Post-Digital Humanities: Computation and Cultural Critique in the Arts and Humanities

TL;DR

This paper discusses the pervasive integration of computation into daily life and culture, highlighting how digital and non-digital worlds are converging through embedded technologies and challenging traditional distinctions.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of post-digital humanities, emphasizing the blurring boundaries between digital and material worlds in contemporary cultural critique.

Findings

Digital and non-digital worlds are increasingly intertwined.

Embedded computation reshapes cultural and artistic practices.

Traditional digital distinctions are becoming obsolete.

Abstract

Today we live in computational abundance whereby our everyday lives and the environment that surrounds us are suffused with digital technologies. This is a world of anticipatory technology and contextual computing that uses smart diffused computational processing to create a fine web of computational resources that are embedded into the material world. Thus, the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred, to the extent that to talk about the digital presupposes an experiential disjuncture that makes less and less sense. Indeed, just as the ideas of online or being online have become anachronistic as a result of our always-on smartphones and tablets and widespread wireless networking technologies, so too the term digital perhaps assumes a world of the past.