DARIAH Virtual Annual Event 2021: Interfaces

Digital interfaces enable communication between humans and machines, especially computers, by translating signals and providing capacity for the interpretation of information. They facilitate work in digital environments and can take on many different forms, ranging from command line interfaces (CLI) to 2D graphical user interfaces (GUI) or immersive 3D (Augmented/Virtual/Mixed Reality) approaches.

Modern interfaces as access points to information have been discussed at least since the 1960s, with Marshall McLuhan as one of the first to focus on them. Practitioners and designers after him have developed his most famous sentence “the medium is the message” into “the interface is the message”. The first GUI was introduced by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), while Timothy E. Johnson used an input device to interact with a computer in 1963. Today, we are seeing new approaches, such as Mitchell Whitelaw’s “generous interfaces” that offer more diverse, more visual, more intuitive access to digital cultural collections. Digital platforms enable online interfaces to virtual worlds, federated content and artworks, creating new modalities, reaching new audiences, as well as building communities that may never have interacted before.

It is the aim of this year’s DARIAH Annual Event to discuss the role that interfaces play in the arts and humanities. To what extent do they enable new research, and at the same time, do they also limit research possibilities? How is content/information changed while being transmitted by interfaces? How do interfaces reframe the roles of those using them, their roles as producer and/or consumer of interfaces?