Comments on Alex Reid on Digital Humanities

I’ve taken a passage from a post by Alex Reid (ancestral data: practicing the digital humanities #dhdebates) and interpolated comments. Reid’s words are in italics, mine are not.

Thus perhaps we are left with pondering what Meillassoux's claim that "what is mathematically conceivable is absolutely possible" means for digital humanities. At some point, would one want to claim that digital humanities scholarship produces knowledge that is ontologically different from that offered by conventional criticism, in that, like the ancestral scientific knowledge Meillassoux describes, it describes conditions outside correlation?

Not having read Meillassoux there’s an obvious facet of this I can’t address, but I note the mention of mathematics; Chomsky made a certain use of mathematical argument to precipitate a revolution in the study of language.

But, sure, why not make such an ontological claim about the product of digital humanities scholarship (at least some of it)? It’s clear to me on the face of it that it yields a different KIND of knowledge (see my recent post, Distant Reading in Lévi-Strauss and Moretti). But it hadn’t occurred to me state this difference as one of ontological kind. THAT is a most interesting suggestion. Note, that while we’re talking of knowledge, the suggestion is about the ontology of knowledge, not about epistemology.

I'm not sure what the answer is to that question. Neither is Witmore. However, I think it might turn the complaint about the lack of theory in digital humanities on its head.

I should think so, yes.

At the same time, such questions need to be investigated carefully. It is all to[o] clear that the various populist detractors of the digital humanities offer warnings that DH will offer itself as a quasi-science and start making scientific truth claims based on data. I don't think that's likely to happen.

Hmmm ... Why the shivers over the possibility of science cooties? ... Ah, I see, it's a setup.

However, it is still a misunderstanding of the problem, at least as I see it. Here, again from a Latourian perspective, the problem comes from how we understand the sciences. Instead, briefly, if we think of scientists as constructing knowledge through use of methods, tools, etc., then we can see the digital humanities in the same way. It's not that dh is true but rather that it is constructed in a different way from conventional humanities.

Yes, it’s about HOW knowledge is constructed.

It begins with a recognition that texts are real objects in the world and seeks to describe them on those terms.

Again, yes. And I do think that description is where we must begin. I would further note that useful description is far from an obvious task. By way of example I note, first, that it took naturalists decades and centuries to invent and use the descriptive techniques that gave Darwin the knowledge base on which he could construct his account of the origin of species. Second, the 1953 paper by Watson and Crick in which they set out the structure of the DNA molecule, that was a piece of descriptive work. But there was nothing obvious about it (see comments in this post about abstract pictures).

Speculative realism does offer a way to think through that process of description in philosophical terms.

I would like to think so, though it’s not obvious to me that it does. In any event, methods tend to arise in the concrete practice of solving problems, not the philosophical contemplation thereof. That's secondary.