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Right Research

 | 
Chelsea Miya
, 
Oliver Rossier
, 
Geoffrey Rockwell

Section one: Re-defining sustainability

4. Kitting the Digital Humanities for the Anthropocene: Digital Metabolism and Ecocritical DH

Amanda Starling Gould

Texte intégral

As our landscapes of digital stuff continue to expand and connect, it is imperative we devise a toolkit for thinking (and doing) that tends to the environmental pulses of our digital condition. It is time now, if it isn’t already too late, to enact a spongier digital-material form of knowledge-production, tailored to the concerns of our emerging Anthropocenic humanities, that absorbs the full force of our interconnections. A deliberate environmental intervention is not only an obvious response but also an opening: it plants our field securely within the earth, opens us to seeing our tools as environmental artifacts, and urges us to use our talents for doing earth work.

Introduction: Activating Digital Environmental Metabolism

  • 1 Bethany Nowviskie, keynote address. Also published as ‘Digital humanities in the Anthropocene’, Dig (...)

1In her keynote for the Digital Humanities conference in 2014, Bethany Nowviskie invited listeners to think about how their scholarship might change if it grappled truly with the grand ecological challenges of the Anthropocene: a planetary epoch that—to paraphrase atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen—coincides with human-driven forces fundamentally changing the composition of the planet. Nowviskie, thinking with the coming extinction of numerous species and the loss of ecological habitats, called for a digital humanities, in all of its broad forms, that changes its global sense of scale to embrace larger temporalities, to teach its practitioners to memorialize and live differently, and to pursue an active—and I’ll add activist—engaged praxis that connects technology, the environment, and the ‘ethical conditions of our vital here-and-now’.1

2This is my inspiration.

  • 2 Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelski, ‘Knowledge in the age of climate change’, South AtlanticQuarterly, (...)

3That we are living in worlds profoundly altered by human influence is no longer a speculative issue. The facts and figures of anthropogenic environmental change daily rehearsed in news outlets and on social media illustrate, among other things, climate changes, sea level rises, severe weather events, polluted living conditions, growing mountains of toxic waste and extinction-level losses of biodiversity. The implications of environmental change are now, borrowing the words of Ian Baucom ‘deeply connected to what it means to be human on earth in the twenty-first century’.2

4In the so-called age of the Anthropocene, the planet’s wealthiest and most educated humans have, through our daily acts of wasteful modern technological living, accelerated climate change more than 170 times its natural pace. Despite claims that technology will save us (from ourselves), our technosphere is in fact partly, if not largely, to blame for our current Anthropocene habitat. The misguided notion that our digital networks are composed of ‘immaterial’ ‘clouds’ of digital data that one ‘goes to’ when one ‘gets online’ is at best untenable and, at worse, blindingly destructive. Indeed, this type of (un) thinking sentences us to lives lived with the afterlives of our technologies and the implication of their geophysical wastes.

5As our landscapes of digital stuff continue to expand and connect, it is imperative we devise a toolkit for thinking (and doing) that tends to the environmental pulses of our digital condition. It is time now, if it isn’t already too late, to enact a spongier digital-material form of knowledge-production, tailored to the concerns of our emerging Anthropocenic humanities, that absorbs the full force of our interconnections. A deliberate environmental intervention is not only an obvious response but also an opening: it plants our field securely within the earth, opens us to seeing our tools as environmental artifacts, and urges us to use our talents for doing earth work.

  • 3 I do not here mean to critique his project but to set mine apart.
  • 4 See more on this concept of digital metabolism, and more about digital minerals and wastes, in my 2 (...)

6About a year before Nowviskie’s call, I started thinking about metabolism as a model for better understanding our inherent and inescapable physical connections with our technologies and the planet. If humans cannot be human without our nonhuman metabolic partners—and we know we cannot—new ecosystemic patterns materialize if we trace our contemporary digital vitalities with a metabolism in mind. If we take as a premise that, in our present Anthropocenic age defined by humans acting as a geophysical force, human bodies, cultural technologies and the earth are intersecting material practices, we edge toward this living relation. I argue this human-earth-technology intersectionality is neither cyborgian nor posthuman, as some digital media scholars insist, but is something far more natural: it is a metabolic relationship wherein each system is inherently implicated in the perpetuation of the others. Thinking ecosystemically—not about ecologies of machines working in tandem like Matthew Fuller does in Media Ecologies3 but about the interconnections between humans, our digital technologies, and the environment—reveals a metabolic relation. In turn, metabolic thinking ties our technologies to their rare earth mineral beginnings and also to their earth-infecting wastes.4

7Digital metabolism is not meant to be a metaphor but an operational, and observable, definition of the digital’s functionings and interconnections with the earth’s human, biotic and geological ecologies. What digital metabolism makes thinkable is a world in which digital and environmental systems are not separate but inherently linked, in our modern ways of living, as kin. At its core, digital metabolism is a concept of co-living, of overlapping and co-constituting systems. Digital metabolic thinking gives us a rather radically ecosystemic way of looking at our bodies, our technologies and our contingent ecological connections.

8Ecocritical digital humanities gives us a way to play out these digital metabolic relations. It gives us a kit for enacting deeper engagements with our entanglements as well as solutions for developing more sustainable digital practice. I see promise in ecocritical digital humanities as an ethical and active practical skill set that might unhinge dominant forms of doing in digital humanities scholarship to provide a richer and more engaged framework for Anthropocenic digital humanities practice. Indeed, digital scholarship is uniquely positioned to address the ecological concerns of climate change. Ecocritical digital scholarship can intervene to produce what Nowviskie calls a ‘capacious’ thinking capable of responding to Anthropocene-age challenges by operating simultaneously across scales, disciplines and institutions.

Ecocritical Digital Engagement

9Ecocritical digital work like that we’ll see here has the advantage of being public, global, accessible work. As such, it can reach a wide audience to engage public, global issues such as environmental justice, climate change, eco-awareness, environmental health, and daily living in Anthropocene futures. It can translate human-environmental issues into digital interventions that can meaningfully disturb the system through outreach, participation, education and organization. It can help us actively remake our ideas about nature and the relationship between humans and the environment.

10Ecocritical digital work comes in the form of digital archives, digital activism, digital data, and digitally-based research projects. It is self-reflexive while performing its work: it is aware of its ecological footprint and acknowledges its role in environmental anthropogenic/ technogenic destruction. Ecocritical digital work pivots from traditional ecocriticism by refocusing from reading representations of environment in text to more active and activist projects that instead focus on the material effects of our digital tools/texts and on documenting/sharing ‘real’ environmental issues. It is a platform for exploring and publicizing the (in) human (e) aspects of our increasingly severe environmental issues.

  • 5 For more, see https://www.datarefuge.org/.
  • 6 For more, see 100 Views of Climate Change at http://changingclimates.colostate.
    edu/, FutureCoast a (...)
  • 7 See, for instance: U Penn’s Da/um project, lexiconofsustainability.com, Digital Detroit, The Asthma (...)

11I’ll ground us here in the work by detailing a few examples. The critical data-saving post-Obama North American #Datarefuge project had humanists rallying to archive critical climate and environmental data from United States government websites.5 Projects like 100 Views of Climate Change, FutureCoast and Climate Stories NC capture climate stories from people across the globe.6 Carl Sack’s #NoDAPL Map plots Indigenous cultural areas alongside governmental geographic areas and oil pipeline sites. Researchers at the University of British Colombia and Yale, among others, have developed augmented reality projects that educate and compel users to initiate more sustainable behaviours. The new project Solar Protocol, by Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson and Benedetta Piantella, at http://solarprotocol.net/​, ‘explores the sun’s interaction with Earth as a form of logic that shapes daily behaviors, seasonal activites and the decision making of almost all life forms. Other ecocritical digital projects digitize and archive historical environmental media, map the overlaps between poverty and pollution, provide public updates on air and water quality, illustrate the relationship between environmental and human health, and elicit public participation in local pro-environmental activities.7

  • 8 Mark Sample, ‘Your mistake was a vital connection: Oblique strategies for the digital humanities’, (...)

12Mark Sample’s tweeting sharks project is an example of an open and accessible ecocritical digital mediation that works to reconfigure, or re-narrate, the relationship between humans, technology, literature, sharks and the earth. In this project, Sample hacks into OCEARCH’s website to turn a pair of location-pinging sharks, Mary Lee and Katharine, into literary swimmers.8

  • 9 Since 1962, the US National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Cooperative Shark Tagging Program (CSTP (...)
  • 10 See: Surf Life Saving Western Australia (SLSWA), http://surflifesavingwa.com.au//; and Alan Yu, ‘Mo (...)

13OCEARCH’s open-source Global Shark Tracker monitors the surfacing activity of great white and tiger sharks.9 When any of their tagged sharks surface for longer than ninety seconds, their tags send location data to the OCEARCH’s website and app. OCEARCH’s researchers then share that information via social media. This is similar to Australia’s Surf Life Saving Western Australia project which has since 2014 had more than 300 sharks tweeting their locations in alert as soon as they swim within half a mile of a beach.10 These sharks have been co-opted by marine scientists into providing a social service act of tweeting their locations to potential ocean-swimmers.

14What Sample’s project does is hijack this scientific project, turning it into a more ecohumanist enterprise. Sample discovered an undocumented application programming interface (API) in OCEARCH’s shark tracking database that allowed him to pull OCEARCH’s location data on the two great white sharks Mary Lee and Katharine from its site so he could feed it into his Twitter bot @Shark_ Girls. He then partnered Mary Lee and Katharine’s location information with a coded Python program that randomly-generates sentences from Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day, whose main characters are Katharine and Mary. The result is a Twitter bot—an automated Twitter account—that tweets an image of Mary Lee and Katharine’s mapped location data along with a line from Woolf’s novel. Reading through the Twitter feed, we watch Mary Lee and Katharine appear in different oceanic locations, reporting one day to be near Florida, another to be near South Carolina, and another to be in the Pelagic Sargassum Habitat Restricted Area. As we track their travels, we ‘hear’ them speak lines of literature. Their tweets are like postcards we receive from vacationing friends.

15What Sample’s project urges us to do is reconsider the relationship between oceanic wildlife (sharks), humans (those who are engaging the tweets) and our technospheric surround. If carefully considered, it brings to light our interconnections. It amplifies the live-ness of the sharks by allowing tweeting technohumans a glimpse at their pelagic daily lives. We see them move, driven by predators, prey, reproduction, death and weather. We meet them here, online on Twitter, as kin, as creatures similar to ourselves.

  • 11 Amit Chowdhry, ‘How Google stops sharks from eating undersea cables’, Forbes (August 15, 2014), htt (...)
  • 12 The term ‘oddkin’ is from Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. She defines there ‘oddkin’ as ‘ (...)

16When placed alongside images of sharks interacting with (and sometimes even biting) undersea Internet cables, we are introduced to a second layer of anthropogenic shark behaviour: not only are we making them tweet, we are also disturbing their habitat with our transpacific hyperspeed telecommunications cables. Perhaps rightfully so, they are disturbing us back with their bites. In 2014, Google began wrapping its transpacific fiber cables in Kevlar to protect from shark bites.11 The hope of a project like Sample’s, from an ecocritical digital perspective, is that we’ll recognize the sharks, both those who tweet and those who eat upon our Internet cables, as “oddkin” implicated in our digital system.12

  • 13 Dr. Da Costa unfortunately passed in 2012 and the blog is no longer active.
  • 14 Haraway (2016), pp. 24–25.
  • 15 Ibid., p. 25.
  • 16 Ibid.

17In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway offers a similar project— the Pigeon Blog, a project by UC Irvine’s Beatriz da Costa in 2006 that used pigeons to monitor and report air pollution—to illustrate how our interconnectedness matters. Miniature pollution-stations were put into tiny backpacks that were worn by professional racing pigeons— with the collaboration of the pigeon’s owners—who flew throughout Los Angeles recording and reporting pollution data. Their data was transmitted in real-time to the project’s researchers and shared on the Pigeon Blog.13 Projects like Pigeon Blog can activate the human part of the earth-human-digital connection to behave more generously toward the other two. In the context of the Pigeon Blog, Haraway reports the youth who were involved in the project ‘move from seeing pigeons as “rats with wings” to sociable birds with lives and deaths. [They] transmute from bird hecklers and sometimes physical abusers to astute observers and advocates of beings whom they had not known how to see or respect’.14 The youth, she says, ‘became response-able’.15 To those still dubious, she offers: ‘I know this account is a story, an invitation as much as an accomplishment, but the space for recuperation across despised cross-species categories of city dwellers deserves to be widened, not shut down […] To re-member, to com-memorate, is actively to reprise, revive, retake, recuperate’.16

  • 17 Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia Universit (...)

18The human-animal, human-nature divide—what Valerie Plumwood calls hyperseparation—holds us apart and ‘contributes to our inability to be affected by the incredible loss of this period of extinctions’.17 These projects, the Pigeon Blog and Sample’s literary sharks close the distance between the human, technology and the natural nonhuman world. They open, as Thom van Dooren might say, new sensitivities to the living practices of nonhuman creatures.

  • 18 Ibid., p. 22.
  • 19 Ibid., p. 79.

19In his work, van Dooren asks us to imagine life forms as forms-of-life entangled with other forms-of-life in inescapable webs of co-dependence. He asks us to ‘pay attention to species as evolving “ways of life” that are shared, produced, and nurtured in the world through the work of successive generations of living beings’.18 These ecocritical digital projects provide us an avenue to do just this. ‘ [B] eing attentive to the stories of penguins and others’, which here for us are pigeons and sharks, can ‘help to challenge the closure of human-centric narratives’, van Dooren says. We open new stories and, in turn, open new possibilities for care relations when we recognize nonhuman others as partners in the ‘ethical, collaborative, communicative and mutualistic’ project that is Anthropocenic living.19

  • 20 Ibid., p. 83.

20When we are unable or unwilling to recognize or properly acknowledge the stories and relationships other creatures have, we destroy (and de-story) their ways of living—and ultimately, our own. ‘Knowing more matters’ van Dooren says, ‘not least because it can and does enable us to see differently, and so to be drawn into new kinds of relationships, new ethical obligations’.20

21Environmentally-related citizen science work, most particularly that of Jennifer Gabrys, co-opts neither sharks nor pigeons but instead human bodies, to promote data-based human-nature interactions. In Gabrys’s Citizen Sense work humans become digital sensors and the living loci bridging the digital, the environmental and the human.

22Unlike an ecologically-minded Augmented Reality project which uses carbon-devouring large-screen AR technology to ‘immerse’ a user in certain ‘natural’ environments, Gabrys’s citizen science immerses users in ‘real’ natural habitats—their own and those surrounding them—asking them to experience anew the relationships and lifecycles, the metabolic systems, if I may, in which they are always already implicated.

  • 21 See Citizen Sense, Pollution Sensing, http://citizensense.net/projects/pollution-sensing/.
  • 22 Ibid.

23Citizen Sense’s pollution sensing projects display pollution data and develop platforms to make that data more accessible. The projects ‘attempt to make more immediate and actionable the details of environmental pollution’ through direct engagement, collaborative citizen-powered fieldwork and thoughtfully composed human data stories.21 In a project like Dustbox (October 2016-April 2017), Citizen Sense lent, from the Deptford Lounge Library, air monitoring kits called ‘Dustbox sensors’ to south Londoners so they might monitor and report local rates of particulate matter and pollution. Nearly 9,500 Londoners die each year due to exposure to NO2 and particulate matter and Dustbox puts “the itinerant qualities of individual exposure to air pollution” to work as a site for citizen engagement and empowerment with and against this fact.22 A similar project conducted by Citizen Sense in 2013–2015 in Pennsylvania worked with residents living near oil fracking facilities to develop air monitoring kits that would allow them to measure and report local conditions. For both projects, the Citizen Sense team created a user-friendly, human-friendly digital tool that translated their captured data into human-readable stories that organize, visualize, and otherwise transform abstract numbers into usable narratives that suggest actionable responses. Earth health (care) and people health (care) are shown to be intimately interrelated.

  • 23 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 110, (...)
  • 24 Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 2, https://doi.org (...)

24As citizen scientists use their smart phones and small DIY electronics to sense, record, access and engage environmental data, they gain access to a sixth sense—one digitally mediated by technological devices—that moves environmental data from an abstract, and often unseen, concept to a concrete experience of embodiment. The body of the citizen sensor becomes not one set in opposition to nature but one that is, as Spinoza long ago recognized, ‘radically open to its surrounds and can be composed, recomposed and decomposed by other bodies’.23 The citizen sensor’s body is always caught up in the material systems and beings that compose their immediate environments and these projects make that connection visible. ‘ [W] ith every breath you take’, Mitchell Thomashow says, ‘you participate in a dynamic exchange of global metabolism’.24 When that breath is filled with pollutants and particulate matter, our dynamic exchange becomes one of metabolic disease. I believe one of the fundamental roles of ecocritical digital work is to highlight exactly this and facilitate methods for citizen response.

25The hope here, from an ecocritical angle, of Citizen Sense’s work and similar, is that the average daily consumer will become aware of her behaviours, will subsequently reduce her contribution to pollution, and will also become an amplifier of the message that humans and nature and consumption and pollution are all deeply intertangled and are, in some senses (for the relatively well-off and careless consumer) one and the same.

26Gabrys’s work exemplifies embodied digital work in so far as it enables material interactions between person-machine-environment. Participants enact ways of knowing through doing with their bodies. Here, pollution data is (as it should be) human data, and is of human concern. She recruits human bodies to be active in data projects that affect human bodies.

  • 25 For more, see Brian Handwerk, ‘With wearable devices that monitor air quality, scientists can crowd (...)
  • 26 See also Davey Alba, ‘This wearable detects pollution to build air quality maps in real time’, Wire (...)

27Her projects help us understand how human bodies and communities are bound and implicated in the metabolic processes of extinction, re/ production, disturbance and how those feed back into human bodies and communities. The Citizen Sense projects, and many others akin to them (see, for instance, the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona, Spain, where researchers are using wearables to track and map pollution25 and the collaborative work of the CITISENSE consortium of 29 institutions from 14 countries), alongside consumer buyable or DIY makeable products (like UC Berkeley’s Clarity sensor, Dustduino, Air Quality Egg, Smart Citizen Kit, Tzoa, Airbeam and Speck), translate earth data (which is also human data) into its embodied, embedded contexts.26 Where Gabrys’s work stands out is it then further translates that data into seeds for doing important earth work:

  • 27 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational (...)

[D] ata are seen to enable modes of action that are meant to offer effective ways to respond to those problems. With more data, potentially more accurate data, and more extensively distributed data, environmental problems such as air pollution are intended to be more readily and effectively addressed. Data are intertwined with practices, responses to perceived problems, modes of materializing and evidencing problems, and anticipations of political engagement.27

  • 28 Ibid., p. 138.

28By measuring environmental data of human concern, with the help of the humans who are affected by it, and then creating human-legible data stories, Citizen Sense makes visible the unseen, the ignored, and the overlooked. If, as Gabrys asks ‘environmental problems need to be visible in order to be actionable’, these projects are revealing untold stories and facilitating participation—both bodily and narratively— between humans, pollution and the environment.28

  • 29 Ibid., p. 21.

29The ecocritical digital projects mentioned here allow us to read air, birds, marine animals and environmental health as environmental texts through digitally-mediated collaboration. These are perhaps precarious, imperfect readings but they are, in a way, entry points, or ‘ecotones’, if we might borrow a term from ecology and permaculture, that blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman and environment. If we respond by making moves to clean, restore and protect those who— and that which—speak to us through data, these ecocritical digital projects are indeed planting seeds. They open, as Gabrys says, ‘new ways of approaching digital technology as material, processual, and more-than-human arrangements of experience and participation’ while all the while also opening new ways of approaching our environments as material, processual and more-than-human arrangements of agencies.29 In bringing an ecocritical humanities lens to environmental issues, these projects complicate the complex relationship between humans and animals and illustrate the fragility of the claim for human-nature separation and the damage done by what Plumwood calls hyperseparation.

  • 30 See the Soil Selfies project here: enviroed4all, Soil Selfies (July 12, 2015), http://soils.enviroe (...)

30Projects like Soil Selfies and FutureCoast combine the mediated digitality of Sample’s sharks with the human-involvement of Gabrys’s Citizen Sense projects to create wholly new experiences. The goal of the 2015 Soil Selfies project, developed by Australian environmental educator Jeanie Clark, was to coerce people to develop a new, and more caring and familiar, relationship with the soils upon which they walk and from which their food feeds.30 Participants were invited to take and post photos of themselves with their soils and to thus take a moment to consider how intimately associated their lives are with our soils. Soil provides food, plants (which clean the air), natural environmental protection like water barriers, human and nonhuman habitat, minerals, raw materials, water filtration and even carbon storage. Soils are our friends, with whom we can take selfies, and Soil Selfies celebrates this.

  • 31 All messages taken from FutureCoast.

31FutureCoast is a more robust project devised by World Without Oil designer Ken Eklund and a team at Columbia University. Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, FutureCoast is a storytelling project that asks participants to record voicemail messages from the future. Those voicemails are then organized, published, and promoted on the FutureCoast website. Recognizing that science has not yet been able to tell compelling behaviour-altering stories of climate change and Anthropocene futures, FutureCoast’s simple intervention adds the missing human dimension. The human voice replaces scientific data and the contemporary medium of voicemail message brings the future into the present. Chilling quick messages left by friends, family members and neighbors report of water shortage, underground markets for fish or fruit, carbon rationing and extreme weather events:31

‘Hi it’s me. the city has just turned off the water. If you’ve got water, bring home as much as you can. Love you, bye’.

‘Hi Mom. I’m calling to see if you or grandpa happen to have any credits left on your Cal Card for the month. I was [robbed] and they got my Cal Card. And we’re running low on food here’.

‘Oh hey, Jordan, this is Dave. The house battery isn’t charging like it used to. I even hooked it up to the bicycle recharger and it’s just not holding a charge anymore. Do you think you can come by and take a look?’

  • 32 FutureCoast.

32Other messages, from automatic robotic messaging systems, foretell eminent institutional organizations:32

‘Good morning valued citizens, this is your monthly reminder from the Department of Resource Conservation and Rationing. Remember that your water usage is limited. Each family is allowed two gallons a day. Failure to comply will lead to disciplinary action and potential deportation’. (Automated Human voice)
‘Hello, this is the Federal Department of Rations reminding you to renew your sixth-month order of rations. We thank you for your cooperation. Have an eco-friendly day’. (Robot Voice)

33These glimpses from the future remind us of our present. The voices compel us to rethink our relations to water, oil, food and our resource-sharing human and nonhuman kin. They ask us to think about what we would we do if we didn’t have water to grow our last cucumber seeds or bathe before work. They introduce us to short tales of woe due to rationing, scarcity, surprise weather events, and property value loss due to climate change. The voicemail messages, with different voices and various qualities of transmission (like real voicemail messages) put us on the phone with the future.

34Eklund reports participants in his globally-known World Without Oil project—which created a simulated no-oil world, complete with an infrastructure of news updates, mock protests, and live participant feedback to make the situation more realistic and asked participants to live as if the world was experiencing an inescapable oil shortage— actually succeeded in transforming participants’ lifestyles. After being immersed in the alternate realty of a world without oil, participants planted gardens, started cycling to work, and adopted other oil-saving practices. The hope, of course, is that FutureCoast participants and listeners will do the same. As an ecocritical project, it uses digital technology to reflect on a diminished present and future habitat in part propelled by our excessive overreliance on polluting material-intensive technologies.

35Ecocritical digital humanities projects, like these mentioned here and in other contributions in this volume, can reconfigure our perceived contingencies. They re-narrate through digital tools and hands-on practice, reframing, providing ‘proof’, collaboration, ecodata and digital stories. Ecocritical digital work recognizes our technospheric condition and disturbs it, positively, through education, outreach, participation and cultivation of new flows of behaviours with the system.

  • 33 Claire Colebrook, ‘Not symbiosis, not now: Why anthropogenic change is not really human’, The Oxfor (...)

36The point is not to advocate we rid ourselves of technology—after all, man is both ecological and technological, as Claire Colebrook reminds us—but to add a layer of metabolic awareness to our technology use and theory and to use our technologies to address the issues they create.33 We have an opportunity to set an example from within our own digitally-inflected humanities fields of praxis, and we have a ready platform for using our knowledge to help foster lasting changes of practice and relational understanding.

Bibliographie

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Yusoff, Kathryn, ‘Geologic subjects: Nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman’, Cultural Geographies, 22.3 (2015), 383–407, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014545301

Notes

1 Bethany Nowviskie, keynote address. Also published as ‘Digital humanities in the Anthropocene’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30. Sup1 (2015), i4-i15 (p. i5), https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv015.

2 Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelski, ‘Knowledge in the age of climate change’, South AtlanticQuarterly, 116.1 (2017), 1–18 (p. 1), https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3749271.

3 I do not here mean to critique his project but to set mine apart.

4 See more on this concept of digital metabolism, and more about digital minerals and wastes, in my 2017 dissertation ‘Digital environmental metabolisms: An ecocritical project of the digital environmental humanities’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 2017), https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/14457.

5 For more, see https://www.datarefuge.org/.

6 For more, see 100 Views of Climate Change at http://changingclimates.colostate.
edu/, FutureCoast at https://ccnmtl.github.io/polarhub/core_projects/futurecoast.html, and Climate Stories NC at https://climatestoriesnc.web.unc.edu/.

7 See, for instance: U Penn’s Da/um project, lexiconofsustainability.com, Digital Detroit, The Asthma Files, Environhealthsense.org, EnviroAtlas. For more on digital environmental art works, see my essay ‘Dirtying the Digital, ’ in the Digital Trash Exhibition Catalog, Rutgers (2018) and my 2017 dissertation ‘Digital environmental metabolisms: An ecocritical project of the digital environmental humanities’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 2017), https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/14457..

8 Mark Sample, ‘Your mistake was a vital connection: Oblique strategies for the digital humanities’, Keynote Address, Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (2015).

9 Since 1962, the US National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Cooperative Shark Tagging Program (CSTP) has tagged more than 300,000 sharks.

10 See: Surf Life Saving Western Australia (SLSWA), http://surflifesavingwa.com.au//; and Alan Yu, ‘More than 300 sharks in Australia are now on Twitter’, NPR (January 1, 2014), https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/12/31/258670211/more-than-300-sharks-in-australia-are-now-on-twitter.

11 Amit Chowdhry, ‘How Google stops sharks from eating undersea cables’, Forbes (August 15, 2014), https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/08/15/how-google-stops-sharks-from-eating-undersea-cables/#15904d931f2b.

12 The term ‘oddkin’ is from Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. She defines there ‘oddkin’ as ‘the colloquial term for other-than-conventional biogenetic relatives.’ Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 221, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780.

13 Dr. Da Costa unfortunately passed in 2012 and the blog is no longer active.

14 Haraway (2016), pp. 24–25.

15 Ibid., p. 25.

16 Ibid.

17 Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 18, https://doi.org/10.7312/columbia/ 9780231166188.001.0001.

18 Ibid., p. 22.

19 Ibid., p. 79.

20 Ibid., p. 83.

21 See Citizen Sense, Pollution Sensing, http://citizensense.net/projects/pollution-sensing/.

22 Ibid.

23 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 110, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203418659, paraphrasing Spinoza, quoted in Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 28.

24 Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 2, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1673.001.0001.

25 For more, see Brian Handwerk, ‘With wearable devices that monitor air quality, scientists can crowdsource pollution maps’, Smithsonian Magazine (March 12, 2015), http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/with-wearable-devices-that-monitor-air-quality-scientists-can-crowdsource-pollution-maps-180954556/#5zKIohrRUEkmuLlr.99.

26 See also Davey Alba, ‘This wearable detects pollution to build air quality maps in real time’, Wired (November 19, 2014), https://www.wired.com/2014/11/clarity-wearable/; Megan Treacy, ‘10 environmental sensors that go along with you’, Treehugger (March 5, 2013), http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/environmental-sensors.html; ‘Small, portable sensors allow users to monitor exposure to pollution on their smart phones’ (n.a.), Jacobs School News, UC San Diego (December 18, 2012), http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1295; and visit Instructables to find instructions to make your own DIY sensor: FabLabCuneo, ‘Environmental pollution’, Instructables http://www.instructables.com/id/Environmental-Pollution/. As of early 2017, the United States EPA website even has an ‘Air Sensor Toolbox’ for citizen scientists: United States Environmental Protection Agency, Air Sensor Toolbox for Citizen Scientists, Researchers and Developers, https://www.epa.gov/air-sensor-toolbox.

27 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 159, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.001.0001.

28 Ibid., p. 138.

29 Ibid., p. 21.

30 See the Soil Selfies project here: enviroed4all, Soil Selfies (July 12, 2015), http://soils.enviroed4all.com.au/soil-selfies/.

31 All messages taken from FutureCoast.

32 FutureCoast.

33 Claire Colebrook, ‘Not symbiosis, not now: Why anthropogenic change is not really human’, The Oxford Literary Review, 34.2 (2012), 185–209 (p. 195), https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2012.0041.

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