Discussion
Each chapter in this series has its own discussion page. If you’d like to make a general comment about the Tooling Up for Digital Humanities series in general, please do so here. We especially value your feedback and comments regarding the content presented here.
Comments
Thank you to Cameron, and Professor’s Christensen and Frank for an enlightening workshop. It is a fascinating emerging field, and I’m excited to see how, and if, it revolutionizes scholarly humanities research and the classroom experience here at Stanford. The 10,000 foot perspective on this enterprising field provided the scaffolding for further inquiry. It is great to just be aware of some of the new ways technology is being employed in humanities research and very thought-provoking.
Such an engaging and edifying class this quarter—thanks for the amazing work everyone put into it. I was a complete neophyte coming in, and now I feel like…slightly less of a neophyte. But I’m thoroughly hooked and can’t wait to learn more. Hope to see some of you at the conference in June.
I want to quickly comment on today’s discussion. It seems like the title of the class was errant, and should have read “is digital humanities a field?” The answer didn’t feel like a given today, but a question that needs to be discussed and decided if these lessons are going to shake up the humanities in the way that they (I agree with Yvon) desperately need to. Everything we covered this quarter was too practically unrelated, too conceptually inchoate to qualify as a field. Saying “I’m a digital humanist” instead of “I’m a (blank-humanities-field-ian/ist) who makes use of digital tools” seems like a fallacy, and a destructive fallacy at that. The issues raised with digital humanities today (lack of a narrative object, difficulty in interdisciplinary collaboration, etc.) all seem to result from this confusion, from a lack of clarity of goal and purpose as to just what the digital humanities are (to this scholar, simply: a set of very useful tools). Then we can really focus on the best way to invent, apply and disseminate these new approaches, maybe start to see the great ambitions of such an enterprise realized. And if I’m wrong, if digital humanities is a field, then we need mightily to distill (I’m thinking of what Franco said at the end of class about collaboration) its concepts and values.
I’ll echo Nile in the thanks due to Jon, Cameron, and Zephyr for pulling 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?
Following the preceding comments, I too would also like to thank Cameron and Professors Christensen and Frank for putting together this quarter’s workshops. And of course, all the other presenters throughout this week. As a student not directly involved in the humanities field, it was interesting to see all the different ways a simple text could be analyzed or presented, and what implications doing so could have. I also gained a lot of useful research tips – specifically different programs to help organize all the data I collect. I have always found this to be one of the more challenging aspects of research, so taking this course has helped ease the process.
On a semi-tangent note, I really appreciated Friday’s discussion panel and the graduate student with a linguistics and engineering(?) background. As a Political Scientist major possibly also considering the linguistics route, it was cool to see how two very different areas of interest can be combined and produce an interesting product.
May 20, 2011: The Future of Digital Humanities
I very much enjoyed the debate about the future of Digital Humanities. It was clear from the discussion that the enormous amount of information appearing in the daily basis demands new methodologies to make a coherent interpretation, data analysis, etc. I feel digital humanities offers a good approach to tackle problems in humanities that involve large amounts of data. I disagree with some of the audience that digital humanities will be a field reserved mostly to computer scientists. Even though the methodologies will come mostly from computer science, the interesting questions still will appear within the different fields of humanities. In my experience, it is hard to make good questions if you are not immersed in the field. So, computer scientist will need to familiarize themselves with humanities and vice versa humanities people will need to learn new methodologies. Both ways offer challenges. What I found most exciting about this field is the possibility of analyzing hundreds of years of digitized archives to answer questions about writing trends across centuries and cultures. I found this very fascinating.
Like many of those who have commented before me, I’d like to thank all of the people involved in organizing the workshop and those who spoke during the various sessions throughout the quarter.
I thought that the last session was particularly interesting because it provided an opportunity for a much-needed conceptual look at what exactly the digital humanities are halfway through 2011, and whether or not there is an agreed-upon path forward for the field (and, it seems, there is not). I was also intrigued by how closely some of the concerns raised toward the end of the hour–those regarding disciplinary colonialism–parallel the rhetoric used in discussions on the value of the arts and humanities on this campus, throughout the country, and in Washington. This is highly speculative, but it might be that the digital humanities can give humanities on the whole a better way of communicating to non-humanists the value of humanists’ fields, in addition to the many other potential benefits of increased use of digital methodologies in the humanities. If that’s so, it’s yet another possible feather in the cap of this emerging field.
Anyway, thanks again for a great workshop series, and I hope that there will be more opportunities like this at Stanford in the years to come!
I’m really interested in which the Digital Humanities developments might align with the hack day and developer communities. I think Mia Ridge has been doing some fantastic work in this area and the link between these communities and the museum user community as well.
At the moment I’m particularly focused on an online Shakespeare hackday we are hoping to run for a project called Will’s World, which is building a registry of Shakespeare resources. And I would be hugely appreciative if others here would consider filling out a survey we are running to give us an idea of what would make a fun, productive and accessible hack event around Shakespeare data and metadata:
https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/willsworldhack/
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Thanks, Nicola.
Thank you to those who took part in our survey on the proposed Shakespeare hackday after my comment here on 7th November.
I am very excited to post this follow up to announce that the Hack Event will be taking place as a one week online event from 5th-12th December 2012. Full information, registration form and the event wiki can be found via our latest blog post:
http://willsworld.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2012/11/22/join-wills-world-online-hack-5-12-dec-2012/
Thanks,
Nicola