Fellow NUDHL participants,

Just following up on our discussion today with that link to Judith Butler’s recent commencement speech at McGill. As I mentioned in the seminar today, it strikes me that many of her questions about the value of the humanities are the same ones we’ve been kicking around all year. She addresses the contemporary critique which we were discussing:

And now, most certainly, there are new voices of skepticism, asking: What value do the humanities have? Are they useful? Can we measure their impact, their outputs, their profits?

It’s a great talk, and I’m interested in what everyone thinks about DH and its possibilities for reconceptualizing the same questions and challenges Butler addresses here.

You can listen to the whole talk (and read a few excerpts) at Brain Pickings.

Hello all –

In anticipation of our meeting tomorrow, I just wanted to throw out a couple of questions that came up for me during the readings. My apologies, but they’re more bullet points and random questions than anything organized. Will look forward to talking with everyone tomorrow.

1. In his very brief piece, “The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing,” Daniel Cohen discusses the way the “social contract of the book” transforms when moving from traditional print publishing to digital publishing. As he points out, the producers of these publications have dedicated a great deal of energy toward their side of this contract. But he claims that many “fewer efforts have been made to influence the mental state of the scholarly audience,” or what he calls the “demand side” (320). But how can we go about doing this? What would this look like? Cohen proposes the idea of community-based curation as a means of selecting publications and promoting them to consumers (321). What would this look like? Where do digital journals fall in this picture? Similarly, I find his call for greater acceptance of publications regardless of their print or digital status intriguing, but what are the problems inherent in recognizing “outstanding academic work wherever and however it is published,” whether the work comes from a blog or a peer-reviewed journal (320)?
2. Cohen’s piece and others for this week, especially Witmore’s “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” made me wonder more generally about the way materiality and aesthetics influence the shift from print to digital publication. I found Witmore’s pieces interesting for the way they seem to collapse any hard-and-fast distinction between digital and printed texts and the way we interact with (or address) them.
3. Alexander Reid’s “Graduate Education and the Ethics of the Digital Humanities” touches on many of the questions we tossed around in our last meeting, regarding incorporating DH training into graduate education. He proposes the idea of a requirement that grad students acquire a “digital literacy,” which he admits would vary across disciplines. So, as in our last meeting, we’re confronted with a series of challenging questions: What constitutes a digital literacy? How can departments expect grad students (and faculty, for that matter) to simultaneously acquire and teach a digital literacy? How can this digital literacy be maintained, so that it does not become outmoded? In building resources into departments (like hiring educators with the ability to teach graduate students these skills, or establishing university-wide initiatives), how might this move inadvertently reinforce existing hierarchies already endemic to higher ed? Considering the realities of funding and resources, and especially coming from an institution with extremely limited resources (where there were lots of first-generation students, like myself), this seems to me a significant problem. On a related point, I come from an MA program that trains both PhD-bound students and students aspiring to teach in secondary ed. Would this digital literacy apply to both, or to each group in different ways? And finally, as always, this piece brings me back to Jillana’s question from the first meeting: how much of this digital literacy is just learning to use new technologies, and how much of it is learning to use new technologies to ask new questions? We might look at Reid’s description of his own department on p. 359, for example.

(Hello fellow NUDHL-ers. I came across an article and wanted to share it with all of you. I’m interested to know what everyone makes of it. I’m cross-posting to the HASTAC website as well. Happy Thanksgiving!)

President of the AHA and American environmental historian William Cronon recently published an intriguing piece in the November issue of Perspectives on History. In “Recollecting My Library . . . and My Self,” Cronon ponders what is lost in the transition from material text to digital text. His own interests in senses of place and the nature of storytelling really shape this piece, and I found it a very compelling claim about the potential pitfalls of our embrace of the digital. I thought it would be worth sharing, to see what others make of this.

He points out a few dangers that the “digital revolution” poses to “building personal libraries.” As others have pointed out before him, the ease of retrieving information has fundamentally transformed the research process. Cronon also points out that the digital turn imperils a source’s context, comparing the ease of computer searching with a return to the Roman scroll. He discusses his own difficulties in locating a piece of information that he’s already collected in a digital storehouse vs. a material library. I think Cronon is signaling toward important problems here, and I wonder how other researchers (not just historians) are grappling with these same challenges in their use of the digital. Cronon somberly points out that digital evidence gathering is forcing a change in how historians conceive of themselves through their research processes:

“This lifelong process of creating a scholarly self by means of an intellectual and emotional journey whose way-stations are marked by passionately remembered texts — many of them so dear to us that we keep them close to us for our entire lives — is being transformed in the fragmented world of search and scroll that has become our dominant metaphor for knowledge itself.”

If this transformation (which reads to me, in this account, as something woefully lost) is inevitable, as Cronon claims, what are we to do about it? He points out that what is at stake in this transformation is not just a form of practice but a sense of identity. So how are digital researchers to maintain their “memory palaces,” as Cronon calls them? How are we to construct these palaces at all? If the materiality of the research process is being lost, is it also being replaced? Is there a materiality to the digitized research process? Is the memory palace still there, but in a different form? Can we still construct a scholarly sense of self when the trek to the archive is not a journey to a foreign country, but the act of opening a laptop? Can we maintain a sense of context through the iPad?

I’m eager to hear what others have to say about this transformation.

I’d just like to offer a few scattered thoughts and questions about the readings for this week, to note the ideas I found most interesting. These are in no particular order, so please forgive the untidiness.

In our first meeting, Jillana declared that if our enterprise wasn’t going to offer her a new kind of theory or a fresh critical lens, she wasn’t interested in pursuing it. I found this remark ringing in my ears as I worked my way through the set of readings for this week, since many of the authors gesture toward the same dilemma. In outlining some of the arguments made for digital artifacts as scholarship or argument, Ramsay and Rockwell describe Margaret Masterman’s framing of digital tools as “‘telescopes for the mind’ that show us something in a new light” (79). McCarty also picks up on this conception of the digital, to ask, “What can the digital humanities do for the humanities as a whole that helps these disciplines improve the well-being of us all?” (119).  I’m interested in learning more about how other group members envision the digital transforming their scholarship in a way that is more than just quantitative. As an historian, how can the digital change the kinds of questions I can ask, not just with respect to scale and scope of my work? That’s part of the reason I was excited to join in this year-long discussion. I want to figure out how this can transform the way I understand and approach scholarship. (To be quite honest, I’m also interested in the way digital tools can increase my productivity and research efficiency, but I think that’s worth leaving aside for right now.)

Similarly, I’m interested in the idea (posited by Ramsay and Rockwell) that a researcher must understand the mechanics of the digital tool they’re using (its composition, function, etc.) in order for that tool to be considered a form of scholarship or argument (80-1). How does this demand for precise understanding of a digital tool interact with McCarty’s question about whether DH is just for gruntwork (“drudgery”) or for something more?

The idea of legitimacy (professional, academic, and intellectual) was another prominent theme in our last meeting, and resurfaces this week. I found one of Hall’s questions intriguing: “Is the turn toward computing just the latest manifestation of and response to this crisis of confidence in the humanities?” (134). How does everyone feel about this way of framing the computational turn?

I found Scheinfeldt’s distinction between ideas and “organizing activities” intriguing (125). I wonder if this is a problematic distinction, especially following the Ramsey/Rockwell piece, which grapples explicitly with the idea of digital artifacts as argument/theory/scholarship.

Finally, how does materiality factor into the debate about whether digital projects count as scholarship/argument, or whether DH is a legitimate field of scholarship?

These are just a few points I thought might be worth pursuing. I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on the material and debates at hand.

Hello, fellow HASTAC Scholars! I’m looking forward to getting to meet each of you and to embark on this year-long journey together. My name is Emily VanBuren, and I am a first year doctoral student in Modern European History here at Northwestern, specializing in Modern Britain. My fields of interest include Cultural History, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. My current research focuses on interwar British theatre as a space of reflection on the First World War, and I’m beginning to move my project toward the context of internationalism and the stage. This is probably enough information to demonstrate that I am training as an interdisciplinary historian, and my arrival in the HASTAC seminar is the direct result of my desire to work across fields.

In the book Debates in the Digital Humanities (edited by Gold), I especially enjoyed the interview with Brett Bobley, published in Part I. He predicts that the digital humanities will have its greatest impact in terms of scale – “Big, massive, scale” (63). I see it the same way, and I hope the increase in size will generate greater interdisciplinarity and collaboration as research projects and exponentially increasing sources demand the expertise of more than one or two researchers. I’m interested in how long it will take for interdisciplinary humanities research to move from something novel to the norm (or if it already has!). Like several of those who sought to define the digital humanities in the book, I see it as the application of digital tools to “traditional” humanities research, making the work not only more efficient but also opening up new questions to be asked of our materials and sources.

From a practical standpoint, I’m also drawn to this field because of the “big, massive, scale” that Bobley mentions, and the challenges it has already caused me. I’m lucky be working with a very exciting archive in my research. But it’s also proved daunting tackling a mountain of primary sources during my first large-scale project. I’ve turned to digital tools in an effort to better organize and analyze these materials, but I’m excited to discover more effective methods than those I’m currently employing. I’m hoping my year as a HASTAC Scholar will help me in that pursuit.

There are about a dozen other issues related to the digital humanities that I’m looking forward to discussing with the other participants (like access to tools in the face of massive cuts to educational funding, or how this field will change the career paths of myself and my cohort), but I’ll save those for now. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you. Feel free to contact me on Twitter (@emilydvb). See you soon.