The humanity in Digital Humanities

I had an epiphany of sorts the other night, summed up by the following set of tweets: 

 

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I really think that’s true. Part of the project of digital humanities has to be thinking about how electronic content is produced. I don’t mean just thinking critically about authority, or even about what “New Media” might mean. That’s part of it. But we need also to approach digital material with the same eye toward history and accountability with which approach material texts and the material world in general. 

I started out thinking about the idea of “human-powered search,” and that set off a train of free association that ended with Google’s old “PigeonRank” April Fool’s prank. What makes PigeonRank funny is that no one outside of a few mathematicians really understands how search works. Unless you hang out with cryptographers and AI hackers (or programmers under NDA with Google), even the most tech-savvy person you know only kind of understands how it all works. As far as most people are concerned, it may as well be a flock of pigeons in a warehouse. When we throw people into that equation, it starts to get scary.

Google, of course, has their famous “don’t be evil” policy, and the pioneers of human-powered search over at Mahalo are good people. I used to be lead blogger at one of Jason Calacanis’ other properties, and Mahalo’s ex-Editorial Director is going to be my best man. I’ll vouch for them.  The history of technology, though, tells us that good ideas end up moving offshore for production, and that greed eventually trumps all other production concerns. In the inevitable cycle of merger and acquisition, how long before some adolescent in China is answering questions about trivia in between sewing shoes and gold farming for the Warcraft black market? When will the algorithm stop finding Jesus and start finding sweatshops in Guam?

What then?

Of course, I’m being a little hyperbolic, here, but a successful digital humanities will eventually require a fusion of critical theory and canny consumerism.