What do we mean by "Digital Theology"
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A presentation to an interview panel for the research post in a leading Theological department in the UK
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What do we mean by "Digital Theology"
- 2. What might be meant by ‘Digital Theology’
- 3. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • relevant and important question • no simple answer • digitisation of sources? • digitisation of hermeneutics or systematics? • impact of digitisation - future of the (e)book? • digital pedagogy – KhanAcademy/Sugata Mitra • digital exploration of theology • theological exploration of the digital • Re-engineering the categories
- 4. Might Digital Humanities hold the key?
- 5. • Digital Humanities à la Berry • Lyotard and infinite knowledge • -> new infinite archive • two waves/layers/moments • 1 -> infrastructure, imitation, inputting • 2 -> born-digital artefacts, distant reading • 3 -> reinventing humanities – colaboratories
- 6. • Digital Humanities à la Berry • The Power of Code • Not the Humboldt Bildung • But Hofstadter’s Intellect • Berry (ed.), Introduction: Understanding the Digital Humanities, pp.1-20
- 7. Just hold on a moment?
- 8. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • Hofstadterian meta-comment moment… • Conceptual ambiguity about “digital” • Berry’s waves: • Digital as “Techne” - digisation • Digital as “Episteme”- born digital artifacts
- 9. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • Marshall McLuhan • Technology as extension of human capacity • Extends reach into new space/place/state (*) • Four rules: • Extend:Reverse:Retrieve:Obsolesce • But focus not on the tech but on the medium • The medium is paramount
- 10. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • McLuhan • “The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb” • Issue is the episteme that techne represents • Techne and episteme – which comes first? • Medium sustains(?) figures • Episteme sustains(?) techne • Medium as cultural milieu/sociological canvas/the ground of being?
- 11. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • Latour – Reassembling the Social • ANT - actor/network theory • focus on the actors but realise the network is what gives them the space to act in a particular way • “Network” as cultural milieu/sociological canvas/the ground of being? • Medium ≣ Network • Figure ≣ Actor • Kittel, Buribunks, Hansen, Campbell on this…
- 12. The polyvalence of the term ‘digital’
- 13. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • Heidegger – ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ • “Die Technik ist nicht das gleiche wie das Wesen der Technik…So ist denn auch das Wesen der Technik ganz und gar nichts Technisches.” • Technik (Techne) ≠ Wesen (Episteme) • “Die Technik ist eine Weise des Entbergens” • But also “Wir nennen jetzt jenen herausfordernden Anspruch, der den Menschen dahin versammelt, das Sichentbergende als Bestand zu bestellen – das Ge-stell”
- 14. Hold on, Martin!
- 15. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • …. eine Weise des Entbergens? • Revelation of what exactly – Enframing! Control! • (ed. > co-creators – in God’s image?) • Heidegger and technological determinism rests on the refusal to ask the question about revelation and instead to be sucked into the question of Enframing (Gestell) • Towards the end – art as techne – “Weil sie ein her- und vor-bringendes Entbergen war und darum in die poietis gehörte”
- 17. • “Digital” Humanities • Wave 1 – techne – digitisation, archiving • Wave 2 – episteme – born-digital, DH manifesto
- 18. • Digital Humanities Manifesto • The genre here is all M’s: • mix :: match :: mash :: manifest. • An array of convergent practices • Called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse • To model excellence and innovation • Multi-purposing, multiple channelling • Generative Humanities, co-creative • Re-engineering, repurposing, translating • Reconfiguration, dedefinition, triangulation • http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf
- 19. • “Digital” Humanities • Wave 1 – techne – digitisation, archiving • Wave 2 – episteme – born-digital, DH manifesto • ??? Wave 3 – poesis ??? - ??? • Synthesising, forming new pedagogies • Embedding Dasein into the Vorhandenheit of the Academy? • Creating new tools • Dangers of Enframing rather than revealing?
- 20. • Digital Humanities – Presner (DHM) • “…must be engaged with the broad horizon of possibilities for building upon excellence in the humanities, while also transforming our research culture, our curriculum, our departmental and disciplinary structures, our tenure and promotion standards, and, most of all, the media and format of our scholarly publications.”
- 21. A whole herd of Vorhandenheit Elephants?
- 22. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • What is this ‘digital’ epistemology? • Does techne reveal episteme? • Does techne create episteme? • Which came first – tools or the need to use them? • Will to mastery or the tools to master? • Or both at the same time? • Is Heidegger right about Enframing? • What about social shaping of technology? • What about Epstein’s call to pour our humanity into the technology to give it the gift of humanity?
- 23. • What might be meant by Digital Theology • McLuhan – Latour - Heidegger • Medium ≣ Network ≣ Wesen der Technik • Figure ≣ Actor ≣ Technik • ‘Digital’ as a polyvalent term • Digital Theology is about digital technology • Digital Theology is about digital culture • But it is probably about so much more as well
Editor's Notes
- Lots of people ask my what I mean by Digital Theology I’m putting together book proposals for publishers on Digital Theology – I really need to understand what I am talking about. Relevant and important question – the problem is that even though it seems an intuitive phrase – there is no simple answer. On the one hand it could mean a digitisation of sources – papyri and manuscripts, texts and databases, images and videos On the other hand it could be a technologisation of hermeneutics or systematics – have you read Gordon Fee’s approach to exegesis in 24 steps with 300 substeps? Or it could be about the effect of digitisation- John Dyer’s work on the effect of reading Bible texts online – there seems to be greater cognitive retention when texts are read from books – is that just for a pre-digital generation. And what of the need to ensure your iPhone Quran app is the highest App on your phone, your App the highest book on your desk and that you refrain from keeping your phone near less clean parts of your body? And how about tweeting in Church? Or is it about changing the way that we teach in the Academy – adopting the teaching methodologies of the Khan Academy or of Newcastle’s celebrated Professor of Education Sugata Mitra – both focus on self-learning as the paradigm for the digital classroom – students learn the basics at home and then engage in practical exercises in class with teachers mentoring students on a one to one basis. Is that possible for the Academy? Or is it an investigation of theology in digital terms? How do we talk of incarnation in digital terms – Mikhail Epstein – kenosis as humanity emptying itself into technology that technology might become more humane. Or an investigation of the digital in theological terms – what is the theological freight of the digital revoution – of new concepts of presence, absence, embodiment, friendship. How do we talk of God in the digital space? A kind of updating of Teilhard de Chardin? Whatever it means, there seems to be the need to disambiguate the terms, to re-engineer the categories.
- David Berry’s Introduction to Digital Humanities is one of the central texts exploring this newish discipline. Berry’s argument is at times partial, exploratory, jumping from subject to subject, full of questions and not so many answers. Berry notes the truth behind Lyotard’s warning about the excess of information – so much information is being created second by second that it is almost impossible for anyone to be an expert on anything anymore. We cannot read all the novels written in the 20th century, so how can anyone claim to be an expert in that subject. In terms of big data and corpora of media information now available, this new infinite archive demands a new way to do research and be open to the benefits of technological advance offers to the academy. Assuming the huge impact of information culture and the digital revolution, Berry talks of two waves/layers or movements of the development of Digital Humanities. The first focuses on the technology (techne) – the process of digitisation, electronic publication, replication of what we have done so much in print. To some extent this is a process of imitation – creating the paperless study rather than changing the nature of the study altogether. The second focusses on the impact of the developing digital culture – looking at using born-digital artifacts, Big Data, the Arts, corpus linguistics, and other inventions of the digital which can bear fruit within the humanities. But he also points to a third wave – the need to transform the whole concept of academic study, disciplines, process, research – the creation of colaboratories where interdisciplinarity, co-working, science-like teams working on joint projects become more and more the norm.
- He asks about what it would mean to understand the humanities through a new language – through the structure and process of Code – what would it mean to do theology according to C++, to talk of the resurrection in the terms of Visual Basic? In making this query, he challenges traditional understandings of the Academy – by looking back to two German scholars arguments about the Academy. First he picks up on Humboldt’s vision of a university which is established to output students with the profile or bildung deemed appropriate for public or academic life – in other words a university which is more about formation of acceptable citizens than about academic freedoms or creativity. A university which feeds the state with the people the state needs – for Berry this seems to be the role of the traditional humanities – to create the researchers to feed the research machine. In contrast, he draws on Hofstadter’s work in the 1960s to draw disinction between intelligence and intellect – he refers to intellect as:” Intellect is the creative and contemplate side of the mind. Where intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will sieze the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole…Intellect is a unique manifestation of human dignity.”
- It is really important to note the kind of conversation we are having. A properly Hofstadterian question! If we track back over the last two slides, we might have noticed that in fact two distinct conversations are happening at the same time. The two conversations kind of match the two waves in classic positions on DigiHumanities. However, we need to recognise that each wave points to a different meaning of or use of or semantic of the word “Digital”. And that in our use of the phrase “Digital Theology”, there is a profound Conceptual Ambiguity. To some extent Berry hits the ambiguity nail on the head when, early in the chapter, he talks about the difference between digital as ‘techne” and digital as ‘episteme’. If we look back at the first slide, where we asked what digital theology might mean, we begin to see the same process – some conversation about whether “digital” a technological category – the way we develop a specific skill/machine/technology to fulfil a specific task – or an epistemological category – to do with our understanding of the world and the ways things are.
- Of course, this split between technology and epistemology isn’t new at all and has been part and parcel of the digital conversations. So McLuhan argues that technology is an extension of part of the human body – the bike an extension of the leg, the microscope of the eye… which enables human beings to extend themselves into a new space or to a new level of fulfilment. McLuhan was always warning us to focus not so much on the technology as on the extension – focus on the medium not the message – so, as Postman also argued, it is not so much the technology of the telegraph or the telegram or the telephone which is important but rather humanity’s extension into long range communication which no longer necessitated the communicators to be physically present to one another. The technology may be the telegram, but the epistemological issue is absent present communication.
- McLuhan: “The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb” Technology – casing Epistemology – explosive Technology therefore, while often being the external expression which materialists in a consumer society are so prone to drool over is actually the Trojan Horse of Digital Humanities. Wave 1 is important because it focuses on the physical expression as a way of distracting us from the epistemological changes which are much larger, much more long term and much more pervasive throughout society as a whole.
- Latour Ground/Medium/Dasein/Vorhandenheit vs x/Figure Kittel and Hansen have discussed this more explicitly, although less easily…Kittel tracing the development of techne into episteme, Hansen arguing that episteme drives humanity to create new technology
- Heidegger – Die Frage nach der Technik Relatively brief discussion – part of a longer series of essays on the role of art as revelation of the truth. Heidegger wants to categorically state that there is a difference between technology and the essence of technology “Die Technik ist nicht das gleiche wie das Wesen der Technik…So ist denn auch das Wesen der Technik ganz und gar nichts Technisches.” Technology is not the same as the essence of technology…so then as well the essence of technology is certainly not technical” As Berry later picks up, it is Heidegger who briefly noted the different between techne and episteme. Technik (Techne) ≠ Wesen (Episteme) = Technology is not the same as Essence Technology rather is a place of revelation – that which reveals reality – aletheia. “Die Technik ist eine Weise des Entbergens” = Technology is a way of revealing Having noted this key point, Heidegger immediately switches tack to query what might be being revealed. He spends a long time arguing that modern technology is about mastering creation. A power station on the Rhine no longer adopts the form and essence of the river – like a bridge did – but rather then river is dammed into the power station – the power station takes control of the nature of the river – it frames the river, it creates the river as a standing reserve, mastered ready to be consumed We name now then that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve”
- Does Heidigger jump the shark by refusing to pause to consider technology as a revealing – a revealing of what? Art – Because it was a forth- and hither-bringing revelation and therefore belonged within poesis.”
- Wave 1 DH is about the technology – it’s about what we can do with the technology to enhance the academic work we do. Johannine Studies at BNTC – much more on textual variance arising specifically from the presence of the digital. Wave 2 DH is about the epistemology – BNTC to Bible and Critical Theory and Reception or Katie Edwards on Biblical Literacy – following in the great tradition of Sheffield in merging interdisciplinary studies and the Bible – David Clines, Stephen Moore, Hugh Pyper, Cheryl Exum, Ela Nutu…finding biblical literacy by distant reading of culture. In other words, what seems to be happening here is a mixing of categories.
- DH manifesto – a clarion call to revolution against the Humboldtian university. Picking up much of the angst of postmodern theory allied to deconstruction and liberation pedagogy. An attempt to take the opportunity which the digital revolution gives us to bring a radical transformation to the university to creative a Hofstadterian paradise
- Latour Ground/Medium/Dasein/Vorhandenheit vs x/Figure Kittel and Hansen have discussed this more explicitly, although less easily…Kittel tracing the development of techne into episteme, Hansen arguing that episteme drives humanity to create new technology Wave 1 DH is about the technology – it’s about what we can do with the technology to enhance the academic work we do. Johannine Studies at BNTC – much more on textual variance arising specifically from the presence of the digital. Wave 2 DH is about the epistemology – BNTC to BCTR, Katie Edwards on Biblical Literacy – following in the great tradition of Sheffield in merging interdisciplinary studies and the Bible – David Clines, Stephen Moore, Hugh Pyper, Cheryl Exum, Ela Nutu…finding biblical literacy by distant reading of culture. In other words, what seems to be happening here is a mixing of categories.