Despite finishing just 48 hours ago, the Interface conference now feels a long way away as I write this from the first stop of my summer break at La Tranche sur Mer on the beautiful west coast of France! However this review looks back on two and a half engaging days of talks, workshops and conversations around the idea of Digital Humanities. In fact, to me Interface very much felt like Humanities+, with a significant number of delegates (including myself) dealing with subjects that are either on the fringe of the traditional humanities or much closer to the arts. There was a sense that the use of ‘advanced’ digital or technological tools (whether programming, XML, web science, or computational analysis) was the common framework within which a diverse range of disciplines were able to come together and share skills, ideas, and the experience of undertaking a PhD.
Stephen Scrivener’s keynote talk on design innovation in the context of research was a fascinating lecture as a designer that also covered many of the issues raised by inter-disciplinary research. The way he moved between arts and computing (and research and practice) throughout his career was encouraging, and as a PhD student from a School of Architecture, the way the design was described as a research activity (and not just in research by design) was highly resonant. Categorising three processes of research design; ‘problem solving’ (traditional research question), ‘projective’ (perceived as risky in the context of academia) or ‘reflective’ (not often done explicitly by designers) was useful, and the admission that many projects written up as a clean ‘problem solving’ thesis came out of a messy ‘projective’ process made many in the room feel a lot better about the confusion in their own projects!
Melissa Terras (UCL) questioned the relevancy of defining a field for ‘digital humanities’ in the age of everyone using Google or databases. She also suggested that in order to define yourself as ‘digital’ you need to develop expertise across a range of tools and disciplines – and as the conference progressed it became clear that many individuals were trying to become ‘multi-lingual’ in digital tools across the disciplinary spectrum.
The format of the ‘lightning talks’ seem to make people more nervous than one might have expected, as the stress of what to leave out from a detailed research project led to two approaches; focus in more detail on one aspect or try and give a very light overview of everything that is of interest. The fear was heightened by the fact that any slight overrun would be immediately cut off by the two-minute horn. As they flashed it was hard to keep up, though the ones that stuck out for me were the more alternative interpretations of ‘Humanities’, such as Eve Forrest’s (Uni of Sunderland) phenomenology of Flickr users, Tim Murray-Browne’s study of the interactive effect of interactive art, and Jenny Steele’s art projects in China. The type of researchers one might expect at a digital conference meant that there was the obligatory simultaneous conference proceedings and commentary via Twitter – though it was hard to tell how much this added to the relatively tight-knit conference or whether it was simply a distraction.
One benefit of the lightning talk format was the acted as a social ice-breaker, with people suddenly approaching to say “was yours the one with the site-specific theatre…?” This led into the afternoon workshops, but a late withdrawal by the representative from Mandelay (a rival of Zotero) led to Leif Isakson (all-round digital researcher from Uni of Southampton and former host of Interface) leading a really useful session on Geo-Spatial technologies including Simile Exhbit, Google Fusion, GIS, and Geo-databases. We covered a lot of technology I was familiar with but it was good to see some different applications as well as being another chance to get to know some like-minded PhD students.
Next up, Martin Zaltz Austwick of CASA led a hands-on introduction to programmatic visualisation of social and spatial data. Many of the recent CASA examples demonstrated the compelling nature of beautifully presented and analytic communication of complex datasets (but also a continued preoccupation with Twitter). The popular open-source Processing (Java) language was used in conjunction with CSV data, with the basics of parsing and projection explained in an accessible manner. The work of CASA will definitely continue to be an important reference point for my research as I progress.
Claire Warwick’s (UCL DH) session on studying users may have been framed a little too narrowly, with all of the examples related to the digital archives. However the principles of user-orientated design; participation, testing, redesign could all be related to the wider disciplines that all involve some form of user interface. Indeed, a recurring issue that came up in informal conversations with other delegates was the lack of engagement or ‘fear’ of studying users in the arts.
From a personal point of view, the rest of the talks that made up the morning of the third day felt somewhat less relevant (though this may well have been a product of staying up very late to see some experimental theatre on a night bus (see the separate post for a review of ‘Zero Hour’). These sessions concerned academic publishing, funding, and careers, which may feel pressing for ‘pure’ Humanities scholars, but it’s a route that I have yet to be sold on post-PhD.
Though many including myself found the management-speak title of the final ‘un-conference’ a little grating (I was still tired), the principle of opening up a whole session to address topics raised by delegates is a good idea, and one that the Interface members took on with gusto. Having chosen to participate in the crowdsourcing subgroup (an area of genuine interest but one which only impacts on my project indirectly), we had a lively and well-informed discussion covering participant motives, incidental and designed interfaces, when crowdsourcing works best and worst, and the reliability of the data generated.
All in all this was very enjoyable and engaging conference, principally because of the open, intelligent and truly inter-disciplinary group of researchers. The workshops were the most successful element as these were skills-focussed sessions rather than subject-specific. However I do feel that in future Interface could be made stronger by focussing more on the digital (and being inviting to arts & social science) and keeping the larger Digital Humanities conference more strictly for the humanists.
