Advancing Digital Humanities

Research, Methods, Theories

P. Arthur, K. Bode, P. Arthur, K. Bode

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137336996
• eBook ISBN: 9781137337016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Social Sciences

Advancing Digital Humanities moves beyond definition of this dynamic and fast growing field to show how its arguments, analyses, findings and theories are pioneering new directions in the humanities globally.

1

Collecting Ourselves

Katherine Bode and Paul Longley Arthur

Digital humanities has become an influential and widely adopted term only in the past decade. Beyond the rapid multiplication of associations, centres, conferences, journals, projects, blogs, and tweets frequently used to signal this emergence, if anything characterizes the field during this time it is a concern with definition. This focus is acknowledged and reflected, for instance, in Matthew Gold’s 2012 edited collection, Debates in Digital Humanities. The debates surveyed are overwhelmingly definitional: ‘As digital humanities has received increasing attention and newfound cachet, its discourse has grown introspective and self-reflexive’ (x). Questions that Gold identifies as central to and expressive of the emerging field include: Does one need to build or make things to be part of the digital humanities? ‘Does DH need theory? Does it have a politics? Is it accessible to all members of the profession’, or only those working at elite, well-funded institutions? ‘Can it save the humanities? The university?’ (xi).

The 2013 collection Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader (Terras et al. 2013) also reflects this focus, bringing together historical and contemporary readings on the act of defining digital humanities, many of which, not incidentally, are canonical in the field. Other areas of activity are equally self-reflexive, including the field’s various manifestos¹ and the annual Day of Digital Humanities, where definitions are crowdsourced and participants are asked to document through text and image ‘what digital humanists really do’. Despite this long-standing preoccupation, no clear agreement on a definition has emerged beyond broad references to research, teaching, and technical innovation at the intersection of humanities and computing. And within this broad description, commentators emphasize different aspects of the intersection—historical, institutional, political, economic, or social—as the aims and scope of digital humanities continue to be debated.

Why, then, is digital humanities so focused on defining itself, yet unable to arrive at an agreed-upon definition? Many have assessed this situation from a positive angle. Gold, for instance, suggests that such introspection simply marks ‘a field in the midst of growing pains as its adherents expand from a small circle of like-minded scholars to a more heterogeneous set of practitioners who sometimes ask more disruptive questions’ (Gold 2012, x–xi). Alan Liu (2013) identifies this focus as a characteristic that digital humanities shares with a number of past fields, and thus, presumably, a relatively normal stage of development and maturation. We could add that even the most mature disciplines have adapted and shifted their boundaries in recent decades as the practices and rhetoric of interdisciplinary research have extended the scope of traditional pursuits. The definitional debate has also expressed many positive aims for digital humanities and the humanities more broadly, including openness beyond the university; the importance of interdisciplinary and global connections, conversations, and collaborations; critiques of established forms of hiring, peer review, and publication; and the importance of valuing—and making a case for the value of—humanities scholarship.

Yet the coin has a negative side, too. The focus on definition has fed into internecine and public battles about who is in and out of digital humanities—for example, whether one needs to code, or just to ‘build’, or neither, to be considered a ‘digital humanist’ (Ramsay 2011). Such disputes make the field appear cliquish and arguably occur at the expense of—or at the very least overshadow—the actual work of doing digital humanities and advancing the field by showing, rather than proposing or imagining, what can be achieved and discovered. This criticism could be pushed further, as a number of commentators within and outside digital humanities have done, to describe the work in digital humanities thus far as inadequate to constitute a field of humanities scholarship worth defining.

The most cogent and confronting expressions of this position come from within digital humanities itself. For instance, Patrick Juola’s 2008 analysis of article citations and author affiliations in the flagship journal Computers and the Humanities (CHum) highlighted the ‘minimal’ impact of this research on mainstream humanities research. Building on this critique, in 2011 Andrew Prescott described digital humanities as too focused on internal debates—definitional, institutional, and technical—and displaying a lack of engagement with critical theory that left the field ‘perilously out of touch with the modern study of the humanities’ (69). The result, Prescott argues, is a ‘collective failure to produce scholarship of outstanding importance and significance’ (63). Liu’s 2013 PMLA article encapsulated such criticisms as ‘the meaning problem’ in digital humanities: the seeming inability for research in this area to move from data (or textual models or visualizations) to arguments and interpretations that contribute to knowledge and debates in the broader humanities.

The fact that major figures in digital humanities question whether the field has made any real contribution is concerning enough; what makes these critiques even more worrying is how closely they mirror earlier criticisms and supposed solutions. Reflecting on the first 24 years of CHum, the same journal Juola analyses, in 1991 Rosanne Potter argued that most of its authors ‘let the computer define what to look for, and the statistician define what was significant’ while ‘neglect[ing] reading what others were doing and had done’; this ‘toddler and teenager thinking’ produced a lot of counting, but not much in the way of insights relevant to mainstream humanities disciplines (427). A few years later, referring to this synopsis, Mark Olsen—like Prescott—diagnosed the urgent need to ‘address the issues surrounding the general failure of our discipline to have a significant impact on the research community as a whole’ (1993/1994, 309) by engaging with contemporary theoretical insights and approaches.² The fact that the same problems—and purported solutions—remain despite more than two decades of work and a name change (from humanities computing) indicates the complexity of the ‘meaning problem’ for digital humanities.

A number of chapters in this collection continue and develop these and other critiques (see, for example, Bode and Murphy, Robinson, Rossiter, and Turnbull). But Willard McCarty’s description of digital humanities’ shortcomings is especially sobering, in part because his chapter was originally delivered as a lecture upon receiving the Busa Award, the most prestigious recognition of digital humanities scholarship offered by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations:

Make no mistake: we are surrounded by mature, subtle civilizations of enquiry, whose intellectual resources dwarf our own in volume, variety, and sophistication . . . . We need far more than the luck of the moment, dozens of sessions at the MLA, THATCamps everywhere, millions of tweets, thousands of blogs, and so on and so forth. We need resonance with the intellectual cultures of the arts and humanities . . . and [of] the techno-sciences.

McCarty points to fear—of our confrontation with ‘the uncanny otherness of computing’ (this volume, 294) and of our being unable to emerge unscathed from this encounter—to explain why digital humanities (and humanities computing before it) has not achieved the stature of other areas of inquiry.

These criticisms of digital humanities provide a potential answer to the question of why the field has been so focused on definition, and why agreed-upon definitions, despite this effort, have not emerged. Instead of occurring at the expense of, or overwhelming, the work of doing digital humanities, it may well be that definition has been pursued as a stand-in for the insights and discoveries the field is not providing. Pursuing this line of reasoning, perhaps the unprecedented attention that digital humanities has received in recent years accounts for the current fever pitch of definitional debate. Heralded as the ‘next big thing’ (Pannapacker 2009)—or even just ‘the thing’ (Pannapacker 2011)—by many within and outside the academy, and even put in the position of saving the humanities from its own crisis of meaning (Liu 2013), the focus on definition may be an attempt to provide something—anything—for those who look to the field for salvation at a time of institutional and financial pressure, and even epistemological and ontological crisis.

This collection was conceived in the context of such criticisms of digital humanities—with the aim of advancing the field beyond definitional debates to show, rather than describe, what digital humanities is, what it can do, the contribution it makes to humanities research, and the role it can play in the future: its research, theories, and methods. To attempt this ambitious contribution, we embarked on the collection with two main ideas. First, rather than predetermine the areas we believed to be part of digital humanities, we sought contributions from a wide range of scholars who had self-identified with the field by attending the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities at the Australian National University in Canberra in 2012.

The result of this self-selecting approach is a collection that traverses some of the field’s key fault lines. Indeed, quite unintentionally, the resulting collection demonstrates the broad version of digital humanities—its areas of need and promise—that Liu has been mapping out and advocating for a number of years (2011). Describing digital humanities from an ethnographic standpoint, Liu (2013) points to media studies—concerned with new media objects and networked, visual, and multimodal work—and traditional humanities computing—focused on technical questions and support—as neighbouring tribes to the core digital humanities, which arises mainly from traditional humanities disciplines and is predominantly concerned with textual materials as well as the examination and value of the old. This collection unites members of these ‘neighbouring tribes’ to demonstrate the importance of traditional and new scholarly objects and methods for digital humanities.

As is appropriate, given the emphasis internationally on literary studies in digital humanities research, that discipline provides one focus for this collection. However, such literary scholarship extends from established humanities computing areas of digital scholarly editing and stylistic analysis to book history and quantitative literary history. Moreover, these literary chapters sit alongside, and resonate productively with, a wide range of chapters relating to new media studies and theory, as well as contributions from researchers in film studies, history, cultural heritage, and even astrophysics. In addition, far from lacking the ‘critical awareness of the larger social, economic, and cultural issues’ at stake in humanities research (Liu 2011, 11)—a charge frequently levelled at digital humanities—this collection demonstrates a clear focus on relations of power and inequality, including their relation to gender, nationality, and global capital. Finally, while incorporating researchers from across the globe, the collection’s origins give it an Australasian inflection, showcasing work from Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and thus providing an important addition and corrective to the North American and European focus of many previous edited collections.

The second way we endeavoured to advance digital humanities beyond definition was to request contributions that did not merely describe digital humanities projects and methods but made an original contribution to research. The result is a collection of arguments, analyses, findings, and theories of relevance and value to multiple areas of the humanities. Such research has importance far beyond what it says about digital humanities, and we end this introduction by describing some of the specific ideas and arguments presented. Collected together, these chapters clearly demonstrate (rather than describe) the capacity of digital humanities to function as a site of rich conversations between and across disciplines.

What this collection also reveals, and what is particularly surprising given the diverse range of topics explored, is a set of significant commonalities in the approaches used and, more essentially, in the epistemological questions posed. Not all of these commonalities are new to our understanding of digital humanities, with themes such as the power of ‘big data’, the relationship of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading, and thinking through building all much discussed in recent years. Yet deployed in ways that advance our understanding of the world and our place in it, these common themes begin to indicate some of the intellectual possibilities of digital humanities: that is, not only how digital humanities can contribute to humanities disciplines, but what it does differently from these disciplines, and why and how this difference is important in understanding and analysing human culture and society now and in the future.

The core commonality that emerges is the centrality of collections as a product of, resource for, object of, and epistemological challenge in digital humanities research. While the meaning of collections has expanded in the digital age—here including digital archives and libraries as well as collections of images, documents, words, and metadata—its centrality to the humanities is long-standing. As the authors of Digital_Humanities write,

Collection-building and curation have remained constants of humanistic knowledge production from remote antiquity through early modern courts to the academics of the Baroque era to late nineteenth century universities where chairs were typically associated with research collections. These domains became disjointed from the mainstream of scholarly practice only during the late print era, and are once again becoming integral to many forms of Digital Humanities practice.

(Lunenfeld et al. 2012, 32)

Rather than simply continuing a tradition, the chapters in this book exemplify and interrogate how digital collections are motivating new ways of doing research—and indeed, of thinking—in the humanities.

The critical potential of data-driven analysis to enable new perspectives and insights provides another common thread. In a wide range of topics—including Harlequin Romance fiction (Elliott), the operations of Australian cinemas (Maltby et al.), and the ‘digital human’ created in assemblage with the smartphone (Coté)—these chapters demonstrate the capacity of data-driven analysis to indicate patterns and conjunctions that could not otherwise be perceived, and which enable us to understand cultural phenomena in revealing and challenging ways. As well as seeing culture from a ‘distance’, a number of contributors integrate data-rich analysis with exploration of particular instances: whether this means using data to highlight phenomena that are explored further by ‘analogue’ means (such as interviews, archival research, or textual analysis), or moving iteratively between these two levels of analysis. In combining what has been called ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading, such research brings together modes of analysis that are in some quarters seen as paradigmatic of a supposed opposition of humanities and digital humanities, and takes a step that Liu (2013) identifies as vital for solving the ‘meaning problem’ in digital humanities.

Another commonality across the collection is a focus on thinking through building. While also an established theme in digital humanities—developed in discussions of the role of knowledge representation and modelling in the field—chapters in this collection realize the potential of this process by showcasing the intellectual, critical, and theoretical outcomes that thinking through building enables. The emphasis, in other words, is as much on thinking as on building, and these chapters highlight the iterative or dialogic movement between building and thinking, as models or prototypes prompt new questions and arguments that in turn motivate the creation of new models or prototypes, and so on. In his chapter in this collection, McCarty expresses ambivalence about the critical potential of modelling—a form of thinking through building that he himself did much to clarify—for digital humanities research, because it is ‘unable to do more than work through consequences of interpretation that had already happened—elsewhere by other means’ (this volume, 293). The work that follows shows the continuing importance and vitality of this approach, which in shifting our perceptions by degrees supports interpretations that would not be possible otherwise.

A key reason why the chapters in this collection succeed in using building to move beyond existing ways of thinking points to another commonality: an explicitly self-conscious and critical approach to the nature and implications of collections. As Julia Flanders explores in this volume, the current remediation of our cultural heritage into digital forms provides the opportunity to interrogate our assumptions about, and approaches to, collections before they become ingrained, normalized, and ultimately invisible. A number of chapters take up this challenge by highlighting the methodological and epistemological challenges and potential of analysing mediated objects, from mid-eighteenth-century documents used in the border negotiations between Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland (Eide), to the collective of Australian Twitter users (Bruns et al.) or national biographical datasets (Arthur). While Prescott criticizes digital humanities as atheoretical, even antitheory, if theory is ‘a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions’ (Eagleton, cited in Prescott 2011, 68) then theorizing is pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Collecting Ourselves
• Part I: Transforming Disciplines
• Part II: Media Methods
• Part III: Critical Curation
• Part IV: Research Futures
• Index