 and I'm delighted to welcome Claire who is Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Durham and was previous Vice-Chancellor for Research there. She's also been the head of UCL Department of Information Studies and Director at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and began her academic career as a lecturer at Sheffield University's iSchool and going back even further her PhDs from Cambridge and was an English literature followed by a postdoctoral position at Oxford University's Humanities Computing Unit and Faculty of English. So what we're going to do today and why I'm saying we need a little bit of your help is Claire is going to offer short provocation talking about managing the digital dystopia and then we'll have some discussion afterwards. Now we also gave you and Claire submitted a pre-leading list so I'm hoping some of you will have had a wee look at it and it will have stimulated some thoughts and questions you would like to ask to start this conversation. So as Claire's talking please do pop your questions in the Q&A I'm hoping to see a fair few there very shortly and then I'll start the conversation at the end and ask and go through those conversations and start that growing once we've finished. So now without further ado I'm going to hand over to Claire thank you. Thank you very much Kirsty and hello everybody it's amazing to see or rather not to see because I can't really see all of you but it's amazing to be aware that there are so many of us here and actually you know let's start off on a positive note in a funny way this is one of the very good things about the digital. I've had a couple of experiences now where I've done something similar where I've been on Zoom and I've been speaking with people around the world hundreds of people potentially there usually bigger than or more people around them than I would normally talk to if it were a kind of research seminar or something like that because it tends to assume that people have to be in the room. So I find this kind of interesting that one of the positives of what we've had to learn to do in Covid is to work at a distance but yet working at a distance does allow us to as it were be in places that we couldn't physically be in at some point in October I went in the in digital space from India to France to the UK to can't remember where else it was but anyway couldn't possibly have done that in a week physically or at least it might have been difficult. So I think you know let's not say that digital things are terrible they are not but what I want to talk about today is some of the issues that I think as Kirsty said Covid has brought into focus about how do we literally how do we feel about digital environments and how do we negotiate them and is there a danger that our experience of enforced enforced presence as it were online has meant that we have had to come up against some of the more unpleasant examples of the digital or some of the things about digital things that worry us. This isn't necessarily predictable at the moment I'm on research leave and I'm writing a book about the history of cyberspace and in that book I've been looking at you know various things about what I talk about in cyberspace is like really the internet of the 1990s when it was really very new and it was very newly privatised. Therefore I've been coming up against many of the predictions that were made at the time and it's interesting that at the time a lot of people thought that by now we would pretty much be doing everything online and happy to do so that we would be particular interest for many librarians you know the the death of the book was widely predicted it was assumed that we'd all be reading everything in digital form very soon certainly by now that pretty much much of university learning would be done online that people would simply not need to go to physical universities on the basis that once you could connect via a computer network then why would you need physical presence? Equally there were very optimistic predictions made about working from home and you know why would people need to commute and wouldn't it be great because the traffic would be far less serious and you know again the all of these assumptions they even stretch to the ideas of perhaps we wouldn't even have to go to museums or galleries you know as long as we could see digital images of a museum object or an art work perhaps we didn't even need to be there. That all sounds fairly onkers now but you know there were there were these these really kind of optimistic or pessimistic depending on the way you want to look at it predictions and people were exploring the idea of online community. You know people were hanging out in small or large even bulletin board systems and thinking that this might be an alternative way to socialize. This might be a way to extend consciousness a way to recreate community. So at the time you know the beginning of the 1990s in many ways people were being very optimistic about a lot of digital phenomena and had the idea that I'm sure many people on this call will be able to remember it. If you digitized things like museum objects or images of text or whatever people would no longer need to see the physical object which would be particularly useful where things are fragile and you know handling would damage them. You know the amazing work that Andrew Prescott for example did on the Beowulf manuscript with colleagues at the British Library would be a very good example of that and we also were somewhat prey and at the time and it's been remarkably persistent to this myth of the digital native so the idea being that younger people okay some of us old people might find digital things a bit of a challenge but you know once the new generation of kids came up they've you know these days you still hear it said oh yes they've been using iPads since they're tiny so they'll feel much more comfortable with this. These all of these things are transitional they'll go away. Turns out not so much. I think one of the you know the major fallacies that has affected our relationship with digital and physical things is the myth of replacement. You know a lot of those ideas that were being knocked around in the 1990s were talking about the digital as a replacement for the physical so we wouldn't need you know it sounds crazy but we need to go to a museum because it would be just as good to see a museum object online. It turns out that and of course the more we digitize things as the British Library soon found with the Beowulf manuscript and others the more people actually want to see things they you know they are captivated by real things so the more it is digitized the more fascinating the idea of the physical object becomes. So in a sense one could say this is in a sort of way given birth to some of these digital dystopian ideas in that you know the more people have had to work at home as in the more people there are doing it and the more time all of us have had to spend online many people have been coming up against the idea of this feeling it's not a replacement at all you know it really isn't a replacement for many people for their social environments for their working environments and therefore we've had you know I think one of the things that we need to really be clear about is digital does not replace physical it always augments in possibly in different ways but it augments it is not a good replacement and in a sense a lot of the you know some of the the rhetoric about isn't digital wonderful or wouldn't it be wonderful in the old days came from the idea of dissatisfaction with physical communities or physical places so a lot of the people who were who were enthusing about how wonderful online communities might be were also writing about how um how the sense of real community the sense of belonging had had dropped out of as it was then contemporary society that you know feeling that there was no physical community feeling that they had no attachments to community organizations they felt that digital might replace this rather than thinking about well actually if the community is broken don't we need to fix the community role then put a digital plaster on it um so hence we've got what we're seeing now I think is is perhaps a result of some of those attitudes that digital is being seen in some ways as at best second best if you see what I mean and at worst toxic so some of the things that I suggested that you might read in preparation for this section are really about this that people are worried about the use of algorithms you know the a-level algorithm was a particular controversy for those of you not in the UK this was uh that um an algorithm supposedly I'm sure it was much more complicated than one simple algorithm was used to um how should we put it sense check the the grades that teachers awarded for a-level exams and the whole thing was an absolute disaster and many parents ended up very stressed and very unhappy about this never mind the students themselves um so in a sense what we've got is this idea that either people are genuinely worried about um digital phenomena you only have to see the amount of online um well the amount of concern being expressed whether it's online or in the um in the press one way or another about the effects of um Facebook various types of digital interaction online bullying mental health problems all of those kinds of things you know the possible manipulation of the democratic process etc um there is this sense of toxicity or just that online is just really not good enough hence the article about yes of course you can actually do you can do learning in digital space as people knew in the 1980s and mind the eight 1990s but it just doesn't seem to be anywhere near as good you know students are saying well they they like physical presence at the moment of course they may not want it because they may be worried about um contagion but in kind of quote normal times people do want physical presence so as I say what I might my particular concern is that people are beginning to see the digital as as something worrying or just not very good um I think you know one of the things that that we might say is that there have been upsides to this you know some of these worries have meant that actually the social media companies having said that it was absolutely impossible for them in any way to control content have started to do so how you know covid has led social media companies to start issuing warnings about you know dangerous possibly an accurate post that might be life-threatening and we've seen this spreading to the discourse around the American election where you know some posts have been flagged up in a way that social media companies said they simply couldn't do six months to a year ago and suddenly it turns out they can you know so some of this anxiety could be positive um we do know I mean I don't need to tell a group of information professionals what remarkable things one can do with digital resources that really couldn't be done with the physical resource we know this so I'm not trying to question the value of you know the cognitive value of of digital resources which are genuinely useful and you know sometimes absolutely groundbreaking um you can even have positive uses of algorithms it turns out um you know there was a fascinating article the other day I was reading about somebody using AI to compare thousands of recordings of people with coughs to work out which is a quote covid cough and which isn't which could be extremely useful when it comes to diagnosis and indeed for helping people to work out whether they should be worried or not um so I think I'm not going to go on for too much longer about this but I think one of the things we should start to think about is okay well how can we come up with a balanced view of some of this we should clearly the the hype that originally surrounded things digital was not realistic because it didn't take into account the fact that we are we're physical people who live in a physical universe and we like social interaction it's important to us to to be around other people to have experiences in a social way at the same time I think it's important not to get carried away with some of the perhaps digital dystopian attitudes of oh my goodness this stuff is all terrible and if it's not terrible it's just not very good um I think some of this comes back to questions I think one of you know one of the things we might suggest is that we need to think about the interaction of the human with the digital and what is causing potentially some of these problems um we might want to go back to the you know quite the old days of digital library research and some of the big questions that we've never really answered um for example I think that people get anxious about things that they can't they can't understand and they can't visualize so people you know we know this it's a it's an old thing that people can stand in front of the bookshelf and get a get a rough idea of how many books there are and they can look at a library and get roughly how an idea of how big the library is they can't do that with digital libraries they they have no idea how big a digital library is they don't know if what they found is a little bit or a lot or everything or and this is an old question but I think it's coming back to bite us now when we start to think about the use of AI with you know millions of billions of data points people can't visualize that you know when Greg Crane talked about what should we do with a million books even the idea of visualizing a million books I mean some librarians out there may be able to do that but I can't I can't even imagine what a million books is going to look like never mind how should we manipulate that data and I think some of the anxiety comes from this sense of my perception cannot encompass this and I can't sense check it you know if I send a bit of AI off to do something I launch a search of some kind it brings me back the results back how do I know that that's reasonable I can't sense check it I have to trust it and yet I'm reading these news stories that tell me maybe these things aren't to be trusted so how do we you know I I think we need to go back to some of these questions you know how do we know that a resource is trustworthy how do we understand the extent of something how can we understand why we're getting the results we're getting um and I think that's you know people will say oh yeah well of course you know like google will give you the first 10 results and say well there are goodness knows how many million possible hits on this and we don't go through all the screens most of us um generally you know people are very happy to accept the first 10 hits maybe not even the first 10 but I think in cases where it worries people where it's a case of their health or their children's education then they start to think how do we trust this thing how do we know what what if what if it's not right what if um maybe I do need to know a bit more than the first 10 hits and um what happens if there's a consequence to this and I think what we're being brought up with brought up to at the moment in in this COVID era is there are some nasty consequences of how should we put it the use of algorithms people don't understand what what is happening but they can understand that some of the things aren't good you know I think a lot of the controversy about should we have a lockdown or not you know people this is in a sense the first digital epidemic people in just normal people are able to see quite complicated statistical projections are you know able to look at the disease statistics every day for example on the british government's um dashboard you know using kind of real time mapping that gosh you know 15 years ago 10 years ago even would have been considered really state of the art stuff but it's so we're seeing lots of numbers but what does that mean and what is as all this digital information say and how can it be that you know different lots of scientists look at this stuff and they come up with completely different conclusions and I think you can see why that drives a sense of anxiety um so I think my I always come back to this um I always find this it's good talking to an audience of libraries because I always come back to the idea that we have to come back to the people in this we have to come back to the users we have to try and understand where our users are and where they're coming from with this you know I'm trying to work out why do algorithms make people anxious why is it that we don't want to do everything in digital terms well because we recognize that there is something about physicality that is important and in some cases very special if we're talking about things like art or museums or books and it's it's a case of I think coming back down to one of my colleagues when I was a PVCR talked really really eloquently about the importance of getting the social science right when in this case perhaps the library science right not just the science in other words for example he gave the example of GM food scientifically that was great you know it could have had a lot of positive you know GM seeds and things like that could have helped with food security problems etc but people were very anxious and the scientists never really explained why they shouldn't be anxious or perhaps well their grounds whether they should be anxious and what he talked about was saying okay the science was perfect but the social science would rubbish you know we just did not engage with the with the people and I think a lot of the what we're seeing around you know digital resources and COVID is a failure to engage with the social science with the people aspects with the users of it um so you know I would finish with I think what I come up against is this is never about the technology just the technology this is about how people and technology and policy and health and um you know politics international relations and all that it's how they all start to work in a system with each other but it's not just a technical system and we have to realise that humans are part of the system and this goes right back to cybernetic ideas that were being aired in the 1940s this is not particularly new but it's often something that people find difficult to work with um so I think people aren't being unreasonable um it is reasonable to be anxious about things it is reasonable to say I'm a social being I want to socialise but how do we work to support interaction with the digital in that context well that is what I'm hoping to discuss with you today so that's all from me I hope we've got some really interesting questions and remarks well um that provocation certainly was a provocation and we have got some great questions coming through so thanks everyone who's popped the questions um into the well in fact both the chat channel and also the q&a but they're all coming through to me here so that's brilliant I think you really provoked a lot of people into thinking around about trust um and certainly when we first spoke that was one of the things that I was really struck with and especially looking at the sort of reading as well that trust and digital and how can we create trust in in digital when it is so amorphous doesn't have a sort of physicality to it and how can we demonstrate to because quite often we are producers of digital outputs we have you know digital libraries and e-resources so how can we get our users to understand what is trustworthy within this digital environment and kind of regenerate that trust I think actually I think librarians have a hugely important role to play in this um I think you know perhaps it's been you know we go right back to the days when people talk about disintermediation and certain libraries without mentioning any names started saying oh we don't need librarians you know all our users can just google stuff which of course turned out thankfully to be entirely wrong but I think it's that question of librarians are very gifted intermediaries who like digital humanities professionals in fact speak the language of the technical and the digital but they also speak the language of the human and I think you know one of the really important roles in building trust is this is one of the librarian's skill sets that being able to mediate between what people know and what people need to know um so I think you know in a sense it I think it's fascinating that our students I'm sure a lot of other people out there are finding this our students want to be in the library when they work I mean of course at the moment they can't be but I'm sure they'll be very happy to get back to that um partly of course because they want to be able to socialize with their friends but partly because they want to be able to ask people if they've got a query or a problem and of course you can do that online and they might do another day but just being able to have that kind of dialogue with a librarian so I think that the face to face kind of roles you know this hasn't gone away if anything there are more and more students every year who want to work in the library and want to be able to talk to people I think also there are all sorts of issues that again they go back quite a long way in terms of digital libraries about how do we reassure people that this resource is is trustworthy and then you get into complicated questions about metadata and rdf and all that kind of stuff which the problem about that is the while information professionals and um district humanities people understand that kind of complexity general your average user doesn't so um or may do but it's not it's not common metadata um it's not easy to understand or so I think I think we kind of gave up on that a bit I think we all thought okay well great you know there's google now it's fine people are just google stuff it doesn't matter the page rank will sort it out and it sort of did to some extent but I think you know some of these questions that we we started asking ourselves in the 1990s and 2000s we never really answered and I think this question of how do we not just convince our colleagues but our users that something is trustworthy and maybe even enjoyable to use is it's not an answered question at all so you know I I think that is something I I have to hand back to the libraries because I think you guys are are the experts so from what you're saying there's really is a kind of role for us educationally to kind of as information professionals to help people understand I think this was one of the points from the questions you know is is that one of our roles within the library to help people understand what is trustworthy how do we understand algorithms and data and that we should kind of start picking up that role a little more and doing more around about that okay picking up on some of the other questions that have come through there's quite a few round about have we just fallen out of love with the digital because of the fact that algorithms have proven to be untrustworthy or distorting things has there become a sort of lopsided reporting and portrayal of different digital elements so that we now no longer love it the way we were so enthusiastic once upon a time yeah I think we have a bit I mean this is always the problem isn't it this is how the hype cycle works if I'm sure everybody's seen that graph you know you have that you know do you start off with a new thing and it's enormously hyped and then then you get into the trough of despondent or whatever it's called and then it tends to pick up and these these things fluctuate I think what's interesting is that perhaps for those of us who have been working in digital humanities or in you know in the information profession we've been thinking about these issues for quite a long time but it was quite difficult to to get journalists or politicians to be interested in them back in the day now suddenly people are interested suddenly people are worried about you know cyberterrorism or cyber attacks or algorithms or you know how do we trust the information we have and what might be the effect of it I think in a sense we have as information professionals seen it before we have to start thinking well okay this is the same wave effect we have to hope that we come up the other side of it because I think you know what is needed is a really a balanced a balanced consideration of yes there are some things that digital resources perhaps don't do so well but on the other hand there are also some good things you know that we we need not to be journalistic about it you know for for those of us who are somewhat introverted actually lockdown has been whispered really quite fun because you know for some some people don't enjoy a huge amount of social contact some people quite like working at home quite like talking to colleagues online and especially people who are newer or diverse this may you know literally have made their life hugely better so you know there are positive aspects to digital interaction and I think it it may be incumbent upon some of us who were once upon a time the enthusiasts though we are you know sometimes our role is rightfully to critique but sometimes our role is to remind people hey you know what this stuff is still great you know I was just thinking today as I'm obviously working at home you know here I am with my tiny little iPad that is no bigger than a book and you know sometimes I'm reading and using voice notes to just dictate notes sometimes I am carrying it downstairs during my lunch break plugging it into the TV and watching some terrible program from from Netflix or something like that but but you know I was just thinking isn't this wonderful you know this is just such a tiny little thing and yet it's so powerful like I've just been writing about you know what what are what the net looked like and what computers look like in 1990 I just thought you know this is miraculous we have to remember this is a wonderful thing and in a sense it is it is our job to remind people that this is wonderful as well as terrible and I think again that was one of the um pointers that our questions that were kind of coming through that reflecting on where our users are currently and how they're feeling around about digital and I think what you expressed just there was some of the kind of joy and I think you know we're all probably quite relieved that we're in lockdown you know at this particular point in time because digitally we can just find another film on Netflix or read a book or get something when we're not allowed out but again then there is this whole you know how do we deal with this sort of sheer volume of data that we've got and I think another idea that's sort of coming through from the questions is around about how we how we as users start thinking around about that data and also our behaviours how we behave with that data and what are the ethics or it and I think is that something you could just reflect on how do we manage our data ethically and present it. Oh that is really interesting um could you say a bit more about the thinking about kind of things like algorithmic bias and things like that. Yes so there's been quite a number of things around about the algorithms and the distortions and also the lopsided idea of empowerment which is compounding the digital divide that we're coming across and then again we're beginning to sort of see you know at Edinburgh we've got the chair and data ethics and we're beginning to recognise that actually it's not the algorithms in themselves that are creating bias or distortion it's how they're applied and it's around about thinking about that wider kind of social cultural context in which you're applying those particular algorithms in order to understand what's happening what do you think we can do around about that so that that joy of digital that you were touching on isn't perhaps lost and that we aren't so fearful but that we balance it. Yeah okay um I see where you're coming from on that one I'm yeah I mean I actually think it's very very important that some of these issues have come to the fore and I in a sense I welcome the A-level algorithm fiasco because it has made people think about okay what are these things and what effect are they having on our life and of course you know many of the accounts were you know trivialised and and I find it kind of interesting that we all know that you know those of us who have children are going through university admissions all those of us who've been involved in it for our department or whatever know that they're always going to be if you've got highly selective universities kids who simply do not achieve the grades they wanted to get and of course they're upset and disappointed but that happens every year because children are young adults are valuable teachers are sometimes too optimistic sometimes something weird happens in the exams and there's this understanding that you know weird things can happen with humans because we're human somehow we expect that an algorithm never makes mistakes so you know there was there was the fury about the algorithm because it's like but these kids haven't got the grades they expected well yes but that happens every year but we were you know people were thinking yes but it's not right if a human decides that it you know it's it's it's kind of sorry it's not right if an algorithm decides that it's it's it's not understandable we there was sort of extra level of fear and I think it's very important therefore that these things are beginning to be discussed and the you know subsequently and quietly some local authorities started to think about whether they should drop the use of algorithms in terms of evaluating and guiding welfare provision which has been highly controversial but only highly controversial if you're kind of interested in this stuff so I think there is a beginning of a sense of the discourse is changing you know the discourse of well how you know what effects could these things have it is the sort of thing we should be discussing much more you know it's good that it's in the popular press it's good that journalists are talking about it we need to be talking about it more at universities as you say it's it's good that we we also have a recent appointment in algorithmic bias at Durham I think it's something that people are beginning to be aware of you know the algorithms do not right themselves yet you know they mine to some point but but they're written by humans and therefore the all of these questions are complex and work into questions about equality diversity bias that humans have and algorithms have but if you bake them into an algorithm then things become more complex so I I think that it is a matter of own discussion it's the sort of thing that you know way back in the day when I was at UCL doing what now sounds like a extremely old-fashioned program I used to run called electronic communication and publishing it sounds just you know incredibly creaky but you know these were the sorts of things we didn't discuss algorithms but we did discuss a lot of these issues at the time and I remember thinking yeah but you know what this needs to be widely discussed it doesn't just need to be you know 30 students who happen to have taken this course you go out into the world and understand it there needs to be a much wider level of understanding I think I I'm not convinced that we've still got that level of discussion in universities we're beginning to but I think I think we really need to to keep working on that which is a great segue into one of the questions that Michelle Blake put is how do we need to engage with our local communities within the university and wider to kind of make sure that trust and digital is understood especially seeing as we've got quite a kickback at the moment around about people being sick of experts and not really wanting to trust them and I think again during the pandemic what we've discovered the advice keeps changing and people have found that really challenging so again we're sort of in that position as you know professionals being being experts how do we kind of get that role and relationship right and build the right communication with that community that is very difficult I am I'm not at all sure I have answers for that one of the things I would say is I think it's about what people my sense is that what people have tired of is just being talked at and told stuff during the pandemic one of the things that again I think librarians and museum professionals are very good at is actually involving people in terms of bringing them in and asking people to engage in co-creation and thinking about how okay we're thinking about things like special collections and museums but what questions do our communities our users want to ask of these things what do they want to see and it's interesting we've got a really successful project at Durham which is actually run out of our computer science department called TechUp which is about involving people from the local community who haven't had the educational opportunities that they might have liked to have this is women in in coding in learning how to code in you know the idea is to improve their career prospects but also I think the sheer experience of coming into university meeting people who are called professor so and so getting involved is has been a really positive one because it's beginning to break down some of the some of the walls if you like that they're not real they're perceptual walls between our community doesn't necessarily think it has anything you know that and it doesn't really think about interacting directly with academics or with information professionals I think this is something you know information professionals do and could do really well thinking about how do we you know our university libraries are very much you know big buildings into which you never go unless you're a student are there ways to integrate the way library provision works and in terms of the community as well as as well as academic libraries you know what what links do we have with the things that Marcus Rashford's talking about about books as well as food for for kids who've not had many opportunities you know the fact that he never read a book until he was 17 you know how do we how do we break these things down again I don't feel I'm sufficiently expert to to give the answers but I do think it's about working actively with the community rather than just talking at it and again we've had some a number of questions around about what you're beginning to touch on there that sort of digital physical I think within the universities quite often the library is seen very much as a physical building where you go to study and you get access to the books but in reality actually most of the content or a lot of the content that our students are accessing is digital and you know it'll be more digital than it will be the physical and again there's another kind of question here around about that you know we've got these blended digital physical spaces how do we navigate between the two and make people aware of each side of it and again I think you touched on you know there's a joy in that digital but there's also we take real pleasure in the physical and for some of us our physical books are you know magical things but then we also have the digital so how do we navigate that yeah I I stop me if I go on about this because I could I could go on about it for hours and frequently do um but you know this is this is one of the really fascinating research questions of our time released it is to me you know I think I'm going to be working on this question for the rest of my career and I've been working on it for a few years now it turns out that you know how do we move between physical and digital information spaces well it seems so simple when back in the day we just thought okay a digital library is a new thing we all will do is provide training courses for people they've used physical libraries it'll be fine they can read a book they can read stuff in a digital library no problem end of end of thing no turns out really really complicated and that the firstly the information skills that we have in physical spaces turn out to be very very complicated and not necessarily easy to translate into digital things my husband knows that I sort of do anthropology on him if you like you know he is an academic he is a historian but you know sometimes I marvel at the fact that he can find some digital things difficult when he's actually really quite good at using a computer and I think that's the problem we underestimate how difficult some of this stuff is and how for some people it's intuitive and for others not and they're not taking a photo at all it's just it's not intuitive the emotional aspects are you know that's kind of straightforward to some extent the emotional aspects are really fascinating these questions of how do we feel about our environment you know as you said books we love books and you know some of the stuff I've been reading recently from my book you know back in the 1990s people really terrified that we would lose our books you know there was a sense of grief that came out of the writings at the time it hasn't happened you know there are more and more books published and you know the digital share of the market goes down in relative terms in the last few years because because books evoke an emotional reaction because books are you know reading is a social activity especially reading with children um and we are only beginning to understand this relatively recently but it is certainly not true that the younger people are the more they love digital stuff they don't and the research that one of my former PhD students and their colleagues Laura Dietz has done on this does suggest that in fact there's if anything there's an opposite age effect but young people love books you know young people might well just as well enjoy visiting a museum they don't necessarily want to visit it in digital space we don't we do know that people don't tend to in fact almost never um express any strong really strong emotions strong aura strong wonder about digital environments and digital objects whereas they would with pretty much exactly the same you know that the original of the thing that's been digitized would evoke a completely different reaction and we don't really very much know why at the moment um there's some there's some suggestion we got a little bit of evidence that this might be slightly different with art objects um but unfortunately the rest of that research we this was a pilot study and the rest of the research didn't get funded so we've kind of stopped doing research on that unfortunately um but um yeah this is this is really fascinating and a lot of it is to do with how do our brains work you know we can cognitively we can understand the text that we're reading whether it's from a physical text or uh uh digital text but even then it's difficult you know the longer the text is the more difficult it is for us to ask to deal with it in in digital space even my colleagues mathematicians will tell me that if they've got a really difficult maths proof they want to work on they do not want to work on an iPad thank you very much you know we we've recently built a new computer science and maths building in Durham and they absolutely insisted that we must have whiteboards in the corridors so that people could get together and write things on whiteboards and solve problems together I think that tells you a huge amount both about the sort of the social effect of mathematics but also you know I've talked to colleagues in math about this and they said I just can't understand complexity in maths if I'm having to do it in a digital space I need to see it in front of me so whether it's cognitive aspects whether it's emotional aspects and the way that these two things or three things we talk about social the way these all kind of mesh in together turn out to be really interesting and I think it's to do something to do with multi-sensory input and the digital channels we're usually only using two senses today we're using our site and our hearing we can't touch and we can't smell and we can't taste and we certainly don't have that whatever its sense it's called but that sense of being in a group which is another sense that's that kind of feedback loop that you get so at the moment we don't know if we've bored everyone or whether everyone is actually fascinated about this but it's something I find absolutely fascinating so yeah and I too find this a particularly interesting area and I think again we've got another great question I'm not quite sure who posed this one it came through the chat but it's around about that sustainability of digital and we're all very much conscious that you know climate change and we need to kind of reduce fossil fuel reductions and so on and the internet is as it so nicely says here the world's largest fossil fuel burning machine so how can we all reduce digital addiction and enforced adherence to digital culture which is unsustainable in order to help support and make those climate changes so I think what you were saying earlier is quite fascinating because actually we haven't all we're currently shifting to digital because of the situation but we don't seem naturally inclined to yeah I think that's interesting as you say we are not naturally inclined to go into digital spaces unless you are a sort of weird digital humanities geek such as myself um but you know generally people aren't and I think these questions of the impact of digital on climate change have been relatively it's just not really considered I mean we're all aware that well isn't it great that we're not flying at the moment because you know that's lowering emissions from flying hugely and that's great and you know being online can help us not to fly and I think that that is important but yeah I mean when you think about the the sheer heat that is created by server you know banks of servers at Durham we have huge capacity in HPC the biggest of any university in the north of England and that's wonderful but our buildings are and we will have to build new buildings to be able to recycle that heat it turns out that it is ruinously expensive to backwards engineer a building to to cope with the cooling you know the heat and the water that come out from the cooling from computers and there have I think there have to be thoughts about this you know how do we how do we reuse some of those things and there was a wonderful uh occasion when I was in Paris um a few years ago when I was on the committee scientifique for the compass condos say which is in um and that is a what used to be a very big brownfield site used to be kind of big kind of warehouses factories etc and now is partly it's turning into console say which is a university site but also um some high tech um businesses and one of these had um I was walking along the road uh one one day with with some locals and I said there are palm trees going along there how come there are palm trees in Paris outside and they said oh well that'll be the cooling from um from that's a big um server farm in there and they're using the water to grow palm trees which was you know a wonderful thought so in some ways we could and should be thinking about how do we how do we use the apparent waste products from uh from computing in a better and more sustainable ways it doesn't have to be palm trees it could be vegetables um it could be you know things that will help feed us all but yeah I mean there I think it's a bit it struck me the other day it's a bit like car use you know for many years people just blithely went around using their cars until someone said uh what about the effect of all these fossil fuels and I think we've all been blithely using our computers with literally no thought to what um what the effects may be so so yeah this is a it's just beginning to be an issue now and I I do think it's something we're going to have to think about further I mean you know the dear old book is wonderfully sustainable it keeps going for years if you look after it nicely and it doesn't emit anything except when it's been and it's initially transported so yeah I think I think we have to we think some of these questions although we've had some interesting kind of chat coming through as well people just reflecting that because we've got digital technology and because we're in this current situation we're not commuting um and the way that we were which was also kind of causing climate change so there is a flip side to it the technology is enabling some of things but also occasionally um creates harm and I think as you were sort of saying it's the idea of kind of looking at reuse um and and kind of rethinking some of the way we deal with things um I'm just trying to have a look we've had a huge range of questions um and things coming through also around about loneliness and anxiety which you also touched on um within that digital space um so I think um is that something you would like to just reflect on for a couple of minutes and then I'm afraid I think we'll have to finish up. Yeah I just I mean I've just been quickly looking at the chat and the and the Q&A and we've got so many things in there I wish we had more time to talk about them but maybe something we can we can think about how could we deal with this and how could we yeah anyway let's think about some of the issues coming up but yeah I mean the loneliness issue I mean it is strange isn't it that I mean I think it's made us think more about these questions of neurotypical and neurodiverse people because um for many neurotypical people lockdown has been incredibly difficult you know the people have been missing their families and their friends and work has been you know even the literally no water cooler moments because nobody has a water cooler um I think some I think some workplaces and some groups of friends have been really creative in terms of thinking about how can we try and help you know how can we replace this even slightly so we're having a my department is having a departmental coffee break every every Thursday morning at 11 just so people can join and it's that's for the staff but you know the students are finding all sorts of ways that they can keep in contact with people when they're having to be you know kept in households and not able to socialize so I think in a certain way digital has been fantastic in that sense because we know it's not the same and we know it doesn't replace but where would we be without it I mean my goodness at the moment you know um imagine this has happened 20 years ago we how would we have communicated you know we had we we simply could not be doing what we're doing now you know we just it would not have been possible in terms of the bandwidth available the technology available so in a sense we we should be deeply grateful for it I think it also does remind us that you know for our colleagues and friends who are not neuro neurotypical who are neurodiverse this may have been a huge relief you know some people may be feeling much less stressed because if they don't um if if physical interaction is is more challenging then in some ways this this has been a kind of sanctuary and I think in some cases that that means that we as employers and maybe even friends and relatives need to think again about how how should we interact in future do we always have to interact face to face could we think about okay we've all learned that trying to have a part face to face and part online meeting is a total nightmare and teaching is even worse but you know could we think about how how do we respond to the needs of people for whom you know big social gatherings and face to face meetings are not easy so perhaps that's a that's a positive piece of awareness that may have been being created so I'm going to be relentlessly cheerful about this and I think again there's been a really interesting kind of kind of comment through about you know we almost need to create a third kind of space a kind of mixed space um and especially for libraries that's something we maybe need to think around about and think around about our different users because they are all in different places and some have really welcomed this as you've so nicely highlighted and some have found this just a little bit more challenging so we do need to think around about that