Hello digital comrades-
I’m Kellen Bolt, and I’m a first year PhD student in English. More specifically, I’m interested in 19th-century American lit & culture with particular emphases on immigration & diaspora and American Imperialism.
My interest/knowledge of the digital humanities (which is counter-intuitively singular?) is only nascent & emerging, and thus the introductory readings have profoundly impacted my understanding of it. While “digital humanities” is a buzzword du jour, I have only recently began to understand what it is and what its potential impact on the humanities (& beyond) will be.
The DH, as far as I can gather, is both a methodology and a movement that is responding to/evolving alongisde the shift from print to digital/electronic culture. DH, at home within this new virtual realm of circulation and production, offers or demands that we ask new questions, push back against older—perhaps, out-dated—modes of publication, and engage more directly with the public sphere. How does one put this into practice? Must we all be programmers to be DH? Such a reductive & restrictive definition makes me shudder. As a collaborative, interdisciplinary methodology, DH negates such essentialism. The ability to conceive of and complete a scholarly project in DH seems increasingly less tenable and is perhaps increasing less desirable. Indeed, the DH is a continuum that ranges methodological tools like data mining & statistics to online peer-review & wikis to the digital publication of journals, books, and archives.
Perhaps my greatest interest in the DH is its (theoretical) commitments to democracy & publication. Online access to texts, archives, scholarly journals, and other academic tools gives us the opportunity—though we shouldn’t take it for granted—to connect to the public sphere. Non-academics can access & use our work without having to maintain a costly professional membership or subscription. Through this commitment to democracy, the DH offers to revitalize the humanities both inside & outside the ivory tower. While I do not want to over-glorify or naively predict the scope or intellectual trajectory of DH, I do want to posit that DH occupies/will occupy a relatively unique position among the humanities, and we should use it to advance both the cause of our fields and the cause of open & democratic knowledge production.