A Historian Reads Digital_Humanities

Digital_Humanities by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lununfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp (MIT Press, 2012).

Second in a series 

What’s not to like with a preface that locates humanities to digital humanities as a “cultural-historical transformation” and argues that “the humanities have the potential to play a vastly expanded creative role in public life” (vii)?  That the authorship process and structure of the book could serve as a model just made me admire Digital_Humanities even more.

Every section invokes an“awareness of … historical background” as “crucial” to understanding what digital humanities does today (32).   The first chapter situates the humanities historically, rooted in the curriculum of the trivium and quadrivium and evolving until the industrial revolution when “humanities” split off from their more practical cousins, even as “text-based disciplines and studies” like history positioned themselves as “expression of Wissenschaft in the double sense of a ‘science’ and a discipline endowed with a distinctive toolkit for grappling with the cultural record.” (6)  

The authors, practitioners in book arts and new media, make constant reference to the historical, comparing, for example, the “digital” revolution to the development of print culture.   They note, that Digital humanities’ “distinctive contributions do not obliterate the insights of the past” and call for “comparative, historically information study” “rooted in historically situated understanding” (16).   Social production is analogized to the innovation of the railroad in the ninteenth-century and framed by the query “would Egypt’s triumphant  Tahrir Square have turned out like China’s Tiananmen square” without “cell phones, twitter, and Facebook?” (81).  Digital humanists “share traits with both poets and historians .. engaged with ‘worlds past’ and … world that are not yet” but “with fundamentally transform(ed) authorship practices" (81).

Although they avoid canonical projects, familiar digital history works, appear such as Valley of the Shadow.  However the authors also create an alternative genealogy that runs from McLuhan through John Berger to graphic novels and contemporary films, and offer musing about potential digital projects using Holocaust oral histories, in addition to providing a case study based on an Afghan refuge camp as a site of cultural memory.

A series of predictions ends the book. I found myself particularly well pleased by “humanities need to establish discipline-specific agendas for computational practice” (103), since I’ve been arguing for a need to think about digital history as much as digital humanities.   I found their notion of digital humanities as “making, connecting, interpreting, collaborating” particularly fruitful.  The prediction that  “the scales and registers of what counts or is value as human experience and, therefore, the objects of humanistic inquiry, will find themselves altered (105) is quite welcome to those who support #TransformDH.  To see the promises of social history wedded to digital history informed by an analyste or microhistorica approachl is extremely exciting, as is the idea of “investment in the online equivalents of the Carnegie libraries, settlement houses, and other great philanthropic undertakings that prompt the enfranchisement of all sectors of society” (112). As a historian issues of assessment of digital historical projects tied to the public advocacy of the humanities seems quite pressing as I have written about the extremely negative assessments of some of the earliest “new” social histories of the 1970s.  However, the idea of the conservation of historical materials framed as “erasure and forgetting” as opposed to “preservation and remembering” a little more difficult for a historian.  Historical memory has always relied on a complex interaction forgetting and memory, but it is clear that the context and scope/scale of this forgetting and memory has shifted due to the sheer volume of knowledge produced.

I found several overlaps with my own fields of inquiry.  In particular, I heard considerable resonances with Katie King’s Networked Reenactments.  The argument that “the digital … offers expanded possibility for exploring multiple approaches to what constitutes knowledge and hat methods qualify as valid for it production” reminds me of  King’s, especially their idea of Knowledge Models (30).  Threaded throughout the work are brief boxed statements almost like the bolding for the TL:DR crown in blogging that highlight themes central to King’s work. 

Because I teach at a SLAC, I also found the pedagogical implications fascinating. In order to prepare future digital humanities for these new economies and exigencies of knowledge production, education must create hedgefoxes, students who combines the inquisitiveness of foxes with the focused tenacity of hedgehogs.

Ultimately this book serves as an excellent introduction to the methodologies of digital humanities and I’m planning to recommend it to everyone, historians and other humanists, alike.  I particularly liked the Q and A sections at the back that define everything from digital humanities (even tho I don't agree with all of the definitions) to project.