imagining cooperative interactivity and the democratic digital humanities.
Digital humanities gets a lot of hype as a field: it could be, many argue, the way to connect the liberal arts to the twenty-first century labor market more effectively. At the center of this rhetoric is the notion that the digital humanities encourages collaboration.
Collaboration is supposed to supplant the old ideal of the isolated scholar in a medieval garret or monastic library. In the digital future, supposedly, the humanities can help to train workers for a world beyond the cubicle. Students in the humanities will ostensibly know how to dial in to the network and give themselves over to its tweeting, networking, coding, project managing, interning, and team building. But what are they giving up in these supposed collaborations?
The lack of focus on the complex interactivity between self and group is what worries me about current versions of digital humanities collaboration. And this is not just a semantic issue. It’s a question of what it means to be democratic, indeed of what it means to be human. Aside from the fact that the word reminds me of Vichy France, collaborators must often give up something of their independence, if not explicitly then implicitly. At worst, the word is invoked to mask unequal relations of power. Collaborators in such scenarios are told they must, at some level, submit their sense of autonomous judgment, integrity, and ethics to a larger force: the long tail, the smart mob, the data mine, the wiki, the algorithm, or the market. To do this, at an even deeper educational level (perhaps at the deepest level), they must compromise the very skills of critical reflection, analysis, and interpretation that the humanities are supposed to enhance.
As humanists in the digital realm, then, we must carefully probe the meaning and practice of collaboration. Our goal as educators should not be to train ultimately-submissive workers, but rather to encourage democratic citizenship. I would argue that democratic citizens can become innovative workers in the capitalist marketplace (or any marketplace, or any non-market institutional setting, for that matter), but not the other way around. This is because citizenship demands entering into cooperative relationships, not collaborative ones. By cooperation, I mean to emphasize mutuality and the difficult but wondrous balancing act between self and group that, one could argue, defines humans at their best.
Those who enter into the bonds of cooperation must possess extraordinary skills of perception, comprehension, analysis, negotiation, assessment, and communication. They must consider the relation of the common (and the commons) to the uncommon and distinctive. They must learn to get along, but also to fight for their rights. And they must, most of all, be able to assess the interactivity that goes into the balance between self and group. Here is where the digital comes in, for what defines this emerging world more than interactivity?
If one of our core tasks as digital humanists is to study and explore what it means to be human within the digital, then we might think more about connectedness in all its vexed but powerful dimensions. To that end, I would suggest that we shift from collaboration to cooperative interactivity as a key goal in the emerging field of the digital humanities.
The digital humanities might position training in twenty-first century “work skills” within the broader pursuit of understanding the interactive nature of democratic life in all its senses, from the political to the cultural to the economic. Which is to say that the interactivity of people, and between people and machines, must be hyperlinked to the question of democracy. If it is, then research and teaching in the digital humanities can accentuate the active, fraught, and essential connectedness that technologies enable between individuals and groups. Instead of a few lines on a resume, training in the digital humanities starts to become nothing less than the effort, at both abstract and applied levels, to understand and sustain an interactivity between the flourishing self and enriched collectivity.