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.
Galleries, History, Research, Teaching

Objects from The Information Age

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With research and teaching plans tumbling around my head, I visited the Science Museum yesterday to pick through the Information Age Gallery in the company of Oliver Carpenter, Curator of Infrastructure and Built Environment, historian of technology, and good friend. As someone whose research lingers at length on how and by whom things are made, sold, and used, I’m keen to keep in mind that all this data floating around us – historic or otherwise – is connected to tangible, physical, grabbable things.

Things like corkboard server racks that Google cobbled together in 1998 to meet demand on their new search engine, an object that brings to mind the land once used for agriculture that now hosts server farms (say in Ireland by Microsoft to support their Azure cloud: diagram, deck) in order to meet our demand data everywhere, all of the time.

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Things like a PDP-10 Operating Console used in the early 1970s to send messages (ergo emails) around the ARPANET (ergo – ish – the internet), an object that suggests that our interfaces with computers are not things that are given, not things that are just there, but methods of accessing data that exist in a complex interplay of choosing and being chosen.

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Things like the IBM System 360, one of the first computers that was networked, an object whose size, presentation, and computer-terminal-as-caricature-like appearance speak to how we perceive computation in media and film: as complex, opaque, blackboxed.

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Things like (from a nearby gallery) the Jacquard Machine, an early-nineteenth century punch card driven system for weaving patterned fabrics, an object that refutes the elision of technology (and especially computational technology) with the now, the contemporary, the solutionist, self-aggrandising and innovation-laden language of Silicon Valley or Silicon Roundabout (on which I can’t recommend David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old enough).

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Things then that span a good two centuries of human history. Things that point to real changes in society and culture. And things without which our data lacks meaning and can too easily be decontextualised, can – as Nathan Jurgenson argues in an excellent essay in The New Inquiry – slide into supporting rationalist fantasies of big data as providing a disinterested picture of reality, of human phenomena: a narrative of objectivity, of having harnessed a view from nowhere, promulgated by a tech industry oblivious to and ignorant of the biases in their data capture, of the lived world their data inhabits.

Whether I am thinking about how ordinary people expressed themselves on Geocities and Amazon in the 1990s or about ripping apart, remixing, and recontextualising as data information on London businesses assembled for and printed in late-Georgian directories, the meanings and contexts these things have to offer strike me as vital.