Humanities2

What follows is the lightly revised text of a 'Provocation' I presented at the launch event held to celebrate the creation of the Digital Humanities Institute  from the Humanities Research Institute.  Held in Sheffield on the 17th of January 2017, the event perhaps required more celebration than critique (and the DHI deserves to be celebrated).  But I hope that the main point - that we need to move beyond the textual humanities to something more ambitious - comes through in what follows.

I have been working with what has up till now been the Humanities Research Institute for almost twenty years.   I have witnessed as it has grown with each project, and engaged with each new twist and turn in that remarkable story of the evolution of the digital humanities in the UK since the 1990s.   It has been a real privilege. 

Of all the centres created in the UK in that time – the HRI has been the most successful, and most influential.  And it has been successful, because, more than any other equivalent it has created a sustainable model of online publishing of complex inherited materials, and done so in delicate balance with an ongoing exploration of the new things that can be done with each new technology – and in balance again with a recognition of the new problems the online presents.

I frequently claim that the UK is at the forefront of the digital humanities – not necessarily because the UK has been at the bleeding edge of technical innovation; or because its academics have won many of the intemperate arguments that pre-occupy critical theory.  Instead, it is at the forefront of worldwide developments because, following the HRI, the UK figured out early that the inexorable move to the online, both demanded a clarity of purpose, and a constant and ongoing commitment to sustainable publication.  The HRI, and now the DHI, represent that clear and unambiguous commitment to putting high quality materials online in an academically credible form; and an equally unambiguous commitment to measured innovation in search and retrieval, representation, and analysis.

But, while it is a moment to look back on a remarkable achievement, it is also a moment to grasp the nettle of change.  This re-foundation is a clear marker of that necessity and reflects a recognition both that the Humanities as a whole are on the move, and that the roles the DHI might play in that process are themselves changing.

For me, this sets a fundamental challenge.   And where I tend to start is with that label ‘The Humanities’.  This category of knowing has never really sat very comfortably for me.  It has always seemed a rather absurd, portmanteau import from the land of Trump – a kind of Trumpery – used to give a sense of identity to the thousand small private Universities that pock-mark the US; and to a collection of ill-assorted sub-disciplines brought together primarily in defence of their funding.  And it goes without saying, ‘The Humanities’ are always in crisis.
 

But, if you asked me to define the ‘humanities’ part of that equally awkward phrase – the Digital Humanities – it has to encompass that process through which a society learns about itself; where it re-affirms its collective identity and values; where the past and the present work in dialogue.  And whether that is via history, or literature, philosophy or politics, or the cultural components of geography and sociology – the ‘Humanities’ is where a community is first created and then constantly redefined in argument with itself, and with its past. 

For all the addition of the ‘digital’ to the equation, that underlying purpose remains, and remains uniquely significant to a working civil society. 

But, up until now – that conversation – that dialogue between the past and the present – has pre-eminently taken the form of text – the texts of history books and novels; long analytical articles and essays; aphorisms, poems and manifestos.  And even when you add the ‘digital’ to create the ‘Digital Humanities’, the dominance of ‘text’ remains constant.  Indeed, if you look at the projects that have been undertaken by the HRI over the last two decades, the vast majority have been about text, and the re-representation of inherited text in a new digital format.  You can, of course, point to mapping projects, and 3d modelling of historic buildings, but the core work of the ‘digital humanities’ to date has been taking inherited text, and making it newly available for search and analysis as a single encoded stream of data.

This is a fantastic thing – the digital humanities have given us new access to old text; and created several news forms of ‘reading’ along the way – distant, close, and everywhere in between.  It has arguably, created a newly democratic world of knowledge – in which some 40% of all humans have access to the web and all the knowledge contained therein – all 3.5 billion of them.  That small-minded world many of us grew up in, of Encyclopaedia salesmen peddling access to a world of information most of us were otherwise excluded from by class and race and gender – is simply gone.  This is a very good thing.

But, while the first twenty years of the web forms a place where the stuff of the post-enlightenment dead needed to find a home; our hard work recreating this body of material also means that we have spent the last twenty years very much swimming against the tide of the ‘humanities’ as a set of contemporary practises.  We have reproduced an old-school library, but online – with better finding aids and notetaking facilities, and we have made it more democratic and hyper-available – for all the paywalls in the world.  But at the same time, we have also allowed ourselves to limit that project to a ‘textual’ humanities; when the civic and civil conversation that the ‘humanities’ must represent, has itself moved from text to sound and from sound to image.  There is a sense in which we are desperately trying to represent a community – a conversation – made up of an ever changing collection of voices in an ever changing series of formats, but trying to do so, via that single encoded stream of knowing:  text.

This is where the greatest danger and the greatest opportunity for the ‘digital humanities’ lies – because if you look at ‘data’ in its most abstract forms, this equation between knowing and text, is breaking down, and is certainly changing at a dramatic pace.

The greatest technological developments shaping the cultures of the twentieth century focussed on creating alternatives to text.  Whether you look to sound and voice, via radio and recording; or image and movement, via film and television – the first half of the twentieth century created a series of new forms of aural and visual engagement that gave to sound and image, the same universal reach that for the preceding four hundred years, was provided by print.  The second half of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty-first, was equally taken up with putting sound and image in our everyday - jostling for attention, and pushing aside – text.  

It is perhaps difficult to remember that the car radio only became commonplace in the 1950s; and that the transistor radio making mobile music possible – on the beach and on the street – was a product of the same decade.  Instant photography and moving images were similarly, only given freedom to go walkabout in the 1970s and 1980s, with luggable televisions, and backbreaking video cameras. 

This trajectory of change – and ever greater focus on the non-textual – has simply increased in pace with the advent of the smart phone and the tablet.  While at the margins, the Kindle may have changed how we read Fifty Shades of Grey on public transport; it was the Walkman, the iPod, and the smartphone that have most fundamentally changed how we spend our time - what kinds of signals we are interpreting from minute to minute.   The most powerful developments of the last decade have involved maps and images – from Google Earth to Flickr and PinInterest.

Ironically, while the book and the journal article have remained stubbornly the same - even in their digital forms; and while much of ‘digital humanities’ efforts have been directed towards capturing a technology of text that had been largely invented by 1600, and remained largely unchanged since; the content of our culture has been radically transformed by the creation of unlimited sound and image. 

If you want proof of this, all you need do reflect on the triggers of your imagination when contemplating the 1960s or 1980s – or the 2000s or 2010s.  We have become a world of sound and image.   

Half the time we now narrate the past through discographies of popular music; and most of what we know about the past is delivered via image rich documentaries, and historical dramatizations – wholly dependent on film archives for their power and claim to authenticity.  Our conversation – that dialogue with the dead, that forms the core of the humanities – has become increasingly multi-modal; and multi-valiant. A simple measure of this – is that the percentage of text on the web has been declining steadily since the mid-2000s.  According to Anthony Cociolo, text currently represents only some 27% of web content.  

Over the last two decades the Digital Humanities has crafted a technology for the representation of text; but we now need to pay more attention to all that other data – the non-textual materials that increasingly comprise our cultural legacy, and the content of our humanities conversation.

And the digital humanities have a genuine opportunity to create something exponentially more powerful than the textual humanities.  What the digital side of all this allows, is the removal of the barriers between sound and image and text – between novel, song and oil painting.  Each of these is no more than just another variety of signal – of encoding – now, in the digital, divided one from the other by nothing more substantial than a different file format.

If we can multiply sound by text – give each encoded word a further aural inflection; and each sound a textual representation of its meaning to the listener – we make the humanities stronger and more powerful.  By bringing text and image together; we create something that allows new forms of analysis, new layers of complexity, and new doubts and claims, to be heard among the whispering voices of that humanities conversation.  In part, this is a simple recognition that the physical heft of a book, changes how you read it; and that doing so on a crowded tube train, is different from reading even the very same physical book on a sunny beach.

Much has already been done to bring all these signals on to the same screen – to map texts; and add image to commentary; but there is an opportunity to go much further with this, and to acknowledge in a methodologically consistent way, that we can use sound and image, place, space and all the recoverable contexts of human experience to generate a more powerful, empathetic understanding of the past; to have a fuller more compelling conversation with the dead.  To my mind, we need new methodologies that allow us to analyse and deconstruct multiple signals, multiple data streams – sound multiplied by text by image by space.  We need to recreate the humanities by multiplying its various strands, one against the other, to create something more powerful, more challenging, and more compelling.  Perhaps, the Humanities³.

 
 

Voices of Authority: Towards a history from below in patchwork

This post is intended to very briefly describe a project I am about halfway through - that seeks to experiment with the new permeability that digital technologies seem to make possible - to create a more usable 'history from below', made up of lives knowable only through small fragments of information.

This particular project is called ‘Voices of Authority’, and is a small part of a larger AHRC funded project – The Digital Panopticon – that is seeking to digitise and link up the records reflecting everyone tried in London between around 1780 and 1875, and either sent to prison, or else transported to Australia.  This small element of the wider project is bringing together a series of different ways of knowing about a particular place, time and experience – the Old Bailey courtroom from around 1750-1850, and the experience of being tried for your life and for your liberty.  The conceit behind this project, is really a suggestion that building something in three dimensions, with space, physical form and performance, along with new forms of analysis of text; can change how we understand the experience of the trial process; and to allow a more fully empathetic engagement with defendants; along with a better understanding of how their experience impacted on the exercise of power and authority.

This project is only half completed – so this is very much a report of 'work in progress'.  But, in essence, what seeks to do is bring together three distinct different forms of ‘data’ and to re-organise that data around individual defendants.  

First, it takes the text of the Old Bailey Proceedings – the trial accounts of some 197,745 trials held between 1674 and 1913, and recognises them as comprising two different and distinct things – a bureaucratic record of the trials themselves (names, verdicts, punishments); and at the same time, one of the largest corpora of recorded spoken language created prior to the twentieth century – some 40 million words of direct, recorded testimony for the period under analysis.

These understandings of the Proceedings are, of course, built on projects of much longer duration; including the OldBailey Online, and more particularly, on Magnus Huber’s additional linguistic mark-up of the Proceedings, which allows ‘speech’ to be pulled from the trial text, and to identify the speaker along the way.  This is available via the Old Bailey Corpus.

The project also builds on text and data mining methodologies – including direct counting of word and phrase distributions, and the application of a form of explicit semantic analysis, that allows us to look at the changing character of language used in witness statements over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

 

In other words, the first element of the project is the text and speech, crimes, punishments and dates provided by the Old Bailey Proceedings.

The second element is the body of the criminal - the physical body of the individual  men and women involved.  The broader project is creating a dataset of some 66,000 men and women – with substantial and detailed information about their lives, both before and after transportation or imprisonment – reflecting the inter-relationship between the people who became defendants and criminals with the systems of a global empire. And this material provides a huge amount of data about bodies – to add to the words individuals spoke to power.  Height, weight, eye colour, tattoos among a range of other aspects of a physical self.  Suddenly, we know if a collection of words was spoken by a ten stone, 5 foot two inch woman with brown hair and black eyes, and a withered left arm; or by a six foot man with an anchor tattoo on his left arm, and a scar above squinting blue eyes. 

To think about it another way, this bit of the ‘project’, allows us to worry about the ragged boundary between the ‘physical’ as recorded in a set of numerical and standardised descriptions, and the ‘textual’ – the slippery and ambiguous content of each witness statement. 

In relation to ‘history from below’, this allows us to put together the lives of people like William Curtis, who as a 16 year old, in the summer of 1843, had a perfectly healthy tooth pulled, before stealing the dentists’ coat.  And Sarah Durrant, who was convicted for receiving two banks notes worth 2000 pounds. It all allows us to know their words (their textualities), and at the same time to see them as part of a different kind of truth – of place and body. 

The aspiration is to essentially code for the variabililties of body type at scale, to add a further dimension to both the records of the bureaucracy of trials (charge, verdict punishment), and the measurable content of the textualities of those same trials.

And finally, we are adding one additional dimension – space –  a ‘scene of trial’.

For this we are first of all building on a project called Locating London’s Past, which among other things, maps crime locations on to the historic landscape of London.  And to this we are adding a reconstruction of the courtroom, where all these trials took place. 

Simply using Sketch-up, we have made most progress on the George Dance’s building, finished in the late 1770s and providing the main venue for the relevant trials for the next hundred years – basing the models on the architectural plans from which it was built.  

In the process of creating this model, huge amounts of imformation about trial procedure has been revealed, including the changing layout of the court, and the relative position of the different speakers.  The design itself reflects a hitherto unacknowledged transition in the character of how witnesses and defendants were divided in this evolving space, evidencing a new story of the evolution of the criminal trial. 

The architecture itself, suggests that there was a clear transition from a situation in which witnesses and victims stood in a similar relation to the judge and jury (both facing the judge, relatively close to one another); to one - like a modern anglo-american courtroom  - where the judge and witnesses are on one side, and the defendant on the opposite side of the courtroom.  In other words, the character of the adversarial relationship at the core of the adversarial trial was re-defined, with the witnesses and victim re-located on the either side of the argument, and the judges role, redefined as arbiter between them.  At some level, in the process community resolution was replaced by court judgement. 

If you want to explain why conviction rates at the Old Bailey rose from under 50% in the mid eighteenth century, to over eighty percent at the end of the nineteenth century, starting from precisely the moment when the courtroom was rebuilt, this ‘fact on the ground’ needs to be part of the story.

What has also been revealed is the importance of levels – with lawyers speaking upwards to the judge, jury, witnesses and defendant, from a cock-pit several feet below their eye level.  Like a theatre audience, the judge, jury and defendant looked down on the stage below.  In other words, what was created, at least for a short time (70 years), was the real feel of a ‘theatre’ in which, as a barrister, you were forced to perform to the gods.  

 

Looking forwarding to the next stage, this particular sub-project is seeking to move from the ‘art’ of making and performance, through a humanist and historical appreciation of ‘experience’, towards the tools of social science and informatics – seeking to combine the close reading of a single desperate plea, with the empathy that can only come with physical knowledge, with that macroscopic image of all the similar words spoken over a hundred years – how that one plea fits in a universe of words and bodies.  And all of this, is in turn, being undertaken in pursuit of a more nuanced and empathetic engagement with the lives of working people - both for its own sake, and as part of a new analysis of the workings of power 'from below'.

With luck, this will allow us to move beyond a simple analysis of the courtroom, and the ‘adversarial trial’ - to an analysis through which we can see the whole system from the defendants’ perspectiv.

In other words, the next step is about creating a history of the British criminal justice system, and of transportation from an experiential perspective on a large scale – contributing to a history of common human experience, evidenced from the distributed leavings of the dead, analysed with all the approaches available to hand, from all the perspectives available.

Big Data, Small Data and Meaning

This post was originally written as the text for a talk I gave at a British Library Lab's event in London in early November 2014. In the nature of these things, the rhythms of speech and the verbal ticks of public speaking remain in the prose. It has been lightly edited, but the point remains the same.  

In recent months there has been a lot of talk about big stuff. Between 'Big Data' and calls for a return to ‘Longue durée’ history writing, lots of people seem to be trying to carve out their own small bit of 'big data'. This post represents a reflection on what feels to me to be an important emerging strategy for information interrogation driven by the arrival of 'big data' (a 'macroscope'); and a tentative step beyond that, to ask what is lost by focusing exclusively on the very large. 

And the place I need to start is with the emergence of what feels to me like an increasingly commonplace label – a ‘macroscope’ - for a core aspiration of a lot of people working in the Digital Humanities. 

As far as I can tell, the term ‘macroscope’ was coined in 1969 by Piers Jacob, and used as the title of his science fiction/fantasy work of the same year – in which the ‘macroscope’, a large crystal, able to focus on any location in space-time with profound clarity, is used to produce something like a telescope of infinite resolution. In other words, a way of viewing the world that encompasses both the minuscule, and the massive. The term was also taken up by Joel de Rosnay and deployed as the title of a provocative book on systems analysis first published in 1979. The label has also had a long and undistinguished afterlife as the trademark for a suite of project management tools – a ‘methodology suite’ - supported by the Fujistu Corporation. 

But I think the starting point for interest in the possibility of creating a ‘macroscope’ for the Digital Humanities, comes out of computer science, and the work of Katy Börner from around 2011.

Her designs and advocacy for the development of a ‘Plug and Play Macroscope’, seems to have popularised the idea to a wider group of Digital Humanists and developers. To quote Börner: 

'Macroscopes provide a "vision of the whole," helping us "synthesize" the related elements and detect patterns, trends, and outliers while granting access to myriad details. Rather than make things larger or smaller, macroscopes let us observe what is at once too great, slow, or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.' (Katy Börner, ‘Plug-and-Play Macroscopes’, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 54 No. 3, Pages 60-6910.1145/1897852.1897871)

In other words, for Börner, a macroscope is a visualisation tool that allows a single data point, to be both visualised at scale in the context of a billion other data points, and drilled down to its smallest compass. This was not a vision or project initially developed in the humanities. Instead it was a response to the conundrums of ‘Big Data’ in both STEM academic disciplines, and the wider commercial world of information management. But more recently, a series of ‘macroscope’ projects have begun to emerge from within the humanities, tied to their own intellectual agendas, and subtly recreating the idea with a series of distinct emphases. 

Perhaps the project most heavily promoted recently, is Paper Machines, created by Jo Guldi and Chris Johnson-Robertson – and the MetLab at Harvard. This forms a series of visualisation tools, built to work with Zotero, and ideally allowing the user to both curate a large scale collection of works, and explore its characteristics through space, time and word usage. In other words, it is designed to allow you to build your own Google Books, and explore. There are problems with Paper Machines, and most people I know have struggled to make it work consistently. But it rather nicely builds on the back of functionality made available through Zotero, and effectively illustrates what might be described as a tool for ‘distant reading’ that encompasses elements of a ‘macroscope’. 

What is most interesting about it, however, is the use its creators make of it in seeking to shift a wider humanist discussion from one scale of enquiry to another. Last month, to great fanfare, CUP published Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s History Manifesto, which argues that once armed with a ‘macroscrope’ – Paper Machines in their estimation – historians should pursue an analysis of how ‘big data’ might be used to re-negotiate the role of the historian – and the humanities more generally. Basically, what Guldi and Armitage are calling for through both the Manifesto and through Paper Machines, is the re-invention of ‘Longue durée’ history – telling ever larger narratives about grand sweeps of historical change, encompassing millennia of human experience. And to do this in pursuit of taking on the mantle of a public intellectual, able to speak with greater authority to ‘power’. 

In the process they explicitly denigrate notions of ‘micro-history’ as essentially irrelevant. At one and the same time, they seem to me to celebrate the possibility of creating a ‘macroscope’, while abjuring half its purpose. What we see in this particular version of a ‘macroscope’ is a tool that privileges only one setting on the scale between a single data point, and the sum of the largest data set we can encompass. In other words, by seeking the biggest of big stories, it is missing the rest. 

Perhaps the other most eloquent advocate for a ‘macroscope’ at the minute is Scott Weingart. With Shawn Graham and Ian Milligan, he is writing a collective online ‘book’ entitled, Big Digital History: Exploring Big Data through a Historian’s Macroscope. The book is a nice run through of digital humanist tools, but the important text from my perspective is a blog post Weingart published on the 14 September 2014. The post was called: The moral role of DH in a data-driven world; and in it, Weingart advocates a very specific vision of a ‘macroscope’, in which the largest scale of reference and view is made intelligible through the application of a formal version of network analysis. 

Weingart is a convincing advocate for network analysis, performed in light of some serious and sophisticated automated measures of distance and direction. And his work is a long way ahead of much of the naïve and unconvincing use of network visualisations current in large parts of the Digital Humanities. Weingart also makes a powerful case for where a limited number of DH tools – primarily network analysis and topic modelling - could be deployed in re-engaging the ‘humanities’ with a broader social discussion. 

Again, like Guldi and Armitage, Weingart seeks in 'Big Data' a means through which the Humanities can ‘speak to power’. As with the work of Armitage and Guldi, the pressing need to turn Digital Humanities to political account appears to motivate a search for large scale results that can be deployed in competition with the powerful voices of a positivist STEM tradition. My sense is that Weingart, Armitage and Guldi are all essentially scanning the current range of digital tools, and selectively emphasising those that feel familiar from the more ‘Social Science’ end of the Humanities. And that having located a few of them, they are advocating we adopt them in order to secure our place at the table. 

In other words, there is a cultural/political negotiation going on in these developments and projects that is driven by a laudable desire for ‘relevance’, but which effectively moves the Humanities in the direction of a more formal variety of Social Science. 

Others still, are arguably doing some of the same work, but using a different language, or at the least seeking a different kind of audience. Jerome Dobson, for example, has recently begun to describe the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in historical geography, as a form of ‘macroscope’. This usage doesn’t come freighted with the same political claims as are current in Digital Humanities, but seem to me an entirely reasonable way of highlighting some of the global ambitions – and sensitivity to scale - that are inherent in GIS. The notion - perhaps fostered most fully by Google Earth - that you can both see the world in its entirety, as well as zoom in to the smallest detail, seems at one with a data driven ‘macroscope’. But, again, the scale most geographers want to work with is large – patterns derived from billions of data points. And again, the siren call of GIS, tends to pull humanist enquiry towards a specific form of social science. 

And finally, we might also think of the approach exemplified in the work of Ben Schmidt as another example of a ‘macroscope’ approach – particularly his ‘prochronism’ projects. These take individual words in modern cinema and television scripts that purport to represent past events – things like Downton Abbey and Mad Men - and compares them to every word published in the year they are meant to represent. 

Building on Google Books and Google Ngrams, Schmidt is effectively mixing scales of analysis at the extremes of ‘big data’, on the one hand – all words published in a single year – and small data, on the other. Of all the examples mentioned so far, it is only Schmidt who is actually using the functionality of a ‘macroscope’ effectively, making it all the more ironic that he doesn’t adopt the term. 

And almost uniquely in the Digital Humanities – a field equally remarkable for its febrile excitement, and lack of demonstrable results – Schmidt’s results have been starkly revealing. My favourite example, is his analysis of the scripts of Mad Men, which illustrates that early episodes referencing the 1950s, overuse language associated with the ‘performance’ of masculinity – words that reflect ‘behaviour’. And that later episodes, located in the 1970s, overuse words reflecting the internalised emotional experience of masculinity. For me this revealed beautifully the larger narrative arc of the programme in a way that had not been obvious prior to his work. Schmidt has little of the wider agenda to influence policy and politics evident in that of Armitage, Guldi and Weingart, but ironically, it is his work that is having some of the greatest extra-academic impact, via the anxiety it has created in the script writers of the shows he analyses. 

All of which is simply to say that playing with and implementing ideas around a ’macroscope’ is quite popular at the moment. And a direction of travel which, with caveats, I wholly support. But it also leaves me in something of a conundrum. 

Each of these initiatives, with the possible exception of Schmidt’s work, seems to locate themselves somewhere other than the Humanities I am familiar with. And this seems odd. Issues of scale are central to this. Claiming to be doing ‘big history’ sounds exciting; while claiming that more formal ‘network analysis’, will answer the questions of a humanist enquiry, appears to create a bridge between disciplines – allowing Humanists and more data driven parts of the Social Sciences to share a methodology and a conversation. But with the exception of Schmidt’s work, these endeavours seem to be privileging particular types of analysis – Social Science types of analysis – over more traditionally Humanist ones. 

In some ways, this is fine. I have discovered to my own benefit, that working with ‘Big Data’ at scale and sharing methodologies with other disciplines is both hugely productive, and hugely fun. To the extent that ‘big stories’ and new methodologies provide the justification for collaborating with researchers from a variety of disciplines – statisticians, mathematicians and computer scientists – they are wholly positive, and a simple ‘good thing’. 

And yet… I find myself feeling that in the rush to define how we use a ‘macroscope’, we are losing touch with what humanist scholars have traditionally done best. 

I end up is feeling that in the rush to new tools and ‘Big Data’ Humanist scholars are forgetting what they spent much of the second half of the twentieth century discovering – that language and art, cultural construction, human experience, and representation are hugely complex – but can be made to yield remarkable insight through close analysis. In other words, while the Humanities and ‘Big Data’ absolutely need to have a conversation; the subject of that conversation needs to change, and to encompass close reading and small data. 

The Stanford Humanities Centre defines the ‘Humanities’ as: 

'…the study of how people process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world.'

Which makes the Humanities sound like the most un-exciting, ill-defined, unsalted, intellectual porridge ever. And yet, when I think about the scholarly works that have shaped my life, there is none of this intellectual cream of wheat. 

Instead, there are a series of brilliant analyses that build from beautifully observed detail at the smallest of scales. I look back to the British Marxist tradition in history – to Raphael Samuel and Edward Thompson – and what I see are closely described lives, built from fragments and details, made emotionally compelling by being woven into ever more precise fabrics of explanation. 

A gesture, a phrase, a word, an aching back, a distinctive tattoo. 'My dearest …. Remember when…' 

The real power of work in this tradition, lay in its ability to deploy emotive and powerful detail in the context of the largest of political and economic stories. And the political project that underpinned it, was not to ‘speak to power’, but to mobilise the powerless, and democratise identity and belonging. With Thompson’s liquid prose, a single poor, long dead framework knitter affected more change than any amount of more formal economic history. 

Or I think of the work of Pierre Bourdieau, Arlette Farge and de Certeau, and the ways in which they again use the tiny fragments of everyday life - the narratives of everyday experience - to build a compelling framework illustrating the currents and sub-structures of power. 

Or I think of Michel Foucault, who was able to turn on its head every phrase and telling line – to let us see patterns in language – discourses – that controlled our thoughts. Foucault profoundly challenged us to escape the limits of the very technologies of communication and analysis we used; and to see in every language act, every phrase and word, something of politics. 

By locating the use of a ‘macroscope’ at the larger scale, seeking the Longue durée, and the ear of policy makers, recent calls for how we choose to deploy the tools of the Digital Humanities appear to deny the most powerful politics of the Humanities. If today we have a public dialogue that gives voice to the traditionally excluded and silenced – women, and minorities of ethnicity, belief and dis/ability – it is in no small part because we now have beautiful histories of small things. In other words, it has been the close and narrow reading of human experience that has done most to give voice to people excluded from ‘power’ by class, gender and race. 

Besides simply reflecting a powerful form of analysis, when I return to those older scholarly projects I also see the yearning for a kind of ‘macroscope’. Each of these writers strive to locate the minuscule in the massive; the smallest gesture in its largest context; to encompass the peculiar and eccentric in the average and statistically significant. 

What I don’t see in modern macroscope projects is a recognition of the power of the particular; or as William Blake would have it: 

To see a World in a grain of sand, 
And a Heaven in a wild flower...
                               Auguries of Innocence (1803, 1863).

Current iterations of the idea of a macroscope, with all their flashy, shock and awe visualisations, probably score over these older technologies of knowing in their sure grasp of data at scale, but in the process they seem to lose the ability to refocus effectively. 

For all the promise of balancing large and small scales, the smaller and particular seem to have been ignored. Ever since the Apollo 17 sent back its pictures of earth as a distant blue marble, our urge towards the all-inclusive, global and universal has been irresistible. I guess my worry is that in the process we are losing the ability to use fine detail in the ways that make the work of Thompson and Bourdieau, Foucault and Samuel, so compelling. 

So, by way of wending towards some kind of inconclusive conclusion. I just want to suggest that if we are to use the tools of 'Big Data' to capture a global image, it needs to be balanced with the view from the other end of the macroscope (along with every point in between). 

In part this is just about having self-confidence as humanist scholars, and ironically serving a specific role in the process of knowing, that people in STEM are frequently not very good at. 

Several recent projects I was privileged to participate in, involved some hugely fun work with mathematicians and information scientists exploring the changing linguistic patterns found in the Old Bailey trials – all 127 million words worth. And after a couple of years of working closely with a bunch of brilliant people, what I gradually realised was that while mathematicians do a lot of ‘close reading’ – of formulae and algorithms - like most scientists, they are less interested than I am in the close reading of a single datum. In STEM cleaning data is a chore. Geneticists don’t read the human genome base by base; and our knowledge of the Higgs Boson is built on a probability only discovered after a million rolls of the dice, with no one really looking too carefully at any single one. 

In many respects ‘big data’ actually reinforces this tendency, as the assumption is that the ‘signal’ will come through, despite the noise created by outliers and weirdness. In other words, ‘Big Data’ supposedly lets you get away with dirty data.  In contrast, humanists do read the data; and do so with a sharp eye for its individual rhythms and peculiarities – its weirdness. 

In the rush towards 'Big Data' – the Longue durée, and automated network analysis; towards a vision of Humanist scholarship in which Bayesian probability is as significant as biblical allusion, the most urgent need seems to me to be to find the tools that allow us to do the job of close reading of all the small data that goes to make the bigger variety. This is not a call to return to some mythical golden age of the lone scholar in the dusty archive – going gradually blind in pursuit of the banal. This is not about ignoring the digital; but a call to remember the importance of the digital tools that allow us to think small; at the same time as we are generating tools to imagine big. 

In relation to text, you would think this is easy enough. Easy enough to, like Ben Schmidt, test each word against its chronological bed-fellows; or measure its distance from an average for its genre. When I am reading a freighted phrase from the 1770s, like ‘pursuit of happiness’, I want to know that till then, ‘happiness’ was almost exclusively used in a religious context – ‘Eternal Happiness’ - and that its use in a secular setting would have caught in a reader’s mind as odd and different - new. We should be able to mark the moment when Thomas Jefferson allowed a single word to escape from one ‘discourse’ and enter another – to read that word in all its individual complexity, while seeing it both close and far. 

I know of no work designed to define the content of a ‘discourse’, and map it back in to inherited texts. I know of no projects designed with this notion in mind. And if you want a take home a message from this post, it is a simple call for ‘radical contextualisation’. 

 To do justice to the aspirations of a macroscope, and to use it to perform the Humanities effectively – and politically – we need to be able to contextualise every single word in a representation of every word, ever. Every gesture contextualised in the collective record all gestures; and every brushstroke, in the collective knowledge of every painting. 

Where is the tool and data set that lets you see how a single stroll along a boulevard, compares to all the other weary footsteps? And compares it in turn to all the text created along that path, or connected to that foot through nerve and brain and consciousness. Where is the tool and project that contextualises our experience of each point on the map, every brush stroke, and museum object? 

This is not just about doing the same old thing – of trying to outdo Thompson as a stylist, or Foucault for sheer cultural shock. My favourite tiny fragment of meaning – the kind of thing I want to find a context for - comes out of Linguistics. It is new to me, and seems a powerful thing: Voice Onset Timing – that breathy gap between when you open your mouth to speak, and when the first sibilant emerges. This apparently changes depending on who are speaking to – a figure of authority, a friend, a lover. It is as if the gestures of everyday life can also be seen as encoded in the lightest breathe. Different VOTs mark racial and gender interactions, insider talk, and public talk.

In other words, in just a couple of milliseconds of empty space there is a new form of close reading that demands radical contextualisation (I am grateful to Norma Mendoza-Denton for introducing me to VOT). And the same kind of thing could be extended to almost anything. The mark left by a chisel is certainly, by definition, unique, but it is also freighted with information about the tool that made it, the wood and the forest from which it emerged; the stroke, the weather on the day, and the craftsman. 

One of the great ironies of the moment is that in the rush to big data – in the rush to encompass the largest scale, we are excluding 99% of the data that is there. And if we are going to build a few macroscopes, I just want to suggest that, along with the blue marble views, we keep hold of the smallest details. And if we do so, looking ever more closely at the data itself – remembering that close reading can be hugely powerful - Humanists will have something to bring to the table, something they do better than any other discipline. They can provide a world of ‘small data’ and more importantly, of meaning, to balance out the global and the universal – to provide counterpoint in the particular, to the ever more banal world of the average.