Back in the winter of 2013, I was a research assistant for Dr. Matt O’Hara of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s department of History and Latin American and Latino Studies. His research centered on the examination of the history of time in colonial Mexico and the Spanish Inquisition.
After reading Dr. Johanna Drucker’s text “Humanities Approach to Graphical Display,” I was immediately reminded of many of the sources I encountered during my time as a research assistant under Dr. O’Hara. One article in particular, entitled “Uncertain Times: the Notion of ‘Risk’ and the Development of Modernity” by Gerda Reith stuck in my mind as being relevant to Drucker’s article.
In her essay, Reith explores the “ways in which understandings of uncertainty have evolved during the development of modernity, and in particular, how they are expressed in the notion of ‘risk.'” Through a temporally heterogeneous analysis ranging from the medieval to the modern, Reith demonstrates how the definition and idea of what it means to take risks are embedded in socio-economic contexts and grounded in particular temporal orientations, specifically as expressed in notions of determinism and indeterminism.
If the humanistic approach which Drucker discusses in her text is centered in the experiential in which “capta” should be taken actively and “data” are assumed to be a given, capta will reflect the divergent experiences of each generation on a temporal scale. After rereading Reith’s article I found that the connection between how humans perceive notions of risk in many ways reflects how Drucker suggests that digital humanists today should interpret and display data.
In her article Reith states that “so, as long as human actors who perceive and think and respond are involved in the probability equation, there can be no such thing as ‘objective’ risk.” Here Reith both highlight’s Drucker’s theory of data as capta by pointing to each generation’s different interpretation of the notion of risk, and also shows us that the idea behind risk itself is rooted in the impossibility of a singular, real or objective point of datum. In other words, the both the perception and later observation of risk is changeable and open for human interpretation. In her article, Drucker asserts that all eras representation’s of knowledge are distinct, and divergent from the next. Reith explains that during the medieval period and other periods where technological control over the natural world was limited, uncertainties were expressed and managed through a range of religious or magical concepts such as luck or fate, but around he seventeenth century, dramatic developments in social, intellectual and economic life transformed ideas about uncertainty, the future and human agency through the growth of economic systems such as capitalism, credit, and insurance. During the early modern era, perceptions of risk shifted and allowed for greater human intervention as opposed to a reliance on faith or luck for an explanation of teleology.
I think Professor Drucker’s approach to the study of digital humanities with “capta” is honorable because it holds true to the traditions of what it means to conduct scholarly research within the sphere of the humanities, while still employing new forms of technology to support those inquiries.
View Reith’s article here: http://tas.sagepub.com/content/13/2-3/383.full.pdf