Humans in the Loop: Epistemology & Method in King’s Digital Lab

Abstract

Digital Humanities laboratories, where teams of analysts, project managers, designers, developers, and systems administrators experiment with data and algorithms, build websites and archives, and collaborate with researchers on a range of projects, are proliferating in the humanities and social sciences. King’s Digital Lab (KDL) at King’s College London, a large laboratory by contemporary standards, provides an emblematic (if not necessarily representative) example of how these teams are contributing to theory and method, and the wider knowledge environment. Following in the tradition of ‘laboratory studies’, this chapter analyses KDL from methodological, epistemological, technological, and business perspectives. The ‘collision’ of these elements in the physical space of a central London laboratory offers a complex interpretative domain, as rich in potential meaning and implication as the scientific laboratories studied in earlier decades. The various methodologies used in the lab present a complex entanglement of humans and machines with the economics of contemporary academia, but also - in their union of theory and practice - a potential focal point for the wider DH community. Show more