Prompted by the emergence of interdisciplinary data science programs at major U.S. universities, Alan Liu’s latest [graduate seminar](https://alanyliu.org/course/english-238-the-humanities-and-data-science-fall-2019/) posits data science as the new liberal arts, a universal and totalizing form of knowledge that touches all disciplines, cultures, and histories. With this massive transition (or, more pessimistically, overhaul) of the liberal arts framework, data science fundamentally alters not only traditional disciplines of study but also and intrinsically, global power structures, economic modes, subjectivities, and forms of resistance/revolution. Without imposing a cause-and-effect relationship, this post ruminates on the emerging constellation of paradigmatic shifts from liberal arts to data arts and from the liberal humanist subject to the posthuman or cyborg, alongside transformations in the structuring and dissemination of knowledge.

At the crossroads of literature and games, Interactive Fiction (IF) has long attracted scholars of literary studies, game studies, and computer science. Also known as "text-based adventure games," IF preceded graphical home computer games, taking place in the textual interface of the command line. The computer provides a textual description of the game world and the player inputs commands through a text parser in order to direct the protagonist through this textual environment. Underneath, there's lots of code, but on the surface, there's only the ebb and flow of natural language, of text. Almost all of IF criticism focuses on the code below (Pias) or the player's interaction (Aarseth) or the code implied in the player's interaction (Douglass)--but what if we directed our attention instead only to this textual surface, fishing it out from the source files and leaving (or banishing) the code and player in the depths?

In my previous post "Back to the Screen," I examined the impetus in game studies (and media studies writ large) to "go deeper," and explore the ostensibly "hidden" layers of games--the software and hardware underlying the content. For these scholars, content functions similar to ideology in orthodox Marxism, hiding or otherwise obscuring the real processes and relations of, in this case, the gamic world. While this may very well be the case for most games, this post considers a "critical hacking" genre of video games in which, far from hidden, code and other computational infrastructures appear front and center on the screen itself. While perhaps starting as merely representations, the development of this genre (a history of which will require a future blog post) appears to reach its apotheosis in games like "Quadrilateral Cowboy" and, especially, "else Heart.Break()," in which the user interacts with fully functioning computational infrastructures that blur the divisions between content and medium, representation and real. Examining "else Heart.Break()" as a case study, this post explores the theoretical implications and potential politics of a game that opens up its own infrastructure, inviting in the player as co-constructor.

This blogpost is an elaboration on ideas presented in my starter kit for an infrastructural approach to game studies developed for Alan Liu's Critical Infrastructures course at UCSB. Taking off from Liu's brilliant conceptualization of the field, this post attempts to re-think a particular subset of DH and New Media Studies--game studies--in relation to critical infrastructure studies, and vice versa. In assessing the media ecology of our present moment, video games seem uniquely predisposed toward not only *representing* but perhaps even *performing* computational infrastructures, thus providing a mediational entry-point to infrastructure at the level of cultural artifact. Why?

In the latest turn toward critical infrastructure studies, media scholars have drawn attention to the insufficiency of established cultural studies concepts in addressing issues of infrastructure. For Christian Sandvig, “infrastructure” replaces the “network” as the new “diffuse and inconsistently applied concept” generating current research in the field of new media studies. Less cynically, Alan Liu suggests the potential for “infrastructure” to become what “culture” was for the Birmingham school, an all-purpose word to convey social complexity at varying institutional levels. Revising the base-superstructure model of the past, Liu reveals the inextricability of culture and infrastructure, as both become enmeshed in our current media epoch. Engaging with the work of these scholars as well as others in the emerging field of critical infrastructure studies, this blogpost aims to rethink Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation in relation to the repurposing of already existing infrastructure for new media technologies.

One of the promises of digital humanities scholarship, going back at least to Moretti’s quote above, has been the potential, even the necessity, of moving beyond canons. Not merely The Canon (of dead white males), but canons in any form and of any composition—that is, any assemblage of literary texts with which scholars within a given field are assumed to have some familiarity if not expertise. But, as Matthew Wilkens points out, canons still exist, albeit in a slightly more multicultural variety. In this post, I would like to reopen the discussion of canons in the digital humanities, highlighting some of the ways through which they still exist and exploring the potential for moving beyond them.