Making + Sensing: Making Sense of the Digital Humanities

Analyzing data to draw conclusions underpins much of the scholarship in Digital Humanities. But what do we know about the operations and processes it takes to build a dataset to analyze? Data is often misunderstood as universal in truth, incorruptible, or at the very least, binary: black or white. Do we, the audience—whose skills, knowledge, and experiences vary—collectively possess the data literacy necessary to fully comprehend and critically engage with data processing in order to fully contextualize the analysis and conclusions that are drawn from them? When the myriad of decisions and the extensive labor it takes to finalize a dataset are obscured, we face an epistemological barrier: what are we able to really know if we can’t see the whole picture and how we got there?

Making the Desert Island Discs Dataset: data visceralization and how we don’t know what we know (MDIDD) is an epistemological interrogation of the Digital Humanities. Inspired by the work of Mimi Onuoha, Romi Morrison, and Jacqueline Wernimont, our project proposes ways of critical making that help to illuminate the foundations of data science and this kind of Digital Humanities practice. Going beyond the common methods of visualization, we created data visceralizations—what Bleeker, Verhoeff, and Werning refer to as “knowledge objects” (Bleeker et al., 2020) and sonifications, for instance—which imbue information in alternative ways that allow us to experience data, which in turn affects our understanding of the process and the products that come from it. Our outputs convey different relationships than a typical visualization (Special Characters, Top 8), highlight absence as well as presences in the information (Map & Key, Data Textile, The Sounds of Age), illuminate the often obscured feminized labor of data processing (Data Textile), re-constitute data to convey the human intervention needed to “clean” it (Special Characters, Top 8), and convey the potential for different senses to activate our understanding (Special Characters, Data Textile, The Sounds of Age, Top 8). By pointing to the human intervention needed in computational processes and engaging the audience through different modalities, we aim to expand the developing canon of the Digital Humanities and encourage critical approaches to knowledge creation across the field.