{"id":5516,"date":"2014-09-29T17:07:34","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T17:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=5516"},"modified":"2014-09-29T17:25:05","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T17:25:05","slug":"we-have-never-been-digital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=5516","title":{"rendered":"We Have Never Been Digital"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historian of technology Thomas Haigh has written a nice reflection on the intersection of computing and the humanities, We Have Never Been Digital (PDF)<\/a> (Communications of the ACM, 57:9, Sept 2014, 24-28).\u00a0He gives a nice tour of the history of the idea that computers are revolutionary starting with Berkeley’s 1949\u00a0Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think.\u00a0<\/em>He talks about the shift to the “digital” locating it in the launch of\u00a0Wired, <\/em>Stewart Brand\u00a0and Negroponte’s\u00a0Being Digital.<\/em> He rightly points out that the digital is not evenly distributed and that it has a material and analogue basis. Just as Latour argued that we have never been (entirely) modern, Haigh points out that we have never been and never will be entirely digital.<\/p>\n

This leads to a critique of\u00a0the “dated neologism” digital humanities. In a cute move he questions what makes humanists digital? Is it using email or building a web page? He rightly points out that the definition has been changing as the technology does, though I’m not sure that is a problem. The digital humanities should change – that is what makes disciplines vital. He also feels we get the mix of computing and the humanities wrong; that we should be using humanities methods to understand technology not the other way around.<\/p>\n

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There is a sense in which historians of information technology work at the intersection of computing and the humanities. Certainly we have attempted, with rather less success, to interest humanists in computing as an area of study. Yet our aim is, in a sense, the opposite of the digital humanists: we seek to apply the tools and methods of the humanities to the subject of computing…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On this I think he is right – that we should be doing both the study of computing through the lens of the humanities and experimenting with the uses of computing in the humanities. I would go further and suggest that one way to understand computing is to try it on\u00a0that which you know and that is the distinctive contribution of the digital humanities. We don’t just “yack” about it, we try to “hack” it. We think-through technology in a way that\u00a0should complement the philosophy and history of technology. Haigh should welcome the digital humanities or imagine what we could be rather than dismiss the field because we haven’t committed to only humanistic methods, however limited.<\/p>\n

Haigh concludes with a “suspicion” I have been hearing since the 1990s – that the digital humanities will disappear (like all trends) leaving only real historians and other humanists using the tools appropriate to the original fields. He may be right, but as a historian he should ask why certain disciplines thrive and other don’t. I suspect that science and technology studies could suffer the same fate – the historians, sociologists, and philosophers could back to their homes and stop identifying with the interdisciplinary field. For that matter, what essential claim does any discipline have?\u00a0Could\u00a0history fade away because\u00a0all of us do it, or statistics disappear\u00a0because\u00a0statistical techniques are used in other disciplines? Who needs math when everyone does it?<\/p>\n

The use of computing in the other humanities is exactly why the digital humanities is thriving – we provide a trading zone for new methods and a place where they can be worked out across the\u00a0concerns of other disciplines. Does each discipline have to work out how texts should be encoded for interchange and analysis or do we share enough to do it together under a rubric like computing in the humanities? As for changing methods – the methods definitive of the digital humanities that are discussed and traded will change as they get absorbed into other disciplines so … no, there isn’t a particular technology that is definitive of DH\u00a0and that’s what other disciplines want – a collegial discipline from which to draw experimental methods. Why is it that the digital humanities are expected to be coherent, stable and definable in a way no other humanities discipline is?<\/p>\n

Here I have to say that Matt Kirschenbaum has done us an unintentional disfavor by discussing\u00a0the tactical use of “digital humanities” in English departments. He has led others to believe that there is something essentially mercenary or instrumental to the field that dirties it compared to the pure and uneconomical pursuit of truth to be found in science and technology studies, for example. The truth is\u00a0that no discipline has ever been pure or entirely corrupt.\u00a0STS has itself been the site of positioning\u00a0at every university I’ve been at. It sounds from Haigh that STS has suffered the same trials of not being taken seriously by the big departments that humanities computing worried about for decades. \u00a0Perhaps STS could partner with DH to develop a richer trading zone for ideas and techniques.<\/p>\n

I should add that\u00a0many of us are in DH not for tactical reasons, but because it is a better home to the thinking-through\u00a0we believe is important\u00a0than the disciplines we came from. I was visiting the University of Virginia in 2001-2 and participated in the NEH funded meetings to develop the MA in Digital Humanities. My memory is that when we discussed names for the programme it was to make the field accessible. We were choosing among imperfect names, none of which could ever communicate the possibilities we hoped for. At the end it was a choice as to what would best communicate to potential students what they could study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historian of technology Thomas Haigh has written a nice reflection on the intersection of computing and the humanities, We Have Never Been Digital (PDF) (Communications of the ACM, 57:9, Sept 2014, 24-28).\u00a0He gives a nice tour of the history of the idea that computers are revolutionary starting with Berkeley’s 1949\u00a0Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think.\u00a0He … Continue reading We Have Never Been Digital<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foundations-of-computing","category-history-of-computing-and-multimedia","category-humanities-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5516"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5520,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5516\/revisions\/5520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}