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London Lives and the Digital Humanities Experience

My analysis of a digital humanities project for my master's program.

By Mimo le SingePublished 4 years ago 7 min read
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Image via London Lives

Among many histories, I have always been fascinated by Victorian London and the developments leading up to it, so the opportunity to write about London Lives has come to me at the right time. This is a digital humanities project that provides access to published and unpublished documents, each illuminating some aspect of the lives of lower-class citizens living in what had become one of Europe’s largest cities in the 18th century (LL).

The most obvious contribution London Lives makes to the digital humanities, arguably, is through computational thinking. In the case of research and computational intelligence, this skill enables scholars to create and navigate both digital and digitized resources reminiscent of archival practices in the past that relied on libraries, record classifications, and archive collections. (Berry and Fagerjord, 3) London Lives accomplishes this by restoring quality manuscripts and creating datasets for a plethora of sources that can be linked together to provide according to the creators a more neutrally conducted, comprehensive understanding of how commoners contributed to London’s social architecture (LL).

To facilitate word searches, automation is used instead of manual labour so that more time can be dedicated to engaging with the research (Berry and Fagerjord, 4). The keyword search page that can be found on London Lives operates on a markup system that makes it easier to identify particular individuals of interest, their characteristics, and their contexts (LL). Abstractions are an integral component of automated processes, and an especially noteworthy aspect of them is that they can help eliminate inadequate or irrelevant information during the research process (Berry and Fagerjord, 4). The project utilizes a similar procedure whereby any records that are less qualitative, oversaturated, and/or unable to be supplemented with supporting materials were not included in the archives (LL).

Generating solutions in research involves decomposing a problem, and digital resources such as databases can help to bring about to the appropriate methodologies by the way they are programmed (Berry and Fagerjord, 6). We can see this with London Lives’ mandate: to prioritize individual-oriented research and avoid sources prepared with an institutional agenda attached to them as those tend to push a narrative intended to shape beliefs as opposed to presenting an unfiltered insight into plebeian lives for readers to grapple with.

Instead, researchers discover that such institutions were pressured into appeasing elitist communities (LL). Much like how the state depends on media politics, (Castells, 12), agencies such as charities and government services relied on their users to fundamentally dictate the discourse on plebeian lives (LL). We might relate this to the network society, in which meaning is molded depending on crucial interactions between subjects and it in turn establishes culture at large (Castells, 7). By essentially recreating the lives of Londoners as accurately as possible through the consolidation of documents, researchers are able to not only immerse themselves in a society long past and reflect on it, but they can also re-establish core values regarding education in areas such as policy reform in a digital context (LL).

It is especially evident when discussing power struggles in different historical periods, (Castells, 7) as institutions have had control over the literature and London Lives is now working to undo the centralization of content and supply researchers with many more options not written from one perspective through features such as structured searching and mapping (LL). That power is vital to the ways in which technology is associated with human experiences (Castells, 9). In the case of London Lives, researchers are able to expand on problem solving and the ways in which life in 18th-century London is reexamined for a modern audience (LL).

Legitimacy can be restored when entities share their power among branches best suited to overseeing certain aspects of their function, including decision making and negotiation (Castells, 14). Staff members such as data developers collaborating on London Lives each have their own specialized responsibilities – tagging and manual checking, among others – rooted in ensuring relevant sourcing when implementing features like the search engine (LL).

This helps to coordinate interactivity and consistency in communication between all the links in the system (Castells, 15). There are also attributes present in London Lives that mirror McPherson's lenticular logics (145), such as composition and robustness, for its interface and pages are navigable, their databases are coded according to the specific needs of their respective projects. These choices are clearly explained based on how the subjects are categorized, whether by geography, roles within a system, or type of institution responsible for overseeing a particular activity or service, for example (LL).

There can, however, be setbacks, as is the case with too much neutrality. The obvious example is a lack of concrete interactions with fields that address race and gender (McPherson, 150). London Lives is no exception, because it does not take a stance when detailing the lives of citizens even when it lists documents according to an applicable category (LL). Still, the amount of texts that can be investigated is not the only important component to consider in that regard but also the potential ideas that could arise on the part of researcher’s efforts (Hayles, 46).

Because of the flexibility that London Lives offers by remaining neutral in their archiving practices, researchers are able to conduct their own readings of texts that will be of import or interest (Hayles, 47) to their research. They can shed light on disciplinary gaps by uncovering new issues or policy suggestions, create new theoretical and conceptual frameworks as well as methods for research, and challenge their preconceived notions or other sources they have extracted. This is because making sense of the human experience is essential in figuring out: what assumptions can be made within the context of the disciplines most appropriate for answering the research question, the mechanisms that will help create knowledge on the subject, and the objectives that will have implications for future research, or the operations of the organizations being addressed in the work (Hayles, 48).

Ultimately, we must understand that human history is transformative for that to work. Even if an event or era ends and is not repeated again, it can still be reexamined and compared to the current time (Hayles, 48). Additionally, the shift toward the digital age (or even the experience age) should be observed as humans are continuously adapting to new technological capabilities; for scholars, it would be the specific ways that the use of digital technologies are transforming thinking and proactive in the digital humanities. (Hayles, 48) London Lives, in a way, serves as the researchers’ answer to the archival practices of 18th-century London. Even if people did not have access to such resources at the time, we are able to combine our technical knowledge with their materials to continue the work (LL).

We see the way in which print and digital media influence each other, as the former provide a basis on which theory can be formed and the digital humanities open up possibilities for interrogation, always consulting the source material for new approaches to problems (Hayles, 50). Another technique worth mentioning is visualization, which helps to organize content and allow for patterns to be discernible visually. This makes it possible for readers to engage with the material and make their interpretive analyses, although it is not always easy (Hayles, 51).

While visualization is not necessarily a major feature of London Lives, it nevertheless follows a similar mentality in how it captures a pattern of plebeian intersections with different institutions (LL). Finally, I would like to remark on the way in which London Lives is exemplary of remediation. Within it, the digital tools and print materials do not replace or interfere with one another, and neither is prioritized over the other (Leander, 3). Rather, the project is concerned with how audiences will use the resources available to them to create meanings from interpretations and contribute to the process of knowledge generation (LL)

Works Cited

Berry, David, and Anders Fagerjord. "On the Way to Computational Thinking." Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Polity Press, 2017, pp. 3-6.

Castells, Manuel. “Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society.” British Journal of Sociology, vol., 51, no. 1, 2000, pp. 7-15.

Hayles, Katherine. “How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies.” Understanding Digital Humanities, edited by David M. Berry, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 46-51.

Leander, Kevin. “Composing with Old and New Media: Toward a Parallel Pedagogy.” Digital Literacies: Social Learning and Classroom Practices, edited by Victoria Carrington and Muriel Robinson, SAGE, 2017, pp. 3.

McPherson, Tara. “Why are the Digital Humanities So White or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 145-50.

Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Sharon Howard and Jamie McLaughlin, et al., London Lives, 1690-1800 (www.londonlives.org, version 1.1, 24 April 2012).

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About the Creator

Mimo le Singe

First, there was Mailchimp. Then, there was Wordchimp. And now, you've got a “Storychimp” sharing writing-related advice and other random musings. Happy reading! All works are written by me, not by AI.

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