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.
DHums, Research

Digital methods will open our eyes

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Following on from his keynote appearance at DH2014, Bruno Latour has published a short (not peer reviewed) essay digital methods and the social sciences. In it he and his co-author Tommaso Venturini reject the siloing of both studies of and research using digital technologies, meditate on the limitations of quantitative and qualitative methods when used by social scientists in isolation or as independently reinforcing (in short, they are good at studying stable situation and poor at studying volatile, changing situations), plead for open methods, open results, and open data, and argue for a radical methodological shift towards ‘quali-qualitative’ methods: that is, methods that use the traces left by digital technology to erase the micro/macro border and track actors and interactions at hitherto impossible scale and detail. And all over just seven pages.

At times the essay reminded me of Tim Hitchcock’s recent call for historians to build genuine macroscopes rather than methods/tools that seem macroscopic but in reality only deal with phenomena at a detached, view from nowhere vantage point, particularly in all three authors’ call for a retention of our close scholarly focus whilst connecting it to the massive scale of human and non-human existence and for the riotous ambition – perhaps even impractical ambition? – of that call. Either way, I cannot fail to agree with Latour and Venturini’s stiring closing remarks, however daunting the task of converting their vision of scholarship into reality may be:

Social existence is not divided into two levels. Micro-interactions and macro-structures are only two different ways of looking at the same collective canvas, like the warp and weft of the social fabric. There – in the unity generated by the multiplication of differences, in the stability produced by the accumulation of mutations, in the harmony hatching from controversies, in the equilibrium relying on thousands on fractures – lie the marvel of communal existence. Qualitative and quantitative methods have too long hid this spectacle from us. Digital methods will open our eyes.