Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies UCLA UCLA Previously Published Works Title Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3n0096h4 Journal PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, 131(2) ISSN 0030-8129 Author Carruth, Allison Publication Date 2016-03-01 DOI 10.1632/pmla.2016.131.2.364 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3n0096h4 https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ IN 2009 WILLIAM PANNAPACKER PRONOUNCED THE DIGITAL HUMAN- ITIES TO BE “THE FIRST ‘NEXT BIG THING’ IN A LONG TIME” PROMISING to reconfigure and reinvigorate the humanities. The same could now plausibly be said about the environmental humanities with the recent rise of dedicated academic centers (at, e.g., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden; Princeton University; the Uni- versity of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah), grant- funded projects (like the Saw yer Seminar on the Environ- mental Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the consortium Humanities for the Environment ), and faculty positions. If the digital and environmental humanities have been ascendant amid what Christopher Newield describes as the “un- making” of public higher education and what Richard Grusin terms the “crisis humanities,” such an assessment invites the question of whether the ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) might serve to combine the most saleable facets of the digital humanities and the environmental humanities for university stakeholders who promote applied humanities work outside academia or, alternatively, a hybrid method for researching, teaching, and designing cultural responses to structures of ecological and social precarity (Grusin 80). While these potential futures of EcoDH could unfold simultane- ously, I aim in what follows to pave the way for this hybrid method, by ofering a supplemental framework for connecting the environ- mental and digital humanities, which this essay terms ecological me- dia studies. A prompt for academic inquiry as well as collaboration outside academia, this framework combines scholarly attentiveness to the material ecologies of new media and digital computing with the participatory, playful media practices at work in twenty- irst- century environmental art and activism. he new materialist provo- cation to understand all bodies—human, animal, plant, mineral, microbial, machine, and inanimate—in their material and semantic lives and in their networked and individuated phases informs my conceptualization of ecological media studies by suggesting that the ALLISON CARRUTH , associate professor in the Department of En glish and the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, is affiliated with the university’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP, 2013). the changing profession Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies allison carruth [ P M L A © 2016 allison carruth PMLA 131.2 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America364 ubiquity of ecological metaphors for the digi- tal (from data mining to media ecology itself) obscures the matter of digital technologies. The Ecological Digital Humanities: Genealogies and Horizons In a 2004 primer, Greg Garrard deines eco- criticism capaciously as the literary and cul- tural study of ecological problems wherein rhetorical analysis is central. Garrard ob- serves that the organizing premise of such an endeavor is the notion that “environmental problems require analysis in cultural as well as scientiic terms, because they are the out- come of an interaction between ecological knowledge of nature and its cultural inlec- tion,” or, more aptly, inlections (14). In step with Lawrence Buell and Ursula K. Heise,1 Garrard traces the history of ecocriticism from an initial focus on nature writing, wil- derness rhetoric, and local place- based identi- ties to widening concerns with environmental justice, urban ecologies, other- than- human bodies, and the environmental consequences of colonialism and globalization. Ecocriticism by this measure has become a “convenient shorthand,” as Heise puts it, for variegated ap- proaches that fall under the headings of “en- vironmental criticism, literary- environmental studies, literary ecolog y, literary environ- mentalism, and green cultural studies”—a catalog to which we could add theoretically and politically inlected ields such as post- colonia l ecologies, environmenta l justice cultural studies, and material ecocriticism (“Hitchhiker’s Guide” 506).2 As ecocriticism has become more multiform over the last de- cade, so too have ecocritics resituated their work within the environmental humanities, deined to include literature, media studies, science studies, philosophy, history, art his- tory, cultural geography, and anthropology (not to mention the digital humanities). How- ever multidisciplinary, the environmental hu- manities arguably cohere in how they depart from what Buell terms irst- wave ecocriticism (“Ecocriticism”). Namely, environmental hu- manities projects are expanding the param- eters of environmental culture by addressing not only literar y texts but also visual art, performance, new media, activist ephemera, popular science, ethnographies, and scientiic models; by imagining nature to include cities, food systems, diasporas, indigenous cosmolo- gies, and global energy networks along with wilderness sites and rural locales; and by de- veloping critical theories of the environment. Two publications illustrate these intel- lectual trends and open onto the question of what imperatives and ideas are shaping (or might shape) EcoDH. he irst is a 2009 Criti- cal Inquiry essay that has become required reading in the environmental humanities: the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “he Climate of History.” Organized around four theses, the essay posits that the science of anthropogenic climate change—which shows that with industrialization humans become geological agents and which accordingly sug- gests an epochal shit from the Holocene to what has been provisionally termed the An- thropocene—requires a new historiographic practice. Such a practice, Chakrabarty con- tends, should start by jettisoning “the age- old humanist distinction between natural his- tory and human history” (201). While critics of Anthropocene discourse have cautioned against its tendency toward a universalism that elides the unequally shared causes and consequences of climate change, Chakrabarty mostly avoids this pitfall in arguing that en- vironmental history—and by extension the environmental humanities—best responds to climate change by bringing “together intellec- tual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital” (213). his idea has particular implications for EcoDH. If we fol- low Chakrabarty’s argument, a ield sited at the convergence of ecological problems and 1 3 1 . 2 ] Allison Carruth 365 t h e c h a n g i n g p r o f e s s i o n digital humanities methods should strive to interlace the timescales of “deep and recorded histories” with the compressed temporality of the digital (as in the real- time cadence of rapid prototyping, database querying, and media streaming) and to recognize not only the bodies of species and institutions of capi- tal but also the virtual networks that connect, track, and animate both. The second publication with insights for EcoDH is Bodily Natures, by the femi- nist science studies scholar Stacy Alaimo, who has been at the forefront of the material turn. Like the collections Material Feminism (which she coedited) and Material Ecocriti- cism (to which she contributed an essay), Bodily Natures takes nature seriously in its concrete multiplicities—presenting Alaimo’s research on the science and culture of X- rays, toxic chemicals, deep -sea creatures, and plas- tic compounds. In doing so, it contests ten- dencies in poststructuralism, posthumanism, and certain strands of ecocriticism to abstract nature from its material and historical in- stantiations. To guide her research, Alaimo develops a theory of transcorporeality, a the- ory rooted in the idea that “the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cul- tural, scientiic, and substantial ” and in the corollary notion that the “material environ- ment is a realm of oten incalculable, inter- connected agencies” (20–21; emphasis mine). Putting Cha k rabar t y’s sca le- shif ting historiography into dialogue with Alaimo’s materia list feminism of fers anot her pos- sible direction to early adopters of EcoDH (whether or not they would identify with the label)—from the Humanities for the Environ- ment–sponsored Life Overlooked, an archive that contains multimedia narratives of lora, fauna, and other bodies inhabiting the crev- ices of local places, to the interactive Nature- hoods, a database of parks and other green spaces in three dozen cities in the United States that Stanford University hosts and that employs spatial mapping as well as text- mining methods. Scholars like Chakrabarty and Alaimo suggest the importance of histo- ricizing and materializing the digital technol- ogies that constitute the research apparatus of such EcoDH projects by mapping those tech- nologies onto timescales slower than the real- time “interval” of “versions, updates, and . . . half- lives” and by apprehending them within material networks composed of biological and engineered bodies (Raley 39). The Digital Humanities: From Computational Techniques to Material Conditions I will return to Chakrabarty’s and Alaimo’s principles below in pivoting from EcoDH to ecological media studies. As a bridge, I turn now to recent calls for the digital humanities writ large to examine and intervene in the ma- terial social conditions of network society and digital infrastructure. In dialogue with other scholars, N. Katherine Hayles locates the ori- gins of the digital humanities in decades- old humanities computing eforts to digitally pre- serve and parse text archives. These efforts laid the groundwork for the digital humani- ties to organize initially around “machine reading” techniques of encoding, mining, and analyzing lexical and generic patterns in large corpora of texts. Taking stock of the present, Hayles contends that the digital humani- ties are “morphing” as researchers “advocate a turn from a primary focus on text encod- ing, analysis, and searching to multimedia practices that explore the fusion of text- based humanities with f ilm, sound, animation, graphics, and other multimodal practices” (25). Gary Hall reinforces this claim, noting that the digital humanities now encompass “interactive information visualization, science visualization, image processing, geospatial representation, statistical data analysis, net- work analysis, and the mining, aggregation, management, and manipulation of data” (781). 366 Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies [ P M L A t h e c h a n g i n g p r o f e s s i o n Such appraisals dovetail with Alan Liu’s 2013 blog post on the thorny question of whether the term digital humanities should be singular or plural. While Liu acknowl- edges that when treated as singular the term names a coherent ield, he suggests that the digital humanities would do well to retain a plural sense of self by “engag[ing] in much fuller conversation with their affiliated or enveloping disciplinary fields (e.g., literary studies, history, writing programs, library studies, etc.), cousin ields (e.g., new media studies), and the wider public about where they it in, which is to say, how they contrib- ute to a larger, shared agenda expressed in the conjunction and collision of many ields” (“Is”). Liu echoes recent critiques of the digi- tal humanities (including his own) that query the growing professional divide between the production of computational algorithms, databases, and tools and the cultural study of digital media (Grusin; Hall; Hayles; Liu, “Where”; Raley). hese analyses of such a di- vide encourage a détente between praxis and criticism and between the digital humanities and the so- called interpretive humanities. Holding up Franco Moretti ’s distant reading methodology for its capacity to pose cultural and sociological questions of large text corpora, Liu envisions digital humani- ties approaches that integrate “text analysis and cultural analysis” (“Where”). Namely, he advocates for cultural analysis of the “instru- mentality” paradigm that shapes knowledge work in the information age, including the knowledge work of the digital humanities. Elaborating on this idea, Rita Raley argues that the digital humanities have proved “par- ticularly useful” (or instrumental, as Liu puts it) “in our current mercantile knowledge re- gime, with its rational calculus of academic value” (32). She identiies a pressing need for “more critical ref lection upon, and ironic self- awareness about, the embedded place of digital humanities in the contemporary knowledge economy” (34). For Grusin, this project is vital, given that “the institutional structure of digital humanities threatens to intensify . . . the proliferation of temporary insecure labor that is rampant not only in the academy but throughout twenty- irst- century capitalism” (82). In enumerating the forms that “critical relection” might take for the digital humanities, Raley looks to the “self- ref lexivity about situatedness” in cultural studies and the “play ful inter ventions” of new media art practices that she has classed under the heading of tactical media (35, 40). Referring to exempla like the independent network WiFi .Bedouin, Raley writes, “Tac- tics are designed to produce open- ended questions rather than def initive answers, to lead to new discovery rather than diag- nostic evaluation, such that the researcher remains continually aware of the mechan- ics of knowledge production and attuned to the possibilities of alternative techniques, frames, and paradigms” (39). his mode of tactical critique and countercultural engi- neering, Raley suggests, could powerfully retool the digital humanities. Ecological Media Studies: Projects and Prototypes he environmental humanities have a poten- tially unique contribution to make to such tactical digital humanities by delving into what we could term, building on Raley’s for- mulation, the ecological materiality of digital “knowledge production” and by collaborat- ing on “techniques, frames, and paradigms” that model alternative labor conditions and alternative environmental ethics to those of late capitalism. I contend that ecological me- dia studies ofers a nimble rubric for doing just that. My thesis builds on the arguments that Hayles, Raley, Tara McPherson, Patrick Jagoda, Wendy H. K. Chun, and others have made for linking the digital humanities, me- dia studies, and multimodal media practices and thereby generating more robust methods 1 3 1 . 2 ] Allison Carruth 367 t h e c h a n g i n g p r o f e s s i o n and theories by which the “materiality in me- dia” may be understood (Hayles 7). Hayles teases this trope out on grounds that are especially resonant with ecological media studies. Her work provides concep- tually rich histories of the embodied forms that digital technologies assume in literary narratives, visual media, scientiic research, engineered machines, and human- computer interfaces. Her latest thinking along these lines swerves toward new materialism and, if tacitly, the environmental humanities. In How We Think, she writes that to “gras[p] the complex ways in which the time scales of human cognition interact with those of intelligent machines requires a theoretical framework in which objects are seen not as static entities that, once created, remain the same throughout time but rather are under- stood as constantly changing assemblages” (13). This argument chimes with Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality while calling to mind Jane Bennett’s description of assem- blages in Vibrant Matter. his sense of com- puting technologies as bodies embedded in material networks informs Hayles’s related points about the geospatial materiality of digital production. “If time is deeply involved with the productions of digital media, so too is space,” Hayles writes, explaining that “GIS (geographic information system) mapping, GPS (global positioning system) technolo- gies, and their connections with networked and programmable machines have created a culture of spatial exploration in digital me- dia” (14). Hayles’s arguments show that we think the digital not just through virtual programs and distributed networks but also through the extended, embodied “cognition” that human- computer interactions germinate and, critically, through the “larger networks that extend beyond” devices and users “into the environment” (3). EcoDH qua ecological media studies can lesh out these principles by addressing the nonhuman and nonmachine bodies of lora, fauna, rare earth minerals, earth and sea un- dergrounds, regional watersheds, and glob- ally networked energy ields that constitute both the environments and infrastructures of the digital. Situated at the crossroads of the environmental humanities and media stud- ies, a number of projects have recently begun to model this undertaking. Notable examples include Sue Thomas’s exploration of “tech- nobiophilia”; the essay collection Ecomedia and its companion blog (Rust, Monani, and Cubitt); Heise’s account of “unnatural” eco- logical metaphors in media ecology (“Unnat- ural Ecologies”); Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s environmental history of old and new media and accompanying criteria for green media practices; Stephanie LeMenager’s in- clusion of print and digita l media in the “petroleum archive” she builds for her book Living Oil; Nicole Starosielski’s accounts of the media heat and undersea cables that help to power the Internet (“Materiality”); Heather Houser’s contemplation of how data visual- ization and information management tools operate across contemporary environmental media to disseminate “data sets that are too large, complicated, inaccessible, or tedious for [individuals] to comprehend ” (319); an online storytelling platform about foraging ecosystems, cultures, and economies, known as Matsutake Worlds Live; and, finally, the open- source app Curatescape, designed to enable communities to exhibit site- specific histories (Tebeau and Cleveland State Univ.). As this range of examples indicates, the emerging field of EcoDH, which I am fur- ther delineating as ecological media studies, runs the gamut from peer- reviewed scholar- ship that draws on archival research, herme- neutics, and cultural history to experimental research that blends ieldwork, media aesthet- ics, and creative noniction to self- published sites that aggregate multimedia narratives with geolocated data. he projects share the investments identiied above as constitutive of ecological media studies. hat is, each endeav- 368 Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies [ P M L A t h e c h a n g i n g p r o f e s s i o n ors to provide material histories and theories of digital technologies and—whether through traditional scholarship, public projects, or both—to make visible the ecological as well as the sociocultural circumstances of networks. I hope that in the future ecological media studies—now a somewhat aspirational ield— will continue to bring further coherence to these multipronged eforts. Here, Starosiel- ski’s research on Internet infrastructure (de- ined to encompass the mined metals, cellular towers, satellites, cables, servers, data centers, and networked devices that coproduce digi- tal networks) provides an exciting prototype. Starosielsk i was arguably the f irst media studies scholar to develop an eco- centric ap- proach to the materiality of digital media and networks. he approach informs her research on the undersea cables that disturb coastlines around the world (“Beaches,” “‘Warning,’” and “Critical Nodes”). So too does it inlect her short history of the evolving hot- and- cold registers for diferent media (“Materiality”). hat account ends with a relection on data centers and suggests that material as well as rhetorical links now exist between the Inter- net and global climate change: “Data centers and computer systems generate enormous amounts of heat, which in turn form one of the greatest threats to communications sys- tems. . . . An attention to the generation and redistribution of this heat connects media to the energy infrastructures on which they depend and, in turn, to the intensification of globa l warming” (“Materia lit y” 2505). As Starosielsk i concludes, t his at tention to virtual- biophysical exchanges (like the heat exchanges that attend the f low of data through networks) “help[s] us to better un- derstand how media both enfolds and gives rise to a set of broader environmental rela- tions and conditions for life” (2506). Her con- clusion here dovetails with my own analysis of “the digital cloud” (or the Internet in the era of apps, social media, mobile computing, cloud storage platforms, and the estimated ten billion network connections worldwide). Observing that “the cloud’s apparent ubiquity makes it diicult to assume an outside, criti- cal perspective on its infrastructure,” I have elsewhere identified a lack of attention in environmental and media studies to the con- crete materials, and material consequences, of the Internet’s growing footprint (343). Such inquiries underscore that it would be fruitful for ecological media studies to cultivate “an ecological ethic for storing, accessing, and sharing data that takes into account forms of digital power and disempowerment” (353). In 1967 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore asserted that in the information age any “un- derstanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments” (26). While their assertion relegated biophysical environ- ments to the rhetorical status of metaphor (ironically, just as environmentalism was coming to life as a social movement), ecologi- cal media studies might return ecology to a literal register by taking up the matter of digi- tal technologies and the ecology of media. Coda: Ecological Media Praxis he intellectual contexts for ecological media studies posited above suggest how blurry the boundaries are becoming between the digital humanities and media studies. hese blurred boundaries stem partly from cultural work outside academia—including do- it- yourself maker culture, citizen science, new media art, tactical media, and hacktivism—that does not separate practice from theory, engineer- ing from critique. The existing projects we might tag as EcoDH have of ten ta ken cues from and, in some cases, joined these communities of practice beyond the university. The Hu- manities for the Environment stands out on this score. An international Mellon- funded consortium of humanities centers, it has in- volved an array of collaborators, including 1 3 1 . 2 ] Allison Carruth 369 t h e c h a n g i n g p r o f e s s i o n historians, ecocritics, bioethicists, environ- mental justice scholars and activists, forest ecologists, creative writers, artists, and urban designers. One project in which public en- gagement and collaborative environmental media praxis coalesced was Dinner 2040, organized by the Arizona State University team in the Western Observatory of the Hu- manities for the Environment. Dinner 2040 adapted a design process used in architecture and urban planning known as charrette to convene local and visiting academics as well as artists, chefs, farmers, activists, and other community members to address the question “what should be on our plates for Dinner in 2040?” (“Dinner”). A creative and speculative exercise that digitally archived participants’ narratives, values, concerns, and hopes in response to that question, Dinner 2040 was modeled on an actual public dinner that took place in the street along multiple blocks of downtown Phoenix and that used media old and new (including vinyl illustrated place- mats) to galvanize conversation about the ecological prospects and possibilities for the region’s food system. Keeping in mind the experimental and participator y structure of Dinner 2040, I would highlight another prototype for ecolog- ical media studies in which generating public engagement with a city’s ecological futures animates a participatory project that is at once artful and activist: Play the LA River. A project cofounded by the urban planner John Arroyo, the designer and documentary pho- tographer Barron Bixler, the artist Amanda Evans, the historians Catherine Gudis and Jenny Price, and me (and in which LeMenager, a coeditor of this special cluster, was an early collaborator), Play the LA River took shape as a mix of environmental outreach and so- cially engaged participatory art. Grant Kester deines “socially engaged” art as collaborative creative work outside the “international net- work of art galleries and museums, curators and collectors,” which adopts a “process- based approach” aiming to catalyze conversation, community, and social change (xiii, 9, 1). Play the LA River can be described in kindred terms: a public call to communities across Los Angeles, especially those living along the ity- one- mile length of the Los Angeles River, to “enjoy, reclaim and reimagine the river as a civic space that can green and connect” ur- ban communities (“Play”). he project sought to support ongoing environmental and social justice eforts and to widen the public sphere around those eforts through tactics—in Ral- ey’s sense—that made use of print media, dig- ital tools, and community gatherings. he last of these tactics, which proved challenging to implement, centered on a single year (Septem- ber 2014 to September 2015) of collaborative programming with other groups (in addition to social media prompts to spontaneous river excursions). This part of Play the LA River featured small- scale picnics and riverside zine- making workshops as well as exhibits of site- speciic student art and performance, among other events. At the project’s center was a playful and playable media artifact that dovetailed with these community eforts: an oversize deck of cards and an online interac- tive companion that each worked as a provi- sional and open- ended guide to ity- two sites along the Los Angeles River. his mix of print and digital media, live gatherings, and distrib- uted participation made Play the LA River an experiment in employing tactical media and participatory art to foster and make publicly visible community involvement and invest- ment in urban ecologies. Projects like Play the LA River and Din- ner 2040 demonstrate how the environmental humanities—in turning toward t he digi- tal—might turn outward to ecological media practices and publics. Such projects expand the purview of ecological media studies be- yond the critical analysis and cultural study of digital materiality to include creative uses of digital technologies and new media, which in turn become lively materials for imagining 370 Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies [ P M L A t h e c h a n g i n g p r o f e s s i o n environmental crises, layered histories, and alternative futures. NOTES 1. Buell, Future and “Ecocriticism”; Buell, Heise, and horn ber; Heise, “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” Sense, and “Eco- criticism.” 2. Inluential work in postcolonial ecocriticism in- cludes that of Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey; DeLoughrey and George Handley; Graham Huggan; and Rob Nixon; environmental justice cultural studies has been developed by, among others, Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein; T. V. Reed; and Michael Ziser and Julie Sze. 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