When the question “What is Digital Humanities?” is posed, I’m inclined to say that it’s whatever we collectively say it is. Against seeing it that way, one might think that DH has some essence. The massive amount of disagreement, especially among its practitioners, lends credence to the view that it has no essence. Accordingly, when DH practitioners debate about the definition of DH, it’s probably right to conclude that they are not offering competing claims about the true nature of DH; instead, they are just offering differing practical visions of what DH could be.
Despite being a bit dismissive of the debate around defining DH, I find these goings-on interesting, albeit from an outsider’s perspective. I’m not a DHer in any sense. Sure, I write on computers, but since about 2 billion other people do that, I’d like to think that’s not sufficient for getting classed as a DHer, however permissive definitions might become. I’m interested in DH, however, as a philosopher.
Most philosophers could not care less about DH. Most of us philosophers have the following attitude, “Whatever those literary and cultural studies people do with ‘texts’ and computers have nothing to do with our work.” Brazen and bullheaded as that might sound, it’s probably right. Recently, I was thinking about whether property rights are best understood as a contingently related set of rights and duties to others or whether some essence underlies and unifies all such instantiations of said rights. Obviously, DH doesn’t bear on this question. All the same, there might be some questions that DHers ask or raise that is, or ought to be, of interest to philosophers.
First, some DHers, for instance, challenge our notion of authorship. While some of the theoretical arguments against more traditional ideas of authorship were already expressed before by philosophers (think Derrida and Foucault), the new claims of DHers are worthwhile to philosophers as well. Second, DHers highlight real ethical quandaries about how systems of higher learning ought to reformed to achieve their proper ends and how scholarship is best conducted and what its proper aims are.
For my purposes right now, however, I’m interested in a more subtle question at the core of DH. What is it that literary scholars do? Philosophers of literature have not paid much attention to the activity of those who play a pivotal role in the modern practice of literature. Even when I read a non-DH scholar like Lauren Berlant, I’m struck by what she purports to be doing. She is not, as I might have naively imagined, just offering readings of books and films. She does things like propose theories of citizenship. This is weird. It is equally weird when DHers say that DH is about constructing things. I, again naively, would have thought that literary scholars aren’t about constructing anything really, as their jobs were to read books and tell us what they say. Now, I’m playing up the naivete, since I am, of course, well aware of that the simple model of what literary criticism encompasses is very much old school. This way of thinking may track the New Critics, but perhaps not many others. Literary criticism today is often also cultural criticism. Criticism here means both explication as well as appraisal. Constructing things to that end, be they codes or theories of citizenship, might be necessary.
Though I don’t have the old school picture of literary criticism in mind (at least not anymore), there is still much to learn about the ways of the literary critic. I’d like to think more about how, if at all, literary critics contribute to the creation of knowledge. I’d like to think about what, if anything, unifies the humanities, something that literary critics talk about but about which philosophers often roll their eyes. I also would like to think about what follows from thinking of literature as a practice constituted by producers of literature, regular consumers, and elite consumers like literary critics. Finally, I want to know how the emergence of DH affects these answers.