Abstract
The digital humanities can be seen as a twenty-first century humanities project driven by frustration, dissatisfaction, epistemic tension, everyday practice, technological vision, disciplinary challenges, institutional traction, hope, ideals and strong visions. (Svensson, this issue)
I don’t want a digital facelift for the humanities, I want the digital to completely change what it means to be a humanities scholar. (Perry, quoted by Svensson, this issue)
A simple question is asked in our final article, but runs through the issue: Is/in what way is the digital good to think with?
Importantly this is a question rather than a claim, a question that challenges us to move away from many of the rhetorics surrounding ‘our digital future’ to what Svensson calls the project for a changing academy: away from digital determinism, from ‘project plus digital equals funding’, from the politics of a digital agenda, however taken up, back to disciplinary processes, knowledge-making, meaning-making and identity-making.
There are answers throughout this issue but, at a time of univocal claims about all things digital, perhaps most importantly there is critique, problematization and admission of some very personal concerns – about identity, nostalgia, threat, isolation. As our final piece again highlights, the terms of the debate have run to some extreme imagery: the digital humanities as either the saviour or the cuckoo-in-the-nest destroyer of the humanities. The so-called ‘Big Tent debate’ asks a question:
Nowadays, [digital humanities] can mean anything from media studies to electronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas. […] Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanities and I say ‘yes’. […] But if you are not making anything, you are not – in my less-than-three-minute opinion – a digital humanist. (Ramsey, quoted by Svensson, this issue).
This extreme, much-quoted definition of a digital humanist is overtly inclusive (‘while inviting…’) but actually excludes so many of us who are digitally adept humanists – who use digital to think with, to design projects and curricula around, who teach.
The issue starts with Alan Liu’s keynote, ‘The state of the digital humanities: A report and a critique’, positioning the digital humanities in higher education and in society. After authoritatively theorizing and scoping the extensive digital humanities literature – under the headings ‘Unification of foundational concepts’, ‘Integration with the past’, ‘Rejoining the social’, ‘Scaling up’, ‘Expanding the interpretive paradigm’ – he turns to the critique. At this point, he joins in a dialogue with Prescott, who, in his ‘Consumers, creators or commentators? Problems of audience and mission in the digital humanities’, asks: How can the digital humanities achieve its promise and transform humanities scholarship? Prescott suggests that the digital humanities community is too inward-looking and needs to reach out to wider constituencies. Alan Liu, continually reviewing while critiquing the relationship of the digital humanities to society, calls for a critical reflection from the inside:
Currently, I fear, the digital humanities are not ready to take up their full responsibility because the field does not yet possess an adequate critical awareness of the larger social, economic, and cultural issues at stake. [For the] overall field [has been brought] to a tipping point where it has the potential not just to facilitate the work of the humanities but to represent the state of the humanities at large in its changing relation to higher education in the postindustrial state. Are the digital humanities up to this larger task?
These questions will continue to resonate…
One answer here comes in ‘The digital humanities as a humanities project’ by Svensson, who contributed to, as well as critiquing, the crucial digital humanities fora at MLA 2009 and 2011. Here he argues for ‘construing the digital humanities as a “trading zone” and meeting place [which] can be instrumental in facilitating the digital humanities as a humanities project’. The result is that ‘rather than disregarding “the digital”, interpreting it as purely technical or seeing it as an uncomfortable denomination, it can arguably be used as a means of making the humanities a catalyst for interchange, development and envisioning the future of the academy’.
To move from the global to the particular – since it is ever the focus of attention for a humanist to give an interpretative, significance-highlighting narrative of the particular – several of the contributors reflect on how the digital humanities have affected them as academics.
The conference on ‘Digital Technologies: Help or Hindrance for the Humanities?’ – here reported through a dialogue between three self-identifying ‘digital humanists’ and two ‘technologists’ – brought out some interesting expressions of the hindrances. There was a nostalgia for tangible data: an archive, a painting in a basement or something else that the researcher could uniquely work on, claim and be identified with. This can be justified: no digital reproduction can provide all the contextual and inscribed detail of ‘the original’. But it seems a more visceral response: people talked of the trek, the quest, the blowing off of dust from something ‘discovered’, all as a rite de passage. I was reminded of an Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (AHHE) colloquium reported in issue 7(1), when Professor Dame Strathern talked of the importance of the particularity of humanities data. She spoke as an anthropologist, inclusion into which discipline has traditionally rested in the completion of a unique project – the observation of a particular culture at a particular time and afterwards ‘writing culture’. One of the claims that we make for the humanities is that we do deal with that which is singular – discrete, unrepeatable – and that which is particular – located in a certain context. Our hermeneutic is one of deriving interpretative narratives, often plural, avowedly partial, from singular, particular events. With digital data, however, there is a sense of, rather, dizzying plurality, seemingly stretching almost to infinity; of data analysis and interpretation getting faster and faster. There has been a call, rather, for ‘slow reading’, a hermeneutic of concentration, looking inwardly at the object rather than always seeing the outward-leading network. This may well be nostalgia, but it behoves digital humanists to show their workings as well as their technologies and applications.
(Digital literacies – reading and writing the disciplines in a digital age, especially digital storytelling and its effect on disciplinary identity and understanding – is an ongoing focus of attention in AHHE: see, for example, the Writing [in] the Disciplines Special Issue, 9(2), and the Forum on Digital Storytelling in issue 7(2). This concern is taken up in this issue by Clarke and Adam's ‘Digital storytelling in Australia: Academic perspectives and reflections’. We would welcome an article considering the question ‘Slow reading with digital?’)
Another nostalgia was for the very local discipline groups now hidden, it was argued, by social referencing and other academic networking opportunities which offer exciting communication, discussion and collaboration partners at the touch of a button. Not that such nostalgia is limited to the older generation – Kim Singletary starts her account of being a HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) scholar with ‘To tell the truth, I was not prepared for the isolation that graduate work naturally requires.’ It is to counter this isolation that HASTAC was formed, with founding principles including
the idea that we could take the practices and principles of open web developers, the collaborative methods through which the World Wide Web was created, and explore the ways that those principles and methods could transform higher education
as well as the aim ‘to rebalance intelligence for the interactive digital age with emphasis on
This issue includes other dynamic young scholars: the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE) scholars of University of California Santa Barbara and a UK digital humanities doctoral student, Mia Ridge. All easily bridge the ‘digital divide’ between the discipline and the technology that seems threateningly alien to some humanists. Not, however, that being ‘born digital’ means that postgraduate digital skills training is unnecessary: Ensslin and Slocombe’s research report ‘Training humanities doctoral students in collaborative and digital multimedia’ has fascinating lessons about how much is both needed and appreciated.
HASTAC’s ‘Interdisciplinary intellect: HASTAC and the commitment to encourage collective intelligence’; the RoSE scholars’ ‘Creating socially networked knowledge through interdisciplinary collaboration’; Scanlon’s ‘Digital futures: Changes in scholarship, open educational resources and the inevitability of interdisciplinarity’ and Lang’s major case study ‘Exploring the potential of social network sites in relation to intercultural communication’ are all concerned with how the digital enables new spaces and new conversations. As the University of California at Los Angeles’ White Paper claimed:
Already within the broad field of Digital Humanities, we are seeing a flowering of interdisciplinary, collaborative, and technologically-sophisticated research and pedagogy that is producing new modes of knowledge formation.
This, to go back to the opening, is an answer as to whether the digital is good to think with. Yes, is the answer: across disciplines and spaces and places. But such deliberately formed and nurtured fora highlight another issue: the term ‘the digital’ deliberately begs an important question about the role of technology as working with or against social networking. Some visions of the researcher’s future envisage an infinitely customizable interface onto a ‘vast library of tools from which to build specific portals’, and as everyday technology becomes daily more personally reactive and inflected, it is difficult to imagine what the new doctoral students will have at their disposal in only a few years – ever more connected, but ever more individually customizable and potentially isolated. And the metaphor ‘library of tools’ suggests a range of applications to be picked up and tried at will, rather than the digital as a transformative power with potential to change research processes and identity. As Svensson again writes, ‘It is noteworthy that technology here is given considerable agency’ and leads away from the lived disciplinary experience of teaching and research. (The Oxford Internet Institute and UK Research Information Network research reported here as ‘Discipline matters: technology use in the humanities’, shows, rather, that researchers’ uses of, and attitudes towards, digital technologies are affected by existing disciplinary habits and preconceptions. Furthermore, it found that the computational and collaborative complexity of the tools that researchers used was linked to their disciplinary backgrounds.)
Conclusion: Turning outwards
Liu, Svensson and Prescott all conclude that, whatever and whoever the constituents of the digital humanities Big Tent, the challenge and possible importance of digital humanities is in the public understanding and public appreciation of the humanities. As 4Humanities (‘a platform and resource for advocacy of the humanities, drawing on the technologies, new-media expertise, and ideas of the international digital humanities community’) claims:
The humanities are in trouble today, and digital methods have an important role to play in effectively showing the public why the humanities need to be part of any vision of a future society.
Indeed.