Patrik Svensson the director of HUMlab at Umeå University and a docent in the
humanities and information technology. His research concerns digital humanities
as a field, learning and information technology, cyberinfrastructure for the
humanities and new media studies. His current work includes an article on
screens as humanistic infrastructure (with Erica Robles), implementing a new
HUMlab-X on the Umeå Arts Campus, and organizing an upcoming conference on
Media Places.
This is the source
The digital humanities is increasingly becoming a buzzword
, and there is more
and more talk about a broadly conceived, inclusive digital humanities. The field is
expanding and at the same time being negotiated, and this article explores the idea
of a broadly conceived landscape of digital humanities in some depth. It is argued
that awareness across this landscape is important to the future of the field. The
study starts out from typologies of digital humanities, a flythrough
of the
landscape, and a discussion of what being a digital humanist entails. The second part
is an exploration of four concrete encounters: ACTLab at University of Texas at
Austin, the Humanities Arts Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), the
Humanities Computing Program at the University of Alberta, and Internet Studies. In
the third part of the article, it is suggested that a model based on paradigmatic
modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology can help chart
and understand the digital humanities. The modes of engagement analyzed are
technology as a tool, study object, expressive medium, exploratory laboratory and
activist venue.
Where do the digital humanities start and end? This article explores a dynamic and multi-faceted field.
Over the last five years, there has been a surge of activity in the multifarious
emerging field often referred to as digital humanities.
Of course,
humanities-based engagement with information technology is not new, but we are now
seeing a rich multi-level interaction with the digital
that is partly a result
of the persuasiveness of digital technology and the sheer number of disciplines,
perspectives and approaches involved. Humanists are exploring differing modes of
engagement, institutional models, technologies and discursive strategies. There is
also a strategy-level push for the digital humanities which, among other things,
affects university research strategies, external funding and recruitment.
This is the second article in a four-part series exploring the intersection of the humanities and the digital. In the first article, I examined the discursive transition from humanities computing to digital humanities, looking at how this naming is related to shifts in institutional, disciplinary, and social organization. I also addressed the epistemic culture and commitments of humanities computing, and tensions between this tradition and a broad notion of digital humanities.
In the current article, I start out from a broad notion of the digital humanities
that is sometimes suggested but rarely analyzed in more detail. The landscape of
digital humanities is explored more broadly through a fly-through
critical
overview of the landscape and an exploration of four concrete encounters. I argue
that a better understanding of the landscape of the digital humanities is vital to
the continued growth and consolidation of the field, and necessary to meet a range of
exciting upcoming challenges. Importantly, acknowledging internal variation and
tensions are critical to this enterprise, and it seems likely that the way forward is
neither a singular vision of a unified, homogenous digital humanities nor extensive
fragmentation and lack of shared awareness and common visions. It is suggested that
one way of understanding and acknowledging the different traditions and epistemic
commitments of the digital humanities is to consider different modes of engagement
between the humanities and information technology. The third part of the article
consequently offers an in-depth analysis of some paradigmatic modes of engagement
between the humanities and information technology. I feel this approach will give a
better sense of the breadth and depth of the field, different implementations, and
points of connections and divergence. Further, I argue that a better understanding of
the landscape of the digital humanities is vital to the continued growth and
consolidation of the field, and necessary to meet a range of exciting upcoming
challenges.
The third article discusses cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and digital humanities more broadly, and presents a case study from HUMlab at Umeå University in Sweden. In the fourth and final article, I explore the multiple ways in which the digital humanities have been envisioned and how the digital humanities can often become a laboratory and means for thinking about the state and future of the humanities at large. I conclude by presenting a tentative visionary space for the future of the digital humanities.
The article series as a whole traces the digital humanities as a project in terms of history, epistemic commitments, modes of engagement with the digital, conceptual foundations for associated cyberinfrastructure, visions and hope invested, as well as future directions for the field, and necessarily, for the humanities at large.
This article is divided into three main parts that present different perspectives or lenses on the landscape of the digital humanities.
The first part provides a territorial fly-through (critical overview) of the
landscape of the digital humanities that discusses ways of reading
the
territory as well as specific parts of the terrain. The picture given is broad, but
also fairly particular in relation to specific initiatives and associated discourses.
Typologies of the digital humanities are discussed, as well as what it might entail
to be a digital humanist.
The second part of the paper presents four personal encounters with digital humanities initiatives that occurred between 2001 and 2009. These offer different perspectives on the digital humanities: ACTLab at University of Texas at Austin, the Humanities Arts Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), the Humanities Computing Program at the University of Alberta and Internet Studies through an exchange with Charles Ess.
The third part discusses paradigmatic modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology: information technology as a tool, an object of study, an exploratory laboratory, an expressive medium and an activist venue. The first three modes of engagement are given most attention. This analytical model provides one possible way of charting the territory of the digital humanities.
Necessarily, any attempt at charting a large and indeterminate field such as digital
humanities cannot be all-inclusive. The focus in the following exposition is large
structures as well as particular examples, but the reader will find neither detailed
accounts of specific fields such as computer mediated communication or history and
computing, nor of associated fields such as technoscience (cf.
Together, the fly-through, the encounters and the analytical framework will help
garner a better understanding of the field of digital humanities. The mapping
activity itself is as important as the resultant patchy map, however, and it is
argued that the challenges and possibilities ahead call for a shared awareness and
rich collaborations across the landscape of the digital humanities.
In the following it will be assumed that the digital humanities comprise a field in a loose sense. This is not to suggest a well-defined and delimited academic field outside of the traditional humanities disciplines, but rather an inclusive notion that will allow us to talk about different kinds of initiatives and activities in the intersection between the humanities and information technology or the digital. It is claimed that this conversation can be quite important to further and consolidate digitally inflected work in the humanities. This does not mean, however, that the ultimate goal necessarily is an all-inclusive digital humanities.
Any attempt at mapping a field such as the digital humanities will naturally be a particular reading and interpretation of that field. We will start by surveying a few suggested typologies for the digital humanities.
In a 2008 talk
Along somewhat similar lines, Humanities 2.0 is distinguished from monumental,
first-generation, data-based projects not just by its interactivity but also
by openness about participation grounded in a different set of theoretical
premises, which decenter knowledge and authority
In a time of paradigm shifts, moral and political
treachery, historical amnesia, and psychic and spiritual turmoil, humanistic
issues are central — if only funding agencies, media interests, and we
humanists ourselves will recognize the momentousness of this era for our
discipline and take seriously the need for our intellectual
centrality.
Both McPherson and Davidson point to a transition from humanities computing or computing humanities to multimodal humanities or humanities 2.0 (cf. also the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 and the distinction between a first and second wave of digital humanities work). The endpoint can be interpreted as a current and forward-looking variety of the digital humanities. There is a clear assumption of change and trajectory here, and a risk that different epistemic traditions and goals are conflated in this trajectory. In practice, it would seem that humanities computing (even if called digital humanities) will not — at least not fully or anytime soon — become the multimodal humanities or humanities 2.0 envisioned in these articles. However, as both writers show, the intersection between these traditions is a productive and important one. Importantly, while there is a great deal of ongoing collaboration and identification of common goals, we need to be aware of the fact that we are concerned with several epistemic traditions and visions. It could be argued that there is a need for an expanded, multi-layered discussion of visions, collaborative possibilities, and possibly but not necessarily, an articulated convergent path forward.
Another mode of analysis is provided by Hayles (The kinds of articulation that emerge have strong
implications for the future: will the Digital Humanities become a separate
field whose interests are increasingly remote from the Traditional
Humanities, or will it on the contrary become so deeply entwined with
questions of hermeneutic interpretation that no self-respecting Traditional
scholar could remain ignorant of its results? If the Digital Humanities were
to spin off into an entirely separate field, the future trajectory of the
Traditional Humanities would be affected as well. Obviously, this is a
political as well as an intellectual issue. In the case of radical
divergence (which I think would be a tragic mistake), one might expect turf
battles, competition for funding, changing disciplinary boundaries, and
shifting academic prestige.
Interestingly, Hayles brings up questions of the disciplinary status of digital
humanities that have generated much discussion and debate over the years (cf. But let me offer a different criterion for success:
simply to be accepted as one of the community, to sit at the table among
equals and talk, then to go back home to a department of the digital
humanities, with its students, programmes, seminars and so on, and get on
with educating and being educated.
occasional turf battles, competition for funding, changing
disciplinary boundaries and shifting academic prestige.
Arguably,
disunification can bring stability to a disciplinary area such as digital
humanities (cf. intellectual vibrancy
The complexity of digital humanities as a field
comes partly from its
disciplinary and institutional diversity, and its multiple modes of engagement
with information technology. Looking at a restricted field, presumably part of the
digital humanities, Bell notes that the
field
of cyberculture (or whatever) studies is diverse and heterodox,
too undisciplined to be called a discipline
It is true that digital humanities
probably defies any precise definition
and that it can hardly be called a discipline. The question is whether it even
constitutes a field. This is the position taken in the Digital Humanities
Manifesto 2.0 (2009): Digital Humanities is not a unified field but
And even if the assumption of a field is made, the emerging nature of this field will often be emphasized as in this definition from the website of the journal
Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods.
The
There may be several reasons for trying to promote digital humanities as a field. In the case of humanities computing, there was already the sense of an established field with journals, conferences and people primarily engaged in the field. This is not to say that everyone engaged in humanities computing (or humanities computing as digital humanities) would describe it as a field, but there is a fairly general consensus and a strong tradition. The following quote, from the introduction of the
fieldscan coexist.
The digital humanities, then, and their interdisciplinary core found in the field of humanities computing, have a long and dynamic history best illustrated by examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with computation.
Under this reading, humanities computing provides the core whereas digital
humanities presumably also includes the disciplines. As I have shown earlier
An alternative focus on technology or the digital as study object, however, may
lead to a weaker sense of the field of digital humanities — exactly because of the
tight relation between the traditional discipline and the digitally inflected
study object. The study object would probably also tend to be aligned with the
epistemic commitments of an established discipline (or several disciplines) even
in the context of a multidisciplinary complex. As a result, the discipline may
change to incorporate such objects, but this is rarely a simple or
straight-forward process, and one interesting question is whether the digital
calls for other modes of investigation, collaboration and making that may be
partially incompatible with the epistemic commitments of the established
discipline or field: It follows that the consequences and implications of
digital media for research into cultural studies themes, problematic, and
questions cannot be explored simply by using the recognized, legitimate,
preconstituted, disciplinary forms of knowledge: literary studies,
philosophy, sociology, history, psychoanalysis, and so on. Digital media
change the very nature of such disciplines, rending them “unrecognizable” as
Derrida says of psychoanalysis.
On a more mundane scale, there is definitely a tension between the traditional disciplines and some of the scholars and initiatives engaged with the digital as a study object. This sentiment, which may lead to the establishment of discipline-external centers or even new disciplines, is also significant. So while technology as a study object will often foster a much tighter relationship to the disciplines (closer to the heart of the disciplines) than technology as a tool, there might also be distancing. However, this distancing is often not institutionalized, which is an important factor in maintaining a fairly strong link to the disciplines. Humanities computing, on the other hand, is almost always institutionalized to some extent. For initiatives focused on the digital as a study object, discipline-external sentiment can be seen as channeled through organizations such as the Association of Internet Researchers, which gathers researchers from a number of disciplines.
In some cases, however, new fields or areas of research are institutionalized in relation to specific themes or study objects. An example would be games studies and internet studies, which have partly been institutionalized in some university contexts (e.g. at the Center for Games Research at the IT University in Copenhagen, the Singapore Internet Research Centre at Nanyang Technological University and the Oxford Internet Institute). Typically these do not strongly align themselves discursively with the digital humanities.
Part of the problem with an inclusive and broad notion of digital humanities may
be that the relatively high level of abstraction makes it difficult to come to
grips with the field on a more basic and practical level. From a strategic level,
however, this may not be a problem, but rather an asset as it makes it possible to
frame a large scope, substantial impact and broad engagement. This engagement
often relates to the development of the humanities at large, a discussion of the
traditional humanities disciplines, and sometimes a call to action. The below
quote is from a HASTAC Forum discussion on the digital humanities where Brett
Bobley, head of the NEH (National Endowment of the Humanities) Office of Digital
Humanities, was one of the interlocutors. I don't know how Brett Bobley or others might answer this
but I don't actually find disciplines tragic . . . just in need of major
refurbishing and a good dose of introspection about what it is they do, how
willing they are to be irrelevant to a larger world, how they fight their
declining (in the humanities) numbers, and how urgently they reconsider
their shape and importance in the light of the new, global forms of
knowledge being produced everywhere around them, and changing the timelines
and the geography of knowledge production. It is such an exciting time and I
wish more in the humanities grasped the implications of what this new time
means for the shape of our many fields and inter-fields.
There is a fair degree of sympathy and understanding for the traditional (but seemingly declining) humanities in this statement, as well as a call for change. The digital humanities, thus, becomes a site for change and action.
The diverse and multiple-mode territory of the digital humanities can be further
exemplified by two descriptions of digital humanities in an educational context.
The first text is a description of a planned, but not realized, interdisciplinary
major in the Digital Humanities at Stanford University: The increasing importance assumed by digital technologies
in contemporary culture has given rise to new forms of scholarly inquiry,
new ways to assess and to organize humanistic knowledge, and new forms of
cultural communication. The very questions that the humanities disciplines
ask have changed. How have reading and writing changed in the digital era?
What new forms of cultural expression emerge with the advent of the digital
age and how do they build upon or break with the old? How should we assess
the ethical and political implications of digital technologies? What kinds
of tools do we have or do we need to develop in order to make sense of
and/or to take advantage of these new technologies?
Here the emergent nature of digital humanities is emphasized, as well as a strong
link to the humanities disciplines and a partial reconfiguration of the
humanities. The major mode of engagement is technology as a study object, even if
there is also an interest in the instrumental use of digital technology, and to
some extent, information technology as a medium. In contrast, the following
description from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) website at
King’s College provides a much more static description of digital humanities. The
main mode of engagement is clearly technology as a tool. The digital humanities comprise the study of what happens
at the intersection of computing tools with cultural artefacts of all kinds.
This study begins where basic familiarity with standard software ends. It
probes how these common tools may be used to make new knowledge from our
cultural inheritance and from the contemporary world. It equips students to
analyze problems in terms of digital methods, choose those best for the job
at hand, apply them creatively and assess the results. It teaches students
to use computing as an instrument to investigate how we know what we know,
hence to strengthen and extend our knowledge of the world past and
present.
We need to be careful not to draw too far-reaching conclusions from such limited
and contextually situated material, but there can be no doubt that these two
descriptions suggest rather different types of digital humanities and epistemic
cultures. Unsurprisingly, there are several points of connection. One such
connection is offered by the mention of tools and creating tools at the end of the
first text, which relates to the predominant focus on tools and methods in the
second text. Interestingly, despite the general CCH focus on tools, the short text
does not say anything about creating new tools. There's another reason I stick to the simplest of
tools. It's not just that these beginners would be stumped by Perl or
Python, say, it's that their attention would be diverted from the
intersection of the literary problem with computing to tool-making
itself.
Many digital humanities centers are housed in close proximity to university
libraries,digital cultural heritage,
which
deals with digital management of and access to cultural heritage more broadly. In
Europe, for instance, there is EU-funded research on cultural heritage, digital
libraries and digital preservation (DigiCult).
Libraries are an important part of the infrastructure of the humanities, and in a
sense, a kind of humanities laboratory
The performed epistemic scope of library and information science in the context of
the digital humanities is prevalent and not always entirely transparent. One
recent example is a survey on digital humanities centers in the U.S. A digital humanities center is an entity where new media
and technologies are used for humanities-based research, teaching, and
intellectual engagement and experimentation. The goals of the center are to
further humanities scholarship, create new forms of knowledge, and explore
technology’s impact on humanities-based disciplines.
This is a fairly inclusive definition even though the outset could be said to be
representative of an instrumental mode of engagement (most clearly indicated by
are used
). While the three goals presented here
are broad and open-ended, it could be argued that they construe technology as
being outside the disciplines rather than as an integrated part (which would be
congruent with mainly seeing information technology as a tool).
Following the above definition, the report provides a list of activities, some or
all of which a digital humanities center undertakes in the analysis presented in
the survey (abbreviated):
Although not necessarily evident in the more general definition quoted above, this
list of criteria makes it rather clear that there is a particular perspective or
orientation underlying the definition. This information and library science
perspective is perhaps not surprising given the origin of the survey (prepared for
CLIR), but it does create a discrepancy between the more general definition and
the particular activities listed. A similar narrowing down of epistemic scope (in
that case from a broad sense of digital humanities to traditional humanities
computing) was noticed in an analysis of the call for papers for the Digital
Humanities 2010 conference
The link between digital humanities and libraries is robust, but not static, and the expansion of the digital humanities and changing roles for libraries may lead to a new set of dynamics and a renewed sense of library as laboratory as well as a physical and digital repository. The idea of the library as a space for collaborative scholarship is strengthened through the introduction of more study spaces for (primarily) students, project spaces for digital humanities and technical infrastructure such as large, interactive screens. Perhaps libraries have always been the analogue to laboratories, in that they are sites for knowledge production, a repository or archive, and a place of exchange. In this sense, the contemporary moment re-sensitizes the traditional function of the library in order to extend its dynamic qualities, rather than those that may be strictly archival.
The type of library and library science definition of digital humanities centers
described above would probably not include research areas such as critical
cyberculture studies, which predominantly focus on digital culture and the
cultural construction of information technology as a study object: Critical cyberculture studies is, in its most basic form, a
critical approach to new media and the contexts that shape and inform them.
Its focus is not merely the Internet and the Web, but rather, all forms of
networked media and culture that surround us today, not to mention those
that will surround us tomorrow. Like cultural studies, critical cyberculture
studies strives to locate its object of study within various overlapping
contexts, including capitalism, consumerism and commodification, cultural
difference, and the militarization of everyday life.
The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies is an online resource associated with this area, and one of the services provided is an extensive set of book reviews. These reviews are frequently carried out by several reviewers and are often accompanied by author responses. This is a very valuable resource, and it also gives an indication of the breadth and extent of more cultural study based approaches to the digital and information technology. As of November 24, 2008, there were 390 reviews available of the same number of books. Interestingly, this resource does not seem to include any books that explicitly deal with humanities computing or humanities computing as digital humanities. For instance, the 2004 volume
Neither critical cyberculture studies, nor internet studies, nor initiatives such
as new media studies and critical digital studies, which all come from cultural
studies or art theory backgrounds, typically make frequent use of the term
fields
are currently being negotiated and explored. In any case, the contrast between the
King’s College description of the field of digital humanities cited above and the
description below of critical digital studies is quite significant. From the spectacular emergence of new media innovations
such as blogging, podcasting, flashmobs, mashups, and RSS feeds to
video-sharing websites (MySpace, YouTube), Wikipedia, and massively
multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), the how and what we know of
contemporary society, culture and politics is continuously being creatively
transformed by strikingly original developments in technologies of digital
communication. To the challenge of understanding the implications of
technological innovations, Critical Digital Studies responds by developing a
new method of critical digital studies: its scope — full-spectrum knowledge
of the digital future; its method — media archaeology; its practice —
crossing boundaries; and its goal — bending the digital future in the
direction of creative uncertainty.
Here we are concerned with a rather future driven, positivistic and arguably
techno-romantic presentation (starting from the spectacular
emergence of new media innovations
) that lists a number of contemporary
media representations, as well as suggesting an ongoing creative transformation of
society, culture and politics as a result of strikingly
original developments in technologies of digital communication
— a
movement described by the
The field itself is singularly defined in
terms of scope, method and goal. The goal is described as bending the digital future in the direction of creative uncertainty.
In another passage of the same chapter, this is elaborated as privileging the intermediations, inflections, and
paradoxes that are so deeply characteristic of the digital flow
academic
activism.
An example of digitally inflected academic activism is Sharon Daniel’s work on women in prison, and on the prison system as a public secret, as exemplified her piece
Three years ago, on visiting day, I walked through a metal detector and into the Central California Womens' Facility. It changed my life. The stories I heard inside challenged my most basic perceptions — of our system of justice, of freedom and of responsibility. Walk with me across this boundary between inside and outside, bare-life and human-life, and listen to Public Secrets.
Juhasz argues that she sees a turn towards art and activism in traditional
scholarship, and that the digital part is perhaps what was needed to push more scholars to engage
with the personal and political implications of their practices
turn
could be disputed, it would seem that there is a
connection between the digital, associated expressive means, and academic
activism.
An important, but difficult, issue is whether art, activist-based initiatives, or academic activism at all should be considered to be part of the digital humanities. The answer has to do with how we relate to divisions between the humanities and art, the humanities and science, thinking and making, and the university and the outside world. These categories are not binary, and it does seem that the digital can sometimes help challenge these oppositions. Also, it would seem that the contemporariness of much of interpretative digital humanities work, coupled with an interdisciplinary sentiment and digital means of production and intervention, support an interest in academic activism.
We will return to a more in-depth discussion of the various modes of engagement identified here, including technology as an activist venue, later in this article. But let us first consider the inhabitants and landscape of the digital humanities.
As we have seen, digital humanities hardly make up an uncontested or well-defined landscape. So far the picture has been painted using rather broad and structural brush strokes. Another way of approaching this issue is to start from the individual or particular — from the individual person engaged in what may be called digital humanities.
It would seem tenable to state that minimally, digital humanities is manifested by
a single scholar, teacher, artist, programmer, engineer or student doing some kind
of work — thinking, reflecting, writing, creating — at the intersection of the
humanities and information technology — or by products
resulting from such
activities. Every combination of the humanities and technology does not qualify as
digital humanities, of course. For instance, while word processors may be
interesting as a study object from a humanities perspective — e.g. looking at
their conceptual history, the textually of revision functionality, or the
prescriptiveness of built-in dictionaries — a humanities scholar using a word
processor to write an article would not necessarily qualify as a digital
humanist.
As a matter of fact, it is not entirely clear that even individuals deeply
engrossed in the digital humanities would necessarily identify with the
denominations digital humanist
or digital humanities.
Partly because
of the diversity and history of the field, disassociation may be rather vigorous: How different is it [speculative computing] from digital
humanities? As different as night from day, text from work, and the force of
controlling reason from pleasures of delightenment.
The individual term digital
part of the scholarly identity (if you are scholar)
or giving too much prominence to the humanities part of your professional identity
(if you are a digital humanities programmer or a system architect). The more
general and non-personal term the digital
needs to be specified at all, and it is not uncommondigital
is not required.
But clearly these terms are gaining ground, and while the introduction of the term
Recently I’ve claimeddigital humanist,though that term is arcane and hard to define. I define it assomeone with a humanities degree who’s interested in computers.
It would seem that the individualized forms
These changing patterns can be exemplified by means of some crude search data from
Google and the development between two data points approximately one and a half
years apart. Needless to say, these data should be treated with caution in terms
of methodology and accuracy, and the absolute figures have little significance.
What is interesting is the indication given by the relative change in frequency.
On March 10, 2008, the query digital humanist
resulted in 420 hits on
Google. There were about the same number of hits for the plural form digital
humanists
(456 hits), and there were (about) 99,800 instances of digital
humanities.
The same queries executed on October 6, 2009, show that
digital humanist
is about eight times more common (3460), digital
humanists
40 times more common (18,600), while the number of instances of
digital humanities
has doubled (about 180,000). The general pattern
seems to be that direct references to digital humanists (singular and plural) have
become much more common relative to references to digital humanities. The more
frequent use of the plural form (five times as frequent as the singular form) is
not surprising given that it carries with it a lesser degree of individuation
(focusing on the group of digital humanists rather than individual people, cf.
digital humanities
would seem to indicate a degree of
saturation or possibly moving away from the over-arching term to more specific
reference (digital humanist
and digital humanists
).
Another perspective on the landscape of digital humanities can be offered by
specific encounters with humanities and technology initiatives. In the following,
I draw on some personal encounters with such settings and people between 2001 and
2009. Most the encounters are given a material quality through the examination of
associated spaces, which is based on the assumption that space and spatial
grounding is closely related to knowledge production
The four encounters are by no means a representative sample, but rather a way of continuing the discussion, exploring emerging issues and providing some experiential and material grounding both in relation to the flythrough critical overview of the landscape of the digital humanities presented in Part I and the discussion of modes of engagement in Part III. They are also chosen because they accentuate different modes of engagement and perspectives on the digital humanities. The encounters are ACTlab at University of Texas, the Humanities Art Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), the Humanities Computing Program at the University of Alberta, and Internet Studies (through an exchange with Charles Ess).
I visited the ACTLab at University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and encountered a
studio space with an articulated conceptual underpinning and a set of related
practices. I was struck both with the actual space and the clearly stated
relevance of its grounding: It's hard to separate the ACTLab philosophy from the studio
space, and vice versa. They are co-emergent languages. The ACTLab studio is
the heart of our program and in its semiotics it embodies the ACTLab
philosophy.
Most of the courses given were thematic, which often turns out to be a productive
or at least manageable interdisciplinary strategy. Broad themes allow faculty and
students from a range of departments to participate around a topic of interest. In
Sandy Stone’s words, Our curricular philosophy is about constructing dynamic
topic frameworks which function by defining possible spaces of discourse
rather than by filling topic areas with facts
ACTLab courses are concept-driven, rather than skills-driven; but we believe that theory flows from the act of making, rather than the other way around. The point of each ACTLab course is to help you define, develop, and produce a project that reflects on the social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and personal issues raised in that particular class. […] Our motto ismake stuff . We offer you the opportunity to engage cutting-edge technologies, but we also encourage you to view these as tools rather than as ends in themselves. Make sure you're taking advantage of technology, rather than waking up to find that technology is taking advantage of you. That's why we encourage critical thinking, and offer you the opportunity to engage cutting-edge theory along with making. [original emphasis]
Connecting making and critical practice is not simple, and the interrelation is complex and often difficult to analyze. Obviously, these are not distinct categories, and there is a fair deal of blurriness and a dynamic balance. In the case of ACTLab it seems that making is privileged and that critical practice, to a large extent, is achieved through the making. Consequently, there is considerably less focus on more traditional forms of critical production and reflection. This affects the balance and outset, and it seems that an enterprise such as ACTLab has more in common with an art school or a media production studio than a humanities department.
ACTLab began 1992 in a closet
Sandy Stone’s description
In the process we painted the entire space black and hung
Christmas lights from the ceiling, causing neighboring faculty to complain
that we were running a den of iniquity. The ACTLab's first floor plan had a
seminar table in the middle of the room, and the walls lined with
workstations.
The space I visited in 2001 was the new TV/Film production studio acquired in 2000, and as noted above, the central table was still part of the setup. The space was quite distinct in combining studio, performance and seminar elements as well as incorporating various technologies (both analogue and digital), and importantly, ACTLab could not be described as a sterile or instrumental space. The spatial grounding of ACTLab is obviously important, and in the personal experience of the author, there is a recurring interest in having lab and studio space when talking to the digital humanities community.
As evident from both the physical setup of the ACTLab studio and the above quote,
technology is an integral part of the setup — and although making does not
necessarily have to be digital or digitally supported, technology is undoubtedly
an important prerequisite in this space for making stuff.
This closeness to
technology, tinkering
and digitally supported expression is not necessarily
that common in the digital humanities. In terms of the modes of engagement
discussed in this article, the focus on technology as tools
rather as ends in themselves
suggests an instrumental relation, which
here is intimately linked to the digital as a means of expression and as an
activist venue in various projects and installations. Also, through the themes
employed in the courses there is — to varying degrees — an interest in the digital
as a study object. Nevertheless, it is quite likely that the ACTLab community
would never use digital humanities
to describe themselves (the online
correlation seems almost negative).+
rendered 37 hits, most of which are chance correlations or ACTlab
email lists of job opportunities elsewhere.digital humanities
+ACTlab
Although the ACTLab relates to many different disciplines and institutions, there
seems to be a clear sense of being outside the traditional structures. Sandy Stone
talks about the codeswitching umbrella — a device used to hide what is beneath and
vice versa — and the contrast between the inside and outside is fundamental in the
model presented. Institutional dire necessities, discourses of closure, structure
and bean counting are contrasted with messy creativity, emergent work, risk,
passion and deliberate structurelessness. According to Stone, When people below the umbrella experience passion, people above the umbrella
see structure.
The sense of being outside and oppositional is recurring
in the narratives surrounding the ACTLab: Like any oppositional practice, we don't just live under
the codeswitching umbrella; we also live under the institutional radar, and
to live under the radar you have to be small and lithe and quick. We cut our
teeth on nomadics, and although we've had some hair-raising encounters with
people who went to great lengths to stabilize the ACTLab identity, we're
still nomadic and still about oppositional practices.
This oppositional stance creates a strong discursive delineation between the ACTLab and the rest of the university, and although Stone talks about operating under the radar it also seems that ACTLab clearly and consistently signals its status of being different and oppositional; this is part of the essence of the ACTLab. There are several possible consequences of such a strategy; for instance a strong sense of interior community and a focus on collaboration with particular individuals rather than on structural and institutional collaboration. More importantly, it would seem that an inside position — under the umbrella — is not easily compatible with changing or subverting what is outside (e.g. the rest of the university) — above the umbrella. This is a deliberate and justifiable strategy, of course, but nevertheless an important question is whether there could be mutual gains from a more permeable umbrella?
It just so happens that on Sept. 29-30, SHL will be hosting
an important meeting on digital humanities work which will include two
sessions that might be of interest to you: one (in the late afternoon of
Sept. 29) a public conversation involving the directors of SHL, the Duke
Franklin center, UCHRI, and the like; the second, on the morning of Sept.
30, a closed door conversation between the leaders of several new SHL-type
research centers and top industry, foundation, and museum people about
potential partnerships. You would be most welcome to join either or
both.
I was visiting Stanford University for a couple of meetings in the fall of 2004, and was interested in establishing contact with the Stanford Humanities Laboratory (SHL) and associated researchers. I was fortunate to stumble across a national meeting on digital humanities organized by HASTAC — the Humanities Arts Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory — mainly held on campus at Wallenberg Hall. HASTAC had recently been co-founded by David Theo Goldberg, UC Humanities Research Institute, and Cathy Davidson, Duke University (in 2002). The above email and friendly invitation is from SHL director Jeffrey Schnapp.
Wallenberg Hall is a renovated building in the central quad of the Stanford campus, which integrates technology-supported teaching areas, communal spaces, offices and open plan multiple-purpose zones. The large lecture theater which hosted the HASTAC meeting I attended has flexible furniture and three projection screens next to each other. Normally one screen serves as the primary screen and the two others function as supplementary screens. I have seen all of the screens used at the same time, but it is much more common that only the main screen is used. While there was a distinct physical grounding for the meeting, the multi-institutional sentiment and organization of HASTAC was rather based on the idea of a virtual organization.
At the HASTAC meeting I met a range of people interested in the digital humanities
from a number of mostly American universities and institutes. American-style
humanities centers were well represented. There was a multi-level discussion with
a slant towards the institutional, organizational and visionary. Cathy Davidson
and David Theo Goldberg spoke of HASTAC as a project. Both Davidson and Goldberg
combine excellent track records in more traditional humanities and social science
research with high-level institutional positions, which adds credibility and
probably also leads to the foregrounding of questions to do with institutional
practice, university-level strategies, national and international perspectives,
and funding. HASTAC propels collaboration to a new multi-institutional
level. Headed by the leaders in humanities-technology collaboration, HASTAC
commands academic attention, and harnesses the prestige and existing
infrastructure of top universities, industry, foundations, and government.
This leadership team is expert in managing and facilitating
interdisciplinary collaboration, and several illustrative projects are
already underway. By generating new funding opportunities and reward systems
for multi-author and multi-disciplinary projects, HASTAC will compel
universities and funders to take note of this new model of scholarship. As
an integral part of this process, the HASTAC collaborative will develop,
test, and disseminate HASTAC propels collaboration to a new
multi-institutional level.
The language used in the quote above is clearly not indicative of a hesitant
humanities, but is rather an example of academic power speak
and a clearly
proactive humanities. This is particularly clear in the choice of verbs such as
commands
and compel,
and in stressing high-level leadership and
expertise. This leadership and commanding perspective would seem to serve the
cause well, and helps in identifying the humanities as a strong partner.
The fact that several humanities centers in the U.S. have served as important
platforms and as a driving force for HASTAC is not accidental. At their best,
humanities centers and cross-disciplinary institutes are catalysts for
humanities-wide perspectives and change (cf.
At the Stanford-based event, a pronounced interest in collaborative practice,
laboratory environments and new social relations
was expressed, as well as
a concern with the future of the humanities. Questions posed in this session
included How will the Humanities survive?
, as well as
a general discussion of the importance of humanities leadership. The broad and
outward sentiment of HASTAC presents an interesting contrast to ACTLab in terms of
institutional strategy.
This largely strategic level conversation was mixed with reporting and discussion of a few ongoing projects and practical-level initiatives. One initiative presented was the online journal
More generally, initiatives like HASTAC, may risk — especially at an early phase —
focusing on strategic-level issues at the expense of the more mundane issues such
as actual research and real implementation. Put differently, there may be a gap
between strategy, politics and grand visions and the grounding found in individual
and institutional practice. This gap may be enlarged by the distributedness of
such virtual organizations, although importantly, this organizational form is also
scalable and potentially quite powerful. And because of the high-level, structural
interest, the scope of transformation advocated may extend far beyond the
intersection of the Humanities and information technology proper. While very
important and exciting, this large scope and far-reaching ambitions may create a
dissonance with ground-level research and education. It might be argued, however,
that initiatives such as HASTAC are in fact establishing academic trading zones
Furthermore, there is an important and complex relationship among pushing for changing funding, university and reward systems, and close contact with various policy makers and industry. There may be a risk of relying too much on external structures and hence directly or indirectly buying into belief systems that are part of such structures. Also, while technology obviously plays an important role, the kind of methodological and technological rigor and infrastructure associated with e.g. humanities computing may not initially be part of the setup.
Looking at the developments after 2004, HASTAC has grown with the support from a
number of institutes, universities, the MacArthur Foundation and several other
major funding agencies. Among other things, activities include workshops,
conferences and a number of diverse venues to make things happen.
There is
also a more obvious researcher involvement (also from many young researchers), a
HASTAC scholar initiative (which combines local grounding and national level
networking), and a very productive attempt at creating an energetic and modern web
space for discussing and demonstrating issues with digital humanities, digital
media and learning (http://hastac.org/).
I don’t want to lose the computing connection,
one of the students (with a computer science background) said. We are
discussing digital humanities as a term (relating it to humanities
computing) in one of the labs of the humanities computing program at the
University of Alberta in Canada. In a well-equipped lab mainly set up for
computer workstation work, there was also a large table affording laptop
work and meetings. I enjoyed the mixed environment as well as getting a
sense of what the students were working on. One student was engaged in a
facetted browsing project, another one was doing an analysis of web-based
games targeted at girls, and a third one was planning a short-term project
to do an international slice of digital humanities for a particular
day.
I visited the University of Alberta in November 2008, which gave me the
opportunity to reconnect with humanities computing and digital humanities in
Canada. Based on my admittedly limited experience, it seems that Canadian
humanities computing is characterized both by a commitment to humanities computing
as practice and paradigm (hence maybe also less use of the term The balance between pursuing in-depth studies in the
intellectual rigours of one discipline versus a broader integration of
theoretical approaches is a constant struggle. The programme committee, with
consultation from departmental representatives, decided that exposure to a
breadth of disciplines should be essential to the MA as a Faculty of Arts
programme, but that depth of knowledge in one discipline should be a
complementary priority. Students apply to do the MA in Humanities Computing
through a ‘home’ department: that is, one of the existing departments in the
Humanities, Social Sciences or Fine Arts.
During my visit we had several discussions of institutional models and it was entirely clear that this kind of integration was seen as crucial. Over time, administrative and implementation pathways are established, although trying to establish a multi-department model can be quite challenging. You need to involve a number of departments and you are dependent upon them and their support, and while affiliating students with humanities departments may not be difficult, a far greater challenge may be with departments outside of the humanities proper (not because of these departments, but because of administrative and disciplinary boundaries). Likewise, finding sustainable ways of sharing resources (including faculty) between departments and a humanities computing center or programme can be difficult, especially if the departments are small or pressed financially.
We also talked about space in relation to the lab I visited, as well as more generally. It was obvious that the fairly large meeting table, prominently placed in the lab as you enter the room, had not been easy to come by. In a
offering social space to accompany the excellent lab space that we have — Humanities Computing should certainly be aware of the importance of human interaction in the work we do
non-functionaltable. This is a tendency I have come across in labs and university environments around the world — the difficulty of controlling and planning the spaces that often are at the heart of educational and research programs.
It was apparent from the students talking about their projects that humanities
computing at Alberta supports multiple modes of engagement with technology. While
technology as tool (as in traditional humanities computing) predominates, some
projects were much closer to technology as study object. In general, the
intellectual milieu seemed to draw on this multiplexity as well as on creating
(often through programming) as an important part of the research process. Part of
the discussion concerned Ph.D. possibilities and it was abundantly clear that few
schools offer the kinds of programs that meet student expectations.
I talked to Geoffrey Rockwell about process and methodology in relation to tool
building and textual analysis. He is a well-established researcher and organizer
in humanities computing who has long experience from large-scale projects such as
Tapor, and he has progressively advocated web-based, modular and relatively
open-ended tools for a long time (as opposed to the all-in-one software packages
that were common earlier in humanities computing), as well as engaged with social
software. When I was there, Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair had just finished a bout
of what they call experiments in text analysis or extreme text analysis. The idea is simple. Two people do text analysis together
with only one person on the computer and the other directing and commenting
(and typing a meta-narrative on another computer). This means that all
decisions have to be discussed and negotiated which means that one is forced
to reflect on what one is doing, which was the point for us. It takes
longer, but you get a better result and you are forced to reflect on what
you are doing […] Extreme Text Analysis, as we practiced it, was more a
reflective practice, that used experiments in small text analysis to reflect
on methodology and technology.
In their practice, they produce short web essays that do not focus on methodology or text analysis, but on the research question posed. It could probably be argued, however, that there is a basic tool-based sentiment here, which is maybe emphasized by the brevity of the individual analyses. Through using modular tools from the Tapor project, they are able to embed dynamic content in the web essays and, for instance, allowing a reader to check a query or try another one. In the example I was shown, the corpus query used in the article could be rerun, but interestingly and innovatively, you could also run a different query. This type of dynamic tool could be quite useful for not least text-centric academic publication. The researchers document the process through a meta level document and they provide reflections on text analysis. All this is done over a very limited period of time. While Rockwell’s and Sinclair’s extreme text analysis experiments are limited so far, there is no doubt that this is methodologically and conceptually a very interesting approach to text analysis drawing on a new generation of modular web tools, making and experimenting as an important part of the process, and combining interpretative and methodological foci.
I had been intrigued by internet studies for quite some time and was interested in Charles Ess’s work in the area, so his visit to HUMlab in the beginning of November, 2009, was very timely. Ess is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Drury University and presently a guest professor at Aarhus in Denmark. We initiated an energetic discussion about internet studies and other matters, and among other things I learnt that there are presently three handbooks on internet studies or internet research being planned or finished. After his visit, the conversation continued, and the below is directly from our informal email conversation concerning internet studies.
My sense of internet studies (IS) is that it largely focuses on internet as a study object (no surprise of course).
I would say more on the sorts of human/social interactions that are facilitated by the technologies and applications, FWIW — this focus is why...
IS is not close to the technology in the sense of being involved in much tool building. It does not typically take place in lab and studio environments.
Correct — though occasionally there are the equivalent of controlled
experiments that may use a real
lab or something analogous.
My guess is also that the community at large does not have a strong sense of
being part of digital humanities
(neither in the humanities computing
sense, nor in the more expansive and newer reading even if the latter would be
closer I guess).
Unfortunately, I think this is correct — unfortunately, because as someone who tries to keep abreast of both worlds, I'm convinced they have much useful and fruitful to say to one another, but as I said, apart from me and perhaps one or two other people, I don't see much in the way of bridges, much less strong interactions between the two domains.
A good chunk of this may be the artifact of the origins of what has become
called Internet Studies predominantly in the social sciences. To be sure, there
is some work done from the standpoint of the humanities — critical versions of
cultural studies as applied both to online interactions and the
scholarship/research thereupon come to mind, as well as the applied ethics work
of Internet Research Ethics. But these are areas largely
There is a strand in the second type of digital humanities that is very much concerned with the future and development of the humanities (beyond the subject area) — using the digital as a vehicle I think — and my sense is that this is not part of IS to any large extent (seeing the field as potentially reforming the humanities — publication practices, tenure evaluation, collaborative work etc.). There would probably be a bit of this I guess — there seems to be a strong interdisciplinary sentiment in internet studies.
Exactly — and again, it may reflect a resource limit, but not on the other
side
: only so many humanists to go around, and while a few become
engaged with IS, more became engaged with DH.
(It occurs to me that this in turn may in part reflect the excitement in the 1980s re. hypertext and hypermedia, which dominated at least U.S. attention — including the now venerable TLG [Thesaurus Linguae Graecae] that Willard [McCarty] worked on. That is, those of us who cut our digital teeth on hypertext and hypermedia could see very clearly how computing would radically transform our work in the humanities, so I see this as providing considerable direction and momentum in the trajectory you describe in terms of this strand of the second type of DH.)
Also, I do not get a sense that most internet studies researchers experiment a great deal with alternative modes of expression, multimodal installations etc. This is important to some kinds of new digital humanities — as represented in the journal
I think it's more accurate to say that they primarily study it as an artifact more than they actively experiment with it, e.g., as many people in Scandinavia, for example, so so — here, in some measure, in conjunction with a strong tradition of design. As you initially said, while more or less everyone I know in IS is tech-happy and tech-savvy — very few take this to the point of actively constructing alternative environments, etc. in the name of research. There's just so much happening before us that it's all one can do to try to research and explore the diverse social and communicative phenomena from especially (but again, not exclusively) social science perspectives...
Finally, there are some parts of new media like studies or initiatives (not
digital humanities normally) that engage in academic activism
— using
technology to (potentially) change the world or make a political statement etc.
Again, my sense is that is not a major part of IS? You may find this sentiment
as part of certain kinds of cultural studies I imagine, but it does not seem to
be mainstream to me in IS.
Again, I think this is quite accurate — though a more complete picture, in my
view, goes like there. A significant number of researchers and scholars in IS
are motivated, to some degree or another, by what they see as the
transformative potentials of new communication technologies, though this is not
always apparent or overt in their work. On occasion, the commitment to
progressive politics creates tensions — both with the disciplinary requirements
for some version of objectivity (lots of discussion, of course, re.
positivist
notions whose ghosts will walk the halls of many
departments...vis-à-vis, for example, participant-observer methodologies, etc.)
and, e.g., in the case of AoIR, institutional/organizational requirements to
avoid overt political stands. ICT4D [Information and communication technology
for development] is a place where this can comfortably and appropriate come to
expression, as well as in cultural studies of the Anglophone sort — though one
of our major points of contrast and tension (not to say, conflict) at the
recent AoIR conference was how more German-oriented and philosophical senses of
critical theory apparently failed to take on board the more radical critiques
from the standpoint of race, gender, and sexuality at home in a more Anglophone
critical studies tradition.
I would be very thankful for any comments or clarifications! I realize that IS is not one thing, and that the above is an overgeneralization. I am so glad I met you, and with your experience, work on the edited volume etc. you are a perfect person to ask.
I hope this helps somewhat — and again, many thanks in turn: this has been most helpful indeed for me, and I couldn't be more pleased but to have had the opportunity to start to discuss these matters with. To be sure, I like to think that the work on the Blackwell volume, along with serving on the Executive Committee of AoIR, etc., gives me something of a reasonable overview — but it also gives me the very strong sense that for any generalization/observation I may want to make, the object of my attention is in constant flux and transformation and is being studied from thousands of diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives: what the hell do I know?
In a conceptual and disciplinary map of the digital humanities, the encounters described above and the examples cited earlier would be distributed over a rather diverse territory. One important, distinguishing parameter is how different perspectives and initiatives relate to information technology and the digital. For example, as we have seen, traditional humanities computing tends to have a rather instrumental relationship to information technology, which serves primarily as a tool, whereas a cultural or media studies-based approach is more likely to focus on digital culture and the cultural construction of information technology as a study object.
In the previous analysis, it has been suggested that the territory of the digital humanities can be analyzed fruitfully through looking at principal modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology or the digital. Below, I will examine five major modes of engagement in some more detail: information technology as a tool, as a study object, as an expressive medium, as an experimental laboratory and as an activist venue. The first three modes will receive the most attention. Importantly, these should not be seen as mutually exclusive or overly distinct but rather as co-existing and co-dependent layers, and indeed, the boundaries in-between increasingly seem blurry. This does not mean, however, that it may not fruitful to analyze and discuss them individually as part of charting the digital humanities.
Different disciplines are likely to privilege different modes of engagement. For instance, cultural anthropology would seem more concerned with technology and the digital as an object of analysis than as a tool, and the converse relationship would probably be true of large parts of history as a discipline. Similarly, different approaches and interdisciplinary research fields express different configurations of engagement with the digital. Some of these will be explored below.
The instrumental role of information technology seems rather self-evident.
Computers and, more generally, information technology are very capable of handling
an increasing set of tasks. Historically, computers have often been seen only as
tools, although that perception has changed over timeIn its fifty-year history, the computer so far has been a
calculating machine, an electronic brain, a filing cabinet, a clerk, and a
secretary. […] In the 1940s, when the brilliant and elegant John von
Neumann, the brilliant and eccentric Alan Turing, and many others were
designing the first programmable computers, they were not defining a new
medium. They were building super-fast calculating engines to solve problems
in science and engineering.
Computers in humanities computing often take on the role of calculating
engines,
and although the focus is not on science or engineering problem,
they often become textual engines.
Also, underlying the use of computers as
a tool may be an ideology of cognition and functionalism (cf. [o]ur goal is to explore and develop information
technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research
In practice, the symbiotic machine became a problem-solving
rather than a problem-posing device. For the most part, that is how the
computer continues to function. Licklider’s dream remains largely
unfulfilled. Perhaps transforming the computer from machine to tool, from a
device that automates mundane mental tasks to one that augments critical and
creative thought, is the task now facing computing humanists.
Interestingly, Laue’s argument is clearly placed within the framework of computer as machine or tool. In some other varieties of digital humanities, for instance cybercultural, internet and media studies and internet studies, the instrumental use of information technology does often not extend far beyond standard tools. Here the tools used are mainly a means to an end and do not necessarily carry much prominence. Neither is there typically a strong interest to create and develop tools.
Increasingly, however, different kinds of tools and data are made available over
the web, and it would seem much easier at the present for researchers to try out
available tools than previously — for instance, through employing web-based
software such as visualization tools or various APIscultural analytics
at University of California at
San Diego, which strive to use quantitative, analysis, interactive visualization
and, to some degree qualitative analysisbegin analyzing patterns in massive cultural data
sets
We believe that a systematic use of large-scale
computational analysis and interactive visualization of cultural patterns
will become a major trend in cultural criticism and culture industries in
the coming decades. What will happen when humanists start using interactive
visualizations as a standard tool in their work, the way many scientists do
already?
Here, very powerful tools are projected, and the cultural analytics research group
has some impressive examplesa massively scientifistic attitude
as
well as his reservations in terms of methodology: For experimenters know that the set-up is directed toward a
certain problematic, and if the results are not predictable in advance, they
will nonetheless fall in a certain range and register of experience. Without
foregrounding some of these issues, I think we risk capitulation to
neoliberalism and the university as hedge fund, to put it crudely.
There is obviously a range of available and possible digital tools for the
humanities, and it does not seem that the digital humanities has yet developed a
comprehensive framework, design sensibility and assessment methodology that will
allow us to design, critically discuss and evaluate different kinds of tools in
the best possible way (cf. Blindness to the rhetorical effects of design as a form of
mediation (not of transmission or delivery) is an aspect of the cultural
authority of mathesis that plagues the digital humanities community.
[original emphasis]
The work of Drucker and her colleagues at University of Virginia is inspirational in the sense of innovation within a conceptual framework, a strong interest in design and a critical discussion of both the framework and the actual tools. Several of the tools or projects (e.g.
Another fairly well-documented example is Pliny developed by the Center for
Computing in the Humanities at King’s College which is a note-taking and
annotation tool particularly aimed at humanities research and which allows users
to integrate these initial notes into a representation of an
evolving personal interpretation
In Bradley 2005 I suggested that
tool builders in the digital humanities would have better success persuading
their non-digital colleagues that computers could have a significant
positive benefit on their research if the tools they built fit better into
how humanities scholarship is generally done, rather than if they developed
new tools that were premised upon a radically different way to do
things.
Pliny is deliberately not web-based (and hence maybe set in a old-style instrumental paradigm) and the power comes from the openness and not making too many assumptions about what resources may be valid or how a detailed interpretative process works — instead allowing space for that interpretation and epistemic alignment to be carried out. In this space creating, Pliny and the UVA tools have something in common, although the rationale, reasoning and epistemic commitments behind them are quite different.
A third example is the UC Los Angeles-based project HyperCities which may arguably
be classified as a tool or a set of tools, but project leader Todd Presner says
that he rather sees it as part of an intellectual-humanistic project for
conceptualizing/studying culture and cultural artifacts
search
is currently such a strong paradigm.
This is obviously not the place to present a fully-fledged framework for
classifying and analyzing digital tools for the humanities, but hopefully the
above examples can work as a way of opening up a discussion of relevant
parameters. It is fairly obvious that we are concerned with a range of tools and
tool uses. Some are more specific to the digital humanities than others. For
instance, while word processors certainly play a very important role for digital
humanities, they are not specific to digital humanities. A concordance program,
however, is much more specific and used by a smaller group of people. Many of
these users would be digital humanists
in disciplines such as linguistics
and literary studies. This tool has an analogue predecessor and a largely
automatic
function. Consequently, it could be argued that a traditional
piece of concordance software exhibits a high level of automaticity and fairly low
degree of innovativeness. We may also want to refer to the interpretative,
representational and explorative powers of tools: To date, the digital technology used by humanities scholars
has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and
disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not
engaged the central questions and concerns of the disciplines. It is largely
seen as technical and pre-critical, the occupation of librarians, and
archivists, and editors. The general field of humanities education and
scholarship will not take up the use of digital technology in any
significant way until one can clearly demonstrate that these tools have
important contributions to make to the exploration and explanation of
aesthetic works.
There is a difference between a tool that mainly allows you to search for linguistic constructions in a text database (showing results in a table or concordance list), and a tool that does that as well as provides an interface where you can visualize results, create interpretative models, collaborate with others and combine different medial representations (for instance sound-audio, text, a timeline and relevant metadata).
Further suggestions for what to look for in analyzing and designing tools are the
materiality of the interface, structural properties (e.g. layering of
information), collaborative affordances, interpretative scope and modes of
distribution. Through interaction design research, a number of digital artifact
qualities can be brought into the picture. For instance,
Digital tools should not be seen as neutral artifacts. In their construction and
contextual use, they reproduce certain assumptions. While generic tools such as
word processing programs are arguably more easily construed as neutral,
it
would seem that the subjective and epistemic nature of tools is more explicit with
interpretative and experimental tools. This does not mean that the epistemic
commitments associated with digital tools and tool use are well understood or
given enough attention. As same
digital objects, and hence important in relation to an expansive
notion of digital humanities. Epistemic commitments may influence and determine
identification of study objects, methodological procedures leading to results,
representative practices, and interpretative frameworks.
Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording
objects of analysis for the humanities. Linguists may use digital tools (such as
concordance software, acoustic analysis or dialectal mapping tools) to do their
research, but if they move to incorporate digitally mediated language or
communicative patterns in Second Life as objects of study into their research, we
are concerned with a different mode of engagement. Of course, these objects may be
studied using digital tools. These new
objects of study (see new
in new
media) can be more or less controversial in relation to the discipline at
question. They can clearly be within the disciplines, arguably be part of new,
emerging disciplines or relate to different kinds of interdisciplinary centers and
associations.
The institutionalization of the humanities in the late 19th century and former
part of the 20th century may be said to have linked certain objects of study, or
facets of those objects, to certain disciplines. In her analysis, same
analytical objects could be analyzed using the different
methodologies strongly associated with the disciplines, but with this growth of
disciplinary focus and specialization, there not would necessarily be a great deal
of synthesis.
This model has been under pressure from an increased interest in interdisciplinary
studies and different types of thematically organized research agendas. It is easy to see, in hindsight, how disciplines
professionalized and specialized objects of analysis. To say that such
objects were (under the older regime) disciplinarily driven is to say that
disciplinary demands — historical and textual, institutional and official,
methodological and epistemological — determined which were legitimate for
analysis.
Davidson and Goldberg point to how interdisciplinary practice calls for objects of
analysis that are more diffuse and multiplex than those disciplinarily conceived.
There is a tension between this type of object and the established sense of what
normally constitutes a valid object of analysis in the traditional humanities. Traditional humanistic work assumes its object. A book,
poem, text, image, or artifact, no matter how embedded in social production
or psychoanalytic tangles, is usually assumed to have a discrete, bounded
identity.
Let us again look at a particular community that can be assumed to have a
commitment to technology as study object in a broad sense. In this sense, study
objects include phenomena, cultural artifacts and processes that to some extent
are digitally inflected. There is a fairly large group of researchers whom engage
in internet studies,
of which many are organized by the Association of
Internet Researchers (cf. the encounter described in Part II above). They had
their tenth conference in October 2009. The organization is presented on their
website as follows: The Association of Internet Researchers is an academic
association dedicated to the advancement of the cross-disciplinary field of
Internet studies. It is a member-based support network promoting critical
and scholarly Internet research independent from traditional disciplines and
existing across academic borders.
about
page on the organization’s website. Moreover, it
is interesting to see that the research promoted is described as independent from trauditional disciplines.
While we
should not read too much into this, it is somewhat telling that the perspective
presented is one of alleged independence rather than one pointing to the
interaction between the organization and associated research in the traditional
disciplines (where most of the participants are probably located
institutionally).
Returning to the question of modes of engagement, it seems quite clear that the
principal mode for internet research of this type is the digital or the internet
as an object of analysis. This is not very surprising, of course, but it makes
internet studies an interesting area to look more carefully in this context — also
because it is a large and important organization. The investment in this
particular mode of engagement seems quite clear. As the above quote shows, the
internet is not necessarily seen as a study object that can be handled within the
realms of any existing or new discipline, or even from an interdisciplinary, but
not transdisciplinary, perspective. A trandisciplinary field is one defined by the globality of
its object of study, combined with the complex, emergent, and changing
nature of that object (Genosko, 2002, p. 26). The very nature of the
Internet as an object of study is its incomprehensibility as a whole from
disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.
The study object is thus seen to be too complex or dynamic to be managed by any
one discipline, and it can be argued that an approach less based on traditional
institutional structure has clear advantages. In the indisciplined approach, there is no importance
attached to unity of perspective or method because there is no need to
engage in exclusionary boundary work. There is only a shared commitment to
the importance of systematically analyzing a new phenomenon, even if that
phenomenon changes.
We might question the ease of analyzing such objects without doing boundary work (where much of the interesting tension tends to take place) and with only a common commitment to analyzing a specific phenomenon (which in a sense makes the studied phenomenon static). It would seem that there is a risk here to disregard the epistemic commitments of the disciplines, as well as the emerging commitments of a new research community.
In any case, the connection to the digital humanities, which has a stronger
historical and epistemic link to technology as a tool, is seemingly weak. Part of
the reason is probably exactly the difference in main modes of engagement, and
there also seems to be a sense in the digital humanities community, not least the
parts more engaged with the digital as a study object, that internet research is
too large or too traditional (alluding to the institutional placement) to be
included under the heading digital humanities. Looking at the internet research
community on a more general level, there seems to be a sense that the perceived
independence is quite important. Internet research could become a subset telecom research,
digital studies, or something else, and when it takes on the identity of the
other, it will surely lose some of its current richness.
This emphasis on independent status was also quite clear from the AoIR website
definition discussed earlier. On a more particular level, it is also difficult to
identify a sense of internet research (in this organized sense) belonging to the
digital humanities. For instance, looking at instances of digital
humanities
on the Air-L email list, the digital humanities is directly
mentioned in 27 out of 19619 posts
In some ways, it is interesting to compare internet research and humanities
computing as they represent two parallel traditions with rather different
epistemic scopes and principal modes of engagement. In
The analysis is based on ten iterations of the conference (1999-2008) through the
full programs of all the conferences. There is hence a partial chronological
mismatch with the above study of digital humanities conferences. All titles and
names of panels and sessions were included, and all other text removed. Functional
words (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, modal verbs etc.) were removed, and
all content
words were retained. The 17 most frequent words all occurred in
all ten AoIR conference programs:
Humanities based engagement with the digital or technology as an object of analysis is obviously multi faceted and complex, but looking at the digital humanities in a broad sense, this mode of engagement seems quite prevalent. Importantly, the digital may not have to be the main focus itself, but rather phenomena, cultural artifacts and processes that are digitally inflected. Initiatives with a significant investment in this mode often seem fairly discrete in the landscape of the digital humanities while they are rarely in fact recognized as digital humanities.
One important and apparent consequence of increased digitalization and, in
particular, the web, is highly increased access to and availability of different
types of content and media. Some of this content is born-analogue and much of it
is born-digital. Increasingly, but not necessarily, these expressions are media
rich, polytextual and mixed. fungibility
— the gathering of many types of content
(moving image, text, music, 3D-design, database, graphical detail, virtual
walk-through etc.) into a single environment — as the core of digital mediation.
Content can accordingly be infinitely manipulated and remobilized without loss. As
Nonetheless, we have been slow to explore the potential of
interactive, immersive, and multimedia expression for our own thinking and
scholarship, even as we dabble with such forms in our teaching. With a few
exceptions, we remain content to comment about technology and media, rather
than to participate more actively in constructing knowledge in and through
our objects of study.
Looking at where we do find complex, multimodal, interactive and networked
expressions in the humanities, it is clear that they are more common — but by no
means very common — in undergraduate education than in faculty research. This can
presumably be traced back to the idea that students are seen as more adept at
using new media and that they need this kind of literacy for future careers (in
particular outside the academy). On the whole, undergraduate education is probably
also more likely to change in relation to external expectations and availability
of new expressive modes than research carried out by senior scholars as part of a
highly structured reward system. This does not mean that the traditions of
undergraduate humanities education are not challenged by these modes: That is, digital media, functioning as they do in the world
of networked computing, often break down the boundaries we once took for
granted in setting tasks for our students: the finality of composition, the
identity of the author, the role of the audience, and the unity of
purpose.
For instance, looking at the role of the audience, it is quite clear that the
sense of an external, and potentially engaged audience, often has a strong
motivating function in educational contexts In its growing interest in the research and instruction of
multimedia art, design, and culture, therefore, humanities computing finds
itself in league with the visual and performing arts in legitimizing
technological practice and the creation of non-textual-only scholarly
artefacts.
It is not surprising to find that such expressions are more common in undergraduate education than in faculty research and graduate education. An important determining factor is the reward structures of academe. For tenure-track scholars, there is often a sense that digital modes of representation may place you at a relative disadvantage. Indeed, this may be outright advice from senior faculty and administrators. These reward structures may be changing, but at a very slow pace and there is no simple path forward although work such as
The reward structures, however, do not always stop Ph.D. researchers from
expressing themselves alternatively, but it is often seen as an extra
undertaking which does not replace the traditional work needed to qualify
academically. Indeed, this pressure sometimes seems to result in securing very
strong academic merits as we well as engaging in alternative practices and modes
of production.
There is a range of possible digitally inflected modes of expression, and these are situated within different disciplinary, institutional and personal contexts, and consequently come with different implications and degrees of risk taking. A dissertation presented as a virtual world installation would naturally be much more challenging to the established system than a personal research blog or a research oriented Twitter feed. If that Twitter feed, however, was suggested as carrying academic weight in a tenure portfolio, the stakes would be much higher. Similarly, an online video clip would not be expected to adequately present a research proposal to a funding agency, while it may be seen as potentially useful (or at least not harmful) as a reference in a written application.
It might be fruitful to also consider less extreme expressive situations where the
stakes are not quite as high. The MLA conference in December 2009 provides an
interesting example because of the use of networked (mainly text based)
communication channels, and how this communication and exposure contributed to a
conference that was not technology focused, as well as the external reading
of the conference. In particular, the digital humanities contingency at the
conference got received fairly large exposure despite their comparatively small
numbers. According to Amanda French's calculation, a mere three percent of the
conference participants were tweeters (in the sense of producing Twitter
entries
or tweets), and only few of these came from outside of digital
humanities.
The relatively large exposure was partly because there were
many digital humanities-like sessions, many of them reportedly well attended, but
also because the digital footprint of this contingency was comparatively large.
Twitter played an important role and the hash tag #MLA09 accumulated 1750 tweets
between Dec 4, 2009, and January 4, 2010 (the majority during the actual
conference, and the days before and after). Also, the story of one previous
attendee, Brian Croxall, and his not coming to the conference for financial
reasons made the connection between remote and present participation quite
prevalent. In particular as this non-attendee posted his panel contribution online
and tweeted about it at the same time as it was read at the conference
Some of these uses of media are no more revolutionary than adding a YouTube
reference to your application, and the buzz may not be proportionate to the actual
impact at the conference,
A quite different and unsuccessful example of recent use of networked media in a
conference situation is the Web 2.0 Expo conference in November 2009, at which a
so-called back channel was made front channel through a screen behind the
presenter. Tech celebrity Danah Boyd describes her experience of the setup as a
speaker: And then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing
rumblings. And then laughter. The sounds were completely irrelevant to what
I was saying and I was devastated. [...] I didn't know what was going on but
I kept hearing sounds that made it very clear that something was happening
behind me that was the focus of everyone's attention.
Her subsequent analysis importantly states that a public-facing Twitter stream forces the audience to pay attention to the back channel. Part of the challenge ahead is about exploring digitally inflected modes of academic expression, how they interrelate, and their importance for humanities scholarship.
As David Goldberg noted in a talk on May 14, 2009, at Umeå University, it is often
easier to accept a changing process than a changed end product. Most of the papers
and panels at the MLA conference discussed above were traditional in terms of
deliverance, and the use of networked media (mainly process
) did not
influence these products
in any major way (with the possible exception of
Croxall's paper). Looking at academic publishing rather than conferences, a rich
collaborative and networked process may be what leads to the publication of
monograph (a privileged form of publication), but the monograph itself is likely
to be seen as the product of one person or a few people. The process may partly be
multimodal and networked, but the product is likely to be textual and single
voice.
It seems clear that new academic journals only published digitally are more likely
to be open to alternative modes of publication than traditional print
journals,
experiments in new media.
submissions whose base format is something other than text. They may includeAll submissions can be media centric (or text centric), but there is also a specific submission type calledextraordinary multimedia(multimedia in non-standard formats) and may involve more complex interactive behavior.
interactive works.According to the Guidelines for Submission, suitable works can include original hypertext fiction, an online educational application or game, an interactive visualization or an original interactive digital artwork
Vectors is a new, international electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media.Vectors brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures social and cultural relations.
It is clear that
moving far beyond theAt the beginning of 2010, five issues had been published (Vol 1:1 to Vol 3:1), with a sixth expected to go live soon.text with imageformat of most online scholarly publications.
On a simple numerical level,
In the first five issues of
special clustercontributions). Of these, more than a third (14) have no non-textual elements whatsoever, although three of the articles have textual tables. Another 4 articles have a single non-textual element: a picture of deformed text, an inscription on a stone, a mathematical formula, and a screenshot from a piece of software called the manuscript browser. It is interesting to note that these images are indeed very textual. Looking at the full
It could be argued that the privileged mode of engagement of
useand reference. In sense of multimodal representation and digital expressiveness, the journal is not experimental, although there is a solid textual basis that can possibly be used in tools.
In trying to understand how difference matters in the digital era, we should perhaps suspect that the very structures of our information economy (and of the code that underwrites it) look a particular way today precisely because the Civil Rights and other freedom movements happened at mid-century. Both cybernetics and Civil Rights were born in quite real ways of World War II and are caught in tight feedback loops. Certain aspects of modularity, fragmentation, and dispersion that are endemic to digital media also structure the more covert forms of racism and racial representation that categorize post-Civil Rights discourse.
get toin terms of the full content compared to
experienced,and the reader often gets content bit by bit. For a few projects, there is a visualized index that provides access to different elements that make up that particular project including text, images and connections between elements. Interestingly, these indexes show some of the underlying ontology of
While
packagingis a consequence of the multi-modal, installation-like format. Simple text is obviously easier to reference than video or events in game-like worlds. However, this an important issue in relation to a connected
collective ether
This tension can also be evidenced in some of peer commentary and discussion associated with the
I wonder generally if the basic interactive format in some ways vitiates the force of an ongoing argument, not just in Friedberg’s project but in any project presented this way. A book, say, can be randomly accessed but also may have an argumentative spine. There is certainly a strong spine here, but I find it gets lost in the array of examples and commentary. The timeline functions as a spine of sorts, but primarily as it focuses on the history of developing technology.
This is not necessarily a criticism of the format of the journal or this particular project, but rather an issue of what we expect, how cohesion and complex argument are created, what our frame of reference is (book or artistic installation), as well as modes of consumption.
While there are obviously structural commonalities in design and expression in
readthe previous one. Arguably text is the dominant carrier of meaning, although the piece is also distinctly aural, visual and almost poetical. The textual expression itself is not uniform. Not only does the text move, but it also is textured through the use of different font sizes, colors and at times slanted text. The layout and presentation of text is meaningful and an important part of the narrative. There are also a number of images and a few films, all of which contribute to a coherent and suggestive narrative. Another of the projects,
This expressive variation contrasts starkly with
In most ways,
Some instrumental uses of digital technology in humanities contexts introduce an exploratory methodology, where the researcher or student is encouraged to explore materials, datasets or issues in an experimental fashion. A simple example would be a series of multimedia productions produced in Sweden about 10 years ago which covered the history of different parts of the capital (e.g.
At a more concrete level, humanities laboratories or digital humanities centers
can also be exploratory laboratories that support exploration and experimentation
whether in physical, digital or hybrid spaces. The exploratory affordances in an
environment such as HUMlab at Umeå University come from the availability of data
sets, a mix of analytical and creative practices, interdisciplinary challenges and
competencies, international visitors, easy access to different types of
technologies (that do necessarily have a precise, predefined function), and from
the sense of being in a collaborative, lab or studio like space. Digital platforms
such as TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and Second Life can also
function as exploratory spaces. When museology and culture analysis students at
Umeå build exhibitions in Second Life and produce machinima films, the digital
space is used as a laboratory that enables enactments and experimentation that
would be quite difficult to facilitate in physical space. Similarly, when a
researcher explores a text corpus through a collection of interactive
tools
provided in TAPoR, we may be concerned with a use of technology that extends
beyond instrumental tools.
If we consider the digital more generally as a possible laboratory for the
humanities, the discussion can be extended beyond specific interpretative and
exploratory tools and spaces. The Humanities is often portrayed as not having a
predicative or intervening role, whereas the sciences are said to attempt to both
explain and predict natural phenomena. In looking at the primary interests of
natural scientists, social scientists and humanists, an understanding of human reactions to events and the
meanings humans impose on experience as a function of culture, historical era,
and life history
(humanists).
In a seminal article, given
(nature)
and the humanities study the created
(what humans give rise to), the
sciences are more prone to use active, interventionist methods and be involved in
creative processes (e.g. creating new technology or materials). The humanities,
which studies dynamic processes and cultural products associated with humankind,
tend to observe, document and analyze, and are rarely seen as an important factor
in creative processes.
Janlert and Jonsson argue that there are several reasons as to why the humanities tend to be analytical and passive in relation to their study objects: unmanageable objects of analysis (difficult to control and restrict), lack of scalability (often very substantial study objects that cannot be downscaled, and individual cultural artifacts that scale up badly because of the large number required), powerless models (limited quantitative models and lack of tools to manage large-scale qualitative analysis) and, finally, intervening and creating are often seen as controversial in the Humanities (ideologically difficult to implement active and intervening work processes).
It seems clear that modern information technology can have a significant role in
facilitating the type of exploratory space — cultural laboratory — that Janlert
and Jonsson discuss. The following is partly based on Janlert and Jonsson’s
article. Dynamic visualization can offer a window to large data sets and
possibilities to visualize or enact complex objects of analysis. Interactive tools
can help the researcher to get an intuitive sense of objects of analysis and the
model, and allow fast what-if analyses. On a more profound level, researcher
interaction can change the models themselves, or their parameters, data and
relations to allow the study of hypothetical correlations or comparison of
outcomes from different models applied on the same object or situations.
Thick,
qualitative models — of detailed environments, objects, processes
and correlations, unstructured information — can be handled through use of
technology, and complex qualitative correlations can be modeled by massive
simulations. Digital, controlled spaces — such as virtual worlds — can be used to
facilitate cultural laboratory work. Participants in simulations could be humans
or computer run entities. Real time interactive data can feed into digitally
enhanced research spaces. Of course, all this is fairly visionary and
non-concrete, and maintaining a critical stance is quite important. There is no
doubt, however, that we see many of the elements discussed here in some of the
interpretative digital humanities tools, interfaces to large material, and some of
the
The issue of activism as related to the distinction between art, artistic practice and the humanities is by no means clear or uncontested. We earlier used Sharon Daniel’s
activehumanities discussed in the previous section. It could be argued that work such as Daniel’s
their tinkering, playing, and visualizationand the academic criticism and cultural critique of her own kind of work,
making things, as a thinking practice, is not only formative but transformative
As previously noted, it seems that the contemporary engagement, interventionist interest, critical stance and creative forms of expression associated with some of the digital humanities could be related to a mode of engagement according to which the digital facilitates an activist venue.
This activist engagement is, again, more prevalent in some areas than in others. One example is when art and the digital come together, as in the Australian-based email list
-empyre- facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media by inviting guests -key new media artists, curators, theorists, producers and others to participate in thematic discussions.
-empyre- themes normally run for a month with guest editors, and previous themes
include Sedition (the anti-terrorism bill), Sites in Translation (the San
Diego/Tijuana border), Asian Perspective (with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries),
Play with a Purpose: Politics and Art in Computer Games, and DNA Poetics. In other
initiatives and forums, the direct engagement is typically much stronger and there
is a stronger focus on acting and intervening. An example of this would be a group
such as Preemptive Media (which is related to what is often referred to as
tactical media): Preemptive Media is a group of artists, activists and
technologists who are making their own style of beta tests, trial runs and
impact assessments based on independent research. PM is most interested in
emerging policies and technologies because they are contingent and
malleable. The criteria and methods of PM programs are different from those
run by businesses and government, and, therefore, PM gets different results.
PM hopes that their inquiries create new opportunities for public discussion
and alternative outcomes in the usually remote and closed world of
technology-based research and development.
In yet other types of experimental work, there may not be a strong or direct
agenda per se, but a sense of creating meaning through facilitating different
kinds of performative action through the support of digital technology. In other words, the massively collaborative, search and
analysis gameplay of I Love Bees was a means to an end beyond innovative
entertainment. It sought to create a highly connected player-base dedicated
to, and impressively capable of, defining and solving large-scale problems
together.
Would we expect digital humanists to become involved in pervasive gaming, flash
mobs, online installations or Twitter performances? The above quote is from a
commercial project (I Love Bees), but similar kinds of methodologies have been
applied to e.g. academic discourse as in PlaceStorming v 3.0: If your research were a superhero, what kind of superhero
would it be? This provocative question forms the foundation of Jane
McGonigal's PlaceStorming, which begins with the seemingly dubious union of
academic writing and pervasive, mobile gaming. Not only does the game put
the
site
back into cite,
but it perforates the walls dividing
academia and the world at large, inviting academicians to relinquish the
sanctity of their written texts and gamers to play with those texts,
transforming their meaning through an unlikely process of disassembly,
recombination and discovery.
In the dialogue associated with the piece on the
In a suggestive article on
the cultural spaces being opened up by digital technologies
The most adventurous niches within higher education have started to register these complexities. They have begun to expand their models of training, research, and output in keeping with the distributive nature of innovation, creation, and authorship within the knowledge economy. Among the many accompanying shifts, there is an increasing erosion of the boundary line once separating the roles of scholar, artist, and technologist, as the old means of distributing knowledge give way to far more fluid means that easily allow creative producers to function in many roles and disseminate their productions to vast, geographically disparate audiences. What has emerged are varieties of creative practice that bridge the gap between thinking and doing, between the excavation of the past and the creation of the present, based on what Aristotle referred to asphronesis : knowledge integrated with practical reasoning.
This kind of vision suggests that making a clear separation between activist and art-based practice and more traditional humanities-based endeavors may not be trivial, and according to Schnapp and Shanks, hardly desired.
The territory of the digital humanities is currently under negotiation. While there
is no doubt that the field is expanding, it is not entirely clear what is included
and how the landscape can be understood or structured. These ongoing negotiations
occur on multiple levels, from an individual graduate student and local institutions
to national funding agencies and international institutional networking. They are
consequently situated institutionally, physically, politically and epistemically.
These negotiations, which tend to be located in between,
are particularly
important to any attempt at analyzing or advocating an inclusively conceived digital
humanities.
The current article started out from an inclusive notion of the digital humanities and three analytical and exploratory lenses: a critical overview of the landscape of the digital humanities, an investigation of specific encounters, and an analytical model based on paradigmatic modes of engagement. The critical overview of the landscape provided a structural and broad comprehension of the digital humanities as well as a critical discussion of typologies, varieties of digital humanities, epistemic traditions and digital humanists. In contrast, the four encounters focused on specific initiatives at particular points in time, and their material and ideational grounding. Based on the critical overview, the encounters and the analysis presented in the first article in this series, an analytical model was suggested based on paradigmatic modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology or the digital: tool, study object, expressive medium, exploratory laboratory and activist venue.
In addition to shedding light on these negotiations, which tend to be located in
between,
the current article has attempted to complement a comprehensive
overview of the landscape with more detailed, personal accounts of specific
encounters. These perspectives on the digital humanities were complemented by an
extended discussion of the epistemically and categorically poignant distinction of
different modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology.
We are undoubtedly at an exciting and challenging point in time with regards to the
area loosely described by the term
One such important challenge is the rethinking, shaping and implementing of cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. What type of research infrastructure do we need? How do we align ourselves with science and engineering driven agendas, and how can we make a strong and grounded argument for humanities cyberinfrastructure? These are some of the issues discussed in the third article of this series, in which I look at cyberinfrastructure for the humanities in relation to the ongoing debate about research infrastructure and the digital humanities. HUMlab at Umeå University serves as a case study, and design principles are discussed as well as the conceptual underpinnings of infrastructure such as digital humanities centers.
In the final installment, I explore the hopes and visions invested in the digital
humanities, and how the digital humanities often become a means for rethinking the
humanities at large. How is the future of the humanities projected? Can the
digital
fundamentally change the humanities? What issues are critical?
Could the expanded dialogue called for above lead to a shared vision of the digital
humanities? And do we even want one?
This article has been substantially improved by comments and feedback given by Stephanie Hendrick, Erica Robles, Jenna Ng, Matthew Ratto, and the two anonymous DHQ reviewers. Emma Ewadotter helped competently with data collection and other matters. Useful feedback was also given at a seminar at UC Santa Barbara on November 12, 2009.
10louder, or, the amplification of scholarly communication