Comment by Mace Ojala
Fabian Pittroff, a fellow RUSTlab member, presented insights from his ongoing work as an “infrastructure-ethnographer-insider” (my term) at a large conglomerate of humanities researchers. The core premise is that Humanities, in German Geisteswissenschaften, bring about – or to apply the RUSTlab semester theme, fabricate – the Geist from the data.
It needs first to be noted for international audiences that the German Geist is a complicated term whose dictionary translation spans spirit, mind, intellect, wit, soul or indeed ghost, including the Holy Ghost. Fabian’s choice to stick with the Geist is smart – the alternative would be to go for the “human” of the Humanities, but as Fabian noted, everyone tends to believe they know what “human” is. “Geist” has the benefit of remaining in the realm of the ambiguous and the esoteric, and few would dare to claim total knowledge or ownership of it. This ambiguity keep the research field open. Additionally using an emic term makes sense to informants, since the research conglomerate runs in German in a German speaking research environment.
(Photo from Geisterzug 2024 by Barbara Sailer, used with permission)
Now, what makes less obvious sense at the field is the term “data”. It is not entirely surprising that Humanities scholars might push back against this concept as it is received in our time and age: there are few Excel sheets, no tech corporations or big business, no experiments, no sensors, and statistics, errors and sample validity are peripheral concerns, with perhaps the exception in specialized Digital Humanities (German academia has chosen the de-Geistified term, as far as I understand). However, nobody would deny that inductive reasoning is in full effect throughout the Humanities: literary historians, say, wouldn’t feel the need to read all the books from 16th century to say something plausible about 16th century literature, and a selection of interesting artists would be used to theorize worldviews of an æsthetic movement. What then are these data the Humanities have, and which produces (or perhaps repair, maintain and care for, as was suggested later during the conversation) the Geist?
Praxeologists such as Annamarie Mol insists that data always reduces to data practices. Now then, to see how the-sausage-known-as-Geist gets made, the imperative is to go look at data practices of Humanities scholars, ie. Geisteswissenschaftler:innen. This is the work Fabian does, going beyond/underneath semantics and fabrication of language. Extending the notion of “data” to cover materials such as texts, thoughts, literary references and objects – or rather their material inscriptions in notebooks, digital artworks and artists own statements about them, postit notes, medieval manuscripts and their digital twins, books and their Zotero entries, the pile of PDF debris growing skyward – lead to where Wissen about Geist is produced.
Based on what we heard from Fabian’s observation, interviews and workshops, to me a lot of the production the elusive Geist honestly sounds like desktop file management – we heard of all the highly relatable experiences of contemporary, project-based white-collar computer life(worlds): typing lists in commodity word processor programs, library collection management work, keeping track of memos, saving and recalling URLs, taking screenshots, keyword searching transcripts, organizing folders of the computer, and of course the never ending hoarding of PDFs (well, all of this is highly relevant for my own interests haha). Fabians theorybuilding is in the works, but I dare to predict that if these are the data processes from which the Geist arises, it will assume the material form of text on computer screen… an aspirational funding application for the next research project, perhaps… to keep the circle of reproduction of the Geist in perpetual movement. Zeitgeisteswissenschaften, you know.
I would like to thank Fabian for sharing his work. What was really nice was the rich conversation which followed, I believe due in part due to the productive and evocative ambiguity of the term “Geist”, and in part due to the relatability of the data practices we heard about. Besides questions and comments (and some of our besserwisserisms) on the insistence on the term “data” as already noted above, we compared Fabian’s line of reasoning with other areas of academic work in sciences of the social, the natural, the computer as well as the arts and mathematics which STS has strong tradition in. However, the “science in action” of Humanities has largely been ignored. Thanks Fabian for working on that! And yes, there were some Hegel jokes 👻