This week I've been writing fellowship & grant applications and paper proposals. I've applied to two places (the DSRG and the Clark) to get money to go to LA and see the Wilde typescript. Besides these applications, I also submitted an abstract to a special edition of Digital Humanities Quarterly on Minimal Computing, on my highlighter tool as a tool that resists the tendency of EdTech to track and quantify student data.

Writing out the various proposals forced me to see my project within the space of few sentences, and I struggled here to articulate the role of "queerness." Here's what I came up with in the intro:

Within the broad field of the Digital Humanities (DH), an emerging Queer DH explores what is queer about digital methods and media. These initiatives often critique the practice of using digital tools to verify, correct, or establish “facts” about cultural materials, preferring instead to orient technological contexts around speculation and experimentation. In support of such efforts, my project excavates the limitations of digital methods that overlook or collapse the complexity of literary materials to consider how they might open possibilities for queer scholarship. I examine how the processes of electronic editing, social reading and archiving tools draw attention to the ambiguities of queer subjectivity, experience, and embodiment.

The main point I was trying to get across is how "queerness" in media centers on the ways that tools act unexpectedly, give us unexpected or suprising results---they are "queer" in sense that they diverge from the "norm". This idiosyncrasy (and it is an idiosyncrasy) of digital tools results from the condition of being embodied, of their material and physical existence as hardware and software, a condition that's often overlooked by what Matt Kirschenbaum calls digital media's "formal materiality," the illusion that objects on the screen have no connection to hardware realities. So, in order to explore this condition, it's necessary to take apart the machine, to look at its components and software to see how it works. We start to see how machines are not the flawless, homogenous, objective workers we thought them to be, we see how they are built by humans.

As we begin to look more closely into computational processes, we also see the parallels between computational and human cognitive processing. We start to appreciate how both humans and machines closely resemble each other, how they both make mistakes and misreadings. We start to develop a new way of understanding how they might interact, how they can fit (or mis/fit) together. This is where queer materiality leads to dis/ability.

It's a strange trajectory of ideas here: first I'm saying that there's something flawed and messed up about computers, something fundamentally physical and therefore unpredictable. Then I'm saying this problem with computers actually reflects the way that humans are built, the way that human bodies, perception, memory works. Then I'm saying that this creates new ways of looking at human/computer interactions. This new way accepts difference, surprise, strangeness---queerness---as a minimum for interaction.

This seems to me a very tenuous line of argument, something that can be easily critiqued and taken down at each step. Especially when considering the other ways I use queer, which is a reading practice and a subject matter. Maybe those other understanding of queer build toward this one about media and bodies?

Another thought---more exciting---that my dissertation chapters can focus on one part of the above argument: - first chapter: on reading---there is something fundamentally physical and therefore unpredictable about computational processes. Creates a critical distance /relationality between reader and text. - second chapter: on editing---this issue with computers actually reflects back to a human issue (Caughie: the questioning of computing gender leads us back to gender ontology) of fully knowing and formalizing ourselves. - third chapter: on annotating---this queerness shared across humans and computers can guide the way we create/use digital tools, in a way that accepts difference, surprise, strangeness as a minimum for interaction. - fourth chapter: archiving---do I need a fourth chapter? Maybe this can become some kind of epilogue