Abstract
The Politics of code. How digital representations and languages shape culture
Highlights
Digital languages and instruments are powerful tools for simplifying and enhancing the work of humanists and social scientists, they create new cultural representations and self-representations that transform both the epistemology and the practice of research.In particular, digital representations can influence and shape our cultural artefacts and everyday experiences in various ways
We will discuss three encoding tools widely used in the Humanities and Social Sciences communities: HTML, the de facto standard for encoding Web documents and pages, Unicode, an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers, and XML, which defines a set of rules for encoding documents
The evolution of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as a structural language and application standard of the World Wide Web has been largely shaped by forces outside of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international community assembled by Tim Berners-Lee ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web’
Summary
Digital languages and instruments are powerful tools for simplifying and enhancing the work of humanists and social scientists, they create new cultural representations and self-representations that transform both the epistemology and the practice of research. In our paper we will focus on this second aspect, and show some examples of how code and encodings are shaping the way we conceive and practise the work of reconstruction, conservation and representation of information structures and cultural artefacts. To this aim, we will discuss three encoding tools widely used in the Humanities and Social Sciences communities: HTML, the de facto standard for encoding Web documents and pages, Unicode, an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers, and XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which defines a set of rules for encoding documents
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