Keynote lecture to the Winter School at the University of Exeter on 'Transforming Digital Methods', 11-12 December 2014

1. The Arts and Humanities in a
Digital Age: Disruptions and
Continuities
Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow
‘Transforming Digital Methods’, University of Exeter
Winter School, 11 and 12 December 2014

9. The Gutenberg Bible led to religious reformation
while the Web appears to be leading towards
social and economic reformation. But the Digital
Industrial revolution, because of the issues and
phenomena surrounding the Web and its
interactions with society, is occurring at lightning
speed with profound impacts on society, the
economy, politics, and more.
Michael Brodie, Verizon

16. Sidney Pollard on the Industrial
Revolution in Sheffield and Birmingham
“a visitor to the metalworking areas of
Birmingham or Sheffield in the mid
nineteenth-century would have found little
to distinguish them superficially from the
same industries a hundred years earlier.
The men worked as independent sub-
contractors in their own or rented
workshops using their own or hired
equipment … These industries .. were still
waiting for their Industrial Revolution”

17. William Holt Yates Titcomb, The Wealth of England, the
Bessemer Process of Making Steel (1895)
Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust

18. Model of Newcomen
Steam Engine at the
University of Glasgow
repaired by James Watt
in 1765

19. I believe that the most useful and novel inventions
and improvements of the present day are mere
progressive steps in a highly wrought and highly
advanced system, suggested by, and dependent on,
other previous steps, their whole value and the
means of their application probably dependent on
the success of some or many other inventions, some
old, some new…
In most cases they result from a demand which
circumstances happen to create. Most good things
are being thought of by many persons at the same
time.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel

20. Steve Jobs as the heir of James Watt: New Yorker,
November 14, 2011

21. • ‘Digital transformations’ refers to (and misinterprets)
the ‘disruptive’ models of Christensen
• The process of innovation is frequently a continuum
of incremental development (Steve Jobs as
‘tinkerer’): particularly true in arts and humanities
• Is there a continuity with the industrial age?
• Did anything special happen in the 1990s or is it
simply a further expression of a process reaching
back to the beginnings of industrialisation?
• What does this tell us about further lines of
development?
Questioning rhetorics of transformation
and innovation

23. Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage, 1798
- Rural poverty and hunger
- Effect of French Wars
- Leading characters in poem engage in repetitive, alienated
and meaningless tasks – in an almost machine-like fashion
- The poem is haunted by almost spectral figures – elegy for a
lost countryside

24. The Old Cumberland Beggar
But deem not this Man useless.--Statesmen! ye
Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye
Who have a broom still ready in your hands
To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud,
Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate
Your talents, power, or wisdom, deem him not
A burthen of the earth! 'Tis Nature's law
That none, the meanest of created things,
Or forms created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good

25. The Excursion, 1814
Meanwhile, at social Industry's command
How quick, how vast an increase. From the germ
Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced
Here a huge town, continuous and compact
Hiding the face of earth for leagues - and there,
Where not a habitation stood before,
Abodes of men irregularly massed
Like trees in forests, - spread through spacious tracts.
O'er which the smoke of unremitting fires
Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths
Of vapour glittering in the morning sun.

27. Coleridge:
‘We are daily advancing to the state in which there are
but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents’.
Calls for ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing
and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of
life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism
which, in everything that is most worth of the human
intellect, strikes Death’.
Seeks studies promoting ‘’the harmonious development of
those qualities and faculties which characterise our
humanity’

28. Matthew Arnold, Literature
and Science, 1882
‘The great majority of
mankind... would do well, I
cannot but think, to choose
to be educated in humane
letters rather than in the
natural sciences. Letters will
call out their being at more
points, will make them live
more’.

32. Proceedings of the Old Bailey:
www.oldbaileyonline.org

33. A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualisations for the
Humanities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvOuJ2RwBTA

34. There is no single answer
True digital transformations will involve:
•Risky short-term experimentation and supporting
sustainability
•Mash-ups made in bedrooms and experiments with
synchotrons
•Digital art works and huge quantitative
visualisations
•A critical and theoretical debate and building new
things
•Data flows and new perspectives on materiality
•Technology and people

35. Imaging of the Beowulf manuscript using fibre optic backlighting to reveal letters and words concealed by
nineteenth-century conservation work

38. Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: digital re-creation of John
Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon, 1622:
http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/listen-from-the-cross-yard/

39. tangible-memories.com

40. carolanguitar.com

41. The political and literary
papers of Gladstone
preserved in the British
Library comprise 762
volumes containing
approx. 160,000
documents.

42. George W. Bush Presidential Library:
200 million e-mails
4 million photographs

44. Michael Takeo Magruder, insurance.aes256
http://vimeo.com/35972114

45. Fabio Lattanzi Antinori
The Obelisk, 2012
http://
fabiolattanziantinori.co
m/obelisk.php

46. Paper keyboard, printed using
conductive ink

47. http://vimeo.com/80058198

48. http://vimeo.com/65236882

49. Slide from Nicole Coleman and Erica Savig, Common Design
Strategies for Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell
Motility in Biology
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 1
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 2
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 3
Parametric Modeling Quantitatively Maps Single Cell Protein
Levels to Individual Qualitative Components

51. http://www.meagreresource.com/other-projects/tape/
nctrc.html
Nottingham Tape Club