Warnke leads the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media and a research group on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (German), both at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. He studies knowledge orders of the digital and simulation. His talk had three parts.

1. First he looked at a dH project that is about visualization of a Jewish cemetery,
2. Then he discussed the general situation of such projects,
3. And he concluded by talking about dH in general.

The project he started with is called Relations in Space – Visualization of topological micro structures (German) It is a project working on the visualization of cemeteries including the Jewish cemetery in Hamburg-Altona. The project was funded from 2014 – 2016. It is now winding down.

Jewish tombs are not removed over time the way Christian ones are. They are left for eternity. As you walk the cemetery you go through time. The tombs tell us about names, what they did, good times, bad times, and the languages of the dead.

The challenge with the Altona cemetery was that there were two different sources of data to be merged. It is the map that does the job of synthesis. It does the magic of gathering information. You can make inferences that you couldn’t from just the data. He showed a simple map of the tombs and then showed variants. He talked about some inferences that can be from the map like why there are a line of womens’ graves when people are supposed to buried in order of death. It could have been an epidemic in the birthing house that killed a number of women at the same time.

There were two different databases that came from different groups and were not easily merged. Historians of architecture had gathered information about shapes of tombs and the epigraphists gathered information about inscriptions. For art historians cemeteries are miniature towns that can tell us about sculptural fashions.

The art historians had learned XML and oXygen and XSLT and were able to develop technical independence. The text on Jewish tombs is rich and poetic. They have acrostics. Warnke showed the XML for both the sculptural database and the inscriptions.

He then talked about data gathering they did on the field to build an accurate map. They used IncScape for vector graphs which works with XML. All the XML was brought in and then merged by a software company. They output merged XML that could be read into HyperImage a tools they have been developing for annotating images and then outputting interactive explorations.  HyperImage can be queried. The project is at http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/hyperimage/HI_Altona/ . Here you can see the interface.

One of the challenges for the programmers is that the historians constantly change their data. The programmers want stable data. They had to develop a versioning system.

Warnke showed the system and talked about the change in perspective from “distant reading” to “close reading” and back. Manovich doesn’t look any more at the single image – he looks only at large numbers. The HyperImage system lets you go in and out.

He commented on how when you do real projects you eventually hit the limits of your tools. The HyperImage editing tool ran into trouble with the Altona cemetery. He showed a different cemetery and how you can search the database and map the results. Thus the visualization becomes not just a way to explore the database, but also a way of viewing results.

Digital Humanities Projects

Warnke then talked about the situation of such projects. There are three miseries:

• Misery of the business model – One needs to spend time on the business model for projects rather than the project and the research. And, there are no good business models.
• Misery of infrastructures – Everything has to be redone every 5 years. University computing centres don’t want to maintain individual projects. Big infrastructure projects like Dariah can’t afford to either. Existing projects need to be updated as you are trying to do new ones. He talked about solutions like Prometheus which makes a number of databases available.
• Misery of funding – At the end all the projects are poorly funded. We are tempted to use commercial systems like Instagram to save our data where commerce maintains things, but that has problems too.

He also mentioned the joy of doing all this in an still open field – there is a joy in doing new things.

dH in General

Warnke concluded with some comments on dH in general. DH has a name now, which is a sign of its maturity. It is a scene. But it is also very text centric – what about images, sound, film, and so on.

One reason for the field being text centric is a problem with some multimedia like film where one can’t quote a clip the way you can quote a text passage. It is hard to openly address and reference materials other than text and this is the foundation of humanities work.

The relationship with CS also varies. In some cases CS is treated as an ancillary science. At the same time CS folk don’t think they can learn anything from the humanities. They don’t think they have any history. They think they can learn what we do quickly. Perhaps they are right – that we wallow in trivial subtleties.

He closed on idea of humanists becoming self-enabling. Kittler famously argued one should learn to read code as part of literacy.

Erik started his talk by commenting on how the ocular (sight) dominates how we know and explore. For Erik visualization goes way back and used to be connected to the acoustic and to architecture. You didn’t have visualizations detached from a space and without a soundscape.

He then talked about how games are not just about knowing visually, but also about knowing through the game-mechanics or the interaction. He gave the game September 12th: A Toy World as an example where the game mechanics are part of the way meaning is made.

He then argued that a data visualization can be different types of things for knowing or learning:

• A game that changes your ideas
• A presentation of visual uncertainty where people argue about reconstruction
• A “reading” diagram and data

He commented on how people tend to believe vizualizations. They have rhetorical power and can therefore be a way of presenting things to broader audiences. He also talked about how for many people the word “game” makese more sense than “visualization.” You tell people you have game for them to learn from and they know what to do.

He talked about what are the concerns of non-text? In his book on Critical Gaming he has an opening chapter on “The Digital Humanities and the Limit of Text.” Champion wants to go beyond text with visualization and games, not just use visualization as a way of exploring text. Some of the issues and ideas he mentioned included:

• Preservation of Digital Heritage. Erik’s work focuses a lot on developing virtual spaces for communicating about heritage or for letting people negotiate heritage. One of the major problems of this field is that virtual heritage projects tend to disappear and disappear faster than the actual project. There are no good standards for 3D data. He drew our attention to the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage which is well meaning, but doesn’t seem to be having any effect.
• Infrastructure. A related problem is the infrastructure for non-textual digital work. We have a significant amount of textual infrastructure that we take for granted (think libraries and archives), but less visual. How is visualization supported and by who? PublicVR seems to be one organization trying to make 3D heritage available to schools.
• Process not Product. Fields like archaeology are a process not a product. The field cannot be communicated by texts. We need to think of how the digital can communicate process, collaboration and reflection and games could play a role in this. He mentioned Elegy for a Dead World as an example. It is a game where you write about the dead world you are exploring.
• Counterfactual History. How can we use simulations and games to explore “what if” scenarios. This is a way of knowing too. He mentioned Muzzy Lane Software who, for example, developed Making History.
• Pointing in 3D. How do we point in 3D worlds. Erik has a project where they have created avatars that point for you.

Champion showed a number of really interesting projects that we need to look at like Paper Machines (a Zotero text analysis tool) and Dead Men’s Eyes. Near the end he talked about Artificial Intelligence and how we can learn about AI in games. His idea is for people to play NPC’s and get the AI to figure out who they are – a reverse Turing game.