The Digital Humanities Situation | The Transducer

Let’s be honest—there is no def­i­n­i­tion of dig­i­tal human­i­ties, if by def­i­n­i­tion we mean a con­sis­tent set of the­o­ret­i­cal con­cerns and research meth­ods that might be aligned with a given dis­ci­pline, whether one of the estab­lished fields or an emerg­ing, trans­dis­ci­pli­nary one. The cat­e­gory denotes no set of widely shared com­pu­ta­tional meth­ods that con­tribute to the work of inter­pre­ta­tion, no agreed upon norms or received gen­res for dig­i­tal pub­li­ca­tion, no broad con­sen­sus on whether dig­i­tal work, how­ever defined, counts as gen­uine aca­d­e­mic work. Instead of a def­i­n­i­tion, we have a geneal­ogy, a net­work of fam­ily resem­blances among pro­vi­sional schools of thought, method­olog­i­cal inter­ests, and pre­ferred tools, a his­tory of peo­ple who have cho­sen to call them­selves dig­i­tal human­ists and who in the process of try­ing to define the term are cre­at­ing that def­i­n­i­tion. How else to char­ac­ter­ize the mean­ing of an expres­sion that has nearly as many def­i­n­i­tions as affil­i­ates? It is a social cat­e­gory, not an onto­log­i­cal one.

To many, the dig­i­tal human­i­ties feels like a small town that has recently been rated as a great place to raise a fam­ily. It is now inun­dated by devel­op­ers who want to build con­dos for new­com­ers who are com­pet­ing for resources and who may not under­stand local cus­toms. Iden­tity crises emerge when tacit, unspo­ken under­stand­ings and modes of inter­ac­tion are dis­rupted by exter­nal con­tact and demo­graphic shifts. In the quest to defend old ways and invent new ones, in-groups are defined, prophets emerge, witch­craft accu­sa­tions are made, and peo­ple gen­er­ally lose what com­mu­nal sol­i­dar­ity they once had. The dig­i­tal human­i­ties com­mu­nity has not gone this far, but one can­not help but notice the dis­par­ity between the Wood­stock feel­ing of THAT­Camp events and what appears to be the Alta­mont of DH 2011.

So, if the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is, nei­ther in fact nor in prin­ci­ple, a dis­ci­pline, then what is it? Surely, with its grow­ing army of fol­low­ers and plethora of con­crete insti­tu­tional man­i­fes­ta­tions, it must have some basis in a real­ity other than its own exis­tence. In fact it does. The dig­i­tal human­i­ties, as both a broad col­lec­tion of prac­tices and an intense, on-going inter­pre­tive praxis gen­er­a­tive of such prac­tices, is best thought of as hav­ing two very con­crete but equally elu­sive dimen­sions. One the one had, the dig­i­tal human­i­ties (con­ceived of in the plural) com­prises some­thing very much like a cur­ricu­lum, an inter-related col­lec­tion of sub­ject domains and resources that, as a whole, con­tributes to both the con­struc­tion of knowl­edge and the edu­ca­tion of peo­ple. Although no one indi­vid­ual can mas­ter an entire cur­ricu­lum, a cur­ricu­lum nev­er­the­less has a logic, a coher­ence, and even a cen­ter of gravity.