Why Digital Humanities?
Art and critical thinking can start at the code
The Dutch newspaper the “Green Amsterdammer” recently ran a special in which scholars in the arts and humanities discussed the challenges and changes in their fields today. What these scholars find, correctly I believe, is that the humanities are by no means in crisis, but are today as vibrant and interesting as ever – not too surprising a finding, considering that the central concern of the humanities is not likely to go out of style any time soon: the question of what it means to be human. The special report also emphasised how scholarship has changed over the past decade. This has included the prominent but also controversial “digital turn” in the arts and humanities, most visible in the increasing popularity of teaching programmes and research projects in the so-called “digital humanities”.
Considering how crucial digital media and digital methods are to my own work, I want to take the opportunity to look at some of the criticism that has accompanied the digital turn, and explain why I think much of that criticism is misrepresenting what digital humanities are. I also want to discuss what a good digital humanities approach should entail, and why I think that the ethos of digital humanities is actually not disruptive, novel, or revolutionary, but in fact draws from the very same ideas that have informed good scholarship and good teaching in the humanities all along. I have also followed up on these issues in a recent interview at Leiden University, so I am including the video here.
[youtube id=”fOHhfx6yLvs”]The “dark side” of the digital?
The discussion over digital humanities tends to reproduce many of the arguments that accompany the wider debate on digital media, which often draws from clean-cut dichotomies of techno-utopianism vs. techno-phobia, emancipation vs. totalitarianism, and ultimately good vs. evil. A high-profile, polarized debate about the digital turn has arguably been the entertaining though at times misleading sparring between Clay Shirky (2010) and Evgeny Morozov (2013), though other prominent writers and public intellectuals like Sherry Turkle (2011) or Nicholas Carr (2010) have also added to the hype and hysteria.
It is therefore understandable that critics of the digital humanities like Stephen Marche feel that supporters are enamoured of a fad. For Marche, digital humanities are simply “yet another next big thing”. In its more innocent guise, this may simply mean that professors are now “aware of the existence of Twitter”. In its more worrisome incarnation, the digital humanities appear to be a project by computer geeks and neoliberal administrators who want to turn traditional scholarship on literature, art, or music into “big data” research. In this view, the fact that more and more books are being digitized, for example, threatens to turn the art and literature into problem-solving exercises within a large corpus of words that are searched and mined by means of digital tools. The university, in such a model, is no longer an institution of learning and critical thinking, but becomes a factory that produces “solutionists” (Morozov 2013): people who see the world as a set of puzzles that need solving, rather than as a myriad of different viewpoints that deserve to be explained and understood.
William Pannapacker has collected additional critical comments on the digital humanities, and has argued that many of these worries are directed at a straw man. The reality of digital humanities research is quite different. In essence, the digital humanities are about two things: firstly, they are about making use of digital technology to study the human condition. This can include the use of digital tools to explore large amounts of text, but it can also mean looking at images in new ways, or using software to map out what role social ties played in different historical situation, such as Renaissance Florence, premodern Mesopotamia, or imperial China. In that sense, digital humanities deploy new tools to study existing topics. Secondly, and equally importantly, digital humanities aim to create a nuanced and critical understanding of how digital technology shapes humanity. This can mean studying how we acquire knowledge through search engines and online encyclopaedias, how social movements use microblogging services and mobile technologies to organize protests, or what politics inform the linking behaviour in a certain part of the blogosphere (cf. Rogers 2013). In other words, digital humanities raise questions that affect our societies today but would be difficult to study without taking digital media seriously in their own right. To me, neither of these concerns obviates traditional ways of studying culture or exploring how societies and their politics work.
Four ways to be digital about the humanities
Good work in the digital humanities needs to always be in dialogue with other scholarship, not parasitical of it as the critics seem to fear, and I think there are four ways to assure this:
1) Being interdisciplinary: Steve Jobs liked to present his company Apple as an enterprise at the crossroads of Technology and Liberal Arts. Much can be criticized about Apple and its founder, but the insight that digital technology should serve human creativity deserves attention not only from those who work on technology, but also from those whose focus is on the arts. Digital humanities aim to break down disciplinary boundaries and focus on the shared questions that drive scholarship in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. They are a team effort that can bring together scholars from diverse fields, such as literature, art history, anthropology, politics, sociology, psychology, computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, and many more.
2) Being open: one thing that the digital humanities have arguably inherited from the counter-culture of hackers is an egalitarian, open-access spirit. This does not mean that classic education methods like the university lecture should simply be “digitized” and offered online, though this has indeed been a trend in higher education. Maybe more importantly, digital humanities scholarship does not only study digital media, or build digital tools into its research designs, but also uses digital media to communicate ideas and facilitate discussions. True to the view of the education reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the philosophy that his explorer-brother Alexander practiced in his lectures, the digital humanities emphasize that scholarship always happens within and together with society. This means communicating research results clearly to a broad audience, whether through websites, online videos, microblogging, social networking tools, or mobile aps. It also means involving students in open discussions, and including non-academics in the exchange of ideas.
3) Being digital: the digital humanities are not simply a way to showcase scholarship in digital form, for instance by digitizing books or articles. They also provide the digital methods to creatively explore issues that have been “born digitally”, such as how information flows through digital social networks, or how knowledge is structured on the Internet (Rogers 2013). Digital humanities also takes the idea seriously that scholarly content can itself be “born digitally”, and it consequently aims to empower students to explore their creativity through digital media, for instance by putting together a graduate thesis as a website, creating software art or platforms for sharing political art, or building interactive curriculum vitae. Digital humanities is at its heart a creative endeavour.
[grid_6] [frame_right]Wilhelm von Humboldt:
“the ultimate task of our existence is to give the fullest possible content to the concept of humanity in our own person (…) through the impact of actions in our own lives” (UNESCO 2000) [/frame_right] [/grid_6]
4) Being critical: one of the arguments against digital humanities is that research in this field often uses existing social media platforms and search engines, and that this fundamentally compromises the researchers while legitimizing commercial companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google. Indeed, a favourite credo in the digital humanities is the question “what would Google do”, made famous by the blogger and business consultant Jeff Jarvis. Such criticism omits how digital humanities research critically examines the myths of digital communication in different contexts and questions the agendas of the major players in the digital media industries (Turner 2008). In addition, such research explores the ways in which our lives are embedded in software code that we ourselves have not written, and that most people are not able to fully understand. As Lev Manovich has put it: “Welcome to the world of permanent change – the world that is now defined not by heavy industrial machines that change infrequently, but by software that is always in flux” (Manovich 2013). This is why digital humanities start with the code: they see programming not only as a creative way to produce software, but also as a way to interrogate software for its inherent rationale and transformative effects.
Conclusion: digital literacy
Digital tools have enabled fresh ways to look at the world, and promoting such new perspectives is indeed an important aspect of the digital humanities. At the same time, the digital humanities extend the logic of critical thinking that has always informed good scholarship and teaching to our contemporary human condition. The world we live in tethers us to digital devices and complex information networks, to smartphones and PCs, ATMs and CCTV camera systems, search engine results and wikis. In this world, our societies, cultures, politics, and economics are fundamentally shaped by digital technologies and codes. Being able to understand how Google works, what goes on inside an Apple product, and how to programme in html or python have become matters of basic literacy. This is why the digital turn in the arts, humanities, and social sciences is not a fad, but a responsibility.
References:
Carr, Nicholas (2010): The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. New York: W.W. Norton.
Manovich, Lev (2013): Software Takes Command. New York & London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Morozov, Evgeny (2013): To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. New York et al.: Penguin Press.
Rogers, Richard (2013): Digital Methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shirky, Clay (2010): Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators . New York et al.: Penguin Press.
Turkle, Sherry (2011): Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Turner, Fred (2008): From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
UNESCO (2000): “Wilhelm von Humboldt“. Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education XXIII/3-4: 613-23.
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About the Author: Florian Schneider
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you have a great website with well written stuff, and I think you are taking the right broad intellectual approach to asia studies.
this is a long piece by Morozov, with quite some relevant insights for this subject, IMHO of course. you may find it relevant :
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler
also, the recent Pinker versus Wieseltier thing touches on the issues mentioned in your piece.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114754/steven-pinker-leon-wieseltier-debate-science-vs-humanities
surprisingly many relevant contemperary debates someway or another are related to this subject :
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115279/joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-reviewed-thomas-nagel
I’m intersested in the question whether “asia studies” , admittedly a vague term, is able to draw enough, ( go beyond the we’ve got confucius-thing ), from these relevant issues and debates, that are currently taking place in the “west”.
Thanks for these very interesting links. I find the debate between Pinker and Wieseltier fascinating, though this may be something worth discussing in another blog post at some point – one on the “neuro” turn in the humanities and social sciences, perhaps…
As for Morozov, I agree with you that many of his critical points are well taken. In particular, I think it is worth checking how the Internet mythologies that are popular in Silicon Valley connect to specific models of neoliberal entrepreneurship. I can very much recommend the book by Turner I’ve referenced above. It makes a similar point. What I find regrettable about Morozov is his polemic writing, and his often reductionist arguments. “To Save Everything, Click Here” tends to conceal a conservative agenda that I personally don’t find very convincing.
But to answer your question regarding “Asian studies”, I think the general concern of how digital technologies affect our lives is one that is being asked in Seoul or Tokyo or Shanghai as much as in New York or London. In that sense, the simple answer to your question is that collaboration with colleagues at, for instance, Singapore’s Internet Research Centre or the various Hong Kong research institutes promises to offer rich and diverse takes on the subject – not because these institutes happen to be located in “Asia”, but because they have great scholars working on these issues.
The more philosophical but equally important answer is that many of the questions that get asked on the subject (and theories that get put together to answer those questions) tend to be informed by specific social and political concerns that are at times promoted as universal – much of the “emancipatory media” debate, for instance, is arguably informed by assumptions that are based on a specific (“Californian”?) model of envisioning progress. Asian studies, or maybe more broadly “area studies”, offers a great perspective for studying such debates, because the basic premise of area studies is to always ask “where is here”? What role does our social-historical “place” play in how we conceptualize what humanity, progress, modernity, information, and so on mean? This is why it is compelling, IMHO, to incorporate a digital humanities approach into area studies scholarship in Leiden.
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Erik Johnson:I’ll echo Nile in the thanks due to Jon, Cameron, and Zephyr for punlilg this series together. The snapshots it has provided of projects, tools, and methodologies being developed around the Stanford community have been fascinating and useful. Perhaps the biggest contribution digital humanities has to make to the rest of us right now is precisely this sharing model, since it’s a tendency in our compartmentalized, period-bound disciplines for methodological developments and tools to end up ghettoized to particular subfields or objects of study.Is digital humanities a field though? Digital humanists seem to have staked themselves out as a group that wants (as a group) to generate its own research questions. I wonder if the field can or should balance these enterprises with a more consistent sense of service to the humanities as a whole.Bibliography, paleography and textual editing, for instance, are fields, but they are fields that exist with a strong sense of service to the larger humanities world. The research questions they generate by virtue of their own techniques and tools are rarely of intrinsic interest unless they speak to larger research questions. Whether or not there’s a comma between two words or how many times Great Expectations were reprinted are not innately interesting questions. But textual scholarship can help to resolve the interpretive problems raised by close readers; descriptive bibliography can answer questions about an author’s biography and enumerative bibliography about the audience of his novels; and so on.So my question: could there be a more effective balance between digital humanities that aims to reinvent its field and digital humanities research that serves the existing humanities community? Should the goal be to take distant reading approaches and produce some synthesis of data (about topics in the Victorian novel, say) that any one working on a dissertation on Dickens would then be obliged to consult in the same way they’d be obliged to consult a good Dickens bibliography now?Should groups like the literary lab here be structured so as to consult systematically with students and professors doing work that is not explicitly digital and say, okay, you work on adultery in the Hellenistic world, let’s locate that within a topic model, with an aim to incorporating these kinds of research methods more fully into the larger humanities conversation? Or does the desire to articulate a digital humanities agenda mitigate against that happening?
Thanks Farid for sharing your thoughts on this (though I wonder whether you had meant to address someone else? Where you having a debate with Erik Johnson?). At any rate, I second your concerns about specialization, and about ‘digital humanities’ being conceived of as a stand-alone field. Personally, my research is focused on the relevance of digital technology in contemporary societies, so I do not do the kind of corpus analyses or big data analyses of bibliographies etc. that are often associated with digital humanities. These approaches are interesting, but I agree with you that they need to be interesting first and foremost in a broader context of studies. A digital approach alone does not obviate careful hermeneutic work, e.g. close readings, historical contextualization, etc. At the same time, such ‘traditional’ approaches can benefit from the kind of questions that digital methods scholars raise, so there is a real opportunity here to integrate digital approaches into humanities endeavours more generally. I myself am mainly interested in how our world views and our understanding of knowledge change at a time when nearly all our engagement with the world is influenced or filtered by software (through search engines, through digital devices, through text editors, and so on), and I’d like to see that concern represented centrally in any humanities programme. Hardly any humanities project is free of digital influences these days (for better or worse), so does that not mean we have a responsibility to our students to provide them with critical awareness of what this implies? In that sense, I would like the ‘digital’ to be at the core of humanities in general, rather than marking a field of particular research practices, as exciting as they may be.