About

What is Minimal Computing?

We use “minimal computing” to refer to computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors. Minimal computing includes both the maintenance, refurbishing, and use of machines to do DH work out of necessity along with the use of new streamlined computing hardware like the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino micro controller to do DH work by choice. This dichotomy of choice vs. necessity focuses attention on computing that is decidedly not high-performance. By operating at this intersection between choice and necessity minimal computing forces important concepts and practices within the DH community to the fore. In this way minimal computing is also an critical movement, akin to environmentalism, asking for balance between gains and costs in related areas that include social justice issues and de-manufacturing and reuse, not to mention re-thinking high-income assumptions about “e-waste” and what people do with it. Minimal computing thus relates to issues of aesthetics, culture, environment, global relationships of power and knowledge production, and other economic, infrastructural and material conditions.

What will the GO:DH Minimal Computing group do?

• Provide a space for generating and sharing discussion and resources exploring the practice and impact of minimal computing from both a practical and theoretical perspective.
• Shine a spotlight on a large portion of humanities work that is currently going unnoticed, enabling further research to take place in these areas
• Fold in (rather than appropriate) this sort of work into academic work for discussion and analysis
• Raise cultural awareness and explore questions such as:
  • In digital humanities and other computing contexts, what is being done with what technologies, how, and why?
  • What are best practices for application construction in order to maximize availability, decrease obsolescence, and reduce e-waste?
  • What are the social impacts of digitization and computing from a post-colonial perspective?
  • How does doing minimal computing by choice differ from doing minimal computing by necessity? Does this result in different interactions between the user and the technology?
  • In terms of computing and culture, what meaningful differences emerge across economical, infrastructural, and material conditions?