A Technology of the Vernacular

Inclusion, Community, Literacy: Vernacular Innovation

One beneficiary of the rise in vernacular was Caterina da Siena, who would live as a community builder, ambassador, and mystic writer, despite having been born both female and non-noble in 1347. As an uncloistered nun, Caterina was credited with returning the pope to Rome from Avignon, became canonized in the century after her death, and was made a doctor of the church in 1970. Probably, Caterina’s impressive CV would not have been possible without her ability to read and write. A member of the artisanal class, Caterina gained literacy through her relationships with other women: her fellow Mantellate of the third order who included noble widows. Her choice of the Dominican order provided her with a rich intellectual environment, and Caterina learned across fields from religious studies to biology. She became a prolific writer in the last few years of her short life.

Despite her achievements and ability to teach others, reading and writing in the vernacular was not considered to be true literacy in a Latinate world. Though Caterina was born half a century after Dante’s death, little had changed regarding the status of the Italian and Latin languages and what participating in those language communities meant. Latin—the language of upper-class men, intellectual humanists, and the church—presented a clear barrier that prevented the general public and women in particular from accessing information. Though Caterina did learn Latin (the extent to which we cannot be sure), she consciously and strategically chose Sienese Italian as her language of writing and speech. She so believed in the power of the vernacular that she wrote to the popes of her time in Sienese, such that it was required for her letters to be read aloud to them in Latin, viva voce. This approach was not for the faint of heart, considering the power of the papal seat at the time. As a spiritual figure serving her community, offering comfort, advice, and care to the prisoners, penitent women, and ill of Siena, how could Caterina choose to communicate in a language that the majority of those around her would not be able to understand?

About 30 percent of Caterina da Siena’s nearly 400 extant letters were written to women, indicating a thriving vernacular female readership in Italy as early as the fourteenth century. More than those addressed to women, many of her letters contain the echoes of full literate communities as they capture the voices of all those physically in the room when a letter was penned. Among Caterina’s scribes were her own female followers, revealing literary production—and the technical ability to write with fourteenth-century tools—outside masculine spaces. Letters, sometimes, are considered alongside ephemera and are not afforded the full weight of other texts. Caterina, who wrote a book, some prayers, and these letters, employed unique and consistent metaphors and imagery across her corpus and also persuasively enacted diplomacy through her writing, indicating a poetic and rhetorical prowess. A somewhat earlier medieval figure, Brunetto Latini—a philosopher, notary, and Dante’s famous damned teacher—argues that Cicero’s teachings on speeches also apply to letters in his French work Tresor.3 Caterina writes her letters with the decorum one may expect of the period, especially when addressing the pope, and we do know that the technical act of writing was more laborious than it is today, suggesting that these texts of spiritual teachings for her followers were not intended to be thrown away.

Indeed, Caterina thought very much of her legacy and, on her deathbed, she asked the most trusted men of her famiglia followers to gather her writings together and watch over them. They would eventually collect these works for her canonization proceedings and to further distribute them across Europe in manuscripts and translations. The first printed edition of her letters was an early vernacular book run by Aldus Manutius in 1500, prior to his printings of Dante and Petrarca.4 Her book, Il dialogo, is a multi-century bestseller: the first printed edition was done in 1472 by Azzoguidi in Bologna, and a print run has taken place every seven to eight years since then (Cavallini, xiii). Her books would prove to have a lasting impact on her reception and also would be among those texts working to solidify Italian as a language on the global stage.

Caterina represents innovation in the emerging vernacular language and in a community approach that was fueled through her interest in the technology of writing. She used new language that signaled a new spiritual approach and leveraged the language of the general public for effective political discourse. While she often positioned herself outside privileged and exclusive spaces, Caterina was able to negotiate these sites and work within and against them to push forward the community-based project of developing a recognized and elegant vernacular. The record of her work reveals a wide literary exchange with people who could read and write Italian from all walks of life in the fourteenth century, inviting them into the commons of knowledge rather than casting them out.

Although history often preserves a single hero and single date for many inventions and innovations, this work is actually slow, iterative, often intergenerational, and generally the result of many building on the efforts of others. At its best, innovation can drive access, but often access will drive innovation by including more people who can anticipate more angles and approaches to solving a given problem. Dante is often credited with being the father of the Italian language, but the project of Italian began before him and persisted after. Like Caterina da Siena, there were many other spiritual community builders working in the Italian peninsula in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, including Franciscan friar and poet Iacopone da Todi, Franciscan mystic and writer Angela da Foligno, and Augustinian tertiary and healer Elena da Udine. These figures innovated on the language spoken by the people in their urban areas and developed a public repertoire outside institutions of power and privilege, seeking to drive inclusion and access through public speech and written texts. Through distancing themselves from a separate and self-monitoring elite group, those who emphatically wrote texts or gave speeches in Italian included communities historically excluded. This work helped to bring women, prisoners, the poor, the disabled, and other marginalized people into broader public discourse. Though inequity was not eradicated, there were increased avenues for literacy and communication across class lines.

While many other factors contributed to the growing rise in global literacy, the impact of the shift from Latin to the vernacular in the late Middle Ages and into the early modern period cannot be overstated. With data from several data stores, including the World Bank, Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina have created a number of compelling graphs on the rise of global literacy, which as of 2019 rests just above 86 percent (World Bank).

With the concession that older data come with many caveats, Eltjo Buringh and Luiten van Zanden have estimated that 15 percent of the population in Italy were literate within the timeframe of 1451 to 1500. They have come to this conclusion in part based on their data for per capita consumption of printed books annually across countries, which can certainly erase many readers, as we know one book can be read by many, which was notably the case in monasteries.5 In the figures available on Manifold, Roser and Ortiz-Ospina collapse that period to 1475; I have added the percentages onto the countries within the map. Of the European countries with data available, with the exception of the Netherlands, Italy has the highest literacy rate, which arguably correlates with the earlier adoption of the vernacular language as well as Italy’s high production of manuscripts (see Buringh and Van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West,’” for data on book production across Europe). Italy would continue to accelerate on literacy through 1800, where it caps at 23 percent. By then, the Netherlands achieved 85 percent literacy and Great Britain 54 percent, based on Buringh and Van Zanden’s estimates.

Literacy would not have risen without certain innovations. Of those innovations, some may belong more firmly to the purview of what we today consider to be the sciences and technology (we may include better access to resources and healthcare, and more intuitive writing technology as belonging to these disciplines), but in working together with the innovation of the vernacular language—led by humanists who wrote literature and built communities—we have all benefited from more reading, more writing, and more knowledge sharing. Had historical innovators not been able to drive these outcomes, inviting more interlocutors into an expanding discourse, we would not be so well positioned today with a wealth of recorded knowledge that we can continue to build on.

The work to expand access and invite more interlocutors is an ongoing effort. As the inheritors of both humanistic and technological traditions, the computational humanities are in a position to meet people where they are, to speak in languages more people understand (here, let us include digital and other literacies besides human language), and to drive greater inclusion. There is so much that is at stake, and those who are at the crossroads of where computation meets the humanities have a unique opportunity to increase the number of potential stakeholders we need today through expanding literacy and what literacy may mean.

Open Source and Vernacular Code

Today, there is another kind of literacy where many are excluded and where much is at stake. As of 2021, roughly 0.379 percent of the global population can code (Mleczko).6 This is compared to the nearly 59.5 percent of the global population (4.66 billion) who are active internet users worldwide in 2021 (Statista). Of course, this does not mean that under 1 percent of the population produce content on the internet, but it does reveal a stark disparity between how many people can create software versus how many people can consume only the user-interface element of software.

More than a decade ago in 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published his famous op-ed “Why Software Is Eating the World” in the Wall Street Journal, signaling the growing rise of software and how it is increasingly important to how we live today. Significantly, software is not only entrenched within our digital and virtual realities, but it also tangibly impacts our physical world, as software is part of what runs cars (not just self-driving ones), space vehicles, and elevators, and is used to create other smart appliances and material objects.7 While some of this software is proprietary, a lot of it is community-built open-source software, and more often than not, for-profit proprietary software is built on open source.

Open-source software refers to software in which source code is made available to others so that they may inspect, reuse, and modify it, and oftentimes open-source software is developed collaboratively in public. Closely related in ethos to open access, the open-source and free software movements represent a site of community-based technology building. The hundreds of millions of lines of code that underlie processes in modern vehicles are largely coming from open-source libraries, and NASA’s small helicopter Ingenuity flew on Mars thanks to many open-source contributors building software to automate and innovate over years and decades (Holmes; Vaughan-Nichols). These examples are just a small fraction of what runs on open source today. Crucially, open source can be read by anyone who is literate in code, and inspecting open-source libraries can give insight into what is happening under the hood of not just cars but computers, apps, and websites, too. Open source could therefore be thought of as a kind of vernacular in that it lays bare its algorithms and developers can build on top of it and innovate on it. But it is not vernacular in the sense that people on the streets are speaking that language—what would a native, vernacular Java programming language look like? On the other hand, proprietary software represents code that cannot be read or modified, which is why it is hard to determine if there is algorithmic bias on social media platforms that rely on closed instructions and opaque data stores.8

Though it is not the only platform where people can host and collaborate on software projects, GitHub is one of the most popular examples. Founded in 2008, the platform had 10 million repositories by 2013, and today it has more than 190 million repositories (at least 28 million of those being open source). The rapid growth of open-source software generally is hard to track in totality, but the data provided by GitHub (“2020 State of the Octoverse”) can provide a sense of the acceleration and scale of software projects—both open source and proprietary. GitHub was acquired in 2018 by Microsoft; it is hugely problematic that much of the open-source software ecosystem is hosted on the closed-source platform of a giant tech company.

One of the problems with the tech industry broadly, and open source in particular, is diversity. I am referring here to the broadest possible intersectional diversity, but we need to rely on common metrics to start to understand the degree of monoculture that exists in tech. In industry, underrepresented women of color do not make up even 10 percent of major tech companies in the United States. The data in the chart available on Manifold demonstrate that there is a large gender disparity, and an even larger disparity when one considers race and gender together (Fussell). How can the software and products built at these companies equitably serve all communities when their workforce does not even approximate the demographics of the United States?

Open-source software is even less representative. In 2017, the Open Source Survey was conducted by GitHub with partners in academia and industry, and researchers found that open source was orders of magnitude away from a diverse space. A full 95 percent of respondents to the survey identified as male, only 3 percent identified as female, and just 1 percent as nonbinary. In terms of race, 16 percent of respondents to this survey said they belonged to ethnic or national groups that are in the minority in the country in which they live. My pessimistic suspicion is that there have not been any more recent surveys because the data have not indicated that tech and open source have become more inclusive, but I would be happy to be proved wrong. The more generous read is that this small group of people, homogeneous though they may be, have created some substantial innovations that have permanently changed the way we work, play, and live. What would our world look like if there were a vernacular programming language that enabled more people to participate? How could those precluded from technocratic power get involved in open source as literate technologists and stakeholders?

Technology will only truly serve all communities if more individuals from more contexts are building technology and leading innovation. By “literate technologist” I mean someone who understands how software works, not necessarily a programmer. By “vernacular” I would like to invite expansive readings—what would it look like for technology to be truly vernacular, to be something that people “speak” in everyday life, where there is not a barrier for them to enter into discourse like a computational language that they must learn and gain fluency in? Historically, we know that when one closed, self-monitoring group is in charge of language, information, and knowledge, then many people are kept out. Once more people are invited in, there are increased opportunities for knowledge sharing and knowledge production, and more individuals can work to innovate in ways that benefit the communities they represent. Some answers to vernacular code are already being developed. There have been interesting programming language innovations that represent natural languages other than just English in their keywords (the heritage of imperialism is long), and there has been a proliferation of “no code” and “low code” platforms as well. The right kind of solution here demands an interdisciplinary approach that can likely benefit from an undergirding grounded in the humanities.

I feel so strongly that we must work to lower barriers of entry to building software that I have dedicated my post-academic career to making progress in driving technical literacy and advocating for open source. I am currently the senior director of developer enablement at Chainguard, a software supply chain security startup with a long-term mission of making secure software development the default. I work closely with several open-source projects, and the Sigstore project in particular, which provides tools to make the open-source ecosystem more secure. This work supports broader efforts in software ethics, allowing technologists to understand the code they are implementing, preventing cyberattacks, and supporting a trust root in software. I have previously built open-source learning platforms and maintain open-source repositories for teaching purposes. Among my colleagues at Chainguard with interdisciplinary academic backgrounds are Kathleen Juell, a software engineer who holds a PhD in early American literature, and John Speed Meyers, a security data scientist who holds a PhD in policy analysis. While I discuss my work with a long view to the Italian vernacular, Juell discusses her web development work in the context of world-making from the literature she researched.

My previous roles were at Sourcegraph, a code search company; and DigitalOcean, a cloud computing company. In my industry roles, I have built teams that develop software, open-access technical tutorials and documentation, free ebooks, and interactive web-based terminals for learning (innovative as an educational sandbox that hooks into cloud infrastructure).9 With the weight of a company behind you, there are resources to scale work like this; my ebook How to Code in Python was downloaded over 150,000 times, and my single-authored tutorials have been accessed over 45 million times to date. Monthly, about 5 million unique users visit the DigitalOcean web properties; to me, this represents a lot of opportunities to drive more technical literacy in incremental ways (DigitalOcean Holdings, “Form S-1/A”). The tech industry has afforded me with a wider reach than I had access to in the academy, and I am able to build things with and for a wider community, with the intention of making that community larger through education.

I met (hired, promoted) other humanities PhDs throughout my tech career to date. Erin Glass currently leads my former team at DigitalOcean. Her PhD was in English and her dissertation was titled “Software of the Oppressed: Reprogramming the Invisible Discipline”—if you think that the tech industry has no room to employ those who wield critical discourse, think again. DigitalOcean more recently hired Jeanelle Horcasitas as a developer educator; she completed a PhD in literature and cultural studies and was a HASTAC Scholar like myself. On the technical editorial team, which works alongside Developer Education, recent hires include Rachel Lee, whose English PhD focused on Romantic literature, and Caitlin Postal, who was a fellow panelist of mine on a digital humanities session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo (she completed her English PhD in 2022). A previous technical editor was Matt Abrams—PhD in art history—who is now a community support engineer at Grafana Labs, a monitoring startup. A former user research colleague of mine at DigitalOcean was Michele Tepper, who is currently director of user experience on the Platform Developer Experience team at Salesforce. Scott Bailey, who was technical content marketing manager when we worked together at Sourcegraph, completed graduate work in philosophical theology and had a career working as a digital humanities developer and librarian at university libraries before making this transition into tech.

I do not share these names to say that tech startups have been particularly interested in humanities PhDs; rather, I would like to draw attention to the fact that we humanists are already in tech. We perform many different roles; we are collaborating with many others across our organizations; we are bringing our training to us. And I am glad that we are here because we need to be among those leading technical innovations and outcomes alongside our colleagues with training in the physical and social sciences.

The question of the vernacular language of tech and how to drive inclusion are among the most compelling problems that humanists can begin to address, and there are many additional areas where the humanistically minded can innovate within tech. PhDs and other post-academics interested in joining the tech industry are particularly well suited to startups where their skill combination of high agency, fast learning, strong communication (teaching and writing), skillful research, and strong analysis proves to be very valuable. I do not think there are prescriptive pathways to follow; we are software developers, marketers, product managers, solutions architects, relationship partners, customer engineers, executive-level leaders, and more. I would love to have you as colleagues. But humanists need not be in industry to make an impact within the technology sector and to drive innovation generally; there is much that can be done from the academy and other alt-ac spaces to influence tech, create a vernacular for technologists of the future, and build something new.

Computational Humanities as a Site of Interdisciplinary Innovation

The digital humanities and computational humanities have many opportunities to shift the way research is done and counted to enable humanists to participate in interdisciplinary innovation. Research that brings together a group of experts across fields to create new methodologies and new knowledge is one avenue to explore. Unlocking History is a group of “conservators, paleographers, literary scholars, historians, publishers, book-artists, imaging experts, engineers, and scientists” who research letterlocking, an early form of material information security. They have been able to virtually unfold and read documents that remained sealed for hundreds of years, and their approach and findings were published in Nature Communications in 2021 (Dambrogio et al.). The researchers were able to apply X-ray microtomography scans and computational flattening algorithms to reconstruct and virtually unfold letters that were complexly locked to be read again. More than this, the group has been very engaged in the public humanities space through letterlocking workshops and a YouTube channel with over 17,000 subscribers.10 The team is co-led by Jana Dambrogio, a conservator at MIT Libraries, and Daniel Starza Smith, a lecturer in early modern English literature at King’s College, London, and they are joined by contributors in fields ranging from algorithm engineering and computer science to dentistry and material science.11 Given the wide scope of security and letters, along with sizable archives of unopened locked letters (the Brienne Collection has 577 unopened letters), this project is compelling and incredibly innovative. No team had ever been able to read a letter locked in this manner without damaging it before.

There are other recent examples of interdisciplinary projects that bring together humanists with those in the sciences or other disciplines. Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online is one example. Led by Crystal Lee, an incoming assistant professor of Computational Media and Design at MIT, along with a team of computer scientists and an anthropologist, this timely research brings scientific approaches in content and method (the spreading of falsified science alongside data visualizations) together with humanistic inquiry.12 Another example is the 2019 book Language and Chronology: Text Dating by Machine Learning by Gregory Toner, professor of Irish at Queen’s University, Belfast, and Xiwu Han, a computer scientist and research fellow also at Queen’s University. The book is part of the LexiChron project that uses machine learning to determine the chronology of ancient and medieval texts with unclear or no dates. The book seeks to more precisely date Irish sagas (ca. 700–ca.1700) through several approaches. The text’s conclusion underscores that humanists with domain knowledge must interpret machine learning results. If only we could encourage more stakeholders in industry to think about their own machine learning algorithms with a similarly interdisciplinary eye.

Consider how much we as a society could innovate and drive equity if humanists trained in gender theory, queer theory, and critical race studies would be in a position to directly collaborate with others in technology and science.13 We are at a pivotal moment where humanists have the opportunity to recognize and act on the ways in which we can disrupt some increasingly dystopian trends before we get further locked into a technological society without coleadership from philosophers, historians, and ethicists. In their chapter “Manufacturing Visual Continuity” in this volume, Fabien Offert and Peter Bell discuss the implications of what could be achieved if digital humanists did not limit themselves to established techniques of computer science, but explored new innovations from the field. I would like to take this further and involve humanists not only in the application of evolving technology but in the production of new and more equitable technologies. This call to action is with the caveat that Roopika Risam rightly points out in her chapter, “Double and Triple Binds,” in this volume: we as humanists must hold ourselves accountable, “redistribute resources to assist scholars who do not have access to them,” and fight against systemic racism within digital and computational humanities practices. We are in a position to fight against structural inequity within technology; let us not propagate it.

Outside of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, academics may believe we cannot participate in the software ecosystems that increasingly provide the infrastructure for our research and teaching. With increasing budget cuts, less access to institutional relationships and resources, and an increased likelihood of trained humanists having a precarious academic job—or a job outside the academy altogether—it is hard to think about the positions of power that humanities scholars do have. When evaluating what the digital humanities as a field has to offer, we must reframe how we recognize work and support the growth of our practitioners. We may consider how to encourage and fund contributions to open source, how to assess software as scholarship, how to equally recognize collaborative research in addition to single-author research, and how we may effectively participate in research projects across disciplines, like the team digital humanities projects I mentioned above. Damerow, Gibson, and Laubichler make a strong case for new approaches in their chapter (“Of Coding and Quality”) in this volume, “Computational humanities . . . require a shift from the traditional one-person research project that is common in the humanities toward a more team-oriented approach that is typical of science.” Alongside this, we can be champions of open access, ensuring that everyone has access to (often government-funded) research—rather than have it be locked behind expensive paywalls—so that we can all read the code that informs the ever-expanding repository of human knowledge.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to critically consider how we can engage with and properly compensate and recognize humanists who are in precarious positions or who are no longer institutionally or departmentally affiliated, because humanities work is not limited to the work of the traditional tenured faculty member in a disciplinary department. If we can begin to make other kinds of scholarship more legible, we can begin to participate more fully in the production of humanistic technology—it would no longer be something that is carved out alongside single-authored traditional research but can instead become the primary location of research output. It is of increasing importance that we pursue opportunities to not only participate in the governance of the software that we are using to do research and to teach, but also to be among those who are building this software. And we are well positioned to do so. To serve these ends, we need to stop creating ever more impossible barriers to entry in our disciplines and start recognizing digital, public, and technology-focused humanities work for the vital work that it is.

If we can imagine how to reward projects outside the single-authored, peer-reviewed paper and single-authored monograph, we can recognize collaborative work in the field, as the examples mentioned above suggest. We will open up more possibilities for practice of the computational humanities. How many humanists are there in open source? Can we onboard more humanists onto these platforms as part of our teaching and research? How can the academy commit to open scholarship and incentivize scholars to open source their research data or software? What models can we borrow from other fields, and what new methodologies can we create to help teams of researchers who build on each other’s humanities open-source projects? How can we recognize non-code contributions in software development and open source? As trained humanists with deep knowledge of computation, we can strengthen our public practice as technical communicators to support more technology consumers from understanding what is at stake with proprietary software and the collection of user data. Many of our colleagues in the sciences collaborate on teams and with industry, and they do this work in a cross-disciplinary manner. David Gray Widder, a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, was the lead author on a paper entitled “Limits and Possibilities for ‘Ethical AI’ in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes,” which provides analysis and possibilities for open-source communities to practice an ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). He collaborated with not only academic computer scientists but also Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist who is in industry at Intel Labs. How may humanities scholars develop relationships to create working groups, benefit from funding, drive research, and provide humanistic perspectives in potential cross-disciplinary and cross-sector partnerships?

I would like to invite more relationships and inroads between the humanities and the tech industry (I include here both for-profit companies and nonprofits). There are many sites for collaboration, from user research and product research to education and community to software development and DevOps. We have already witnessed what happens when the tech industry builds software for use in higher education without true collaboration with the end users they will serve. Turnitin and Course Hero have each had their fair share of criticism from plagiarism and privacy concerns to the ethical use of data. As educators, we are all too familiar with subpar learning management systems that are adopted across a given institution that never seem developed with our use cases in mind. However, even platforms that have been started by higher education institutions like edX have been handed over to for-profit organizations. What does true vernacular humanities software look like? The best examples may be truly distributed software projects that bring together universities, academic professional groups, and the tech industry. Commons In A Box (CBOX) is the open-source software behind projects like the Humanities Commons and CUNY Academic Commons, and it is built by a number of groups including the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), City University of New York (CUNY), and those in industry.14 Danica Savonick and I have argued that the use of CBOX as part of the Futures Initiative courses offered across the CUNY Graduate Center and the CUNY undergraduate campuses enabled students to be more participatory with their studies. The digital host of the Debates in Digital Humanities series, Manifold, is also a cross-industry and open-source endeavor with the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding among the collaborators and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This project can very well be the future of open-access publishing.

Part of the work of creating more vernacular software is to create space and structure for collaboration across sectors, including with humanists who have left the academy and today may be precluded from academic collaborations. Those trained in the humanities who are working in different industries often lose institutional access to resources, have limited time to do labor that is not compensated through a research line, and are not always considered to be part of the larger academic community. Some initial steps that universities and academic departments can take to support those who leave academia include providing continued library access to alumni,15 keeping track of the career outcomes of all alumni, and creating visiting affiliations for those outside institutions to be part of a research community.16 Those alumni in turn may be able to work with their employers to support internships for current students, provide free versions of their software (or other product) to researchers, or teach technical workshops. In the beginning of this chapter, I gestured toward the professional lives of vernacular innovators whose work outside the “life of the mind” has long been central to the humanist endeavor. Now, with ever-ubiquitous technology, there is much at stake, and there are many sites where humanists (whether inside or outside academia) can begin to become engaged, from open source to industry to centers of ethics and technology.

We need everyone involved in the critique and production of computational technology if we are going to build technology that serves everyone. In these endeavors, humanists bring nuance, ask relevant questions that may diverge from their STEM peers, draw from other fields of knowledge, and advocate for the end user. Humanists can interrogate how ethical machine learning algorithms can be, consider what is at stake when corporate entities collect data, and imagine different use cases for the same technologies. It is important that the humanities are among those driving the development of technology.

Returning briefly to Caterina da Siena, I would like to share an abridged quote from a letter she wrote to her confessor, Raimondo da Capua. Though we do not have any of her (or her scribes’) original manuscript letters today, she tells him that this letter and another she sent him were written by her own hand rather than by the hands of scribes. She relates to him the pure joy of being able to complete the technical act of writing by hand alongside the technical act of communicating her thoughts onto physical material.

This letter and another I already sent you I wrote in my own hand . . . I was full of self-admiration . . . and of his abundant providence toward me that provided me relief in the aptitude for writing, a consolation I did not have knowledge of due to my ignorance—so that when I descended from the high I had a little something with which I could vent my heart, so that it would not burst. . . . Forgive me for too much writing, it is because my hands and my tongue are in harmony with my heart.17

Caterina uses the quite humanistic symbolism of the hands, tongue, and heart working together to convey her message and to describe how this effort both brings her out of her ignorance and makes her proud of the accomplishment. Moreover, being able to communicate in this way relieves her, for she has had so much she wanted to share and was not able to without being able to use the tools of broader discourse. Imagine what it is like to be completely precluded from intellectual discourse because you were not taught Latin; to be something of a foreigner in your own land. I, too, have felt what she expresses: proud when an essay I have written resonates with others, relief when writing software that compiles (eureka!), and joy when software I launched is adopted or built upon by others. Being able to communicate, learn, and collaborate with others is vital across all fields of human pursuit, and always has been across contexts, regions, and time, which is why being able to do these acts effectively—with a shared vernacular—is so crucial.

The poets and community builders who innovated the vernacular language and invited more people into knowledge production come from a common foundation with us today. If we do not continue this work and bring everyone into the production of technology, then we risk losing ground on combating discriminatory search results and ungoverned data collection, and we may be unable to drive inclusion and the creation of equitable algorithms. We, as humanists, must take stock of our rich history and its intersections with other fields of learning. We must work to subvert current power hierarchies in the eternal projects of meaning-making and knowledge production in order to empower all who engage with technology, whether they are the builders, the readers, or both.

Notes

This chapter is dedicated in memory of Hollie Haggans, builder and innovator of inclusive tech communities.

1. 1. Trans. J. M. Rigg.

2. 2. See Pullella, “Pope Francis Renews Curbs on Latin Mass in Rebuff to Conservatives.”

3. 3. “Or dit li mastres que la escience de retorique est en .ii. mainieres, une qui est en dissant de boche & une autre que l’en mande par letres; mais li ensegnement sont comun, car il ne puet chaloir que l’en die ou en conte ou que l’en mande par letres. . . .” (Latini, Li livres dou tresor, 296). For a full discussion of the Ars dictaminis and Brunetto Latini, see Ronald Witt’s “Brunetto Latini and the Italian Tradition of Ars Dictaminis.”

4. 4. Aldus Manutius printed Petrarca in 1501 and Dante in 1502.

5. 5. One example relevant to Catherinian studies is the case of Syon Abbey in England, which would circulate books not only among nuns but among laywomen in the nuns’ networks; many women readers can be left uncounted in this way (for more on this see Tagliaferri, Lyrical Mysticism, ch. 5).

6. 6. Admittedly, every counting body likely approaches the questions of what coding is and who a coder is differently, but other estimates I have found go no higher than 0.5 percent. However, a more generous calculation may be to use GitHub’s registered user base, which is 56 million as of September 2020. There may be duplicate users, but this would certainly include nonprofessional developers, bringing the percentage total to 0.72 percent of the world population (GitHub, “2020 State of the Octoverse”). See also discussion and some sources on Quora (https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-on-earth-know-computer-programming) and 2014 data from IDC (https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers/).

7. 7. If you want to know why McDonald’s ice cream machines are often broken, it seems to have something to do with proprietary software and willful obfuscation of knowledge working together to drive unchecked profit (see Greenberg, “They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War”).

8. 8. See, for example, Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and popular articles such as Rebecca Heilweil’s “Why Algorithms Can Be Racist and Sexist.”

9. 9. Credit for this software goes largely to Jamon Camisso, DevOps engineer, developer educator, who studied information studies and teaches system administration at York University.

10. 10. “Letterlocking Videos,” @Letterlocking, YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNPZ-f_IWDLz2S1hO027hRQ.

11. 11. For information on the Unlocking History research team, see https://letterlocking.org/team.

12. 12. The MIT Visualization Group page is http://vis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/viral-visualizations.

13. 13. In her essay “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions,” Cathy N. Davidson makes a compelling argument not only about the role of the humanities in scientific discovery but also what is at stake in the early twenty-first century.

14. 14. I am on the technical advisory board of Humanities Commons. I share this to both disclose my interest in the platform and also to note that those working on the Humanities Commons are interested in perspectives from a wide audience (including mine as an academic in industry). My personal view is that this is a forward-looking move that will support innovative development of the platform, and I would like to thank the Humanities Commons for including me on the board.

15. 15. Here, I would like to recognize the librarians, faculty, and staff of the CUNY Graduate Center and the Mina Rees Library who provide me with considerable access to resources and databases as an alum. I would also like to thank the librarians and staff of the New York Public Library and its MaRLI (Manhattan Research Library Initiative) program, which provides me with world-class access to books and other resources. I encourage other libraries and universities to learn from these programs.

16. 16. In the spring 2022 semester, I was a visiting scholar in the Italian department at Rutgers University, where I taught a graduate-level course on the digital humanities and gave invited talks and workshops as part of Digital Humanities and Public History programming. I believe my experience in the tech industry, combined with my academic background, was valuable to my students, and I would like to thank the program for my personal opportunity and their leadership in this area.

17. 17. Letter T272, following Noffke. “Questa lettera, e un’altra ch’io vi mandai, ho scritte di mia mano . . . ma piena d’ammirazione ero di me medesima . . . e la sua Providenzia; la quale abondava verso di me, che per refrigerio, essendo privata della consolazione, la quale per mia ignoranzia io non cognobbi, m’aveva dato, e proveduto con darmi l’attitudine dello scrivere; acciocchè discendendo dall’altezza, avessi un poco con chi sfogare ’l cuore, perchè non scoppiasse. . . . Perdonatemi del troppo scrivere, perocchè le mani e la lingua s’accordano col cuore.”

    Translation mine. Note that this is a mystical text, and the “high” is generally understood to be a mystical elevation and the “providence” is divine.

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