Beyond the skills and knowledge with which the Narrative and Computational Text Analysis intensive equipped me, I found it a valuable space for orienting myself a little more within the interdisciplinary space which my work will have to occupy. It is so far the closest fit I have found to my own interests—for once, I was able to start a sentence engaging with literary analysis and end it with data and computation, or vice versa, without feeling the need to translate one discipline’s language into the other’s for the sake of my audience. And even though my art and design work were not entirely relevant to our conversations, user experience and interaction were. I was excited by the particular approach described in one course text (Fitzgerald and Cordell’s chapter on 19th-century vignettes and virality) which embraced rather than simplified uncertainty in computational analysis, and which treated the messy parts of data which would not fit neatly into a frame as the starting point for interesting discussion, rather than proof that computational analysis is pointless or that the data are of little use. Seeing a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods which did not try to paint the former as oversimplistic or the latter as overly subjective was a really encouraging experience.
However, it also showed me that digital humanities in the narrower sense (meaning specifically the application of digital methods to humanities concerns) is not precisely the work I want to do, as fascinating as I find it. All of the questions we raised during the intensive about digital media, representation and identification in stories, and contemporary narratology were vital questions to pose to our increasingly digitized world, but they all ultimately fed back into the humanities disciplines which are already largely convinced of the value of things like stories and representation. They delved deeply into interesting nuances and dilemmas there, and I don’t mean to suggest that such work cannot ripple out from humanities scholarship to change society as a whole, but this kind of work does seem to hold the digital world primarily as an object and method of study. Whereas I see it as a context which encapsulates not only my research but also the people my research needs to convince, or at least to put in conversation with each other. I’m more interested in what happens when humanities and digital methodologies combine, or when the drastically different theories vital to both are put in conversations that are more nuanced than a straight dichotomy.
