In recent years, networked devices have taken an ever tighter hold of

people’s everyday lives. The tech companies are frantically competing to grab

people’s attention and secure a place in their daily routines. In this short paper, I

elaborat further a key finding from an analysis of Finnish press coverage on

Google Glass between 2012 and 2015. The concept of pre-domestication is used

to discuss the ways in which we are invited and persuaded by the media discourse

to integrate ourselves in the carefully orchestrated digital environment. It is

shown how the news coverage deprives potential new users of digital technology

a chance to evaluate the underpinnings of the device, the attachments to data harvesting, and the practices of hooking attention. In the paper, the implications of

contemporary computational imaginaries as (re)produced and circulated in the

mainstream media are reflected, thereby shedding light on and opening possibilities to criticize the politics of mediated pre-domestication.

Books and reading habits belong to one of the areas of our everyday lives that have strongly been affected by digitalisation. The subject has been lifted repeatedly to public discussions in Finnish mainstream media, and the typical discourse is focused on e-books and printed books, sometimes still in a manner which juxtaposes the formats. Another aspect of reading that has gained publicity recently, concerns the decreasing interest towards books in general. The acceptance of e-books and the status of printed books in contemporary reading have raised questions, but it has also been realised that the recent changes are connected with digitalisation in a wider cultural context. It has enabled new forms of reading and related habits, which benefit readers and book culture, but it has also affected free time activities that do not support interest towards books.

In this paper, my aim is to discuss the research of books and reading as a socio-cultural practice, and ask if this field could benefit from co-operation with digital humanities scholars. The idea of combining digital humanities with book research is not new; collaboration has been welcomed especially in research that focuses on new technologies of books and the use of digitised historical records, such as bibliographies. However, I would like to call for discussion on how digital humanities could benefit the research of (new) reading practices and the ordinary reader. Defining ‘the digital’ would be essential, as well as knowledge of relevant methodologies, tools and data. I will first introduce my ongoing PhD-project and present some questions that I have had during the process. Then, based on the questions, I’d like to discuss what kind of co-operation between digital humanities and reading research could be useful to help gain knowledge of the change in book reading, related habits and contemporary readership.

PhD-project Life as a Reader

In my ongoing dissertation project, I am focusing on attitudes and expectations towards printed and e-books and new reading practices. The research material I am using consists of approximately 540 writings that were sent to the Finnish Literature Society in a public collection called “Life as a reader” in 2014. This collection was organised by Society’s Literary- and Traditional archives in co-operation with the Finnish Bookhistorical Society, and the aim was to focus on reading as a socio-cultural practice. The organisers wanted people to write in their own words about reading memories. They also included questions in the collection call, which handled, for example, topics about childhood and learning to read, reading as a private or shared practice, places and situations of reading, and experiences about recent changes, such as opinions about e-books and virtual book groups. Book historical interests were visible in the project, as all of the questions mentioned above had been apparent also in other book history research; interests towards the ordinary readers and their every day lives, the ways readers find and consume texts and readership in the digital age.

In the dissertation I will focus on the writings and especially on those writers, who liked to read books for pleasure and as a free time activity. The point is to emphasise the readers point of view to the recent changes. I argue that if we want to understand attitudes towards reading or the possible futures of reading habits, we need to understand the different practices, which the readers themselves attach to their readership. The main focus is on attitudes and expectations towards books as objects, but equally important is to scrutinise other digitally-related changes that have affected their reading practices. I am analysing these writings focusing especially to the different roles books as objects play in readers lives and to the attitudes towards digitalisation as a cultural change. The ideas behind the research questions have been based on my background as an ethnologist interested in material culture studies. I believe the concept of materiality and research of reading as a sensory experience are important in understanding of attitudes towards different book formats, readers choices and wishes towards the development of books.

Aspects of readership

The research material turned out to be rich in different viewpoints towards reading. As I expected, people wrote about their feelings about the different book formats and their reasons for choosing them. However, during the process of analysis, it become clear that to find answers to questions about the meanings of materialities of books, knowledge about the different aspects of reading habits, that the writers themselves connected to their identities as readers, was also needed. This meant focusing on writings about practices that reached further than only to book formats and reading moments. I am now in the phase of analysing the ways in which people, for example, searched for and found books, collected them and discussed literature with other readers. These activities were often connected to social media, digital book stores and libraries, values of (e-)books as objects and affects of different formats to the practices. What also became clear was that other free time activities and use of media affected to the amount of time used for reading, also for those writers that were interested in books and liked to read.

As the material was collected at the time when smartphones and tablets, which are generally considered having made an essential impact to reading habits, had only quite recently become popular and well known objects, the writings were often focused on the change and on uncertain futures of books. The mentioned practices were connected to concepts such as ownership, visibility and representation. As digital texts had changed the ways these aspects were understood, they also seemed to have caused negative associations towards digitalisation of books, especially among readers who saw the different aspects of print culture as positive parts of their readership. However, there were also friends of printed books who saw digital services as something very positive; as things that supported their reading habits. Writings about, for example, finding books to read or discussing literature with other readers online, writing and publishing book reviews in blogs or being active in GoodReads or Book Crossing websites were all seen as welcomed aspects of “new” readership. A small minority of the writers also wrote about fanfiction and electronic literature.

To compare the time of material collection with the present day, digital book services, such as e-book and audiobook services, have been gaining popularity, but the situation is not radically different from 2014. E-books have perhaps become better known since then, but they still are marginal in comparison with printed books. This means that they have not gained popularity as was expected in previous years. To my knowledge, the other aspects of new reading practices, such as the meanings of social media or the interests towards electronic literature have not yet been studied much in the Finnish context. These observations lead to the questions of the possible benefits of digital humanities for book and reading research.

Collaborating with digital humanists?

The changes in books and reading cause worries but also hopes and interest towards the future reading habits. To gain and produce knowledge about the change, we need to define what are ‘the digital’ or ‘digitalisation’, that are so often referred to in different contexts without any specific definitions. The problem is that they can mean and include various things that are attached to both technological and cultural sides of the phenomenon. For those interested in reading research, it would be important to theorise digitalisation from perspectives of readers and view the changes in reading from socio-cultural side; as concrete changes in material environment and as new possibilities to act as a reader. This field of research would benefit from collaboration with digital humanists who have knowledge about ‘the digital’ and the possibilities of reading related software and devices.

Secondly we could benefit from discussions about the possibilities to collect, use and save data that readers now leave behind, as they practice readership in digital environments. Digital book stores, library services and social media sites would be useful sources, but more knowledge is still needed about the nature of these kinds of data; which aspects affect the data, how to get the data, which tools use, etc.. Questions about collecting and saving data also include important questions related to research ethics, that also should be further discussed in book research; which data should be open and free to use, who owns the data, which permissions would be required to study certain websites? Changes in free time activities in general have also raised questions about data that could be used for comparing the time used different activities and on the other hand on reading habits.

Thirdly collaboration is needed when reading related databases are being developed. Some steps have already been taken, for example in the project Finnish Reading Experience Database, but these kinds of projects could be also further developed. Again collecting digital data but also opening and using them for different kinds of research questions is needed. At its best, multidisciplinary collaboration could help building new perspectives and research questions about the contemporary readership, and therefore all discussion and ideas that could benefit the field of books and reading would be welcome.

Reading is evidently a part of the cultural heritage. With respect to nourishing this, Finland is exceptional in the sense it has a unique library system, used regularly by 80% of the population. The Finnish library system is publicly funded free-of-charge. On this, the consortium “LibDat: Towards a More Advanced Loaning and Reading Culture and its Information Service” (2017-2021, Academy of Finland) set out to explore the loaning and reading culture and its information service to the end that this project’s results would help the officials to elaborate upon Finnish public library services. The project is part of the constantly growing field of Digital Humanities and wishes to show how large born-digital material, new computational methods and literary-sociological research questions can be integrated into the study of contemporary literary culture. The project’s collaborator Vantaa City Library collect the daily loan data. This loan data is objective, crisp, and big. In this position paper, the main contribution is a discussion on limitations the data poses and the literary questions that may be shed light on by computational means. For this, we de-scribe the data structure of a loan event and outline the dimensions in how to in-terpret the data. Finally, we outline the milestones of the project.

The paper is devoted to demonstrate the significance of virtual museums’ study, to define more exactly the term “virtual museum” and its content, to show the problems of existing virtual museums and those complexities, which they represent for the study of cultural heritage, to show the problems of usage of virtual museum content in classical researches, which are connected with the specificity of virtual museums as informational resources and to demonstrate possible decisions of problems, sorting out all possible ways of the most effective usage of Cultural Heritage in humanities researches. The study pays attention to the main problems, related to the preservation, documentation, representation and use of CH associated with the virtual museums. It provides the basis for solving these problems, based on the subsequent development of an information system for the study of virtual museums and their wider use.

As it has often been noted, digital humanities are to be understood in plural. It seems, however, that quite as often they are understood as the practice of introducing digital methods to humanities, or a way to analyse “the digital” within the humanist framework. This presentation takes a slightly different approach, as its aim is to challenge some of the traditional theoretical concepts within a humanist field, narrative theory, through the properties of today’s computational environment.

Narrative theory has originated from literary criticism and based its concepts and understanding of narrative in media on printed works. While few trends with a more broadly defined base are emerging (e.g. the project of “transmedial narratology”), the analysis of verbal narrative structures and strategies from the perspective of literary theory remains the primary concern of the field (see Kuhn & Thon 2017). Furthermore, the focus of current research is mostly medium-specific, while various phenomena studied by narratology (e.g. narrativity, worldbuilding) are agreed to be medium-independent.

My presentation starts from the fact that the ancient technology of storytelling has become enmeshed in a software-driven environment which not only has the potential to simulate or “transmediate” all artistic media, but also differs fundamentally from verbal language in its structure and strategies. This development or “digital turn” has so far mostly escaped the attention of narratologists, although it has had profound effects on the affordances and environments of storytelling.

In my presentation, I take up the properties of computational media that challenge the print-based bias of current narrative theory. As a starting point, I suggest that the scope of narrative theory should be extended to the machines of digital media instead of looking at their surface (cf. Wardrip-Fruin 2009). As software-driven, conditional, and process-based, storytelling in computational environments is not so much about disseminating a single story, but rather about multiplication of narrative, centering upon the underlying patterns on which varied instantiations can be based. Furthermore, they challenge the previous theoretical emphasis on fixed media content and author-controlled model of transmission. (See e.g. Murray 1997 and 2011; Bogost 2007, Hayles 2012, Manovich 2013, Jenkins et al. 2013.)

Because computational environments represent “a new norm” compared to the prototypical narrative developed in the study of literary fiction, Brian McHale has recently predicted that narrative theory “might become divergent and various, multiple narratologies instead of one – a separate narratology for each medium and intermedium” (2016, original emphasis). In my view, such a future fragmentation of the field would only diminish the potential of narrative theory. Instead, the various theories could converge or hybridize in a similar way that contemporary media has done – especially in the study of today’s transmedia which is hybridizing both in the sense of content being spread across media and in the sense of media being incorporated by computer and thus, acquiring the properties of computational environments.

The consequences of the recognition of media convergence or hybridization in narrative theory are not only (meta)theoretical. The primary emphasis on media content is still clearly visible in the division of modern academic study of culture and its disciplines – literary studies focus on literature, for example. While the least that narrative theory can do is expanding “potential areas of cross-pollination” (Kuhn & Thon 2017) with media studies, for example, and challenging the print-based assumptions behind concepts such as narrativity or storyworld, there may also be a need to affect some changes in the working methods of narratologists. Creating multidisciplinary research groups focusing on narrative and storytelling in current computational media is one solution (still somewhat unusual in the “traditional” humanities focused on single-authored articles and monographs), while the other is critically reviewing the academic curricula. N. Katherine Hayles, for example, has “Comparative Media Studies approach” (2012) to describe transformed disciplinary coherence that literary studies might embrace.

In my view, narrative theory can truly be “transmedial” and contribute to the study of storytelling practices and strategies in contemporary computational media, but various print- and content-based biases underlying its toolkit must be genuinely addressed first. The need for this is urgent not only because “narratives are everywhere”, but also because the old traditional online/offline distinction has begun to disappear.

References

Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York Univ. Press.

Kuhn, Markus and Jan-Noël Thon. “Guest Editors’ Column. Transmedial Narratology: Current Approaches.” NARRATIVE 25:3 (2017): 253–255.

Manovich, Lev. 2013. Software Takes Command: Extending the Language of New Media. New York and London: Bloomsbury.

McHale, Brian. “Afterword: A New Normal?” In Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds, edited by Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, and Frans Mäyrä, 295–304. London: Routledge, 2016.

Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press.

―――. 2011. Inventing the Medium. Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. 2009. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Cambridge, Ma. and London: The MIT Press.

Recent research introduces a concept-metaphor of “broken data”, suggesting that digital data might be broken and fail to perform, or be in need of repair (Pink et al, forthcoming). Concept-metaphors, anthropologist Henrietta Moore (1999, 16; see also Moore 2004) argues, are domain terms that “open up spaces in which their meanings – in daily practice, in local discourses and in academic theorizing – can be interrogated”. By doing so, concept-metaphors become defined in practice and in context; they are not meant to be foundational concepts, but they work as partial and perspectival framing devices. The aim of a concept-metaphor is to arrange and provoke ideas and act as a domain within which facts, connections and relationships are presented and imagined.

In this paper, the concept-metaphor of broken data is discussed in relation to the open data initiative, Citizen Mindscapes, an interdisciplinary project that contextualizes and explores a Finnish-language social media data set (‘Suomi24’, or Finland24 in English), consisting of tens of millions of messages and covering social media over a time span of 15 years (see, Lagus et al 2016). The role of the broken data metaphor in this discussion is to examine the implications of breakages and consequent repair work in data-driven initiatives that take advantage of secondary data. Moreover, the concept-metaphor can sensitize us to consider the less secure and ambivalent aspects of data worlds. By focusing on how data might be broken, we can highlight misalignments between people, devices and data infrastructures, or bring to the fore the failures to align data sources or uses with the everyday.

As Pink et al (forthcoming) suggest the metaphorical understanding of digital data, aiming to underline aspects of data brokenness, brings together various strands of scholarly work, highlighting important continuities with earlier research. Studies of material culture explore practices of breakage and repair in relation to the materiality of objects, for instance by focusing on art restoration (Dominguez Rubio 2016), or car repair (Dant 2010). Drawing attention to the fragility of objects and temporal decay, these studies underline that objects break and have to be mended and restored. When these insights are brought into the field of data studies, the materiality of platforms and software and subsequent data arrangements, including material restrictions and breakages, become a concern (Dourish 2016; Tanweer et al 2016), emphasizing aspects of brokenness and following repair work in relation to digital data (Pink et al, forthcoming).

In the science and technology studies (STS), on the other hand, the focus on ‘breakages’ has been studied in relation to infrastructures, demonstrating that it is through instances of breakdown that structures and objects, which have become invisible to us in the everyday, gain a new kind of visibility. The STS scholar Stephen Jackson expands the notion of brokenness further to more everyday situations and asks ‘what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media?’ (2014: 174). Instances of data breakages can be seen in light of mundane data arrangements, as a recurring feature of data work rather than an exceptional event (Pink et al, forthcoming; Tanweer et al 2016).

In order to concretize further the usefulness of the concept-metaphor of broken data, I will detail instances of breakage and repair in the data work of the Citizen Mindscapes initiative, emphasizing efforts needed to overcome various challenges in working with large digital data. This kind of approach introduces obstacles and barriers that slow or derail the data science process as an important resource for knowledge production and innovation (Tanweer et al 2016). In the collaborative Citizen Mindscapes initiative, discussing the gaps, or possible anomalies in the data led to conversations concerning the production of data, deepening our understanding of the human and material factors at play in processes of data generation.

Identifying data breakages

The Suomi24 data was generated by a media company, Aller. The data set grew on the company servers for over a decade, gaining a new life and purpose when the company decided to open the proprietary data for research purposes. A new infrastructure was needed for hosting and distributing the data. One such data infrastructure was already in place, the Language Bank of Finland, maintained by CSC (IT Centre for Science), developed for acquiring, storing, offering and maintaining linguistic resources, tools and data sets for academic researchers. The Language Bank gave a material structure to the Suomi24 data: it was repurposed as research data for linguistics.

The Korp tool, developed for the analysis of data sets stored in the Language Bank, allowed word searches, in relation to individual sentences, retaining the Suomi24 data as a resource for linguistic research. Yet, the material arrangements constrained other possible uses of the data that were of interest to the Citizen Mindscapes research collective, aiming to work the data to accommodate the social science focus on topical patterns and emotional waves and rhythms characteristic of the social media. In the past two years, the research collective, particularly those members experienced in working with large data sets, have been repairing and cleaning the data in order to make it ready for additional computational approaches. The goal is to build a methodological toolbox that researchers, who do not possess computational skills, but are interested in using digital methods in the social scientific inquiry, can benefit from. This entails, for instance, developing user interfaces that narrow down the huge data set and allow to access data with topic-led perspectives.

The ongoing work has alerted us to breakages of data, raising more general questions about the origins and nature of data. Social media data, such as the Suomi24, is never an accurate, or complete representation of the society. From the societal perspective, the data is broken, offering discontinuous, partial and interrupted views to individual, social and societal aims. The preparation of data for research that takes societal brokenness seriously underlines the importance of understanding the limitations and biases in the production of the data, including insights into how the data might be broken. The first step towards this aim was a research report (Lagus et al 2016) that evaluated and contextualized the Suomi24 data in a wide variety of ways. We paid attention to the writers of the social media community as producers of the data; the moderation practices of the company were described to demonstrate how they shape the data set by filtering certain swearwords and racist terms, or certain kinds of messages, for instance, advertisement or messages containing personal information.

The yearly volume and daily rhythms of the data were calculated based on timestamps, and the topical hierarchies of the data were uncovered by attention to the conversational structure of the social media forum. When our work identified gaps, errors and anomalies in the data, it revealed that data might be broken and discontinuous due to human or technological forces: infrastructure failures, trolling, or automated spam bots. With the information of gaps in the data, we opened a conversation with the social media company’s employees and learned that nobody could tell us about the 2004-2005 gap in the data. A crack in the organizational memory was revealed, reminding of the links between the temporality of data and human memory. In contrast, the anomaly in the data volume in July 2009 which we first suspected was a day when something dramatic happened that created a turmoil in the social media, turned out to be a spam bot, remembered very well in the company.

In the field of statistics, for instance, research might require intimate knowledge of all possible anomalies of the data. What appears as incomplete, inconsistent and broken to some practitioners might be irrelevant for others, or a research opportunity. The role of the concept-metaphor of broken data is to open a space for discussion about these differences, maintaining them, rather than resolving them. One option is to highlight how data is seen as broken in different contexts and compare the breakages, and then follow what happens after them, and focus on the repair and cleaning work

Concluding remarks

The purpose of this paper has been to introduce the broken data metaphor that calls for paying more attention to the incomplete and fractured character of digital data. Acknowledging the incomplete nature of data in itself is of course nothing new, researcher are well aware of their data lacking perfection. With growing uses of secondary data, however, the ways in which data is broken might not be known beforehand, underlining the need to pay more careful attention to brokenness and the consequent work of repair. In the case of Suomi24data, the data breakages suggest that we need to actively question data production and the diverse ways in which data are adapted for different ends by practitioners. As described above, the repurposed data requires an infrastructure, servers and cloud storage; the software and analytics tools enable certain perspectives and operations and disable others, Data is always inferred and interpreted in infrastructure and database design and by professionals, who see the data, and its possibilities, differently depending on their training. As Genevieve Bell (2015: 16) argues, the work of coding data and writing algorithms determines ‘what kind of relationships there should be between data sets’ and by doing so, data work promotes judgments about what data should speak to what other data. As our Citizen Mindscapes collaboration suggests, making ‘data talk’ to other data sets, or to interpreters of data, is permeated by moments of breakdown and repair that call for a richer understanding of everyday data practices. The intent of this paper has been to suggest that a focus on data breakages is an opportunity to learn about everyday data worlds, and to account for how data breakages challenge the linear, solutionist, and triumphant stories of big data.

References:

Bell, G. (2015). ‘The secret life of big data’. In Data, now bigger and better! Eds. T. Boellstorf and B. Maurer. Publisher: Prickly Paradigm Press,7-26

Dant, T., 2010. The work of repair: Gesture, emotion and sensual knowledge. Sociological Research Online, 15(3), p.7.

Domínguez Rubio, F. (2016) ‘On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach’ Journal of Material Culture. 21(1): 59–86

Jackson, S.J. (2014) ‘Rethinking repair’ in T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, and K. Foot, eds. Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society. MIT Press: Cambridge MA

Lagus, K. M. Pantzar, M. Ruckenstein, and M. Ylisiurua. (2016) Suomi24: Muodonantoa aineistolle. The Consumer Society Research Centre. Helsinki: Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki.

Moore, H (1999) Anthropological theory at the turn of the century in H. Moore (ed) Anthropological theory today. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1-23.

Moore, H. L. (2004). Global anxieties: concept-metaphors and pre-theoretical commitments in anthropology. Anthropological theory, 4(1), 71-88.

Pink et al, forthcoming. Broken data: data metaphors for an emerging world. Big data & Society.

Tanweer, A., Fiore-Gartland, B., & Aragon, C. (2016). Impediment to insight to innovation: understanding data assemblages through the breakdown–repair process. Information, Communication & Society, 19(6), 736-752.