A precursory definition of Digital Humanities might be the utilisation of technology in order to better understand the humanities, particularly in a time when the digital world is rapidly becoming central to our daily lives, providing the ability to utilise a critical humanities background in analysing the digital world. Paraphrased from today’s seminar; ‘rigidity of computer and epistemological structures in contrast to humanities scholars wider understanding of culture, literature, language etc..’ The Digital Humanities also incorporates ideas around accessibility and responsibly of scholars and institutions to make their work available to the public, particularly publicly funded academic institutions. One end or goal of the field might be keeping the humanities current and promoting flexible types of thinking, particularly in the online world, when cultural or political issues are increasingly presented in bite-sized formats and as ‘black and white,’ often without nuance.
This is a very interesting idea, especially your mention of “flexible types of thinking”. I think DH allows for more representations of analysis, rather than just an essay / article / lit review / printed anthology. Perhaps this is achieved through a purely aesthetic method. I’m thinking about the graphs we looked at in class: eye-catching colours, visual peaks and troughs, quasi-pictoral diagrams. But what do these vibrant infographics actually tell us, without some relevant content presented in a boring, “black and white” way? Is Digital Humanities not just totally dependant on a regular Humanities?
Perhaps you can argue the same of literary criticism: a creatively responsive responsive discipline, rather than one that is purely and primarily, creative. But isn’t a text that anyway? Relational, depandant on context? I’m getting sucked into the post-modern chasm… A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile
than ever before … ect. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition)
I understand the lack of nuance that you suggest exists in the current technological state of the world, and I certainly agree that about the bite-sized information blasts, but I don’t think we should “dumb down” humanities in order to cater to people who don’t want to enagage meaningfully with academia. (also, I don’t think you’re suggesting that, I just have a fear of this after reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad) BUT we should do everything to engage access and excite the public! So yes, maybe DH is a great entry point to the H! Long live public scholarship!
I suppose my overall question is: Why can’t we just have a DH analytical approach to a regular English essay question? Why does it have to be a whole separate sphere and academic discipline altogether?
I particularly appreciate you mentioning how online culture increasingly presents information in ‘bite-sized’, ‘black and white’ formats, as I think there is a real risk that this logic could bleed into the digitisation of scholarly texts. Indeed, the manipulation of texts for screen-based consumption is unavoidable, as Johanna Drucker notes in ‘Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing’, ‘Texts that are digitised and in the structure of an underlying database have undergone elaborate acrobatics to produce readable texts,’ highlighting how texts are altered just in order to function within digital systems.
Therefore, when considering how Digital Humanities place strong emphasis on accessibility – especially in making scholarly material available outwith academic institutions – there is a risk that texts fall to capitalist and consumerist tactics of snappy titles, less condensed graphs, and shorter, more digestible paragraphs which are associated with screens (especially since the private company Google is a main player in digitising books). The reason this is so important is because the Humanities Studies, especially English Lit, demonstrate that the way information is presented can be just as important as the information it presents and so formatting and editing information around online appeal and functionality could be to the detriment of intellectual nuance, depth, and impact.