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We've been trying to define Digital Humanities to no real avail, and our conversation on methodologies carried a similar inconclusive feel this week. So I thought we could try something different. Willard McCarty explores how one might define 'modeling' in the assigned reading from this week but, perhaps even more importantly, he poses a reason for doing so that may just as well be applied to that futile quest for a firm definition of the nebulous term, DH:
Why do we need
an answer to this question? Because, I have argued, ours is an experimental
practice, using equipment and instantiating definite methods, for the skilled
application of which we need to know what we are doing as well as it can be
known.
This week, I'm going to describe a scenario of sorts and posit a
few questions, one being "who's in and who's out?"
So:
A Classical
numismatist and a scholar
of Renaissance literature walk into a bar.
More precisely, they walk into the Unicorn Inn in Canterbury (best
Kentish bar billiards in town, possibly the only Kentish bar billiards in town,
come to think of it) and sit down with 9 students. You see, they are a group of
study abroad students participating in a course that has them acting as a
research team. Before they had embarked for England they transcribed a
hand-written Renaissance coin-catalogue into a database using TEI tagging.
Their primary task while in England is the identification and subsequent data
entry of coins that were part of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosity. This coin
catalogue is stored in a database associated
with a particular collector. That database is part of a larger project aimed
at exploring the 17th-century 'culture of curiosity' by creating "a
database of artifacts and natural specimens as represented by surviving records
of early modern collections, museum databases, contemporary drawings and
engravings, as well as images of extant remnants of these collections."
So, what’s the deal? Is this a DH project? It has so many of the
markers we’ve been associating with DH: interdisciplinarity, project work,
digital tools, etc.
More interesting to me: Are these digital humanists? We talk about
digital humanism being a state of being, but that’s pretty hard to determine
from the outside looking in, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s a good thing, a guard
against some (but by no means all) of the exclusivity that we've been talking about.
Does it have to be conscious? Quick note, I was one of those
students studying abroad (if that wasn’t fairly obvious before). Am I a digital
humanist even if I don’t think of myself as one? What if somebody is in denial
and refuses to be defined as such out of principle, even if he or she is engaged in all the
kinds of things DH is about.
The uncertainty of all this scares me, especially since academia is already plagued with impostor syndrome (check out this one too)
The uncertainty of all this scares me, especially since academia is already plagued with impostor syndrome (check out this one too)
I think the potential danger in this exercise of defining DH or
digital humanists is that it forces us to create division even among projects.
In the strictest sense, we could end up limiting the title to only those people
who lead projects, those who engage with the material at a structural and
theoretical level.
On the other hand, I don't think we should relegate digital humanism to something one catches without knowing about it while studying abroad in England either. Nor is it something one should easily lose, it isn't a very useful term that way.
What do you all think? Is it a valuable point to discuss? Or is it
just as futile an exercise as the other definitions we’ve been seeking?
When you say: "In the strictest sense, we could end up limiting the title to only those people who lead projects, those who engage with the material at a structural and theoretical level," you imply that these are the only alternatives. While in the following paragraph, you suggest that we should not let DH be something that just happens. What do you really think? (Remember that you can have an opinion today and that you can still change your mind later).
ReplyDeleteI think that in order for DH to be a valuable term people should subscribe to it (and proudly). Part of that involves drinking the kool-aid and acknowledging that this kind of work is different or has an extra facet to it. People should decide for themselves if they are 'in.' People can certainly work on DH projects and not yet consider themselves to be DHers, but at some point they will have to decide whether or not they buy in to the methodology and want to subscribe to it. I was learning about DH methods when I was involved in that research, though I had not decided to be nor quite grasped what that means. The leaders of that project are engaged in DH research but might largely value or prefer their traditional scholarship more. In that case, they see the use of applying such methods, but don't pretend that such methods are their primary modes of research.
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