I’m not thrilled with the term “digital humanities.” When people refer to the “humanities,” I think I know what they mean: those disciplines that are concerned with human activity and everything it produces, and take as their task both to preserve and transmit that culture on the one hand, and to understand and interpret it on the other. But what is the sense of qualifying that noun with the adjective “digital”?
In the twenty-first century, the phrase can’t really stand in opposition to an implied “analog humanities”: no such thing exists. (When was the last time anyone submitted a hand-written or manually typed manuscript to be edited with grease pencil before being manually typeset with hot lead?) “Digital humanities” refers instead to scholarship in the humanities that consciously takes account of the fact that we all work digitally now.
What troubles me is that our use of the marked term “digital humanities” implies that the unmarked term, “humanities,” is being used to refer to scholarship that does not reflect on the media we all work in (a usage that is sadly accurate in the academy today). I am particularly disturbed because I would like to imagine that an education in the humanities encourages the kind of critical self-awareness that would enable us to think more meaningfully about our relation to the environment we live and work in, including our technological environment and the ways it is interwoven with our institutions and values.
By using “digital humanities,” we’re allowing the term “humanities” to stand for an uncritical scholarly practice that is at odds with the goals of a humanistic education.
8 comments:
Thank you for this post, Neel. In a similar way, not exactly but similar, would anyone say that the essence of medicine has changed and now we have to say "Digital medicine" to make a difference with "traditional medicine"? I would be surprised.
btw, I hope your doing well, Neel, and Happy New Year 2012. Marion
One crucial difference is that if you perpetuated century-old medical practices as a physician, you would immediately be sued for malpractice. I think we're encouraging scholarly malpractice, analogous to encouraging doctors to follow 19th-century surgical techniques without anesthesia.
Exactly!!!!! I love this medical metaphore I chose to use so frequently, it works each time, or almost. Try it each time needed, you'll see. It relieves like ... a good medicine drug. :)
Traditional closed-text scholarly publishing is print-directed regardless of whether it is accessed online. The term "digital" is commonly applied to anything computer-based ("computer-driven humanities" isn't very catchy).
I recently asked a professor how he balanced his "digital" research and his "traditional scholarly publishing." [If I remember correctly] he said he didn't, that the former was interesting and exciting and the latter totally boring.
Things shift slowly. In Anne Knowles two GIS Humanities books, most of the chapter authors go into detail on the humanities side of their projects but leave out details on how the deliverable was created, what platforms were used, etc. The tools used in creating their published product (and any technical problems overcome) are at least as interesting as the humanities scholar's contribution. Admittedly Knowles is a historian and her target audience is fellow historians, not programmers or other tech-centric types.
Knowles herself suggests(in the forward of "Placing History," 2008) that a 1960s-70s "quantitative history" movement overstretched in an arrogant challenge of traditional narrative history. Perhaps those overeager revolutionaries were mostly smacked down by entrenched scholars who viewed new computer-driven methods as a threat?
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I recently asked a professor how he balanced his "digital" research and his "traditional scholarly publishing." [If I remember correctly] he said he didn't, that the former was interesting and exciting and the latter totally boring.
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What a brilliantly perceptive observation! I do wonder what the opposition between "digital" and "traditional" publishing means today.
Can "traditional" work published today be considered scholarship if it doesn't take account of contemporary scholarly practice? Can "traditional" scholarly practice be considered "scholarship" if practiced today?
Not so clever. Apparently, when you gather in the august Salle des Actes at ENS, you can meet people who believe they do own Plato, research paper and don't care to share with others who fall short of their standards, thank you very much.
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