{"id":9939,"date":"2011-02-07T16:00:32","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T21:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/?p=9939"},"modified":"2020-10-08T16:03:38","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T20:03:38","slug":"the-questions-of-digital-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/the-questions-of-digital-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"The Question(s) of Digital Humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following remarks are a slightly modified version of a presentation made by MITH Director, Neil Fraistat, for the TILTS Symposium Roundtable: \u201cWHAT IS DIGITAL HUMANITIES?\u201d In order to open conversation on this topic, Fraistat draws together quotations from some of the most recent statements on the subject and articulates a set of questions through which it might be thoughtfully explored.<\/em><\/p>\n

THE QUESTION(S) OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES<\/strong><\/p>\n

The topic for our roundtable today, \u201cWhat is Digital Humanities?,\u201d is a question that has already been widely addressed in a virtual cascade of tweets, blogs, newspaper articles, conference sessions, and manifestoes, not to mention a few essays, the most recent and best of which is by my colleague Matt Kirschenbaum<\/a>. \u00a0Links to much of this commentary can be found at CUNY COMMONS<\/a>. The intensity of interest in this question and the heated debates about it reflect the perceived high stakes of the answer. Two MLAs ago, Digital Humanities was proclaimed as \u201cthe next big thing\u201d on the academic scene; this past MLA it was discussed in the Chronicle as not only already well established, but as having developed a \u201cstar system,\u201d a sure sign of approaching superannuation.\u00a0 Next year, I expect we\u2019ll be hearing about \u201cThe Death of the Digital Humanities,\u201d so it is probably best that I speak quickly before the whole subject completely disappears.<\/p>\n

At an MLA session on \u201cThe History and Future of Digital Humanities\u201d a few weeks ago, I found myself wanting to tell those in the room who were obsessing over exactly what Digital Humanities is to relax: I\u2019m a Romanticist, and after over 150 years we still haven\u2019t come to a generally agreed upon definition of the field–and that, oddly enough, has helped to keep Romanticism dynamic and vibrant. On the other hand, it has also made Romanticism as a field vulnerable to disappearing into the long 18th or 19th<\/sup> Centuries, which is to say that \u201cfieldness\u201d has very real material and institutional instantiations and consequences, as Kirschenbaum and others have argued.\u00a0 These consequences are well illustrated by Kathleen Fitzpatrick in terms of the Media Studies Progam at Pomona College. Here is a long but very useful quotation\u00a0from “The Stakes of Disciplinarity”<\/a> on\u00a0her blog \u201cPlanned Obsolescence\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“

[I]n order to be able to hire the person that media studies needed, in the subfields that we needed, working on the issues and with the methodologies we wanted our students exposed to, we had to become a department. We had to be able to control our own positions. We also needed our own space, rather than being spread out across the campus, and we needed a budget that could support the faculty that we were building. All of these pressures had the inevitable result of shoving us into a disciplinary model. In order to make the case for departmental status, I had to argue that media studies was a coherent field with a commonly agreed-upon set of core texts and methodologies. And it is, sure \u2014 but the thing about those core texts and methodologies is that they\u2019ve got their origins in a range of other disciplines, which media studies has brought together in conversation around the idea of mediation. Over time, of course, those conversations have resulted in something that begins to look like a canon, and that process of canon-formation has, as it has repeatedly in fields across the academy, resulted in debates about what\u2019s in and what\u2019s out, who\u2019s really doing media studies and who\u2019s not.”<\/p>\n

Fitzpatrick concludes by wondering about the cost of \u201cdisciplinarity,\u201d about \u201cthe degree to which we are now being disciplined by our need to define the field. What conversations won\u2019t take place,\u201d she asks,\u00a0 \u201cnow that our structure has become officially institutionalized?\u201d We DHers stand now at an intoxicating and relatively rare moment in the history of the humanities, at the cusp of what appears to be an emerging field that our own words and deeds can help to define; but Fitzpatrick\u2019s cautionary note should bring necessary sobriety to our discussions about the exact meaning of Digital Humanities, since each of our attempts to discipline Digital Humanities risks losing whatever is most vital and promising about it. And yet such discussions as our own should and must go on.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to help frame our discussion this morning by thinking about some of the most interesting questions that are presupposed by the question, \u201cWhat is Digital Humanities,\u201d the first among which would appear to be: \u201cIs it a field?\u201d Although some still consider DH to be an array of methodologies across the humanities disciplines rather than a field in its own right, most DHers appear to consider themselves to be engaged in a field with already well entrenched institutional roots. In the words of Steve Ramsey<\/a>: \u201cDigital Humanities is not some airy Lyceum. It is a series of concrete instantiations involving money, students, funding agencies, big schools, little schools, programs, curricula, old guards, new guards, gatekeepers, and prestige. It might be more than these things, but it cannot not be these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who assume DH is a field face another set of subsidiary questions, among them:<\/p>\n

\u2022 What is its geneology?<\/p>\n

\u2022 What are its Boundaries?<\/p>\n

\u2022Who is a Digital Humanist (and who is not)?<\/p>\n

\u2022How does it change humanists’ relationships to their tools and objects of study?<\/p>\n

\u2022Who does its Labor?\u00a0 How is this labor rewarded?<\/p>\n

\u2022 What is its Language?<\/p>\n

\u2022What is its Curriculum?<\/p>\n

\u2022What is its Value?<\/p>\n

\u2022Has it Been Successful for the Right Reasons?<\/p>\n

\u2022Is it Sustainable?<\/p>\n

\u2022What is its Future?<\/p>\n

These are some of the questions that I hope we\u2019ll pursue in our joint discussion, for which I would like to prime the pump by making a few related observations. Of the questions I\u2019ve named, the one about the boundaries of DH is perhaps the most contentious and has involved problematic oppositions between DH and new media studies, building and theorizing, method and ideology, service and research, \u201cbig tent DH\u201d and disciplinary specialization. About such issues, I find especially interesting the following provocation by Mark Sample, with its call for innovation and disruption, though it might seem to fly in the face of thematerial realities I\u2019ve already discussed:<\/p>\n

Stop worrying about definitions and categories and celebrate hybridity. Take advantage of all that the margin affords. Do what you do and keep doing what you do. Engage outsiders, build coalitions, and form tactical collaborations. And move on when the time comes to move on, finding another periphery point to innovate and disrupt.<\/p>\n

Sample\u2019s tactics are founded on a compelling vision of the field as always not one, as it were–or to be more precise, that is always not one thing, but rather a dynamic process of thinking, making, and collaborating that is fundamentally concerned with disciplinary interrogation, innovation, and transformation.<\/p>\n

What DH has perhaps most lacked are compelling strategic visions of its own larger place and value both within and outside of the academy. As Johanna Drucker has recently noted<\/a>,\u00a0the real challenge to digital humanities is still intellectual: how does work in this area contribute to theory, methods, or the corpus of humanistic study? This question goes right to the heart of ways we assess the value of tool-making, project development and management, institutional initiatives, programs. Humanities fields constitute themselves, like any discipline, through their theoretical approaches (ways of thinking), methods (ways of doing), and objects of study (pre-existing and constituted by the act of study). I do think we have instances of each of these in our legacy of digital humanities projects, but the explicit articulation of this \u2013 rather than blunt assertion \u2013 is not yet fully developed or we would not have to keep making the case.<\/p>\n

Alan Liu similarly laments the lack of cultural criticism in DH:<\/a><\/p>\n

To be an equal partner\u2013-rather than . . . just a servant<\/em>-\u2013at the table, digital humanists will need to find ways to show that thinking critically about metadata, for instance, scales into thinking critically about the power, finance, and other governance protocols of the world.<\/p>\n

Questions that might follow from Liu\u2019s position include:<\/p>\n

\u2022What are the politics of DH?<\/p>\n

\u2022What kinds of ideological commitments does DH embody?<\/p>\n

\u2022How does DH engage issues of Access, Openness, and Literacy?<\/p>\n

\u2022How does DH engage issues of Diversity, Equity, and Globalism?<\/p>\n

If Drucker and Liu are right about the intellectual work left to be done for the field, then for the purposes of our joint discussion this morning, we might take our cue from Chris Forster, who in a posting on the HASTAC blog last September that received much attention, suggests:<\/p>\n[I]nstead of asking “What is ‘digital humanities’?” we might ask, with greater profit (or maybe, simply, greater honesty): ‘What does the digital humanities want?’ or ‘What do you want from the digital humanities?’ or ‘Why do you wish to make the humanities digital?’\u201d<\/p>\n

Addressing such questions thoughtfully and compellingly is, perhaps, our best hope of securing the future of digital humanities. But, to my mind, the vitality of that future depends on our not foreclosing our definition and leaving the question of digital humanities just that.

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