Jan 20, 2013
“Digital Humanities”: Two Definitions
Those of us working in or close to the field of Digital Humanities know that the very definition of the term has been vexed from its inception–in my opinion, moreso than typical academic fields.
I’ll not go into them in depth here, but two of my major concerns about the term have been that (a) the literal meaning of the term implies (and, to at least a minority, means) that non-DH practitioners are non-digital humanities professors; (b) the field is much more narrowly defined than the literal meaning of the term suggests.
Whenever we start to debate about these matters–and debates have been particularly numerous lately–it seems like at bottom there are two very important conceptions. The first is sometimes called the “narrow” definition of DH, or recently “‘DH’ with capital letters,” or what I and some others refer to as “tools-and-archives.” One of the things that is strange about this definition is that few of the most prominent voices in the field seem to like it (although it also appears to be the most influential definition with regard to funding and hiring), so when these definition discussions happen, we tend to arrive quickly at violent agreement that what I’ll call the second definition should obtain: the “big tent” definition, or what I’d call the plain literal meaning of the term “digital humanities” (or recently, “dh” with small letters): anything that combines digital work of any sort with humanities work of any sort.
One of the frustrating things about these debates is that sometimes people seem to shift back and forth between the two definitions, insisting on the narrow interpretation in some contexts, but then shifting to the wide one in others. It’s also frustrating that, in public, so many champion the “big tent” definition, but that when looking at the main funding bodies for DH and the majority of job postings, the narrow definition seems to obtain regardless.
Having had a long personal experience with this pattern of shifting definitions, I have found myself profoundly frustrated by the debate, not least because so many of the active practitioners in the field seem to like the “broad” definition, which is of course the one I prefer.
Yet I’ve never seen quite as direct an example of this definitional conflict as we’ve just had. That comes courtesy of the recent book Digital_Humanities, by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp (MIT Press, 2012). Schnapp recently put up pages 121-136 from this book as a “Short Guide to Digital Humanities,” which got quite a few members of the DH community talking on Twitter.
Something about this text struck me as very, very odd. Three of its authors–Drucker, Lunenfeld, and Presner–are faculty members listed as part of the Steering Committee of the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. It’s hard to imagine that these three were not highly influential in the drafting of the “What Is DH?” section of their website–indeed, it’s hard not to imagine that at least some of them actually drafted it. Part of that definition reads (the bolded part is bolded on their site):
Digital Humanities interprets the cultural and social impact of new media and information technologies—the fundamental components of the new information age—as well as creates and applies these technologies to answer cultural, social, historical, and philological questions, both those traditionally conceived and those only enabled by new technologies.
and
Digital Humanities practices are not limited to conventional humanities departments at UCLA, but can affect every humanistic field at the university, both those within the Division of the Humanities, and those in other divisions, including history, anthropology, arts and architecture, information studies, film and media studies, archaeology, geography, ethnic studies, and the social sciences. At the same time, Digital Humanities is a natural outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the Humanities, not a replacement or rejection of traditional humanistic inquiry. In fact, the role of the humanist is critical at this historic moment, as our cultural legacy is migrated to digital formats and our relation to knowledge, cultural material, technology, and society is radically re-conceptualized.
and
As we train students to enter the world of the 21st century, there are significant technological, social, cultural, and intellectual skills that they need to master. These skills include literacy in both traditional and new media, the technical skills related to this literacy, the development of tools for critical analysis, the ability to navigate across, reconfigure, and evaluate different media forms, the ability to synthesize information and bring together different media and methodologies to solve complex problems, the ability to construct models and visualizations for interpreting large-scale datasets, the ability to design information systems and technology platforms to ensure the long-term preservation and sustainability of digital data, and the ability to critically evaluate the potentials and limitations of new technologies. At its core, Digital Humanities addresses these issues by teaching students to create and critique media content, to develop the necessary skills and abilities to evaluate this content, to manipulate and transform digital technologies, and to develop the requisite literacy across information environments and media forms, including textual, aural, visual, and digital domains.
Now if you read these sections very, very carefully, they tend toward the “narrow” definition of DH, but they go out of their way to make it seem otherwise, with consistent reference to “interpretation,” to “new media,” to “include,” to “cultural and social impact.” There is an explicit awareness in this definition that humanists (and administrators) not “part of” DH may see it as harboring some kind of desire to “replace or reject” what they call (in what I consider a highly tendentious fashion) “traditional humanistic inquiry.” This definition seems worried that people might find DH exclusionary, and works hard to paint an inclusive picture.
Since it appeared, I have used this definition in my own papers and presentations because it strikes me as doing double work–not quite telling the whole truth as fully as it could, and thus looking like it doesn’t take issue with the “big tent” definition while relatively quietly insisting on the “narrow” definition.
Word cloud of The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction by S Schreibman, R Siemens, & J Unsworth (from http://tdbowman.com/wp/2012/09/08/scientometrics-scholarly-communication-and-big-data-oh-my/)
So now contrast the language in the Digital_Humanities book, by, I think it’s fair to say, the same authors:
What isn’t the Digital Humanities?
The mere use of digital tools for the purpose of humanistic research and communication does not qualify as Digital Humanities. Nor, as already noted, is Digital Humanities to be understood as the study of digital artifacts, new media, or contemporary culture in place of physical artifacts, old media, or historical culture.On the contrary, Digital Humanities understands its object of study as the entire human record, from prehistory to the present. This is why fields such as classics and archaeology have played just as important
a role in the development of Digital Humanities as has, for example, media studies. This is also why some of the major sectors of Digital Humanities research extend outside the traditional core of the humanities to embrace quantitative methods from the social and natural sciences as well as techniques and modes of thinking from the arts.
Note that this language, dismissive, assured, and not worried about outsiders looking in–indeed, part of a section telling academics how to evaluate DH work for tenure–directly contradicts the bolded section of the definition on UCLA’s own website, where “interprets the cultural and social impact of new media” is among the first descriptions offered. In fact, “interpreting new media” is specifically one of the contentious areas in the fights about DH definition–part of what most of the big-tenters would like included, and what we feel the narrow-DHers purposely exclude (although the justification for this exclusion is rarely if ever made clear). (In a future posting, I hope to have the chance to reflect on a particular concern about explicit ruling-out of digital tool use as a part of DH.)
I will say as carefully as possible that this dynamic is exactly what I have seen in DH: one unthreatening, expansive definition when outsiders look in, another, exclusionary, imposed by a small but powerful and influential subset of DHers, forcefully advocated behind the scenes.
I’ve even seen it from some of these very people.
But never, before, have I seen it so clearly and demonstrably in public. I hope that the great majority of DHers who endorse the big-tent definition will use this as impetus to insist even more forcefully and even more loudly in public that the narrow definition is unacceptable.
The Digital_Humanities book is written as if it speaks with authority over both what the field is and how it should be practiced, although it does not appear to do much to explain the source for that authority. As an outspoken fan of the “big tent” definition, I encourage everyone else who favors that definition to make sure their voices are heard.
[...] about the Digital Humanities, and as far as I know no papers were given that addressed the “narrow” or “Type I” Digital Humanities; on the other hand, if one accepts the broader [...]
[...] increasingly elusive since I’ve stepped outside the academy. For the moment, in spite of the ongoing debate about who is in and who is out, I think DH can still be characterized as an inclusive scholarly community (or at least one that is [...]
[...] a recent post, “‘Digital Humanities’: Two Definitions,” I tried to point out an ongoing conflict in the deployment of the term “Digital [...]
[...] not surprising that, as David Golumbia points out in “‘Digital Humanities’: Two Definitions,” multiple and contradictory assertions of what digital humanities are “about” [...]
[...] Golumbia has a pair of posts tackling, first, in-group and out-group dynamics that plague the digital humanities community, and, second, the role of tools and tool use in [...]
A lot of thoughtful commentary, but I’d like to take Underwood’s assertion that “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” and play with it a bit more. I agree that the rise of separate domain called digital humanities is highly unlikely, as much as it gets bandied about in the CHE, at MLA meetings, or in badly written job postings. One thing is certain, for those of us who have worked at the edges of the disciplines large enough to have institutional units named after them — e.g., “history” or “English” — is that those disciplines are highly resistant either to lapsing or to morphing too quickly.
And so I think Underwood has it exactly right: a whole lot of what gets called “digital humanities” (with or without capitals at the beginning of the words) will simply be enfolded back into the larger set of scholarly practices from which its pioneering practitioners emerged. For example, I can see my own work in the future being described as something like corpus folkloristics and it will have more in common with corpus linguistics than it will some facets of folklore studies.
This impulse to study things en masse, distantly, to understand things as part of a larger corpora with its own internal relations best described through a better understanding of statistics and mathematics does not readily rest in most humanities. I will be curious to see if Roland Barthes observation holds true, that transdisciplinary work does not combine old disciplines but creates a new research object. I think something of that nature is percolating: how else to describe the kinds of conversations occurring among very diverse practitioners together trying to stumble through the results of their initial forays into topic modeling and such?
[...] I mentioned in my last post, the ”Short Guide to Digital Humanities” (pages 121-136 of Digital_Humanities, by Anne [...]
Entering late into this engrossing thread, I am reluctant to join the discussion too much to the bramble of my meditations elsewhere (DHQ 6.2) on the vexed disciplinary formation of the digital field — which term I prefer to DH, as (other echoes of “Freudian field” aside), it means to messily overlap with and divide “DH”: a different sort of big tent, smaller than H, tout court, bigger than D (tout court?) as well. I’m sure that what I do, when I do D, is pretty close to what others would call DH, but I’ve always thought of myself as a doer of H (the biggest tent of all), and then doing *that* to the defiles and distortions of D within H.
The terminology we adopt for talking about what we do to each other, in training our charges and our employers in talk about what we do obviously matters a good deal: our discursive formations are social relations and these produce — especially in the ever-shrinking zero-sum of the American university system — significant effects on what is funded (extravagantly or parsimoniously, and with hard or soft monies), and what is tolerated or allowed to pass under the radar of “pragmatic” decisions about the strategic disciplines. I use “pragmatic” and “strategic” here advisedly, as I teach in a state university system in which the highest-ranking decision makers, our Board of Governors — who are appointed by a Governor who blithely dismisses the value of any but the narrowest of STEM-related disciplines — are on record as saying that the humanities are not “strategic” disciplines in the future of the University.
So we choose which master signifiers to which we affiliate carefully, so as to fit with what we anticipate may be the dominant discourse of a near future. That’s not a cynical enterprise, or not only cynical; it is essential to the formation of a discipline, and that in turn is necessary to itself. In the present intellectual and educational funding climates in the United States, a strategic alignment of the digital field with the humanities is being promoted as a method of reinvigorating the humanities and humanizing the digital, when it may be also a method of sequestering disruptive potentials of both the humanistic and the digital.
[...] of practice-based research in their attempts to define the discipline of Digital Humanities, or as Golumbia [...]
Part of the reason why I’m not troubled by terminology is that I don’t think we’re going to come out of this with a distinct field at all. I suspect the boundaries of existing disciplines will hold, and DH will end up as a loose name for an assortment of different interdisciplinary projects.
Some people will do histories of digital media, and may have strong connections to depts of media studies. Other people will do data mining, and may have connections to library science or computer science. Music and visual art and geography will do their own things.
As those different projects grow, the umbrella concept of “digital humanities” will become less and less meaningful. Personally, I already find it too vague to be useful. I prefer to describe myself as a literary historian who does data mining. If I were advising my dept on language for an ad, I would tell them: absolutely don’t ask for “digital humanities.” If you want text mining, say that. If you want game studies, say that.
But since other people still seem to care about this: in my book, absolutely any project that wants to call itself “digital humanities” *is* digital humanities. I’ve got no more interest in defining that boundary than I do in defining “the humanities” themselves.
I think Ted identifies the most likely long-term outcome, here. I do give precisely the advice Ted describes, when I am asked, and will continue to do so. What’s good in “DH” will be better served by disaggregation from its transcendental signifier than by the latter’s further engorgement, and while there is certainly a legitimate “big tent” argument to be made, refracturing and refactoring may be both more sensible and more likely.
I’ll add this. Intentions aside (and granting Matthew Kirschenbaum’s point about “algorithmic operationalization,” in his comment below), the dissemination of a “DH” discourse and the creation of institutions built around it has not been inexpensive. I realize that people who have devoted much genuinely selfless time and effort to facilitating and supporting the work of others, and who deserve credit for that, find this difficult to hear — but where material *and* intellectual resources are scarce (be that scarcity organic or artificial), expansion here often means contraction elsewhere, in a creative destruction that is almost never planned with malignant intent, and can almost always be understood as a regrettable accident, provided that one chooses to face the facts and endure the stain of association. It’s U.S. Americanism of the worst kind to refuse to do so.
The most pathetic (meaning infused with pathos) aspect of the current struggle of self-nominated “DH”ers to comprehend their opposition is the wishful thinking through which opposition is re-imagined as (1) a “fear” of “DH”, rooted in fear of the future and/or of a specific technicity associated with “DH”; and/or (2) a disappointed desire to be included in “DH.” That a critic of “DH” might well have technical training and knowledge that match or outstrip the most polymathic of self-nominated “DH”ers, and that a critic of “DH” may simply see no point in associating her or his work with a discourse in which she or he has no *sincere* *intellectual* (as distinct from opportunistic professional) interest, appears to be nearly inconceivable.
But talk isn’t cheap. As I’ve already remarked, the “DH” discourse has long since become the person in the room who talks three times as loudly as everyone else, doesn’t notice you wincing, and picks a fight when you ask him to lower his voice. It’s time for that to stop.
I realize those last three paragraphs aren’t aimed at me, but — because I’m unwise — I can’t help saying that I think the creation of all those DH institutions has been a great thing.
I was a relative latecomer to these problems, and there’s no way I could have oriented myself in a complex interdisciplinary space without the websites, the books, the twitter networks, that served as a map. In many cases it was a map pointing outside itself. E.g., discussions among “DHers” on twitter pointed me to subfields of linguistics and computer science that, in 2009, I didn’t even know existed.
So I’m enormously grateful. I don’t think “DH” is the name of a specific intellectual project — and as I said, I wouldn’t use the term in a job ad. But it’s been a name for institutions and for an online community that did a lot to re-energize and refuel my own intellectual life. And sure, yes, as you say, that probably did mean a reallocation of time and energy (and money) from other projects. All I can say in response is that personally, for me, the results were worth it. And now I’ll stop talking so as not to “talk three times more loudly than everyone else”
I can understand that. And would not begrudge anyone pursuit of the continued intellectual growth that too few of us ever even contemplate, after a certain point (or even from the start!). Speaking generally, it does seem to me that others in the history of “humanities computing” successfully pursued such growth without the assistance of a wave of institutional disruption and accompanying publicity in any way comparable to “DH.” Still, it happens as it happens, and on a personal level, I can certainly see the good in it in this case.
ted’s point seems exactly right to me; indeed, if any of the folks in my current grad seminar swing by here, they will recognize an attempt to do exactly this (with _exactly_ the same examples) from our meeting last week: avoid the vague term “dh” in favor of something clearer & more specific.
But as your own example points out, what is intellectually most clear and honest has a bit of trouble when the rubber meets the road of institutional disciplinarity; not all departments have someone so savvy and there are job ads which ask for “dh” explicitly. And people stepping into those positions are going to have questions of P&T; one hopes & expects, of course, that exactly what dh is (to those hiring depts) would be sorted out in the hiring process, but there seems enough room for confusion here so that, despite understandable frustration with the question, arguing what dh is remains a worthwhile activity.
the question of institutionalization also goes to brian’s point (above): a fear that in a “year of death,” DH may suck what little air remains in the room for any /h/ at all. I must say, that while I see where this claim is coming from, I’m not totally convinced that it is true. there are clearly bigger problems facing universities (and “the humanities”–ted’s post on _this_ term also struck me as right) than the “rise” of “dh.” but absent clear numbers, these sort of anxieties–stemming from the definition(s) of dh–seem worthy of consideration.
(ALSO, FYI, THIS WHOLE POST WAS WRITTEN IN UPPERCASE!!!)
Yes, one must keep control of the promotion & tenure narrative. I know that well, having maintained several different professional identities and having abandoned one of the things I was hired to represent, halfway through my own probationary period! So that is possible too.
I myself think there is no bigger threat to the humanities than the capitulation represented by the prefix “digital,” and that it is the much longer history of *humanitas* and “humanism” (see, e.g., Vico vs. Descartes) that is relevant here, more than the 20C U.S. American institutional history of the “humanities.” But you certainly have a point too.
[...] weighed in on this issue of “defining” DH and provided salient critiques, most recently David Golumbia, and there were others before him at MLA (the now infamous “Dark Side” panel is one [...]
David, thank you for this post. After the Twitter-storm that ensued and the discussion that spanned a few days, I’m pleased to see some of it captured here.
There’s an issue not just with the naming of digital humanities. It *has* become a recognizable moniker to administrators in my university (*that* university that’s recently decided to institute MOOC format in a partnership with Udacity). What’s missing from this post, though, is the clear economic boundaries drawn by the initial Short Guide. Doing digital humanities, whatever the definition, can be extremely expensive unless there’s an underlying infrastructure for scholars, teachers, and students. At many institutions, faculty sneak it under the guise of DIY — a very dangerous proposition because it implies that DH can be implemented in scholarship and teaching on the cheap and that the particular skillset of a DHer is not valuable enough to fund or compensate.
The other side of this Short Guide issue smacks in the face of those who can do DH only as a codicil to their teaching. The only mention of students in that short guide comes as labor provided for large projects. This again points toward an existing infrastructure to practice DH instead of recognizing digital pedagogy as an inherently valuable strata of DH (or whatever you would like to call it).
The very danger in this Short Guide is that administrators in my university will indeed read something like this and refer to it during T&P decisions — because it came from MIT. It’s not the definition of DH that’s my pet peeve. It’s the fact that there is no room for other kinds of dh or DH at other types of institutions.
What I have worked so diligently towards over the last 8 years has been marginalized (in this Short Guide) by those who don’t teach 4-4 with 4 preps to students who are the first in their families to attend (and hopefully graduate) college. One of the few ways that I can get dh/DH/dp into my courses is to DIY the technology, insert bloom & fade assignments, engage students in project-driven assignments. Where is that in this Short Guide?
Thanks, David. I’m looking forward to that “future posting” that responds to those who rule out mere “digital tool use as a part of dh.” The most digital work that I do amounts to mere digital tool use; moreover, I use the simplest, cheapest digital media that I can find in order to focus on original media. I usually get the sense from dh talk that this sort of thing won’t count as part of digital humanities, but some dh folks have tried to assure me of the big tent. I try not to invest in the dh name, so I don’t have to care much, personally. As a disinterested outsider, I suspect that the more it excludes traditional textual scholarship and original media, the less enduring and important dh will be.
[...] 21-01-2013: Deze blog-post gaat ook in op de problematische definitie van digital humanities. Tegelijk verwijst hij naar dit [...]
I’d just add that (as I’ve also told the author being “paged” by Whitney in her reply above
) it makes little sense to me personally to describe DH as a “tactical” term or discourse. To me DH is not a “tactical” discourse but very much a *strategic* one, in the general sense of that distinction as made by Certeau, and as it diffused through U.S. cultural studies in its age of infatuation with Certeau.
That is, “DH” is a deliberately large-scale formation aligned with the interiority of institutions and with existing power, rather than with exteriority and weakness. Self-nominated or nominating DHers have certainly tried and continue to try to appropriate a certain “tacticity,” for DH, but it’s just not very persuasive — at least to me, but I’d wager also for not a few others who’ve long noted the so-called “dark side” of the DH.
To me, at least, there simply was no “Digital Humanities” before the English-language phrase “Digital Humanities” appeared for the first time — to the best of my knowledge, in the year 2001 (see http://www.ade.org/cgi-shl/docstudio/docs.pl?adefl_bulletin_d_ade_150_55.pdf ). Before that English-language phrase appeared, the practices and ambitions now nominated by “DH” simply had other names (in my opinion, much less stupid and obnoxious ones — but that’s another debate).
It’s not my place or my desire to tell other people what to call their own work — but there are *also* those of us out there (though I speak for myself, and not necessarily for David G. or for anyone else in particular) who have been long doing things that *could* be called “DH,” who *don’t* want to call those things “DH,” for among other reasons because the “DH” discourse has long since become the person in the room who talks three times as loudly as everyone else, doesn’t notice you wincing, and picks a fight when you ask him to lower his voice.
For us, the term “DH” and its definitions are more (and more literally) historical than operational in either the tactical or the strategic sense — but if one has to choose, much more the latter than the former. I’m not really a fan of the “big tent” talk for that reason, though I understand David’s support for it (and support it myself in spirit, if not letter).
Certeau notwithstanding, the emergent digraphic constructs dh/DH/D_H/#dh/#transformdh seem precisely tactical to me, and, as I argue in my piece, also to varying degrees algorithmically operationalized through social media services.
On a more general note, it’s odd to me that so many (or is it so many?) seem so vexed by a terminology that has such a specific and cleanly documented onset. (I don’t claim that my accounts are definitive btw, but I think they are illustrative of what can be accomplished with just a little digging.) To the extent the term is useful or empowering, use it, in exactly the way Alex Reid describes below. If a more powerful or palatable construct emerges, agitate for it, take ownership. In this I agree with Brian: it’s discourse all the way down. I will say that for those of us who have centers/programs/curricula/what-have-you one proposal, one hire, one lecture series, one grant, one server, one basement room at a time, the institutional interiority and strategic complicity of digital humanities seems perhaps equally unpersuasive.
The association of “big tent” dh with “newcomers” is one of these points of contention for me. As a digital rhetorician coming out of a field of computers and writing that is several decades old (and having been in the field for nearly two decades myself), I don’t view myself as a newcomer to doing digital work in the humanities. At the same time, I’m not doing the same kind of work as the once-and-future humanities computing folks. I don’t know that we need to be grouped under a single tent. My only complaint is that when humanities computing adopted the digital humanities name, they implied, intentionally or not, that their work encompassed the entirety of digital work being done in the humanities. Now we are all stuck with the term. I don’t think of myself as a digital humanist, but when others outside of humanities computing hear what I do they identify me as a digital humanist. When I want to convince my dean and provost to support the kind of work I do, they will be viewing me as a digital humanist.
So we’re all stuck with it now.
alex: i do see what you’re saying, and i do recognize the dilemma — but i also just think you’re mistaken. we’re not stuck with the term or concept, the discourse, or even the existing network of individuals and institutions nominated “DH.” deans and provosts are people (& almost always faculty colleagues) with whom we converse — and conversation changes minds. those who think the term “dh” has outlived what usefulness it may have had, at a particular moment, or who think it was simply never a sensible choice in the first place, are not alone.
As an example of how quickly things can change for large-scale collaborative, resource-intensive, publicity-seeking new academic research formations, consider what happened after the ALPAC report of 1966, which produced an abrupt collapse of what had been vigorous and continuously growing funding for research in machine translation. By 1968, as U.S. MT research groups dwindled from the ten active in 1963 to three, the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics had actually dropped “Machine Translation” from its name.
All it takes is one aggressive top-level funding audit to send things spinning, even if its conclusions are unfair (as most MT researchers have argued of ALPAC, possibly with some justice).
“my only complaint is that when humanities computing adopted the digital humanities name, they implied, intentionally or not, that their work encompassed the entirety of digital work being done in the humanities.”
I was there, so to speak, and I can tell you that it was completely unintentional. They were trying to come up with a name to describe a particular community of practitioners of the sort exemplified in the first Blackwell Companion. In effect, they were trying to distinguish themselves from other fields like media studies, game studies, “hypertext theory,” and all the other digital things that were going on — all of which were far sexier than humanities computing at the time.
One of the consequences of their success is that this term has come to be more attractive than the terms against which it was supposed to be contrasted. There is no Office of Game Studies at NEH; there is no giant international consortium of scholarly societies called Media Studies.
So, yes: we’re all stuck with it now. It would be nice, though, to go back to a term that actually makes a useful distinction between, say, media studies and the-activity-formally-known-as-humanities-computing. Because there *is* a distinction there, and in my opinion, it’s a very useful one.
You were there, Stephen, and I believe that you, Matt, John Unsworth and others involved did not intend to (and maybe can’t even have foreseen the possibility) create the terminological ambiguity we are all dealing with now.
However, it’s important to say that I got “there” just after you, Matt, and John left, and that I did see an awareness of the power of that ambiguity (whether or not that had been in their minds when it was developed), on the part of two very influential individuals in particular I’ll refrain from naming here (but one of which is at least in part responsible for the contradiction I outline in this blog post). I was told by each of them on many occasions (when they imagined I agreed with them, because I kept my mouth shut in a determined effort to “get along,” and at first took the statements with much less gravity than they came to seem to me later) that they knew exactly what it bought them; and I also saw the tactic deployed, and heard many more stories (from them) of how they’d used that ambiguity to their advantage. I saw it used repeatedly to confuse (and, frankly, manipulate) colleagues and administrators; and I heard of its use to steer the intentions of two major funding organizations. That is, of course, why I wrote this post, because I’d never before seen such a clear example in public of the double definition, with at least a hint of its possible strategic uses.
not to rock the boat, but doesn’t “Computational Literary Studies” imply (if you are saying it is an alternative to dh as a term) that non-literary studies i.e. the non-textual, are excluded?
Hi Erik,
I meant that as the name for “narrow” DH in English (since that’s the most contested field, and the one I work in)–it just seems to me a more literal description. But I don’t meant to suggest we could start changing terminology at this point. Had “they”/”we” gone for Computational Lit Studies in the first place, I’d assume we’d also have had Computational Art History, Computational Media Studies, & so on, which would have covered visual and other non-textual media, much like other methods that occur in several fields (including Computational ____ fields, of which there are quite a few, and which have rarely caused the consternation that “DH” has).
Thank you for the post! I think this is a very interesting issue.
To some extent, I think this is a question of history. What you call narrow DH can largely be traced to humanities computing – and I would argue that narrow DH has quite a few proponents (and I would not make any value judgement about this). The broad definition is newer and, in my mind, more clearly associated with recent buzz, white papers, and leadership level talk. It is also associated with many “newcomers”.
As for your reading of the book chapter, I can see your point and also see why the what the dh-section is not can be read in the way you do. I think it can also be read that the DH is not either or. It is not mere use of tools (divorced from the actual scholarly work of the humanities) and it is not just replacing traditional objects of study with digital ones. Another reading would be that this is indeed a kind of broad DH being described.
As you may know, my own sense of DH is extremely broad (probably more so than the DH book, in particular in relation to interpreting new /and old/ media), but I do think the crossovers are important (tools are part of interpretative processes, and technological engagement can inform media studies kind of work). In the book (I have the whole thing), there is a focus on work that is both critical and experimental. And yes, there is a revolutionary tendency in the book and maybe an exclusionary stance too (not all humanists are digital humanists). There is also not a whole lot on new media studies-like work although there is a stress on the importance of that kind work (p.30, whether seen as DH or not is a bit unclear).
Looking forward to the continued discussion. I appreciate your work.
Whitney (hi!) – I think you make too much of the printed/not-printed distinction. I think tactics overflow twitter feeds and blog entries too, and there is not necessarily anything wrong with that (but I agree, we need to be aware).
Hi Patrik,
I really appreciate your comments. Had I been moving just a little bit more slowly, I’d have taken the time to point toward your excellent writings on this tension in DH–these include both “Beyond the Big Tent,” in Matt Gold’s edited Debates in DH, and a series of four essays in DHQ: “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3:3 (2009); “The Landscape of Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 4:3 (2010); “From Optical Fiber To Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5:1 (2011), and “Envisioning the Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 6:1 (2012).
I’d want to press on the history you rightly present just a bit, but I’ll leave that for another venue. Briefly, Humanities Computing did not, to my knowledge, frame itself as an academic discipline, but much more as a support field, and the move to DH was done self-consciously to make it a discipline, while retaining much of the approach of Humanities Computing, in part because that was the skill set that those who championed the terminology change had. I have trouble getting the parts of the book I’ve looked at to read the way you suggest (as endorsing the “big tent” in particular), but that may be clouded by by own personal history, & I’ll try to give it another shot when I have a chance to read the whole thing–I was definitely reacting to the “Short Guide” and to Schnapp’s declaration that it was meant to serve as a summary of the book’s major themes.
David
Thanks for this post. I’ve been thinking about this myself recently, though more in terms of how DH is representing itself within the history of scholarship — that is, as a movement propelling the humanities forward toward a future that is actually a *return* to what that humanities always/already was, or should be; a kind of Ur-humanities. In other words, the field wants to claim both perpetual novelty and the kind of deep traditionalism that makes it palatable to the unconverted.
I wrote “wants” but should have used “needs.” Which is to say: despite our critiques, it’s worth remembering that the tensions in how DHers describe the field in print publications are the result of tactics — of needing to walk the fine line between what administrators or non-DHers want to hear and what those of us who have been claiming to do some form of DH for many years now actually do (paging Matt Kirschenbaum!). It’s the reason I don’t trust much of anything published in print on DH: it’s written for future audiences, and for audiences not necessarily internal to the field itself, even under the “big tent” definition. These tactical definitions only become problematic, it seems, when their nature *as* a tactic becomes transparent, invisible; forgotten; normalized.
David,
Thanks for this great post,
Many DH practitioners were very disturbed by that part of the book in conversations on Twitter – especially when the argument reappeared in a “short guide” the authors prepared and distributed for free online. I presume that the short guide (around 15 pages) is meant to be given to scholars and admins who are asking about DH. I prepared a one-page poster in response to the “short guide” which attempts to assertively reinforce the idea of a “big tent.” Honestly, from an ethical and a rhetorical point of view, I feel the idea of a big tent in DH is the way to go: we don’t need another “next big thing” in the humanities that tries to replace everything that came before it. And also, many of my colleagues are interested (but wary) about DH.
If DH arguments are made in the context of an invitation to try out different approaches to traditional work, scholars seem more willing to try them. If, on the other hand, DH is seen as this huge thing that will destroy everything in its path, suddenly it becomes lumped in with things like MOOCs, tighter administrative control, and neoliberalism.
At any rate, here ‘s a link to my poster. It’s a work in progress and not perfect by any means, but I tried as well as I could to combine the concision of a one-page poster with the idea that many, contradicting voices are doing things under the big tent. If you have any critiques or recommendations, I’d be happy to hear them.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogerwhitson/8393472295/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Thanks, Roger. I like your poster and honestly believe that most of us engaged in the field like the big-tent version.
As I’ll try to detail in a future post, in reply to both you and Whitney, the parallel I can’t avoid in my own mind (because I’ve taught and worked in the field a bit) is Computational Linguistics, which is so much less controversial in Linguistics than DH is in ours. I’d have preferred the term “Computational Literary Studies,” since that would appear to name a particular set of approaches and tools that would parallel in a strong way what Computational Linguists do, and whose literal meaning would seem closer to the “narrow” DH definition. I think — frankly, I know — that the ambiguity in the term DH and the light it appears to cast on “non-DH” scholars was part of what attracted its nominators to it.