Comments on d i a p s a l m a t a: Digital Humanities vs the digital humanist

Nick -- thanks, wish I could have been there last ...

2010-05-26T21:56:03.491-04:00

Nick -- thanks, wish I could have been there last weekend! And good reminder. "Born digital" is an admittedly terrible term for scholarship produced, published and disseminated in a uniquely web-y way. I haven't hit on the right word yet; and as tempted as I am to devise my own perfect portmanteau, ramification is better left for trees. I should probably start (and stick) with something like "webtext."

Whitney, I appreciate your discussing some of the ...

2010-05-25T20:06:09.290-04:00

Whitney, I appreciate your discussing some of the other ways that "digital" and "humanities" can combine, some of which were voiced at the recent Hyperstudio conference on Visual Interpretations. I hope that as people in the capitalized Digital Humanities bring new methods to the study of traditional objects, they also become willing to accept new forms of digital publication and the study of culturally important computational objects (that is, computer programs).

I thought I'd mention, though, that when you call your thesis "born digital" you're using the same term that, for instance, Matt Kirschenbaum uses to describe contemporary published-in-print novels that are composed on word processors. Your thesis wasn't *just* born digital!

@cheryl re: "anti-disciplinary," points ...

2010-04-15T21:09:09.540-04:00

@cheryl re: "anti-disciplinary," points well taken. I think where I'd like to come down hard on the "anti-" is in emphasizing that *thinking through media* is a methodology, a way of being a scholar, not a canon. As soon as we start defining it as such, we've lost the point.

@rachel helpful links, thanks! I've read these posts but haven't revisited them. You're right, they seem to have worked themselves deep into my brain somehow. :) I'm really fascinated that you say you don't have any "hard" technical skills -- I hear this a lot from colleagues, and am always tempted to say "BUT IT'S SO EASY!" We no longer have to wait for a print-out to test our BASIC skills; plug-ins, CMSs, libraries like jQuery (which I love love love) make it ridiculously easy to "make something" online. A little CSS, a little HTML, and a good CTRL-U/CTRL-C/CTRL-V dance is all you need to start hacking something together. In fact, the root of my frustration with some of the big, all-inclusive projects that provide fancy tools is that the fancy tools are, more often than not, harder to learn and incorporate into your daily routine than just familiarizing interested scholars with the necessary skills, making them literate in what they're looking at and using.

I *really* wish programming 101 was requisite for a liberal arts degree. I also wish we didn't make it so scary, like the hardcore geeks are going to come after you with pitchforks if your code isn't beautiful and clean and efficient. If I, who totally suck at programming -- and seriously, I really don't think most of my code and/or websites could *be* any more ugly or inefficient under the hood -- can hack something simple together, anyone else who wants to can, too.

This is a long & rambling comment; advance apo...

2010-04-15T20:31:53.336-04:00

This is a long & rambling comment; advance apologies!

Your post resonates with two others I've read recently, which you might have already come across. Kathleen Fitpatrick recently wrote about DH & disciplinarity; she begins with the observation that what we now call DH is not always what the term referred to (which is partly the reason for the DH identity crisis), and she also links this to institutional turf wars.

Virtualpolik gives an overview of the DH identity crisis in terms of the major associations (on the one hand, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Society for Digital Humanities -- and on the other hand, the Association of Internet Researchers) and their radically different vocabularies and purposes.

The post also touches upon various positions with the conversation about what the DH is and does, including this snippet from Bogost's "The Turtlenecked Hairshirt":

It's not "the digital" that marks the future of the humanities, it's what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.

For me, your call to tell students to "MAKE SOMETHING" points to this interface between the humanities and the outside world of jello salads, but it's still not quite getting at the problem of born-digital scholarship, and Where It Fits (or doesn't) within the DH.

One last point: I know I'm part of the problem. I'm a PhD student in an English Dept, and I've been claiming DH as one of my research interests for some time now without giving much thought to what that actually means (which sounds awfully silly, now that I say it). I've been working on a dissertation chapter on Wordsworth and media history, and recently thought it could be fun to use a text comparison/collation tool (Juxta) to more closely examine textual variance in different versions of the texts I'm working with. I can manage basic XML, and follow directions, but I don't have very solid tech skills. I imagine it would be really cool to do some data visualizations of these textual differences...but really, I have no idea how, or where to put that kind of work, or how my advisor would "assess" that, or even how to really use such activity as some kind of real evidence (beyond a cool thing to try) in an otherwise fairly standard dissertation.

I recently saw Victoria Szabo speak on the DH, and she, like others, argues that we as a community need to figure this out, we need to determine things like how much technical knowledge can we expect DH scholars and researchers to know. And I feel like as a grad student, who already struggles to figure out and fit into the Academy (or maybe that's just me!), working within DH seems in some ways like just another identity crisis. But, of course, it also feels like there's a lot more at stake -- those glimpses of jello salad.

Whitney, This quote puts a lot into perspective: ...

2010-04-13T18:41:35.721-04:00

Whitney,

This quote puts a lot into perspective:

//Against the disciplined Digital Humanities and its large-scale iniatives, this model is lower-case and personified, enacting micro-revolutions that reframe our mundane interactions with new media as points of connection and collaboration. If the digital humanist emphasizes pedagogy, it's not through class websites and digital resource-based assignments, but by signing students up for a WordPress account, giving them a camera and saying, "Here; make something."//

although I'm not going to comment much on it, just to say "I agree."

Your post is otherwise well-timed in that, tomorrow, I have to argue to my English department colleagues why we need a hire in digital publishing (we have a publishing studies sequence...). The odd thing about that proposal is that it purposefully expands the tent of DH (without actually using the DH term, maybe to its downfall). Such a position would cover everything from NINES to just short of Kairos -- or as much as humanly possible -- and/but it's completely transdisciplinary in that this person's field of study could be *anything* within English studies OR a host of things outside of English (history, informatics, anthro, arts tech, you name it).

So, I'm not sure about the "anti-disciplinary", except that it's good for encouraging academics to see that walls need breaking. DHers feel they/we are already breaking walls, in our own small ways (and, no, I don't really see myself as a DHer. Like you said, it's a funding term.)

Reason why I'm not keen on the "anti-"? Cuz, at the end of the day (for the sad, foreseeable future), if we do get this hire (which is unlikely in this economy), that person has to reside in a disciplinary department -- as broad as that dept (like mine, graciously so) is -- and has to conform to /some/ disciplinary standards. We're gonna have a helluva time writing the actual job ad and figuring out where to place it, if we do make the cut. I feel like maybe a combination of HASTAC blog and Twitter would be the best job-ad venues, cuz none of the traditional ones would cross widely enough for our current and future needs.

btw, when are you going to send me your thesis for consideration in Kairos? ;) Or in Vectors? Or in Computers & Composition Digital Press? Or maybe even MIT Press? ;) There's some goodness going on out there. We just gotta take more advantage of it!

cb

I didn't want to edit the original post, since...

2010-04-13T14:21:02.065-04:00

I didn't want to edit the original post, since it's a re-post, but did want to add that: 1) yes, what I'm talking about has a lot of resonance with the work Johanna Drucker got rolling at UVA, and therefore yes there's space within big-D, big-H Digital Humanities for what I'm talking about -- the dichotomies aren't entirely stable -- and 2) I realize that NINES et al. often have some form of "curate," "publish" or "exhibit" function, but a) find them pretty useless, to be honest, and b) am concerned that these features only further entrench structures and models of scholarship that negate the early promises of the open web.