PART I | Chapter 4
Laboratory
A New Space in Digital Humanities
Urszula Pawlicka-Deger
Over the past few years we have seen major infrastructure changes that indicate two directions in the development of digital humanities. The first change involves the reorganization of centers into departments and the institutionalization of the discipline; for instance, the Center for Computing in the Humanities was renamed the King’s College Department of Digital Humanities in 2011. The second change is related to launching a laboratory within humanities departments and libraries, such as the Digital Humanities Lab at the Yale University library, which was founded in 2015. Some labs are already established as part of a digital humanities institute, as with the Digital Humanities Laboratory, established in 2012 in the Digital Humanities Institute at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Thus, in addition to a center and department, a new unit, the laboratory, emerged in the field with a different structure and new conceptual models. The purpose of the infrastructure turn is to be an “agent of change,” as Neil Fraistat rightly called it in the context of the digital humanities center.1 The growing number of humanities laboratories raises questions about their role and impact. In contrast to place-based versions of digital humanities sites like centers and libraries, the laboratory model can function both as a physical working place (e.g., the Digital Humanities Lab located at the Yale University library) and a virtual space (e.g., the Kyoto Laboratory for Culture and Computing). This multifunctionality of laboratories affects digital humanities, which is seen both as a discipline located in a physical place and a practice used in various areas (virtual labs, lab-based courses, and collaboratories). A laboratory brings new practices to digital humanities and strengthens research methods developed by the model of the center. The laboratory should thus not be treated as the next place after the center but as a new space that offers different research practices (e.g., experiment, virtual research environment, and problem-based projects) and methods (e.g., data mining, 3D digitization, tinkering, coding, crafting, and prototyping). Hence, the purpose is to recognize the mission and characteristics of lab space rather than to draw a dividing line between a lab and a center. However, to a certain extent, the comparison is unavoidable in order to grasp the distinctive features of laboratory.
The goal of the chapter is to look at this new unit to comprehend its uniqueness, understand its function, and discern its influence on the transformation of digital humanities. The assumptions that underpin the paper are as follows: first, the infrastructure of digital humanities has changed from a discipline-based center to an interdisciplinary laboratory; second, the concept of the digital humanities field has been modified by providing digital tools and services with activities of solving problems and conducting critical theoretical research; third, digital humanities’ research practices have shifted from situated practices occurring in physical locations like centers and labs to virtual practices and collaborations through various platforms like Slack and Humanities Commons; and fourth, digital humanities itself has been altered to be more a method and “dispersed practice” than a field, which is elaborated further in the last section of this chapter. These changes in digital humanities have emerged along with infrastructure transformations, including establishing laboratories. To investigate the function and the influence of labs on digital humanities, I begin with a short examination of centers and explain their major features and then analyze the laboratory unit established in the humanities.
Center: Institutionalizing Digital Humanities
Since the 1980s, the humanities has established many centers to propel and facilitate humanities research, support scholarship and teaching, stimulate cross-campus dialogue, and sponsor national workshops and conferences. At that time, the humanities computing center emerged, later becoming the digital humanities center, defined by Diane M. Zorich as “an entity where new media and technologies are used for humanities-based research, teaching, and intellectual engagement and experimentation.”2 The center played a crucial role in facilitating and reinforcing digital humanities research at the university by providing digital resources, services, and tools, supporting the teaching of new digital practices, and hosting symposia and lectures.
The next goal of the center was to gather researchers from a range of disciplines who were interested in applying and developing digital methods in one place because, as Fraistat claims, “centers, in short, can be invaluable community resources.”3 Establishing a digital humanities community was a key strategy to enhance the formation of a new field, bridge the gap between technology and humanities scholars, and build a solid foundation for the development of digital humanities.
Further, digital humanities centers have been housed in academic departments and libraries and organized around a particular area of knowledge, aiming to develop and strengthen the new research approach. Thus, the center as institutional unit contributed to formalizing digital humanities, which evolved into a discipline and transformed the center into a department.
Since 2010, however, centers have gradually been weakened in what was called the “death of the digital humanities center.”4 Above all, centers suffered from a lack of financial support, and they turned out to be fragile and unsustainable, existing on soft money and positioned somewhere between departments in discipline-dominated organizations. As Klein astutely observed, “The word ‘center’ is ironic, since many are not central to the mission of an institution. They are peripheral enclaves.”5 The issue of the isolation of centers was also addressed by Fraistat, who explained the consequences of centers operating as silos: “They rarely collaborate with other centers, with whom they compete for funding and prestige, and when working in isolation they are unable to address the larger problems of the field.”6 Ultimately, centers were found to be a contradictory idea that aimed to stimulate interdisciplinary and collaborative work but at the same time contributed to the separation of digital humanities from other disciplines.
The very function of centers has also decreased by entering a new stage of digital humanities that goes beyond baseline goals like introducing digital tools and providing services to advance innovative research and apply digital humanities methods in various disciplines. New functions of digital humanities have thus required new structure and new research practices to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, drive experiment, and enhance technology-based projects.
Weakening centers and redirecting digital humanities converged with the boom of laboratories in the humanities and social sciences, and also outside of the academy walls. Laboratories have been established to meet new requirements and develop a new vision of the humanities as mentioned in the report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.7 Taken together, whereas a center and department foster digital humanities as a discipline, a laboratory propagates digital humanities as a method and practice that is by nature distributed and decentralized.
Laboratory: From Scientific Place to Social Space
A laboratory in the humanities grows out of a fusion of the scientific and social labs, distinguished by different features. By briefly juxtaposing these two models, we can trace the transformation of the laboratory concept from an experimental and instrumental physical place to a discursive and movable space arising around community and problems.
A scientific laboratory associated with chemistry, biology, and physics is a place that has instruments, devices, and equipment used to conduct experiments, investigate objects, manufacture knowledge, and explore innovative solutions.8 The notion of laboratory, however, extends beyond a criterion of physical location to a “set of differentiated social and technical forms.”9 Drawing on Knorr Cetina’s research, a laboratory is a space to reconfigure the natural and social orders. A laboratory is thus designed as a place for situated, experimental, and technology-based practices but also a space for social activities, symbolic practices, and collaborative systems. Therefore, it concerns both instrumental and material parts and symbolic and conceptual areas.
The vision of a laboratory as a placeless “conceptual vehicle” (the term used by the Critical Media Lab at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Basel) means that labs have made inroads into areas that had never been designed in such a way.10 Therefore, a second model of a laboratory has arisen as a social and cultural institution fueled by social issues and challenges. This type of creative space, alternately called a citylab, labcraft, or makerspace, is established in a common space such as a library, museum, or urban place to gather the local community, enhance creativity, foster public engagement, and promote collaborative problem-solving.
One creative space is a social lab, described by Marlieke Kieboom as a “container for social experimentation.”11 Zaid Hassan says in The Social Labs Revolution, the first publication devoted to this issue, “We have scientific and technical labs for solving our most difficult scientific and technical challenges. We need social labs to solve our most pressing social challenges.”12 Therefore, as the editors of Labcraft explain, such labs seek to create new ways of seeing the world and construct an alternative world.13
By looking at the scientific and social model of laboratories, we can see that a lab is an environment defined by categories of place and space. These two concepts are used across various academic fields and investigated in different contexts, from a socially constructed physical place to virtual spaces involving geospatial technologies, platforms, and services. Significantly, the development of spatial technologies and digital research, which seems to detach work from a physical location, has led to a growing interest in the concepts of place and space, which are key elements in defining the culture of research. Based on essential studies on place and space by Edward Relph, Henri Lefebvre, Edward W. Soja, and Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish, we can identify place as a physical location that involves structure, materiality, connectedness, interaction, cultural representation, and social behavior. In contrast to place as the reality, space is seen in nonphysical categories including cyberspace, digital infrastructure, geographical space, and digital platforms. Space is associated with the idea of placelessness, which can be conceived as a “place without walls.” As Robert E. Kohler explains, “Placelessness marks lab-made facts as true not just to their local makers but to everyone, anywhere. It marks the lab as a social form that travels and is easy to adopt, because it seems rooted in no particular cultural soil but, rather, in a universal modernity”; further, he stresses that “placeless means dispersible.”14
Along with the growing popularity of mobile labs, virtual labs, and lab-as-platform, the concept of laboratory has gone beyond the category of place to a placeless and mobile idea created around people and issues rather than a specific location. A laboratory is thus not determined by physical limitations, materials, and instruments, but it is defined by the experimental approach, concepts, and conditions for catalyzing innovative solutions, reinforcing collaborative actions, and translating ideas into practice. Therefore, the definition of laboratory extends beyond the very notion of physical location to an idea, action, and spirit that can be dispersed and activated “beyond the science” all over the world.
Laboratory beyond the Science
The 1980s and the early 1990s are associated with the emergence of the first laboratories “beyond the science” in media studies; for instance, MIT Media Lab was launched in 1985 and Media Lab Helsinki at Aalto University emerged in 1993. The 1980s and 1990s, as Kohler astutely observed, are recognized as a productive time for laboratory studies, and the laboratory itself was seen as a social institution.15 The interest in laboratories was propelled by a series of key publications that presented new perspectives on science and the laboratory, such as Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979), The Manufacture of Knowledge by Karin Knorr Cetina (1981), Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science by Michael Lynch (1985), and Science in Action by Latour (1987).
After this period, the notion of the laboratory was neglected until its interest was revived in the twenty-first century, particularly after 2007–2008 when the idea of the laboratory started to enter other academic fields and areas beyond the university. Kohler’s “Lab History” was published in a special issue of Isis focused on laboratory history in 2008. This article was significant, implying a surge of lab activity again after 2007–2008 and a need to track its history. Since that time, the laboratory landscape has grown with a new model of labs created in the humanities area, emerging from the intersection of technoscience labs, media labs, and social labs, and underpinning the development of a new field of digital humanities as well as the emergence of a new type of lab, the digital humanities lab, after 2010.
The last seven years has been called “a second wave of humanities lab” as numbers have increased sevenfold.16 The proliferation and fragmentation of laboratories have caused landscape changes in the humanities and media labs that go beyond the academy walls (e.g., Maker Lab at Douglas College established in the River Market) and space limitations (e.g., LINHD Digital Humanities Innovation Lab is a virtual research environment). The array of humanities labs is immense and includes media labs, cultural labs, humanities labs, and digital humanities labs. Each focuses on different purposes, tasks, and challenges; however, all of them are linked by the humanities dimension.
The multiplication of this new architecture has occurred along with a new perspective on the humanities, distinguished by situated practices, technology, problem-based research, collaboration, community practice, and public engagement. The topic of new humanities shaped by a laboratory place has been explored by researchers in academic (Earhart, Svensson, Lane, and Pawlicka) and nonacademic publications (Hiatt, Joselow, and Breithaupt) and at particular conferences and workshops devoted to institutional transformations, such as “The Hum Lab: A Consortial Workshop,” organized at Haverford College in 2014; “The Humanities Laboratory: Discussions of New Campus Model,” organized by Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research at the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2016; and “Digital Humanities Forum: Places, Spaces, Sites: Mapping Critical Intersections in Digital Humanities” at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas in 2016. These activities show that the issues of lab, place, and space are becoming more significant in the face of institutional changes of the (digital) humanities that entail new forms of collaboration and new ways of constructing knowledge.
In particular, the notion of collaboration is at the forefront of discourse about humanities labs. The need to reinforce cooperation and interaction in this field was mentioned by Maxine Joselow in her convincing article, “Labs Are for the Humanities, Too,” and by Gina Hiatt in her essay “We Need Humanities Labs.” Hiatt exposed weak points in the humanities, including isolation of grad students; a lack of frequent interaction among students, peers, postdocs, and faculty; and a lack of one common place for learning, teaching, and discussion. The humanities suffers from time and logistical constraints of structural units: a classroom is for lecture, a seminar for conversation, a library for studying, and an office for consultation. Under these conditions of a “structural crisis,” as Fritz Breithaupt says in “Designing a Lab in the Humanities,” the humanities has taken action to revamp its architecture as a method to reorganize its teaching and research model.
Therefore, the laboratory works as a driving force to develop a new model of the humanities based on collaboration, partnership, interdisciplinarity, situated practices, technology-based research, and alternative empirical education. This new vision of the humanities drives the creation of laboratories whose missions and descriptions are strongly related to the idea of reconstructing the humanities. Two statements by two very different institutions sum up this vision: the Humanities Labs at Duke University seek to “redefine the role of the humanities,” and Digital Humanities Lab Denmark aims to “rejuvenate fields of research within the humanities and social sciences.”
The laboratory, with its features like cooperation, interdisciplinarity, hands-on practices, innovation, and experimental and technology-driven projects, significantly transforms the organization and operation of the humanities, including digital humanities.
The Landscape of Digital Humanities Labs
In “The Digital Humanities as a Laboratory,” one of the first articles related to this issue, Amy E. Earhart rightly notes that digital humanities can especially benefit from adopting a laboratory model because this institutional structure by its nature fosters the aspects of digital humanities, including collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and team-based and technology-driven practices. The corollary of this is the growing number of digital humanities labs after 2010, which coincides with the proliferation of humanities labs in general.
Digital humanities labs have been launched in diverse locations and defined in various ways and perform different functions. They are located in centers and institutes of digital humanities (e.g., Digital Humanities Laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), in English departments (e.g., Digital Humanities Lab at Texas Tech University), in History departments (e.g., Digital History Lab at California State University, San Marcos), in libraries (e.g., Penn State Digital Humanities Lab), and in other institutions.
Along with the multiplication of humanities labs, their definition has significantly extended beyond the criterion of workplace toward categories that stress the role of practice, experience, and collaboration. A laboratory is thus called a hub (Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria), a meeting place (Humlab at Umeå University), and a course (Global Humanities Lab at Northwestern University). The laboratory includes changes on how to conduct research and the perceptions of objects through collaborative, experimental, and tinkering practices.
The multiple meanings of laboratories illustrate their different functions and research objectives. The purposes of digital humanities labs range from facilitating and promoting innovative projects to designing knowledge and creating digital works.
The first purpose is thus associated with developing, supporting, and disseminating digital humanities research by providing training, consultancy, and technical facilities. The second goal is related to a workspace model, which means that the lab functions as a place that provides technical equipment, software, conference rooms, staff space, and more (e.g., Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte). This type of lab is perceived instrumentally as a physical location that facilitates and supports technology-based research.
The third function of digital humanities labs results from the service model, providing help to digitize materials and preserve access to original collections (e.g., Stanford Media Preservation Lab) and to build websites and display data in new and dynamic ways (e.g., the UC Arts Digital Lab at the University of Canterbury). The next purpose refers to the platform and network model of the laboratory, which is focused on fostering global collaboration and building an international consortium and a research infrastructure (e.g., Digital Humanities Lab Denmark).
The last function of digital humanities labs is based on a research model that aims to investigate ideas, conduct research projects, and apply constructed knowledge and products. This type of lab is seen as an experimental space devoted to the exploration of cultural, social, media, and economic issues and the design of technologies, software, and applications, and then to their use in different research domains to solve particular problems, generate new ideas, and develop research areas. Digital humanities research is performed by a diverse and collaborative team built by scholars from various fields, including humanists, librarians, archivists, programmers, developers, managers, engineers, and others. Consequently, they jointly contribute to the creation of the following types of digital humanities products: software, tools, and applications (e.g., the text analysis tool Textometrica created in Humlab at Umeå University and open access tools provided by Humanities + Design at Stanford University); archives and collections (the Early Caribbean Digital Archive in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks); digital platforms (the German Screen Studies Network in King’s Digital Lab and a web-based platform, Photogrammar, which was supported by the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University but preceded that lab’s founding by several years); interactive maps (the Great Lakes mapping project in Nexus Laboratory for Digital Humanities and Transdisciplinary Informatics); games (video games produced in the ModLab at the University of California Davis); and more.
Digital humanities labs attract people with their equipment, their advanced technologies, and their statements, presenting labs as transdisciplinary communities and experimental and collaborative places with an innovative use of technology. These types of labs emphasize the laboratory itself, which is sometimes viewed only in the context of physical place, which consequently leads to the equation of laboratory with a workspace. The very notion of laboratory and technologies is, however, a starting point for creating an environment in which digital humanities can be perceived as useful research practice. Therefore, I present two significant impacts of the laboratory idea on digital humanities taken as a main research method that applies in interdisciplinary problem spaces.
Digital Humanities as Dispersed Practices in Problem Space
The assumptions that underpin laboratory nature are collaboration, interaction, interdisciplinarity, and experiment. Laboratories are established around problems and challenges rather than fields, so that labs are focused on solving particular issues through collaborative practices instead of on reinforcing a discipline. Therefore, labs related to digital humanities include units that are called digital humanities labs and also include places that apply digital humanities practices but whose names do not indicate the discipline itself; for instance, Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago uses digital humanities methods to analyze the dynamics of knowledge creation, transformation, and dissemination. The proliferation of various labs in the humanities indicates that a division between digital humanities labs and nondigital humanities labs is hard to set.
Therefore, the concept of laboratory affects digital humanities, which has gradually become dispersed practices that can be used in various units in different departments and institutions. Further, digital humanities as dispersed practices means that it is perceived as a research method and concept that can be applied beyond space constraints, for instance, in virtual labs and global platforms.
Constructing a laboratory around urgent and crucial social issues brings us to the concept of laboratory as problem space, described by Lisa Osbeck et al. in the framework of “science as psychology.”17 According to this framework, the laboratory is not simply a physical location but also a problem space associated with the cognitive partnerships occurring between the technological artifacts and the researchers. Research laboratories address problems through situated and distributed practices, and the problem-solving process can occur among humans, technological instruments, materials, a place, and so on. Given the different scope of issues, laboratories vary in size, facilities, and operations. Each lab reveals itself as an individual environment in which construction depends on the research problem requiring different cognitive systems. Taken together, the laboratory is not a physical structure itself but an environment that seeks to take on specific and complex issues.
My perspective on the laboratory seen as problem space stems from a specific model of humanities lab represented by the Humanities Labs, founded by the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) at Duke University in 2010. This model functions as a “new architecture of multiple humanities laboratories,” in which each lab is created around a central theme and involves faculty and students from across the humanities and other disciplines. Since 2010, the Humanities Labs have included ten laboratories; some are still supported, and others have been concluded. What distinguishes this structure is that each lab is set up for a fixed period and for a specific purpose. The first humanities laboratory at the FHI, the Haiti Lab, was established after the natural disaster in Haiti and driven by innovative thinking about the country’s recovery, the expansion of Haitian studies in the United States and Haiti, and broadening knowledge about Haitian culture, history, and language. The laboratory is thus seen as the only structure entirely devoted to one specific research problem investigated in innovative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative ways. This model shows that the laboratory in the humanities is a unique and crucial architecture to develop the field into practices performed in a problem space constructed around challenges beyond disciplines.
The following labs, applying digital humanities practices, can be seen as the implementation of problem space, and the scope of their problem-based research is often indicated by the lab name itself. For instance, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), established in a library at the University of Victoria in 2005, focuses on cross-disciplinary study of the past, present, and future of textual communication by using a digital humanities approach. Besides specific research areas, the unit focuses on strengthening the interdisciplinary research environment by establishing digital knowledge networks (like Iter Community and the Renaissance Knowledge Network) as the key way to solve complex issues. Therefore, the lab functions both as a physical place located in the McPherson Library and a space that models collaborative work, creates an international network, and applies interdisciplinary methods for problem-based research.
The second example is the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab, started in the Department of English at Michigan State University in 2012, which is a space dedicated to research on cognition, literary neuroscience, the history of cognition and media, and theories of knowledge production in the digital age. The lab is an open environment for scholars from different fields who want to explore the question of cognition in a collaborative and experimental way by using digital technologies. This space was thus launched to conduct national and international projects devoted to specific research problems using interdisciplinary methods, such as literary neuroscience, the history mind, and digital humanities.
The laboratory has arisen in the humanities as a physical place, transforming a field by becoming not simply a kind of knowledge but a form of activity that takes place in a concrete location and involving complex practices. The new structural unit also has a significant impact on digital humanities itself, which has developed in two directions: as an institutionalized field located in centers and departments and as dispersed practice applied in various humanities and media laboratories. A lab is an interesting environment in which digital humanities can be perceived as significant research methods and practices. The laboratory, however, due to its open structure, indeterminate function, placelessness, and temporariness, can be seen as an unsustainable unit that functions more as a project than a research place. Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold describe the benefits and drawbacks of pursuing a lab model in their chapter in this volume.18
There is a need for greater self-determination, a precise vision of development, and a specific function of digital humanities to enhance the role of the laboratory as an innovative problem space rather than treating the place as the only strategy to revive the humanities by involving collaborative and interdisciplinary technology-based projects.
Notes
Fraistat, “Function of Digital Humanities Centers.”
Zorich, Survey of Digital Humanities Centers, 4.
Fraistat, “Function of Digital Humanities Centers.”
Sample, “On the Death of the Digital Humanities Center.”
Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity, 77.
Fraistat, “Function of Digital Humanities Centers.”
ACLS, Our Cultural Commonwealth.
Hannaway, “Laboratory Design,” 585.
Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, 26.
Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, “Critical Media Lab.”
Kieboom, Lab Matters, 9.
Hassan, Social Labs Revolution, 2.
Tiesinga and Berkhout, Labcraft, 34.
Kohler, “Lab History,” 766.
Kohler, “Lab History,” 761.
Duke University, “Franklin Humanities Institute Seeks Proposals.”
Osbeck et al., Science as Psychology.
Tilton and Arnold, “What’s in a Name?”
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