12. The Weight of The Digital: Experiencing Infrastructure with InfraVU1
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Texte intégral
The following chapter by Ted Dawson explores the environmental entanglements of the digital humanities, considering the imbrication of digitally-driven attempts to confront environmental crisis with the contributions of digital technologies to that very crisis. The chapter centers on a case study of the InfraVU project undertaken in 2016–2017 at the Vanderbilt University Center for Digital Humanities, a project that sought to draw attention to the infrastructure supporting digital humanities (DH) at Vanderbilt. Dawson first considers the experience and concealment of infrastructure in contemporary life, and especially at the university. He then moves into a fuller description of the InfraVU project itself, showing how the development of the project exploited a productive tension between making and thinking which is central to so much DH work, and which can be understood as a specific inflection of the larger tension between understanding digital culture and digitally understanding culture. In addressing that tension, the InfraVU project demonstrates how digital humanists can use computational methods to think through environmental issues, while also reflecting critically on how that technology is itself implicated in environmental issues. The chapter concludes by foregrounding the role of the arts and humanities in ecocritical digital humanities (EcoDH).
Introduction: EcoDH
1What is the environmental impact of the digital humanities (DH)? Let me approach this through a somewhat humbler question: what is the environmental impact of a single DH center? On entering the space, we recognize that the scarcely audible hum of computers indicates the flow of electricity, the generation of heat and the burning, in some far-off place, of fossil fuels. But how much do we really attend to the scope of the environmental entanglement of these technologies? And as we use these technologies to broaden humanistic thinking and find new pathways to understanding such intractable problems as anthropogenic climate change, how does our investigation itself become part of the problem we investigate?
2This latter question, a central question of ecocritical digital humanities (EcoDH), could be understood as corollary to a central question of DH in general: how does inquiry into the culture of digital technologies inscribe itself into the use of those same technologies in cultural inquiry more broadly? Kathleen Fitzpatrick gave this one of its clearest formulations in a 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education piece, in which she labeled DH a ‘nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities’, and to ‘ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies’, thus outlining two tacks in DH which must obviously inform one another.2 Though I do not expect in the following to resolve the tension between these two aspects of DH—nor would I want to—I hope to make some small contribution to imagining more vividly what their imbrication looks like. The EcoDH framing of this question is helpful in this regard. Shifting from the question, ‘How does understanding digital culture relate to digitally understanding culture’ to the question, ‘How does understanding the digital contribution to environmental crisis relate to digitally understanding environmental crisis’ is both an attenuation and an expansion of the question. It narrows the focus to a specific sort of DH investigation, such as the one I will be describing below. Jennifer Gabrys offers an example of how such work frames the question: ‘on the one hand, ubiquitous computing has become central to performing new environmental practices […] Yet on the other hand […] the projected rise in computational objects and applications is sure to generate new modalities and distributions of electronic waste’.3 Such a dichotomy is clearly more manageable than the vast question of computers and culture. At the same time, though, the EcoDH framing links the question of the digital to the question of the geological, asking not just what it means to be human in a digital world, but what it means to be human in a time of human geological agency, the time some call the Anthropocene, in which the question becomes, per Stacy Alaimo, ‘What can it mean to be human at this time when the human has become sedimented in the geology of the planet’.4 By recognizing the expansion of human impact on the planet beginning in the late eighteenth century as a categorical shift in the relationship of human and planet, the Anthropocene explodes the idea of human culture, giving a sense of urgency to our investigations of the human/ digital interface, as this becomes the human/digital/planetary interface.5
3I will begin by focusing on the narrow and specific, discussing a particular EcoDH project undertaken in 2016–2017 at the Vanderbilt University Center for Digital Humanities, a project that sought to draw attention to the infrastructure supporting DH at Vanderbilt. The project was dubbed InfraVU, a name meant to highlight the focus on infrastructure as well as our group’s desire to get beneath the surface of Vanderbilt University, an institution which, like other universities, has a vested interest in concealing that infrastructure. I will thus first consider the experience and concealment of infrastructure in contemporary life, and especially at the university. I will then turn to a consideration of the InfraVU project itself, showing how the development of the project exploited a productive tension between making and thinking which is central to so much DH work, and which can be understood as a specific inflection of the larger tension between understanding digital culture and digitally understanding culture. I will finally address that tension, showing how InfraVU both uses digital technology to think about environmental issues, but also thinks critically about how that technology is itself implicated in environmental issues.
Concealing Infrastructure
4We live in an age of marvels and a world of wonders. The Blue Man Group puts it well:
Right now, there is a virtually invisible network which links together millions of people who would otherwise be completely isolated from each other. This exciting technology has grown to become an incredibly complex web of connections that is so large and difficult to track that it would be practically impossible to estimate its total size. And even though most of us live alone in urban isolation, this system represents one of the few ways all of our lives are intertwined. This system is: modern plumbing.6
5This scatological riff on the Internet makes two important points. First, all-encompassing networks are not so new as we sometimes think; and second, there is a long history of burying the infrastructure that enables our modern existence, both in the literal sense, for water and sewage lines, like fiber-optic cables, are generally underground, but also in the abstract sense. Indeed, the comedy of this quotation arises from the simultaneous overwhelming presence in our minds of the Internet as metaphor for connection with the total obscurity of the actual infrastructure of connection.
6While concealed infrastructure is a fundamental condition of our day, few institutions display this condition—which is to say, few institutions conceal their infrastructure—with more care and attention than the university. The campus tour given to prospective undergraduates and, more importantly, their parents, must be able to move smoothly across lawns, between academic buildings, and through libraries, dorms and dining facilities, without stumbling across the waste dumps, loading docks, HVAC units and computer clusters upon which these buildings and their occupants depend. And, as Nicole Starosielski points out in The Undersea Network, this is not a matter only of hidden pipes and cables, but of ‘hidden labor, economics, culture, and politics’.7 As much as we in the academy may be focused on bodies and embodiment, as much as we may study labor practices and advocate for improving them, the life of the mind as presented to our future students is all about the brains and computers of students and faculty, with pesky matters like plumbing, climate control and, indeed, computer networks, relegated to anonymous staff, hidden behind brick enclosures and buried under the ground.
7Lisa Parks writes:
While concealing infrastructure sites may be a viable aspect of urban planning (as has long been the case of sewer, electricity and water systems), one of its effects is to keep citizen/users naive about the systems that surround them and that they subsidize and use. Because of this, it is important to devise other ways of visualizing and developing literacy about infrastructures and the relations that take shape through and around them.8
8In 2016, the EcoDH working group at Vanderbilt’s DH Center sought ways to ‘visualize and develop literacy about infrastructures’ that sustained our own work. We hoped to unearth some of the hidden aspects of DH at Vanderbilt, beginning with the infrastructure itself. Sitting in our climate controlled, brightly lit, and thoroughly screen-encrusted space in the Vanderbilt DH center, we wondered whether the material weight of digital work was really perceptible to users of the DH Center.
9Much recent scholarship has categorized, measured and historicized the materiality of digital life, drawing attention to just the sort of material and human dimensions we were concerned with. Tung-Hui Hu, for example, in his Prehistory of the Cloud notes that ‘the cloud is a resource-intensive, extractive technology that converts water and electricity into computational power, leaving a sizable amount of environmental damage that it then displaces from sight. […] it also turns human labor into a resource’ and ‘covers up the Third World workers who invisibly moderate […] websites and forums’.9
10Allison Carruth has written similarly of the material dimensions belied by the ‘light and airy image of the digital cloud’.10 And just as Hu notes that ‘the cloud has become so naturalized in everyday life that we tend to look right through it, seeing it uncritically, if we see it at all’,11 Carruth writes that ‘the web is so ubiquitous for those cultures and communities that are “plugged in” that its infrastructure becomes imperceptible’.12 She is not vague on the cause of this imperceptibility: ‘The preponderance of ecological metaphors in how we speak about digital technology and networked computing masks, willfully in some cases, what is an energy-intensive and massively industrial infrastructure’.13 In their introduction to Media and the Ecological Crisis, Richard Maxwell, Jon Randaulen and Nina Lager Vestberg argue similarly about not simply the everyday environmental metaphors that refer to media (beyond the cloud, Carruth names ‘streaming content’, ‘server farms’, ‘the hive mind’, and ‘mountains of data’ as examples) but specifically about the metaphors of media studies itself, most importantly the term media ecology, which, by deploying the word ecology in an analogic sense to explain relations among media technologies, obscures the term’s usual meaning. ‘This is why the old media ecology needs to be recycled: its defining metaphor of media environments ironically fosters ongoing and harmful neglect of the media’s environmental impact’.14 They would surely agree with Carruth’s assessment that ‘the pull of metaphor directs one’s attention away from the materiality of information’.15
11Arguably, though, there is something redundant in the idea of metaphors directing attention away from materiality, for we never really noticed that materiality in the first place, a point Matthew Kirschenbaum had already made at the beginning of this century in identifying the ‘tactile fallacy’, the widespread belief that ‘electronic objects are immaterial simply because we cannot touch them’.16 These metaphors, then, troubling as they surely are, simply reinforce what appears as an intuitive understanding of digital culture as ephemeral. For InfraVU, counteracting the imperceptibility of the infrastructure supporting DH at Vanderbilt would mean directing attention towards the materiality of something whose immateriality we take for granted, and then reinforce with metaphors.
12We had already attempted a few smaller interventions to encourage thinking about the materiality and energy consumption of digital work. A simple activity involved having participants perform a traceroute to any familiar website, especially one they used in their work, and imagining the physicality of the list of routers returned in terms of their smashability—that is, considering the IP addresses displayed as places their digital journey could be ended with a hammer.17 In another activity, intended to make the energy use of the computers in the DH Center more relatable, we recorded the electricity consumption of a single workstation over a week, and then used the numbers to extrapolate the mileage that could be driven in an electric car using the same amount of power as our computers.18 But such exercises seemed woefully insufficient given the challenges outlined above. We wanted to do something bigger, something that would not only refer to the infrastructural entanglements of our work, but that would actually make the infrastructure visible. We began by considering the specific ways in which infrastructure is concealed at Vanderbilt University.
Experiencing Infrastructure (InfraVU)
13The windows of the Vanderbilt DH Center, situated on the third floor of Buttrick Hall, look eastward over the verdant library lawn. In the morning, sunlight glitters in through magnolia leaves brushing the glass. Were the opposite side of the building visible, it would offer a rather different vista. Some two hundred feet to the west, sprawling across an area somewhat larger than the manicured lawn to the east, lies the university power station. But you can only see it from offices on the upper floors of the building. Students in classrooms on the lower floors, like pedestrians outside the building, cannot see the power station for the tasteful brick buildings situated in front of it, cheerfully obstructing the sight lines to the hulking industrial heart of the campus. Indeed, the arrangement of structures is such that the hungry scholar moving between Buttrick Hall and the adjacent dining building on the way to satisfy bodily needs would not even suspect the presence of the facilities they pass within 250 feet of, which secretly satisfy the sundry needs of the campus, channeling electricity, water, steam (used for hot water, heating and cooling) and, of course, data, to the buildings around them.
14Needless to say, no unsightly power lines connect the station to the other buildings on campus. Instead, a network of traversable underground tunnels joins the power station to the various academic buildings. If we wanted to make the environmental implications of DH work at Vanderbilt perceptible, we thought a good starting point would be to make visible this infrastructure literally under the center. This would, of course, represent only the smallest portion of any sort of Vanderbilt DH ‘footprint’, as the infrastructure supporting the physical space of the DH center is slight compared to the infrastructure of the Internet and the decentralized data storage and processing that power so much of our work. But if the connection between a small office space and the machinery beneath it could be made, we supposed, this would serve as a microcosm for thinking about the larger issues. The incomprehensible material weight of the digital cloud investigated in the works of Carruth or Hu would make a deeper impression on shoulders that had already hefted the weight of the local infrastructure. Such language is of course figurative, though by the end of our work, we would begin to find ways to make it more concrete.
15But we began not with the concrete but with the virtual, deciding to make a 360-degree video tour that would allow users to follow the path of water, steam, electricity and data from the inside of the power station to the DH center via the underground tunnels. We photographed a series of five videos. Four used a stationary camera, showing two sections of the plant interior, the interior of Buttrick Hall, and the interior of the DH Center. The fifth video was a two-minute journey through one of the steam tunnels from the plant to beneath Buttrick hall.19 By inserting this video between the two of the plant and the two in Buttrick, we had a series that rendered the vast majority of the infrastructural journey we wished to depict as virtual experiences that, by donning a headset, a viewer could enter.

Fig. 1 Still from the first 360-degree video, showing the plant interior. Note the icon at top left, which can be used to move the viewing angle. This shows the video as viewable on desktop. Photograph by Ted Dawson (May 16, 2017).

Fig. 2 The third video, traveling through the tunnels, before the two fish-eye images are stitched. On the left (behind the camera, holding it) is group member Adam Merki. On the right (in front of the camera in the distance) is Ronnie Pepper, our guide. Photograph by Ted Dawson (May 16, 2017).
The Infrastructure of InfraVU and Other Concerns
16But before we had even finished stitching and editing the videos, we shifted again from tinkering to thinking about our tinkering.20 Our concerns began with questions around immersion and embodiment. As we were testing our videos, one of our group members noted that the tunnel video induced nausea. That users might experience ‘virtual reality sickness’ while attempting to experience infrastructure with our videos was of course troubling in itself, but more troubling was the notion that this was more likely to happen to women than to men watching our videos. As observers of the higher prevalence of ‘VR sickness’ in women have asked: ‘Is virtual reality sexist?’21 Lisa Nakamura has glossed this problem as one of technology not accounting for human difference and the way ‘women’s bodies are more skeptical than men’s’, pointing out how many virtual experiences are coded—in two senses—as white male experiences.22 Riffing on Laura Mulvey, we might speak here of ‘male embodiment’.23
17That our project would be reproducing the histories of oppression built into the technologies it used connects to a range of systemic problems of the digital age that digital humanists have been confronting with both important theoretical contributions such as those of Nakamura or Safiya Noble, whose Algorithms of Oppression considers how ‘digital decisions reinforce oppressive social relationships’,24 as well as in practices from the selection of keynote presenters at conferences, to the formation of organizations like African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) and the creation of digital projects like ‘Torn Apart / Separados’, with its elucidation of the networks of power that enrich themselves by excluding human beings from our national community.25 My chief concern in the present essay, however, is a second problem that cut straight to the heart of our project, potentially undermining our very purpose.
18While we sought to find ways to make visible the material entanglements of our seemingly lightweight lives, we were at the same time making tangible that very lightness. That is, the content of our videos was meant to be: ‘look at all this stuff under your feet that enables digital experiences like this one’, but the form of the experience, putting on a headset, possibly even a flimsy Google Cardboard, was reinforcing the sense of magic that the digital so easily evokes, the sense of being untethered from the material world. VR demands an enormous amount of computing power, and hence an enormous amount of electricity use and heat generation, but little of this is readily apparent to the end user, whose experience is literally lightweight and figuratively transcendent.26 We were, in other words, participating in the occlusion of VR’s footprint while trying to draw attention to the occlusion of the DH center’s footprint. Lisa Parks, writing about cellular antenna trees, notes that, ‘as a cell tower disguised as a tree, the antenna tree draws attention to the materiality of infrastructure in the very process of trying to conceal it’, and ‘actually exposes more than it hides and in this sense can be thought of as a site for generating further public knowledge about the materiality of wireless and other network systems’. If, per Parks’s argument, cell trees reveal as they attempt to conceal, were we doing just the opposite, and concealing what we tried to reveal? Were we creating a site for generating public knowledge about materiality, or were we creating a site for reinforcing the perception of immateriality, reinforcing the ways in which ‘we are socialized to know so little about the infrastructures that surround us’?27
19This problem is a specific instance of a larger issue that arises from seeking to use a technology to provoke criticism of that same technology. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno famously observed of the culture industry, could we not equally well say here that attempts to use the infrastructure of digital capitalism to call into question the infrastructure of digital capitalism do little more than ‘confirm the validity of the system all the more zealously’?28 Jodi Dean writes that:
In communicative capitalism, reflexivity captures creativity, sociality, resistance, and critique enclosing them into mediated networks for the financial gain of a corporate and shareholding class. Within mass social and personal media networks, expressions of dissent enrich the few and divert the many. The media practices we enjoy, that enable us to express ourselves and connect with others, reassemble dissent into new forms of exploitation and control.29
20Were we contributing to the project of ‘big VR’, and more generally, to the efforts of the ‘corporate and shareholding class’ to position VR and the resource-intensive networks and systems upon which it relies as enjoyable media practices, virtual reality with a purely representational connection to real reality?
21Cate Sandilands has suggested that ‘the contemporary, full-color, digitized proliferation of natures-as-commodities acts as a screen covering the exploitation of the natural world that is a central condition of capitalist production; this incorporation of the natural world into the bourgeois narrative of progress via green technologies and nature documentaries serves only to continue the barbarism of the present’.30 Somewhere between green technologies and nature documentaries, of course, one could find our 360-degree videos, which thus become part of the ‘bourgeois narrative of progress’.
22Sandilands goes on to wonder what a Benjaminian arcades project of contemporary ‘bourgeois nature’ might look like. Just as Walter Benjamin drew together diverse texts to present dialectical images of his time, what if we attempted to constellate dialectical images of present-day texts of the environment? Sandilands asks us to imagine:
what nature might appear […] when arrested in a montage assembled from a 1972 Nova Scotia travel poster, a pulp western or two by a now-forgotten author, an old copy of National Geographic from the doctor’s waiting room, last year’s treatise on the ‘right’ kind of diet for optimal cardiovascular health (found right beside the dusty Stairmaster), The Bell Curve (garbage even before it was published), one of George W. Bush’s televised speeches on oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and just about any policy document that speaks earnestly about the merits of sustainable ‘development’.31
23What nature might appear, we wondered, in the constellation of our videos with 360-degree videos of swimming with dolphins, VR first-person shooters set in post-apocalyptic landscapes, and Google’s ‘Tilt Brush’, an application that immerses users in an empty black space and allows them to ‘paint’ the world into existence around themselves? Of course, Benjamin does offer a sort of hero of the arcades in the flâneur, and Sandilands wonders what this nineteenth-century figure might look like today: ‘What modes of knowing […] are generated in the eco-arcades that are the iconic/historic sites of late capitalism? […] what kind of marginal-critical figure is enabled, not by the metonym/ site of nineteenth-century arcade/exhibition, but by that of twenty-first-century Facebook/ecotour?’32 But she leaves this question open. As Benjamin observed of the original flâneur: ‘the man of letters […] goes to the marketplace as flâneur, supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer’.33 And I hardly think handing to the flâneur a VR-headset changes this situation.
Conclusion: Bodies
24There is, however, one last lesson from the Blue Man Group quotation: there is something fleshy and substantial in the Internet, namely ourselves. We are part of the system, even if as mere meat space flâneurs, wetware yet to be factored out of the hardware we have built.34 The Internet is unthinkable without plumbing, not only because the physical infrastructure linking inputs and outputs of computers relies on the same formal principles, and sometimes follows the same paths, as the physical infrastructure linking the inputs and outputs of human bodies, but because human bodies, with all their attendant infrastructure, still constitute the Internet to a great extent.35 This idea does not somehow free us from the aforementioned problems, but hopefully can help us attend to them. For as Alaimo writes: ‘huge McMansions, giant trucks, and gas-guzzling SUVs’—and I would add universities—‘serve to insulate their inhabitants from the world. Attention to the material transit across bodies and environments may render it more difficult to seek refuge within fantasies of transcendence or imperviousness’.36
25With the focus on bodies in mind, we returned to tinkering. Even if our project cannot but take its place in the ‘bourgeois narrative of progress’, even if VR is nothing if not a ‘fantasy of transcendence’, could we find ways it might help us attend to the ‘material transits across bodies and environments?’How might we replace the lightweight digital experience with an experience that we feel in our bodies? Lisa Parks finishes her essay on antenna trees by invoking the artist, writing of the antenna-tree photography of Robert Voit that ‘while manufacturers and carriers have devised ways to conceal cell towers, some artists have created works designed to draw our attention back to them’.37 Inspired to think like artists, we imagined ways we might add heft to the experience of our 360-degree videos.
26The next step for InfraVU will be what we are calling ‘Google CastIron’, which essentially will consist of attaching a skillet to either side of a Google Cardboard, so that the body experiencing our video tour will bear significant weight as it does, and the normally easy experience of turning to look about the virtual space will become one associated with significant physical discomfort. This will not by any means help supplement the impoverished sensorium of virtual reality; while the cast iron may supply some olfactory sensation of metal and grime, this will only coincidentally resemble the scent of the tunnels, and while holding the weighty metal will generate muscle heat, this will not come close to the stifling conditions we experienced while filming. We aim less to enhance the verisimilitude of the tunnel experience than to render perceptible the weight of the virtual experience itself. But cast iron will bear no direct correspondence to the material entanglements of the virtual experience, either. We had considered ways we might do this, for instance by attaching a headset to the floor, ceiling, and walls of a room with tension bands which would tighten in some correlation to the amount of electricity being consumed in the process of streaming the videos over the Internet and playing them on the headset. The preference for cast iron came not only because it would be far easier to implement and (we imagine) more memorably whimsical, but because attempting to tie the experience to a specific material weight would undercut the point that the material weight of our DH work ultimately escapes our calculation.38
27Let me return finally to the question with which I began: What is the environmental impact of DH? Of course there is no possible answer to this question, any more than we can say what the environmental impact of the car is. To be sure, we can extrapolate numbers from tailpipe emissions, and so arrive at some numerical estimate of the environmental impact of cars, but we cannot even begin to figure the costs of the shifts in human ways of living tangled up with the emergence of the car—the shape of cities and the contours of the working day, just to name the obvious ones—and any understanding of what cars mean for our planet has to understand all of that as well. If there is an answer to this sort of question, it will not reveal itself to computational methods or big data crunching, but sooner to imaginative humanistic exploration of the sort that has been found in ecocritical work for decades already.39 This is why the humanities are so critical in the Anthropocene. While many look to natural science and policy for solutions to global warming, it is in the humanities that we are most likely to find the kinds of work that challenge our assumptions about the world and our ways of living in it, and these are ultimately the things we must address if we are to avert catastrophe.
28We are, in the end, not out to measure the footprint of DH so much as to shift the public discourse about the digital and the environment, to help us all remember that the difference between paper and digital is not one of dead trees versus digital ephemerality, but rather one of dead trees versus melting permafrost. We DH-ers will continue to do this as we always have, through intellectual and physical endeavors, by writing articles disseminated electronically and by holding seminars in which we use traceroute to imagine the infrastructure of electronic dissemination, by attending conferences and by measuring the ‘mileage’ of computers, by computing minimally and by affixing cast iron skillets to flimsy bits of cardboard.
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 I am grateful to Madeleine Casad, Sophia Clark and Adam Merki, who, as members of the EcoDH working group convened at Vanderbilt in 2016–2017, contributed substantially to the ideas and projects discussed in this essay. I convened that group as the DH Center’s first HASTAC scholar, and this work could not have been completed without the support of that organization. Ideas developed here have been presented to audiences at HASTAC 2017 in Orlando, at the 2018 Global Digital Humanities Symposium at Michigan State University and at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park, and I am indebted to helpful feedback from audience members at all of these venues, and especially to discussions with my co-presenters, Craig Dietrich, Amanda Starling Gould, libi rose striegl and Max Symuleski.
2 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference’, The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: ProfHacker (July 13, 2010), http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/reporting-from-the-digital-humanities-2010-conference/25473.
3 Jennifer Gabrys, ‘Re-thingifying the Internet of things’, in Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment, ed. by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 180–195 (p. 181).
4 Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 1, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816621958.001.0001.
5 That the Anthropocene begins in the eighteenth century (indeed, that it has begun at all) is a matter of some controversy. I follow Dipesh Chakrabarty in opting for a beginning in the 1780s, a timing which coincides with measurable greenhouse gas increases in ice core samples, the invention of Watt’s steam engine, and Kant’s formulation of the ‘Copernican revolution’, which takes on a new weight in the face of dawning human geological agency.
6 Clips from this show are shown in the PBS documentary Blue Man Group: Inside the Tube; see Blue Man Group: Inside the Tube, dir. by Chris Wink and Candice Corelli (PBS, 2006). The scene quoted can be seen here: Blue Man Group Modern Plumbing And PVC IV (HQ), 3: 03, posted online by bluemangroupsurrey, YouTube, October 25, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuQvgswttz0.
7 Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 2, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376224.
8 Lisa Parks, ‘Around the antenna tree: The politics of infrastructural visibility’, Flow Journal (March 6, 2009), http://www.flowjournal.org/2009/03/around-the-antenna-tree-the-politics-of-infrastructural-visibilitylisa-parks-uc-santa-barbara/.
9 Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015), pp. xii, 146, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029513.001.0001.
10 Allison Carruth, ‘The digital cloud and the micropolitics of energy’, Public Culture, 26.2 (2014), 339–364 (p. 339), https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2392093.
11 Hu (2015), p. xii.
12 Carruth (2014), 343.
13 Ibid., 341.
14 Richard Maxwell, Jon Randaulen and Nina Lager Vestberg, ‘Introduction: Media ecology recycled’, in Media and the Ecological Crisis, ed. by Richard Maxwell, et al. (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), pp. xi–xxii (p. xiii), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315885650.
15 Carruth (2014), 339.
16 Kirschenbaum, who has used both the term ‘tactile fallacy’ and ‘haptic fallacy’ in referring to this phenomenon, goes on to call for scholars to ‘begin cultivating a critical sensibility in which knowledge of material matters matters’ (see Matthew Kirschenbaum, ‘Editing the interface: Textual studies and first generation electronic objects’, Text, 14 (2002), 15–51 (p. 43)). This should by no means suggest that a focus on “material matters” had not previously existed in media studies—indeed, a material focus dates back at least to the seminal work of Friedrich Kittler. But Kirschenbaum’s call certainly reverberated, and the focus on the materiality has picked up throughout media studies fields, so that Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker can write in 2015 that ‘environmental media studies has taken its own materialist turn’ (Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, ‘Introduction: Sustainable media’, in Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment, ed. by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 1–19 (p. 12) https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315794877).
17 I describe this activity in more detail in a blog post which compares the route between my then home and Vanderbilt University by bus (6 miles) and by Internet (400+ miles). So much for the efficiency of teleworking. See Ted Dawson, ‘Sustainable DH, or: Smashing things with hammers’, HASTAC (October 30, 2016), https://www.hastac.org/blogs/tedawson/2016/10/30/sustainable-dh-or-smashing-things-hammers.
18 Our preliminary conclusion was that the three computers then in the Center (which had just opened) used enough power per week to drive forty miles in a Nissan Leaf.
19 We made several other videos, including a video of the disused coal burning furnaces and of the power station’s control room. In the interest of creating a tour as transparently logical as possible, we did not include either of these videos in the virtual tour, as the areas depicted were not obvious pieces of the infrastructural connection between the power station and the DH center. It is worth considering the arguments that could have been made for these videos’ inclusion, however. In the first case, coal burning was discontinued at Vanderbilt in 2015, and thus does not form a current part of the story we were telling, but including the interior shot of the furnaces would not only connect to the legacy of coal burning on campus, but also to the continuing use of coal in Vanderbilt’s energy mix. While 23 % of Vanderbilt’s electricity is provided by natural gas burning at the plant, the other 77 % comes from TVA, and as that mix comes roughly 24 % from coal, about 18 % of Vanderbilt’s electricity still comes from coal burning (TVA, ‘TVA at a Glance’, https://www.tva.gov/About-TVA/TVA-at-a-Glance; Melanie Moran, ‘Vanderbilt celebrates end of coal, smokestack teardown’, Vanderbilt News, Vanderbilt University (April 13, 2015), https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/04/13/vanderbilt-celebrates-end-of-coal-smokestack-teardown/). Including what remains of the coal furnaces in our tour, then, would have worked to counteract the rapid dismantling of the plant’s coal smokestack, which was gone a mere six months after the cessation of coal burning. In the case of the control room, not only would this have linked back to the human beings connected with the system, but it would have allowed us to include a marvelous anecdote of energy-consumption based surveillance, involving the spiking of steam usage during students’ peak shower hours. That our individual human behaviors collectively manifest themselves as easily traceable energy usage patterns neatly encapsulates certain mechanisms of human geological agency.
20 Because 360-degree videos necessarily consist of several different camera images displayed together, the different views must be ‘stitched’ to remove redundant areas and overlap edges.
21 Gian Volpicelli, ‘Posture could explain why women get more VR sickness than men’, New Scientist (December 9, 2016), https://www.newscientist.com/article/2115648-posture-could-explain-why-women-get-more-vr-sickness-than-men.
22 Lisa Nakamura, ‘The racial empathy machine: Discourses of virtual reality in America after Trump’, Global DH Symposium (Michigan State University, March 22, 2018).
23 For Mulvey’s notion of the ‘male gaze’, see Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
24 Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018), p. 1, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5.
25 http://xpmethod.columbia.edu/torn-apart/volume/1/.
26 On a consumer-grade computer, stitching a three-minute video can take hours, a reminder of the processing work involved on the production end.
27 Parks (2009).
28 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 102.
29 Jodi Dean, ‘Faces as commons’, Online Open (December 31, 2016), https://onlineopen.org/faces-as-commons
30 Catriona Sandilands, ‘Green things in the garbage: Ecocritical gleaning in Walter Benjamin’s arcades’, in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, ed. by Axel Goodbody and Catherine E. Rigby (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 30–42 (p. 36).
31 Ibid., pp. 37–38.
32 Ibid., p. 38.
33 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Verso, 1973), p. 34.
34 Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has pointed out that ‘wetware designates human insufficiency but also marks the embattled area that the computer must yet master in order to render humans obsolete’ (‘Hardware/software/wetware’, in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 186–198 (p. 191)).
35 In ‘Pipeline Ecologies’, Starosielski describes how fiber optic cables in upstate New York follow pathways of both human waste and nourishment, including the distribution of milk.
36 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 16.
37 Parks (2009).
38 We faced similar considerations with our ‘computer mileage’ experiment described above. While rendering energy used by computers in terms of electric vehicle mileage does tie digital work to more traditional measures of energy use and concomitant anthropogenic climate change, it also drastically underestimates the energy use involved, since much of the work performed ‘on’ the DH Center work stations in fact takes place in remote server farms and data centers, where its footprint is almost unknowable, though certainly always increasing.
39 Already in 1932, Aldo Leopold had written, “When I submit these thoughts to a printing press, I am helping to drain a marsh for cows to graze, and to exterminate the birds of Brazil. When I go birding in my Ford, I am devastating an oil field, and re-electing an imperialist to get me rubber” (Quoted in Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 74, https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061194).
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