Reflexivity and Arts Informatics

Arts Informatics is a recently introduced cross-disciplinary
program at the University of Sydney. Students in this
undergraduate degree take a major in the Faculty of Arts, and
a major in Information Systems in the Department of
Information Science in the Faculty of Science. This paper
reports on the pedagogical and theoretical questions we are
facing in building this program. As an academic unit operating
as the intermediary between two faculties, we are the
articulation point between two different academic worlds. Our
approach is to read the Humanities as (cultural) technologies,
and to unpack the humanity (and social construction) of
information systems.
The Humanities has always been technological, even if that
hasn't always been acknowledged. Arts Informatics draws
heavily from the parts of the humanities tradition that do address
these questions, from Plato's famous critique of writing, to
Derrida's deconstruction and Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg
galaxy. The recent literature in new media studies directly
addresses the implications of computers for knowledge and
cultural practices (Manovich; Barret and Redmond; Everett
and Caldwell; Wardrupp-Fruin and Montford).
In the other direction, social studies of technology offer the
Arts Informatics program resources to analyse the ways that
information technologies are embedded in wider cultural and
societal processes. Actor network theory's adaptation of
post-structural semiotics to technological change is particularly
useful in offering a symmetrical approach to the human and
non-human components in sociotechnical assemblages.
One of our central themes is the question of reflexivity.
Anywhere computer technologies participate in traditional
humanities practices (research, interpretation, textual
production, communication, teaching), necessarily means
qualitative transformations in that practice. The day-to-day
materiality of work itself changes. Knowledge is acquired,
handled, produced and communicated in different ways. As
Michael Heim's analysis of word processing (1987, 1993)
shows, computers are an additional component in daily
practices, not simply a potentially intelligent opponent. While
some of the claims behind the avante-garde experiments of
1990s hypertext theorists (Landow) seem somewhat overblown,
the growing role of the Internet in everyday teaching, publishing
and research over the past decade is incontrovertible. Of course this recent experience of technocultural change is
not exclusive to Humanities scholars and students. Our students
have recent experience with the web, electronic mail,
multiplayer computer games, DVD, SMS, digital television,
and new cinematic paradigms. Their familiarity with such
developments equips them to begin to understand the
interweaving of technological and cultural transformations.
Students are not as well equipped to deal with the cultural
differences between computer science and the humanities. The
Humanities critiques of science and technology (Heidegger;
Virilio; Coyne) are difficult to reconcile with scientific
conceptions of humanities practices (Holtzman). Each of these
areas places quite different, and often directly conflicting
discourses, techniques and systems of value. It is important to
acknowledge and investigate these differences. Even within
the Humanities, there are very contrasting models for integrating
new media technologies into teaching, theory and research.
Even outside these conflicts, teaching in this area seems to
demand constant revision and updating. The only thing that
changes more quickly than new media technologies themselves
are the concepts used to describe them. Terminology seems to
go in and out of fashion more quickly than new standards for
data storage. Terms such as virtual reality, multimedia,
hypertext, telepresence and artificial intelligence have
controversial histories. The conflicts surrounding these terms
have served to establish a vocabulary for discussing some of
the key cultural changes associated with technological change.
The challenge is to remain open to interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary paradigms, while offering students a strong
enough grounding in traditional disciplines to have some
historical and epistemological orientation.
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