Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 22.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-05-13 14:22:45+00:00
From: Yael Rice <yrice@amherst.edu>
Subject: CFP: The Urgency of the Digital (special journal issue)
Dear Colleagues,
A gentle reminder that the deadline to submit paper proposals for "The
Urgency of the Digital," a special issue of the /International Journal
of Islamic Architecture/ to be published in July 2025, is June 1,
2023. We welcome submissions from practitioners, urbanists, art
historians, specialists in literary and religious studies, archivists,
librarians, data scientists, software developers, anthropologists,
geographers, sociologists, and historians whose work resonates with the
topic. Proposal submissions and queries should be sent to
IJIA25Digital@gmail.com <mailto:IJIA25Digital@gmail.com>. Full CFP
pasted below and also linked here <https://t.co/zp2McghdEf>.
I would be grateful if you would re-share the CFP with colleagues and
any other interested parties and lists.
Best wishes,
Yael Rice
Yael Rice (she, her, hers)
Associate Professor of the History of Art & Asian Languages and
Civilizations
208 Fayerweather Hall
Amherst College
Amherst, MA 01002
Tel.: (413) 542-5520
-----
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Journal of Islamic Architecture (/IJIA/)
Special Issue: The Urgency of the Digital
Thematic volume planned for July 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: June 1, 2023
This special issue focuses on the critical and urgent use of digital
tools, interfaces, media, and methods for the study and design of
Islamic architecture, cities, and the built environment. Over recent
decades, architectural historians, architects, and other specialists of
the built environment have drawn increasingly on digitized databases,
digital data, and processing software to reimagine the history,
documentation, design, and construction of buildings, gardens, and
cities wholesale. Representations of historical, contemporary, razed and
never-built structures are now fully realizable, and massive corpora of
information that once took many months or years to sort can now be
analyzed in seconds. Yet, digital tools, infrastructures, and databases
bring their own set of concerns. Databases, like all archives, do not
merely contain information, they are information. And as such, they bear
the marks of the epistemologies that shape them. Digital files are
always remediated, meaning that they are the products of multiple human
interventions, just as analogue media are. Some of the platforms that
facilitate virtual reality simulations of architecture, cities, and
transcontinental migrations enjoy an uncomfortable kinship with the
pervasive governmental and private surveillance technologies in use
today. Artificial intelligence (AI) has enormous potential to transform
the way that architects, city planners, and historical preservationists
work, and yet racial, gendered, ethnic, and religious biases in the
datasets that machine-learning algorithms employ raise questions about
the ramifications of these undertakings. Digital frameworks enable more
expansive, multi-layered, and speculative investigations of buildings,
cities, and spaces, but they also demand rigorous scrutiny.
With computational tools, the many lengthy geographies in Arabic,
Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and other languages that scholars have long
mined for textual evidence of architectural, urban design, construction,
and migration practices can be analyzed at scale. This approach–what’s
known in digital humanities parlance as “distant reading”–permits the
identification of historical patterns, common literary forms, and
intellectual networks that might have eluded analogue methods. It
therefore allows texts to be understood as part of broader, interrelated
phenomena rather than as isolated works. The capacity for large-scale
textual processing may seem especially well-suited to works, like
geographies, that are themselves large-scale and densely packed with
information. However, many distant reading technologies have
historically privileged left-to-right and Roman scripts, and thus betray
disciplinary biases that require their own rumination and interpretation.
Endeavors underway to remedy these technological and hermeneutical
morasses can bring their own insights. For example, the aim of the
University of Maryland-based Open Islamicate Texts Initiative’s
Arabic-script Optical Character Recognition Project (OpenITI AOCP) is to
create technical infrastructure to process texts that use Arabic
scripts. Comprising a team of literary specialists, historians, and
computer scientists, this initiative models an interdisciplinary,
collaborative working approach that bears on how humanities scholars
form research hypotheses and conduct investigations. In such contexts,
digital work can be urgent, generative, and transformative.
Along similar lines, proposed articles might investigate how software
that was created for the analysis of French Gothic churches or the
drafting of architecture using English-language commands transfers (or
does not transfer) to the study and design of buildings in the Islamic
world. Authors might probe how the study of, for instance, madrasas or
gardens through the schemes of big data differs from finer-grained
investigations that focus on a single monument, or what it means to use
Cartesian coordinate systems to map realms that were perceived and
traversed historically through non-Cartesian lenses. The urgent use of
digital files and technologies to reconstruct the physical spaces where
crimes against humanity have occurred, like the Forensic Architecture
research group does, might also be taken up.
Digital databases and archives offer another avenue ripe for
investigation. Troves of image, sound, video, and text files are
seemingly but a click away. Yet, for many, digitized collections remain
out of reach due to paywalls, government censorship, copyright
restrictions, inadequate internet speeds, frequent brownouts, and a
reliance on monolingual (often English-language) interfaces. Migrants,
minorities, people with disabilities, and certain genders also face
obstacles accessing digital content online. We must then ask what it
means to study and reproduce digitized representations of buildings,
cities, and built environments of the Islamic world that are not
accessible to those who are, or once were, local to those places.
According to what paradigms are these data organized, and how are they
and their metadata made digitally findable? Digitization of archival
materials, for that matter, incurs enormous costs in terms of the use of
labor, skill, materials, and computer servers. Who is shouldering those
financial and ecological burdens, and why? And how are decisions made
regarding which files are prioritized for digitization?
This special issue encourages contributions that address the urgent
promises and risks that digital infrastructures, tools, and approaches
hold. We invite paper proposals that employ a wide spectrum of
approaches, including but not limited to spatial mapping, social network
analysis, distant reading, photogrammetry, 3D printing, virtual reality
and augmented reality simulators, humanities gaming, and electronic
publishing, among other topics addressing contexts in or involving the
Islamic world. Paper proposals may also examine how digital collections,
interfaces, and software bear on the study and design of Islamic
architecture, cities, and the built environment. Contributors are asked
to reflect on what the translation of sources and evidence into
electronic data entails, how these acts upend questions and procedures
that are fundamental to our fields, and what pressing limitations and
potentials the digital brings.
Proposals should work from the framework outlined above. We encourage
contributors to consider the themes of this special issue as they
pertain to less frequently represented geographies such as sub-Saharan
Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Submissions addressing
considerations of race, gender, migration, disability, and minority
communities are particularly welcome.
Questions that might be addressed by contributors to this special issue
might include:
1. What does it mean to investigate and design the built environment
through a data-centric lens? What do digital approaches offer
disciplines that are materially and pragmatically oriented? And how do
we maintain any critical distance from the digital when we are also
irretrievably and fully immersed within it?
2. How does the computer see architectural forms and styles? How do
large image datasets provide a corpus for reimagining architecture,
landscape, city planning, and historic preservation in the Islamic
world? What does AI—machine learning and its algorithms,
especially—bring to the design process?
3. What roles do digital databases and archives play in the design and
study of architecture in the Islamic world today? Who has ready access
to these materials, and why? How have earlier histories of
classification, information design, and computers come to bear on
contemporary naming authorities, information retrieval, and metadata
management?
4. How can (and should) computers and digital processes be used to
reconstitute buildings, cities, landscapes, and built environments that
have been destroyed, replaced, looted, or never excavated? Towards what
ends might these same technologies be employed to speculatively imagine
architecture that was never built, or to investigate state violence and
violations of human rights? What are the ethical and practical
implications of these enterprises?
5. How do digital technologies remediate architectural photographs,
plans, drawings, and other media, and what are the broader ramifications
of these processes? What connections, if any, do these phenomena have
with the histories of earlier media?
6. What are the promises and pitfalls of big data approaches to the
study of architecture and architectural history? How might current and
historical acts of state-sponsored surveillance, documentation, and data
science inflect and inform these endeavors?
7. In what ways are current digital tools and approaches like digital
mapping with GIS, distant reading, virtual reality, and artificial
intelligence suited—or ill-suited—to the study of architecture and space
in the Islamic world? How should the digital be leveraged towards more
emic ends, if at all?
8. How have digital technologies made previously “hidden” architectural
histories of marginalized communities more visible? What are the costs
and benefits of making information belonging (or that once belonged) to
vulnerable and underrepresented groups publicly accessible?
9. How might digital tools and processes bridge the study of the Islamic
built environment with that of other artifacts bearing pictorial
representations of architecture and space, such as manuscripts, printed
books, photographs, and ceramic tiles? How might the digital challenge
long-standing disciplinary boundaries that have removed architecture
from the study of portable media?
Articles offering historical and theoretical analysis (Design in Theory;
DiT) should be between 6000 and 8000 words. Those on design and practice
(Design in Practice; DiP) should be between 3000 and 4000 words.
Practitioners, urbanists, art historians, specialists in literary and
religious studies, archivists, librarians, data scientists, software
developers, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and historians
whose work resonates with the topic of this special issue are welcome to
contribute discussions that address the critical themes of the journal.
Collaboratively authored articles are also welcome.
Please send a title and a 400-word abstract to the guest editor, Yael Rice,
Amherst College (IJIA25Digital@gmail.com), by June 1,
2023. Authors of proposals will be contacted by July 1, 2023, and may
be requested to submit full article drafts for consideration by January
30, 2024. All submissions will undergo blind peer review, editing, and
revision. For detailed author instructions, please consult:
www.intellectbooks.com/ijia .
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