I am a postdoctoral fellow with The Graduate School here at Northwestern.  My work and teaching is focused on intersections between American literary and cinematic traditions and paradigmatic changes in American jurisprudence.  I am completing my first book on American Western films and US self-defense laws, Gunslinging Justice, and am also lecturing a survey course in African American literature for the winter term.

An Openly Contrarian Definition of Digital Humanities

At a rather specific level, the digital humanities could be marked as a set of computing practices—read coding, programming  index and website building—that use cultural products as the content or data set of analysis.   Though the content is often humanistic, the methodology of what used to be called humanities computing is more science-y than humanist, more computer science and algorithmic experiments than performance and interpretation.

At a more general level, the digital humanities have started to cohere as a set of practices and methodologies for doing the work of interpreting and disseminating the humanities in the age of the internet.  Quite simply, the term ought to be seen as denoting a historical epoch as much as a specialty practice within the ambiguous and amorphous umbrella term, “humanities.” Digital humanists, then, are those scholars whose disciplinary training was completed after the integration of networked computing within higher education, or those whose technological savvy has kept pace with digital innovation writ large over the past 3 decades.  These scholars work within, as much as with, the indexing, searching, and publishing revolution made possible by the spread of the internet.  In other words, their work as researchers and proselytizers of cultural texts is marked by the internet’s ethos of sharing and building, by its inspirational message of open access to information for all.

A great deal of tension within the debates about digital humanities’ impact has can be attributed to a friction between the basic faith in individual authority and authorship cultivated by the academy on the one hand, and on the other hand the open, putatively more democratic ethos of open-access cultivated by the internet. The internet’s impact on research has been met with optimism, to say the least.  Without question the integration of networked computing within higher education has exponentially increased the effectiveness of scholars working with networked tools and expanded the reach of scholarly materials around the globe.  This particular technological revolution, and the fervor with which its capabilities are touted as emancipatory tools, however, is part of a larger historical change in the preservation and dissemination of cultural products.  New technologies have often been met with such hopeful aspirations.  Let us not forget that Mr. Gatling did earnestly believe his machine gun would end all wars.

I wonder if the push for open-access publication and open-source coding is not actually causally related to the dismantling of public support for the humanities.  If university level research and teaching can be spread remotely why do we need a brick and mortar campus at all?  If everyone’s voice/text/limited number of howsoever witty characters is to be collaboratively weighed and aggregated, where does that leave the professoriate?  Furthermore, how is the DH ethos of building for everyone and sharing with all compatible within a “marketplace of ideas”? To put it bluntly, if the milk is free, who buys the cow?  Could the ethos of open—read “free of charge”—dissemination of scholarship be fueling the retreat of publicly-funded education and actually be stifling academic freedom?