i. Interdisciplinary Typology

If the Internet and the broader new media communication technology field are as important to our society as we are continually told, then we need to network together some of the more insular pockets of Internet discourse. Many Internet researchers are blinkered by technological technique and discount the fact that the Internet is a broad based innovation, cutting across many disciplines and modes of thought.

The sort of techno-centric declarations coming from some in the design community for instance may be contrasted with the Humanities Computing field that almost never engages with interface designers. As a network, the Internet is as multifarious as the society in which it is embedded and we need to develop strategies to celebrate these diversities, rather than allow one group to standardise and dominate our use of it. This is especially perilous for the humanities if this group has commercial imperatives.



An illustrative anecdotal example of a clash between research cultures is when I gave a presentation to a colleague of an interactive map produced at the Virginia Centre for Digital History in the US.[1]  It was a map of a battle that occurred in the Eastern Theatre of the American Civil War and represented many months of effort and specialist historical knowledge. My colleague, an IT expert, proceeded to take one look at the map, did not seem to engage with it on any level (apart from technique), then after one click of the mouse, we were brutally taken forward two centuries to a map of Washington DC property prices!

The point is that the processes of the Internet are an integral part of it, however, what about disciplinary frameworks, or empathy for intellectual context? Technology is not only advanced within the ‘ivory tower’ of self-referential deference to technological technique, but also within a historio-technical schema.

Global theories of usability, interface design, and even hypertext theory that deny disciplinary trajectories and cultural difference are intended to simply privilege one profession. I find it extraordinary that some members of the Internet community believe that web users cannot concentrate beyond thirty seconds of video or that reading academic writing online is somehow beyond them.[2]  In short, mediums compete, professionals compete, and different sections of society will (within their abilities) use and adapt the medium to suit their needs.



The questions concerning technology and society go back centuries and it is naïve to believe that one medium can somehow obviate the larger ingrained structures of cultural practice. In Australia, technological education generally comes from a heritage of utilitarian and vocational training whilst the Humanities have been traditionally more valued by the middle classes.[3]   Many of our technology universities cannot afford nor do not believe their students worthy of a critical Humanities education, thus engendering an a-political, functional and determinist view of technological production..[4] This suits a corporate appetite for skilled labour, but it perhaps does not suit the critical skills and functions of the broader Humanities.

Information Technology does have a close relationship to industry and for a Humanities scholar this causes a lot of friction. Because the skills gained in new media research are directly marketable to industry, the demarcations between what is in the commercial interest and what is in the public interest are sometimes not understood. One could make the argument that the commercial interest is the public interest, however commercialism already dominates nearly every aspect of our society, and there are vital modes of intellectual and cultural production that only exist in our public universities.



There is already probably too much research being produced in Australia that could be described as ‘corporate curatorial’ or research that is focused on consumer software made overseas. [5]  But this is unfortunately the reality of much of the independent student authorship in this medium that the field of Humanities Computing is yet to seriously address. Midlevel consumer software is sometimes the only tools available for many students and institutional repositories have also yet to address this issue.

Many Humanities Computing projects offer helmsmanship for documents relating to canonical Western thought, but disregard the fact that this thought was not advanced logically nor linearly in the first place. Some of the most important documents of the French Enlightenment, for instance, were ephemeral and marginal to the printing processes of the time. They are now some of the most historically significant documents to survive the French Revolution.

Although an author may be discerning about the technology they employ to advance a particular argument, I am not sure if it is the role of the author to ensure that there work is technically canonised for eternity. There are some important unanswered questions here but it is unrealistic to assume that addressing them all is the role of the author.



Another difficulty encountered in electronic research is that it covers such a broad range of skills. These skills (depending on the project of course) range from academic writing, to web design, to oral history, to online video production. In reflection, this has been cognitively confronting in this work, but certainly a broadening experience.

It took me close to a year of reading books on globalisation to embed myself within the phenomena whilst undertaking the oral-history fieldwork. I then had to learn web design, video production, and other software tools for digital media production.

Humanists usually have highly developed thesis writing skills, but we are not only judged on our ability to write well, we are also measured on our ability to engage and position ourselves within the world of humanistic ideas. The ideas that constitute one’s field are augmented by evidence, then selection, interpretation, integration, analysis and argument. Together this is within the raison d'être of the research.

In a project such as this one, there is a fertile blended balance of skills that advance its historio-technical relationships. A researcher with their mind methodologically mapped to the codex may not understand the decisions taken in compressing a twelve hours of video so it can be accessed via a dial up phone system anywhere in the world. This is a political choice as much as it is a technical choice.

The decisions relating to the compression of the video for Milkbar.com.au alone took close to four hundred hours of experimentation and then implementation. One mouse click by the user may represent one hundred hours of work for the author. Again empathy for research cultures is a hard learnt skill for electronic scholarship.

Accordingly, there are many other web and data base technologies that I could have used in this project, but they did not seem appropriate for this work..[6]  They would have required a much more singular intellectual investment and may have made the project far less balanced. Milkbar.com.au is a montage; an eclectic arrangement of people that reflect the complexity of a local environment and some technologies may not communicate this effectively.[7] more>>
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Authored by Craig Bellamy© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002

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