{"id":1317,"date":"2014-07-11T14:19:58","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T14:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jcmeister.de\/?p=1317"},"modified":"2023-05-23T20:10:56","modified_gmt":"2023-05-23T20:10:56","slug":"english-weaponizing-the-digital-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/english-weaponizing-the-digital-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"Weaponizing the Digital Humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today is the last day of the DH 2014 conference at Lausanne<\/a> – a marvellous event both intellectually and socially! For those who don’t know the acronym: the annual “Digital Humanities” conference is the largest and most important conference for the international DH community and this year attracted a record-breaking 700+ delegates from all over the world – so the bar has been raised once again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, the DH no longer attracts scholars only. Today I sat in a session that was also attended by a delegate wearing an unconspicously-conspicous affiliation badge identifying him as belonging to “US Government”. That’s a designation commonly known to be long-hand for NSA and the likes. Just ask such a person for a business card or their contact details (though I’m sure that by next year they’ll have resolved that issue as well).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did this surprise me? Not really. I have myself been contacted twice (i.e., through US academic colleagues) with an offer to consider participation in projects which are funded by the NSA and similar intelligence agencies. And let us not be naive: the more attention DH researchers invest in Big Data approaches and anything that might help with the analysis of human behaviour, communication and networking patterns, semantic analysis, topic modeling and related approaches, the more our field becomes interesting to those who can apply our research in order to further their own goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the nature and dilemma of all open research: we are an intellectual community that believes in sharing, and so unless we decide to become exclusive, there’s no stopping someone from exploiting our work for other purposes. Moreover, all of us who are on an institutional pay-roll are effectively funded by the same body that also channels funds (and lots of it) to military and defense. But it is one thing to entertain this thought in an abstract manner and quite another to realize how bluntly these agencies have begun to operate within our own community. In this particular instance we witnessed first-hand how the “US Government” labelled delegate immediately engaged with one of the younger presenters. My guess is that one of my colleagues has today lost his research assistant to a better paid job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is high time for us to realize that we are now facing the same moral and ethical dilemma which physicists encountered some 70 years ago when nuclear research lost its innocence. What is happening right now, right here is this: our scholarly motivation is being openly instrumentalized for a purpose that is at its very core anti-humanistic. One might of course argue that we need to differentiate between the philosophical and political principles of enlightenment on the one hand, and the necessities of protecting society as well as individuals against acts of crime and terrorism. But even if we decide to adopt such a pragmatist view it is hard to ignore that the apparatus has spun out of control and operates in a fashion that is completely intransparent. What is being presented as a necessary impingement on constitutional rights for the sake of protecting those rights is increasingly drifting towards a neo-McCarthyist attempt at social engineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To date all evidence points to the fact that<\/p>\n\n\n\n