abstract:

This essay considers the complexities and limitations of the “lifecycle report,” an established engineering and business practice in which auditors attempt to account for the entire material and operating “cost” of an electronic component. Answering Bethany Nowviskie’s 2014 call to “attend to the environmental and human costs” of digital humanities, I present the case of Anna Coluthon, a Twitterbot residing on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, that in 2016 became the first nonhuman agent to register as a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA), and to co-present a paper, as she did with me at the MLA convention in 2017. Interleaved with Anna’s own comments, my essay reframes the lifecycle report as an act of Latourian “compilation work,” arguing that any attempt to account for the wholeness of a machine’s impact on the planet is a complex and partial process, as much art as it is engineering audit.

摘要：

本文考虑了“生命周期报告”的复杂性和局限性，“生命周期报告”是一种既定的工程和商业惯例，审核员试图以此来解释电子组件的全部材料和运营“成本”。在回答Bethany Nowviskie在2014年提出的“关注数字人文科学的环境和人类成本”的呼吁时，我介绍了一个驻留在Raspberry Pi微型计算机上的Twitterbot Anna Coluthon的案例，该案例在2016年成为第一个注册成为该组织成员的非人类代理并与她共同发表论文，就像她在2017年举行的MLA大会上与我所做的一样。与Anna自己的评论交错在一起，我的论文将生命周期报告重新设计为Latourian的“编译工作，