Introduction to Digital Humanities

March 14, 2012 4 Comments

Preamble

This talk was given to the University of Canterbury History Department, New Zealand, March 14th, 2012. The talk aimed to introduce both the Digital Humanities, and a proposed new programme in Digital Humanities to colleagues in the College of Arts, School of Humanities. The paper is divided into three parts:

  1. ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities, with apologies to Stanley Fish’.
  2. Everyday Digital Humanities.
  3. Pedagogy and Deployment Models.

 Introduction to Digital Humanities, with apologies to Stanley Fish

Towards the start of this year Stanley Fish sallied forth into the new terrain of Digital Humanities, in three blog posts in the New York Times.[1] His posts are a useful touchstone to begin with, not so much because they can be viewed as the coming of age of the Digital Humanities – their acceptance as a worthy subject in intellectual circles – but because they represent a disconnect between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ views of the practice. To humanists hitherto unaware that the digital humanities existed the posts may well have appeared as a shiny new contribution to knowledge penned by a self-styled ‘defender of the faith’, an up to the minute expose and timely overview of the latest set of barbarians to appear at our gates. Fish grabs the butterfly in mid-flight, throws a pin through its abdomen and proceeds to analyze it. The only problem is that the butterfly he caught and analyzed wasn’t one that I expected; although I enjoyed Fish’s attempt to heat up the debate, and felt he made some useful points, the ‘digital humanities’ he was commenting on was different to the one I know.

How is this possible? I think there are three issues at play. Firstly, the digital humanities is just the latest name for a broad and varied intellectual culture that has been developing since the 1960s, when it first became apparent to humanists that computers might be of use. One look at the contents page to Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities indicates the sheer variety of activity that falls under the general umbrella: literary studies, archaeology, history, art history, classics, lexicography, music, multimedia, linguistics, performing arts…the list goes on. Each of these disciplines has a relationship to the digital humanities that goes back several decades, resulting in a far richer discourse than you would expect from a shiny new movement. While it’s great that the development of the internet has made us more relevant, and a post-millennium boom has seen the number of centres and programmes blossom into over one hundred worldwide, the very success of the enterprise tends to privilege the new over the old. When people talk about the digital humanities they’re often only talking about the tip of an iceberg – the part that appears on blogs and Twitter streams and points towards manifestos of intent. And while these aspects are of undeniable importance, it’s unwise – as Fish did – to extrapolate from the part to the whole.

A second, related, issue is the conflation by Fish of the Digital Humanities with digital literary studies. This isn’t entirely Fish’s fault. The Digital Humanities, and Humanities Computing before that, have long found a welcome place in English departments, where the movement from analog ‘text-on-paper’ to digital ‘text-on-screen’ is of obvious interest. As is clearly demonstrated at our university, English departments are friends of the digital humanities. They incubate, they encourage, they provide institutional refuge and intellectual and theoretical fodder. But it would be a mistake to think that the digital humanities are a sub-discipline of English. Fish writes as if this was the case. He points his barbs at digital literary critics like Stephen Ramsay, who has produced a ground-breaking book arguing for ‘algorithmic criticism’, and Mathew Kirschenbaum whose reflection on ‘digital forensics’ takes criticism to important new places, and –apparently stopping his investigations there – effectively generalizes their arguments to all digital humanists…unwittingly including digital historians, digital classicists, digital art historians and digital philosophers in his identification of writers he views as the advance guard in a new mode of obscurantism and lack-logic. In his defence, I have to point out that some digital literary critics invite this kind of category error by practicing it, but it does speak to a certain thinness in Fish’s research.

The third problem (and this is again related), is Fish’s need to direct his reactionary crusade towards an identifiable enemy. In order to properly dampen the perceived threat of his inadequately defined digital humanities movement, Fish needs to bring it within the ambit of his known intellectual world of disciplines and departments, of academic tradition and campus politics. With the debate moved onto reassuringly familiar terrain through his conflation of DH with literary criticism, he is able to complete the movement towards intellectual hypostatization with such grand statements as:

These two visions of the digital humanities project — the perfection of traditional criticism and the inauguration of something entirely new — correspond to the two attitudes digital humanists typically strike: (1) we’re doing what you’ve always been doing, only we have tools that will enable you to do it better; let us in, and (2) we are the heralds and bearers of a new truth and it is the disruptive challenge of that new truth that accounts for your recoiling from us. It is the double claim always made by an insurgent movement. We are a beleaguered minority and we are also the saving remnant.[2]

I admit that Fish’s outing of the predictable discourse of the-digital-humanities-as-insurgent-movement is useful: liminal groups often tend towards hyperbole and cast themselves as victims in order to undermine the power of the dominant group, and it isn’t a good look. But, contrary to Fish’s assertion that it’s a central aspect of our discourse, in my experience DH culture tends to react against this kind of position. Or, I should say, the networked nature of the digital humanities community (based as it is on the distributed, social nature of the internet itself) reacts against it. This usually occurs by academic grandstanding being viewed, as Alan Liu might put it, as ‘uncool’[3], leading to it being ignored for a day or three until it is subsumed under the next stream of blog posts and Twitter updates. Nothing lasts long in cyberspace and digital humanities theory and method lives and dies in that space – the cycle of debate is blindingly fast by academic standards. There are some notable exceptions where a meme has developed what could be described as having ‘enduring’ characteristics, where authors have stumbled upon a certain underlying zeitgeist (Fish seems to have stumbled upon many of these using his apparently Google-heavy research techniques), but there are always dissenting voices. I’m one, for instance, who reacts quite heavily against the notion that print is in any way “impoverished” by comparison to digital media (a claim Fish suggests is characteristic of digital humanists as a whole); the notion is as absurd as that digital media is impoverished in some way to print. The fact is that they represent two different kinds of sources and need to be handled and interpreted according to their own requirements: what kind of source criticism are advocates of either of these positions teaching their students? That all books are trustworthy but anything digital isn’t? or perhaps that text written on papyrus and leather can be read uncritically, but when digitized those same texts become radically untrustworthy? Of course not: text criticism is a process rather than a simple if/else procedure. Researchers need a broad critical toolkit, and the ability to use the correct tool when confronted with particular artifacts. No format, be it analog or digital, should get a free pass when it comes to scholarly analysis. One important aspect of digital humanities pedagogy for me, then, is format agnosticism – the belief that the format of the source is less important than the scholarly tools we apply to gain an understanding of it. With digital sources we need to be comfortable enough and knowledgeable enough with the underlying technologies to understand the potential benefits and pitfalls of working with them: if twentieth century scholars saw only a rupture between analog and digital sources, twenty-first century scholars need to see a continuum.

And so back to Fish. I don’t want to come across as bagging him here, because his posts were of immeasurable use to the digital humanities community; it’s good to see us being taken seriously by a well-known thinker. It’s just that the weaknesses in his analysis present the perfect introduction to the digital humanities. He makes a variety of mistakes that a newcomer to the field can be excused for making, partly because Google privileges a shallow history oriented towards social media and blog posts that gain the greatest number of raw hits rather than being ones that our small community necessarily values, partly because people practicing digital humanities are prone to category errors themselves, and partly because the field is deceptively broad and complex. Apparently unbeknownst to Fish his posts, as it happens, were published at the same time as a rather robust debate on the role of Theory in the digital humanities (along with attendant anxieties about identity and purpose) was playing out across the community. He wrote in apparent ignorance of this, which is a shame because I’m sure he would have made good use of it: his analysis of the digital humanities proper, as opposed to the digital literary critics he happened upon in his Google searches, would be interesting indeed. I can only provide a rather droll synopsis (along with a couple of points added by me on a whim) of what was a quite significant debate here:

  • The field is developing too fast to allow for a stable definition to appear, and we’re not sure what value such a definition would serve anyway. The practice will eventually be defined by research outputs, syllabi and digital products, but those must surely precede definition.
  • Some of us want to keep the barriers to entry low for some time yet: who are we to define what is and what isn’t ‘DH’?
  • Few digital humanists are interested in politicising the practice.
  • Some digital humanists are interested in theorising the practice.
  • Some digital humanists resist theorising the practice, feeling that method and code are more important (or even that ‘DH arguments are encoded in code’ [4], rendering further theorising redundant).
  • There is a general consensus that, at base, digital humanities is simply about ‘building stuff’.
  • There is some debate on the matter, but many digital humanists would assert that the ability to code (or at least a willingness to learn) is of fundamental importance.
  • If there was a single slogan, it would be ‘Do It Yourself’ rather than getting someone else to do it for you.
  • If there was a single value it would be ‘Open Access and Open Source’, but only in a way that enhances rather than endangers current academic business models.
  • There is a genuine feeling in the digital humanities that we can help the tradition and are a part of it, not a radical new departure from it.
  • There is a difference between a humanist who dabbles with digital tools, and a Digital Humanist who wants to learn how the digital world works from the level of code to broader system architectures, in an effort to gain the level of understanding required to build high quality research tools and produce informed criticism of digital culture.
  • We aren’t entirely focused on the academic world. Many digital humanities programmes work closely with libraries and other cultural heritage organisations, and all are focused on engaging with the community through public and applied humanities.
  • Our goal of opening up scholarship to the wider world (bypassing gated academic services and delivering content on the open internet) is reflective of this. Many digital humanists work outside the academy, and they can’t read our work and engage in our community if we lock our articles into services like JSTOR.

It doesn’t go much further than this, though. Although by no means as deep or broad, the terrain follows basically the same undulations and cul-de-sacs as the Humanities as a whole: no single assumption holds, no generalization works. And this, I suspect, is the reason that digital humanists tend to resist definition – there just isn’t much point, and when it all boils down, we’d prefer to get on and build stuff. It might even be like trying to define the Humanities themselves…fine for a Wikipedia entry, but inevitably inadequate. And so to Wikipedia, for a decent-enough definition of what I do (and no, I’m not going to condescend to tell you the correct interpretative weight to place on a Wikipedia entry):

The digital humanities is an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Sometimes called humanities computing, the field has focused on the digitization and analysis of materials related to the traditional disciplines of the humanities. Digital Humanities currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from the traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining computational analysis) and digital publishing.[5]

As an introduction what I’ve presented thus far might seem rather opaque, but that’s intentional. Our field is one with no front door, no manual and no codex, and although every year seems to take us closer to having those things, there’s no passionate ground-swell suggesting that it must happen. If we melt back into the Tradition so be it; if we end up with highly structured departments, so be it. If there is a radical edge to the digital humanities it’s in this casual attitude towards the expectations of the traditional academic community: an assertion that we’re doing OK and are happy to muddle along, develop our community, and see where things go. And Fish is right – there is an element of the insurgent attitude in this, but it’s more postmodern cynicism than politicized modernist angst. Let’s face it: the twentieth century humanism that demanded structure and definition, and the likes of Fish are so comfortable with, may allow for rigorous debate, but it hasn’t left us in such a good state. The Internet, however, with its distributed and (at least for the moment) radically open structures of knowledge, seems to offer some hope:

In as much as digital humanities is an Internet-based social network, it should come as no surprise that digital humanities looks a lot like the Internet itself. Digital humanities takes more than tools from the Internet. It works like the Internet. It takes its values from the Internet.[6]

If there is radicalism afoot this is where it lies. In my more imaginative moments I wonder if this aspect of the digital humanities represents a return to a kind of ideal Greek marketplace of ideas, where the Academy is situated not in an ivory tower but at the center of public space – subject to its whims as well as its energy. But those moments always dissolve in the realization that for better or worse we’re being encouraged into the ivory towers, and this implies that any idealism will inevitably be blunted by exposure to the administrative and cultural constraints imposed by the university system. In the last few years it’s become clear, for instance, that the startup consensus many of us have enjoyed since around 2000 is coming to a close – evidenced most clearly by Matt Gold’s recent anthology titled ‘Debates in the Digital Humanities’. On the whole the discipline (if you want to call it that) is still formative enough to be able to proscribe the seamier kinds of academic in-fighting, but it is also too developed to allow for the kind of naïve consensus that Fish implies.

Everyday Practices

Given all this, and the need to have you leave this seminar with at least an inkling of what the digital humanities are all about, I’d like to offer a snapshot into everyday practices. It isn’t how we define ourselves as a group that’s important, after all, it’s what we do – whether we’re recognisable as humanists when you’re given a glimpse into our day, whether we’re doing stuff that interests you. So what follows is just that – a snapshot of activities I’ve found myself doing in the 7 months since I began work as New Zealand’s first Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, augmented by a couple of things I know I’ll be doing soon enough.

1.      Twitter

A lot of digital humanists are augmenting their use of Twitter with Google+, because it allows for longer posts and thus more in-depth conversations, but Twitter is still the primary means of communication across the digital humanities community. Our community is global and networked. If you want to get a handle on topics de jour you try to catch a minute to read your feed. If you have something to contribute you post yourself. If you want to contribute to the international digital humanities community – and contribution is key – get an account and get started.

2.       Read, and perhaps peer review, Digital Humanities Now

DH Now is the goto publication for information on the digital humanities. Its base content is sourced from scholarly work referenced in Twitter feeds and blogs, which is then curated by an editorial team and opened up to the community for open peer review. The editorial team currently sifts through 15,000 ‘submissions’ per quarter. Built by the Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in the US, it’s a significant attempt to modernise the academic peer review process for the digital age, and a classic example of the kind of problems digital humanists want to solve. The platform itself is available for anyone to use, and a Digital History version of it appeared a couple of weeks ago.

3.       Check out new work by a digital humanist

In this case, Tim Sherrat’s website ‘The Real Face of White Australia’, which uses facial detection scripts to present identity cards of Asian immigrants to Australia that were buried somewhere in the depths of the National Archives of Australia. The code is open source and available for reuse on Github, so anyone can use it to find out how it was done, and create similar websites. The project is part of a broader project Tim is working on with historian Kate Bagnall. We’re developing a strong trans-Tasman digital humanities community, through the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities. Tim attended last year’s National Digital Forum in Wellington, and will be at Sydney Shep’s inaugural Digital History Workshop at Vic at the end of the month.

4.       Design and manage a digital archive

Paul Millar and I are working on a project to archive digital content related to the Canterbury earthquakes, called UC CEISMIC. It needs to be characterised as an ‘advanced digital humanities’ project, in that it is too big for even a doctoral project. That being said, we don’t have the standards in place to assess it properly even if someone did present us with a similar idea for a doctorate (it would need to be accompanied by an analytical thesis), and it’s uncertain whether it will contribute in any tangible way to my or Paul’s PBRF portfolios for the same reason. I need to start producing some research outputs about the project this year to ensure this happens one way or another.

5.       Supervise an Honours thesis

Last year I helped Paul supervise Donelle McKinley’s excellent Honours thesis on crowd-sourcing techniques used at the New York Public Library.

6.       Supervise Summer of eResearch engineering students

I worked with Sydney Shep from Victoria over the summer, supervising two computer science students on a project to build a plugin for the Omeka digital archive system. The plugin allows anyone to easily harvest content from DigitalNZ and create their own online galleries, and is available from our university digital humanities site.

7.       Produce research articles, book proposals, blog posts, seminars and conference papers on digital humanities and New Zealand literary history

I have to admit that I got more of this kind of work done when I was working outside university, but as UC CEISMIC becomes operational I’m hoping to have time to devote to it.

8.       System Administration

One result of the digital humanities’ emphasis on DIY is that we find ourselves…doing a lot of things ourselves. This increases our workload, and mature centres tend to hire technical administrators to take over the work, but for now our understanding with ICTS is that since we have the skills and don’t like waiting in queues, they’ll manage the operating system layer and we’ll look after the application layer of our web servers. It’s cyclical work that doesn’t come around very often, but has to be done to ensure things keep running.

Pedagogy and Deployment Models

Some of you might be wondering where teaching comes into this, given it’s one of our primary reasons for existence. In normal circumstances you could assume my work on the UC CEISMIC archive would be swapped out for teaching, but we’re still in the process of developing the digital humanities programme, guiding it through the Committee on University Academic Programmes (CUAP) process. I’ll spare you the details of our proposed programme, beyond the two draft course outlines in the handout, which will look very much like any other postgraduate humanities programme (we haven’t got immediate plans for undergraduate offerings) and be circulated across the College, university and some international colleagues. Students will be taught theory and method, along with basic programming and project management skills, all in the context of traditional humanities topics in history, culture and literature. The aim is to produce graduates who have solid critical skills, are aware of the main currents in humanities as well as digital humanities scholarship, and are capable of using basic digital tools and methods in their research and writing. There’ll be options for practical courses as well, which will provide internship and work experience opportunities. That doesn’t explain much about how digital humanities is going to be developed at UC, though. It gives you a broad sketch of what kind of pedagogical flavor the programme will have, but not how it will fit into the structure of the School of Humanities and College of Arts and, as with defining digital humanities, this isn’t something I have a simple answer to (and is a point of debate across the digital humanities as a whole). I’m suggesting we take a careful approach that blends a couple of possibilities and keeps open opportunities to change things as required.

When asked where the digital humanities programme will fit at Canterbury, I generally point to two common ‘deployment models’ and explain that we’re taking a third, blended approach. The first model is a ‘distributed’ one:

Distributed Deployment Model

Academics from a broad range of disciplines, all with an interest in digital humanities who are active in the community, begin incorporating digital aspects into their teaching and research. Over time, their work reaches a level of sophistication that demands greater organisation, and a Centre evolves, providing a hub of activity and a repository for the collective expertise of the group. Such a centre might be interdisciplinary, or it might be located in one department, but it will be an adjunct to the main academic departmental structure. This was how I started in digital humanities when I was working in the History department some years back – just a young graduate tinkering with a few ideas, connecting with an overseas community and considering ways I could set a Centre up. The benefit of such an approach is that things develop organically, and expand only as expertise and understanding develop – there’s no risk of over-extension and digital humanities remain distributed across the School as a whole. The scholars associated with the Centre keep teaching in their core discipline, but (if the Centre is a success) find themselves spending more and more time working with other digital humanists. The downside of such an approach is that there is so much dispersal that it can be difficult to gain traction, and (significantly) because Centres are outside the main university funding channels they’re constantly under threat. In my case my contract expired and I left academia before I could achieve much more than building a couple of websites.

The alternative model, which we probably look like we’re following, is a ‘centralised’ one:

Centralised Deployment Model

With this approach, an effort is made to establish a Digital Humanities Department or Programme along traditional lines, seeding it with a permanent academic or academics who can drive development and truly give it their best shot. The risk is that students won’t be interested or external funding won’t be forthcoming, and you’ll be lumped with an under-utilised staff member, but it has the great benefit of making sense to the broader university and its administrators. It’s uncommon, but sensible. In fact, Digital Humanities at Kings College have recently transitioned from being a Centre to a Department for exactly this reason.

My preference, though, and the one I’m recommending for Canterbury, is a mixed model that draws on the common theme in the IT industry of ‘incubation’:

The idea is that we set digital humanities up at Canterbury within the Department of English, Cinema and Digital Humanities in an ostensibly centralised model, but only at postgraduate level. At undergraduate level we’ll encourage interested colleagues to build digital components into their courses, and help them out as best we can if they’d like advice. If people would rather do things on their own – learn to use digital tools and methods on their own – that’s cool (it’s how I did it, after all). After three years we’ll assess how things are going, and either set up a Centre (with significant external funding), branch out as an independent department, continue as we are alongside English and Cinema Studies or (an option that perhaps wouldn’t work so well for my career prospects) dissolve back into other departments and continue under a distributed model. Either way, the hope is that, after three years, the School of Humanities and the College of Arts will have had a significant increase in activity in things digital, it will be apparent whether we’re going to be an asset or liability for English and Cinema Studies, some pathways into digital humanities study at postgraduate level will have been created, and it will generally be clearer what we should do next.

2013
• Introduction to Digital Humanities
• The Digital Modern: Humanities and New Media
• Digital Literary Studies
• Digital Humanities Research Essay
• Applied Digital Humanities
• Digital Humanities Directed Reading and Writing
2014 – 2015
• Postgraduate Diploma, Masters and Doctoral courses.
2015 –
• Undergraduate?
__________________________________________________

References

[1] Stanley Fish. “Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation.” Opinionator, January 23, 2012. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/mind-your-ps-and-bs-the-digital-humanities-and-interpretation/.

———. “The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality.” Opinionator, January 01, 2012. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/.

———. “The Old Order Changeth.” Opinionator, December 26th, 2011. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/the-old-order-changeth/.

[2] Fish. “Mind Your P’s and B’s”.

[3] Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

[4] Tom Scheinfeldt, ‘DH Comments’, Twitter / @foundhistory. November 11, 2011. https://twitter.com/#!/foundhistory/status/134808062283354112.

[5] “Digital Humanities – Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia”, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities. Accessed February 25th, 2012.

[6] Tom Scheinfeldt. “Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by Its Values.” Found History, December 02, 2010. http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/12/02/stuff-digital-humanists-like/.

Filed under Digital Humanities

Theory, Systems and Vino

November 12, 2011 2 Comments

I’ve been watching the current Theory Debate via Digital Humanities Now this past week or so with interest but have only just found the time to write down my reaction to it. It’s a topic that has been dear to my heart for some time now. It touches on the question of where the digital humanities stand in relation to the core tradition, and what direction it’s going to take as a practice (I’m not sure I’m keen for it to become a ‘discipline’ in the traditional sense of the term). I’ve often said that if DH is to be taken seriously by the analog humanities it will need to begin to engage with some core humanities practices, develop some kind of theoretical framework(s), identify some core methodologies, and  generally produce some writing that has recognizable intellectual ‘grunt’. We’re developing a new community of practice within a 2000+ year tradition that includes some rather weighty names, after all. We should attain to the development of a sub-tradition that draws on everything at our disposal. And that implies ‘a whole bunch of stuff’. A few years ago, while I was working in London, I actually started a website called d-hist, that aimed to united digital history with the core methodological and theoretical traditions taught in post-graduate History classes. I wanted to write a series of essays along the lines of ‘The Historical Dialectic and Digital History’ – the idea was just to get in the kitchen and start throwing ideas together. Unfortunately I was working in IT rather than academe and it went nowhere. My point here is that I’m by no means against Theory, which is crucial to the long-term viability of digital humanities.

As one of my professors used to say, though, ‘Theory is like wine. It’s best enjoyed when it’s of high quality, and even then only in moderation’. The problem with humanistic theorizing, of course, is that it can have a stultifying effect. I love it, but it’s also a good part of the reason why the humanities are in such a dire position in today’s intellectual world. I won’t open that can of worms any further, except to note that my understanding is that ‘DH Culture’ (such as it is) has been resistant to theory partly for this reason. Many early DHers fled to the practice precisely to avoid overly-theorized colleagues arguing in ever-decreasing circles. We enjoyed being incubated from the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, and it’s possible to argue that if this hadn’t been a guiding assumption in those post-Netscape years we wouldn’t be in as good a position as we are today. The argument would go that DH is fresh, new, and untainted from the (I think necessary, if also painful and destructive) battles of the 1980s and 1990s. If we provide hope to embattled colleagues and can be described as a healthy and rare green shoot for the humanities now, it is at least in part because we’re free of the theoretical baggage that is sinking (or has sunk) other humanities disciplines. We need to tread carefully, and although we should encourage digital humanists to emphasize humanities content over computer science, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should subvert our vital connection with computer science by theorizing for the sake of theorizing.

To perhaps grossly over-simplify things, the current conversation seems to me to hinge around two poles that can be broadly characterized as ‘Theory versus Code’, on the one hand we have an understandable desire to make our practice more recognizably humanistic by wrapping it in the kind of critical analysis that is grist to our mill (which requires Theory as the bedstone), on the other we have a commitment to code because our facility with this is the thing that marks DH as a fundamental and exciting departure from the main tradition. Natalia Cecire has represented the former position very well over the past couple of weeks, and it is one that deserves respect. The other side of the equation is perhaps best represented by Tom Scheinfeldt’s comment that ‘DH arguments are encoded in code‘ and don’t need elaboration. As the paragraph above might suggest, I’ve got a lot of time for this position. DHers who believe we should focus on tools and code take a pragmatic stance that doesn’t proscribe Theory, but implies that ‘the code is the theory’, or at least ‘the code is all we need’. The implication is that the empowering feature of DH is that it puts the means of production into the hands of humanists by developing skill at a code level. Such a position implies that DH is primarily about making and hacking: I suspect there’s a deep-seated concern across the community that if we lose that focus in an attempt to theorize the domain we risk sliding back into the insufferable cultural, professional and intellectual situation that code allowed us to escape. I’m by no means suggesting that every person at the Code end of the spectrum thinks this is the case (there’s nothing in their writing that suggests hostility), but I certainly agree with those who feel the development of Theory is risky for DH. To state things baldly, it threatens a return to everything we stand against: partisan politics, ideological wars, normative rather than inclusive politics. The worst case scenario is that it acts as a Trojan horse, importing all that is wrong with the humanities into all that is good.

My ‘worst case scenario’ could also be described as ‘paranoid anti-theoretical nonsense’, of course. As I suggested at the start of this post, the application of high quality theory and method to the digital humanities is essential if we are to develop as an intellectual community and be taken seriously by our peers. The significant point here for me, is that the way to do this is to scale out our focus on tools and code towards a broader, dare I say it more holistic view, that encompasses governance and infrastructure alongside theory and method, content and philosophy. This is the position I put forward in my piece (currently still in preview) in Digital Humanities Quarterly. In that article I argue that if we’re going to create a robust theoretical and methodological apparatus for DH we’re going to need to look to some IT approaches like enterprise architecture, and adapt them to our purposes. While I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as having anything more than rudimentary coding skills, therefore, I have no doubt that code should remain at the center of our community and our practice: it is the lodestone to which  we’ll need to return to again and again to keep ourselves on track. This doesn’t imply we all need to become computer scientists, though. Patrick Murray-John’s suggestion that DHers should at least be able to intelligently discuss a data model, or (to clumsily paraphrase) understand why developers can’t turn lead into gold, strikes me as a sensible approach to take. We need to understand code enough to use it and hack at it for basic purposes. Some will go further and become experts in a particular language, thereby empowering the community as a whole with deep channels of knowledge, but we’re too open for this to become the sine qua non of acceptance. We need basic coding skills so we can do some things ourselves and can move beyond the veil of new media surfaces to understand how digital products function ‘behind the curtain’ – this much is essential for both practical and critical reasons. We also need to understand the technical and creative constraints code places on designers and developers, and be capable of contributing intelligently and usefully to a software development team, but beyond that I suspect anything goes. As an aside, and not that any DHers have suggested it yet, it’s important to remember that if the IT industry demanded coding proficiency for entrance to the profession developers would have to do their thing without the support of a plethora of project managers, business analysts, technical writers and testers (not to mention managers). These people don’t necessarily code, but they sure understand IT.

I think we need to go even further, though, and avoid the simplistic Code versus Theory bind I outlined (and perhaps erroneously identified, too) above. While code should remain our lodestone, Murray-John’s comment brought home to me that our value to the humanities is broader than this. It lies in the fact that we understand how software and web applications work at not only the code level but also at the systems and infrastructure level.  I don’t think we should leave the digital humanities to either a reliance on //code comments, or to purely humanistic traditions derived from literary or historical practice. We need something more radical and broad-ranging than that: we need theoretical and methodological frameworks (note the plural) that can describe the intellectual, cultural and (this is of vital importance) systemic nature of our craft. Humanistic theories and methods imported from literary and historical analysis will of course be central to this, but those approaches will not stop code breaking, or ensure that future humanistic infrastructures are well integrated and sustainable. Theory, then, will occupy a central position in the digital humanities, and we need more of it rather than less, but we also need to remind ourselves that unlike other disciplines we’re building systems: systems of code, systems of metadata……the list goes on. Unlike other humanities disciplines, our theory needs to be what I will clumsily term ‘systemically functional’: it needs to support not only our cultural and intellectual needs, but our technical needs. This is no small task, in fact I suspect it’s a ‘big hairy goal’ that will remain aspirational for a long time in lieu of anyone getting a grasp on what’s really required, but it strikes me that it’s a task worthy of our attention. Right now, it’s probably time for a glass of wine.

Filed under Digital Humanities, Infrastructure, Theory

The moral imperative of the digital humanities

August 27, 2011 Leave a comment

I’ve been taken by the final report of the Comité des Sages (‘the reflection group on bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online’) , The New Renaissance (January 2011). It articulates a moral imperative that has long been a driving force of the digital humanities but is infrequently surfaced, perhaps for good reason given the dangers of mixing intellectual and cultural movements with claims that they coincide with the morally correct.

2.3.2 Second, digitisation is more than a technical option, it is a moral obligation. In a time when more and more cultural goods are consumed online, when screens and digital devices are becoming ubiquitous, it is crucial to bring culture online (and, in fact, a large part of it is already there). If we don’t pursue this task, we run the risk of progressively eroding and losing what has been the foundation of European countries and civilization in the last centuries. It must be clearly understood that if access is the final objective, a tall order, it can only be achieved through preservation of the work.

The report has reminded me why I started working in the digital humanities: at some level, even when debates about Wikipedia were making their way across universities and it appeared that reactionary influences would drown the discipline (such as it was) in a sea of cynicism, it was clear that the movement of the humanities into an online environment had implications that couldn’t be ignored. For me, the imperative for involvement was connected to a desire to preserve an intellectual and cultural heritage I felt was threatened, not by the movement towards the digital but by a reaction in the scholarly community against it. A decade or so later the Comité des Sages is articulating the same concern, but with a much greater degree of maturity. They point out that the task facing our generation of scholars, librarians and cultural heritage organizations has moral implications that will impact future generations. If we get the balance wrong, for instance between the need to involve commercial interests and the need to offer cultural material freely, we risk not only a massive amount of funding but an opportunity to do an enormous amount of good. I’m not so naive as to posit a direct connection between this kind of governmental politico-speak and the objectives of your ‘average’ (whatever that is) digital humanist, but I am bold enough to suggest that whether we’re comfortable with it or not, a moral imperative provides a backdrop to much of our code.

Filed under Digital Humanities

Academic AMIs: Ready to Eat Digital Humanities Infrastructure

June 12, 2011 Leave a comment

A few comments (specifically from @jasonaboyd) about infrastructure at the recent Victoria THATCamp sparked an idea, and I’ve thrown together a site called Academic AMIs: Ready to Eat Digital Humanities Infrastructure. The idea is that, while Amazon Web Services might not be suitable for all (or even many) digital humanities projects, and the platform isn’t exactly user friendly to people uncomfortable with the command line, it does offer an extremely scalable cloud infrastructure and a nice way to package up web application stacks for distribution. Hopefully it will offer digital humanists an easy introduction to the Amazon platform, and perhaps an interesting exercise for DH classes. I hope it’s seen as a step in the right direction, even if it isn’t the final destination.

The first Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on the site is a LAMP server running the Open Journal System from the Public Knowledge Project. I’ll package up new ones when time permits, hopefully at the rate of about one a week. Please read the FAQs and About before jumping in. If the interest is there I’d be interested in contributions.

Filed under Digital Humanities, Infrastructure

The Story of Linux

April 9, 2011 Leave a comment

Filed under History

Digital Humanities: The Pacific Node

December 5, 2010 1 Comment

Tom Scheinfeldt’s recent blog entry ‘What Digital Humanists Like’ suggests the discipline is structured in a similar way to social networks, with the main conversation based on Twitter and an organizational structure best conceived as a series of horizontally (as opposed to vertically or hierarchically) organized nodes. My feeling is that the digital humanities also need to be conceptualized from the point of view of engineering and the history of technology, but that’s another issue. Perhaps it’s enough to note here that although a ‘nodal’ interpretation of the digital humanities presents a healthy view of the humanist imperatives we all hold, it does little to ‘out’ our entanglement with the tools and philosophies of modernity. To this end, to foreground the social at the expense of the engineered is a (perhaps wilful?) denial of an uncomfortable reality.

My point here isn’t to criticize Tom’s great post, though, but to build on it. Most readers will know that I’m rather weary when it comes to the digital humanities in New Zealand: after almost a decade of interest in the field, watching CHNM go from strength to strength and scores of centers crop up around the world I’ve seen frustratingly little progress in New Zealand universities (although there’s been a nice wee flurry of activity recently). I hope I don’t need to reiterate that this is not entirely a reflection on staff who have undergone years of restructuring and are justifiably focused on teaching and traditional research, in the face of administrations that seem extremely backward. The story is typical enough: selling a mantra of innovation but only resourcing it to the level of marketing material. Our government doesn’t help by foregrounding academic funding opportunities that aim to bring our science and technology sectors into the 21st century, at the same time as they leave humanists in the 20th.

But what of the optimistic view? Bethany Nowviskie’s recent visit to Wellington, which I unfortunately missed due to work commitments, reminded me that there is still time for growth. Aside from enjoying her tweets about Wellington (you got lucky with the weather, Bethany), it made me wonder whether the digital humanities haven’t developed in New Zealand universities because we haven’t got the terms of reference right. Maybe I’ve been trying to sell my colleagues, and by implication the universities generally, the wrong brand of Koolaid? For the past decade or so I’ve unthinkingly pressed for a very ‘northern hemisphere’ (I’m not sure that’s the right term to use, but it will suffice as shorthand) brand of digital humanities, as if the digital humanities are destined to be a normative intellectual movement with little variation across geographic locations. This may have been the case in the early days, but as Tom’s nodal network develops we should expect it to become less and less the case.

If so, there are some exciting opportunities for digital humanists based in New Zealand. My feeling is that these opportunities lie in part (the approach is only one part of a complex milieu, and has suffered from a degree of modish assimilation from writers of funding applications over the years) with the nurturing of intellectual and cultural approaches specific to Oceania and the Pacific Rim, and the ‘exportation’ of those ideas to other more established nodes in the network. It would undoubtedly be a welcome contribution. Just as the Pacific has offered the northern hemisphere an ‘alternative modernity’ since the eighteenth century, so it might offer an alternative node to the digital humanities community – and that node, properly conceived, may well present our friends in the north with some useful new perspectives. To borrow the words of Australian sociologist Peter Beilharz, and to return to my interest in the digital humanities as a tool of modernity, our Pacific node could even turn out to be the enabler of ‘[a]nother Civilization, Between Manhattan and the Rhine’. If this is the case, we might decide to build a digital ‘sea of islands’ (Epeli Hau’ofa) reflective of Pacific intellectuals’ penchant for heterogeneity and cultural pastiche – a series of digital beaches connected by high-speed internet connections. There’s an element of post-colonialism in this conception of a Pacific-centered digital humanities node, of course. As much as the international digital humanities community are gregariously interested in new ideas and encouraging of equal participation on all levels and by all groups, they cannot conceive of our local needs, because we haven’t articulated them yet. We need to formulate those needs and then engage with colleagues outside the Pacific to bring a new, digital, vision to reality.

References

P. Beilharz, “The Antipodes: Another Civilization, Between Manhattan and the Rhine?,” New Zealand Sociology 17, no. 2 (2002): 164-178.

Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, eds E. Waddell, V. Naidu and E. Hau’ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific in association with Beake House, 1993), 2-16.

Tom Scheinfeldt, “Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values,” Found History. Accessed December 5th, 2010. http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/12/02/stuff-digital-humanists-like/.

Filed under Digital Humanities, Pacific

The Social University Model

November 6, 2010 1 Comment

People keeping an eye on the digital humanities Twitterverse (or Digital Humanities Now) may have already come across this set of slides describing CUNY’s move to develop a social university. I’m reposting here to pick up those people – hopefully New Zealanders! – who missed it. It’s time to get with the program…

Filed under Digital Humanities, Education

JISC Podcast: The use of technology by arts and humanities researchers

October 14, 2010 Leave a comment

This podcast by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) offers an excellent overview of “how technology can support researchers working in the arts and humanities…”. It provides a useful supplementary resource to my last post.  It can be found in its original context here and on iTunes here. 

Filed under Digital Humanities, Education

An Open Letter to New Zealand Humanities Academics

September 25, 2010 1 Comment

‘Open Letters’ are often dramatic affairs, but this one has a more pragmatic purpose: to give New Zealand university staff working in the humanities a leg-up into the digital humanities, and point out where they should focus their attention. My activities over the past few years have hit the radar of some of my close colleagues, and latterly a slightly wider audience with the publication of this blog and www.humanitiesmachine.org.nz, but I’m constrained by only working in the digital humanities in my spare time, and outside a university setting. I’m grateful to Paul Millar at the University of Canterbury Humanities Computing Unit for both setting up the unit (it represents a significant advance) and adding me, and therefore my occasionally intemperate ideas, as a Research Associate, but we need to get more people onboard.

The New Zealand humanities are ‘backwards’ when it comes to the digital humanities (the quote comes from a leading New Zealand humanist), possibly by 10 years or more. As noted at Humanities Machine, we have been well served by the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre, the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and our libraries and museums, but university academics are almost completely absent. We – I hesitate to say ‘you’, although it is becoming more appropriate with each passing year outside the academy – are sitting on the sidelines as new ideas, methods, publishing opportunities and funding sources pass us by. This comes as no great surprise in the context of New Zealand intellectual history: my doctoral research made it apparent to me that we’re generally 10-15 years late integrating the latest ideas into our humanities culture. But this latest ‘fad’, ‘movement’, or whatever you choose to call it in your more illiberal moments, is different to those of the past, because it involves infrastructure. This isn’t something that we can wait for a future generation to pick up and run with. We can’t assume that the next generation will do as most other generations of NZ intellectuals have done, and simply pop into the library, grab that unread copy of theory or method purchased 15 years ago, and put it to use like the cool kids overseas have been doing for years. (I admit this unfairly tars an entire intellectual culture with the same brush, but I stand by it in general terms.) The problem with the digital humanities is that the way we’re going, the next generation will simply be locked out of advanced research in the humanities: they’ll need to spend time building infrastructure before they even start. The situation isn’t irrevocable, by any means, but if we don’t get started building a world-class digital infrastructure now, we’re going to miss the boat.

This isn’t the case in science and technology, where New Zealand functions at the top of the field. The Centre for Software Innovation at the University of Auckland has impressive capabilities, and BeSTGRID and KAREN, along with the HIT Lab and HPC at the University of Canterbury, are world-class assets. There are opportunities for us to leverage this existing infrastructure, but it is going to take a considerable amount of effort. Primarily, the problem relates to experience: because New Zealand humanists have done little-to-nothing for the past decade in the digital humanities we don’t know how to engage with these large projects. We don’t understand the scale we need to work at, are uncomfortable with the engineering language used, and are paranoid about forging links with the commercial world. (The paranoia is a two-way thing, admittedly.) We can’t even conceptualise the field adequately, so that when we do talk about developing the digital humanities it often sounds like rest-home discourse – as though we’re going to get out a text editor and slap up a website, or really engage with this Wikipedia-thing, or graciously accept that all the kids really seem to like the Google, the Facebook and the Twitter and are going to be flying around in Jetsons cars in years to come.  Equally galling is the idea that we’ll simply get the university library to buy exorbitant subscriptions to commercial digital offerings, that will not only be gated from the tax-payer and send money offshore, but offer little to researchers in New Zealand studies. I would remind you that that $20, 50 or 80K per year getting sucked from the library budget could be spent on a young colleague to lower your teaching and administrative load and pay back their student loan: this is about fixing a broken system as well as enabling new research capabilities. We need people who can intelligently lobby university administrators about potential new models for humanities publication and research.

So what do you need to do?

  1. Get your head around the infrastructure requirements and concentrate on getting these built, or perhaps engaging with a project like Bamboo that has started development already. Their recent project proposal is available here. The American Council of Learned Societies’ 2006 report on cyber infrastructure for the humanities is also useful.
  2. Request assistance from your university Computer Science and IT departments in terms of conceptualising requirements. Funding could well be available through FRST and perhaps the Digital Strategy for joint undertakings, so both sides of the university could potentially benefit. Remember that it’s quite valid to apply for funding to better understand your requirements; it doesn’t have to involve building anything. Open some conversations. The SUDAMIH project at Oxford University have completed this kind of exercise already.
  3. Focus on consciousness raising and workshops that get you and your colleagues keyed into the current state of the field. This isn’t about becoming experts in the digital humanities, it’s about understanding the issues.
  4. Focus on cross-university initiatives and assume that local projects are going to be less than cutting edge. We’ll always need local projects, just like we need local publishers and local community-based foundations, but cutting edge digital humanities projects are focussing on developing national and international research infrastructures. This is not the time to nurture the local kid who can build a website; it’s the time for professional scholars to get together and build a national digital humanities infrastructure.
    Personally, I am going to be limited in what I can do to help in years to come: I have my own humanities projects I want to pursue and have been outside the university environment for too long to be effective. It’s over three years now since I worked in a university, and I’m simply too out of touch with the intellectual, political and policy contexts to offer anything tangible. As an independent researcher I’ve found I’m also barred from applying for any meaningful research funds. I’ll keep doing bits and pieces when I can, no doubt, but this letter is a bit of a handover – if not to the current generation, then perhaps to that student  who’ll come along in 10 or 15 years time and want to dust off some old ideas and catch up with what the cool kids are doing.

Filed under Digital Humanities, Research

Humanities Machine – A New Zealand Digital Humanities Portal

September 12, 2010 Leave a comment

For those of you who follow my blog but aren’t on Twitter, a quick note that New Zealand now has a digital humanities portal. Humanities Machine is presented in partnership with the University of Canterbury’s Humanities Computing Unit, and has been put live slightly earlier than expected because of the recent earthquake. I view this very much as ‘Version 1.0′ and hope  it can be developed further, perhaps even being completely remodeled and extended as part of an antipodean One Week One Tool kind of program. Of course, when the time comes it may well be best to go back to the drawing board and develop requirements for a completely new and fully-featured VRE, sitting on BeSTGRID-like infrastructure (with a parallel publishing platform perhaps available elsewhere), but Humanities Machine provides us with a quick win and what I think is a much-needed overview of New Zealand’s digital assets. I hope you find it useful.

Humanities Machine

Filed under Digital Humanities

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.