The document discusses the King's Digital Lab (KDL) at King's College London. It provides background on KDL, describing its establishment in 2016 with 14 staff members from diverse backgrounds working on around 100 inherited projects and 20 ongoing projects involving over 5 million digital objects. The document frames KDL as a socio-technical system and critical experiment, exploring how digital humanities labs can be understood through lenses like the history of technology, social studies of science, and post-phenomenology. It argues KDL has ethical, epistemological and methodological responsibilities both to traditional humanities and to innovation.

1. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
Mechanizing the Humanities? King’s
Digital Lab as Critical Experiment
Paul Caton, Ginestra Ferraro, Luis Figueira, Elliott Hall, Neil Jakeman, Pam Mellen, Anna-Maria Sichani,
James Smithies, Miguel Vieira, Tim Watts, Carina Westling
King’s Digital Lab | King’s College London | @kingsdigitallab
james.smithies@kcl.ac.uk | @jamessmithies | Director

2. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
James Smithies
Director, King’s Digital Lab
King’s College London
@jamessmithies
james.smithies@kcl.ac.uk
Miguel Vieira
Senior Software Engineer, King’s Digital Lab
King’s College London
@jmvieira
jose.m.vieira@kcl.ac.uk
Ginestra Ferraro
UI/UX Developer, King’s Digital Lab
King’s College London
@ginez17
ginestra.ferraro@kcl.ac.uk
Pam Mellen
Project Manager, King’s Digital Lab
King’s College London
pamela.mellen@kcl.ac.uk

3. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
The evolution of KDL
▪ 30 years of activity, against a background of rapid innovation and change
in Humanities Computing and Digital Humanities.
▪ Centre for Computing and the Humanities (1991); Centre for eResearch
in the Humanities (2008).
▪ Department of Digital Humanities (2011-):
▪ ~300 students across 5 Masters and 1 Undergraduate degree.
▪ ~30 academic staff.
How do you develop multiple projects in an academic department?

4. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
King’s Digital Lab
▪ Established 2016. See https://www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/blog/kdl-launch/.
▪ 14 staff: Director, Deputy-Director, Project Manager, 3 Analysts, 1
Software Engineer, 2 UI/UX Developers, 3 Back End Developers, 1
Systems Manager. We also have 1 contract analyst, and 1 contract
project manager.
▪ 2015: 1 woman, 6 men; 2017: 6 women, 8 men.
▪ 8 countries of origin, 11 languages.
▪ ~200 virtual machines, 400GB RAM, 27TB data + AWS / Azure.
▪ ~100 inherited projects, 20 ongoing. ~5 million digital objects.
▪ Supported by external funding, under-written internally.

5. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
http://germanscreenstudies.eu
http://www.chopinonline.ac.uk
http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk
http://www.aemap.ac.uk

6. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.

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10. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
King’s Digital Lab as Critical Experiment
What is a digital (humanities / social science) lab, and how might we try to
increase our critical understanding of them?

11. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
A socio-technical system
History of Technology
(engineering / materialism /
historicism).
Social Studies of Science
(constructivism, tacit
knowledge, ethnography).
Epistemology (the nature of
Truth, the process of
knowledge creation).
Post-phenomenology (the
entanglement of humans
and things).

12. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Pergamon Press,
1981), p.47:
To restore the contextuality of science, we have had to go into the laboratory and observe the
process of knowledge production. In view of the opportunistic logic we found at work in this
process, "scientific method" can be seen as a locally situated, locally proliferating form of practice,
rather than a paradigm of non-local universality. It is context-impregnated, rather than context-free. And it
can be seen as rooted in a site of social action, just as other forms of social life are.
What should we be looking for in the KDL ‘socio-technical
system’?

13. DH2017, Montreal, August, 2017.
Mechanizing the humanities? More accurately….
• KDL creates ethical as well as epistemological and methodological load:
• Ethical duty to continue the humanities tradition as traditionally conceived.
• Ethical duty to avoid the replication of inequities of tech-sector culture.
• Ethical duty to manage our financial responsibilities transparently – and perhaps even aim to profit - in consciousness of
the opportunity costs for our colleagues.
• Epistemological duty to safeguard but also extend the modes of knowledge creation and interpretation open to humanities
researchers in a manner in keeping with the humanities tradition.
• Methodological duty to be experimental and innovative – and embrace the possibility of failure – but also transparent.
• An epistemological / methodological duty to embrace the full spectrum of ‘meaning construction’ in the humanities, from
deformance to empiricism.
• To claim KDL is part of a trend towards ‘mechanizing the humanities’ is to remove agency from the ‘humans in the socio-
technical loop’; to deny the entanglement of those humans with the technical systems they maintain is naïve.