Digital Humanism
March 9, 2016 11:49 PM Subscribe
The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Franco Moretti - "the term 'digital humanities' (DH) has captured the imagination and the ire of scholars across American universities. The field, which melds computer science with hermeneutics, is championed by supporters as the much-needed means to shake up and expand methods of traditional literary interpretation and is seen by its most outspoken critics as a new fad that symbolizes the neoliberal bean counting destroying American higher education. Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes lies a vast and varied body of work that utilizes and critically examines digital tools in the pursuit of humanistic study.
"This field is large and increasingly indefinable even by those in the midst of it. In fact 'digital humanities' seems astoundingly inappropriate for an area of study that includes, on the one hand, computational research, digital reading and writing platforms, digital pedagogy, open-access publishing, augmented texts, and literary databases, and, on the other, media archaeology and theories of networks, gaming, and wares both hard and soft. As Franco Moretti said to me early in my conversation with him: ' 'digital humanities' means nothing.' " (via; previously)
"This field is large and increasingly indefinable even by those in the midst of it. In fact 'digital humanities' seems astoundingly inappropriate for an area of study that includes, on the one hand, computational research, digital reading and writing platforms, digital pedagogy, open-access publishing, augmented texts, and literary databases, and, on the other, media archaeology and theories of networks, gaming, and wares both hard and soft. As Franco Moretti said to me early in my conversation with him: ' 'digital humanities' means nothing.' " (via; previously)
Wow. There's nothing like watching one of your research subfields torn to shreds conceptually by someone as astute as Franco Moretti. :/
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:55 AM on March 10, 2016
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:55 AM on March 10, 2016
As someone who works in digital humanities, I get a bit frustrated with how much time and ink people spend on trying to define it and deciding whether it's worthwhile rather than just doing stuff and letting other people figure out what to make of it. I don't know any other discipline where the majority of papers at the major conferences are about what the field is and whether it should even exist.
posted by lollusc at 1:08 AM on March 10, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by lollusc at 1:08 AM on March 10, 2016 [9 favorites]
Yeah. And where the discipline's main listserv delivers a pure, unadulterated dose of existential doubt and professional identity crisis direct to your email account every morning.
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:21 AM on March 10, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:21 AM on March 10, 2016 [5 favorites]
I don't know any other discipline where the majority of papers at the major conferences are about what the field is and whether it should even exist.
Geography. Been doing it for a century and still going strong.
posted by cromagnon at 1:26 AM on March 10, 2016 [5 favorites]
Geography. Been doing it for a century and still going strong.
posted by cromagnon at 1:26 AM on March 10, 2016 [5 favorites]
Metafilter: a pure, unadulterated dose of existential doubt and professional identity crisis direct to your email account every morning.
posted by lollusc at 4:38 AM on March 10, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by lollusc at 4:38 AM on March 10, 2016 [7 favorites]
I don't know any other discipline where the majority of papers at the major conferences are about what the field is and whether it should even exist.
Also librarianship in general, although there the existential question is more often a variant of "have we become obsolete?!?". Of course, digital humanities librarians get the double-dose of doubt.
posted by metaquarry at 5:24 AM on March 10, 2016 [4 favorites]
Also librarianship in general, although there the existential question is more often a variant of "have we become obsolete?!?". Of course, digital humanities librarians get the double-dose of doubt.
posted by metaquarry at 5:24 AM on March 10, 2016 [4 favorites]
the discipline's main listserv
Is this where I do an awkward "fellow Humanist subscriber" fistbump?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:25 AM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
Is this where I do an awkward "fellow Humanist subscriber" fistbump?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:25 AM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
I never saw why I had to call myself a "humanist" just because I like books
posted by thelonius at 5:42 AM on March 10, 2016
posted by thelonius at 5:42 AM on March 10, 2016
In my humble opinion as a once-academic in a related field, Digital Humanities - or, at least, the bit of DH which is about applying machine logic tools to cultural artefacts - is the biggest hunk of steaming shite that could ever be dropped out of an ivory towered cloaca. It's methods prove nothing, give no useful output, and can only be reproduced with skilled staff in both engineering and humanities interests.
It is, however, like fucking catnip to budget-writing, as suddenly the artsy-fartsy department is putting in a bid for something that management understands. The cost benefit of a visiting lecturer is hard to prove, but put in a bid for five new computers and some Adobe licenses and you've got a much more management-friendly document. Concrete outcomes too; not a painting or a poem, but an honest-to-goodness report with graphs and charts.
posted by The River Ivel at 7:42 AM on March 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
It is, however, like fucking catnip to budget-writing, as suddenly the artsy-fartsy department is putting in a bid for something that management understands. The cost benefit of a visiting lecturer is hard to prove, but put in a bid for five new computers and some Adobe licenses and you've got a much more management-friendly document. Concrete outcomes too; not a painting or a poem, but an honest-to-goodness report with graphs and charts.
posted by The River Ivel at 7:42 AM on March 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
I really, really like Franco Moretti. (In fairness, he's just about the only literary theorist where I feel like I am pretty familiar with all the key moments in his work - I would never say that about other theorists I get a kick out of.)
And I really like his mapping/distant reading stuff. The Atlas of the European Novel in particular is a lot of fun and very accessible and will increase your actual novels-to-be-read list immensely.
However, look, when he says that a DH approach ought to be what the general public is looking for, and how old fashioned it is that newspapers still have critics who tell you if a book is "good" or "bad", I think he's talking out of his hat.
That's not how you experience the humanities unless you've already got a schema in your head. I really enjoyed all Moretti's work from go, for instance, because I already had some novel-reading to pin it on. I certainly hadn't read most of the stuff he was on about, but I knew what it was to experience a novel as an individual book. That's how most people start with works of art most of the time - you don't generally start by saying "hm, I would like to read some essays about how borders appear in early 19th century English novels, even though I have not read any of such novels and know nothing about them - they might be boring as hell".
Someone who is already a bit of a specialist might start that way - Moretti got me into some stuff because I liked his theories about it, but that's not how I approach most novels most of the time, and I think it will never be how the general public approaches most novels most of the time - because that's not what novels do best, it's not what they're fundamentally for. It's like saying "dance music is really great, but the problem is that most people are interested in whether a given track is fun to dance to, when they should really be primarily interested in different forms of musical reproduction and how they have changed over time, that's what is really interesting". You're taking something that is indeed very interesting but not especially unique to the form and saying that the common or garden fan should come to the form that way.
Like, I can get at ideas about the border in the UK in the 19th century many ways, not just by studying novels. It's cool to see what novels tell us, and indeed if I were going back to grad school I'd want to apply Morettian techniques to SF, but it's not something where I'd expect most SF readers to be more interested in that than in, like, aliens and displacement and landscape and so on.
That said, I am surprised that Stanford - Stanford! - can't devote more resources to a lab for someone of Moretti's standing.
posted by Frowner at 8:24 AM on March 10, 2016 [4 favorites]
And I really like his mapping/distant reading stuff. The Atlas of the European Novel in particular is a lot of fun and very accessible and will increase your actual novels-to-be-read list immensely.
However, look, when he says that a DH approach ought to be what the general public is looking for, and how old fashioned it is that newspapers still have critics who tell you if a book is "good" or "bad", I think he's talking out of his hat.
That's not how you experience the humanities unless you've already got a schema in your head. I really enjoyed all Moretti's work from go, for instance, because I already had some novel-reading to pin it on. I certainly hadn't read most of the stuff he was on about, but I knew what it was to experience a novel as an individual book. That's how most people start with works of art most of the time - you don't generally start by saying "hm, I would like to read some essays about how borders appear in early 19th century English novels, even though I have not read any of such novels and know nothing about them - they might be boring as hell".
Someone who is already a bit of a specialist might start that way - Moretti got me into some stuff because I liked his theories about it, but that's not how I approach most novels most of the time, and I think it will never be how the general public approaches most novels most of the time - because that's not what novels do best, it's not what they're fundamentally for. It's like saying "dance music is really great, but the problem is that most people are interested in whether a given track is fun to dance to, when they should really be primarily interested in different forms of musical reproduction and how they have changed over time, that's what is really interesting". You're taking something that is indeed very interesting but not especially unique to the form and saying that the common or garden fan should come to the form that way.
Like, I can get at ideas about the border in the UK in the 19th century many ways, not just by studying novels. It's cool to see what novels tell us, and indeed if I were going back to grad school I'd want to apply Morettian techniques to SF, but it's not something where I'd expect most SF readers to be more interested in that than in, like, aliens and displacement and landscape and so on.
That said, I am surprised that Stanford - Stanford! - can't devote more resources to a lab for someone of Moretti's standing.
posted by Frowner at 8:24 AM on March 10, 2016 [4 favorites]
I don't know any other discipline where the majority of papers at the major conferences are about what the field is and whether it should even exist.
LarryC on May 12, 2011: "Digital Humanities is a rapidly evolving new field dedicated to arguing about what is meant by Digital Humanities." :P
That said, I am surprised that Stanford - Stanford! - can't devote more resources to a lab for someone of Moretti's standing.
software is eating academia? "Getting denied another round of NSF funding in the early days of Mosaic turned out to be a huge catalyst to start a company around the fledgling web browser... Since Andreessen's Mosaic days, calibrating the interplay between academia, government, and the private sector has gotten, if not easier, less exotic — with schools like UC Berkeley and Stanford setting the standard for providing students and faculty with a clear path forward. From picking the right classes, to picking the right institution from which to turn research into a company, Andreessen and Chris Dixon discuss the role academia plays..."
posted by kliuless at 8:46 AM on March 10, 2016
LarryC on May 12, 2011: "Digital Humanities is a rapidly evolving new field dedicated to arguing about what is meant by Digital Humanities." :P
That said, I am surprised that Stanford - Stanford! - can't devote more resources to a lab for someone of Moretti's standing.
software is eating academia? "Getting denied another round of NSF funding in the early days of Mosaic turned out to be a huge catalyst to start a company around the fledgling web browser... Since Andreessen's Mosaic days, calibrating the interplay between academia, government, and the private sector has gotten, if not easier, less exotic — with schools like UC Berkeley and Stanford setting the standard for providing students and faculty with a clear path forward. From picking the right classes, to picking the right institution from which to turn research into a company, Andreessen and Chris Dixon discuss the role academia plays..."
posted by kliuless at 8:46 AM on March 10, 2016
What academic or artistic endeavor doesn't have an IT element?
posted by judson at 9:04 AM on March 10, 2016
posted by judson at 9:04 AM on March 10, 2016
I find digital humanities, as a field and a concept, very interesting and exciting. The geospatial history work is especially cool.
posted by delight at 12:16 PM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by delight at 12:16 PM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]
The geospatial history work is especially cool.
You would have liked the PhD thesis of a guy I know--as I recall, he was working on a way to take old verbal descriptions of the border between Norway and Sweden and translate them into actual map references.
Ah, here it is:
You would have liked the PhD thesis of a guy I know--as I recall, he was working on a way to take old verbal descriptions of the border between Norway and Sweden and translate them into actual map references.
Ah, here it is:
Eide, Øyvind. "The area told as a story. An inquiry into the relationship between verbal and map-based expressions of geographical information." PhD thesis, King's College London, 2012.posted by Mr. Bad Example at 1:40 PM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
I just looked at the contacts section in my profile, but sadly there is no contact category labeled "we both know Øyvind". So I'll have to list you as "colleague" instead.
posted by lollusc at 2:40 PM on March 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by lollusc at 2:40 PM on March 10, 2016 [3 favorites]
(My thing is more along the lines of computational stylistics, but we're a small and kind of weird bunch.)
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:55 PM on March 10, 2016
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:55 PM on March 10, 2016
I've used GIS and databases in history research. It was just natural given some of the stuff I was doing.
But I've always been curious: why no coding software in humanities qualitative study? though maybe the answer is that most coding software is overpriced and extremely user unfriendly.
posted by jb at 11:06 PM on March 10, 2016
But I've always been curious: why no coding software in humanities qualitative study? though maybe the answer is that most coding software is overpriced and extremely user unfriendly.
posted by jb at 11:06 PM on March 10, 2016
I'm not sure what you mean by "coding software"? Many IDEs and almost all major programming language platforms are open source and free. Are you thinking of tools that are optimized for DH-related development or something like that?
posted by thelonius at 5:25 AM on March 11, 2016
posted by thelonius at 5:25 AM on March 11, 2016
Sorry - I should have said "qualitative analysis software". It's software that helps you organize and analyse texts (eg interview transcripts, anything textual). One of the processes is called "coding" and it's on my mind right now.
Qualitative Analysis Software is a niche market - and remains expensive and poorly designed.
posted by jb at 6:11 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Qualitative Analysis Software is a niche market - and remains expensive and poorly designed.
posted by jb at 6:11 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Miriam Posner on Money and Time:
Why does digital humanities look the way it does right now? I think the boom-and-bust cycle of grant-chasing and temporary funding has had a huge but largely unacknowledged effect on the kind of scholarship we’re producing. If we want to produce truly challenging scholarship and keep our best scholars from burning out, we need to pressure our institutions to, frankly, pay up. You can optimize, streamline, lifehack, and crowdsource almost everything you do — but good scholarship still takes money and time.posted by metaquarry at 5:10 PM on March 14, 2016
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Could be a nice way to segue back into academia though so I'm trying to find out more about my local university's incarnation of it.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:50 AM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]