There’s No-Place Like the Digital Humanities

Andrew Hartman and an entertaining cast of commentators discuss “the utopianism of the digital humanities” over at the US Intellectual History blog today.

Addendum:

For posterity here are my comments on Andrew’s post:

Andrew,A typically sharp, Laschian post. Since I’ve been working at the interstice of modern US cultural/intellectual history and digital history here are a few observations on the ways in which people are talking about the field, followed by my own sense of things.

(1) First, one issue here is that digital humanities means many things to many people right now. Its meaning and future are contested. There is, however, a developing critical, methodological literature of DH that is not all utopian. I think THATCamp is meant to be utopian in a way that the larger field is not necessarily. (The whole THATCamp “unconference” move is intriguing in its own right, and worthy of inquiry methinks.) But from what I read, DH is deeply engaged with the very questions you raise. Is it new? Is it good? What is it, anyway? And so on.

For instance, (these are just a few among dozens) there were these intriguing articles about a “big tent” approach to DH (coming out of a DH conference in 2011)…its possibilities and problems:

Douglas Knox, Digital Humanities 2011 and the elephant in the tent, http://beingnumero.us/blog/2011/07/digital-humanities-2011-and-the-elephant-in-the-tent/

And William Pannapacker’s overviews:

http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities/128434/

http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities-a/129036/

And Fred Gibbs has been thinking about these issues, see http://historyproef.org/blog/digital-humanities/critical-discourse-in-the-digital-humanities/.

On to part 2…

…part 2(2) Digital history is indeed the latest “trendy” subfield in history. After all, this is how the discipline works, for better or worse. Social history in the 70s, cultural history in the 80s, the transnational more recently. One of the great things about intellectual history, in my opinion, is that it is always there in all of these fields, which is what causes handwringing about intellectual history as an autonomous subfield, but also what makes IH such a worthy, important kind of work.

For a number of DHers, digital humanities is a kind of return and extension of cliometrics and the Braudelian French Annales School approach. These are the “big data” people who are thinking about how we can use computational power to discern patterns that are not visible using smaller sets of empirical evidence. What happens when you look at 20,000 19th century newspapers? What can you see using algorithmic searches that can then work as a heuristic for further inquiry (here I’m drawing on Ted Underwood’s work, http://www.english.illinois.edu/people/tunder; or see Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs project about Victorian literature, and other projects, http://historyproef.org/projects/). Another project that uses digital tools to “mine” new information from sources is Kate Bagnall and Tim Sherratt’s work on Invisible Australians: Living Under the White Australia Policy, which used facial recognition software to extract the visages of non-Europeans from government documents and place them front and center, pulled out of archives that categorized them as less than full citizens and humans (http://invisibleaustralians.org/faces/).

The Invisible Australians project points to another dimension of DH. It’s not just about applying digital tools to evidence to see new things, but also about communication: how can we express historical interpretation in new ways, mediums, modes, narrative forms?

For still others, its about the education end of things, how do we train students (and retrain ourselves) for the digital, information age (and do we want to? do we have to?)?

(3) Digital history/humanities are possibly responses to tectonic shifts in our world. Picking up on Tim’s comments above, the position here would be that DH is the equivalent of the shift from scrolls (and the professional scribes who made them; and the people who read them) to the Gutenberg press. DH is a scholarly response to these large-scale transformations. Easy to take down this idea, easy to inflate it, but the truth is we just do not know yet.

I think the most intriguiing writer on this (from the “the world is changing” side of the equation) is Cathy Davidson, especially this essay:

http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/information-age-without-humanities-industrial-revolution-without-steam-engine

(4) My take: zooming back in on scholarly concerns, I think digital history has the potential to reinvigorate core historical questions, most especially the way we investigate and communicate the relationship of evidence to argument. In this sense digital history is no utopian revolution, but rather an elaboration and continuation of what’s best about historical method. New tools for the toolbox of seeing patterns and talking, writing, sharing, and debating them. When the hype settles down about DH, this may well be the main contribution.

So, last thought: if you want to get students to write and read more deeply and critically, one non-utopian question is whether the digital might enable that in new ways. Not as a replacement of what intellectual history is about, but rather as an elaboration and enrichment of it. The answer may be no, but the question is worth pondering.

Cheers,
Michael