Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 409.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-02-26 19:58:56+00:00
From: Yael Rice <yrice@amherst.edu>
Subject: CFP: The Urgency of the Digital (special journal issue)
Dear all,
I share below (and have also attached to this email and linked here
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H5v_n05QTaONRPgp1osFILNc7tOUrL5Emi25wO7ihhs/edit?usp=sharing>)
a Call For Papers for "The Urgency of the Digital," a special issue of
the /International Journal of Islamic Architecture/ to be published in
June 2025. We welcome submissions from practitioners, urbanists, art
historians, specialists in literary and religious studies, archivists,
librarians, data scientists, software developers, anthropologists,
geographers, sociologists, and historians whose work resonates with the
topic. Proposal submissions (due by *June 1, 2023*) and queries should
be sent to IJIA25Digital@gmail.com <mailto:IJIA25Digital@gmail.com>.
I would be grateful if you would share the CFP with colleagues and any
other interested parties and lists.
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA)
Special Issue: The Urgency of the Digital
Thematic volume planned for July 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: June 1, 2023
This special issue focuses on the critical and urgent use of digital
tools, interfaces, media, and methods for the study and design of
Islamic architecture, cities, and the built environment. Over recent
decades, architectural historians, architects, and other specialists
of the built environment have drawn increasingly on digitized
databases, digital data, and processing software to reimagine the
history, documentation, design, and construction of buildings,
gardens, and cities wholesale. Representations of historical,
contemporary, razed and never-built structures are now fully
realizable, and massive corpora of information that once took many
months or years to sort can now be analyzed in seconds. Yet, digital
tools, infrastructures, and databases bring their own set of
concerns. Databases, like all archives, do not merely contain
information, they /are/ information. And as such, they bear the
marks of the epistemologies that shape them. Digital files are
always remediated, meaning that they are the products of multiple
human interventions, just as analogue media are. Some of the
platforms that facilitate virtual reality simulations of
architecture, cities, and transcontinental migrations enjoy an
uncomfortable kinship with the pervasive governmental and private
surveillance technologies in use today. Artificial intelligence (AI)
has enormous potential to transform the way that architects, city
planners, and historical preservationists work, and yet racial,
gendered, ethnic, and religious biases in the datasets that
machine-learning algorithms employ raise questions about the
ramifications of these undertakings. Digital frameworks enable more
expansive, multi-layered, and speculative investigations of
buildings, cities, and spaces, but they also demand rigorous scrutiny.
With computational tools, the many lengthy geographies in Arabic,
Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and other languages that scholars have long
mined for textual evidence of architectural, urban design,
construction, and migration practices can be analyzed at scale. This
approach–what’s known in digital humanities parlance as “distant
reading”–permits the identification of historical patterns, common
literary forms, and intellectual networks that might have eluded
analogue methods. It therefore allows texts to be understood as part
of broader, interrelated phenomena rather than as isolated works.
The capacity for large-scale textual processing may seem especially
well-suited to works, like geographies, that are themselves
large-scale and densely packed with information. However, many
distant reading technologies have historically privileged
left-to-right and Roman scripts, and thus betray disciplinary biases
that require their own rumination and interpretation.
Endeavors underway to remedy these technological and hermeneutical
morasses can bring their own insights. For example, the aim of the
University of Maryland-based Open Islamicate Texts Initiative’s
Arabic-script Optical Character Recognition Project (OpenITI AOCP)
is to create technical infrastructure to process texts that use
Arabic scripts. Comprising a team of literary specialists,
historians, and computer scientists, this initiative models an
interdisciplinary, collaborative working approach that bears on how
humanities scholars form research hypotheses and conduct
investigations. In such contexts, digital work can be urgent,
generative, and transformative.
Along similar lines, proposed articles might investigate how
software that was created for the analysis of French Gothic churches
or the drafting of architecture using English-language commands
transfers (or does not transfer) to the study and design of
buildings in the Islamic world. Authors might probe how the study
of, for instance, madrasas or gardens through the schemes of big
data differs from finer-grained investigations that focus on a
single monument, or what it means to use Cartesian coordinate
systems to map realms that were perceived and traversed historically
through non-Cartesian lenses. The urgent use of digital files and
technologies to reconstruct the physical spaces where crimes against
humanity have occurred, like the Forensic Architecture research
group does, might also be taken up.
Digital databases and archives offer another avenue ripe for
investigation. Troves of image, sound, video, and text files are
seemingly but a click away. Yet, for many, digitized collections
remain out of reach due to paywalls, government censorship,
copyright restrictions, inadequate internet speeds, frequent
brownouts, and a reliance on monolingual (often English-language)
interfaces. Migrants, minorities, people with disabilities, and
certain genders also face obstacles accessing digital content
online. We must then ask what it means to study and reproduce
digitized representations of buildings, cities, and built
environments of the Islamic world that are not accessible to those
who are, or once were, local to those places. According to what
paradigms are these data organized, and how are they and their
metadata made digitally findable? Digitization of archival
materials, for that matter, incurs enormous costs in terms of the
use of labor, skill, materials, and computer servers. Who is
shouldering those financial and ecological burdens, and why? And how
are decisions made regarding which files are prioritized for
digitization?
This special issue encourages contributions that address the urgent
promises and risks that digital infrastructures, tools, and
approaches hold. We invite paper proposals that employ a wide
spectrum of approaches, including but not limited to spatial
mapping, social network analysis, distant reading, photogrammetry,
3D printing, virtual reality and augmented reality simulators,
humanities gaming, and electronic publishing, among other topics
addressing contexts in or involving the Islamic world. Paper
proposals may also examine how digital collections, interfaces, and
software bear on the study and design of Islamic architecture,
cities, and the built environment. Contributors are asked to reflect
on what the translation of sources and evidence into electronic data
entails, how these acts upend questions and procedures that are
fundamental to our fields, and what pressing limitations and
potentials the digital brings.
Proposals should work from the framework outlined above. We
encourage contributors to consider the themes of this special issue
as they pertain to less frequently represented geographies such as
sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Submissions addressing considerations of race, gender, migration,
disability, and minority communities are particularly welcome.
Questions that might be addressed by contributors to this special
issue might include:
1. What does it mean to investigate and design the built environment
through a data-centric lens? What do digital approaches offer
disciplines that are materially and pragmatically oriented? And how
do we maintain any critical distance from the digital when we are
also irretrievably and fully immersed within it?
2. How does the computer see architectural forms and styles? How do
large image datasets provide a corpus for reimagining architecture,
landscape, city planning, and historic preservation in the Islamic
world? What does AI—machine learning and its algorithms,
especially—bring to the design process?
3. What roles do digital databases and archives play in the design
and study of architecture in the Islamic world today? Who has ready
access to these materials, and why? How have earlier histories of
classification, information design, and computers come to bear on
contemporary naming authorities, information retrieval, and metadata
management?
4. How can (and should) computers and digital processes be used to
reconstitute buildings, cities, landscapes, and built environments
that have been destroyed, replaced, looted, or never excavated?
Towards what ends might these same technologies be employed to
speculatively imagine architecture that was never built, or to
investigate state violence and violations of human rights? What are
the ethical and practical implications of these enterprises?
5. How do digital technologies remediate architectural photographs,
plans, drawings, and other media, and what are the broader
ramifications of these processes? What connections, if any, do these
phenomena have with the histories of earlier media?
6. What are the promises and pitfalls of big data approaches to the
study of architecture and architectural history? How might current
and historical acts of state-sponsored surveillance, documentation,
and data science inflect and inform these endeavors?
7. In what ways are current digital tools and approaches like
digital mapping with GIS, distant reading, virtual reality, and
artificial intelligence suited—or ill-suited—to the study of
architecture and space in the Islamic world? How should the digital
be leveraged towards more emic ends, if at all?
8. How have digital technologies made previously “hidden”
architectural histories of marginalized communities more visible?
What are the costs and benefits of making information belonging (or
that once belonged) to vulnerable and underrepresented groups
publicly accessible?
9. How might digital tools and processes bridge the study of the
Islamic built environment with that of other artifacts bearing
pictorial representations of architecture and space, such as
manuscripts, printed books, photographs, and ceramic tiles? How
might the digital challenge long-standing disciplinary boundaries
that have removed architecture from the study of portable media?
Articles offering historical and theoretical analysis (Design in
Theory; DiT) should be between 6000 and 8000 words. Those on design
and practice (Design in Practice; DiP) should be between 3000 and
4000 words. Practitioners, urbanists, art historians, specialists in
literary and religious studies, archivists, librarians, data
scientists, software developers, anthropologists, geographers,
sociologists, and historians whose work resonates with the topic of
this special issue are welcome to contribute discussions that
address the critical themes of the journal. Collaboratively authored
articles are also welcome. Please send a title and a 400-word
abstract to the guest editor, Yael Rice, Amherst College
(IJIA25Digital@gmail.com), by June 1, 2023.
Authors of proposals will be contacted by July 1, 2023,
and may be requested to submit full article drafts for consideration
by January 30, 2024. All submissions will undergo blind peer review,
editing, and revision. For detailed author instructions, please
consult: www.intellectbooks.com/ijia.
All the best,
Yael Rice
Yael Rice (she, her, hers)
Associate Professor of the History of Art & Asian Languages and
Civilizations
208 Fayerweather Hall
Amherst College
Amherst, MA 01002
Tel.: (413) 542-5520
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