The Why and How of Middleware
Johanna Drucker, Patrik Svensson · Digital humanities quarterly · 2016
The presentation, publication and research platforms used for scholarly work in the Digital Humanities embody argument structures that are not always explicitly acknowledged. This article examines these platforms, and their protocols, as middleware that includes such purpose-designed projects as Omeka, and Scalar, and general purpose ones such as Drupal and PowerPoint, to ask how they embody rhetorical assumptions at every level of production (from back-end assumptions about what constitutes the smallest unit of discourse, to the front-end modes of presentation and organization of display). It extends the concept of middleware to include physical and social presentation spaces, activities (such as witnessing), to ask how these, also, perform the rhetorical activity of enunciation, positionality, and other discursive modalities.