Research Methods for the Digital Humanities

lewis levenberg, Tai Neilson, David Rheams, lewis levenberg, Tai Neilson, David Rheams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319967134
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

This volume introduces the reader to the wide range of methods that digital humanities employ, and offers a practical guide to the study, interpretation, and presentation of cultural material and practices. In this instance, the editors consider digital humanities to include both the use of computing to understand cultural material in new ways, and the application of theories and methods from the humanities to interpret new technologies. Each chapter provides a step-by-step guide to cutting-edge methodologies so that students can make informed decisions about the methods they use, consider ethical practices, follow practical procedures, and present their work effectively. Readers will develop practical and reflexive understandings of the software and digital devices that they study and use for research, and the book will help new researchers collaborate and contribute to their scholarly communities, and to public discourse. As contemporary humanities work becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, and increasingly permeated by and with digital technologies, this volume helps new researchers navigate an evolving academic environment. Humanities and social sciences students will find this textbook an invaluable resource for assessing and creating digital projects.

© The Author(s) 2018

lewis levenberg, Tai Neilson and David Rheams (eds.)Research Methods for the Digital Humanitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96713-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Research Methods for the Digital Humanities

Tai Neilson¹ , lewis levenberg² and David Rheams³

(1)

Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

(2)

Levenberg Services, Inc., Bloomingburg, NY, USA

(3)

The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

Tai Neilson (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

lewis levenberg

Email: [email protected]

David Rheams

End Abstract

This book introduces a range of digital research methods, locates each method within critical humanities approaches, presents examples from established and emerging practitioners, and provides guides for researchers. In each chapter, authors describe their pioneering work with an emphasis on the types of questions, methods, and projects open to digital humanists. Some methods, such as the translation of literary sources into digital games, are “native” to Digital Humanities and digital technologies. Others, such as digital ethnographies, are adopted and adapted from extensive traditions of humanities and social science research. All of the featured methods suggest future avenues for Digital Humanities research. They entail shifting ethical concerns related to online collaboration and participation, the storage and uses of data, and political and aesthetic interventions. They push against the boundaries of both technology and the academy. We hope the selection of projects in this volume will inspire new questions, and that their practical guidance will empower researchers to embark on their own projects.

Amidst the rapid growth of Digital Humanities, we identified the need for a guide to introduce interdisciplinary scholars and students to the methods employed by digital humanists. Rather than delimiting Digital Humanities, we want to keep the field open to a variety of scholars and students. The book was conceived after a panel on digital research methods at a Cultural Studies Association conference, rather than a Digital Humanities meeting. The brief emerged out of contributions from the audience for our panel, conversation between the panel presenters, and the broader conference that featured numerous presentations addressing digital methods through a range of interdisciplinary lenses and commitments. The guide is designed to build researchers’ capacities for studying, interpreting, and presenting a range of cultural material and practices. It suggests practical and reflexive ways to understand software and digital devices. It explores ways to collaborate and contribute to scholarly communities and public discourse. The book is intended to further expand this field, rather than establish definitive boundaries.

We also hope to strengthen an international network of Digital Humanities institutions, publications, and funding sources. Some of the hubs in this network include the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations and the annual Digital Humanities conference, the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly, funding from sources like the National Endowment for Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities, and, of course, many university departments and research institutes. The editors are each affiliated with George Mason University (GMU), which houses the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. GMU also neighbors other prominent institutes, such as the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at University of Virginia, University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, and Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative. Because Digital Humanities is hardly an exclusively North American project, the contributions to this volume of authors and projects from Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom illustrate the international reach of the field.

There are a number of other books that address the identity of Digital Humanities, its place in the university, or specific aspects of its practice. Willard McCarty’s Humanities Computing is a canonical text, laying the philosophical groundwork and suggesting a trajectory for what, at the time of printing, was yet to be called Digital Humanities.¹ McCarty interrogates the “difference between cultural artifacts and the data derived from them.” He argues that this meeting of the humanities and computation prompts new questions about reality and representation. Anne Burdick et al. position the field as a “generative enterprise,” in which students and faculty make things, not just texts.² Like McCarty, they suggest that Digital Humanities is a practice involving prototyping, testing, and the generation of new problems. Further, Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Mathew Gold, aggregates essays and posts from a formidable cast and does a commendable job of assessing “the state of the field by articulating, shaping, and preserving some of the vigorous debates surrounding the rise of the Digital Humanities.”³ These debates concern disciplinarity, whether the field is about “making things” or asking questions, and what types of products can be counted as scholarly outputs. Other books cover specific areas of practice. For instance, the Topics in the Digital Humanities series published by University of Illinois Press includes manuscripts devoted to machine reading, archives, macroanalysis, and creating critical editions.⁴ Digital Humanities is not only, or even primarily, defined by books on the subject; it is defined and redefined in online conversations, blog posts, in “about us” pages for institutions and departments, calls for papers, syllabi, conferences, and in the process of conducting and publishing research.

Digital Humanities also has its critics. For instance, Daniel Allington et al., authored a scathing critique titled “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. They insist that “despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives.”⁵ They suggest that Digital Humanities appeal to university administrators, the state, and high-rolling funders because it facilitates the implementation of neoliberal policies: it values academic work that is “immediately usable by industry and that produces graduates trained for the current requirements of the commercial workplace.”⁶ Similarly, Alexander Galloway contends that these projects and institutions tend to resonate with “Silicon Valley” values such as “flexibility, play, creativity, and immaterial labor.”⁷ In response to Allington et al.’s polemic, Digital Humanities Now aggregated blog posts by scholars and students decrying the article and refuting its arguments. Rather than dismiss these criticisms outright, Patrick Jagoda encourages reflection on how some forms of Digital Humanities may elicit free or exploited labor and have a role in transforming the humanities and universities of which we are a part.⁸ These are not reasons to give up on the name or the project of Digital Humanities, but they are questions with which a rigorous, critical, open, and politically active Digital Humanities must engage.

Our Approach

We do not purport to make an intervention in definitional debates about Digital Humanities, although we acknowledge that we have our own epistemological, methodological, and even normative commitments. These proclivities are evident in our call for chapters, the self-selection of contributors, and our editorial decisions. Along with most humanists, we are wary of positivist epistemologies and approaches to data collection and analysis. Hence, we adopt reflexive positions regarding the roles of research, interpretation, and critique. Our methodological commitments include, for example, the insistence on marrying theory and practice. As such we asked contributors to be explicit about how their work fits among or challenges existing projects and scholarship, and the questions their work poses and answers. The types of Digital Humanities we are interested in pursuing are also sensitive to the inclusion of underrepresented groups and challenging existing power relations. To do so, requires us to interrogate our own biases, the tools we use, and the products of our research. Each of these positions touches on significant tensions in the field and deserve elaboration.

One thing that unites humanists is our understanding that the texts we work with and the results of our research are not simply pre-existing data or truths ready to be found and reported. This anti-positivist epistemology suggests that the types of questions we ask shape the kinds of data we will produce. It is also an acknowledgment that the types of tools we employ determine the information we can access and, in turn, the types of conclusions we can draw. Johanna Drucker’s work is instructive in this regard. In particular, she differentiates between capta and data. In her schema, “capta is ‘taken’ actively while data is assumed to be a ‘given’ able to be recorded and observed.” She continues, “humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.”⁹ Digital humanists are exposing the fallacy that research involving quantitative or computational methods is necessarily positivist. Rather, there are productive tensions between interpretivist approaches and the quantitative characteristics of computing.

Digital Humanities often involves translating between different modes of expression. Humanities disciplines provide space to question cultural values and prioritize meaning-making over strict empiricism. Their methods are primarily heuristic, reflexive, and iterative. Texts are understood to change through consecutive readings and interpretations. They are always highly contextual and even subjective. Conversely, “computational environments are fundamentally resistant to qualitative approaches.”¹⁰ Fundamentally, digital devices, operating systems, and software rely on denotative code, which has no room for ambiguity. This requires a translation between types of representation. To think about the translation between these different fields of human activity we can recall Walter Benjamin’s argument in his essay “Task of the Translator.”¹¹ He contends that translation is its own art form and like other art forms, it is a part of the technical standards of its time. Many digital humanists engage in the processes of translating texts into digital spaces and data, or translating digital and quantitative information into new texts and interpretations. Translating humanistic inquiry into digital processes can force humanists to make their assumptions and normative claims more explicit. At the same time, Digital Humanities practitioners might work to create computational protocols which are probabilistic, changeable, and performative based in critical and humanistic theory.¹²

Two concerns about theory have demanded attention in debates surrounding Digital Humanities. The first concerns whether there is a body of theory around which Digital Humanities work, curricula, and institutions can or should be organized. The second is a reprisal of debates about the distinctions between logos and techne, theory and practice. The Humanities consist ...