This document discusses how steampunk design fiction can provide models for incorporating environmental concerns into digital humanities work. It references how media terms often obscure the environmental impacts of digital technologies. Steampunk is presented as a design practice that could inspire more sustainable approaches through its emphasis on physical realization, DIY practices, and appropriation. The document also includes extracts discussing how ancient settlements have been buried over time by water and sediment, and how 19th century London demanded new ways of living in its novel, manufactured environment.

1. STEAMPUNK IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Retrofuturist Design Fiction and the Digital Humanities
@RogerWhitson, Washington State University

2. “[T]he immaterial implications of many of our
prominent media terms (e.g. the Cloud, wirelessness,
ubiquitous computing, cognitive labor) may actually
create damaging world views that deny the digital’s
relation to the environment and, in so doing, excuse
producer and users from any active material
responsibilities.
-Amanda Starling Gould, “Restor(y)ing the Ground:
Environmental Media Studies” Networking Knowledge. 9.5

4. “[A]s a design fiction, Steampunk provides an explicit model for
how to physically realize an ideological and imagined world
through design practice. We contend that the practices of DIY
and appropriation that are evident in Steampunk design provide
a useful set of design and implications for HCI [human-computer
interaction].
-Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, Ron Wakkary,
“Steampunk as Design Fiction”

10. “[T]he sites of many villages and towns that anciently existed along the
rivers, or on the lower lands adjoining, were concealed by the water
and the mud it brought with it. The sedges and reeds that arose
completed the work and left nothing visible, so that the mighty
buildings of olden days were by these means utterly buried. And, as
has been proved by those who have dug for treasures, in our time the
very foundations are deep beneath the earth, and not to be got at for
the water that oozes into the shafts that they have tried to sink
through the sand and mud banks.
-Richard Jefferies, After London; or Wild England
(1885)

11. “London at the end of the nineteenth century was the largest
city that had ever existed, the capital of the world’s first
industrialized society and of an empire with global
pretensions. It was also a novel ecosystem, a manufactured
environment in which every scrap of ground and breath of
air bore traces of human action. As such, it demanded new
modes of dwelling.
-Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture:
The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf

15. Thanks!
@RogerWhitson
rogerwhitson.net