Location
Room 201/203. Utah State University, Logan, UT
Document Type
Lightning Talk
Start Date
24-2-2018 10:45 AM
End Date
24-2-2018 12:15 PM
Description
Well before the formation of the Digital Humanities as a field, science fiction as a literary genre was interested in—and preoccupied with—the potential of digital technology. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, in particular, many works about computing emerged in the SF landscape. In 1969, for example, Philip K. Dick’s “Electric Ant” details a man who realizes he’s an “organic robot,” controlled by punch-tape reel encased above his heart. In 1971, Stanislaw Lem’s “handbag computers” take over the tedious task of making small talk. In 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer imagines synthetic flesh on “digital display.” As critics such as Veronica Hollinger, Sherryl Vint, and N. Katherine Hayles have noted, much of this work expresses anxieties about human body—its materiality, its affordances, its vulnerabilities. Such analyses have been vital for making sense of the way writers of speculative fiction imagine digital technology in conversation with three distinct areas of inquiry: information theory, cybernetics, and virtuality.
What has been less explored, however, is the extent to which these three broad preoccupations in SF might be in conversation with the emergence of the field of the Digital Humanities. Inspired by a superb essay published in the 2016 issue of DHQ, “The Stuff of Science Fiction: An Experiment in Literary History” (Stefania Forlini, Uta Hinrichs, and Bridget Moynihan), I aim in this presentation to make the connection between SF and DH, as fields, explicit. By using natural language processing with Python and topic modelling with Mallet, I trace the evolution of “the digital” in the past 44 years of SF scholarship in Science Fiction Studies, from the journal’s first issue in 1973 to the present day. It is my sense that the emergence of DH can be fruitfully mapped against tendencies in SF scholarship to focus on information theory, cybernetics, and virtuality.
Included in
Three Phases of the Digital in SF / Three Faces in SF in DH
Room 201/203. Utah State University, Logan, UT
Well before the formation of the Digital Humanities as a field, science fiction as a literary genre was interested in—and preoccupied with—the potential of digital technology. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, in particular, many works about computing emerged in the SF landscape. In 1969, for example, Philip K. Dick’s “Electric Ant” details a man who realizes he’s an “organic robot,” controlled by punch-tape reel encased above his heart. In 1971, Stanislaw Lem’s “handbag computers” take over the tedious task of making small talk. In 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer imagines synthetic flesh on “digital display.” As critics such as Veronica Hollinger, Sherryl Vint, and N. Katherine Hayles have noted, much of this work expresses anxieties about human body—its materiality, its affordances, its vulnerabilities. Such analyses have been vital for making sense of the way writers of speculative fiction imagine digital technology in conversation with three distinct areas of inquiry: information theory, cybernetics, and virtuality.
What has been less explored, however, is the extent to which these three broad preoccupations in SF might be in conversation with the emergence of the field of the Digital Humanities. Inspired by a superb essay published in the 2016 issue of DHQ, “The Stuff of Science Fiction: An Experiment in Literary History” (Stefania Forlini, Uta Hinrichs, and Bridget Moynihan), I aim in this presentation to make the connection between SF and DH, as fields, explicit. By using natural language processing with Python and topic modelling with Mallet, I trace the evolution of “the digital” in the past 44 years of SF scholarship in Science Fiction Studies, from the journal’s first issue in 1973 to the present day. It is my sense that the emergence of DH can be fruitfully mapped against tendencies in SF scholarship to focus on information theory, cybernetics, and virtuality.