Digital Humanities in Brazil: the path of a growing culture of information visibility

Information in the 21st century has become visual. Data followed by ways of visualizing them in graphic aspects; hyperdocuments in which writings, images and videos are hyperconnected into a single technical-informational and communicational rhetoric. In this scenario, literary or computational languages are more and more mediated by the screens. Screens that, according to Bernard Stiegler (2006), plays a central role in the cultural and political scenario of the world.

In an era marked by a kind of "algorithmic governmentality" (ROUVROY and BERNS, 2013), the recrudescence of a visuocentric culture has definitely impacted our forms of expression, communication and search for information. In the case of the humanities, the approach to the digital has increasingly integrated the praxis of scholars despite the fact that it has not yet become part of their syllabuses. 

In this respect, we highlight the important role of Laboratories and research groups dedicated to the Digital Humanities in the efforts to develop initiatives for the production of computational skills among Humanities researchers in Brazil. Nevertheless, such initiatives cannot be considered without a critical vision since they can attend to a digital fetishism without really understanding what Digital Humanities are. 

Guy Débord, in "The Society of the Spectacle" (2005), says that: "What appears is good, what is good appears". 

In light of his affirmation it is necessary to ask ourselves what role all these artifacts and tools play so that we can create a new "spectacle" of graphic resources, clouds, and networks where more and more data are combined in an unprecedented myriad of information and where scientific communication is reified by the digital shape in which we make it visible.

We also need to ask how Brazil, full of social actors, groups and institutions historically marked by invisibilities, can benefit from the use of these digital technologies capable of modifying both the perspective of the object, as well as its methodology, or the product of research in the extensive field of Humanities that go through changes of an epistemological, discursive and structural disciplinary kind.

References

DÉBORD, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press, 2005.

ROUVROY, Antoinette; BERNS, Thomas. Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d'émancipation: Le disparate comme condition d'inpiduation par la relation? Réseaux, v. 177, n. 1, p. 163, 2013. Disponible: <https://www.cairn.info/revue-reseaux-2013-1-page-163.htm>. Access mars 03 2019.

STIEGLER, Bernard. La télécratie contre la démocratie: lettre ouverte aux représentants politiques. Paris: Flamarion, 2006.