King's College London Digital Humanities

“Rethinking the Meaning of ‘Books’ and ‘Authorship’ in the Digital Age: The KITAB Project and Its Work on Text ‘Reuse’” – Sarah Savant

This lecture focuses on the size of the Arabic tradition (ca. 700-1500), and the likely role that written practices and cultural expectations played in its development. It is arguably the largest written tradition up to its day, rivalled only by medieval Chinese. I focus, first, on recent work assembling a corpus of 1.5 billion words and the composition of this corpus, including the large number of sizable works. I consider these works in light of evidence for a much larger body of no-longer extant material. Second, I introduce the concept of text “reuse,” our method for detecting and measuring it, and my theory. The theory is this: that the substantial reuse of earlier works resulted both in the emergence of very large works, especially from the 10th century onwards, and secondly, that this reuse resulted in the loss of earlier texts, now absorbed in various ways (including abridgement) into larger ones. Finally, I examine the cultural expectations underpinning reuse, and also how they should make us reconsider, at different times and places, notions of the “book” and “authorship.”

Bio: Sarah Bowen Savant is a cultural historian, focusing on early Islamic history and history writing up to 1100, with a special focus on Iraq and Iran. She is the author of The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which won the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, given by the International Society for Iranian Studies on behalf of the Persian Heritage Foundation. Her other publications include The Excellence of the Arabs: A Translation of Ibn Qutaybah’s Faḍl al-ʿArab wa l-tanbīh ʿalā ʿulūmihā (with Peter Webb; The Library of Arabic Literature; Abu Dhabi: New York University Press, 2016), as well as articles and edited volumes dealing with ethnic identity, cultural memory, genealogy, and history writing. Her current book project focuses on the history of books in the Middle East. With a team, she is developing digital methods to study the origins and development of the Arabic and Persian textual traditions. Please see kitab-project.org.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

When and how did economic growth become such a central concern of democratic political life? How might climate change challenge this conception of politics? Join us for an evening talk with Timothy Mitchell (Columbia University) at King’s College London, co-hosted by the Institute for Policy Research (University of Bath) along with the Department of Digital Humanities and the Department of History (King’s College London).

No Business of Yours: How the Large Corporation Swallowed the Future – Timothy Mitchell (Columbia University)

The foundation of good government, political parties often claim, is to manage and improve the economy. That conception of politics is both surprisingly recent, and one that may not have long to live. Before the mid-twentieth century, no one defined democratic politics in terms of the growth of an object called “the economy.” By the middle of the present century we may have little democracy left, given the threat of climate collapse, if we do not find a better way to define the purpose of political life. To format a different politics we must understand how politics first created “the economy” as its object. The answer lies in the rise of the large corporation, and the strange new relationship to the future that the modern business firm engineered.

Bio: Timothy Mitchell writes about colonialism, political economy, the politics of energy, and the making of expert knowledge. Trained in the fields of law, history, and political theory, he works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. His most recent book is Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. He is currently working on a study of durability, examining how the more durable apparatuses for capturing wealth characteristic of late nineteenth-century colonialism (railways, canals, apartment buildings, dams) engineered a new method of extracting income from the future—a future we now inhabit precariously today. Like much of his work, this research combines the study of the built world, technical devices, ecological processes, and the history of economic and political concepts. Professor Mitchell teaches at Columbia University in New York.

What kinds of infrastructures and relations underpin data societies? How is the heat of data streams being harnessed and commodified by data centre operators? How does the commodification of infrastructural discard modify the ways in which we live with and feel data? Join us for a public talk with Julia Velkova (University of Helsinki).

Data that Warms: Remaking our Relations with Data through Commodifying Infrastructural Discard

Infrastructures are things and relations between things that allow the traffic of waste, power, and finances (cf Larkin). In the past few years, new infrastructural arrangements have been made between data centre operators and energy companies across Europe in order to commodify and traffic the waste heat that servers produce in the process of computing and storing ‘the cloud’, and dissipate it in urban homes and offices (Velkova 2016).

In this talk I draw on ongoing empirical work with data centre operators and energy companies located in Finland, Sweden and France to illuminate the cultural imaginaries, and actual infrastructural connections through which the meaning, the value and the ways in which we live with and feel data (Lupton 2018; Kristensen & Ruckenstein 2018; Kennedy & Hill 2017) are redefined. I argue that these new interconnections have crucial implications for the data economy, energy politics, and urban life that become intimately interconnected, and literally powered by data streams.

Bio: Julia Velkova (@jvelkova) is a post-doctoral researcher at the Consumer Society Research Centre at the University of Helsinki. Her current project explores the waste economies behind the production of ‘the cloud’ with focus on the production and management of residual heat, temporalities and spaces of data centres in the Nordic countries. Her work on data centres has been published in Big Data & Society, and is also forthcoming in a special edition of Culture Machine.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.