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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
As the twenty-first century unfolds, computers challenge the way in which we think about culture, society and what it is to be human: areas traditionally explored by the humanities.
In a world of automation, Big Data, algorithms, Google searches, digital archives, real-time streams and social networks, our use of culture has been changing dramatically. The digital humanities give us powerful theories, methods and tools for exploring new ways of being in a digital age. Berry and Fagerjord provide a compelling guide, exploring the history, intellectual work, key arguments and ideas of this emerging discipline. They also offer an important critique, suggesting ways in which the humanities can be enriched through computing, but also how cultural critique can transform the digital humanities.
Digital Humanities will be an essential book for students and researchers in this new field but also related areas, such as media and communications, digital media, sociology, informatics, and the humanities more broadly.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Notes
2 Genealogies of the Digital Humanities
Notes
3 On the Way to Computational Thinking
Notes
4 Knowledge Representation and Archives
Notes
5 Research Infrastructures
Notes
6 Digital Methods and Tools
Notes
7 Digital Scholarship and Interface Criticism
Notes
8 Towards a Critical Digital Humanities
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Digital Humanities
Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age
DAVID M. BERRY AND ANDERS FAGERJORD
polity
Copyright © David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord, 2017
The right of David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9769-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Berry, David M. (David Michael) author. | Fagerjord, Anders, author.
Title: Digital humanities : knowledge and critique in a digital age / David M. Berry, Anders Fagerjord.
Description: Cambridge, England ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016048324 (print) | LCCN 2017010938 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745697659 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745697666 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780745697680 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745697697 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Digital humanities.
Classification: LCC AZ105 .B395 2017 (print) | LCC AZ105 (ebook) | DDC 001.30285--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048324
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
For Lorna M. Hughes and Andrew Prescott
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been written without the support and assistance of a large number of colleagues who have in various ways contributed to the project. So, first, we would like to individually thank our respective supporters.
David would like to thank Mansfield College, University of Oxford, for electing him a Visiting Fellow during 2015/16, which offered a hugely supportive and scholarly environment in which to complete this book – and especially Pam Berry, Tony Lemon and John Ovenden, with whom he enjoyed many Wednesday evening Formals. David would also like to thank colleagues in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex and the members of the Sussex Humanities Lab: particularly Caroline Bassett, Tim Hitchcock, Sally Jane Norman, Rachel Thomson and Amelia Wakeford, and, in the Computational Culture strand, Beatrice Fazi, Ben Roberts and Alban Webb. David is also grateful to the University of Sussex for support for the Sussex Humanities Lab and for digital humanities and computational media at Sussex – particularly Michael Davies, Debbie Foy-Everett and Alan Lester. He would also like to give thanks for the continued support of colleagues: Christian Ulrik Andersen, Armin Beverungen, Ina Blom, Melanie Bühler, Michael Bull, Mercedes Bunz, Natalia Cecire, Andrew Chitty, Faustin Chongombe, Christian De Cock, Natalie Cowell, Michael Dieter, Kathryn Eccles, Wolfgang Ernst, Leighton Evans, Gordon Finlayson, Paul Flather, Jan Freeman, Matthew Fuller, Steve Fuller, Alex Galloway, Craig Gent, David Golumbia, Ground Coffee House in Lewes (particularly Beth, John and Rick), Andres Guadamuz, David Hendy, Lorna M. Hughes, Tim Jordan, Athina Karatzogianni, Raine Koskimaa, Alan Liu, Paul Lodge, Geert Lovink, Thor Magnusson, The Mansfield College Porters, Chris Marsden, Ursula Martin, Derek McCormack, William Merrin, Peter Nagy, Jussi Parikka, Luciana Parisi, The Pelham Arms, Alison Powell, Andrew Prescott, Ned Rossiter, David De Roure, Lucinda Rumsey, Darrow Schecter, Paul Solman, Bernard Stiegler, Nathaniel Tkacz, Transmediale, Iris van der Tuin, Craig Vear, Pip Willcox and the many, many people he may have forgotten to include. Additionally, David would like to thank his Ph.D. students: Yilmaz Aliskan, Emma Harrison, Isla-Kate Morris and Carina Westling for their continued discussions. Many thanks also have to be expressed to Anders Fagerjord who has been a wonderfully collaborative and thoughtful co-writer. Finally, David would also like to thank his partner, Trine Bjørkmann Berry, and their children, Helene, Henrik Isak and Hedda Emilie, for accepting the disruption to family life from writing yet another book.
Anders would like to thank all his fantastic colleagues at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, particularly Terje Colbjørnsen, Charles Ess, Bente Kalsnes, Lucy Küng, Maren Moen, Marius Øfsti, Terje Rasmussen, Tanja Storsul, Espen Ytreberg, the members of the band Stimulus Response, and Gunnar Liestøl, who introduced him to digital humanities more than two decades ago. His Ph.D. students Joakim Karlsen and Kim Johansen Østby have also introduced him to new areas and ideas, for which he is truly grateful. The Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, let him share an office space there for several months when this book was being written, and he would like to give thanks for the hospitality and support extended by Rune Arntsen, Kurt Gjerde, Stein Unger Hitland, Leif-Ove Larsen and Terje Thue. While there, he also enjoyed many fruitful discussions, including those with Dag Elgesem, Jostein Gripsrud, Lars Nyre, Eirik Stavelin and Bjørnar Tessem. He would also like to thank his many friends and colleagues for continued support over the years, including Espen Aarseth, Cheryl Ball, Jay Bolter, Taina Bucher, Martin Engebretsen, Gail Hawisher, Steve Jones, Anders Olof Larsson, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, Andrew Morrison, Cuiming Pang, Jill Walker Rettberg and Scott Rettberg. Finally, he would like to thank David Berry, who first came up with the idea for this book and invited him to take part, something he has enjoyed immensely.
We would both like to thank the team at Polity, who have been very supportive throughout the writing process. We would also like to thank Marcus Leis Allion for his wonderful cover design and for agreeing to take on the project. We are grateful to all the colleagues who have supported the writing of this book, and especially those who hack and those who yack in the digital humanities.
1Introduction
This book is about the digital humanities, an exciting new field of research that emerged at the beginning of the 2000s.1 As digital technology has swept over the world, the humanities too have undergone a rapid change in relation to the use and application of digital technologies in scholarship, although the perceived effects of this are sometimes not always completely visible on the surface of the constituent disciplines. The internet, hand-held network computing devices such as smartphones and tablets, and even ‘smart watches’ have become so ingrained in our lives that it is difficult to remember how we managed without them. Similarly, databases and image archives, applications and digital tools have begun to make a large impact on both the kinds of resources that are available to humanities scholars and the methods we use. Humanities research has been irrevocably transformed, as indeed have everyday life, our societies, economies, cultures and politics. These changes are echoed in new ways of thinking about culture and knowledge, and, in light of this, the humanities are actively augmenting and rethinking their existing methods and practices. ‘Digital humanities’ as a term and a movement has, since its first use in 2001, been taken up by many scholars and universities, and, perhaps more strikingly, by most major funding bodies, but remains contentious and contested.2 Nonetheless, as a term, it helpfully situates humanities research that is self-consciously digital in its orientation, and assists in giving a sense of the kinds of research practice that are increasingly being shared and incorporated into humanities scholarship.
One need not talk to many humanists, however, before one learns that this label is an umbrella term for a variety of diverse practices, which often have a history that is older than that of the digital computer. Some voices also echo the opinion that digital humanities is somehow alien to the tradition of humanities, and may even be a threat to its values. In this book, we touch on some of these controversies and debates and seek to contribute to understanding of them and the ways in which they offer helpful critique, and, sometimes, anti-technology polemic.
This book builds on the theoretical and empirical work already done by fields such as media and communications, and connects them further to the field of digital humanities, particularly to develop and deepen the notion of a ‘critical digital humanities’. In our increasingly postdigital age, whether something is ‘digital’ or not is no longer seen as the essential question (see Berry and Dieter 2015). There are fewer ‘humanities issues’ and distinct ‘technical issues’ that can be neatly bifurcated. The question of whether something is or is not ‘digital’ will be increasingly secondary as many forms of culture become mediated, produced, accessed, distributed or consumed through digital devices and technologies. Thus, the argument of this book is that the digital humanities must be able to offer theoretical interventions and digital methods for a historical moment when the computational has become both hegemonic and post-screenic. With ‘post-screenic’, we gesture to a move away from the computer screen or visual interface as the key site of interaction. We think of the ‘digital’ as a previous historic moment when computation as digitality was understood in opposition to the analogue, rather than complementary, as we argue in this book. Instead of thinking in terms of digital vs analogue, the specific affordances of each form should be understood and used together – for example, paper archives combined with faceted search, or photographs analysed with statistical thematic analysis, etc. Thus, under our contemporary conditions, the modulations of the digital or different intensities of the computational are manifested as a postdigital moment. This includes thinking about the politics of disconnection and how the idea of slowing-down digital projects to ‘disrupt digital networks [might] be akin to what the slow food movement is to fast food: an opportunity to stop and question the meaning of progress’ (Mejias 2013: 159). The digital humanities, as a field, is unique in being positioned between technology and culture and can therefore think critically about how these cadences of the computational are made and materialized. But, perhaps more to the point, digital humanists as builders of these kinds of systems often have a sophisticated understanding of technologies, algorithms, software processes and their implementation, and consequently can contribute important insights into how humanistic technologies can be developed.
Technology is often identified as something done to the humanities (and the university more broadly) – that is, from outside the institution. Whether through economic pressures (cuts in funding, new teaching pressures, marketization, ‘do more with less’) or technical pressures (digital transformations in publishing industries, new technologies of management and control, Bibliometrics, Google Scholar, etc.), the result is that the humanities have sometimes felt under siege or have been called into question, and been questioned about their viability, relevance or purpose in the twenty-first century.
Our book is positioned in the middle of this debate. We aim to trace some of the genealogies from ‘computing in the humanities’ into digital humanities (trace, as a full history would require a whole other, much longer book). We seek to show the wide variety of practices, methods and inquiries that identify with digital humanities, and even some that, although may not identify as digital humanities, can offer useful contributions to the field. We then discuss the possible impact, as well as the limitations, of computational tools and methods for humanistic research. Finally, we argue that the humanities must also build theoretical understandings of computation in culture, just as much as humanists and media scholars have explored the role of writing, of image, and of the printing press. Otherwise, the humanities will make themselves increasingly distant from a society so reliant on ubiquitous digital technology, which might be better called a postdigital society (see Berry and Dieter 2015).
In recent years, there has been a steady flow of research publication within the various disciplines where digital humanities work is being carried out. Many important texts discussing and debating the contours of digital humanities have been published, which have been of great impact (e.g., Schreibman et al. 2004; Berry 2012a; Gold 2012; Svennson and Goldberg 2015). Digital humanities is, broadly speaking, the application of computation to the disciplines of the humanities. But, as these authors have reiterated, digital humanities is, and remains, a discipline very much under construction. Indeed, Pannapacker has been asked whether the term ‘digital liberal arts’ might be more useful (Pannapacker 2013), and Bernard Stiegler (2012) prefers the term ‘digital studies’, to widen the range of its research focus. Franco Moretti has also argued that ‘the term “digital humanities” means nothing’, explaining that ‘computational criticism has more meaning, but now we all use the term “digital humanities”’ (Moretti 2016). In any case, digital humanities is now very much identified with a certain digital ‘way’ of doing humanities research, which has been described as a computational turn in the humanities (see Berry 2011).
This ongoing contestation and debate means that ‘the territory of the digital humanities is currently under negotiation’ (Svennson 2010). This book therefore seeks to contribute to a wider mapping of these contours and possible futures, but argues for an additional critical turn in the digital humanities that would serve further to strengthen and embed its position in the academy.3 We believe there is a need to offer a tentative map of this growing field and a guide to the future trajectories of the discipline, and this book is an attempt to contribute to developing this important cognitive resource. By drawing such a map of the digital humanities, we also discuss and critique its strengths and weaknesses, through a critical digital humanities, where the use of computers and computer culture within the field, and more broadly within society and culture, is itself under scrutiny.
There is no single understanding of digital humanities as such, and we can find a lot of different definitions from practitioners who use the term in multiple ways depending on their fields. Indeed, digital humanists are ‘already united in their dislike of their own label, their dogged insistence that everything that’s being done has been going on since 1982 (or 1949 or 1736)’ (Meeks 2012). There is also the suspicion that the digital humanities represents a ‘management-friendly’ means of disciplining faculty or that digital humanists are selling out the very principles of the humanities in their use of new-fangled technology. Changing to the term ‘digital humanities’, as Hayles argues, was meant to signal that the field had emerged from the low-prestige status of ‘a support service into a genuinely intellectual endeavour with its own professional practices, rigorous standards, and exciting theoretical explorations’ (Hayles 2012). However, this has not quietened the sense that digital humanities has controversial implications for the humanities and the university. Indeed, we agree, but we will argue throughout the book that digital humanities is an important contributor to the humanities and to developing ‘computational’ thinking more generally. Whether this will strengthen the existing contours of the humanities or result in a radical reconfiguration remains to be seen.
The ‘digital humanities’ can be usefully contrasted with what Sterne (2015: 18) has called the ‘analogue humanities’, a term he uses as a heuristic for thinking about what the humanities are and how they contrast and intersect with the digital humanities. He argues: ‘the analog humanities refers to a nexus of methodological, technological, and institutional conditions across the humanities that have only come into clear focus in retrospect. They refer to the cultural and material infrastructures on which humanists depended and still depend. They were (and are) not uniform across fields. Just as “there is no single vision of the digital humanities, nor can a single vision be possible” . . . we could say the same for the analog formations of humanistic scholarship’ (2015: 19).4 This definition is useful in that it points to the importance of materiality and cultural techniques in relation to the epistemology and practices specific to a field of inquiry. Whilst it might overstate the disjuncture between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’, it draws attention to the way in which epistemology and practice change in relation to changes in media of storage, processing and transmission.5
We argue that even the non-digital will become bound up in the preservation possibilities offered by the digital. So the newly digital archive as documentation of the passing of time becomes increasingly critical, both as a source of historical understanding and as a site of identity and culture. It also becomes increasingly encoded in a form of digital knowledge representation (see Folsom 2007). Indeed, we now live within a time of computational abundance which we might think of in relation to the question of being ‘postdigital’, in as much as we are rapidly entering a moment when difficulty will be found in encountering culture outside digital media (Berry and Dieter 2015). Or perhaps any excess outside the digital, which has been termed the non-digital, will largely itself be displayed through the digital ephemera of society, and ironically kept only within computational databanks, if it is preserved at all.
The way in which culture, education and computation are colliding is usefully demonstrated in the example of students looking to study in higher education. In response, the universities focus on the curation of ‘high-quality content’ and capturing the paths that students follow to find that educative content. As many academics are realizing, students are increasingly finding out about university programmes and courses via Google and other private companies, which can target specific ads at them to create stronger links between education and consumerism in the minds of students. This is in addition to the intensive drive to produce metrics and ‘indicators of performance’ in relation to a sector that is increasingly finding that its students are being actively transformed into consumers through governmental and legislative changes. There are also new markets and providers in this area, for example Apollo Education Group (the owner of University of Phoenix and BPP University), and corporate education is now worth an estimated $155 billion. So it is not just a case of computation changing the content and forms of knowledge examined within the university. Computation is also making possible the changing of the university itself, its structures, and its relationship with students, aided by funding regimes driven by private and public actors, and by new regimes of monitoring, accounting and managerial control.
These new technologies also accelerate certain kinds of instrumental practices, such as modularization, mass education, private providers and new kinds of student (in the UK sometimes referred to as three broad market segments).6 New kinds of management are made possible, which can be combined with qualitative and quantitative monitoring and assessment – such as Britain’s REF (Research Excellence Framework) – and student feedback can be used directly to monitor academic ‘performance’.7 Indeed, as Gold (2012) argues, ‘at stake in the rise of the digital humanities is not only the viability of new research methods (such as algorithmic approaches to large humanities data sets) or new pedagogical activities (such as the incorporation of geospatial data into classroom projects) but also key elements of the larger academic ecosystem that supports such work’. This is creating a new visibility for the university and the existing practices of scholarship, collegiality, management, regulation, teaching and research (see Besser 2004 for a discussion of the digital library). As Gold further explains, ‘whether one looks at the status of peer review, the evolving nature of authorship and collaboration, the fundamental interpretive methodologies of humanities disciplines, or the controversies over tenure and casualized academic labor that have increasingly rent the fabric of university life, it is easy to see that the academy is shifting in significant ways’ (2012: ix). We might further add that computation is directly implicated in the possibility of implementing the changes through management information systems and technologies of monitoring and control that, in their granularity, are completely novel in the university.
In the UK, this is demonstrated by a new student tuition fee regime and changes in student recruitment patterns. A new vocationalism is detectable in students (and certainly in university management discourse), with employability required to be baked into undergraduate courses. This is increasingly connected to the digital, communications, media skills, etc., and sometimes understood as ‘21st-century skills’. Indeed, Silicon Valley is also turning its attention to the $1.3 trillion education ‘industry’. The university system costs many students a lot of money through tuition fees, and obtaining a small fraction of this money provides a significant sum. The ‘squeezed middle’ universities are rightly very concerned about having their core programmes and educational mission hollowed out by private ‘challenger’ institutions, who are often more willing to exploit these uncertain times in education.
For example, Coursera (for-profit), Udacity (for-profit), edX (notfor-profit) and many others involved in MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) ‘education platforms’ often cherry-pick the most lucrative teaching from universities and repackage it, leaving the public universities to pick up the more expensive, less popular or unfashionable subject areas. These types of education platform are not just tools: they also promote an internal reorganization of the university as it seeks to compete with marketdriven private providers, but also the digital media delivery that is central to MOOCs’ organizational logic. Indeed, MOOCs provide a model, based around mass education, ease of delivery (for example, 15–minute lectures) and highly polished packaged modules – so that, in many ways, they threaten to drain the most popular courses out of university teaching and into their systems, leaving behind expensive-to-teach and fragile subject areas. The excitement over MOOCs appears to have cooled somewhat and their purported participatory or democratic potential is increasingly rearticulated in terms of finding a smaller number of previously unidentified academically gifted students.8 Indeed, there has been a shift towards mostly vocational training and the notion of ‘augmenting’ traditional teaching, but the fact remains that this technical imaginary created by MOOCs, etc., has had a tremendous effect on how universities see themselves and their relationships with wider publics, governments and students. The pressure from MOOCs has also forced universities to spend vast sums of money defensively and, in many cases, needlessly, on ‘learning technologies’ that either fail or are little used, and on marketing, public relations and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Within this highly volatile situation, the digital humanities occupies a privileged location as both a highly informational discipline and one which appears at first glance to be closely aligned with the worst aspects of computerization and marketization of the university. In contrast, in this book we argue that digital humanities can offer a critical and theoretical contribution to the key debates around this digital technology and the humanities, and in particular to exploring the new trajectories offered by the changes in the university. By outlining those exploring ‘differing modes of engagement, institutional models, technologies and discursive strategies’ (Svennson 2010), and the issues that need to be critically interrogated and linked to the wider questions associated with critical approaches to digital humanities, new media and digital methods more generally, this book also argues for the digital humanities to become more keenly involved in the kind of cultural criticism called for by Liu (2012).
We further believe that the digital humanities should continue to extol the traditional values of the humanities, such as concerns for history, for aesthetics, for language and culture, and for philosophical understanding of human life and thought. Indeed, it is a field that is well anchored in the long history of independent liberal arts universities, and without any necessary connection to neoliberal capitalist ideologies or instrumentalism in education. In fact, as we go through the important debates surrounding the use of computation in the humanist disciplines, we will see that the main concern always is the disciplines themselves, and not performativity, markets or a move to being subsumed under computer science. Where the digital humanities have the power to transform the humanities is where the field opens new scales in research questions that always have been the concern of humanities scholars, but within a newly digital and computational context. As Busa argued in 1980 – and this remains relevant today – ‘the use of computers in the humanities has as its principal aim the enhancement of the quality, depth, and extension of research and not merely the lessening of human effort and time’ (1980: 89).9
A first necessary insight is to reject the idea that digital technology is invading the humanities. Computers were used for humanist ends from very early on in their history, and not only, as one might think, as mere storage for large libraries of text. Early computers were primarily built to calculate, and human text was used (alongside artillery firing tables and nuclear fission simulations) for such calculations, for example in machine translation (arguably the beginning of computational linguistics) and the creation of concordances (hailed by many as the first true digital humanities projects).10 Only when computers became more accessible and had more memory were they used to store and retrieve books and other texts. Another strand of humanist use of computers began in the second half of the 1960s, when new, advanced computer displays were used for experiments with hypertext and multimedia as new forms and genres of expression. In our book, we discuss the importance of these genealogies, combined additionally with another: the understanding of computing not from a computer science perspective, but from the perspective of philosophy (Berry 2011).
Having established this background, we attempt to paint a picture of the current state of the digital humanities, not by listing uses of digital technology in disciplines from archaeology to zoosemiotics, but by identifying some shared common principles. While it may have been possible a decade ago to go through the various disciplines to look at the internal debates and uses, there are now too many important projects discussed in too many specialized journals and books for us to treat them with any justice in a book such as this one. Instead, we direct our attention to digital materiality, looking at common ways of representing texts and other objects in computer systems, and how they are processed computationally, together with the practices associated with it.
Digital humanities is a field that often requires a team of people with diverse backgrounds. It is not uncommon that humanists form teams with experts in database programming and computer visualization and statisticians. We have aimed to make this book readable for a general humanities audience, which inevitably has made us leave out many of the finer details in any specialized area. This book will not teach you how to create a relational database or program an advanced algorithm (and you will not learn how to interpret archaeological findings or a Victorian novel either). For those finer details, there is a wide literature available (see, for example, Schreibman et al. 2004; Berry 2012a; Gold 2012; Svennson and Goldberg 2015). What we hope to do is to make visible the common principles, to prepare the ground for an informed discussion of those principles and the modes of engagement they allow. As we now see how digital technology opens new avenues for humanist scholarship, it is also a moment in time when we may go back and look at the earlier, ‘analogue’ humanists and realize how they also have been dependent on the technologies available to them.
Thinking and writing are always tightly related, and changes in humanist practice bring about changes in research writing. We do now see a new kind of research literature appear, online, distributed, hyperlinked and using multimedia and integrated links to online databases. These new developments in research writing are very much informed by hypertext and multimedia research, which we might see as a further contribution to a genealogy of digital humanities around the question of new forms of publication, open access and participatory knowledge practices (see Berry 2008; Jordan 2015).11
As research changes, writing changes, and also institutions change in order to accommodate these new possibilities better. We believe it is time for digital humanities to deepen its critical understanding of computer technology and its associated practices. That is the final purpose of our book: to collect the early threads of a critical digital humanities, and discuss where they may lead us in the future. The humanities have always been concerned with the contemporary tools for thought and communication, and today networked computers of all sizes are the main media for a working humanist. This is a question not only of histories, literatures and media but also of new philosophies for the twenty-first century, which need to assess critically the role of code and computing in contemporary thought.12
The field of digital humanities has tended to focus on tools and archives in relation to database collections of texts, artworks, scholarly works, dictionaries and lexicographic corpora. Digital humanists introduce methods that are new to the humanities, such as computer statistical analysis, search and retrieval or data visualization, and apply these techniques to archives and collections that are vastly larger than any researcher or research group can handle comfortably. Indeed, it is often claimed that ‘digital humanities practitioners need to possess a certain quotient of technical knowledge to be considered digital humanists’ (Koh 2014: 98). Too often that knowledge, often hard and painfully won through technical projects and programming, encourages the digital humanist onto the pathways already laid by computer science and other technical disciplines.
Many of these digital humanities collections and archives are available on the web or in digital databases, and the material they contain is more openly available. For example, historians can ‘sit in their offices and search through old records and valuable manuscripts kept in faraway places’, and art historians can ‘compare high-resolution digital photographs of paintings from collections in different countries’ (Boonstra et al. 2004: 26; Greenhalgh 2004: 32). But this networking of digital archives does not necessarily undermine the notion of shared community in digital humanities. Civility is a very important value, to the extent that sometimes it is claimed that ‘to be a digital humanist is to be “nice”: collegial, egalitarian, nonhierarchical, and able to work well with others’ (Koh 2014: 95), concepts that go back to the collegial roots of the university itself.13 Whether or not digital humanities offer a radically new way of working with source materials, its focus on collegiality and community are important humanistic principles in a digital age that is often cast as primarily about performance and efficiency.14
As we’ve seen, digital humanists are sometimes targeted as unwelcome messengers of the coming changes to culture and humanistic study. The digital humanities is then seen more often as a threat in relation to the future of the university and the humanities. Digital humanities can be seen as a connected humanities, able to create new kinds of employees, skills and knowledges appropriate for a ‘new economy’. It also sometimes appears to be a little too close to the kinds of instrumental logics that are seen with great scepticism by humanities scholars. As Grusin (2013) wrote: ‘is it only an accident that the emergence of digital humanities has coincided with the intensification of the economic crisis in the humanities in higher education? Or is there a connection between these two developments?’ Is it possible to draw a distinction between the optimism of the ‘digital’ humanities and the downbeat tone of the ‘crisis’ humanities (see McGann 2014).15 This is something we will return to throughout the book.16
There is a strong association with ‘making things’ in the digital humanities, which has been linked (both by digital humanists and others) with current concerns over ‘marketable skills’. Digital humanities questions and explores many issues, from digital storage and retrieval of all kinds of texts, sounds and imagery, to networked communication, to digital pedagogy. And here, of course, we mean computational media of all kinds, using digital media skills such as programming, design, web coding, database management and so on. It is therefore hardly surprising that its detractors see digital humanities as yet another move by neoliberalism/managerialism within the university. Digital humanities raises important questions about how to deploy instrumental rational techniques and practices within the humanities, sometimes insightfully and sometimes with disquieting implications for the humanities more widely. From questions about ‘knowledge representation’ to digital methods and research infrastructures, Drucker (2012) rightly asks, ‘can we engage in the design of digital environments that embody specific theoretical principles drawn from the humanities, not merely work within platforms and protocols created by disciplines whose methodological premises are often at odds with – even hostile to – humanistic values and thought?’ Indeed, as she explains, this ‘question is particularly pressing in light of the absorption of these visualization techniques, since they come entirely from realms outside the humanities – management, social sciences, natural sciences, business, economics, military surveillance, entertainment, gaming, and other fields in which the relativistic and comparative methods of the humanities play, at best, a small and accessory role’ (Drucker 2012: 86). These are important and pressing questions that reinforce the need for digital humanists to connect strongly with their disciplinary colleagues in the wider humanities, both to assess the direction of travel and to refresh and energize their research programmes.
Often the phrase ‘more hack, less yack’ is used in digital humanities to refer to their preference for a more technical orientation, such as programming, rather than theorizing about it. This is a very strong tendency in the digital humanities community, and often articulated in terms of the value of ‘building things’ at the expense of what is often seen as unnecessary ‘theory’. The construction and making of digital systems, archives, interfaces, visualizations and so on are often over-valorized, and the technology can very easily become the focus of a research project in digital humanities. Humanities scholars can also be easily dazzled by the technology, but also by the audience that these humanities–technical projects can attract – in contrast to the almost complete lack of interest among journalists and the public in most traditional humanities research. We argue that this is a limited and self-defeating aspect of digital humanities which urgently needs to become more self-reflexive and, yes, theoretical in its approaches, to widen its intellectual depth and breadth. Without a keen critical reflexivity, digital humanities is failing in its normative potential to contribute to the wider humanities, above and beyond its instrumental contributions.
Even a cursory glance at digital humanities communities reveals a technophile bias.17 Social media backchannels, blogging, visualization, programming and new hardware are all actively used. This translates into a heavy focus on tech in digital humanities, both discursively and in project terms. Social media usage is perhaps the most obvious example of this, where a lot of digital humanities discussion takes place. Often at conferences, the digital humanities ‘backchannel’ is a key way of following the conference’s digital humanities threads (some of which are never articulated outside of Twitter and Facebook, e.g. at the Modern Language Association). The early adopter mentality also translates easily into a ‘progressive’ discourse, contrasted with the ‘old-fashioned’ traditional humanities. These dichotomies are both real and imagined; productive and unproductive. Indeed, often the outputs of digital humanities research, such as code, archives, technical books, etc., are not conceived as scholarly output for tenure, and so on. This is a key source of contestation for both tenured and what are called ‘alternative academics’ (or #altac academics) – that is, holders of non-faculty professional positions in the university who still create and contribute to research activity (see Nowviskie 2010). But this computational turn has also been interpreted as a general move away from theoretical and hermeneutic concerns by the humanities, and a turn away from critical engagement (see Berry 2011; Cecire 2011b). As Lovink argues, ‘digital humanities, with its one-sided emphasis on data visualization, working with computer-illiterate humanities scholars as innocent victims, has so far made a bad start in this respect. We do not need more tools; what’s required are large research programs run by technologically informed theorists that finally put critical theory in the driver’s seat. The submissive attitude in the arts and humanities towards the hard sciences and industries needs to come to an end’ (Lovink 2012).
In other words, we can and should build humanistic tools and methods from a base that is informed with the norms and values of humanistic principles (see Feenberg 2002; Berry 2011). That is, to echo Drucker, to move ‘humanistic study from attention to the effects of technology (from readings of social media, games, narrative, personae, digital texts, images, environments), to a humanistically informed theory of the making of technology (a humanistic computing at the level of design, modeling of information architecture, data types, interface, and protocols)’ (Drucker 2012: 87). In the context of writing algorithms and building digital systems, this means that we need to consider the specific historical constellation of ideas and practices within which we experience algorithms and in which they are made and remade. We need to critique the idea of an ahistorical view of algorithms and the metaphors and analogies that are necessary to explain, but are not sufficient for understanding, algorithmic forms. This is particularly important when computational approaches fetishize the use of ‘scale’ and data as the new intellectual horizon, for work, action and intellectual inquiry, such that Big Data replaces the more important forms of critical reflection in the humanities.
For example, a key issue revolves around the questions raised by data mining and data analytics. Data mining requires researchers to explore the underlying database, the system data flows, problems related to cross-platform data and their architectures and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and related computational technologies and problematics. The increasing corporate use of sophisticated software systems to filter, curate and sift through the data for customer, web, user and so forth requires the development of pattern-matching algorithms that can operate on large data collections of routine information. Of course, this information is not then necessarily presented in textual form – rather, it is visualized, which makes it more amenable for visual pattern recognition by the user. These techniques are crossing over rapidly into the humanities. This creates a very different experience for the reading of or working with texts or other humanities artifacts. Because of this, important questions need to be addressed in relation to how seeing through computation changes what we see and what counts. As Svennson explains, computers in humanities computing often take on the role of ‘calculating engines . . . the use of computers as a tool may be an ideology of cognition and functionalism’ (Svennson 2010).
There is some justification in these concerns. These issues have been characterized as the difference between the ‘dark side’ and the ‘light side’ of the digital humanities.18 Grusin argues, ‘it is largely due to their instrumental or utilitarian value that university administrators, foundation officers, and government agencies are eager to fund DH [digital humanities] projects, create DH undergraduate and graduate programs, and hire DH faculty, it is also the case that this neoliberal instrumentalism reproduces within the academy (in both traditional humanities and digital humanities alike) the precaritization of labor that marks the dark side of information capitalism in the twenty-first century’ (Grusin 2014: 79). And, as Johnson further explains, ‘the “dark side” is that there are places we don’t see, push out, abuse, erase’ (Johnson 2016). Whilst Grusin’s dark–light binary is obviously problematic in that it is far too abstracted from the reality of much digital humanities work, it is nonetheless helpful for situating some of the debates around pressures on the humanities that are being vocalized against developments in the academy. The digital humanities are sometimes seen as the site of a bureaucratic technocratic logic, ‘minimum publishable units’ (‘MPUs’), a divided academy between tenured and non-tenured (#altac), and so forth. Thought to be closely linked to technical concerns, digital humanists often communicate both in a technical language (e.g. MOOCs, backchannels, XML) and through a different medium (e.g. social media and blogs). The funding available also tends to become more technically oriented and seems to have radically different concerns from that of traditional humanist scholarship. Hence, Grusin further claims that ‘digital humanities reproduces structurally both within itself and among the humanities writ large the proliferation of temporary, precarious labor that has marked late twentieth- and twenty-first-century global capitalism’ (Grusin 2014: 87).
As shown by the unabashed rise in importance of statistics and computational techniques for the humanities more widely across the higher education sector, and both the increase in funding streams and the emergence of digital humanities centres, labs, self-designated researchers and disciplinary apparatus, it is clear that the digital humanities is a growing field. One can think of the way in which Big Data analysis of cultural data, such as social media streams and Facebook networks, has so easily become a tool for the advertising industry to use sentiment analysis to nudge customers and sell products. By ‘Big Data’, we mean data that ‘pushes at the limits of traditional relational databases as tables of rows and columns, and requires new ways of querying and leveraging data for analysis . . . [and] big data is big to the extent that it exceeds and changes human capacities to read and make sense of it’ (Amoore and Piotukh 2015: 343). Unsurprisingly with the creation of new funding streams (such as through the American and British research councils NEH and the AHRC), universities have begun to reorient towards this new research agenda with new programmes, research projects and centres, and the development of new disciplinary apparatus. These concerns over the use of technology and the changes in funding seen to link it to wider society resonate back within the academy where the varieties of computation can be conflated into fears of neoliberal attempts to use technology to discipline the academic world.
It is certainly the case that the ‘programming industries’ in Silicon Valley are interested in creating new forms of institutionalized ‘expertise’, and the university is another site of knowledge creation that seems ripe for ‘disruption’. Part of these companies’ strategy is to use data-mining and Big Data techniques to collect the tacit knowledge of users and their ‘data exhaust’ and store them in databases and data lakes. These databases, combined with heuristic algorithms, create ‘applied knowledge’ and are capable of making ‘judgements’ in specific use cases, including the instrumentalization of humanities knowledge. But we want to argue that computational systems and practices can and should be created by humanists for humanists. This is crucially where digital humanities, with its focus on academic development and uses of technology, is exemplary and offers the possibility of a countervailing model for how computation might serve the humanities, rather than the other way around. As McGann argues, ‘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’ (McGann n.d.).19 It goes without saying that these contributions have to move beyond the purely instrumental and mechanical automation of processing of humanities materials.
Computation has compressive effects and generates flattening metaphors, and the visual language of computation tends towards an encounter, maximized perhaps by its tendency towards spatiality, to transform time from a diachronic to a synchronic experience and often into a discrete output. For example, history itself may be re-presented through the screen through a number of computation functions and methods that make it seem geometric, flat and simultaneous, which can be creative and generative as a contribution to humanities scholarship. Indeed, Hitchcock has argued that ‘academic historians have yet to effectively address the implications of the online and the digital for their scholarship, or to rise to the challenge that these resources present’ (Hitchcock 2013: 20). The danger is, however, that a sense of history then becomes a sense of real-time interactions, not so much distant and elusive, whether as cultural or individual memory, but here and now, spectacular and vividly represented and re-presented. These temptations are widespread when using computation as problems of fields are backgrounded and history and difference can be given a ‘presentist’ focus. Using new digital methods, related to studying ‘old’ historical archives, raises similar problems when the rich complexity and materiality of an archive is translated into a digital form. Hitchcock argues that this has ‘resulted in the substantial deracination of knowledge, the uprooting, or “Googleization”, of the components of what was once a coherent collection of beliefs and systems for discovering and performing taxonomies on information’ (2013: 14). But it is important to note that this problem is not inevitable – rather, it requires that humanities scholars ensure that they are closely involved in the technical work or that they can safeguard the archive and curate the way in which it is translated and encoded.20 But this will not be easy, in terms either of learning these skills or of getting disciplines actively to contribute to capacity building around these issues. Prescott signals his frustrations with some academics when he argues ‘the only time that the corduroyed Colonel Blimps of the British historical establishment have grudgingly bestirred themselves from their deep slumber to engage extensively with digital matters was when they belatedly realized that changes in open access might upset the cosy financial arrangements that provided a life-support system for ailing learned societies, and a hasty rearguard action was mounted to try to preserve the status quo’ (Prescott 2014: 340).
To be able to ‘confront the digital’, as Hitchcock (2013) suggests, requires that humanists take digital technology more seriously. This involves thinking through the theoretical and philosophical questions raised by protocols, databases and codework, in as much as fused constructs of encoded information, technology and media are used to construct new forms of archive. Indeed, the ineluctable co-presence of code both operationally behind the scenes and phenomenally in a work’s experiential form, is still to be explored adequately in digital humanities.
Part of this has to involve being attendant to technical projects’ history, presented through databases, code and algorithms, and ensuring that, rather than the ‘code’ leading the project, the humanist is always ensuring the responsiveness of the specification and design of the technical system – even when this creates further headaches, as inevitably it will, for the programmers and project managers. These are important aspects for understanding computation in this postdigital world and a key factor in getting a grip on the challenge of critical thinking within a computational milieu (Berry and Dieter 2015).
This means moving away from a comparative notion of the digital, contrasted with other material forms such as paper, celluloid or photopaper, and instead beginning to think about how the digital is modulated within various materialities with specific affordances. Thus, the contrast between strictly ‘digital’ or ‘analogue’ no longer makes sense. Indeed, we need to think in terms of modulation of the digital
