organism (the body in the world as flesh) has different constraints in relation to the
technologies employed. Every user‐agent comes to the Pure Land projects with inherent physical
capacities.
2. The phenomenological body (our body as we live and experience it; the tactile‐kinesthetic body)
provides a different way of thinking about the past in the present.
3. The ecological body (or environmental contexts) of Pure Land and Pure Land AR are distinct,
resulting in different affects in the way the work is embodied and meaning is created.
4. The cultural body (i.e., cultural artifacts, institutions, practices that constitute cultural life). Every
installation happens in a different cultural context: Buddhist practitioners, academics, and lay
people each bring their own cultural body.
5. The social body (subjective relations). Pure Land demonstrates the dynamics of a single‐user, multi‐
spectator interface that is important to the notion of museums as places of socialization.
The evolution of visitor research in museums since the 1900s reflects an array of diverse evaluation
typologies, pedagogies, collections, and curatorial trends. The museums’ emphasis on the quality of their
collections and scholarly frameworks has evolved to include visitors framed by these qualities. I Sho U can
be compiled by museum evaluators online and deployed over the Internet, and downloaded to tablets.
These tablets are distributed to visitors by docents at the museum. The app encourages visitor agency
through technological interface and creative visualization, and utilizes design‐led integrative thinking,
action, and creative data collection that are led by the visitor.
The history of experimental interfaces for cultural heritage materials dates back to the 1990s in a series of
works by influential media artists. In 2015, the powerful nature of these experiences is now recognized by
industry and will no doubt become the basis for further developments in screen(less) technologies and
immersive environments. Understanding the fundamental nature of embodied experience will put
humanities scholars, and museum curators and designers, at the forefront of articulating and defining
meaning in an increasingly ubiquitous screen culture.
Terms:
 Museum, Heritage, Ubiquitous, Typologies, Pedagogies, Curators, Anthropology,
Pragmatism, Phenomenology, Ecology, Cinematography, Geometry, Human-Computer
Interface, Aesthetics, Linguistics, Philosophy, Panorama, Artists, Engineer, Telepresence
 Chapter 3
The Internet of Things
Finn Arne Jørgensen

At some point in the near future, information will effortlessly flow between ourselves, the rest of
the world, and the technologies we surround ourselves with. Sensors, networks, and computational
capabilities will have been woven into the fabric of everyday life. Since its coining around the turn of the
millennium, the concept of “the Internet of Things” has gained traction as a way of both describing and
prescribing the frictionless and technologically connected world we can see in “A Day Made of Glass.” The
Internet of Things can be seen as a cluster of ideas about the future of technology that pulls in many
different directions.
When Kevin Ashton coined the term Internet of Things in 1999, he envisioned a world where all things were
tagged with a unique identifier that could be queried over the Internet (Ashton, 2009). This is, however,
only one of many possible interpretations of the Internet of Things, and there is no clear and unanimous
definition of the term. Many visions of future applications take daily life situations as their starting point,
extrapolating from them a set of technical capabilities or characteristics. Energy use monitoring has
become a more successful implementation of Internet of Things approaches. Another set of emerging
technologies centers on the interaction of the body and the Internet of Things. Location‐awareness is a
central feature of the Internet of Things. Miniaturized global positioning system (GPS) sensors combined
with digital maps and Wi‐Fi triangulation have made geolocation popular among consumers. It is hard to
discuss the Internet of Things without considering the security and privacy concerns that inevitably come
with the voracious data collection and exchange of spimes, especially considering the global controversy
over National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance that started, post‐Snowden, in 2013. The actual
development of the Internet of Things as concrete technologies and standards is to a large degree driven
by business interests.
In contemporary usage, the Internet of Things has become a generic term that stands for a whole set of
visions of the future, often referencing or inspired by science fiction films such as Minority Report. This
shifting of perspectives between the past, present, and future is common when discussing the Internet of
Things. To properly understand the Internet of Things, we need to look at its storytellers, the ones selling
the idea of the connected future. A key insight of design fiction is that design does something with the
world. It is part of what serves to insert a product into an existing network of potential users, enabling them
to do particular things in particular ways, but also influencing their way of thinking about the world. Similar
narrative trajectories appear in the history of the smart house, one of the most imagined sites for the
implementation of the Internet of Things, from the pre‐ Internet push‐button housewives of the 1960s to
the houses of the imagined near future that already know when a button needs to be pushed (Heckman,
2008). The Internet of Things, as many other design fictions, is often accompanied by technological
boosterism as well as considerable enthusiasm from its creators, but generally doesn’t attempt to pry into
the more problematic implications of a connected world. New technologies come paired with stories of
their future applications.
The Internet of Things is a massive conglomerate of billions of networked objects, wrapped up in visionary
projections of a networked and transformed world. In making technological artifacts networked and
traceable in space and time, the Internet of Things opens up for digital humanities projects that reach out
of our computers and into the physical world. The digital humanities need to engage with both technology
development and the cultural narratives of design fictions. The Internet of Things consists of smart devices
that talk to each other, ideally both mirroring and shaping human behaviors and values. Such delegations
to technology are not in any way new, as demonstrated by Bruno Latour in his classic essay on “the
sociology of a door‐closer” (Johnson, 1988). Let us return to the smart refrigerator to unpack the layers of
delegations, valuations, and social relations inherent in its algorithms. Deeper consideration of “A Day
Made of Glass,” smart fridges, and other design fictions for the Internet of Things – in particular the stories
that are not being told – can provide much insight about the place of digital technologies in contemporary
society. The frictionless and smooth world we are presented with in “A Day Made of Glass” may be a
seductive vision of the Internet of Things. Such breaking points open up for digital humanities investigations
into the Internet of Things. Mark Sample’s “Station 51000” Twitterbot (2013) is one example of how one
can engage with such breaking points. The Internet of Things is just around the corner. It has been so for a
while and will most likely continue to be so. Not only do spimes enable awareness of ongoing practices and
processes in the world; they also provide an entry point for engaging with these processes. It is up to digital
humanists to meet the challenge of wrangling with these spimes in meaningful ways.

Terms:
 Spimes, Sensors, Humanist, Vision, Delegations, Investigations, Sociology, Valuations,
Algorithms, Contemporary, Frictionless, Conglomerate, Fictions, Wi-Fi, Extrapolating,
Miniaturized, Trajectories, Geolocation, Technologies, Millenium
 Chapter 4
Collaboration and Infrastructure
Jennifer Edmond

Changes in a system can be either gradual and organic or sudden and disruptive in nature. Over time,
digital humanities, as it is now known, has emerged as a product of both. But not all of the forces shaping
digital humanities emerge externally. Other shifts within this area of research stem from long traditions
that predate the humanities’ turn toward the digital: the importance of scholarly communities, the
relationship scholars have to their sources and tools, and the institutions in which these sources and tools
are maintained. The adaptation and application of new technologies or norms in the culture of humanistic
scholarship therefore continues to inspire both enthusiasm and resistance.
In the digital humanities, the need for collaboration has the status of an essential component in the
founding myth. Even within the digital humanities, for example, publication norms still lean strongly
toward single, rather than multiple, authorship, obscuring in the peer‐ reviewed journals of the field the
central role of collaboration in how results were achieved (Nyhan and Duke‐Williams, 2014). Many
scholars focusing on systemic and social issues in academic research culture have noted and investigated
this tension over the past 10 years and more, in particular as the methods and approaches associated with
digital humanities have become (in spite of running somewhat against the traditional grain) ever more
commonplace. Over time, a more specific body of work has also emerged, as the issue at hand in a digital
humanities project is not just one of two or more people contributing to a common goal or output. The
key differentiator of the most successful digital humanities collaborations, therefore, is not just that they
monitor and manage all of the task‐ and relationship‐ level difficulties that may befall such an undertaking,
but also that they ensure from the outset that the project objectives propose interesting research
questions or otherwise substantive contributions for each discipline or specialty involved, and that team
members maintain a clear sense of their own roles and respect for those of their fellow team members.
The failure of a collaborative venture usually begins with a failure either to imagine likely outcomes or to
encourage open dialog on the part of the project team and its leader. There is also a further facet of
collaboration in the digital humanities that reaches beyond the project and the development team.
Regardless of the nature or complexities of this move from an individual to a collaborative paradigm for
humanistic research, one thing that is assured by these changes is an increase in the scale of the average
research undertaking. Infrastructure, including the many more nuanced or community‐specific terms used
to refer to it, such as research infrastructure, knowledge infrastructure, or cyberinfrastructure, can mean
very different things to different people. Many initiatives with a claim to inclusion under the heading of
infrastructure – from digital libraries or national repositories to tool suites, standards, data stores, and
knowledge marketplaces – have now emerged and developed to relative maturity. As with shifts in what
is meant by collaboration within the scholarly community, the shift in how to provide the basic platform
for knowledge creation in the humanities is not propagated as a ripple emanating outward from a
definable point, but as a shift in something internal and essential to the long history of the disciplines that
converge in the digital humanities. The moment when this slow divergence in perspectives finally came
to a distinct and open declaration (at least in terms of digital research infrastructure for the humanities)
can be pinpointed to 2006, with the release of two reports, one European, one American, announcing the
arrival of the era of cyberinfrastructure. Since that moment, there has been a rush to develop operational
responses to this dual call for action in the development of digital, virtual, or cyberinfrastructures for
research and discovery in the cultural space. This list is by no means exhaustive, even within the limited
space of large platform developments with a stated or implicit claim to being infrastructures. This is a
characteristic that has been referred to as getting “below the level of the work” (Edwards et al., 2007),
facilitating tasks without determining how they should be carried out. But getting “below the level of the
work” is not as easy as it sounds, because to aim too far below that level carries as much risk as being just
above it. In the absence of any unified vision for a transformative digital humanities infrastructure, we
continue to rely on the original knowledge infrastructures – the libraries, the archives, and the thematic
collections. In addition, while the open‐endedness of digital scholarship is often held up as an advantage
over print publication because it allows its authors to incorporate new findings and documents as they
are discovered, this very open‐endedness of the digital can also be interpreted as one of its greatest
weaknesses. There is a clear imperative, therefore, to make the long‐term sustainability of digital
resources one of the goals of infrastructural support for the digital humanities; however, different
organizations have pursued this goal in very different ways.
How we work together and how we create a fit‐for‐purpose support structure for research: these key
issues stand not only in the middle of the discussion about what digital humanities is and should do, but
are also relevant to all scholarship in the twenty‐first century. It was with great understatement that the
authors of one paper wrote, “Unfortunately, the academic community has a track record of resistance to
new forms of scholarly communication” (Arms and Larsen, 2007). Another such macro‐level issue is that
of whether large‐scale interdisciplinarity and infrastructural development displace the locus of power in
a manner that is not in harmony with the scholarly values that underpin digital humanities.

Terms:
 Myth, Organic, Culture, Enthusiasm, Resistance, Essential, Infrastructure, Authorship,
Digital, Dialog, Exhaustive, Platform, Cyberinfrastructure, Interdisciplinary, Implicit,
Transformative, Sustainability, Organizations, Propagated, Substantive
Chapter 5