Digital Humanities as Ethical Practice: SAH Archipedia Utah
Location
Room 207/205 Traditional Presentations
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
24-2-2018 9:00 AM
End Date
24-2-2018 10:30 AM
Description
In March 2017, I completed a book-length digital humanities project on the hundred most important buildings in Utah. It was part of a nationwide project entitled SAH Archipedia and the most ambitious undertaking by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) since its establishment in 1940. Funded in part by National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), it included metadata, maps, images, and short thematic essays on each state in USA. I was the state coordinator, editor and the primary author for Utah. My colleagues and students furnished about 20% of the material. For the symposium at USU, I propose a 20-minute individual presentation on digital humanities as a form of ethical and civic activism as practiced in Archipedia Utah.
It is an experiment in peer-reviewed short-form scholarship with most of the Utah essays ranging from 750 to 1400 words. It discusses everything from ancient Anasazi roads integral to their sacred rituals to the Central Pacific Railroad Grade Historic District that is a shrine to the age of efficient and opportune circulation. Readers can learn about the food technologies, tools and mnemonic devices found in 12,000 years old Danger Cave in Wendover side by side with the rationalized food production and industrial tools and planning techniques shrouded in a quint-looking 20th century dairy barn. Unlike Danger Cave, McPolin farm stands as the logo of the current ski resort, Park City, whose resourceful (mostly part-time) residents are preserving all things that fulfill their desire to live in an alternative if not botoxed reality. The spatialized competition between church and state gets an airing in the study of the revival styles of LDS buildings, federal as well as state institutions.
My presentation will highlight three attributes of digital humanities. First, it will tease out the potential of short-form scholarship to create a common language between the producers and consumers of the build environment. It is strategically placed to frame the built environment as a highly complex social phenomenon that conditions our attitudes towards gender, childhood, authority, and even decency. It can be compellingly presented as a tool of surveillance, law enforcement, and provoking resistance. This is a critical step in fostering conscientious architecture that is impossible to create in a capitalist democracy without refined public discourse.
Second, in a state like Utah, dominated by the historical narratives of the victorious people, digital humanities is our sharpest tool to pluralizing points of view. Archipedia Utah takes advantage of the platform, giving voice to the architectural contributions of historically subjugated; Native Americans, women, laboring classes, the handicapped, and of course the environment. This results in disruption. Archipedia Utah makes it impossible to see Utah as a glorious unpeopled landscape whose history began with the written word and white settlers in 1847. Mormons no longer appear as pioneers but colonizers and European/ white “exploration” comes across as fully wound up with “exploitation” of existing cultures and natural resources.
Finally, it is in the nature of digital humanities to be possess what Marshall McLuhan calls the “magazine effect;” namely to place disjunctive information side by side on an equal platform. In the case of Utah entries for Archipedia, this attribute necessarily elicits comparative readings of a kind in which past and present become analytical foils for one another. The result is robbing both modernity and tradition of their clichéd perspectives, compelling readers and visitors to these sites, to fill the void by indulging in interpretative labor.
Digital Humanities as Ethical Practice: SAH Archipedia Utah
Room 207/205 Traditional Presentations
In March 2017, I completed a book-length digital humanities project on the hundred most important buildings in Utah. It was part of a nationwide project entitled SAH Archipedia and the most ambitious undertaking by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) since its establishment in 1940. Funded in part by National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), it included metadata, maps, images, and short thematic essays on each state in USA. I was the state coordinator, editor and the primary author for Utah. My colleagues and students furnished about 20% of the material. For the symposium at USU, I propose a 20-minute individual presentation on digital humanities as a form of ethical and civic activism as practiced in Archipedia Utah.
It is an experiment in peer-reviewed short-form scholarship with most of the Utah essays ranging from 750 to 1400 words. It discusses everything from ancient Anasazi roads integral to their sacred rituals to the Central Pacific Railroad Grade Historic District that is a shrine to the age of efficient and opportune circulation. Readers can learn about the food technologies, tools and mnemonic devices found in 12,000 years old Danger Cave in Wendover side by side with the rationalized food production and industrial tools and planning techniques shrouded in a quint-looking 20th century dairy barn. Unlike Danger Cave, McPolin farm stands as the logo of the current ski resort, Park City, whose resourceful (mostly part-time) residents are preserving all things that fulfill their desire to live in an alternative if not botoxed reality. The spatialized competition between church and state gets an airing in the study of the revival styles of LDS buildings, federal as well as state institutions.
My presentation will highlight three attributes of digital humanities. First, it will tease out the potential of short-form scholarship to create a common language between the producers and consumers of the build environment. It is strategically placed to frame the built environment as a highly complex social phenomenon that conditions our attitudes towards gender, childhood, authority, and even decency. It can be compellingly presented as a tool of surveillance, law enforcement, and provoking resistance. This is a critical step in fostering conscientious architecture that is impossible to create in a capitalist democracy without refined public discourse.
Second, in a state like Utah, dominated by the historical narratives of the victorious people, digital humanities is our sharpest tool to pluralizing points of view. Archipedia Utah takes advantage of the platform, giving voice to the architectural contributions of historically subjugated; Native Americans, women, laboring classes, the handicapped, and of course the environment. This results in disruption. Archipedia Utah makes it impossible to see Utah as a glorious unpeopled landscape whose history began with the written word and white settlers in 1847. Mormons no longer appear as pioneers but colonizers and European/ white “exploration” comes across as fully wound up with “exploitation” of existing cultures and natural resources.
Finally, it is in the nature of digital humanities to be possess what Marshall McLuhan calls the “magazine effect;” namely to place disjunctive information side by side on an equal platform. In the case of Utah entries for Archipedia, this attribute necessarily elicits comparative readings of a kind in which past and present become analytical foils for one another. The result is robbing both modernity and tradition of their clichéd perspectives, compelling readers and visitors to these sites, to fill the void by indulging in interpretative labor.