Event Title

PD23 - Simulations in Digital Humanities: Online and AR Reading Machines

Presenter Information

Craig Saper, University of Maryland Baltimore County

Location

VAB-108

Streaming Media

Start Date

3-11-2017 4:45 PM

Description

The readies.org project and the collaborations with the AGAST AR-project seek to examine interface and modality as aspects of database digital humanities research. The simulation of the reading machine and online publication of the anthology at www.readies.org allows readers to experience the Readies as Brown intended one to read them. It also allows readers to make their own judgments about individual readies and the anthology project as a whole. Although initially constructed in 2010, the online simulation of the reading machine laid dormant for the last four years until the spring of 2017, when we repaired the database's links to the interface. So, any discussion digital humanities should include the unique archival issues that arise that are different than the preservation and storage of printed-on-paper codex formats. The Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project recreates the inventions of experimental twentieth-century writers and artists using Augmented Reality (AR), an emergent media technology that mixes digital data and real-time video. Founded by Oxford-Brookes University professor Eric White and Computer Science researcher John Twycross in 2014, AGAST crosses disciplinary boundaries to interrogate the relationships between people, technology, the creative arts and the environment. They have created and exhibited two outputs so far: TRAAK!, an AR re-imagining of an early Futurist musical synthesiser device; and The Reading Machine, an AR headset that recreates a prototype electronic reading device developed by the American expatriate writer Bob Brown in 1930. The readies.org and AGAST groups are collaborating on developing these new types of digital humanities products further. This iteration of the reading machine is quite different than the readies.org version, and by comparing the two "editions," we learn something about re-thinking publishing new editions online in ways unrelated to simply making available a new pdf of a text -- in this case the text without the machine or modality does not live up to the demands of the original publication and it makes the text itself unreadable unless one accounts for the different modality necessary to read the collection of essays (or any texts prepared for the earlier imagined reading machine). As I walk through the online reading machine (internet access and a projector from my laptop), I plan to discuss the salient issues of new modalities of digital humanities in what we might call the second generation DH focused on the interface and interaction rather than the computation and access of a database alone. Finally, both of these new "editions" are pending publication by electric.press under the supervision of professor Helen Burgess, a leader and leading innovator in digital humanities interfaces and modalities. In this section, my paper and demonstration of the reading machine examine and illuminate the issues involved in publishing these inextricably digital humanities works and asks about the role of machines and modalities in the future (present) of scholarship.