New CRC Working Paper short series: Defining Digitalities I – III
The new three part short series of publications »Defining Digitalities I – III« in the Working Paper Series by Thomas Haigh and Sebastian Gießmann asks “What’s Digital about Digits?” (No. 30, July 2023), “What’s Digital About Digital Communication?” (No. 31, July 2023) und “What’s Digital About Digital Media?” (No. 32, July 2023). In asking these questions the short series focuses on defining what digitality is by using a historical approach to the topic and analysing the reading and writing practices that lie within it.
The first paper »What’s Digital about Digits?«, written by Thomas Haigh, argues that digitality is not a feature of an object itself, but of the way that object is read (whether by human or by machine) as encoding symbols chosen from a finite set. Thomas Haigh then comes to the conclusion that digitality is constituted through reading practices.
No. 31 and No. 32 were written by Thomas Haigh and Sebastian Gießmann. In »What’s Digital About Digital Communication?« they continue to work on media and communication systems by looking at the historical broadening of the concept of digitality to include non-numerical systems of representation such as those used to encode text and pictures.
Furthermore, the third paper »What’s Digital About Digital Media?« discusses digitality as a feature of the practices used to read and write symbols from a medium, not a physical property of the medium itself and explores the limited interchangeability of representations between different encodings of the same symbols, connecting the purported immateriality of digitality to this actual fungibility of material representations.
Dr. Sebastian Gießmann is principal investigator of the CRC subproject A01 »Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization« and Reader in Media Theory at the University of Siegen. In 2023, he serves as visiting professor for cultural techniques and history of knowledge at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His book Connectivity of Things: Net- work Cultures Since 1832 is forthcoming in MIT Press’s Infrastructures series. Gießmann’s work intertwines practice theory (which he helped to establish within media studies), cultural techniques, Science and Technology Studies, and grounded histories of (digital) media. He is principal investigator of a major research project on the history of network infrastructures within Media of Cooperation.
Ph. D. Thomas Haigh is associated investigator of the same subproject a Professor of History and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and vis- iting Comenius Professor at Siegen University. Haigh has published extensively on many aspects of the history of computing and won several prizes for his articles. He is the primary author of A New History of Modern Computing (MIT, 2021) and ENIAC in Action (MIT, 2016) and the editor of Histories of Computing (Harvard 2011) and Exploring the Early Digital (Springer, 2019). Learn more at www.tomandmaria.com/tom.
The short series »Defining Digitalities« is a pre-publication of their upcoming book of the same title and published as part of the Working Paper Series of the CRC 1187, which promotes inter- and transdisciplinary media research and provides an avenue for rapid publication and dissemination of ongoing research located at or associated with the CRC. The purpose of the series is to circulate in-progress research to the wider research community beyond the CRC. All Working Papers are accessible via the website or can be ordered in print by sending an email to: info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de