I’m RB, a second-year Master’s student in the English department at Northeastern University, and this website is the product and process of my Digital Humanities certificate. Over the next year, I’ll be collecting minimal computing resources, as well as making a few where they seem necessary, and posting them here for general use. This website will be a space where scholars, teachers, and makers can come to learn about minimal computing, view minimal computing projects, and find tools or techniques that they can apply to their own work.

I myself am still learning about minimal computing. In fact, I’m about as new to digital humanities more generally as I am to minimal computing! When I entered my Master’s program, I didn’t even know what digital humanities was. I took an “Introduction to Digital Humanities” class in my first semester here and was captivated by the field right away. When I read some articles from the Minimal Computing Working Group as part of class, I thought they were uniquely timely, needful, and constructive, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that work in some way. So, here we are.

There’s a lot of fantastic theory work that has been done about minimal computing, and some projects and tools already exist for people to use. That’s awesome, and I will be featuring every project, website, artifact, or article I can find right here! However, when I’ve talked to other folks in academia about minimal computing, the response is often “Yeah, it’s super cool! … how does one do it though?”

It seems that even highly trained academics with a strong interest in the principles of minimal computing don’t always feel confident in adding minimal computing to their existing digital/scholarly practice. What I hope to add to the existing landscape on minimal computing are some roadmaps for those looking to implement these ideas in their work, classrooms, or builds. I especially want to reflect the needs and requests of people with an interest in taking this on, so that I can make resources that directly address challenges that people are facing in work that is already being done.

The obvious first task here is trying to answer the question “what is Minimal Computing?” Thankfully, better heads than mine have already taken positions on this. In the name of having a jumping-off point, minimal computing (to my understanding) can be thought of as a set of principles and an ethos which question excess in computing–excessive bandwidth, excessively powerful hardware, excessively complicated code–and how excess affects access and ownership of digital content.

Despite its relative newness, there’s already been a fair bit of debate about what, exactly, minimal computing is and could be. It’s interesting to see how frequent it is in academia for vigorous discussion to spring up around very fresh terms and subfields–debates about emerging definitions of that subfield, and whether defining the subfield is a bad idea in the first place. I guess that makes sense; it mirrors what we do with data. Drawing a line around something gives you a clear scope and helps you figure out how to approach your subject; on the other hand, any line you draw will inherently include some things and exclude others, which is fraught as hell. I’m not going to be the one to solve that conundrum, much less in an introductory blog post. However, I do want to lay out some common ideas and tensions I see being addressed by minimal computing and that I find myself thinking about a lot as I begin this project. I’m not going to claim that this is an accurate precis of minimal computing’s scope, goals, or principles, but they’re things that are coming up a lot for me as I learn about this. The understanding I outline here may change as I go. I’m hoping that by working through my own understanding (and almost certainly making/fixing mistakes) publicly, I might answer questions that other people who are similarly new to it have.

ACCESS
This is a prime, explicit guiding principle of many minimal computing articles and projects: access. This can mean a lot of things. “Access” or “accessibility” for one person might mean making their digital tool available/practical to use for people who don’t have consistent access to the internet, a computer, or electricity. For another person, it might mean ensuring that the code on their website is screen-reader friendly and uses colors that are easy for colorblind users to distinguish. For yet another, it might mean creating material that expands their audience beyond academia and addresses audiences/users in K-12 schools or independent groups such as churches or book clubs. At its core, I think access is about acknowledging that the way a digital resource is built will make it easier for some people to use and harder (or even impossible) for others, and working to try and mitigate that exclusion as much as possible. For me, that’s going to mean using website accessibility score tools to make sure my website works well with screen readers and meets low-vision requirements, working to make the website as lightweight as possible so that it can be accessed by people with limited internet bandwidth or those accessing it on mobile devices, and collaborating with folks in and beyond academia to make things that directly the needs and issues they encounter in their everyday digital practice. Or at least, that’s the goal; I’m never going to get this perfect, but I can commit to always striving for better. This will be a continual process of refining and rebuilding throughout the site’s existence.

CONSTRAINT
To me, constraint in some form or another seems to be the condition minimal computing is responding to. This may seem counterintuitive in an age of big data and increasingly advanced state-of-the-art tech, but as was just discussed, access to those powerful tools is limited and unequal. Other forms of constraint include knowledge constraint (some people, like me, have access to a very high level of support and training because of a position in academia, but that’s not true for everyone) or time constraint (not everyone has hours to spare on perfecting their Javascript, even if the resources are available). Because of this, working within constraints-in terms of bandwidth, understandability of platform, user hardware-is something that some minimal computing projects do as a way to create an end product that can be accessed by users who are under bandwidth constraints. Examples include Alex Gil and Dennis Yi Tenen’s No Connect (a website that can be downloaded onto a flash drive for use when internet is not available or minimally available) and Low-Tech Magazine’s solar-powered website(which runs completely without the use of outside electricity, and thus has energy constraints which dictate data constraints, such as having only dithered black-and-white images and occasionally going offline). As has been acknowledged, these constraints are artificially imposed for most academics, but I think the potential benefit in imposing them is in leveling the playing field between people with access to considerable resources and those with access to less. If we can create projects and tools that allow communication across digital communities, maybe we can do a better job of sharing knowledge and resources than we have previously.

OWNERSHIP
Lastly, a common goal I’ve picked up on in minimal computing is that of ownership. There is empowerment in being able to build your own website and not relying on large digital platforms such as Facebook or Youtube to share your content-in making your own, you take back a measure of control over how and where your content is displayed and used(and forestall the sale of your personal data). If you build your own tools or your own website to any degree, you regain some of the control and understanding which tech companies have so profitably stripped away from tech users. This is great! It is important! However, it is hard to achieve, especially while striving 1) for access and 2) under constraint. This is a place where I think the perfect is the enemy of good, and minimal computing scholars including Sayers and GIl, in their foundational writings linked above, have pointed out that trying to achieve any of these things is not a process with hard-line specific parameters.

Minimal computing as a subfield is still very new and changing a great deal, but these are some important nodes of interest and tension that I think will probably come up frequently in the work that I do here and the resources that I catalog. I’ll be posting here monthly, logging my progress on the site, changes in my thinking about minimal computing, and any new projects or resources I find. I hope you enjoy your visit!