Applied Media Studies

Kirsten Ostherr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138578265
• eBook ISBN: 9781315473833
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the age of the maker movement, hackathons and do-it-yourself participatory culture, the boundaries between digital media theory and production have dissolved. Multidisciplinary humanities labs have sprung up around the globe, generating new forms of hands-on, critical and creative work. The scholars, artists, and scientists behind these projects are inventing new ways of doing media studies teaching and research, developing innovative techniques through experimental practice. This book of case studies brings together practitioners of applied media studies, providing a roadmap for how and why to do hands-on media work in the digital age.

PART I
Introduction

1
APPLIED MEDIA STUDIES

Interventions for the Digitally Intermediated Age

Kirsten Ostherr

Introduction

In the era of “code for America,” do-it-yourself (DIY) maker movements, hackathons, and STEM to STEAM, the field of media studies is ideally poised not only to analyze but also to intervene in the practices of media production and consumption that characterize our always-on, always-connected, screen-oriented lives. Doing so involves collaboration and translation across diverse modes of practice and fields of expertise. This work also requires inventing new strategies for conducting research, for presenting scholarly work, and for engaging with stakeholders beyond the academy. We call this emergent field of practice “applied media studies” for three key reasons. First, we want to emphasize a shared foundation in scholarship and methods that foreground the medium specificity of representational technologies as we explore how the digital intermediation of information and communication shapes meaning in the world. Second, we want to highlight the role that new kinds of hands-on, critical, and creative “applied” projects are playing in the evolution of scholarly practice in the field of media studies. Third, we want to explore and expand debates and methods at the intersection of humanistic media studies and applied sciences.

All of the projects described in this book represent collaborations among humanists, scientists, artists, and engineers, and in traversing those disciplinary boundaries, the concept of “applied” work in the humanities provokes comparisons with “applied sciences,” raising important questions about the value and relevance of problem-oriented practice in relation to more abstract or theoretical work. This collection extends that dialogue by providing concrete examples of applied media work that offer new models for understanding humanistic knowledge formation as a productive field that can be “applied” to solving “real-world” problems, while also establishing feedback loops that bring new lines of inquiry back to more theoretical research. Applied Media Studies presents the insights and experience of media scholars who have forged innovative paths through this complex terrain, blending theory and praxis in applied projects that engage directly in the creation of new media infrastructures, communities, and texts.

Our goal in naming and defining the emergent field of applied media studies is to open up new approaches to research and teaching through screen-based technologies and media interfaces. Arising from the already multidisciplinary field of media studies, applied media studies adapts the methods for approaching traditional objects of inquiry in the field—that is, electronic, screen-based media—to respond to the demands of twenty-first-century research and teaching through critical experimentation on and with twenty-first-century tools. While older technologies of mediation such as cinema and television had fairly high barriers to entry, more recent iterations of these media enable forms of real-time participation that allow scholarship about media to become scholarship through media. The distinct material infrastructures of celluloid film and analogue television were certainly malleable, as vividly demonstrated by artists such as Stan Brakhage and Nam June Paik. But they were not nearly as malleable as the digital code upon which most of our mediated information, communication, and entertainment rest today.

In the contemporary era, more and more forms of visual, aural, and textual representation are digitally intermediated (that is, they appear, make meaning, and circulate through a complex mixture of digital platforms), perpetually redefining what comprises “screen-based media.” Expanding on Bolter and Grusin’s (1998) “remediation,” scholarship that takes the act and infrastructure of mediation as its object of study is particularly well suited to translating theoretical and historical perspectives on representation into applied practice. As McPherson (2009) has argued, these practices of translation produce new kinds of mediated, multimodal technological interventions, and new kinds of social entanglements. Rheingold (2012) identified networked media creation as a unique sandbox for exploring life in the twenty-first century, noting, “When you start engaging in knowledge or media production, you tend to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of how knowledge and media is produced more generally” (84). As the case studies in this book attest, the work of translation, collaboration through difference, and experimental praxis has allowed the contributors to this collection to extend their scope and impact far beyond the boundaries of their academic settings by engaging directly in applied media studies projects with local and global communities.

Science and Humanities, Pure and Applied

By calling attention to the “applied” dimensions of the media studies projects presented in this collection, we gesture toward a long tradition of scholarly debate on the distinctions between “pure” and “applied” work that has profoundly shaped relations within and between the sciences and the humanities. In both domains, the “pure” end of the research spectrum has typically been valued more highly than the “applied” end. Yet in the era of digital intermediation, technological applications in fields such as statistics, applied mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science have increased the value attributed to applied scientific work by society as a whole. One outcome of the digitization of everything from mechanical processes to interpersonal communication is that the output of applied science is experienced directly by industrialists and consumers alike. For example, discoveries in nanotechnology lead to production of faster and cheaper microprocessors that improve the quality and reduce the cost of new smartphones.

Another critically important outcome of ubiquitous digitization is that many previously elusive phenomena are being quantified and measured, as the conversion from analogue to digital entails the rendering of multidimensional and multisensorial signals into numerical form and binary code. As a result, value in American society has become inseparable from practices of quantification, and the digital era has become the era of the quantified self (Lupton 2016; Neff and Nafus 2016). In this context, the status of computational, quantitative applied sciences has been elevated, while the status of non-computational, non-quantitative humanities has declined. The “two cultures” famously described by C.P. Snow (1959/1961) as split into “polar groups” of scientists and literary intellectuals (also described more generally as “non-scientists”), are reproduced today as data-driven and non-data-driven cultures. But the projects described in Applied Media Studies show the result of collaborative work that could not be accomplished by scientists, technologists, or humanists working alone. Indeed, applied media studies provides a strong counter argument to the “two cultures” thesis because it shows that multidisciplinary efforts to reimagine the uses and meaning we make of digital networks, signals, and sensors result in substantive improvements to technology and society. A brief discussion of the origins and evolution of the “applied” versus “pure” debates will help frame the context for applied media studies today.

First coined by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the term “applied science” appeared in his Treatise on Method (1817). However, according to historian of science Robert Bud (2012), Coleridge himself was translating a distinction established by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) (1786). Kant distinguished between “reine Wissenschaft (pure science), which was based on a priori principles, and angewandte Vernunfterkenntnis (applied rational cognition),” based on empirical observation (Bud 2012: 538). Contemporary scholars see the Kantian distinction as shaping foundational ideas about the relative complexity, intellectual contribution, and cultural value of “pure” versus “applied” science (sometimes known simply as “technology”), whose legacy still shapes universities today.

Indeed, the distinction between “pure” and “applied” science has visibly shaped the funding, organization, and conduct of scientific research in the U.S. since World War II. In a 1961 Technology and Culture essay, James Feibleman defined “pure science” as “a method of investigating nature by the experimental method in an attempt to satisfy the need to know” (305). He contrasted this approach with “applied science,” understood as “the use of pure science for some practical human purpose” (305). The instrumentalist connotations of “applied” work implicit in Feibleman’s definition speak of the struggles for power, resources, and prestige that have driven heated debate over the meanings of these terms, both in the public sphere and in the academy (Bud 2012: 537). Scholars have shown that “the subordination of technological knowledge to scientific knowledge” led historians of “pure” science to exclude scholarship on the history of “applied” science or technology from conferences and publications in the postwar era (Alexander 2012: 518). Extending this analysis, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan critiqued the implicit hierarchies associated with distinctions between “applied” technology and “pure” science in a lecture aptly titled, “Technology Is to Science as Female Is to Male” (1996). Summing up the implications of the analogy by noting, “Some say that science is theoretical and technology is practical; other people say that men are rational and women are practical” (576), Cowan’s assessment of the gendered devaluing of the “practical” in this context provides a useful framework for interpreting the connotations of “applied” work in other contexts, including the humanities.

Debates about the relative merits of “applied” work have followed a tendentious path in the humanities. While the term “applied humanities” appears intermittently in print starting in the early twentieth century, the first extended discussion of the term in a scholarly text does not occur until 1974. In that year, Carnegie Mellon English professor Erwin Steinberg published an essay called, “Applied Humanities?” to argue that, in the face of increasing specialization at the “pure,” abstract end of the spectrum of humanities scholarship, more humanists

must bring to bear their professional expertise on contemporary problems. Doing so may frequently require not only that they move beyond their own narrow disciplines […], but also that they address themselves to educated men and women outside of their own fields and sometimes outside of academia.

(445)

Steinberg’s rationale expressed a complex blend of conservatism, as he mourned the dwindling numbers of English professors dedicated to teaching traditional forms of literary appreciation and composition, and progressivism in his praise of emerging fields within English that studied unconventional topics in popular culture, such as television, detective novels, and westerns (446–47).

The essay goes on to cite several examples of the interdisciplinary, purposeful public engagement that the author celebrates under the heading of “applied humanism,” including the founding of the journal American Quarterly in 1949, followed by the establishment in 1952 of the journal’s scholarly organization, the American Studies Association, the creation in 1964 of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies within the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, England, and the launch of the Journal of Popular Culture in the U.S. in 1967. Steinberg ultimately advocates teaching the insights of these novel fields as the primary vehicle for doing “applied humanities,” though he also makes a brief call for what might be considered proto-digital humanities research, stating, “Indeed, I would urge at the blue sky end of the humanities continuum increased attention to some of the techniques that have proved so successful in the social sciences: statistical analysis, for example, and the use of the computer” (450).

It is perhaps ironic that Steinberg positions computational approaches to the humanities at the “pure” rather than the “applied” end of the spectrum where forty years later they found a home, since for many critics, practices such as text mining and distant reading (Moretti 2013) “fail the ‘So what’ test” (Schulz 2011) that defines knowledge-seeking at the heart of “pure” research. We will return to computational humanities below. Here, it is worth noting the unnamed backdrop to Steinberg’s celebration of the democratizing forces that were bestowing scholarly legitimacy on topics previously considered the domain of “low” culture (Williams 1974; Levine 1988). The attention to popular culture and mass media in this era also opened up research on technology—the “low culture” of science—more generally, but this work developed alongside philosophical approaches at the “pure” end of the humanities spectrum, influenced by French theorist Jacques Derrida’s (1967/1977) method of textual deconstruction. Steinberg critiques these more abstract methods, celebrating material culture at the expense of theory, but his view was not the dominant one in this era. The valorization of the “pure,” theoretical work of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and postmodernism among literary scholars and many other humanists for decades signaled a distant stance toward the world outside of the academy, expressed through critiques of empirical claims about objective reality, including applied methods for approaching them.

The framework of “pure” versus “applied” has resurfaced periodically in debates about so-called crises in the humanities since Steinberg’s publication in 1974. A piece from The New York Times called “The Applied Humanities: A Businesslike Approach” (Kolbert 1985) described the growth in programs dedicated to real-world application of humanities knowledge, or “bringing academic skills to bear on non-academic issues.” That article emphasized the strategic turn toward “real-world” application of fields such as philosophy to help address existing problems as in, for example, ethicists helping to resolve biomedical conflicts in hospitals. Many of the sources interviewed for the article in The New York Times plainly admitted that the move toward “applied” work was driven by a shrinking job market and decreased overall support for many disciplines in the humanities. While such instrumentalist approaches to “applied” work leave many scholars concerned that the move from the “pure” to the “applied” end of the spectrum is a one-way path with potentially fatal, irrevocable consequences, others—particularly in the field of media studies—see the move as timely, politically necessary, and consistent with a wide range of scholarly methods.

For example, in an essay describing the response at the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies to the attacks of 9/11, director of the program Henry Jenkins wrote of “applied humanism” as “the idea that insights from the humanities and social sciences need to be applied and tested at actual sites of media change.” He noted that MIT already had applied physics and applied math, and argued, “It was time [MIT] had applied humanism. We challenged our students to do projects that had real-world impact and that confronted pragmatic challenges” (2004: 91). Jenkins does not dwell at length on the varied connotations of the term “applied.” Instead, he focuses on describing the project that resulted from this mindset: the collaborative development of a website that both produced and analyzed media coverage following 9/11. Expanding on this model, the contributors to Applied Media Studies blend discussion of the conceptual frameworks and theoretical foundations that have guided their projects with descriptions of logistical challenges, technical hurdles, and social complexities that arise from moving their scholarly work into a real-world testing phase.

The call to “apply” critical media studies suggests a new role for critique that goes beyond the description and interpretation of cultural forms to demonstrate how critical perspectives might change or even improve existing circumstances in the world through direct intervention. While the purpose of this book and the projects described within it is not to provide a defense of the humanities, the work nonetheless demonstrates the power of bringing humanist methods of critical inquiry into the practice of technology development, interface design, and media production. At the same time, by claiming the modifier “applied” to describe the humanist media studies work in this collection, we put pressure on the long-standing but often misleading opposition between theoretical and pract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Foundations
• Part III: Challenges
• Part IV: Translation
• Part V: Intervention
• Part VI: Infrastructure
• Part VII: Conclusion
• Index