All posts by jwbaker

James Baker is Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. James is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral research on the late-Georgian artist-engraver Isaac Cruikshank. James works at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and digital technologies. He is currently working on a history of knowledge organisation in twentieth century Britain. In 2021, I begin a major new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage, 1870 – 1950'. Previous externally funded research projects have focused on legacy descriptions of art objects ('Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship', Arts and Humanities Research Council), the preservation of intangible cultural heritage ('Coptic Culture Conservation Collective', British Council, and 'Heritage Repertoires for inclusive and sustainable development', British Academy), the born digital archival record ('Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities', European Commission), and decolonial futures for museum collections ('Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections', Arts and Humanities Research Council). Prior to joining Southampton, James held positions of Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, Digital Curator at the British Library, and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar, a member of The Programming Historian Editorial Board and a Director of ProgHist Ltd (Company Number 12192946), and an International Advisory Board Member of British Art Studies.
Caricature, Neuroscience

Science, Caricature, and Darcus Howe

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Surely the most unsettling type of caricature is that which people fail to realise hasn’t gone away.

Twice this week Darcus Howe has appeared on the BBC. On the first occasion he had to endure former Tory MP Edwina Currie, who appeared to suggest that as we now live in a free, liberal, and racially tolerent society, she was able to understand what it was like for a young Trinidadian man to come to London in the early 1970s. It was a patronising display, all overseen by a surprisingly benign Jeremy Paxman. It is however Howe’s second appearance, this time on News24, which has received the widest attention…
There are many aspect of this ridiculous ‘interview’ I could talk about, most of which would stray towards being a commentary on the disturbances this week, something I’m not prepared to do (I, like many, am still thinking it through).
What I do wish to talk about is how the interviewer saw Howe. This week I read details of an interesting neuroscientific study at MIT exploring the notion that it is through caricature that we recognise faces. Sceptical as I am of the ability of present functional magnetic resonance imaging technologies to capture such data (for a recent addition to the growing critique of fMRI see Neuroskeptic), there remains a striking plausibility to the theory. Responding to the study anthropologist Krystal D’Costa writes:

Caricature emphasizes the things that differ from the norms we create for appearance. It can reveal a great deal about how we see people of different races and ethnicities—and hamper our ability to see these people as individuals. The idea is that when we encounter groups of people who don’t match our established norm, we lump them together with the same exaggerations and we stop seeing them as individuals. We don’t work as hard to pick out the nuances that make them individuals, which gives rise to the idea that members of other races and ethnic groups look alike. We otherize them, and reinforce the stereotypes that are linked to them.

It appears that it is through this lens that the BBC News24 reporter saw Darcus Howe. She mistook passion for aggression, and bitterness at systemic social failures for a support of arson and violence. But what is worse is that she appears to have been unable to recognise Darcus Howe, a prominent writer and broadcaster, from any other black Caribbean man in their late-60s living in South London. The lesson is that if the BBC wish to conduct live interviews in fast moving and fluid environments, those interviews need to be conducted by journalists who are far more accomplished and far more culturally aware. Otherwise the BBC will expose themselves to calls that the old stereotypes of London’s black communities has, in fact, never really gone away.