Presentation to AHRC Digital Transformations workshop

1. Reflections: a Vision for the Arts and
Humanities in a Context of Digital
Transformation
Andrew Prescott,
King’s College London

2. • Initiatives for Access: pioneering British
Library programme from 1993-1997
• Variety of experimental projects
• High level of risk, but many of the
experimental projects have turned into
Electronic Beowulf Patent Office Express
key services such as the online
catalogue, newspaper digitisation and
online patent access
• PLURAL, TRANSVERSAL AND
GENERATIVE
• This translates to: no one single
Dunhuang Project Network catalogues approach, piece of kit or infrastructure
which will enable us to deliver, master or
manage the digital.
• The digital is shape shifting, so it adapts
to our interests and preoccupations
• It is (and should be) like riding a tiger.
Digitisation of microfilm Turning the Pages
(Burney Newspapers)

3. 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

4. In tough times, how do we deliver an
innovative and exciting programme
that is still focussed and coherent?

5. Digital transformations and
innovation

6. Digital transformations and innovation
• The Facebook problem. Are we doomed always to be low
impact?
• Should we let science and technology be more in the driving
seat?
• Or is it cultural theory and critical tools that we bring to the
table? The data world is a world of text, sound, image,
movement. We can imagine new shapes and connections in
that world. Should we be shaping scientific agendas more?
• How do we integrate the insights of process from practice-led
research with speculative research elsewhere?
• Does innovation lies somewhere in the triangulation between
technology, artistic practice and theory? Is that a new
territory?

7. An element of the vision?
• Can we use our theoretical, artistic, historical,
cultural and philosophical insights to develop
new challenges for scientists and to create new
transformations?

8. My HASTAC experience
• A dreary inward-looking digital humanities world that hadn’t
changed very much in seven years
• Young humanities scholars who are very critically and theoretically
aware but who are also enthusiastic hands on coders. Hack v yack
doesn’t matter.
• A lot of the digital transformation is being driven by pedagogy. Is
that a missing piece of the jigsaw?
• True digital transformations are driven by the people not the
technology. We need to transform the people, the practice and the
relationships. Human transformation, not digital transformation.

9. What was missing?
• Sound? Video? Immersive technologies? Were we too
textual, too data driven?
• What about our links with libraries, archives, galleries,
museums?
• Likewise, where do publishers and broadcasters fit in?
• Globalisation? Erik and the Indian call centres.
• The digital economy programme?
• What are the implications for research in the arts and
humanities of the new alignments and commercial
models currently emerging (vide Leveson Enquiry)?
• How do we stop ourselves going backwards?

10. Who should we be talking to?
• Are we focussing too much on a dialogue
between the arts and humanities?
• How should we develop our dialogues with
other funding councils?
• What about technology developers e.g.
Google? Google UK Scholars Forum

11. Are we ready enough for the
unexpected? Are we riding a tiger?
• Is the future really digital? Is quantum digital? And
where do other technologies (nanotechnology,
biotechnology) fit in? Why do we privilege the digital in
our dialogue with science and technology?
• What if the lights go out? Should the arts and
humanities be thinking more about Green ICT?
• We assume that data is big, immaterial and capable of
infinite linking? But the most important digital
transformation might be a material one. What if the
most profound digital transformation turned out to be
Industrial Revolution 2.0?

12. Richard Misrach, Destroy this Memory (Aperture, 2010)

15. Three things
• Embracing diversity and plurality: there isn’t a
single answer
• New dialogues with science and technology
• Seeking a President Kennedy moment:
materiality?