TYPE OF PROPOSAL: Panel Session
TITLE: "Digitizing the Human; Humanizing the Digital"
KEYWORDS: Identity; Rhetoric; Interface

The speakers on this panel are from MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letter and Social Sciences Online, which is housed at Michigan State University. MATRIX hosts and facilitates an ever-widening set of networks, both scholarly and public, such as H-NET, which utilize new communication technology for dialogue about teaching, research, and public humanities. Through these networks, MATRIX aims to bridge the enormous gap between those who are generating new technologies and those who need to know about them. Our intention has been to coordinate regular contacts between government, business, academics, K-12 teachers and members of the general public, allowing regular communication on how the Internet and its successors can be used and understood. Central to this enterprise is not only the implementation of rigorous technology-training programs, but also a commitment to critical consideration of the cultural implications of these types of projects.

The panel will be organized as a series of short, ten-minute presentations, in which each contributor will outline his or her involvement with a specific aspect of the digital humanities, each going on to consider the implications of that project in light of the critical notion of "digitizing the human." While critical approaches to the relation between electronic culture and subjectivity have pointed to notions of technology as contributing to a certain loss of materiality and the degradation of embodied subjectivity, other approaches have pointed to the liberatory and potentially democratizing possibilities of digital culture. Offering differing perspectives and contexts for analysis, each contributor considers the role of various technologies, specifically the database or electronic repository, the interface, hypertext, and imaging and audio-technologies, in both perpetuating and undermining cultural notions of human subjectivity. Addressing how the issues of authentic identity, memory, voice, body, and anatomy are reconfigured in relation to humanities computing, this panel will consider the implications of integrating the "human" into digital culture within various the material contexts of the interface.

PANELIST 1
TITLE: "NGSW: Putting Voices Online"
KEYWORDS: Voice; History; Rhetoric
AUTHOR: Dean Rehberger, Ph.D
AFFILIATION: Associate Director, Matrix: The Center for Online Humanities and Social Sciences
E-MAIL: rehberger@mail.matrix.msu.edu

This panelist is currently involved with in the organization and implementation of The National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW). NGSW is a significant, carefully organized on-line repository of spoken word collections. A collaborative project among the humanities, engineering, and library science, the gallery, now in its second year of development, provides the first large-scale repository of its kind through the identification and digital preservation of crucial materials in tape libraries throughout the United States. It is pioneering developments in information storage as it creates a recognized set of standards for preservation and access, and constructs sophisticated and integrated search mechanisms. As important, the collaborators on this project are identifying a complex set of opportunities for research, teaching and outreach, because the most significant measure of the value of the project will be the users it attracts. High school teachers, college professors, government officials, journalists and engaged citizens will therefore be crucial collaborators in the creation of the NGSW. The NGSW will help create a history of sound in the age of its virtual reproducibility.

By bringing the spoken word across the Internet into living rooms, classrooms, research laboratories, libraries, and government offices, and by delivering the transformative power of language, rhetoric and speech via the Internet, the NGSW has the potential to create a worldwide virtual community. However, the difference between the classical polis and its online equivalent will be the potentially democratic and profoundly chaotic nature of online communities. This process is already occurring around the world, as is recorded by studies like Rhonda and Michael Hauben's Netizens, but it has been based primarily on writing: e-mail, online chat, bulletin boards. As Internet telephony becomes more feasible and popular, more and more online community-building discourse is likely to take the form of speech, but a form of speech that is without memory or history. This speaker will explore the implications of putting historical voices online and the possibilities for creating context and historical meaning for voices within virtual communities.

PANELIST 2
TITLE: "Creating Reflecting Interfaces: Discipline, Project, and Audience Specific Internet Archives"
KEYWORDS: Database; Interface; Rhetoric NAME: Micheal Fegan
AFFILIATION: Educational Development Specialist, Matrix: The Center for Online Humanities and Social Sciences
E-MAIL: mfegan@mail.matrix.msu.edu

The commercial internet company Qwest has run several national commercials commenting on the internet's ability to provide unparalleled access to information. In one commercial, a man walks into a small, dusty bar in the desert and asks the barkeeper what they have on the jukebox. The barkeep responds they have every song, ever written, in any language. Although the internet does not yet offer this volume of information, the commercial points (unconsciously) to the necessity of providing access to information in familiar packages and with familiar metaphors -- in this case a jukebox. Online archives, libraries, and institutions have thus far been concerned with issues of digitization, storage, and portability of information to the internet. Only recently have questions of interface and how interface influences user's access to these warehouses of information come into discussion. Search engines and archives have in large part created and used search interfaces for the faceless, general user or reproduced the environment of the professional researcher. Both of these search metaphors require either the language of the database, the researcher, or the archivist to access information. To use these resources, users must have a great deal of previous knowledge on their subject (to use keywords or browse topic galleries), or have existing technical knowledge (booleans or sql language) to wade through the large amounts of information at any one site.

Recently there has been a shift in emphasis away from large-scale digitization projects, general usability interfaces, and internet-wide search engines to small, user or topic based information resources. These projects create limited resources that speak to specific audiences and use familiar modes of language and metaphors to help these users find relevant information quickly and easily. This speaker will discuss this shift and the necessity of creating smaller, need or discipline specific information resources as well as creating interfaces that speak to the needs and questions of specific audiences. More specifically, this presenter will examine the scope of projects like IMDb - The Internet Movie Database (http://us.imdb.com/) and interface innovations seen in the Ask Jeeves search engine (http://www.askjeeves.com/) innovations we have used in creating Civics Online (http://www.civics-online.org), an online archive/resource created specifically for k-12 teachers and students studying U.S. History and Civics.

PANELIST 3
TITLE: "Forensic Technologies and the Tracing of Identities "
KEYWORDS: Imaging; Body; Culture
AUTHOR: Joy Palmer
AFFILIATION: Educational Specialist, Matrix: The Center for Online Humanities and Social Sciences
E-MAIL: palmerjo@msu.edu

In the vastly popular narratives surrounding forensic science and criminalistics, especially, the fractures elements taken up in these discourses have become familiar pop-icons-fingerprints, hair fibers, semen, DNA samples-all now have a potent currency in a cultural epoch we could characterize by its fetishization of the easily accessible fact and technological exactitude. The elevation of the technologies that "trace" human identity, this speaker argues, stems from a spiraling cultural fascination and growing anxiety over the truth status of the anatomical, traceable, and irreducibly material human body. The most significant characteristic of the narratives surrounding the technologies of the trace is the manner in which they conflate the notion of "individuation"-the forensic method the fragment of evidence is traced back to its originary source-with individuality or humanist notions of essence. As the body emerges as a discrete object of knowledge, it simultaneously dis-integrates into multiple realms of codification, leveled out and gridded into the networked computer database. The ever-increasing glut of narratives that fixate upon DNA, autopsy, trace evidence, imaging technologies and the status of the material body within technological culture, attests to these anxieties over the cultural status of the body as both severed sign, and substantive essence. This speaker will consider how the literal "matter" of the body has come to gain such critical potency within the interdisciplinary discourses of the humanities and social sciences. Within contemporary rhetoric surrounding digital technology, especially, the body has come to function culturally as a boundary concept between the human and the technological, becoming an ideological battleground for competing systems of meaning. Looking specifically at the technologies used to digitally represent the human body in forensics, biometrics and medicine, this presentation addresses the manner in which cultural representations of the body address and attempt to ideologically manage an inherently contradictory knowledge whereby technologies that collapse the body into an infinite series of abstract arts do so in the very name of reclaiming and reintegrating an originary, human identity. The continuous development of visualization techniques contributes to an escalating sense that we have come to "know" our bodies, and those of others, in progressively more complicated and contingent ways. As technology takes imaging to increasingly microscopic levels, these fragmented body parts are all taken up as elements in the construction of cultural identity.

PANELIST 4
TITLE: "Disciplining the Traditional Student Subject in Computer-Composition"
KEYWORDS: Hypertext; Rhetoric; Subjectivity
AUTHOR: Paula Rosinski
AFFILIATION: Educational Specialist:Matrix: The Center for Online Humanities and Social Sciences
E-MAIL: rosinsk2@msu.edu

This speaker will examine the pedagogical, theoretical, and cultural impact of computer technology on composition's representation of the writing student. Considering computer-composition cultural artifacts (textbooks, handbooks, and online resources) this speaker argues -- based on the assumptions made by these artifacts; the beliefs, anxieties, and concerns that they reveal about students; and the narratives they tell about technology -- that much work being done in the area of computer-assisted writing pedagogy is still very traditional and relies heavily upon disciplinary technologies that are committed to molding passive student subjects. These resources also often fail to embody contemporary ideas about how technologically-mediated writing sites (in general) and hypertext (in particular) have the potential to complicate traditional ideas about texts and authors (Joyce 1995; Landow 1997; Johnson-Eilola 1998). This speaker therefore analyzes the contemporary cultural conjuncture in which technology and the rhetoric of liberation are combined, where it is often assumed that the computer-mediated subject in composition will automatically be freed from the humanist Enlightenment bonds of coherent rationality and the Romantic limitations of self-expression. Although the liberatory rhetoric surrounding computer-mediated communication may perpetuate our hopes and desires for technology to reconstitute the student subject as an active rhetorician, it also obfuscates our awareness of how such technologies may reinscribe or colonize the subject as passive or in need.