The University of Sheffield’s Digital Humanities Institute is hosting its two-day conference in Sheffield on the 4th and 5th September 2024. This will be a physical conference. I will be presenting with my colleague Dr Jonathan Evans (University of Glasgow) on session 6, Wednesday 4 September, 15:30 to 17:00hrs at High Tor 4 a paper titled: “Degrowing the Digital Humanities: Towards Sustainable Approaches (Lessons from Machine Translation and Online Interpreting)“.
I am really excited to finally make this conference and to go back to Sheffield. I often wonder if I had become an academic in this general area (and come to the UK) had it not been by the bands I was into as a young person, including Sheffield electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire (see this too)! Most likely not…
You can find the programme here. I am particularly excited about the keynotes by Professor Melissa Terras (Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage, University of Edinburgh) and Professor Simon Mahony (Professor Emeritus of Digital Humanities, UCL)!
Degrowing the Digital Humanities: Towards Sustainable Approaches (Lessons from Machine Translation and Online
Abstract:
Maxwell and Miller point out in Greening the Media (2012) that all forms of media, from print to tablet computers, have an environmental impact. This appears to be common knowledge now, with a growing body of literature directly addressing the environmental impact of cloud computing (Hogan 2018; Crawford 2021). However, digital technologies are often touted as more sustainable than paper-based solutions and yet require not only electrical power but a huge range of rare earth metals, plastics and other materials that are environmentally damaging to extract and produce, as well as difficult and dangerous to recycle. Digital tools and practices that support the wide range of approaches and activities that are covered by the digital humanities ‘big tent’ (Warwick et al 2011) all require significant amounts of computer and electrical power that is necessary to run them. This paper has a two-fold objective. First, it will discuss translation and interpreting technologies as related and important to digital scholarship and the digital humanities; second, it will explore the environmental issues around these technologies, drawing from work in the environmental humanities, media studies and design studies, before exploring more sustainable solutions that, while offering high levels of functionality, can also reduce negative impacts on the environment. These range from reducing the needs for environmental damaging systems through the reuse of existing technologies to designing more readily fixable items, as well as software solutions from open-source communities and less resource-intensive approaches such as frugal and minimal computing with the aim to be sustainable and inclusive. Moving beyond expansionist understandings of both the digital humanities and the translation industry, post-digital approaches (Crary 2022) and degrowth (Latouche 2009) also will be considered as possible ways of thinking the long-term sustainability of translation and interpreting activities.
References
Crary, J. (2022) Scorched Earth: Beyond the digital present to a post-capitalist world, London: Verso.
Crawford, K. (2021). The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press.
Hogan, M. (2018). “Big Data Ecologies. Landscapes of Political Action.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization. Available from https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/big-data-ecologies. Accessed 1 March 2024.
Latouche, S. (2009) Farewell to Growth, translated by David Macey, Cambridge: Polity.
Maxwell, R. and Miller, T. (2012) Greening the Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Minimal Computing Working Group (2022) “About.” Minimal Computing: A Working Group of GO::DH. https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/about/. Accessed 1 March 2024.
Pearce, J. M. (2014) “Free and Open Source Appropriate Technology”, in Martin Parker, George Cheney, Valérie Fournier and Chris Land (eds) The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization, Abingdon: Routledge. 308-328.
Warwick, C; Mahony, S; Nyhan, J; Ross, C; Terras, M; Tiedau, U; Welsh, A. (2011) “UCLDH: Big Tent Digital Humanities in Practice”. In Digital Humanities 2011. Conference Abstracts. Stanford University Library: Stanford, CA, US. pp. 387-38
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