Assistant Professor at The Royal School of Library and Information Science
This is the source
This paper asks the question: Do the humanities by necessity have a digital future? It argues that the answer to this question is both yes and no. The argument looks through the lens of DIY culture as an attempt to try and understand the future for the humanities in terms of both cultural material and processes. The argument is made first by examining the case of information sharing within DIY culture as an expression of current day cultural material. Secondly, it illustrated how traditional humanities scholarship, such as reading ancient documents, compares to it’s DIY equivalent within family history circles, and how both will continue to use digital and non-digital methods.
Henriette Roued-Cunliffe analyzes the future of the digital humanities from the lens of DIY culture.
Do the humanities by necessity have a digital future? This question is answered
by understanding the humanities as the study of human culture and cultural
material, both on and off the Internet. This paper will use
First the phrase and concept of DIY culture will be unpacked:
DIY culture is here defined as the social world of people engaged in DIY activities, which can be anything from building a shed or knitting a sweater to running a food co-op, with the prerequisite that the practitioner has no relevant formal education or training. DIY culture can, in many ways, be seen as simultaneously an online and an offline culture, with a complex relationship between digital and non-digital activity and interaction. Due to its rising relevance, particularly on the internet, it is important that the humanities include the study of DIY culture and its cultural products - digital, non-digital and everything in between.
The humanities are generally defined as the disciplines that examine human
culture, or in other words the products of the human mind, both tangible and
intangible, such as music, arts, crafts, rituals, literature and linguistics.
The humanities have a long history of attempting to understand these different
products of the past and the present. The methods with which these attempts have
been made often strongly depend on the formats of the material as well as on the
technology that is available to the scholars in question
This paper suggests that cultural material produced by DIY practicioners should be the subject of much future research in the humanities, and through examining both products and practices from DIY culture, we can understand the future of humanities scholarship as both digital and non-digital, online and offline.
DIY culture constitutes an important part of human culture today. Gelber (1999)
portrays productive leisure activities (Teachers, recreation directors, journalists, and other
voices of authority have felt free to encourage the autonomy and
creativity of hobbies because even if they sensed that hobbies could
critique regular work, they also recognized that hobbies’ triumph over
idleness was a victory for the values of a market economy.
In other words: Hobbies have been a way to confirm the verities of
work and the free market inside the home so long as remunerative
employment has remained elsewhere.
Gelber uses the existing term Our nostalgia for old-fashioned home and hearth has
transformed our food culture as well. Who hasn’t tried canning jam or
making their own pickles? Young women who, had they been of age in the
1990s, might have been boozing it up in the Meatpacking District [New
York neighbourhood] are now spending Saturday nights baking cupcakes and
photographing them for their food blogs. The kinds of kitchen work once
associated with Depression-era farmwives - making curds and whey,
preserving sauerkraut, grinding flour - are now thoroughly unremarkable
pastimes for young people flush with today’s DIY back-to-basics
spirit.
Both note that times of recession and economic crises give rise to more work-like
and productive leisure activities supported by a media focus on good-things-to-do when there was nothing to do
DIY culture is here defined as a social world surrounding DIY practitioners.
Unruh uses social worlds to refer to a social organisation that cannot be
defined by spatial, territorial, formal or membership boundaries
When examining DIY culture it is not the DIY activities as such that are the focus. How a sweater is knitted or how the shed is built is secondary here. In fact, the act of knitting a sweater or building a shed is not in itself a DIY activity as these tasks can also be accomplished by professionals with the relevant formal education or training. The focus lies instead on how information is gathered that enables people to build sheds, or the social setting in which someone is motivated and gathers knowledge that enables them to knit the sweater, when they have had no formal training to do so. Thus, it is the autodidact information behaviour, which is the foundation of DIY activities, that is of interest here.
DIY practitioners have no formal training or education in this particular
activity. To So
Solomon further argues that from the time they are born humans are constantly
being taught, or allowing themselves to be taught: Every time someone speaks, or points out a bird doing
something strange on the lawn, or reconfigures the computer slowly
enough for us to follow - if we want to, we are being taught.
Solomon’s understanding of autodidact learning is not one of solitude, but rather
one where we are seeking out learning and knowledge from other people. This is
closely related to research in Human Information Behaviour, especially that in
our everyday life: Information Behaviour is the totality of human behaviour
in relation to sources and channels of information, including both
active and passive information seeking, and information use. Thus, it
includes face-to-face communication with others, as well as the passive
reception of information as in, for example, watching TV advertisements,
without any intention to act on the information given.
Information behaviour
Nevertheless, I would argue that there is a general aspect in all DIY activities
that usually require a certain amount of autodidact information behaviour in
order to engage with the activity. This has been the case since the first
mentions of a DIY movement in the 1950s
DIY culture can in many ways be seen as simultaneously an online and an offline culture, with a complex relationship between digital and non-digital activity and interaction. In order to make this argument we will begin by looking at the relationship between time spent on and off the internet, for people of all age groups.
Sigman argues that time spent online displaces face-to-face contact, and he
explains how in turn this lack of face-to-face interaction has been shown to
relate to increased illness and premature mortality
This is furthermore an area where it is important to keep in mind the differences
between correlation and causality. If we make the assumption that there is a
correlation between a high degree of loneliness and a large amount of time spent
online, do people who spend much time online become lonely as a result of less
face-to-face contact or is it the case that people who are lonely spend more
time online, perhaps in order to achieve more social contact via a digital
media? Another suggestion is that there is a third factor involved which causes
a high degree of both loneliness and spending time online, for example bullying
or a general lack of closeness in one’s social network. It is not an easy
question to answer and findings seem to depend on the groups of people that are
studied. Staying with the example of loneliness, which can take different shapes
(e.g. social or emotional loneliness), the size of social networks can for
example have a larger impact on the social loneliness of young adults, while the
lack of closeness to other members of a social network can have a larger impact
on the social loneliness on older adults
Nevertheless, the internet does provide an opportunity to connect with like-minded people or those with similar interests across large physical as well as social distances.
In an attempt to teach the elderly to use computers with the prospect of enabling
connectivity, as shown above, it made sense to change the focus of the syllabus
towards teaching them to use the internet rather than the computer
itself
Each step led small groups of elderly individuals to a new level of motivation to use the internet. Despite their expectations at the beginning of the course, at no point were they taught anything particularly technical.
The tech industry, amongst others, despairs over the lack of understanding of
technology even though young people grow up surrounded by
technology, many of them don’t understand the basic concepts of how it
works – which will leave them unable to fully participate in
society
Technology is a product of the human mind, not the other way around. So perhaps the issue with young people's understanding of the internet is that they understand it differently from those who did not grow up with it. For the older generation a computer is still technology, it is apart from us. For the younger generation, on the other hand, it is perhaps not. For them the computer provides opportunities to connect - the internet an abstraction which they only experience when it is not available.
Another pertinent question is
Many people use the internet to express themselves creatively (a large part of
DIY culture), some use it to express other very human sentiments, with varying
degrees of sympathy. It is intriguing to see how connecting via the internet
increasingly opens up to connecting in the physical world. From blogger meetups
of the 00’s to finding on Ravelry
The internet has a great influence on DIY culture as much as DIY culture certainly has a great influence on the internet. As mentioned above, a large part of DIY culture is the use of autodidact information behaviour. It does not seem so much to be a question of whether the internet plays a large role in this information behaviour or, if not, in fact autodidact information behaviour lays the foundation for the internet, but rather if the internet would be as widespread as it is today (and continually growing), if we humans did not in the first place engage in autodidact information behaviour?
But what about the non-digital world - the offline, the physical world? Most DIY
activities are in some way very firmly grounded in the physical world. Knitting
a sweater is a very physical activity. As is building a shed and running a food
co-op. Running a food co-op is particularly physical and social in its very
nature. Therefore, while a large part of autodidact information behaviour in DIY
culture happens online, there is still a very large part of it that does
not.
An important part of DIY culture today is autodidact information behaviour, much
of which (but far from all) is conducted on the internet. One of the results of
this is an enormous amount of information, of both high and low quality,
flooding the internet. It is generally very difficult to preserve this
information
Understanding these cultural products is a great challenge for humanities
research and will continue to be so in the future. Therefore the answer to the
question,
Furthermore, while the internet itself relies on technology, I argue that we
should not understand the contents of the internet as technological products,
but rather the products of the human mind or as cultural products. Historian Roy
Rosenzweig made this same point in relation to Wikipedia, saying that it was the most important application of the principles of the
free and open-source software movement to the world of cultural, rather
than software, production
The implications of this An expert reads an ancient document by identifying
visual features, and then incrementally building up knowledge about the
document’s characters, combinations of characters, words, grammar,
phrases, and meaning, continually proposing hypotheses, and checking
those against other information, until s/he finds that this process is
exhausted
Along the way there are aspects of this process that are typically done by
non-digital means but which can alternatively be
The second part of the process is the building up of knowledge about the
characters, words and phrases in the document. Typically, this will happen today
by keeping digital and non-digital notes about the different interpretations and
decisions made along the way. Therefore, attempts were made at showing how a
digital
The final part of the process, as described here, is checking against other information. This traditionally required access to copies of published editions that could contain relevant parallels to the documents being studied. Potential parallels would be found by trawling through indices. This is a part of the process of reading ancient documents where digital technology and the internet has had a great influence. By digitally publishing interpreted editions online (using XML), and by making them accessible through search engines this task has become much lighter and has made the texts more easily accessible by scholars around the world. As the example shows, even a traditional digital humanities project that works with digital tools for the reading of handwritten texts continually oscillates between digital and non-digital tools, methods and material.
However, as this second example will show, the reading of handwritten texts is not a method used only by scholars in academia. Genealogy is probably the most well-known DIY activity in which the skill of reading old handwritten texts is quite essential. My own experience of working with family history and engaging with other genealogists has led to a few observations in relation to this skill:
For these skills particularly, genealogists and other amateur historians are
regularly used as volunteer transcribers in museums and archives. With digital
media and the internet, GLAM institutions (i.e. galleries, libraries, archives
and museums) are now able to structure these skills and use them more
efficiently to transcribe material in their collections; in other words, to use
these skills in crowdsourcing projects
This second example suggests that perhaps the skills involved are not what separates the DIY practitioner from the professional practitioner, neither is the need for social networking or collaboration. The motivations for reading handwritten documents are most likely the same, namely recognition and furthering their understanding of the subject at hand. Perhaps what really divides the waters is the information behaviour and whether this is taught or it is autodidact. The consequence of this difference is often that DIY practitioners are in a position to be more adaptable and innovative in their use of digital technology in a way that can be difficult within the organisational structures surrounding the humanities.
Nevertheless, one lesson that can be learned from both examples is that the very traditional humanities method of reading handwritten texts, whether or not it is done as a DIY activity, will involve digital tools in one way or another.
DIY culture is a social world of people engaging in DIY activities, which have in common that they are activities undertaken without any formal education or training. Information behaviour in DIY culture is autodidact and information sharing is informal and outside of organisational structures. Furthermore, it is rarely dependant on funding and thus has the potential to incorporate innovative solutions at a higher speed than we typically see in the humanities. This is why on the one hand it is important for the Digital Humanities to look towards DIY culture and learn from the methods and practises that occur here.
On the other hand, the information sought, created and shared within DIY culture, both on– and offline, is a product of the human mind and can, along with more traditional cultural products, be understood by humanities scholars. The Internet is currently exploding with this material, alongside more frivolous entertainment content. If we in the humanities want to understand our current culture, now and in the future, we need to study DIY culture, both off- and online to a much higher degree than is currently the case.
Therefore, the answer to the question whether the humanities by necessity have a digital future is two-fold. Yes, the humanities need to employ digital tools in order to understand culture and cultural products on the internet However, humanities does not have a solely digital future as culture and cultural products will continue to blossom offline and traditional humanities methods are needed in order to understand these too.