Johanna Drucker’s formulation of performative materiality constitutes a decisive intervention in digital humanities by displacing static ontologies of digital media in favour of an event-based, interpretative model. Against reductive notions of digital immateriality, Drucker argues that digital artefacts are irreducibly material, yet their significance does not reside solely in substrate, code, or infrastructure, but in what they do—how they enact meaning through situated performance. Extending Matthew Kirschenbaum’s distinction between forensic and formal materiality, she introduces a third dimension in which meaning emerges not as intrinsic property but as contingent production, generated through use, cognition, and cultural interaction. This shift from entity to event relocates digital analysis within the lineage of structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, and systems theory, insisting that interfaces are not neutral conduits but enunciative systems that position subjects, encode ideology, and orchestrate interpretative acts. Her critique of dominant HCI paradigms is especially acute: efficiency-driven, task-oriented interface design presumes a user-consumer model fundamentally misaligned with the epistemic aims of the humanities. By contrast, a humanistic interface should foreground ambiguity, multiplicity, and interpretative agency, privileging sustained critical engagement over procedural clarity. Drucker’s case studies—Google, the Encyclopedia of Chicago, and Stanford’s Spatial History Project—demonstrate how interfaces naturalise authority, conceal ideological ordering, and suppress alternative epistemologies through visual and structural conventions. Her proposed alternative is an interpretative interface: polyvocal, mutable, and reflexive, capable of exposing its own constructedness while registering the performative traces of use. In this model, interface becomes not a transparent tool for retrieval but a dynamic epistemic space in which knowledge is continually constituted, contested, and reconfigured.
Drucker, J. (2013) ‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’, DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 7(1), pp. 1–20.
