DSN

The field of the Digital Humanities has developed both in France and globally over the last decade, in line with the penetration of digital technologies into all levels of society and the academic sphere. Coined by Unsworth and Siemens in 2004, the term ‘digital humanities’ was originally intended to signal a shift away from the first phase of humanities computing, which largely involved the digitisation of texts through the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Doing ‘digital humanities’ has since comprised the application of computational methods to the study of texts and also the application of the critical theoretical methodologies of the contemporary humanities to digital objects. It thus overlaps with media studies, which looks at the relationship between technology and the kinds of thought and cultural expression to which different technologies give rise. It has begun to converge, too, in this respect, with the emerging discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which analyses the relationship between technological cultures (scientific instruments, institutional practices) and the formation of scientific knowledge. Just as the digital humanities subsumed the earlier field of the computational humanities, we now argue that the time has come for the digital humanities to be superseded and subsumed within the broader field of digital studies. This is in recognition of the way that all fields of knowledge, including not just the humanities but the social and ‘hard’ sciences, and all aspects of social organisation, are reinvented with every change in the technical systems that constitute culture. With the advent of the digital, this reinvention has been both creative and traumatic in equal measure. Science has been revolutionised by new techniques that permit the unprecedented sharing of data (the human genome project, the compilation of climate data), but has stumbled over intellectual copyright and the privatisation of knowledge, not to mention the profound ‘flattening’ of scientific expertise that comes with the proliferation of media and the prospect of undifferentiated access to all manner of different opinions (Bruno Latour). Similar issues of access are transforming the spheres of politics and the economy (the replacement of ‘professional’ classes with unpaid, free content: from HuffPo to ‘Uberisation’). In each of these cases, we are seeing the realignment of existing social structures around an economy of contribution, in which knowledge is produced not by private, proprietorial users who buy and sell information, but by collaborative participants and amateurs who make their data open to and modifiable by all. Digital Studies is the field of research that takes this emerging ‘economy of contribution’ as one of its objects and systematically investigates the epistemic and epistemological stakes of this new state of affairs in the field of knowledge. The purpose of this bid is to bring together researchers across institutions in Europe, Asia and North and South America to build an international Digital Studies Network, focusing on the way in which society and its institutions are being transformed by digital culture, and by different technologies more generally. In addition to these theoretical and epistemological dimensions, the network will also develop open-source technologies to foster the growth of the economy of contribution as well as new instruments for contributive research. This is where we want to develop an ambitious European and international research program (FET-Exchange) on technologies for contributive categorization, annotation, certification and editorialization with the goal of developing an hermeneutic and negentropic conception of the world wide web.