Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities

Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories

Roger Whitson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317509103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la ciencia ficción

Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China.

Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzón into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.

1 Difference Engines

Plan 28 is one of the most complex retrocomputing projects ever devised. Begun by John Graham-Cunning in 2010, Plan 28 promises nothing less than the construction of Charles Babbage’s unrealized mechanical computer: the analytical engine. In his TedX Talk given to Imperial College, Graham-Cunning calls the analytical engine “the greatest machine that never was”: a device that processed commands and performed Boolean logic, but was also “as large as a steam locomotive” (TedX). While Babbage had originally proposed his previously designed difference engine in order to help tabulate polynomial functions for use by shipping navigators and scientists, the analytical engine was seen as a more general purpose device. Unfortunately, Babbage’s work on the analytical engine was hampered by a lack of funding and finally halted by his death in 1871. According to Allan Bromley, only an unfinished “model of a simple mill and printing mechanism” remained (90). Babbage’s designs for the engine included all of the components of modern-day computers: punch cards designed after Joseph-Marie Janquard’s automatic textile loom; an output mechanism that had a printer, a plotter for graphs, and a Plaster of Paris mold which created stereotype tables; a memory system that held intermediate mathematical results in a set of number axes; and a central processing unit that performed algorithms and made decisions based upon the mechanism of a run-up lever. Eric Roberts explains that the run-up lever “switches from its normal down position into its up position based upon [whether] the sign on the result of the equation is different [than] the sign on the first number of the equation[,] [or] the resulting answer is greater than 50 digits long.” In each case, the run-up lever would change the behavior of the engine in order to perform decisions and initiate or end looping commands. Graham-Cunning explains that the analytical engine even had a bell, “there were actually instructions on the punch card that read ‘ring the bell.’ […] So, stop for a moment and imagine all those noises. This thing goes ‘click, click, clack,’ steam whistling through its parts, and then DING!”

The public campaign surrounding Plan 28 represents the enthusiasm by various non-academic publics for digital humanities projects based upon the nineteenth century. While the project is headed by the Computer Conservation Society and the design team includes the curator of the Computing Science Museum in London, Plan 28 also relies heavily upon crowdfunding and crowdsourced labor to translate Babbage’s plans into workable 3D models, and then print and manufacture its many parts. Further, a good amount of the design work on the models is speculative and conjectural. The reason for such speculative design work, as Adrian Johnson points out, is due to Babbage’s use of paper designs: “the cost of implementation, and the length of time needed to manufacture his design rendered physical prototyping and experimentation largely infeasible.” Johnson explains that unlike “[n]early all mechanical systems, from steam engines to internal combustion engines [whose] state space may be deduced by inspection of the engineering drawings which show their geometry,” Babbage’s engine integrated “complex time-dependent behavior” and “systems where the function transcends the components.” An executable program produces temporal functions whose formal effects depend upon electrical signals, and the complexity of these signals aren’t represented in Babbage’s designs.

Plan 28 is a publicly-funded digital humanities project that recreates Babbage’s nineteenth-century mechanical computer, and struggles with issues of storage, adaptation, emulation, and remediation with regards to historical computation. Babbage’s inability to visually replicate the proposed functions of the analytical engine means that Plan 28 must not only appeal to human publics to complete its project, it must also take into consideration the heterogeneous temporalities of Babbage’s device in order to emulate its time-dependent functions. The cybernetic entanglement of human agency and non-human, mechanistic temporality in Plan 28 illustrates the connection between steampunk alternate history and what Wolfgang Ernst calls “zeitkritik” or time-criticality. Ernst argues in “From Media History to Zeitkritik,” that the functionality of time-critical devices determines the framework of cultural history rather than the other way around. “Technical media are neither the apex nor the driving force of culture,” Ernst explains, “but rather a constitutive element of its history” (132–3). On the one hand, devices like computers can signify elements of human culture and ideology — such as the way 1980s business culture is replicated on graphical user interfaces and the design of early Macintosh computers. On the other hand, electrical signals and their microtemporalities constitute what Ernst calls a “non-discursive aspect” of cultural history: a temporal and programmable logic that determines the functionality of the digital clocks we see on our desktops along with those files, folders, and calendars (134). As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young puts it, “[d]igital media are not simply representations but machines for generating representations” (303). This means that cultural history, and even the cultural identity of a group recreating Babbage’s device, depends upon the signals and time-critical operations embedded within technical media to process and transmit culture. What we call participation, access, or representation is — in other words — largely dependent upon the signals processed within and transmitted between writing machines.

Ernst’s emphasis on processing when discussing time-criticality suggests that cultural history is contingent upon the effects of signals as they travel through the materialities of various media. Ernst’s notion of “chronopoeisis” exemplifies this emphasis on the time-critical signal, since he is primarily interested in media that make time, or “time-giving technologies” (Chronopoetics viii). While time-criticality marks a non-discursive or non-semiotic epistemology enabled by signal-generating devices, chronopoiesis designates the act in which these epistemologies are generated by various media. For Ernst, human beings historically became aware of history through an “acceleration of emphatic time perception” when an “epoch of industrial and political movements also subtly increased awareness of the smallest temporal moments” (Chronopoetics 37). The various measurements emerging with science and technology in the nineteenth century produced an awareness of smaller and smaller temporal phenomena and the smallest of these phenomena are not perceived directly, but only with the aid of electronic apparatuses. With this electronically-enhanced awareness, Ernst continues, comes a variety of time-critical experiments in science, literature, and film. He points specifically to the work of scientist Karl Ernst von Baer who, in the nineteenth century, suggested a correlation between “living time and the time of perception, so a compression of human life into 29 days would give rise to a thousandfold increase in nerve signal time” enabling both the observation of a passing bullet and the hearing of frequencies surpassing our current physiological capabilities (Chronopoetics 38). Whether or not Von Baer was correct is of little matter to Ernst, who argues only that a growing awareness of smaller and smaller units of time enables both the writing of narrative forms of history in the nineteenth century and the various experiments that would disrupt or deconstruct those narrative forms of temporal experience. History is not narrativized in chronopoetical devices, it is mathematically constructed into a sequence of discrete signals that can be detached, remixed, rearranged, and imagined in various other scales and contexts.

Alternate history in steampunk acts as an important cultural register of the temporal heterogeneity emerging out of time-criticality: an imaginative experiment merging an awareness of history with the idea that history can also be disrupted and manipulated. This chapter will explore the diverse temporalities of steampunk by looking at three separate cuts of history. Engaging these cuts in a non-linear fashion, I model how time-criticality tunnels between diverse historical experiences — moving backwards and then forwards in time. To theorize the relationship between alternate history and time-criticality, in other words, this chapter collects the resonances of various chronopoetic media as they process temporality in a very different fashion than human beings. First, I examine William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s steampunk novel The Difference Engine by taking seriously Gibson and Sterling’s claim that the novel is narrated by an artificial intelligence and considering it in light of computational agency and temporality. For me, the narratological complications of The Difference Engine attest to the novel’s interest in elucidating a form of alternate history that simulates computational time-criticality. The second section of the chapter considers the interplay between the mechanical element of escapement in clocks and the construction of computation in Babbage’s theories surrounding the difference engine. I explore how Babbage constructs capitalist and industrial forms of history by overlaying the time-criticality of escapement and its emphasis on efficiency onto human experiences. Finally, I end the chapter by looking at how designers and engineers remake the difference engine and transform the mechanisms and their temporal logic in the process of recreating the device. This chapter puts into relief the temporal differences between machines and human beings, as well as the literary constructions used to entangle them, to trace various contingent histories compressed together into nineteenth-century digital humanities.

Mechanical Time-Criticality

The finale of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) involves a jarring sequence of character sketches that are only tangentially related to the events described in the rest of the novel. Titled “Modus,” the section begins with a lecture by Ada Lovelace that elucidates a number of twentieth-century innovations in mathematics. Lovelace’s speech is speculative, but her ideas also reflect concepts that any reader versed in the history of computer science would recognize. “If we envision the entire system of Mathematics as a great Engine for proving theorems,” Lovelace continues, “then we must say, through the agency of the Modus, that such an Engine lives, and could indeed prove its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself” (478). The Modus is originally believed to be a gambling program devised by Lovelace that allows the user to win in any circumstance. Yet, surprisingly, the program turns out to demonstrate Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness and inconsistency theorems, in which, as Lovelace explains “any formal system must be both incomplete and unable to establish its own consistency.” Lovelace continues on the same page, “[t]he transfinite nature of the Byron conjectures were the ruination of the Grand Napolean; the Modus program initiated a series of nested loops, which, though difficult to establish, were yet more difficult to extinguish. The program ran, yet rendered its Engine useless!” (477). Gibson and Sterling’s own point seems impossible to ignore: that despite the incompleteness and inconsistency theorem, formal computational systems have the potential to develop self-reflexive forms of intelligence that exceed their original design.

The Difference Engine is presented in a series of iterative loops involving historical characters from the nineteenth century, as well as original characters and retrofuturistic machines. As Joseph Conte suggests, the novel is “arranged in a series of five iterations [instead of chapters], with the addition of an epilogue […], a final compiling of the program.” Gibson and Sterling’s novel, according to Conte, “performs something like an analytical engine in its iterations” (43). Patrick Jagoda, shows that these compilations mark “a temporal paradox of inhabiting history and not history” (64). Everyone from Lord Byron and John Keats to Sam Houston and Sybil Gerard from Benjamin Disraeli’s novel coexist in The Difference Engine with punchcard hackers called clackers, kinotrope screens made from spinning wood, and Gurney steam carriages that run without horses. Each of these characters and technologies are positioned in a world where Babbage and Lovelace manufactured the analytical engine and inaugurated the information age in nineteenth-century Britain. As with many MacGuffins in Gibson’s novels, the pursuit of the Modus strings the iterations of the novel together and provides continuity across a narrative that is more interested in world-building than plot. Yet, I argue that the MacGuffin has a more important role in enabling Gibson and Sterling’s worldbuilding novel to act as a translator between the human history readers recognize and the experiences of non-human objects and technologies that also populate the novel. In his book Shaping Things, Sterling argues that computation gives us the ability to analyze “trillions of catalogable, searchable, trackable trajectories: patterns of design, manufacturing, distribution and recycling that are maintained in fine-grained detail.” These tracks, according to Sterling, “are the microhistories of people with objects: they are the records of made things in their transition from raw material, through usability, to evanescence, and back again to raw material” (45). By moving from the experiences of its characters to meditations on alternate history technologies, The Difference Engine illustrates how technology generates what Sterling calls its own “little puddle of experience” (49). In short, Gibson and Sterling’s novel suggests that one way to understand these puddles — and with them the alterity of an artificial intelligence experiencing history — is by exploring the divergences of steampunk alternate history.

The culmination of The Difference Engine’s encounter with non-human history occurs in the Modus section, where the device’s artificial intelligence reflects upon various parts of the alternate London in which Gibson and Sterling’s novel takes place. As Sterling explains in an interview with Daniel Fischlin, Veronica Hollinger, and Andrew Taylor, the novel is not meant to be read as a human history. “The story purports to tell you that the narrative you have read is not a narrative in the ordinary sense;” Sterling explains, “rather it’s a long self-iteration as this thing attempts to boot up, which it does in the final exclamation point. […] [T]he author of the book is the narratron; it’s sitting there telling itself a novel as it studies its own origins.” Apart from the speech from Lady Byron, a few examples of the iterations of the Modus include:

• an advertisement from an 1830 issue of The Mechanics Magazine, lauding the free trade ideas of Babbage and calling on its readers to vote for him;

• a 1912 historical account of the crisis following the 1830 election, which depicts Byron leading a guerrilla class war against the government Tories and the aristocracy;

• miners recalling a moment during the war when they hid Babbage and Byron from the Tories;

• the church shooting of a person who gossips about Ada Lovelace’s gambling habits;

• the employing of John Keats by Laurence Oliphant to decode and copy the Modus punchcards.

These sections at the end create non-linear paths through the novel, reference various parts of Gibson and Sterling’s alternate nineteenth century, and enact a radical narratological shift from the largely plot-oriented structure of the previous iterations to a structure that emphasizes the non-human experience of compiling and processing each of The Difference Engine’s historical events into a signal. The signals processed by the Modus, in turn, comprise small puddles — to use Sterling’s word — of microtemporal history that it registers as it gains sentience. For instance, Edward Mallory’s adventure to rescue Ada Lovelace’s punchards from the luddites constitutes a good portion of the novel, and yet Mallory hardly appears at all in the Modus section — which tends to focus on many of the events happening around Mallory’s story: gossip regarding Ada Byron’s gambling, Oliphant’s attempt to learn the secrets of the Modus, as well as testimonies from a miner who worked with Mallory in his capacity as a paleontologist. In this way The Difference Engine suggests that as the Modus gains intelligence and consciousness, it has a very different understanding of time and history than the human beings narrating and experiencing the other events of the novel.

For me, Gibson and Sterling’s “Modus” section underlines some of the stakes of considering the time criticality of signal processing, as well as the difference between human and machine temporality that impacts the construction of alternate history narratives in steampunk. Digital signal processing is a procedure in computation whereby a message is transformed into electrical signals, transferred through a network and then reassembled as a copy of the message at another point. As Prio Prandori and Martin Vetterli explain, all signal processing involves “any manual or ‘mechanical’ operation which modifies, analyzes, or otherwise manipulates the information contained within a signal” and “operates on an abstract representation of a physical quantity and not the physical quantity itself” (1). Digital signal processing is a manipulation of a message’s original material artifact, it abstracts what is seen as the essential characteristics of a message and represents those characteristics in the signal that it uses to communicate to another point.

The process of abstracting information from the physical materiality of a message is achieved with what mathematical theorists call its proper equivalent class. The first description of an equivalence between analog and digital signals came in the form of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. The sampling theorem describes the bandwidth or information capacity that’s required to represent a given amount of analogue space, which is the physical space taken up by the flow of a signal through a medium. “If a function f(t) contains no frequencies higher than W cps,” Claude Shannon writes of the theorem, “it is completely determined by giving its ordinates at a series of points spaced 1/2W seconds apart” (448). This means, for example, if a sound wave “x(t)” has a frequency of 8 hertz, it requires discrete points of information spaced ⅛ seconds apart in order to be reconstructed adequately to resemble the original message. If the points are spaced further than ⅛ seconds apart, the result is aliasing: a term denoting noise in the wave, and often represented by pixelation on computer images.

Ken Steiglitz further refined the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem in his 1965 dissertation by discussing the “isomorphism” between digital and analog spaces and by arguing that “the theories of processing signals with linear time invariant realizable filters are identical in the continuous-time and discrete-time cases” (455–6). For Steiglitz, however, the identical nature of continuous and discrete signals is defined mathematically, not in terms of physicality. “The important property is that a digital computer can be used to implement the filtering operation,” Steiglitz reminds us, “the term numerical filter might be more appropriate” (456). Importantly, both the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem and Steiglitz’s work on digital and analog equivalence emphasize the inability of human subjects to physiologically perceive the difference between an original analog message and the message reconstructed using digital technology. As Shannon elaborates in “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” “[f]requently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Alternate Histories of the Digital Humanities
• 1 Difference Engines
• 2 Multicultural Techniques
• 3 Anthropogenic Computing
• 4 Dialectical Engines
• 5 Queer Publics
• Epilogue: Processual Histories
• Works Cited
• Index