Introduction: Routledge handbook of the digital environmental humanities
Travis, C.; Dixon, D.P.; Bergmann, L.; Legg, R.; Crampsie, A. (2022). Introduction: Routledge handbook of the digital environmental humanities, in: Travis, C. et al. Routledge handbook of the digital environmental humanities. pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003082798-1
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| Authors | | Top |
- Travis, C.
- Dixon, D.P.
- Bergmann, L.
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| Abstract |
The etymology of the word digital in Western civilisation is traced back to the Latin digitus, denoting a “finger” or “toe,” as illustrated in Roman statesman Cicero's discussion of usury in Marcus Tullius Epistulae ad Atticum (68-44 bce). However, our human “digits” also facilitated interplays between inscription, tabulation and visualisation systems, creating ancient computational methods that shaped the development of Egyptian, African, Babylonian, Chinese, Indus Valley, Mississippian, Aztec, Mayan, Incan, and other Indigenous and Agricultural Revolution civilisations. It has been argued that our level of knowledge concerning the digital-computational transformation impacts of the last eight decades is currently at the stage where Earth systems research was 30 years ago. Discourses in ecocriticism, drawing on biophysicist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis' Gaian tropes, are exhibited in William Rueckert's conceptualisation of poetic recitation as part of “a larger system of energy exchanges where poems act like green plants, revitalising the ecosystem and the reader.” Increasing integration between the planet's litho-, hydro-, bio-, and atmosphere and technospheres ubiquitously populated with digital devices requires new foci on human-Earth systems research and the co-evolution, internal dynamics, and interactions between the arts, humanities, and sciences. In this regard, the emerging field of the DEH provides a common, dialectical space to create an ascending methodological helix to synthesise approaches which interpret, question, catalog, address, formulate, and provide avenues and networks for practical solutions to the wicked problem of global warming and contribute to building applied discourses to discussions of the Anthropocene. This introduction provides outlines and brief discussions about this handbook's six parts and their constituent chapters: “Overview,” “Voicing Indigeneity,” “Geopoetics and Performance,” “Species, Systems, Sustainability,” “Digital Chronicles of Environment, Literature, Cartography, and Time,” and “Algorithmic Landscaping.” |
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