3.1.3: Arts-Based Research

This dissertation and the Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP) were produced as a mixture of arts-based and practice-based methods. This hodgepodge of approaches borrows on separate but intertwined discourses in arts production and the digital humanities (DH). More broadly this whole dissertation was conceived as a practice-based research project, which refers to the use of both arts-based methods and the digital humanities’ interest in design.¹ I will address the shift from arts-based to practice-based language in the next chapter (4.1.2), because the nuance will become clearer in relation to the affordances of a DH project. Moreover, I see the value in understanding these terms as being interrelated, and that arts-based research has value for a subset of scholars and artists who would not benefit from the broader umbrella term. With this in mind, this section outlines what I mean by arts-based research, with some discussion about how DH approaches to digital tool and platform design overlaps with these ideas.

My mix of arts and scholarship is born from Holly Willis’ notion of the “scholar/practitioner”—creative professionals “who, through their practice, are able to contribute new concepts, methods and models in order to participate in the production of original knowledge.”² Willis, whose work at the University of Southern California and interest in avant-garde and experimental media, witnessed and documented a shift in cinematic practice as it happened in the Los Angeles area. Her book, Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts is a taster course in the varied practices which emerged in the city in the late aughts and early teens, and the scholar/practitioner—an interdisciplinary, communal producer of knowledge between new technologies and existing epistemic structures—was a canny means to describe what she witnessed.

I am drawn to Willis’ term because it helps do away with some of the print biases in the academy. As fields interested in creative forms have long articulated the theory building required for the production of aesthetic texts, objects, and ideas. These admissions are generally at odds with the kinds of academic work upon which discourses and careers are forwarded. In DH, the past two decades have been replete with essays noting limits in the traditional bibliocentric bias of humanistic tenure processes, pushing for a similar goal: the idea that the production of digital tools, archives, databases, and code are a kind of theory building and a kind of critical intervention into the established academic conversation (4.1.2).³ These critiques are further entangled and empowered by many DH scholars throughout its big tent, arguing against traditional publishing standards, noting how the unethical and exploitation driven practices of online publishing houses limit audiences and potential scholarly impact.⁴ “Design” is a shorthand for talking about all of these kinds of labors—from the more aesthetic creation of graphic websites, to the computational approaches to generating a computational platform. Design was a way for DHers to argue for academic value in practices and media forms that were thought to be less theoretical,⁵ and my interest in defining arts-based research comes out of this same intent. Artists have long developed work that is deeply theoretical, historically significant, and culturally critical, and their work is often more than just the creation of that art piece, as they require research, experimentation, and exploration. Just as the work in this chapter is indebted to artist engagements with the archive,⁶ so too do other artistic traditions require considered research and academic formulation. My hope is to speak to how differing kinds of academic labor extend and deepen scholarship in the humanities and elsewhere⁷ by helping humanists imagine different ways of engaging with their research.⁸

Encased in Willis’ notion of the artist-practitioner and DH’s defense of design are issues of privilege. Fast Forward looked at a specific geographical and historical moment, Los Angeles around 2010. That moment was only possible because of the deep economic connections of the region to established media production and big tech. Many of the case studies which populate the monograph were produced as part of massive capital projects, be they the production of feature films or television shows, the development of digital art, or the creation of novel techniques to produce visual material. Unacknowledged in her notion of the theorist/practitioner is an idea that this is only seemingly done with the help of substantial financial investment, access to the newest technological doodads, or connections to schools willing to invest in these media forms.

Recent scholarship in DH has challenged issues of scale, access, and computing power for the field. Rather than imagining dream supercomputers and panoptic visual interfaces of cultural analytics,⁹ the minimal computing turn

is less a singular methodology — or even a coherent set of methodologies — than it is a mode of thinking about digital humanities praxis that resists the idea that ‘innovation’ is defined by newness, scale, or scope. Broadly speaking, minimal computing connotes digital humanities work undertaken in the context of some set of constraints. This could include lack of access to hardware or software, network capacity, technical education, or even a reliable power grid.¹⁰

Borrowing from the minimal computing turn, my interest in arts-based research is to articulate a specific mode by which I work—one which is benefitted by my inclusion in a R1 institution¹¹—but in which I can at best be considered an emerging artist or scholar whose value is tenuous at best in the broader discourses in which I work. If Willis’ scholar/practitioner model is to be a tenable one, then it has to be able to exist outside the contexts of her narrow series of case studies.

To this end, I borrow from Robin Nelson’s formulation of arts-based research, which he dubs “practice as research”. A scholar and performer located in the UK, Nelson’s approach offers a compelling conceptual and practical framework for arts-based approaches, as it argues for artists to think in constricted terms, maintain notes as to their creative activity, and speak specifically to academic discourses.¹² This chapter borrows in part from this process, drawing on old documents, using these materials to look both backwards and forwards, and having investments in fields separate from those particularly invested in aesthetics. My reticence in following Nelson too far, however, is in the notion that these practices will somehow improve arts projects and improve knowledge making. This is a theme that this chapter wrestles with at length (3.4.1; 3.4.2; 3.4.3). I am unconvinced as to the benefits of the arts if they are ingested directly into hierarchical knowledge systems: I am not interested in claiming that arts-based research is a means to better arguments, truer claims, more important artworks. I do not want to establish the arts as a superior research process to others.¹³

My hope then, with this chapter, is to provide a needle to subtly deflate these claims.¹⁴ The kind of iterative, growing practice of this chapter relates quite closely to Nelson’s notion of praxis—“an iterative process of ‘doing-reflecting-reading-articulating-doing’”¹⁵—but it is charged with a shrugging nonchalance. I use the term arts-based research as my own conceptuion of an otherwise disparate discourse, to distill a simple definition. Arts-based research is as it reads: it is research that is done through artistic practice.