There are dimensions in text. They’re inherent to both the text and our interpretations of it. Layers, texture. But those dimensions are usually flattened in the way academics present our insights on our field to the public. Something that feels very vivid–the texture of miasma and contagion theories and the way they apply to Gothic literature–is something boring or flat to engage with as the average person. If you’re particularly lucky as an academic, someone might ask you a question. It’s far more likely that question will be “Why does this matter?” The texture is lost somewhere, in the translation between academics and the public.
Because Digital Humanities (DH) is a responsive field, this is where you can manage to retain some of that texture. In the methods of analyzing text, you can illustrate the texture of your intention. When you digitally map the occurrence of keywords in a piece of Gothic fiction and link those words to contagion and miasma, you begin to convey precisely what you mean to someone else. Your insights become visible and your choices become clearly political. And even beyond what dimensions are added through the additional choices you have to make, the choices you were already making become visible to both you and your audience. The process of translating insights about a piece of text into the digital realm forces a process of understanding the dimensions of that text. The layers stop being an assumption of the insight, and become the centrepiece.
That process of understanding is, in my opinion, the most valuable thing to come from DH. It’s impossible to control how people will respond to and interpret a thing that you make. DH puts you in a much better position to communicate your ideas more clearly, but that too can have flaws or gaps between academics and the public that are difficult to identify except through trial and error (although that process is also enabled through digital humanities in a way that is not possible through traditional methods of publishing academic ideas). However, it is certain that the process of thinking through what choices you are making and what elements you are communicating–what you care about and what you dismiss–is a process that results in a much more comprehensive understanding of what you are trying to say. That is how you understand the textures, dimensions, and layers you are playing with in humanities.
This is such a lyrically written post, I really enjoyed reading it. I like the way you frame ‘texture’ as something inherent to texts but often lost in the translation between academic insight and public-facing scholarship. Your suggestion that Digital Humanities can retain, or even foreground, this texture by making interpretive choices more visible feels persuasive, and it made me curious about which methods or forms of presentation you have in mind. For instance, some of the database-driven projects we discussed in class, such as the William Blake Archive, seem deliberately under-shaped by the creator’s own interpretation. They function more as archival tools than as critical arguments, which arguably prioritises clarity and openness over a narrower interpretive framing. I wondered whether this is the kind of approach you see as preserving textual ‘texture’, or whether you are thinking of projects where interpretation is more explicitly built into the digital form itself. If so I wondered if there were any projects or methods that you were thinking of specifically. Clarifying this would help me understand more precisely how you see DH operating in relation to interpretation and critique.
I like the idea of turning choices you were already making more visible to the reader. I wonder what you mean about the idea of interesting ideas not being able to be communicated properly to the reader via traditional humanities form. It’s interesting to consider what specifically it is about traditional form that makes it so inherently uninteresting, or atleast comparatively uninteresting. Is it the form of the text itself to be blamed there or the author? In what ways is trying to make the traditional humanities engaging frowned upon or difficult to do? It definitely has got me thinking that perhaps one of the benefits of engagement perhaps isn’t just the form, but maybe the nature of how traditional humanities even conducts itself as academia. Something that digital humanities is far more free from to therefore be more creative, and as a result preserve that “texture”.