p. 134 – P. B. Andersen, A theory of computer semiotics: semiotic approaches to construction and assessment of computer systems, Updated ed. Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
p. 114 Humanities are concerned with the words and images of ages past and present. In a postdigital age, these are in digital format, not only the primary texts, images and archaeological finds that are represented in digital archives, but also the scholarly texts describing and discussing these, as well as all other contemporary mediated communication. Increasingly, we live our professional and private lives in constant interaction with information technology, using computer interfaces to read and watch, to research and compare, and to write and communicate.
We have argued in this book that digital humanities needs to develop a deep understanding of computer technology, in dialogue with computer and information science, but rooted in the humanities tradition. Looking critically at the technologies we use is central to this understanding, including the interfaces in which we do most of our work. In this chapter, we discuss the possibility of a humanist critique of modern computer interfaces and the way they contribute to our thought and understanding.
Computer systems designers strive to understand better how their systems influence the lives and works of their ‘users’, an influence for which aesthetic qualities such as ‘look and feel’ are increasingly important. Humanist approaches can without doubt help us to understand these effects. Indeed, we argue below that digital humanities should engage in critical design projects to create alternatives to the current computer systems. For many digital humanists, critical engagement in interface design may feel remote from their daily work, however. To put this argument into perspective, we will thus begin with something that is closer to home for any academic: digital scholarly publishing.
The fact that we all now search, find, read and publish research results digitally has opened the path for several new developments. We will first discuss open access (OA), which is the most widely known change, moving on to the discussion of peer review and open review, and then look at some new forms o f scholarly argument in electronic form, hoping to demonstrate that digital interfaces have over the last decade become such an indispensable part of scholarly work that we should analyse how they work.
In the 1970s, Ted Nelson and Frederick W. Lancaster both published visions of research literature being stored and retrieved in a vast computer network (Nelson 1974; Lancaster 1978).