Krista Chesal, Content Solutions Specialist

…and how it has impacted my life…

In 2013, I was a freelance Technical Writer, as the definition at the time went. I wrote documentation for products, and the occasional manual, however I also wrote press releases and marketing content. At one point that year, I attended a career development seminar by the Bay Area Society for Technical Communication where we learned that the future of the job called Technical Writing was about to change dramatically (and, in fact, had already started to change) with the widespread use of API’s (Application Programming Interfaces), which is a form of software that allows two digital interfaces to talk to each other. We were told at the seminar that proficiency in API’s was the future of technical writing and that we would be well served by learning some computer programming languages in order to keep up. This was my first personal experience of the phenomenon of Phronesis: “a combination of a form of technical knowledge (techne) and the practical wisdom that emerges from action” (Berry, 2017, 1), that “includes the ability to reflect on computation and computational practices as a whole.” (Berry, 2017, 1). I was being challenged to integrate digital paradigms within what had been (in my personal, career experience) a largely humanities based career. Did this make me a participant in the Digital Humanities? I believe so. After all, my work now depended on me learning how to navigate “the realities of a wired world in which the “real estate” available for text and images is ever-shifting and in which argumentation must be able to expand and contract as a function of shifting constraints and technological affordances.” (Drucker, 2012, 10-11). And in addition to balancing these new realities of computational thinking within digital space, this work was primarily focused on “The basic building blocks of digital activity: digitization, classification, description, metadata, organization and navigation.” (Drucker, 2012,11).

I did not know this at the time, however. I was briefly overwhelmed at what seemed to be a gargantuan task – of becoming proficient in several computer programming languages in order to do my job effectively. At the time, I did not question this shift. It felt natural that the technological demands required to perform my job and indeed to function in society should be ever increasing. I did not question this assumption of the requirement for increasing technological proficiency, it felt like a natural evolution of society. Had I been reading more widely at the time, I may have questioned my assumptions on the naturalness of the increasing pervasiveness of specialized technology and its role in my life. As Johana Drucker states so eloquently: “The more something appears to be natural, the more it is cultural.” (Drucker, 2010, 50). Was this the point in my personal experience where I became part of the algorithm? part of online existence that would try to “pull (me)…into life patterns that gradually degrade the ways in which each of us exists as an individual?” (Lanier, 2010, x). Perhaps. It was certainly the beginning of a new perspective for me.

Ultimately I found it impossible for my brain to learn enough computer programming to continue as a Technical Writer, and I refocused my career on more traditionally styled editing and writing, and although now keywords and optimization were critical aspects of producing this work, they were more sensical to my style of thinking and working, and so integrated to my work with only a minimum of disruption in the form of education. At the time, despite working parallel to the technological world, I had very little concept of the Digital Humanities as a subject, nor the concepts that they were based on, despite being impacted by them on a daily basis. I lacked even the foundational understanding of Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The medium is the message” (Mitchell and Hansen, 2010, x) and how media is a thing in its own right, “a medium impacts human experience and society not primarily through the content that it mediates, but through its formal, technical properties as a medium.” (Mitchell and Hansen, 2010, x). In a digital society, this can allow us to understand the technology by which we receive media as a thing to be studied and that exists as an entity, “…media as an environment for the living” (Mitchell and Hansen, 2010, xiii), so not simply a means to a message, but an integral portion of the message itself.

What has this meant for my personal journey as a communications professional in the digital world? Gradually, I came to realize that my skill set required an update. But rather than pursue a purely technical qualification, I became deeply curious about the changes I was witnessing in my career, in the ways I socialized with friends, in the ways I spent my leisure time and got my news. In my lifetime, technology has gone from a side dish, ice cream with a cherry on top, to the entire meal and it’s preparation methods. I chose to pursue a Masters Degree in Communication and New Media in order to attempt to understand where humanities and technology meet, as Katherine Hayles puts it: “The issues (of) scale, productive/critical theory, collaboration, databased, multimodal scholarship, and code — are affecting the structures through which knowledge is created, contextualized, stored, accessed and disseminated.” (Hayles, 2012, 60). It is my hope and intention that this course of formal study will allow me to be a part of the Digital Humanities going forward that gets to help us understand how we can maintain true individual integrity while accessing the potential benefits a digital society can afford us, if we avoid the inherent pitfalls of the “algorithm that is not meant to connect us, but to “personalize” or individuate our experiences” (Drucker, 2010, 51) and make these resources work for all of us to increase diversity, representation and access.

References

Berry, David and Anders Fagerjord. 2017. “On the way to computational thinking,” in Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity.

Burdick, Anne; Johanna Drucker & Peter Lunenfeld. 2012. “Humanities to digital humanities” in Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, US: The MIT Press.

Drucker, Johanna. 2016. “At the intersection of computational methods and the traditional humanities.” In Simanowski, R. (ed.) Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy. London: Open Humanities Press. An open access book, licensed under the Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike Licence. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/digital-humanities-and-digital-media/

Hayles, N. Katherine (2012). How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies. In David M. Berry (Ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lanier, J. (2010). “Chapter 1: Missing Persons”. You are not a gadget: A manifesto. (pp x-23).

Mitchell, W.J.T, and Mark Hansen. 2010. Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Featured Image from: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/introduction-to-digital-humanities-a-state/media/digital-humanities-wordle