Melissa Dinsman interviews Richard Grusin in the last LARB interview on DH

Where should the work be done? departments, libraries, labs?

...one of the things I really loved, more than even the networked computer classroom, was the computer lab for our masters program. I would go in the lab regularly to just kind of kibitz and chitchat and see what was going on with people, because at almost any hour of the day there would be some grad student in there working. It was a fun environment: it was loose, informal, collaborative, and the hierarchies broke down — I was the student. So I’m a huge fan of labs. I think one of the positive aspects of the digital humanities has been the creation of these kinds of open and different spaces.

How do you think the general public understands the term “digital humanities” or, more broadly, the digital work being done in the humanities (if at all)?

My first inclination is to say not much. But I think there are two places where digital work in the humanities is being done, and often being done outside the academy. One of these places is participatory culture. There has been an explosion of students writing online, be it blogging or fan fiction or whatever. And I think this is really one of the places where digital work in the humanities is being done as a result of changes in technology. We haven’t really made enough of a connection between this kind of participatory culture and the classroom, but I think we are moving in that direction. The other place is in the classroom. We think of the public in a kind of consumerist way. But our students are also the public. As college is becoming more and more universal, all of those students who are taking humanities courses are part of the public, and I don’t think most of them understand the digital humanities. DH is a branding tool for faculty and getting resources.

Ted "no whiteboard" Underwood on Digital Humanities at LARB

Melissa Dinsman interviews Ted Underwood in the Los Angelis Review of Books, #12 in her interview series on digital humanities. Concerned that vexed term, "digital humanities":

This is a great question for me because I explicitly don’t find the term “digital humanities” useful. I understand why people use it. It gives us a way of unifying projects from game studies to archaeology through the simple fact that people use computers. In 2009 that made sense because a lot of changes were happening at once and we hadn’t sorted them out. “DH” had a real value for me as an encounter group — I met a lot of great people and learned a lot. But as these projects mature, it makes less sense to group them together. It’s clear now that they have different goals and different methods. I suspect that scholars of new media and digital archaeologists would get along better if they stopped imagining themselves as competing versions of a single thing called DH. They’re not really competing. They’re different things. So the name I use for my own work is “distant reading,” which names the new perspective literary historians get by considering thousands of volumes at a time. And while Franco Moretti coined this phrase, in reality the project already existed under other names, like book history or sociology of literature. Technology doesn’t have to be central to it. The questions we’re posing are familiar questions about literary history. But digital libraries and machine learning have given us new leverage on those questions because, for instance, we can trace blurry family resemblances among texts instead of defining fixed categories. It was hard to trace loose family resemblances among thousands of volumes by hand.

Along with the tools comes epistemology:

The main thing I would want to stress is that quantitative fields are not grab bags of tools. Statistics is an epistemology. Machine learning is really, honest to God, a theory of learning. These fields can be philosophical interlocutors for the humanities, helping us to think about interpretation on a scale where variation and uncertainty are central problems. That’s a theoretical challenge of a deep and interesting kind. But you only see the challenge if you take those fields seriously.

And, you know, it doesn't really require a lot of funding:

I don’t know about DH, because it’s so broad. But there is nothing inherently expensive about distant reading. If you want to build glossy websites, then maybe you do need to hire a staff of programmers. But that’s not what I do. I’m just writing articles about literary history — very low-gloss. Usually I can do the programming, or grad students can do it. Articles, professors, courses, and grad students are regular parts of the university. We are not an added expense. Could we use more funding? Sure. Fellowship support for faculty and students is always welcome, and it’s particularly helpful in distant reading because the reality is that most faculty and students in the humanities don’t already know how to do this stuff. What we need is training. So I’ve gotten some internal and external fellowships and I’m grateful that they gave me time to try new things. But it’s not like we had to buy a particle accelerator. At UIUC I don’t even have a room with a whiteboard, to be honest.

Ted has an interesting response to Dinsman's quay about the underrepresentation of women and minorities:

I think the source of the problem here is that none of us have formal training. So people with a hobbyist background have an edge and that hobbyist background is not equally distributed. I think you solve that by building equitable institutions. We don’t have a digital humanities program or center at Illinois, and I’m not trying to build one. What we do have is a school of Library and Information Science (LIS). That’s where most distant reading actually gets done on our campus. As disciplines go, LIS is pretty serious about inclusiveness. The majority of students are women.

As for public intellectuals:

I don’t care about public intellectuals. Ideas are what matter to me, not charismatic individuals. Do you know the name of this decade’s most famous paleontologists? Their names don’t matter. It matters whether we’re creating genuinely new pictures of the human past and beautiful theories and exciting debates.

DH Facing the Public, Sharon M. Leon in LARB

As far as I can tell, most of the debates at digital humanities – what is it? is it complicit in neoliberalism? – are about the position of digital humanities within the academy. These are conversations among scholars about the types of research they do and, less often, the courses they teach. They aren’t about how humanists address the needs and interests of people outside university walls. And yet digital technology, and the web in particular, provides a platform through which scholars can interact with the public at large. And many scholars do that through public-facing blogs. But these activities aren’t much touched upon in the DH debates.

In the most recent interview in her LARB series, Melissa Dinsmore talks with Sharon M. Leon, director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. Her job is to face the public. Here’s some of her remarks.

* * * * *

Can you elaborate on the differences between digital history and digital public history?

I like to make the distinction between doing history in public and doing public history. I think a lot of scholars doing digital history work are doing that work in public and making it available for an open audience to engage with, but the work of digital public history is actually formed by a specific attention to preparing materials for a particular audience — to address their questions, to engage with them, to target a real conversation with the public about a particular aspect of history. In lots of ways, public history doesn’t look like what a traditional historian would consider to be a scholarly argument; it is a little bit more subtle and much more dialogic. It has a much greater sense of shared authority and it is much less about winning a methodological argument with a community of scholars. I engage the public on the grounds that there are multiple causes of a particular event and multiple historical perspectives for understanding it. The primary difference, however, is that public history is directed at a particular audience. It’s not a “we will build it, they will come, and they might be interested” mentality. Instead, it is “I am going to do research about you, I’m going to find out the kinds of materials and prior knowledge you bring to the topic, and I’m really going to engage you.” ...

Coming back to the relevance question, public history has always been targeted and worked in that direction because it is specifically about engaging the public in a conversation about history. That work has been going on for a long time and the interesting thing about it is that just as digital work sometimes struggles for recognition and authorization in the halls of academia, public history has had a really heavy lift. There’s this weird perception that if one engages with someone who is not a credentialed scholar about scholarly questions, somehow we have diluted our commitment to inquiry. ...

How do you think the general public understands the term “digital humanities” or, more broadly, the digital work being done in the humanities (if at all)?

The public doesn’t understand the term “digital humanities,” but they do understand the work if I frame what I do as “I’m a historian who uses digital tools and methods to answer historical questions.” I think as a field our penetration into the consciousness of the public is almost nonexistent, though I imagine your series might help some. The other way to answer this question is to say that we don’t do nearly enough outreach or evaluation to have any idea what the answer is. What I have learned doing public history work is that you have to prepare, you have to know about your audience going in, you have to do the work, and you have to follow up to find out if they got anything out of it. The majority of DH work only does the middle step. They do the work. And it may not be their goal to learn what the public understands, but I think if we are going to make these claims about public relevance, we have to do all of the steps along the way so that we have some sense about our impact.

My next question has to do with public intellectualism, which many scholars and journalists alike have described as being in decline (for example, Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times essay). What role, if any, do you think digital work plays? Could the digital humanities (or the digital in the humanities) be a much needed bridge between the academy and the public, or is this perhaps expecting too much of a discipline?

The problem of the public intellectual is about the way that intellectuals frame their work for the public. It’s not really about the medium. Writing an op-ed for The New York Times for a historian or a literary scholar or a political scientist is a sort of one-shot deal that will reach a certain number of people. Whereas someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is writing all the time, engaging with really important questions, has a digital presence, and actually does engage with members of the public, is a much more effective public intellectual. But I think there are lots of public intellectuals in local communities that we don’t know anything about because we aren’t in that community. Some of that work is digital work and some of it is not.

* * * * *

I have a number of posts on citizen science that are relevant here.

The Humanities? What’s That? (w/ a look at Pamela Fletcher in LARB)

I don’t know when I first heard about “the humanities,” perhaps college, but maybe before. But if before, well, the phrase wasn’t meaningful until college, and after. And ever after it’s been a burden, always in crisis and, always: Am I a humanist or not? Of course I’m not talking about the humanities as in humanism, such as “Renaissance humanism” – from the dictionary: “an outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.” I’m talking about a group of academic disciplines (philosophy, literature, history, etc.) or perhaps – and here things begin to get murky – a way of approaching the subject matter within those disciplines.

For one can approach literature and art as a psychologist. And philosophy departments harbor experts in symbolic logic, which looks and feels an awful lot math. Come to think of it, I used a philosophy course in logic to fulfill the math requirement for my B.A.

My problem, you see, is that while I study literary texts and films, I’ve spent an awful lot of time looking at them through cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. And then there’s all those diagrams I use (and love). They just break the discursive flow, yet often they carry the argument.

And speaking of diagrams, what about all those charts and graphs that turn up in computational criticism (aka “distant reading”)? They may be about literary texts, but they come out of computers and statistics and data munging. Humanities?

I think not! 

And just who, may I ask, are you?

Could it been that 19th century disciplinary categories don’t fit 21st century conceptual practices and possibilities? Just what ARE the humanities NOW?

And that brings me to Melissa Dinsman’s interview with Pamela Fletcher in her excellent series at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Fletcher casts doubt on the category, “the humanities,” though not necessarily in the way I have just been doing. Here’s some remarks from the interview.

* * * * *

What is it about a liberal arts college (or Bowdoin specifically) that makes “digital humanities” an unproductive or not very meaningful label?

Your question gives me pause, and makes me wonder if this is really a good description of liberal arts colleges, or even of Bowdoin, or if it is just my own perspective. I should say that many liberal arts colleges (Hamilton comes to mind) have used the Digital Humanities category very productively, and my own colleagues at Bowdoin have put together a course cluster on that topic. I guess what I meant is that we are such a small — and collegial — place that limiting our conversations about digital and computational work to scholars in the humanities ultimately seemed limiting. And students simply do not divide themselves into those categories: there are plenty of art history majors who double major in physics or biology. And probably even more of the students in my class — or any humanities class — are also fully immersed in work across the curriculum no matter what their major might be. So that particular way of dividing human knowledge into three broad categories — humanities, natural sciences, social sciences — just doesn’t map onto my experience of liberal arts very well.

Should digital humanists know how to code?

From Alverado Rafael Alvarado, The Code Problem:

The first is to learn for the rea­son that Tim Berners-Lee exhorts jour­nal­ists to learn–you need to know how to use tools to manip­u­late data because knowl­edge is increas­ingly pro­duced as data, that is, in more or less struc­tured forms all over the web. This is because the future of the human­i­ties “lies with jour­nal­ists human­ists who know their CSV from their RDF, can throw together some quick MySQL queries for a PHP or Python out­put … and dis­cover the story lurk­ing in datasets released by gov­ern­ments, local author­i­ties, agen­cies, dig­i­tal archives, online libraries, aca­d­e­mic cen­ters, or any com­bi­na­tion of them – even across national bor­ders.” [...]

The sec­ond rea­son to learn to code is philo­soph­i­cal. You should be able to write code–not nec­es­sar­ily pro­gram or, God for­bid, “develop”–so that you can under­stand how machines think. Play with sim­ple algo­rithms, parse texts and cre­ate word lists, gen­er­ate silly pat­terns a la 10 PRINT. Get a feel for what these so-called com­puter lan­guages do. Get a feel for the propo­si­tion, to which I mostly assent, that text is a kind of code and code a kind of text (but with really impor­tant dif­fer­ences that you won’t dis­cover or under­stand until you play around with code). This level of knowl­edge does not require any great mas­tery of a lan­guage in my view. It only requires a will­ing­ness to get one’s hand dirty, make mis­takes, and accept the lim­i­ta­tions of beginner’s knowl­edge. I per­son­ally believe that this sec­ond rea­son is as or more impor­tant than the first.

OK. Moreover:

To get to this place with code, to be able write sim­ple scripts that are use­ful or inter­est­ing or both, you don’t need to do many of the things your cod­ing brethren think you should do. First and fore­most, you don’t need to learn a spe­cific lan­guage unless there is a com­pelling local rea­son to do so, such as being in a class or on a project that uses the lan­guage. [...]

Sec­ond, you don’t need to be involved in writ­ing a full-blown appli­ca­tion to do DH-worthy cod­ing. Appli­ca­tions are fine, and being on a col­lab­o­ra­tive project has huge ben­e­fits of its own, but know that appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment is a huge time-suck and that appli­ca­tions are like restaurants–fun to set up but most likely to fail in the real world. Lots of DH cod­ing projects in my expe­ri­ence are jour­neys, not des­ti­na­tions. [...]

Third, there is no rea­son ever to be forced into using a spe­cific edi­tor or cod­ing envi­ron­ment, espe­cially if it is a dif­fi­cult one that “real” coders use. [...]

Beyond these spe­cific prob­lems, though, there is a more fun­da­men­tal issue about the cul­ture of code that con­tributes to the con­di­tion that Miriam [Posner] and oth­ers con­front: in spite of the well-meaning desire by many coders to bring every­one into the cod­ing fold, there is a coun­ter­vail­ing force the pre­vents this from hap­pen­ing and which emanates from these same coders. This is the force of mys­ti­fi­ca­tion. Mys­ti­fi­ca­tion appears in many forms, includ­ing some of the things I just described–insisting on a dif­fi­cult edi­tor, diss­ing cer­tain languages–but it more gen­er­ally comes from treat­ing code com­pe­tence as a source of iden­tity, whether it be per­sonal or dis­ci­pli­nary. As long as dig­i­tal human­ists regard cod­ing as a marker of prestige–and soft­ware as a token in the aca­d­e­mic economy–and not as a means to other forms of pres­tige (such mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies or writ­ing books), then knowl­edge of cod­ing will always be hedged in by taboos and rites of pas­sage that will have the effect of push­ing away newcomers.

Addendum (7.11.16): From an interview with Pamela Fletcher in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

No, I don’t think you necessarily need to know how to code to do meaningful digital humanities work, not least because collaboration is a central part of DH work and the idea of people bringing different skill sets — and research problems — together is one of its core strengths. Yes, because as a humanist I am deeply committed to the idea that in order to communicate with other people you need to speak their language, and coding is the language of computation. In our new Digital and Computational Studies curriculum at Bowdoin we are starting from the premise that every student who goes through our program needs to understand at least the underlying logic of how computers work and the many layers of abstraction and representation that lie between binary code and what you see on the screen. This is partially about communication: you need to understand what computers are (and aren’t) good at in order to come up with intelligent computational problems and solutions. But it is also because each stage of computational abstraction involves decisions that are essentially acts of interpretation, and you can’t do meaningful work if you don’t understand that. This is equally true, of course, of anyone who uses technology, which is most of us. So I’d say ideally we should be educating all our students to be computationally literate, which is not the same as being expert programmers.

Radical DH and the Xenaverse

It's not at all clear to me just what "digital humanities" is or will become, but it's clear that some are worried that it is just another form neoliberal oppression and won't become much of anything unless it figures out how to be radical in the face of all that tech. Me, I'm Old School and believe in capital "T" Truth, though constructing it is certainly a challenge and a trial. For reasons which I may or may not get around to explaining here on New Savanna I'm inclined to think of all this throat clearing and hemming and hawing about radical DH as a form of territorial marking (I'm thinking of recent LARB piece and its fallout). The purpose of this post is to suggest that the territory was radically marked before the DH term was coined.

Back in 1998 Christine Boese released her doctoral dissertation to the web: The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse. It's certainly one of the earliest hypertext dissertations, if not THE first – I simply don't know. I figure that qualifies it as DH. Here's the abstract:

This dissertation is a case study applying methods of rhetorical analysis and cultural critique to the burgeoning online phenomenon called the Xenaverse: the online spaces devoted to the cult following of the syndicated television program "Xena, Warrior Princess." My work combines two modes of inquiry:

(1) Locating and capturing texts from multiple sites on the Internet known to be parts of the Xenaverse, and

(2) Supplementing those texts with data generated from the limited use of the ethnographic tools of participant observation and informant interviews, both electronic and face to face.

The primary focus of my analysis is on constructions of authority in cyberspace. I explore the constellations of social forces in cyberspace which have led to the success of a noncommercial, highly trafficked, dynamic culture or what is sometimes called a "community." The strengths and weaknesses of this online "community" are examined in terms of the ideals of radical democracy, using Fantasy-Theme rhetorical analysis. This research examines how the rhetorical visions of this culture are used to write the narratives of its ongoing existence, in a way that is increasingly independent of the dominant narratives of the television program itself. Using the relevance of an insider's point of view and taking a case which implies successful democratic social resistance to diverse hegemonic forces, I look beyond the Xenaverse and consider the strength of the frequently-cited claim that the medium of cyberspace is intrinsically democratizing. Considering that claim critically, I suggest democracy both is and is not being enhanced online.

Who put “The Terminator” in “Digital Humanities”?

In thinking about the current discussions provoked by the LARB takedown of digital humanities I’ve been thinking about the term itself: “digital humanities.” The term itself yokes together the opposite poles of a binary that’s plagued us since Descartes, man and machine, the human and the mechanical. I suppose that’s part of its attraction, but also why it can be so toxic.

In these discussions the term itself seems almost to float free of any connection to actual intellectual practice. Given the impossible scope of the term – see, e.g. the Wikipedia article on DH – its use tends to collapse on the binary itself. And if one is skeptical of whatever it is, then the “digital” term becomes those nasty machines that have been threatening us for centuries, most visibly in movies from Lang’s Metropolis through the Terminator series and beyond.

I certainly count myself among those who find the term somewhere between problematic and useless. More usefully, I think the many developments falling within the scope of that term are best seen in terms of a wide variety of discourses emerging after WWII. As a useful touchstone, check out a fascinating article: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry, Fall 2011. He looks at the period during and immediately after World War II when Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan sojourned in NYC and picked up ideas about information theory and cybernetics from American thinkers at MIT and Bell Labs. You should be able to get a copy from Geoghegan's publications page.

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. 

An interesting response to Moretti on digital humanities

On Saturday I ran up a post on Franco Moretti’s assertion that the results of computational criticism have “so far been below expectations”, as he remarked in his LARB interview, conducted by Melissa Dinsman. In response Ted Underwood assured me

I'm more sanguine than I have ever been about the intellectual and historical payoffs for computational criticism. What I've seen in recent papers, and in forthcoming ones, makes me very confident that we are going to engage, challenge, and in some cases frankly refute important existing theses about literary history. Big Ideas and broad theories of the nature of literary change won't be scarce.

I’ve found another response in an interview with Richard Jean So, also by Dinsman in LARB. He’s an “assistant professor in modern and contemporary American culture at the University of Chicago” and has done “computational work on race, language, and power dynamics.” In her last question Disman references Moretti’s reservations and asks So to “look backward and speak to what you think the digital in the humanities has accomplished so far.” Here’s how he responds:

As a younger person in the field, I don’t like the gesture of looking back. I find it problematic for someone to justify a field by saying to people, “Look how great my field is because of all these accomplishments.” If you are in a field and the accomplishments don’t speak for themselves, then you have more work to do. It is a position of potential weakness or insecurity to constantly say, “Look what we’ve done.” There is certainly a place for that, but in trying to build out the field, this looking back can be problematic when done in a defensive way. If our work and accomplishments are not instantly recognizable outside the field, then we have to do more work. So I would definitely say that I am more future minded. It isn’t obvious yet that DH is here to stay, so rather than meet critiques with a “look what we’ve done” mentality, we need to go back to our books and computers and do better work until we don’t have to answer this question any more.

"DH is guilty of making all too visible the dirty gears that drive the scholarly machine"

As though no robber baron tried to launder his guilt by giving libraries to communities across the nation. Brian Greenspan on digital humanities as whistle-blower:

If the digital humanities seem at times to pander to the neoliberal discourses and tendencies that are undeniably rampant within post-secondary institutions, it’s not because they necessarily contribute to exploitative social relations (although they certainly do at times, just like every other academic sector). I rather suspect it’s because digital humanists tend as part of their scholarly practice to foreground self-reflexively the material underpinnings of scholarship that many conventional humanists take for granted. DH involves close scrutiny of the affordances and constraints that govern most scholarly work today, whether they’re technical (relating to media, networks, platforms, interfaces, codes and databases), social (involving collaboration, authorial capital, copyright and IP, censorship and firewalls, viral memes, the idea of “the book,” audiences, literacies and competencies), or labour-related (emphasizing the often hidden work of students, librarians and archivists, programmers, techies, RAs, TAs and alt-ac workers). Far from being “post-interpretative, non-suspicious, technocratic, conservative, [and] managerial,” the “lab-based practice” that we promote in the Hyperlab, at least, involves collaborative and broadly interdisciplinary work that closely scrutinizes the materiality of scholarly archivization, bibliography, writing and publishing across media, as well as the platforms and networks we all use to read and write texts in the 21st century.

If anything, DH is guilty of making all too visible the dirty gears that drive the scholarly machine, along with the mechanic’s maintenance bill. Of course, it doesn’t help appearances that many of these themes also happen to be newly targeted areas for funding agencies as they try to compensate for decades of underfunding, deferred maintenance, rising tuition and falling enrolments on campuses everywhere. Now, some would argue (and I’d agree) that these material costs should ideally be sustained by our college and university administrations and not by faculty research grants. But DH isn’t responsible for either the underfunding of higher education over the last 25 years or the resulting mission creep of scholarly grants, which in addition to funding “pure research” are increasingly expected to include student funding packages, as well as overhead for equipment, labs and building maintenance, even heat and power. The fault and burden of DH is that it reveals all the pieces of this model of post-secondary funding that seems novel to many humanists, but which has long been taken for granted within the sciences. This is the model that acknowledges that most funding programs aren’t intended mainly for tenured professors to buy books and travel, but for their research infrastructure and, above all, their students who justify the mission of scholarship in the first place, and who fill in while we’re flying off to invade foreign archives like the detritivores we are.

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.