Analog vs. Digital: How general is the contrast?

I've been thinking about computation and the brain recently and decided to bump this post from 2016 to the top because it discusses the distinction between digital and analog.  When I started reading about computers in the 1960s every introductory discussion would mention that distinction. But by the time personal computers had become widespread those introductory discussions no longer mentioned analog computing. See the graph below.

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The distinction between analog and digital computers and, more generally, between analog and digital phenomena, has been an important one in contemporary thinking. It is central to David Golumbia’s The Cultural Logic of Computation, where Golumbia says (p. 21):

...a rough approximation of my thesis might be that most of the phenomena in each sphere [covered in this book], even if in part characterizable in computational terms, are nevertheless analog in nature. They are gradable and fuzzy; they are rarely if ever exact, even if they can achieve exactness. The brain is analog; language is analog; society and politics are analog. Such reasoning applies not merely to what we call the “human species” but to much of what we take to be life itself...

Mark Liberman took issue with that statement in a post at Language Log, Is language “analog”?, in which he argued that “crucial aspects of human speech and language are NOT "analog" — are not continuously variable physical (or for that matter spiritual) quantities.” While I agree with Liberman on that point, that is not my point here; if that interests you, by all means read Liberman’s post. Rather, I want to recount something that came up in the discussion, which, in some measure, depended on just what these two terms mean.

I went on to ask when analog and digital began to be used in opposition to one another. It is easy enough to think of slide rules as analog devices and the abacus as a digital device, but is that how they were thought of when they originated?

The Wikipedia entry on analog computer lists a bunch of mechanical, electrical and electronic devices in the late 19th and into the 20th century, but did the people who conceived and used them explicitly conceptualize them as specifically analog in kind? I've run an ngram query on “analog,digital”: 

 

 

The lines for both terms hug the X axis at the bottom of the chart until about 1950 and then both start up, with “digital” quickly outstripping “analog.” The McCulloch-Pitts neuron dates to the early 1940s and was digital in character. Von Neumann discusses analog and digital in his 1958 Computer and the Brain; indeed, that contrast is one of the central themes of the book, if not THE central theme. How much contrastive discussion was there before then?

There’s certainly been a lot of such discussion after then. FWIW, when I started reading elementary accounts of computing and computers in the 1960s, analog vs. digital was a standard topic. At some time during the personal computing era I began noticing that popular articles no longer mentioned analog computing.

 

What I'm getting at is that it may be a mistake to treat the terms as having a well-settled meaning that we can take as given. That may in fact be true for a substantial range of cases. But that need not imply that our sense of the meanings of these terms is fully settled. Are we still working on it?

Liberman responded:

The original sense-extension of analog, as in "analogy", was in the context of one signal (for instance sound as time functions of air pressure) being represented by another (in that case sound represented analogously by voltage in a wire). And the original sense-extension of digital was in the context of a continuous time-function being represented by sequence of numbers (= "digits"). I would have thought that in both cases, the origins were in engineering discussions of telephone technology, but Nyquist's 1928 paper [PDF] doesn't use either word in this way, nor does Claude Shannon in 1948 [PDF]. The OED's earliest citations to this sense of analog are in discussion of "analog" vs. "impulse-type" computers, e.g.

1941 J. W. Mauchly Diary 15 Aug. in Ann. Hist. Computing (1984) 6 131/2 Computing machines may be conveniently classified as either ‘analog’ or ‘impulse’ types. The analog devices use some sort of analogue or analogy, such as Ohm's Law.., to effect a solution of a given equation. [Note] I am indebted to Dr. J. V. Atanasoff of Iowa State College for the classification and terminology here explained.

Note that the “analogy” these is not between a continuous signal and a series of numbers, but between an equation to be solved in one (discrete or continuous) domain and the physics of some machine's internal operations.

Thus it seems that the contrast between analog and digital is a relatively recent one and was originally made in a relatively narrow technical domain. So when we're trying to figure out whether or not or in what way language is analog or digital we're extending the contrast from a situation where it was relatively well defined to a very different situation. In the case of language we don't really know what’s going on and we’re using the analog/digital contrast as a tool for helping us figure it out. And the same is certainly true for nervous systems.

In the case of Golumbia’s example of celluloid film we have a technology that predates that analog/digital contrast. In the context of that distinction I find it reasonable to think of the discrete presentation of frames as digital in character, but I don't off-hand see that the digital concept gives further insight into how the film technology functions. As for digital video or high resolution digital ‘film’ (whether printed to celluloid or digitally projected), the effect on the human nervous system is pretty much the same as that of celluloid film. The frame rate may be different, but in all cases it exceeds the flicker-fusion rate of the visual system so that what we see is continuous motion.

Liberman responded:

FWIW, the distinction in mathematics between “discrete” and “continuous” (in various senses of both) goes back quite a ways, as does the idea of mathematical concepts as symbolically-encoded propositions. But in the end I don't think it's helpful to try to decide on a single binary global classification of issues like whether a function is differentiable, or what it means to describe a band-limited time function as a Fourier series, or whether digitally-encoded music is the same as or different from an analog tape recording, or whether words are discretely encoded in the brain as sounds or as meanings or in whatever other ways. Though all such questions are conceptually inter-related in various ways, each has its own properties, and trying to find one simple metaphor to rule them all is a recipe for confusion.

And that’s where I think we are. The use of a global contrast between analog and digital may have some value in relatively informal discussions, but it’s problematic where precision is required. In those cases we should seek terms crafted to the properties of the domain under discussion.

Cultural Logic or Transcendental Interpretation? – Golumbia on Chomsky’s Computationalism

New working paper. Title above, download sites, abstract, TOC, and Introduction below.

SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2862006

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/29570825/Cultural_Logic_or_Transcendental_Interpretation_Golumbia_on_Chomskys_Computationalism

Abstract: In The Cultural Logic of Computation David Golumbia offers a critique of Chomsky and of computational linguistics that is rendered moot by his poor understanding of those ideas. He fails to understand and appreciate the distinction between the abstract theory of computation and real computation, such as that involved in machine translation; he confuses the Chomsky hierarchy of language types with hierarchical social organization; he misperceives the conceptual value of computation as a way of thinking about the mind; he ignores the standard account of the defunding of machine translation in the 1960s (it wasn’t working) in favor of obscure political speculations; he offers casual remarks about the demographics of linguistics without any evidence, thus betraying his ideological preconceptions; and he seems to hold a view of analog phenomena that is at odds with the analog/digital distinction as it is used in linguistics, computation, and the cognitive sciences.

CONTENTS

Introduction: How can you critique what you don’t understand? 3

Computing, Abstract and Real 3

Computationalism 5

Why Chomsky’s Ideas Were so Popular 8

Hierarchy in Theory and Society 10

The Demise of MT: Blow-Back on Chomsky? 11

White Males, Past Presidents of the ACL, and a Specious Binary 13

Is David Ferrucci a Neoliberal Computationalist? 15

Conclusion: Cultural Logic as Transcendental Interpretation? 17

Appendix 1: Pauline Jacobson on Linguistics and Math 18

Appendix 2: Analog vs. Digital: How general is the contrast? 19

 

Introduction: How can you critique what you don’t understand?

As many of you know, David Golumbia is one of three authors of an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books that that offered a critique of the digital humanities (DH): Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities. The article sparked such vigorous debate within the DH community that I decided to investigate Golumbia’s thinking. I’ve known about him for some time but had not read his best known book:

David Golumbia. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Harvard University Press, 2009.

I’ve still not read it in full. But I’ve read enough to arrive at a conclusion: Golumbia’s grasp of computation is shaky.

That conclusion was based on a careful reading of Golumbia’s second chapter, “Chomsky’s Computationalism,” with forays into the first, “The Cultural Functions of Computation,” and a look at the fourth, “Computationalist Linguistics”. I published my remarks to the web on July 15, 2010 under the title "Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics". Since then I’ve made other posts about Golumbia and participated in discussions about his conception of computing at Language Log, a group blog devoted to linguistics. I’ve taken those discussions and added them to my original post to produce this working paper.

* * * * *

Let’s begin where I started in July, with a question: Why Chomsky?

Chomsky is one of the seminal thinkers in the human sciences in the last half of the twentieth century. The abstract theory of computation is at the center of his work. His early work played a major role in bringing computational thinking to the attention of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers and thus helped catalyze the so-called cognitive revolution. At the same time Chomsky has been one of our most visible political essayists. This combination makes him central to Golumbia’s thinking, which is concerned with the relationship between the personal and the political as mediated by ideology. Unfortunately his understanding of Chomsky’s thinking is so tenuous that his critique of Chomsky tells us more about him than about Chomsky or computation.

First I consider the difference between abstract computing theory and real computing, a distinction to which Golumbia gives scant attention. Then I introduce his concept of computationalist ideology and criticize his curious assertion that computational linguistics “is almost indistinguishable from Chomskyan generativism” (p. 47). Next comes an account of Chomsky’s popularity that takes issue with Golumbia’s rather tortured account, which emphasizes their appeal to a neoliberal ideology that is at variance with Chomsky’s professed politics. From there I move to his treatment of the Chomsky Hierarchy, pointing out that it is a different kind of beast from hierarchical power relations in society. The next two sections examine remarks that are offered almost as casual asides. The first remark is a speculation about the demise of funding for machine translation in the late 1960s. Golumbia gets it wrong, though he lists a book in his bibliography that gets it right. Then I offer some corrective observations in response to his off-hand speculation about the ideological demographics of linguistics.

Is David Ferrucci a Neoliberal Computationalist? Some notes on ideology, practice, and society

I am in the process of revising my post, Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics, and reposting it as a downloadable PDF. The following is some of the new material for the revision.

Who you may ask, is David Ferrucci. He’s the man who led IBM’s Watson team to victory over human Jeopardy champions. He subsequently left IBM for a hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates [1]. As such he works at the heart of corporate neoliberalism. But is he a computationalist in Golumbia’s sense? Does he think the mind is fundamentally a computer?

First, we must realize that Watson was and is a straight-up engineering effort [2]. There is no intention to simulate a human mind. The objective was to achieve a specific practical result by whatever means worked.

With that in mind, let’s look at a snippet from one of the many interviews Ferrucci did after the Jeopardy win. Time Magazine asked him [3]:

Artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once said that consciousness is like a simple memory chip in the brain. Is a conscious computer possible?

Over beers, I could talk for hours and hours about that. But it's a question best left to a philosophical treatment.

I think that reply is worth thinking about. Ferrucci makes a distinction between what he does on the job, which is craft state of the art AI systems, and what’s best left for philosophical reflection. Of course, for philosophers, what Ferrucci calls “philosophical treatment” IS their job.

It’s also interesting that Ferrucci wasn’t willing to offer philosophical speculation in this interview. Why not? I’m guessing it was a matter of (informal) professional ethics and that he was being interviewed about work for which he was professionally responsible. So that set those boundaries on what he was willing to say?

Whatever.

Let us now imagine that we’re in a bar and that the entire Watson team was drinking beer and talking philosophy. That’s twenty or so people, likely broken into three or more groups. On general principle I’m guessing that we’d hear a wide variety of opinions on whether or not the brain is a computer, whether it is digital or analog, whether or not artificial computers can be conscious, and so forth. Moreover I would imagine that some on the team have given a good deal of thought to the philosophical issues and have explored the professional literature while others have not. It is even possible that one’s commitment to a philosophical position is somewhat independent of how much one has looked at the relevant literature. For some the lure of Star Trek is likely to be more imaginatively compelling than arcane arguments in philosophy of mind. I’m guessing that the conversations would be interesting free-for-alls.

Why Chomsky’s Ideas Were so Popular

I am in the process of revising, Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics, and uploading it as a downloadable PDF. The following is from the new material going into the revision.

At the beginning of the chapter on Chomsky, Golumbia speculates that Chomsky’s ideas were so popular because they filled an existing need (p. 31):

[...] despite Chomsky’s immense personal charisma and intellectual acumen, it is both accurate and necessary to see the Chomsky revolution as a discourse that needed not so much an author as an author-function – a function “tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses” (Foucault 1965, 130).

I believe he is correct in this, that the intellectual climate was right for Chomsky, though I’m skeptical about his analysis.

Golumbia goes on to suggest that nascent neoliberalism provided the ideological matrix in which Chomsky’s ideas flourished (p. 32). More specifically (p. 32):

Chomsky insists that the only reasonable focus for analysis of cognitive and linguistic matters is the human individual, operating largely via a specific kind of rationality [...]; second, specifically with regard to the substance both of cognition and of language, Chomsky argues that the brain is something very much like one of the most recent developments in Western technology; the computer.

What is vital to see in this development is not merely the presence of these two views but their conjunction: for while one can imagine any number of configurations according to which the brain might be a kind of computer without operating according to classical rationalist principles (a variety of recent cognitive-scientific approaches, especially connectionism [...] offer just such alternatives), there is a natural fit between the computationalist view and the rationalist one, and this fit is what proves so profoundly attractive to the neoliberal academy.

Before going on, note that parenthetical remark in the second paragraph. We will return to it in a moment.

It is one thing to argue that Chomskyian linguistics dovetails nicely with neoliberalism, but it is something else to argue that it is attractive only to neoliberalism, and it is this latter that Golumbia seems to be arguing. And there he encounters an immediate problem: Chomsky’s own politics. For Chomsky’s own “real-world politics” (my scare quotes) are quite unlike the politics Golumbia finds lurking in his linguistics. He unconvincingly glosses over this by pointing out that Chomsky’s “institutional politics are often described as exactly authoritarian, and Chomsky himself is routinely described as engaged in ‘empire building’” (p. 33). Authoritarian empire building is common enough in the academy, but what has that to do with the radical left views that Chomsky has so consistently argued in his political essays?

To be sure, Chomsky is only a single case of divergence between real-world politics and ideology, but it is an important one as Golumbia has made Chomsky himself the center of his argument for the confluence between computationalist ideology and conservative politics. If the center does not hold, is the connection between real-world politics and computationalist ideology as close as Golumbia argues?

There’s a problem with this story, which is after all a historical one. And history implies change. That parenthetical reference to connectionism as providing an alternative to “classical rationalist principles”, that gives us a clue about the history. While it’s not at all clear to me that connectionism is meaningfully different from and opposed to those classical rationalist principles, let’s set that aside. While connectionism has roots in the 1950s and 1960s (if not earlier), the same time that Chomsky’s ideas broke through, it didn’t really become popular until the 1980s, by which time neoliberalism was no longer nascent. It was visibly on the rise. Shouldn’t a visible and powerful neoliberalism have been able to suppress conceptions inconsistent with it? Shouldn’t those classical rationalist principles become more prevalent with the rise of neoliberalism rather than retreating to the status of but one conception among many?

Connectionist ideas flourished within an intellectual space that originated in the 1950s, and Chomsky’s ideas were catalytic, but certainly not the only ones (as we’ll soon see). As a variety of thinkers began to explore that space, some of them were attracted to different ideas; at the same time, the originating ideas, often grounded in classical logic, ran into problems. Consequently this new conceptual space became populated with ideas often at odds with those that brought the space into existence.

I suggest that at the primaryintellectual attractiveness of newly emerging computing technology is the simple fact that it gave thinkers a way to conceputalize how mind could be implemented in matter, how Descartes’ res cogitans could be realized in res extensa. Computing had been around for a long time, but not computing machines. The computing machines that emerged after World War II promised to be far more powerful and flexible than all others. That is what was attractive, not nascent neoliberalism, though that neoliberalism may have been waiting in the wings and shouting encouragement.

Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics

Edit Note, 7.16.16: I've added two substantial paragraphs near the end of the section, "Computing, Abstract and Real." Check the Golumbia tag for further thoughts, as I'm in the processing of adding new material to a revised version of this piece.

As many of you know, David Golumbia is one of three authors of a recent article that that offered a critique of the digital humanities (DH), Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities [1]. The article sparked such vigorous debate within the DH community that I decided to investigate Golumbia’s thinking. I’ve known about him for some time but had not read his best known book:

David Golumbia. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Harvard University Press, 2009.

I’ve still not read it in full. But I’ve read enough to arrive at a conclusion.

Thus this piece is not a book review. I focus on the second chapter, “Chomsky’s Computationalism,” with forays into the first, “The Cultural Functions of Computation,” and a look at the fourth, “Computationalist Linguistics.”

Why Chomsky?

Chomsky is one of the seminal thinkers in the human sciences in the last half of the twentieth century. The abstract theory of computation is at the center of his work. His early work played a major role in bringing computational thinking to the attention of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers and thus helped catalyze the so-called cognitive revolution. At the same time Chomsky has been one of our most visible political essayists. This combination makes him central to Golumbia’s thinking, which is concerned with the relationship between the personal and the political as mediated by ideology. Unfortunately his understanding of Chomsky’s thinking is so tenuous that his enterprise is flawed from its inception. I am not prepared to say whether or not the rest of the book redeems its dismal beginning.

First I consider the difference between abstract computing theory and real computing, a distinction to which Golumbia gives scant attention. Then I introduce his concept of computationalist ideology and criticize his curious assertion that computational linguistics “is almost indistinguishable from Chomskyan generativism” (p. 47). From there I move to his treatment of the Chomsky Hierarchy, pointing out that it is a different kind of beast from hierarchical power relations in society. The last two sections examine remarks that are offered almost as casual asides. The first remark is a speculation about the demise of funding for machine translation in the late 1960s. Golumbia gets it wrong, though he lists a book in his bibliography that gets it right. I conclude with some corrective observations in response to his off-hand speculation about the ideological demographics of linguistics.

Computing, Abstract and Real

I want to start by making a standard distinction between computing in the abstract and embodied computation, “real” if you will. This distinction is important in the context of Golumbia’s book because Chomsky concerned himself only with computing in the abstract. In contrast, computational linguistics (hereafter CL) is about real computing, though computational linguists may avail themselves of abstract theory as an analytical tool. The so-called Chomksy Hierarchy, which we’ll get to a bit later, is one of those analytical tools, and an important one.

Real computation is a physical activity. It is bounded in time – it must come to an end or it has failed – and space – it is realized in physical stuff, Descartes’ res extensa. In decades stretching from the present back into the 19th century, that physical stuff has been some kind of mechanical, electrical, or electronic system. Starting roughly in the middle of the previous century various disciplines have been entertaining the idea that computation might also be realized in animal nervous systems, the human brain in particular, and even the molecular machinery of DNA and RNA.

Computing in the abstract is not physically realized. It is a mathematical activity concerned with purely abstract machines, often called automata. The abstract theory is concerned about the powers of abstract machines as a function of the symbols available to a machine, the states the machine can take, and the operations through which the machine moves from one state to the next.

We can appreciate the difference between real and abstract computing with a relatively simple example, the contrast between tic-tac-toe on the one hand and chess on the other. Abstractly considered they are the same kind of game, and a trivial one at that. They are both finite. As real activities, that is, as activities realized in physical matter, they are quite different. Tic-tac-toe remains trivial, though perhaps not so for a six-year old; but chess becomes profoundly difficult and challenging for even the most brilliant of humans.

DH and Critique (DHpoco), with a Nod to Latour (via Felski)

I just now came across this three-year old conversation, Open Thread: The Digital Humanities as a Historical “Refuge” From Race/Class/Gender/Sexuality/Disability? It’s a long and very interesting conversation, with 166 comments between May 10, 2013 and May 14. I am reading the conversation in the general context of the May 1 LARB critique by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouille, and David Golumbia, Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities. This not-so-old conversation is distinguished by the variety and number of participants and it’s overall civility.

My purpose, however, is not to attempt either a summary or analysis of the conversation, but to highlight two voices I find particularly resonant. First I look at Chuck Rybak, who speaks up for “poetics/form/rhetoric.” Then Rafael Alvarado suggests that DH should not subordinate itself to the Ministry of Cultural Studies.

The Work Itself

Chuck Rybak, from the third day:

This is an amazingly varied and interesting discussion thread–thank you Roopika and Adeline.

When I look at the opening quote, I immediately wanted to paste in the entirety of Marjorie Perloff’s essay “Crisis in the Humanities.” Instead of the entire piece, I’ll settle for this paragraph:

“It is, I would argue, the contemporary fear and subordination of the pleasures of representation and recognition –the pleasures of the fictive, the what might happen to the what has happened–the historical/cultural– that has trivialized the status of literary study in the academy today. If, for an aesthete like Walter Pater, art was always approaching the condition of music, in our current scheme of things, art is always–and monotonously– approaching the condition of “culture.” Indeed, the neoPuritan notion that literature and the other arts must be somehow “useful,” and only useful, that the Ciceronian triad —docere, movere, delectare– should renounce its third element (“delight”) and even the original meaning of its second element, so that to move means only to move readers to some kind of virtuous action, has produced a climate in which it has become increasingly difficult to justify the study of English or Comparative Literature.”

Since I’m a creative writer and lit prof who teaches a lot of poetry, Perloff means a lot to me as a critic. My sense is that Perloff would reject the word “refuge” and replace it with something like “return.” But a return to what? Simply, a focus on poetics/form/rhetoric. When I first started dabbling in DH work, I was immediately struck by how text-centered the enterprise is, and that has proven very useful pedagogically, especially when working with an undergraduate population who often prefer to flee the text as quickly as possible and get right to ideas in the abstract. In short, I’m sympathetic to Perloff here because I think it approaches this question in terms of embracing an interest rather than primarily rejecting something else. Perloff, in that essay, gives respect to cultural readings of works like Ulysses and Heart of Darkness, especially as they relate to empire, etc. Still, what Martha Smith might describe as a refuge (or seemingly so), I hear someone like Perloff saying what’s needed is a return to poetics. Perloff wasn’t writing about DH, but I imagine one thing Perloff would respect about some DH tools are their ability to hone in on language/aesthetics and treat a poem as a unique rhetoric, stylistic artifact, etc. I’m learning so much from reading this thread, but I chafe a little bit against the notion of a “refuge” from a specific set of concerns, largely because it might attribute an act of will where someone might just be pursuing their particular interests.

And having written this, I can also hear the response: “Perloff, as you demonstrate, is exactly someone who would see this as a refuge.” I’m not sure I could completely rebut that. PoCo is not my area of study/specialization, so I really am offering this very generally.

I note that there was no response to this comment despite the fact that, as Rybak noted at the end, he was using Perloff to advance the kind of position that was brought into question by the thread. Perhaps, because it was late in the conversation, people were tired.

Now, consider a passage by Derek Attridge, which is from a dialog he had with Henry Staten, “Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation,” World Picture 2, Autumn 2008. It has nothing to do with DH, but it speaks to Rybak/Perloff in the face of the demand for critique:

As you know, I’ve been trying for a while to articulate an understanding of the literary critic’s task which rests on a notion of responsibility, derived in large part from Derrida and Levinas, or, more accurately, Derrida’s recasting of Levinas’s thought, one aspect of which is an emphasis on the importance of what I’ve called variously a “literal” or “weak” reading. That is to say, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the effects of the enormous power inherent in the techniques of literary criticism at our disposal today […] The result of this rich set of critical resources is that any literary work, whether or not it is a significant achievement in the history of literature, and whether or not it evokes a strong response in the critic, can be accorded a lengthy commentary claiming importance for it. What is worse, the most basic norms of careful reading are sometimes ignored in the rush to say what is ingenious or different. (The model of the critical institution whereby the critic feels obliged to claim that his or her interpretation trumps all previous interpretations is clearly part of the problem here, and beyond this the institutional pressure to accumulate publications or move up the ladder.) We may be teaching our students to write clever interpretations without teaching them how to read...

Attridge and Staten went on devote a book to the practice of weak reading: Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation, Routledge 2015. Each chapter takes the form of back and forth conversation (via email) about a poem or maybe two. Their object is to find agreement as much as possible, and to clearly articulate disagreement where necessary [1]. They note that they are not trying to replace or displace critique, but to lay a foundation from which other forms of criticism can advance.

Yet another response to LARB on DH: A plague on all your houses!

Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia (ABG) on digital humanities continues reverberating through the online hive mind. It's not clear to me that Justin Evans, System Reboot, knows much, if anything about DH, beyond what ABG mention in their article. He's focused entirely on literary studies:

Anyone who cares about the humanities needs to pay close attention to this argument, because DH undeniably harms the study of literature in the university.

However, after that note of agreement, he goes a step further and ends up here:

If English department politics isn’t a target for neoliberal elites, why has English been so vulnerable to the digital humanities? Perhaps it is because, since English scholars turned their attention to political progressive humanities, the English department has lacked a subject matter of its own. It has become the home of ersatz social science, ersatz science, ersatz philosophy—and now, ersatz computer science. The English department is not a victim of some kind of neoliberal conspiracy. It is just looking for something to talk about.

From this perspective, the digital and the politically progressive humanities [aka PPH] are more like squabbling cousins than opposing forces. Allington et al. write that DH “was born from disdain and at times outright contempt, not just for humanities scholarship, but for the standards, procedures and claims of leading literary scholars”—just as the politically progressive humanities were born from the rejection of New Criticism. DH tries to “redefine what had formerly been classified as support functions for the humanities as the very model of good humanities scholarship”; similarly, PPH redefined the literary scholar’s legitimate helpmates (philosophy, history, science) as “the very model” of literary scholarship. And finally, most importantly, neither DH nor PPH can give students a reason to study literature rather than, say, linguistics or sociology or neuroscience.

Scholars who are serious about saving the English department from the digital humanities need to acknowledge that it needs to be saved from the politically progressive humanities, too.

Whoops! So much for ABG! This puts me in mind of Alex Reid's post, Otters' Noses, Digital Humanities, Political Progress, and Splitters, which invokes a scene from Life of Brian:

Here's his gloss on the scene:

Of course the whole point of it is to satirize the divisive nature of political progressivism. Apparently it pointed specifically at the leftist politics of England at the time, but really this kind of stuff has a timeless quality to it.

Nowviskie on why DH is not a neoliberal con job

Melissa Dinsman interviews Beverly Nowviskie in LARB. Here's one bit:

So how can we reconcile the digital humanities benefit outside the academy with critiques of the field that connect the emergence of DH to the increased “neoliberalization and corporatization of higher education”? (I am quoting media scholar Richard Grusin here from his C21 post “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities.”) Do you think such a comparison has merit? Is there something about the digital humanities’s desire to produce that creates an alignment with neoliberal thinking?

Well, sure, DH is complicit in the modern university in the same way that every other practice and part of the humanities that succumbs to certain logics and economies of production and consumption is complicit. So, part of that struggle to enter the mainstream academy I was telling you about succeeded insofar as we, too, in DH now participate in screwed-up metrics and systems of scholarly communication along with everybody else. I’m talking here about how almost everyone in the academic humanities is caught up in the provision of free labor and content to monopolistic, private journal and database providers that then sell us our own content back to us at exorbitant prices. And I’m also thinking of humanities scholars’ general complicity with mismatched demands between what we know might really benefit scholarship and open inquiry and the public good versus what our disciplines ask early-career scholars to produce — and of how parochially we measure their output and impact. In many ways, I think you could turn around and look to the digital humanities not as a sign of the apocalypse but for paths out of this mess. Here’s a field that has been working for years on open access research and publication platforms, on ways to articulate and valorize work done outside of narrow, elite channels, and on how to value scholarship that’s collaborative and interdisciplinary — instead of done solo, individualistically, and only made legible and accessible to fellow academics in little subdisciplines, which is still the M. O. of the broader field. And on a conceptual level, the data- and text-analysis and visualization strand of digital humanities is pretty much all about finding ways to nuance mechanistic quantification and turn it on its head — to better value and appreciate and elevate the ineffable, not in spite of numbers and measures but through them. I mean, that’s our research field.

On that last point I would note purely discursive thinking tends toward binary factoring into black and white while appropriate quantification allows for nuance by supporting shades of gray, lots of them. 

Digital Humanities in the cross-hairs, with the cavalry on the way

Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia have published a critique of digital humanities (mostly just digital work in english lit.) in the LARB: Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities. Here's the opening paragraph:

Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives. Advocates characterize the development of such tools as revolutionary and claim that other literary scholars fail to see their political import due to fear or ignorance of technology. But the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.

It has provided 30 comments so far, most of them critical. It also provoked Alan Liu to respond with a twitter stream which he then Storified: On Digital Humanities and "Critique". He his not happy, referring to the article's "character assassination of the still evolving field of DH...as an attempt at a last word foreclosing the critical potential of DH". Liu also posted drafts from a book he's working on:

“Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity (book in progress.” Alan Liu, 2 May 2016. http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/drafts-for-against-the-cultural-singularity

I'm about to read through the drafts. Here's Liu's opening paragraph:

My aim in this book is to make a strategic intervention in the development of the digital humanities. Following up on my 2012 essay, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, I call for digital humanities research and development informed by, and able to influence, the way scholarship, teaching, administration, support services, labor practices, and even development and investment strategies in higher education intersect with society, where a significant channel of the intersection between the academy and other social sectors, at once symbolic and instrumental, consists in shared but contested information-technology infrastructures. I first lay out in the book a methodological framework for understanding how the digital humanities can develop a mode of critical infrastructure studies. I then offer a prospectus for the kinds of infrastructure (not only research “cyberinfrastructures,” as they have been called) whose development the digital humanities might help create or guide. And I close with thoughts on how the digital humanities can contribute to ameliorating the very idea of “development”–technological, socioeconomic, and cultural–today.