Category: Humanities Computing

After the Day of DH 2012

Well the Day of Digital Humanities 2012 seems to have gone well. You can see all the activity here. Participants are still catching up with their posts and commenting on each other’s posts. This year we had over 300 participants (332 at last count) though many may not have filled in their blog or registered more than once.

A common concern is that the Day of DH could degenerate into navel gazing. Dan Cohen described the uncharitable possibility succinctly in his post What Is Day of DH? Charitable and Uncharitable Views:

24 hours of navel-gazing and obsessive self-recording by members of a relatively young, slightly insecure field that already spends too much time defining itself or arguing over the definition of digital humanities, even though they basically agree.

I’m obviously the last person anyone should ask about the Day of DH project as I’m part of the team that thought it up and runs it. I do, however, think Dan has put his finger on something important, and that is the youth of the field and the dangers/gifts of youth. Despite decades of humanities computing activities (I’ve been going to conferences since 1989), the field is just becoming a discipline and in this transformation we are likely to exhibit some of the enthusiasms of youth.

But first, Why do I say that we are young? While I believe we have been an interdisciplinary field since the journals in the 1960s and the conferences of the 1970s, I don’t think we became a discipline until we developed the graduate courses, projects, apprenticeships, and programs capable of reproducing practices. When did that happen? I could point to the Kings College London MA in Digital Humanities running in the 1990s, the courses, programs and department I helped develop at McMaster in the 1990s, or the University of Alberta’s MA in Humanities Computing developed by Susan Hockey before she left for UCL. Perhaps it was when the question of disciplinarity itself was debated over a year at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia in a symposium entitled, Is Humanities Computing an Academic Discipline? Sometimes asking the question is its own answer.

Or it could be the extraordinary experiment taking place right now in Ireland with their Structured PhD in a Digital Arts and Humanities. While the rest of us are still thinking and consulting about PhD programs, a network of Irish universities accepted 46 PhD students last year. While I knew about the proposal, only being here for a month and meeting the DAH students have I come to realize what an extraordinary venture this is. Very little seemed to be happening in Ireland before the Digital Humanities Observatory started in 2008, though that may just my impression. Now, four years later, you have a coordinated network of seven universities collaboratively running a PhD program with support from the government and the involvement of the DHO. Of course there are all sorts of wrinkles they have to work out (like the fact that the government funded the students, but not new faculty lines), but there is no denying that this PhD has changed the landscape. 46 students (along with the M. Phil students also admitted at some of the universities) are negotiating what the field is and with relatively little hard supervision. There is no canon, few experienced faculty, and no tradition as to what a PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities should be; so these students and their supervisors are working it out. That is youth! We have much to learn from what they do.

And such negotiation by new digital humanists is what I noticed reading the Day of DH 2012 feed. A cohort of new scholars comfortable with new media are using the Day of DH to have an unconference about what it is to do the digital humanities. I don’t think it is navel gazing; nor do I think it is a sign of insecurity. If anything there is a enthusiasm of being part of something. It is us older folk who are insecure about these new types of events that, frankly, we can’t control. We are also tired of defining the field, but that doesn’t mean that we should deny the pleasure of redefining it to others. The Day of Digital Humanities, like the discipline, is what youthful new scholars will make of it.

So then, what are some of the dangers and gifts of this disciplinary youth?

Near Futures for the Digital Humanities

On Friday I went down to Cork to give a talk on Near Futures for the Digital Humanities at University Collge Cork (Ireland). UCC is one of the universities that are offering the Structured PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities (DAH) so I had a chance after the talk to learn about the program and how it is developing.

The topic of my talk is one we all love to speculate about but should also be careful about as predictions about the future are often so wrong (or so about us now.) I titled my talk “Near Futures” because I wanted to stick to what is near AND talk about how we get near to the future through imagining possibilities (and building possibilities.) The digital humanities has, I think, a different relationship with future humanities than other disciplines that are more focused on the past. That is not to say that other disciplines don’t imagine the future, it is just to say that the digital humanities has to navigate the tide of futurism in computing in general.

Narrative and Technology: Curtis Wong and Geoffrey Rockwell in Conversation – YouTube

The kind folks at the Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin have put up the video of the “conversation” I participated in on the 6th of March. The event was called Narrative and Technology: Curtis Wong and Geoffrey Rockwell in Conversation. Curtin Wong is now at Microsoft Research, but worked for some time at the Voyager Company back in the days when they were developing some of the most interesting multimedia works.

Voyant at Georgia Tech

Today I Skyped into a class by Lauren Klein on Digital Humanities at Georgia Tech. The students all had to use Voyant for an assignment and they had a great set of questions to ask me. See Questions for Professor Rockwell.

Klein also had her students post short essays on using Voyant on Sherlock Holmes under the category Sherlock Holmes Text Analysis. You can see the range of reactions from frustration with the tool, to “so what”, to students who find the “surfing and stumbling” creative. I’m impressed at how Professor Klein has put together a reasonable exercise in text analysis for undergrads.

In the spirit of Voyant, here is a word cloud of the student assignments on the course blog:


The machine in time: In honour of Tito Orlandi

Domenico pointed me to an entry on InfoLet (a blog he and others keep in Italian on informatics and literature.) The entry announces a book La macchina nel tempo: Studi di informatica umanistica in onore did Tito Orlandi that brings together many of the top digital humanists in Italy to celebrate Tito Orlandi’s contribution to the field. You can order online at http://www.lelettere.it. Continue reading The machine in time: In honour of Tito Orlandi

The Digital Humanities and the Revenge of Authority

That has always been my aim, and the content of that aim — a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power — is what blogs and the digital humanities stand against.

Stanley Fish in his blog post on The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality starts by setting himself up as an example of what the digital humanities stands against. We know that his tongue is in his cheek because he prefaces this aim for authority by mentioning David Lodge’s character Morris Zapp “whose ambition, as his last name suggests, is to write about a topic with such force and completeness that no other critic will be able to say a word about it.” It is a lovely move that he returns to at the very end when he reminds us that we are reading a “column, oops, I mean blog.” He can disarm his critics by mocking the authority he really has while using it. That authority comes from, among other things, writing a column/blog in the New York Times. Fish is a slippery Zapp, and he knows it.

Continue reading The Digital Humanities and the Revenge of Authority

In evaluating digital humanities, enthusiasm may outpace best practices – Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed has a story by Steve Kolowich about the essays we published in the MLA journal Profession on evaluating digital scholarship. The story, The Promotion That Matters (Jan. 4, 2012) quotes my essay On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship about how the problem is now how to practically review digital scholarship if you have no experience with it (and are on a tenure and promotion committee.)

It’s interesting how the article begins with what is becoming a trope – that the digital humanities is the new new thing. This time we have no lesser pundit than Stanley Fish proclaiming the arrival of new newness. Kolowich opens the essay (which is mostly about evaluation) by talking about how Fish, the “self-appointed humanities ambassador”, says the digital humanities has replaced postmodernism as the next thing. Its a nice way to open a story on the digital humanities and I suspect we will see more of this opening for a year or two. (What will it mean when people can’t start their stories this way?)

As for Fish, check out his blog post on the MLA, The Old Order Changeth (Dec. 26, 2011). The essay is based on reading the program (rather than attending) and he notices, among other things, all the digital humanities sessions. As he puts it, after reminding us what it was like when postmodernism was the rage,

So what exactly is that new insurgency? What rough beast has slouched into the neighborhood threatening to upset everyone’s applecart? The program’s statistics deliver a clear answer. Upward of 40 sessions are devoted to what is called the “digital humanities,” an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything.

I’m intrigued by the possibility that the digital humanities might sweep through with the same arrogance that theory did. (Did it?) Is DH the same sort of new new thing? Fish lists some of the symptoms we might see if the digital humanities drives through like another revolution:

Those who proclaimed the good news in 20-minute talks at the convention welcomed the dawning of a brave new world; those who heard them with dismay felt that the world they knew and labored in quite happily was under assault, and they reacted, in counterpoint 20-minute talks, by making the arguments defenders of an embattled regime always make: it’s just a passing fad; everything heralded as new can be found in Plato and Aristotle; what is proclaimed as liberating is actually the abandonment of reason and rigor; a theory that preaches the social construction of everything collapses under its own claims; the stuff is unreadable; it has no content apart from its obfuscating jargon; maybe it will just go away.

I hope Fish is wrong. My hope is that colleagues not interested in the digital realize that we are not threatening to replace other forms of scholarship so much as to extend it. Digital practice does not deconstruct other practices/theories/methodologies, it supplements them and re-engages them. From the perspective of practice one of the things that exemplifies the digital humanities is that it is often experienced in projects that bring together “traditional” scholars and digital humanists rather than develop as a confrontation. Some of the more enthusiastic may think that the digital humanities can replace the practices of the last generation and in some cases the digital humanities does raise new questions, but the history of computing in the humanities has never been confrontational. (Instead, I would argue that the digital humanities has been a little too servile, pretending that all we wanted to do was bring new methods to old problems.) Our disciplinary history is that of a prosthesis or monster stitched from the old and the new. For that reason I doubt we will be the same sort of new new thing that postmodernism was. We don’t pretend to attack the foundations of the humanities so much as to extend them. We need our colleagues rather than despise them. We spend our time reaching outside of the humanities rather than gazing into its navel.

No … the danger is not that the digital humanities will try to deconstruct what came before, but that it introduces a new form of busy-ness to the humanities that distracts humanists from whatever is truly important. (And we all know what that is … don’t we?) The digital humanities is endlessly complicated, especially because it draws limbs from alien fields like the sciences and engineering. DH introduces new jargon, new languages (as in programming languages), new techniques, new practices, and new communal projects. All of this newness will keep us busy keeping up. All this newness will seem too much for many who haven’t the time to embrace something so time-consuming no matter how friendly. Many will keep quiet for fear that others think they are stupid because they don’t get computing when really they haven’t the time to do both the old, the new and the new new. Others will practice some cute put down just like all the cute ways we put down other movements we haven’t the time to master. Most will just feel the hug of the digital is a bit too friendly and a bit too tight. They will wait it out until one day something else will be announced as the new form of new new.

So what do I mean by busy-ness being the danger rather than replacement? Busy-ness is my word for the danger of constant activity Heidegger saw in “The Age of the World Picture” though there is something envious and cynical to his characterization of this technical turn. It is the danger of hyperpedantry when you perform the activities of wisdom faster and faster rather than thinking through wisdom. It really isn’t a new danger (Plato, of course, also warned us about this.) It is the danger that those tired of being left behind warn others about in the hopes they will slow down. It is a danger too often voiced by the grant envious which means we don’t listen too them. Here is Heidegger on it,

The decisive unfolding of the character of modern science as constant activity produces, therefore, a human being of another stamp. The scholar disappears and is replaced by the researcher engaged in research programs. These, and not the cultivation of scholarship, are what places his work at the cutting edge. The researcher no longer needs a library at home. He is, moreover, constantly on the move. He negotiates at conferences and collects information at congresses. He commits himself to publishers’ commissions. It is publishers who now determine which books need to be written.

From an inner compulsion,the researcher presses forward into the sphere occupied by the figure of, in the essential sense, the technologist. Only in this way can he remain capable of being effective, and only then, in the eyes of his age, is he real. Alongside him, an increasingly thinner and emptier romanticism of scholarship and the university will still be able to survive for some time at certain places. (p. 64, from the collection Off the Beaten Track, trans. by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes.)

Whatever Heidegger says, I believe it is impossible to distinguish between busy-ness and whatever is considered “real work” or real scholarship. The difference is ineffable, but that is not why busy-ness is a danger to the digital humanities. Busy-ness is the danger because it is the other of technical activity. Practical activity is what the humanities needs after theory, but also what it will tire of. At the very moment when we think the digital humanities has made a pragmatic difference we will worry that there is no meaning to all the technique. The digital humanities will not be critiqued as another replacement or another post post; it will exhaust itself and be found empty. The rhetoric will turn to wisdom and away from best practices.