Unpacking tool criticism as practice, in practice

Abstract

Thanks to easy-to-use data analysis tools and digital infrastructures, even those humanities scholars who lack programming skills can work with large-scale empirical datasets in order to disclose patterns and correlations within them. Although empirical research trends have existed throughout the history of the humanities [Bod 2013], these recently emergent possibilities have revived an empiricist attitude among humanities scholars schooled in more critical and interpretive traditions. Replying to calls for a critical digital humanities [Berry and Fagerjord 2017] [Dobson 2019], this paper explores “tool criticism” [Van Es et al. 2018] – a critical attitude required of digital humanities scholars when working with computational tools and digital infrastructures. First, it explores tool criticism as a response to instrumentalism in the digital humanities and proposes it to be part of what a critical digital humanities does. Second, it analyses tool criticism as practice, in practice. Concretely, it discusses two critical making– inspired workshops in which participants explored the affordances of digital tools and infrastructures and their underlying assumptions and values. The first workshop focused on “games-as-tools” [Werning 2020]. Participants in the workshop engaged with the constraints, material and mechanical, of a card game by making modifications to it. In the second workshop, drawing on the concept of “digital infrapuncture” [Verhoeven 2016], participants examined digital infrastructure in terms of capacity and care. After first identifying “hurt” in a chat environment, they then designed bots to intervene in that hurt and offer relief.