Author: Eric Loy

“I’m still looking for that nugget, that thing I can take away from DH and say ‘here’s the contribution; this is how it relates to someone like me.'”

After a digitally inclined guest lecture on campus last week, a fellow grad student pressed me with this basic question on what Digital Humanities brings to the scholarly table. I understood her mild bewilderment. For those who are not technologically inclined, DH in practice can seem like a heap of techno babble and gimmickry haphazardly tossed over, at best, quasi-scholalry inquiry. Likewise, for those are not humanistically inclined, DH in practice can seem like a misguided use of technological equipment and computational methods.

It’s difficult to even label these reactions as misconceptions. The [intellectual, monetary] hype surrounding DH unfortunately tends to connote lofty ideals, revolutionary ontologies, the latest tools, as well as unnerving intimations of “progress” and the future of the humanities. Furthermore, Matthew Kirschenbaum, on several occasions, has reminded readers about the formation of the term “digital humanities” and its specific relationship with “marketing and uptake” (1) and its current use as a “tactical” term to “get things done” in the academy, be it obtain funding or promote a career (2).

In short, there’s a need for both reconciliation and promotion of the term’s more meaningful usages, particular as a label that describes new practices in the humanities for curious and skeptical onlookers alike. If DH is to be inclusive, its practitioners should take care to articulate clearly their goals and methods to colleagues in all humanities disciplines, not only those who are digitally literate. If DH is to be an advocate for the humanities to the public–as Alan Liu thinks they can be (3)–clear articulation becomes more important still.

DH Makes Explicit

In a 2013 interview, Johanna Drucker recollected that the “mantra of 1990s Digital Humanities” required “making everything explicit we, as humanists, have long left implicit” (4). Her comments refer to the logic of programming–“coding” as a structure for inquiry–but this sentiment also offers an attractive and powerful model for an inclusive DH, and for its full partnership in the humanities in general.

Quickly, let’s apply that framework to a variety of examples:

• Textual Studies: TEI, markup, editing. Like its analog counterpart, digital editing requires its practitioners to throw into relief bibliographic data embedded in physical texts. Markup languages like XML require the attribution of values to textual data. In a simplistic view, explaining a text to a computer requires us to explain it first to ourselves. (We’re having quite a time with William Blake’s Four Zoas manuscript over in the Blake Archive.)

• Literary History: or, the Moretti movement. When I first read Moretti’s now-mandatory Graphs, Maps, Trees (5), I found the middle “Maps” section to be the least provocative. Perhaps that initial reading holds up, but only because the methods described are also the most familiar. When asking “Do maps add anything to our knowledge of literature?”, Moretti illustrates the “centric composition” of Mary Mitford’s Our Village. The map is not an answer to anything, but rather evidence of a narrative feature that requires explanation. In other words, the map makes explicit what our brains are already doing in constructing the narrative.

• Collaboration: DH in practice, in theory. At a recent inter-departmental panel on “Evaluating Digital Projects as Scholarship,” I was stunned to see a senior faculty member cling so tightly to the image of the isolated scholar, the sole author. Yet the incident is also evidence of the disarming effectiveness of DH to explicate, even exaggerate, the collaborative nature of scholarly inquiry, of “work,” of language. While monograph production still remains the normative argumentative structure in the humanities, DH has the ability to critique these modes of production through a kind of processional remediation. In other words, while DH often remediates a variety of texts, it also remediates a variety of roles in the production of those texts and the production of knowledge. Publishers and editors give way to IT directors and programmers; grad seminars give way to graduate research assistantships. This collaborative stance also makes DH an exceptionally natural partner for critical theorists in a variety of backgrounds, whether poststructuralists, McGannian editors, or feminists. The “digital” is so inherently problematic for hegemonic, centralized [hermeneutic] authority that its position as a polemic is only limited by its increasing permeance as common practice. New endeavors like “open peer review,” crowdsourcing, and collaborative authorship represent only the tip of the iceberg.

• The University: departments and disciplines. The idea of “interdisciplinary study” has long been used as shorthand for “diverse research interests,” but how diverse has it usually been? Maybe an English prof who crosses the quad to visit the history department. DH has proven to be an effective identifier of false boundaries within the university structure, particularly the “big one” between sciences and the humanities. Increasingly common vocabularies and technologies have made it possible for humanists to approach the sciences, and vice versa, with informed critical perspectives. It’s happening at the undergraduate level, too, with examples like Stanford’s new CS+English dual major or U of R’s newly revised Digital Media Studies major.

Where Have All the Computers Gone?

For the most part, computer technology is de-emphasized in this outward-facing characterization of DH, and yet it’s because of this de-emphasis that I believe this strategy to be the most advantageous for communicating with peers–and the public–outside of our communities of digital scholars. Coding and building are important for practitioners of DH, but the mere use of technology can’t be why DH is important for the humanities. Instead, when we use DH to “make explicit,” we appeal to a common method of all critical inquiry: to identify and articulate underlying ideological operations, whether they exist in cultural structures, like gender, or cultural artifacts, like literature.

DH’s unique contribution, then, comes with the specific manifestation of this “classic” line of inquiry through new technologies that help us ask, ideally, better questions. And, as we can see with even a cursory list of examples, it’s not simply the “products” of DH that make explicit, but the practice as well.

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Eric Loy is a PhD student in the Dept. of English at the University of Rochester.

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1. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: GC CUNY, 2013. Web. <http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38>

2. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: GC CUNY, 2013. Web. <http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/48>

3. Liu, Alan. “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: GC CUNY, 2013. Web. <http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/20>

4. Berdan, Jennifer. “The Emerging Field of Digital Humanities: An Interview with Johanna Drucker.” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 9.2 (2013). Web. <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1355x2bn>

5. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. New York: Verso, 2007. Print.