[net-gold] DIGITAL HUMANITIES : DIGITAL INITIATIVES : EDUCATION: COLLEGE: ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE : RESEARCH : TECHNOLOGY: Technology is Taking Over English Departments: The False Promise of the Digital Humanities
- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Sun, 4 May 2014 23:55:38 -0400 (EDT)
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DIGITAL HUMANITIES :
DIGITAL INITIATIVES :
EDUCATION: COLLEGE: ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE :
RESEARCH :
TECHNOLOGY:
Technology is Taking Over English Departments:
The False Promise of the Digital Humanities
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Technology is Taking Over English Departments:
The False Promise of the Digital Humanities
BY ADAM KIRSCH
MAY 2, 2014
New Republic
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117428/
limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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http://tinyurl.com/ouy3xgo
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The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big
exception: digital humanities, which is a growth industry. In 2009, the
nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association (MLA)
convention: among all the contending subfields, a reporter wrote about
that years gathering, the digital humanities seem like the first next big
thing in a long time. Even earlier, the National Endowment for the
Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects.
And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks
in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of
universities with large grantsmost recently, $1 million to the University
of Rochester to create a graduate fellowship.
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Despite all this enthusiasm, the question of what the digital humanities
is has yet to be given a satisfactory answer. Indeed, no one asks it more
often than the digital humanists themselves. The recent proliferation of
books on the subjectfrom sourcebooks and anthologies to critical
manifestosis a sign of a field suffering an identity crisis, trying to
determine what, if anything, unites the disparate activities carried on
under its banner. Nowadays, writes Stephen Ramsay in Defining Digital
Humanities, the term 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.
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Within this range of approaches, we can distinguish a minimalist and a
maximalist understanding of digital humanities. On the one hand, it can be
simply the application of computer technology to traditional scholarly
functions, such as the editing of texts. An exemplary project of this kind
is the Rossetti Archive created by Jerome McGann, an online repository of
texts and images related to the career of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: this is
essentially an open-ended, universally accessible scholarly edition. To
others, however, digital humanities represents a paradigm shift in the way
we think about culture itself, spurring a change not just in the medium of
humanistic work but also in its very substance. At their most starry-eyed,
some digital humanistssuch as the authors of the jargon-laden manifesto
and handbook Digital_Humanitieswant to suggest that the addition of the
high-powered adjective to the long-suffering noun signals nothing less
than an epoch in human history: We live in one of those rare moments of
opportunity for the humanities, not unlike other great eras of
cultural-historical transformation such as the shift from the scroll to
the codex, the invention of movable type, the encounter with the New
World, and the Industrial Revolution.
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snip
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The problem for the humanitiesthe institutional and budgetary problemis
that changed minds and expanded spirits are not the kinds of things that
can be tabulated on bureaucratic reports. In humanistic study,
quantification hits its limits (even if quantifiers refuse to recognize
them). It is much easier to measure the meansbooks published, citations
accumulatedthan the ends. It is likely that digital humanities will only
increase this kind of pressure on humanities departments. All those grants
have to be accounted for somehow; the rhetoric of the digital, in the
academy as in the marketplace, prides itself on being results-oriented.
Thus the authors of Digital_Humanities conclude, If the humanities are to
thrive and not just exist in niches of privilege, they will have to
visibly demonstrate the contributions to knowledge and society they are
making in the digital era. Here the populist language of ivory towers
combines with the market language of productivity to create yet another
menacing metric for the humanities.
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The best thing that the humanities could do at this moment, then, is not
to embrace the momentum of the digital, the tech tsunami, but to resist it
and to critique it. This is not Luddism; it is intellectual
responsibility. Is it actually true that reading online is an adequate
substitute for reading on paper? If not, perhaps we should not be
concentrating on digitizing our books but on preserving and circulating
them more effectively. Are images able to do the work of a complex
discourse? If not, and reasoning is irreducibly linguistic, then it would
be a grave mistake to move writing away from the center of a humanities
education.
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These are the kinds of questions that humanists ought to be well equipped
to answer. Indeed, they are just the newest forms of questions that they
have been asking since the Industrial Revolution began to make our tools
our masters. The posture of skepticism is a wearisome one for the
humanities, now perhaps more than ever, when technology is so confident
and culture is so self-suspicious. It is no wonder that some humanists are
tempted to throw off the traditional burden and infuse the humanities with
the material resources and the militant confidence of the digital. The
danger is that they will wake up one morning to find that they have sold
their birthright for a mess of apps.
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The complete article may be read at the URL above.
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Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@xxxxxxxxxx
http://workface.com/e/daviddillard
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