C2DH: Critical and Creative Digital Humanities Against Technological Solutionism by Bruno Ministro

C²DH: Critical and Creative Digital Humanities Against Technological Solutionism

The first part of the title of my blog post plays with the familiar acronyms of European research frameworks and funding schemes—especially Portugal’s newly announced AI² agency, which will soon replace the Foundation for Science and Technology. This new agency promises to prioritize innovation, product development, and knowledge transfer over fundamental research. The second part of my title, “technological solutionism,” refers to a term popularized by Evgeny Morozov, which describes the belief that technology can fix all of society’s problems.

In combining these two initial provocations, I argue that critical and creative approaches in the digital humanities can serve as a counterpoint to both the instrumental reshaping of research agendas and the seductive promise of technocratic fixes.

The digital humanities are sometimes seen—by both practitioners and detractors—as a kind of “reengineered” humanities. For many scholars, digital humanities offer a way to bridge the humanities and the digital landscape. Some find that the discipline has opened up new methods and/or new objects of study, while others see it as a matter of branding and self-interest, aligning the “digital” in “digital humanities” with funding priorities. In this view, it becomes a convenient strategy for securing grants, advancing careers, and shaping new institutional agendas.

Conversely—but not entirely differently—for many scholars viewing the digital humanities from the outside, and who still treat it as a novelty even after decades of development, the digital humanities often appear as a form of applied research that turns humanities inquiries into tangible scientific products. Yet, at the end of the day, the now-famous syntagm still places “humanities” at its center. Put another way: digital humanities are not the humanities done by computing engineers. So, if we return to funding agencies, “No soup for you!” for those who remember the 1995 Seinfeld episode “The Soup Nazi.”

Tree and Forest

In 2022, I was fortunate to have my research project funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Running from March 2023 to February 2025, To See the Tree and the Forest. Reading the Poetry of António Ramos Rosa from a Distance proposed a speculative framework that brought together critical and creative approaches within the digital humanities.

In this blog post, I’d like to briefly revisit one of the initiatives developed by my research team in collaboration with guest artists: the exhibition Matéria Viva [Living Matter], held at Instituto Pernambuco in Porto from October 17 to November 15, 2024. While outlining the exhibition’s general contours and the curatorial practice that shaped it, I will also reflect on what it means to bring critical and creative perspectives together in the digital humanities, both in this section and in the following one.

Broadly speaking, the idea that creative gestures can serve as critical acts was the guiding principle that led us to invite six intermedia and digital artists to develop new works that appropriate and expand the poetry of António Ramos Rosa. The resulting pieces—created by Catarina Braga, D1G1T0 indivíduo_colectivo, Isabel Carvalho, João Castro Pinto, Rui Torres, and Terhi Marttila—span a range of genres and technologies, including interactive design, combinatorial algorithms, artificial intelligence, video games, visual art, and soundscape composition. The Matéria Viva exhibition is thoroughly documented on the project’s website.

In developing this crucial component of the Tree and Forest project—whose work packages were largely devoted to computational text analysis and data visualization—our research team drew direct inspiration from the long tradition of using computational media to process language and generate new texts. This includes works of combinatorial and permutative poetry that predate today’s generative artificial intelligence by decades. Like many scholars and artists, we look to electronic literature as a creative model for exploring critical pathways in poetic practice—particularly when these works invoke, play with, and repurpose preexisting texts, recycling, remixing, and redistributing them into new literary forms.

Critical and Creative

Critical thought naturally emerges whenever creative work comes into being—literary and artistic practices have long offered alternative epistemologies for seeing and making sense of the world. None of this is new. But what happens when creative work is produced expressly within the context of a research project, drawing from and contributing to its inquiries and experiments?

In seeking a tentative answer to this question, I’d like to broaden the frame beyond the Tree and Forest project and the Matéria Viva exhibition. What follows is a discussion of three examples where critical-creative models have been applied within the context of different research projects.

First, I’ll comment on Machines of Disquiet, created by artist and programmer Luís Lucas Pereira in collaboration with the LdoD Archive project, which focuses on representing Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Second, I’ll turn to La Boîte à poésie, developed by Atelier Raffard-Roussel in the context of the Oupoco research project—an initiative closely inspired by, and connected to, the early experiments of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. Finally, I’ll examine a set of digital recreations of experimental poems from the 1960s, created by Rui Torres and others in the context of Po-ex.net, a digital archive dedicated to Portuguese experimental poetry.

These three projects engage in literary experimentation using source texts from modern and contemporary French and Portuguese literature. By presenting and commenting on them, I aim to contrast creative and critical approaches with the increasingly dominant instrumental tendencies in the digital humanities—tendencies that often adopt harshly utilitarian, deterministic, and monolithic perspectives on humanities objects and methods.

What’s at stake here is not the opposition between quantitative and qualitative methods, nor a naïve rejection of computational tools. Rather, it is about how we imagine methodologies that are hybrid not only in form but in spirit. A critical-creative digital humanities does not dissolve interpretive traditions—it expands them.

In this mode, creative and critical digital humanities become generative, disruptive, and vital. These are the practices and postures that keep the field open—not just to new objects or methods, but to new ways of thinking with and through them.

Book of Disquiet and Machines of Disquiet

Máquinas do Desassossego (2017), or Machines of Disquiet (also available in English), by Luís Lucas Pereira, builds on Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego [Book of Disquiet], a highly fragmented and truly unclassifiable prose work. More specifically, these creative “machines” rely on the version of the Book developed by and represented in the digital platform LdoD Archive, a result of the research project suggestively titled No Problem Has a Solution: A Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet coordinated by Manuel Portela (editor) and António Rito Silva (software architecture) at the University of Coimbra since 2010.

As proposed by Portela in Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities (2022), the LdoD Archive is more than a digital scholar edition or archive; it is an evolving engine for the experimental and performative simulation of literary processes. This is one of the primary reasons why its role-playing principle supports the emergence of new critical and creative activities from within.

Through the LdoD Archive and its instantiation of the Book of Disquiet, Pereira’s Machines of Disquiet uses Pessoa’s book “as a modular textual database for a series of applications that engage digital modalities (text, image, sound, animation) and interactions through programmed permutations at different scales (from letter to word to sentence)” (Pereira, 2017: n.p.).

In this context, these machines invite us to reread and reexamine the Book of Disquiet in creative and playful ways. Will this rereading differ from reading the book in traditional ways? Of course. Will something new emerge from this different form of engagement? Absolutely. Is this a better way or a necessity? That’s beside the point. Machines of Disquiet are anti-utilitarian by design: they are made for fun, reflection, and experience—and they stand as aesthetic objects in their own right.

Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle and l’Ouvroir de Poésie Combinatoire

Launched in 2018, Oupoco (l’Ouvroir de Poésie Combinatoire) is directed by Thierry Poibeau and developed within Laboratoire LATTICE at École Normale Supérieure—Sorbonne Nouvelle. As the name suggests, the project is deeply influenced by the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) movement and, in particular, draws direct inspiration from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes—a book that materially enables the combination and recombination of its verses to generate countless variations.

Following an initial automated analysis of rhyme and other phonetic features in 19th- and early 20th-century French poetry, the Oupoco team developed an application that generates new poems from a corpus that includes sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Amélie Gex, Théophile Gautier, Arthur Rimbaud, Renée Vivien, and many others (see Mélanie-Becquet et al., 2022; 2024).

In addition to the online application, another artifact created within the scope of the project is La Boîte à poésie [The Poetry Box]. Developed in collaboration with Atelier Raffard-Roussel, this object takes the form of a physical box with a hand-crank mechanism, allowing users to generate new sonnets by turning a handle, a fascinating blend of mechanical interactivity and algorithmic creativity.

Oupoco embodies a strong connection between the datasets prepared by the research team and the creative potential to reread and recompose these textual resources. La Boîte à poésie extends this method into a tangible, performative space.

The analyses, datasets, and algorithms developed for Oupoco are not designed to mimic or replace the sonnets and poets they draw from, nor to impersonate them—at least not in the way many AI projects today aim to do. In that sense, the project remains profoundly anti-utilitarian. It is less concerned with extractive or imitative logics and more invested in fostering creative thought and reflection.

PO.EX and PO-EX.net Recreations

Like other neo-avant-gardes emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, Portuguese experimental poetry (a.k.a. PO.EX) was deeply entangled with technology. These poets worked across a range of media, from print to audio and video, and were equally engaged with the leading theoretical developments of their time, particularly in information theory and semiotics.

The initial nucleus of this movement was the magazine Poesia Experimental [Experimental Poetry], published in two issues in 1964 and 1966. Nearly forty years later, Rui Torres revitalized these poetic legacies through two projects at the University Fernando Pessoa. The first involved analyzing magazines and catalogs from the 1960s, culminating in a CD-ROM with digital versions of these materials. The second extended the collection into the 1970s and 1980s, paving the way for the creation of the PO.EX Digital Archive.

In addition to digital facsimiles of literary magazines and exhibition catalogs, the 2008 CD-ROM included digital adaptations of selected experimental poems—translating them into new kinetic and interactive forms. Originally developed in Flash, later discontinued by Adobe in 2020, these recreations were recently restored and re-released using Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator.

The eight digital recreations expose the processual and semiotic dimensions already embedded in the original poems. For example, in “Poemas encontrados” [Found poems], António Aragão used a technique of informational collage composed solely of newspaper headlines; in its digital version, Rui Torres, Nuno F. Ferreira, and Jared Tarbel reimagined this method using an RSS feed that updates the poem’s interface in real time.

The PO-EX.net recreations remind us that nothing is lost when we treat print and digital media as complementary—and that much is gained when we refuse to subject unruly materials to static documentation. Let the media perform: their gestures tell us what the archive alone cannot. Inspiration and rereading previous texts open the way to new inventions, new inspirations, and new potential rereadings.

Why does this matter? And why should humanities scholars care about it anyway?

We are currently witnessing what could be described as a second wave of reengineering within the digital humanities. By “reengineering,” in practical terms, I mean those recent shifts that reshape what digital humanities once stood for. More literally, I use “reengineering” to name the growing influence of engineering paradigms—both in discourse and practice—on the conceptual and methodological terrain of the digital humanities.

We know that the digital humanities have always been interdisciplinary, with computing science playing a vital role in many projects. Yet twenty, ten, or even five years ago, it was far less common to hear researchers claim a strictly objective perspective on humanities objects—when what is often really meant is a quantitative approach that conveniently sidelines the long-standing hermeneutic and interpretive traditions that brought us here. The issue is not the use of quantitative methods per se; rather, it is the accompanying posture of superiority that casts those who don’t use such methods as indulging in subjective, flawed, or deficient scholarship.

The rise of this technicist ethos in digital humanities is not accidental—it is a direct consequence of broader shifts in academic economies and cultural narratives. The dominance of AI discourse, the proliferation of “big data” rhetoric, and the systemic prioritization of quantifiable outputs have created a climate in which interpretive labor is undervalued, often dismissed as merely subjective or non-rigorous.

Ultimately, such propositions and judgments promote a strictly utilitarian view of humanities research—one that holds critical thinking hostage to what can be extracted, classified, operationalized, and replicated. This trend has been noted and critiqued by several scholars across different contexts, including in multiple posts by Amelia Sanz Cabrerizo on the RecLit blog. (See, for example, her recent reflection on orthodoxy in the digital humanities after attending two of the field’s major conferences.)

When digital humanities first emerged and consolidated decades ago, most projects centered on building archives and databases. The keyword was accessibility. Scholars worked to make knowledge widely available, digitizing collections of various scales, curating data and metadata, and making digital surrogates of texts, images, and objects accessible for new research.

Today, with the rise of machine learning, generative artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies, digital humanities projects look quite different. So far, so good. But building upon the collections previously digitized, some scholars now seem to fetishize having machines read those sources for them—all that’s needed is the right method. The new keyword is extraction. Knowledge is expected to result from a process that devours earlier materials and forms of inquiry: massive amounts of data as input, complex or semi–black-box procedures in the middle, and neatly packaged, simplified outputs at the end. Caught in this loop, digital humanities risk leaving no space for creative or critical approaches. Or do they?

If today’s digital humanities are caught between fetishizing methods and fetishizing solutions and potential impacts, the projects I’ve highlighted reveal a different path—one where reading becomes play, where archives become engines of reinvention, and where literary works live again in unexpected environments.

These creations don’t pretend to solve the world’s crises (AI bots will do so any day now, engineers say), nor do they aspire to technological perfection. Instead, they invite us to linger with texts, to enter into dialogue with systems, and to cultivate modes of knowing that resist capture.

In a moment when the humanities risk being reengineered into either instrumental usefulness or obsolescence, creative-critical practices perform a kind of quiet resistance. They insist that what matters in literature, and in humanistic inquiry more broadly, is irreducible not only to data, but to the very expectations of utility itself. It is here, in the space between creation and critique, that the future of digital humanities may yet find room to breathe.

Works Cited

Cabrerizo, A. S. (2025). “La ortodoxia en Humanidades Digitales”. REC-LIT Reciclajes culturales en la era postdigital, 31 de julio.

Mélanie-Becquet, F., Grunspan, C., Maignant, M., Plancq, C., & Poibeau, T. (2022). “The Oupoco Database of French Sonnets from the 19th Century”. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 8, 25.

Mélanie-Becquet, F., Plancq, C., Grunspan, C., Maignant, M., Raffard, M., Roussel, M., Ghedini, F., & Poibeau, T. (2024). “Exploring Combinatorial Methods to Produce Sonnets: An Overview of the Oupoco Project”. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 18(1).

Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs.

Pereira, L. L. (2017). Máquinas do Desassossego = Machines of Disquiet.

Pereira, L. L., Portela, M., & Roque, L. (2018). “Machines of Disquiet: Textual Experience in the LdoD Archive”. MATLIT, 6(3), 59–71.

Poibeau, T. (coord.) (2018). Oupoco.

Portela, M. (2022). Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities: Reading, Editing, Writing. Bloomsbury Academic.

Torres, R. (coord.) (2025). RECRIAÇÕES – Releituras da Poesia Experimental Portuguesa. Arquivo Digital da PO.EX, outubro de 2025.

 

Bruno Ministro

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