Finn Arne Jørgensen
At some point in the near future, information will effortlessly flow between ourselves, the rest of the world, and the technologies we surround ourselves with. Sensors, networks, and computational capabilities will have been woven into the fabric of everyday life. Technology will do our bidding without us even having to ask, reading our intentions and divining our wishes as if through magic. Such are the countless visions of the Internet of Things that can be found in the advertisements and reports of many contemporary technology companies. One compelling example is Corning Incorporated’s prize-winning “A Day Made of Glass” short film (2011), in which the glass that Corning produces serves as a slick and seductive interface between people and the Internet of Things. In the video, we follow a family through an entire day, witnessing how glass surfaces displaying customized information function like a natural, almost irresistible, way for them to interact with the Internet of Things.
Since its coining around the turn of the millennium, the concept of “the Internet of Things” has gained traction as a way of both describing and prescribing the frictionless and technologically connected world we can see in “A Day Made of Glass.” This chapter will discuss the Internet of Things in two ways: First, as a term describing the interconnectedness of technological artifacts through sensors and communication networks, and second, as a set of design fictions about how these artifacts are changing the world. These two interpretations are interwoven – since the technological underpinnings cannot be separated from the visions of future applications, we need to understand both the technical and the cultural aspects of the Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things can be seen as a cluster of ideas about the future of technology that pulls in many different directions. We can find both complementary and divergent portrayals of art, interventions, and hacking on the one hand – and corporate control, innovation, and monetization on the other. A common theme is that the Internet of Things allows anything and anyone to connect in any possible way, suggesting that as a technological infrastructure, the Internet of Things is open, neutral, and frictionless. This chapter challenges such a view of technology. Building on concepts from science and technology studies (STS), I discuss the making of standards, technologies, and discourses around the Internet of Things, particularly focusing on agency, power, and human relations, asking how potential areas of application have been imagined, visualized, and embedded in technological designs and standards, including the digital humanities.
When Kevin Ashton coined the term Internet of Things in 1999, he envisioned a world where all things were tagged with a unique identifier that could be queried over the Internet (Ashton, 2009). Ashton – cofounder and executive director of MIT’s Auto-ID Center – built upon an older set of visions about ubiquitous computing (often shortened to ubicomp) in formulating his idea. Ubiquitous computing “describes a set of processes where information technology has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities,” to such an extent that this layer of information technology becomes almost invisible, even taken for granted, by the users (Dodson, 2008:7). In Ashton’s implementation of the ubiquitous computing future, things automatically gather and exchange information about the world around them using radio-frequency identification (RFID), sensors, tagging, and communication networks, bridging the world of physical things with the Internet.
This is, however, only one of many possible interpretations of the Internet of Things, and there is no clear and unanimous definition of the term. We can think of it as an umbrella term covering a series of emerging practices and standards. The idea of “smartness” is central – of smart things that don’t just collect information, but also act independently on that information (EpoSS, 2008). Connecting devices, including those that were previously not connected, to one another is also a key idea. Bruce Sterling (2005) calls the things of the Internet of Things “spimes,” objects that can be tracked through space and time throughout their lifetime. Cory Doctorow (2005) eloquently describes a spime as a “location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities.” Spimes interact with the lives of people in complicated and often controversial ways, creating what Sterling (2004) calls “spime wranglers,” the “class of people willing to hassle with Spimes.” While this chapter is less concerned with the technical architecture of the Internet of Things than with the implications of a society permeated by the Internet of Things, we need to understand some of the basic elements of how it is all supposed to work. One way of gaining this understanding is to look at envisioned use areas.
Many visions of future applications take daily life situations as their starting point, extrapolating from them a set of technical capabilities or characteristics. One frequently encountered example – we can even call it a trope of the Internet of Things – that dates as far back as the late 1990s is the smart fridge that will monitor its contents, write shopping lists, and even suggest meals based on current food supplies. Such visions are behind the relatively recent entry of electronics companies like LG and Samsung into the slowly-moving domestic appliance market. These refrigerators have been commercially unsuccessful, partly because they are very expensive and partly because consumers simply do not see a need for this functionality, yet developers and engineers seem reluctant to let go of the idea. We will return to the engaged engineers and disinterested users of the Internet of Things in a bit.
Energy use monitoring has become a more successful implementation of Internet of Things approaches. Real-time monitoring and visualization of energy use is becoming increasingly common in households and commercial buildings alike, and the next step in the logic of the Internet of Things is to predict and automate. The Nest Learning Thermostat is one example that has been relatively successful (to the point where Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion in 2014), building on the premise that consumers want programmable thermostats, but can’t be bothered to do the actual programming. The networked, sleek, and attractive Nest thermostat learns the preferences of its users over time. After the initial learning period, it can both differentiate between day and night and recognize the difference between weekday and weekend patterns. An embedded motion sensor allows for lower temperatures where there’s no one around. In other words, the Nest thermostat monitors the inhabitants of the house and their habits in order to dynamically adjust the temperature for maximum comfort and minimum energy consumption, without requiring active user involvement beyond the initial learning period. Accompanying smartphone apps enable manual control and detailed logs as well. The Nest is connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi, enabling sharing of information between multiple Nest devices in the same household, but also provides a way for Nest (and now Google) to use the collected data to improve their product. Google’s move into the household automation market signals a continued interest in Internet of Things products and solutions that stay close to home. Smart power grids are also appearing, whole energy infrastructures capable of gathering and acting on information about consumer behavior and fluctuating energy supplies in order to improve the efficiency and reliability of power distribution (Verbong et al., 2013). From an energy efficiency and sustainable development point of view, such automated interaction with the everyday lives of people definitely holds considerable potential.
Another set of emerging technologies centers on the interaction of the body and the Internet of Things. The so-called “Quantified Self Movement” aims to measure all aspects of our individual everyday lives, including food intake, steps walked, sleep patterns, and even mood, with the intention of optimizing and hacking habits and lifestyles (Swan, 2012). A plethora of consumer products in this category have appeared on the market in the last few years, particularly activity monitors such as the Fitbit, Jawbone UP, Nike+ Fuelband, Pebble, and the Samsung Gear Fit. Also other forms of wearable computing promise to blur the boundary between body and technology, in particular Google Glass and the Apple Watch. Yet, the ubiquitous smartphone is perhaps the best example of an already existing Internet of Things device we have – we always have one with us, it is propped full of sensors and connectivity options, and often functions as a hub for other devices.
Location-awareness is a central feature of the Internet of Things. Miniaturized global positioning system (GPS) sensors combined with digital maps and Wi-Fi triangulation have made geolocation popular among consumers. We can already find smart parking spaces that have embedded sensors that let users (or rather, a commercial middleman) know when it’s available. Geofences, where actions are triggered when the users move into a particular space, also belong in this category. The Philips Hue light bulb can turn on when your smartphone enters the room, and can use more sophisticated triggers that consider the time of the day, and other factors. These interactions between people and technology are scriptable, where the user ideally will be presented with some kind of interface to these scripts, prompting a Wired magazine journalist to label it “The Programmable World.” Here, the journalist waxed poetic when thinking about how, as soon as we get enough Things on the Internet of Things, it becomes “a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance” (Wasik, 2013).
It is hard to discuss the Internet of Things without considering the security and privacy concerns that inevitably come with the voracious data collection and exchange of spimes, especially considering the global controversy over National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance that started, post-Snowden, in 2013. Security obviously becomes a concern when all the devices of the Internet of Things are gateways to personal information, potentially allowing malicious code to enter the technologies that surround us. When an Internet security firm analyzed a spam email campaign, they found evidence of more than 100,000 hacked Internet of Things appliances, including refrigerators, sending out this mail (Proofpoint, 2014); a smart fridge can not only store spam, but also email it. When we consider that more dangerous things than refrigerators are also connected to the Internet, such as the nuclear installations that the Stuxnet computer virus targeted, there’s no doubt that there’s also an “Internet of Things to Worry About” out there (Mittal, 2011).
The actual development of the Internet of Things as concrete technologies and standards is to a large degree driven by business interests. During the last decade, a number of commercial forecasts and research reports have subscribed to this projected trajectory by mapping out the many envisioned applications of a fully realized Internet of Things (European Commission, 2009; Sundmaeker et al., 2010; Chui et al., 2010). The 2001 Forrester Report on “The X Internet” concluded that the Internet was boring, dumb, and isolated – “so remote from the real world that the media calls it by a different name – cyberspace” (Forrester Research, 2001). By looking at current trends, the report speculated that smart devices would extend the Internet from its current configuration into the physical world. The Internet of Things seems to be taken for granted as a vision of the future, but one that will “probably require dramatic changes in systems, architectures and communications … middleware, applications support, MAC, data processing, semantic computing and search capabilities, and even low-power technologies” (Yan et al., 2008: vii). In this interpretation, fully realizing the Internet of Things becomes merely a matter of technological implementation. Yet, the question of implementation and its consequences cannot be separated from its social, cultural, and political components, and thus something that the digital humanities should play close attention to.
In contemporary usage, the Internet of Things has become a generic term that stands for a whole set of visions of the future, often referencing or inspired by science fiction films such as Minority Report. These films draw a picture of a believable future, inhabited by people using technological artifacts that have not yet been invented, but that make sense in a way that we can recognize. This projection of current technological possibilities into a vision of future society is an inseparable part of the Internet of Things. Most news reports of the Internet of Things are written in the future tense: this and this will happen, they argue, in the not too distant future (as evidenced by Wikipedia’s (undated) editorial caveat for its Internet of Things entry: “This article possibly contains unsourced predictions, speculative material, or accounts of events that might not occur”). The devices we see now are only the beginning, and the future they promise is just around the corner. But it has been just around the corner for a long time.
This shifting of perspectives between the past, present, and future is common when discussing the Internet of Things. “We now inhabit the future imagined by [ubicomp’s] pioneers,” observe Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish (2007) in an article exploring the state of ubiquitous computing. They define this field as unusual within the computer sciences in that it is not defined by technological problems, but rather by a vision of future possibilities. The Internet of Things can be seen as the latest iteration of this ubiquitous computing vision, a new take on an old future. We find similar observations in another foundational article by Mark Weiser (1991) on “the computer for the twenty-first century,” which both articulated a research agenda and set a rhetorical tone for a particular technological future. Such visions both predict the future and guide the development of future technologies, and this is by no means unique to the Internet of Things. Yet, Bell and Dourish (2007) criticize this view of technological development by arguing that placing ubiquitous computing in the proximate future renders contemporary practice irrelevant. This is where we get a gap or a mismatch between present technological capabilities and social implementation of the same technologies. The promoters of ubiquitous computing considered the implementation of their technological vision someone else’s problem.
To properly understand the Internet of Things, we need to look at its storytellers, the ones selling the idea of the connected future. Technologies are always paired with stories of their use, as historian of technology David Nye (2003, 2006) demonstrates throughout his work. Design fiction can briefly be described as stories of the use of future technologies. Bruce Sterling was perhaps the first to use the term, though others have done much to develop it as an analytical concept, such as Julian Bleecker (2009), who calls design fiction an entanglement of “design, science, fact and fiction.” Design fictions create a discursive space in which new futures might emerge, a “deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” The key concept here is “diegetic,” implying that the technologies within the design fiction “exist as ‘real’ objects … that function properly and which people actually use.” (Kirby, 2010:43). For instance, music playing from a radio in the movie is one such example of diegetic objects, while the movie soundtrack – with music that you as a viewer can hear but not the people on the screen – does not qualify as diegetic (Tannenbaum, undated). It needs to be a fully realized part of the fictional world.
A key insight of design fiction is that design does something with the world. It is part of what serves to insert a product into an existing network of potential users, enabling them to do particular things in particular ways, but also influencing their way of thinking about the world. As Sterling (undated) argues, “the point of a design fiction is to seize public attention, to affect the future thinking of the viewers, and to provoke the viral spread of the message.” We can return to the smart fridge trying to gain entry into the kitchens of the world, presenting a twofold argument to its potential users that their lives would be better if they upgraded their fridge, and that it in any case is more or less inevitable that fridges will become smart and networked in the future.
Similar narrative trajectories appear in the history of the smart house, one of the most imagined sites for the implementation of the Internet of Things, from the pre-Internet push-button housewives of the 1960s to the houses of the imagined near future that already know when a button needs to be pushed (Heckman, 2008). These smart houses are infused with the networked sensors of the Internet of Things, but very few have seen any significant market adoption. Instead, they were prototype houses, laboratories, and testing grounds for particularly new information technology. Gender and technology scholars have pointed out that smart homes are also heavily gendered (Cowan, 1985; Wajcman, 2000). They are often designed by men, for women, around functionality that the designer thought sounded useful rather than based on actual use patterns and needs. As a result, the designs often center on information and communication technologies rather than targeting the actual labor that takes place in the home (Berg, 1999). The future changes rapidly, however, as demonstrated by the Norwegian Folk Museum’s decision to acquire and exhibit Telenor’s smart house from 2001 when the company shut down what they considered a dated vision of the future (Maihaugen, undated). Today, such visions of the smart house are still around, but the smartness has to a large degree shifted over to smart gadgets such as the Nest thermostat, the Hue light bulb, and the one smartphone to rule them all. The visionary smart houses were prototypes that are now being translated into concrete consumer products, within the reach of ordinary consumers who are not necessarily looking to replace their whole house. Functioning as spimes, these gadgets are gateways to a future Internet of Things, slowly extending its reach by connecting people and devices throughout the world.
The Internet of Things, as many other design fictions, is often accompanied by technological boosterism as well as considerable enthusiasm from its creators, but generally doesn’t attempt to pry into the more problematic implications of a connected world. We should ask, however, exactly which problem such connectedness aims to solve, and for whom. Many of the more visionary explorations of the Internet of Things aim at addressing social challenges, particularly surrounding health and environmental issues (e.g., Smith, 2012). Commendable as such ambitions might be, they also demonstrate that the Internet of Things easily can fall prey to what Evgeny Morozov (2013) calls solutionism. Just because something is technologically possible doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, as Morozov enjoys pointing out. Nor are potentially disruptive and revolutionary new technologies necessarily transformative for all users. We see this clearly in the Achilles heel of smart kitchens, for instance. The actual labor that takes place in the kitchen is a heavily gendered issue that domestic design fictions generally ignore (Cowan, 1985; Berg, 1999).
New technologies come paired with stories of their future applications. The emerging clusters of objects, standards, and digital applications that we label “the Internet of Things” cannot be separated from its many design fictions, but these also reveal the complex sociotechnical worlds they are part of. In other words, the Things of the Internet of Things are never just things; they are assemblages of issues and controversies, entangling and connecting values, interests, and actors, never in isolation from the rest of society. An object does not have to be smart and networked in order to do this, but the Internet of Things does serve to draw our attention to both the agency of objects and our delegation of tasks to the material world.
The Internet of Things is a massive conglomerate of billions of networked objects, wrapped up in visionary projections of a networked and transformed world. The scale and scope of the idea is breathtaking, yet the devil is in the details. I suggested in the introduction that the Internet of Things has two different interpretations: first as interconnected technological artifacts, second as a set of design fictions about how these artifacts are changing the world. Both of these interpretations are projected into the future, and we can by no means take it for granted what shape this future will take, and what our place as agents will be. This, I believe, has considerable implications for the place of the Internet of Things within the big tent of the digital humanities.
In making technological artifacts networked and traceable in space and time, the Internet of Things opens up for digital humanities projects that reach out of our computers and into the physical world. In the programmable world of the Internet of Things, the digital gets absolutely physical, and thus blurs the boundaries between what counts as a computer and what does not. We see this exemplified in projects that combine art and critical making such as Garnet Hertz’s “FLY (http://139.142.46.159)” (2001), a fly with an implanted webserver. The networked fly, potentially a flying spime except that it was connected to the Internet through an Ethernet cable and thus was unable to fly, prompts us to question the nonhuman viewpoint of spimes. What do they see? How do they process what they see? How do spimes interact with the world? If we are to take the design fictions of the Internet of Things seriously, digital humanists should include not just computers, but also networked toasters, light bulbs, smart fridges, digital jewelry, cars, and yes, even flies, within the scope of their scholarship. These are all simultaneously spimes connected to the Internet of Things as well as cultural, social, and political objects that intersect with our lives.
The digital humanities needs to engage with both technology development and the cultural narratives of design fictions. If the Internet of Things consists of things talking to each other, shouldn’t we be able to take part in this conversation in one way or another? One task of the digital humanities should be finding ways of inserting people into the conversation. This calls for openness, for hacking, for making and imagining. The spime-wrangler that Bruce Sterling writes into existence is a good model for digital humanities scholars to emulate. For the digital humanities, it is equally important to imagine and develop new and unexpected ways for things to fit together, but also to push things to their breaking point and examine the pieces that remain. It all comes down to the fact that all technology is social (Fischer, 2014). The Internet of Things is not merely a collection of technical protocols, but a full Society of Things.
The Internet of Things consists of smart devices that talk to each other, ideally both mirroring and shaping human behaviors and values. There is a complex process of mutual shaping going on in this relationship, what STS scholars call co-production (Jasanoff, 2004). The Internet of Things prompts us to consider the relationship between people and data. The purpose of many of the elements envisioned in the Internet of Things is to automate the routine actions of everyday life. This can free up time and attention for people to engage in more meaningful activities. But what if those actions are part of who we are? The routine actions and small decisions of everyday life are, in fact, meaning-making actions (Shove et al., 2007). By delegating these to technology and predictive algorithms, are we weaving technology into the fabric of our lives or unraveling this fabric? In the Internet of Things, we not only delegate the gathering and processing of vast amounts of information to computers, but also the right to act on that information.
Such delegations to technology are not in any way new, as demonstrated by Bruno Latour in his classic essay on “the sociology of a door-closer” (Johnson, 1988). In fact, Latour’s vocabulary seems to be made for untangling the complex interactions between humans and nonhumans that surround the Internet of Things. Following Latour’s insistence that if we want to know what a nonhuman does, “simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present” (Johnson, 1988:299), it would be easy to conclude that delegation is simply replacing one or more human actions with a technology that can do the same thing in a more efficient manner. Yet, in this process of offloading tasks to the Internet of Things, new possibilities come into being, some as synergetic effects and others as unintended consequences.
Let us return to the smart refrigerator to unpack the layers of delegations, valuations, and social relations inherent in its algorithms. Say that you are one of the rare people who have a smart fridge in your kitchen, and that you leave it up to the kitchen to suggest new recipes and write shopping lists, even order groceries online directly from the store. We can assume that the algorithms directing its predictive choices might allow for some kind of user feedback and preferences, as in “no, I do not want this for dinner today,” “pick ecological ingredients wherever possible,” or “pick the cheapest ingredients,” but what is the fridge to do when it hears from the smart bathroom scales that its owner’s weight keeps increasing? Will governments require or encourage smart fridges to consider public health advice? In short, whose preferences and values have been delegated to the smart fridge, and which valuations do users reserve for themselves? When a computer anticipates your needs, the interface disappears, even the computer (Weiser, 1991). The Internet of Things is a fundamentally different way of interacting with computers, but one that requires even more awareness of the delegation of morality that takes place. Actions and ethics are profoundly interrelated, so when we delegate actions and agency to technology (which we have done for a long time) we are also delegating ethics. The question of training computers to make ethical judgments is currently facing Google’s self-driving cars – if a car is in a situation where it needs to make an evasive maneuver that would likely kill one person in order to save two other people, what should it do? Whenever you automate something like this, you not only embed particular interpretations, values, and power relations in a design, but also filter away other ways of doing or valuing things. The processes through which these filters act upon the world are not always transparent and open for evaluation, something that becomes very clear in the rapidly growing commercial arena that the Internet of Things is.
Deeper consideration of “A Day Made of Glass,” smart fridges, and other design fictions for the Internet of Things – in particular the stories that are not being told – can provide much insight about the place of digital technologies in contemporary society. They present us with a powerful vision of the future of a programmable world, and as such, something that humanities scholars should engage with, whether or not you choose to call yourself a digital humanist. The obviously affluent family of “A Day Made of Glass” is never overwhelmed by the information they are presented with, which has been filtered by some form of algorithm that is able to judge which information is necessary at any given time. They interact with very few people outside the screen. In fact, the urban world they inhabit seems rather empty and sterile. A screen shows us a mediated traffic congestion that is avoided when the car’s GPS system guides the driver down empty side streets instead. What we are presented with is a world inhabited by things rather than people. Steven J. Jackson (2014) questions the world that much contemporary information technology seems to inhabit. “Is it the imaginary nineteenth-century world of progress and advance, novelty and invention, open frontiers of development?” he asks, pointing to a vision of the world that is similar to this frictionless future of the Internet of Things. Or is it “the twenty-first-century world of risk and uncertainty, growth and decay, and fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown?” (Jackson, 2014:221). While it should not necessarily be the main task of the humanities to point out the depressing state of the world, it would be a useful reminder that the Internet of Things needs to find its place in a broken and messy world, full of tensions, conflicts, constraints, values, power relations, all of which are unevenly distributed.
The frictionless and smooth world we are presented with in “A Day Made of Glass” may be a seductive vision of the Internet of Things. Wrangling with spimes allows us to untangle the layers of delegations and valuations inherent in the Internet of Things in a way that sweeping visions cannot. Like all infrastructural technologies, the Internet of Things requires maintenance, modification, mediation, and domestication to become technologies that we can live with. Jackson argues that we should take breakdown, dissolution, and change as our starting point rather than innovation, development, and design. The world is constantly falling apart, but it is also constantly being repaired, reinvented, reconfigured, and reassembled. Building on Janet Abbate’s work on the history of the early Internet (2000), Jackson argues that the Internet grew by breaking, “bumping up against the limits of existing protocols and practices and working around them, leaving behind almost by accident some of the properties that we now enumerate as key and distinctive virtues of the Internet” (Jackson, 2014:228).
Such breaking points open up for digital humanities investigations into the Internet of Things. Mark Sample’s “Station 51000” Twitterbot (2013) is one example of how one can engage with such breaking points. He presents us with a floating spime lost at sea, infused with a certain humanity through Markov-chained content from Melville’s Moby-Dick. Station 51000 is a data buoy that collects environmental data (wind direction, speed, and gust; atmospheric pressure; air and water temperature) for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (undated). Originally moored outside Hawaii, it went adrift in early 2013 but still continues transmitting data. However, since these buoys are supposed to be fixed in one place, it has no GPS sensor and there is no way of knowing exactly where it is. Sample’s ingenious mashup lets the buoy become a sort of storyteller, sounding as lost and unmoored as the data it generates. On May 14, 2014, for instance, the lost buoy tweeted: “Note the air pressure at 30.09 inches and falling. Who in the lawless seas. It’s a Hyperborean winter scene” (Station 51000, 2014). This is the Internet of Things, adrift, collecting and transmitting broken data to whoever wants to listen. In “Station 51000,” Sample wrangles with a floating spime, engaging in what Ian Bogost calls carpentry – “constructing artifacts as a philosophical practice,” a form of philosophical inquiry through making rather than writing (Bogost, 2012:92). As Sample (2014) has argued, one role for the humanities is to think difficult thoughts, facing and preserving ambiguities rather than striving to eliminate them. The Internet of Things is full of ambiguities and conflicting perspectives that cannot be easily resolved. The more data the Internet of Things generates, the more important the humanistic context of that data becomes. Spimes and their design fictions hold great potential – if critically and carefully deployed – for a wide range of applications in the digital humanities. Scholars like Mark Sample and Garnet Hertz have already begun actively seeking out the breaking points of connected, smart technologies. This hacking and wrangling of the Internet of Things can happen both on the technological and the narrative level, through building and breaking, introducing friction, and exploring broken data, all while questioning its meaning and significance.
The Internet of Things is just around the corner. It has been so for a while and will most likely continue to be so. In striving for the new, however, we should not be unprepared for the shock of the old. We never start from nothing. Infrastructures like the Internet of Things must function in the world as it is, layered with history, filled with elements that don’t fit. The underlying standards and use patterns of the Internet of Things will likely reflect the same boundaries and power relationships as the rest of the world. We need to reflect upon the past visions of the future. When something becomes ubiquitous and pervasive, it also becomes invisible and taken for granted. One way to open this taken-for-grantedness up for analysis is to start by looking at times and places when things were otherwise, before it became ubiquitous. Not only do spimes enable awareness of ongoing practices and processes in the world; they also provide an entry point for engaging with these processes. It is up to digital humanists to meet the challenge of wrangling with these spimes in meaningful ways.