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Resource Operations of the Ecological Digital Humanities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Nicole Starosielski
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Extract

Large-scale industrial processes and networks of extraction, slow violences wrought across toxic landscapes, and rapidly shifting atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic cycles are altering the conditions of human and nonhuman existence in ways that challenge the limits of existing media technologies. The last of these transformations—the fluctuating distributions of water—is the focus of this essay. Hydrologists are struggling to model and predict the intensities of drought, the changing supply of watersheds, the dispersions of chemicals through streams and rivers, and the failures of aging infrastructure. Water transports contaminants too small to identify by sight, requiring technologies that can register tiny particles on a massive scale. Water complicates boundary-making projects—it moves easily across local and regional zones, human and nonhuman bodies, and atmospheric, terrestrial, and marine ecologies. Global weather patterns and distribution infrastructures shape its circulation, yet its material effects depend greatly on local conditions.

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 401 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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