Digital Humanities
Just having completed Skip Via’s ED 677 Digital Storytelling class, it made sense to start with this topic.
Definition:
Bryan Alexander offers a working definition: “Simply put, it is telling stories with digital technologies. Digital stories are narratives built from the stuff of cyberculture” (Alexander, 2010, Loc 110 of 3318). I think there is a subtle difference between these two sentences. The first sentence is broadly inclusive. And so content creators who purchase a sailboat and document their adventures online and content creators who stream MMO gameplay are both engaged in digital storytelling according to the first sentence. Alexander’s second sentence I think modifies the first, focusing the definition on being more exclusively online, “stuff of cyberculture.” I think this turn privileges the MMO streamer’s story. This is a turn with which I do not easily resonate. Rather, it is our shifting back and forth between our online selves and our embodied selves that describe this historic moment for humanity. Perhaps in a few years with AI and robotics have lightened the burden of our embodied selves we will have a fuller sense of entirely digital humanities.
Pausing, because my undergraduate degree is in humanities it seems reasonable to ask what that meant previously? “Humanities” were those fields of inquiry other than math, science and social science. So for example, poetry, painting, theater, and writing both essay and creative, were some of the inquiries that traditionally informed the “humanities.” Hence, why I at the outset reached back to the storytelling of last semester. In summary, these were inquiries that tried to make sense of our human being. And, that detail, I think is why I hold out for a notion of digital humanities at this time that explores our shifting between online and embodied selves.
That said, it is prescient and relevant to anticipate a future where we live almost entirely online. Celebrating Alexander’s foresight, we can begin to predict a “digital humanities built from the stuff of cyberculture.” I recall studying, in the 1990’s, with an artist who was using fractal geometry to create images, or perhaps to let a computer create images, original each of them. His struggle to define “art” at that moment was interesting, but taking it the next turn, what happens when computers refer to images constructed by computers to craft subsequent images? When humans view these images what impact might that have on our person? The computers lack emotion, certainly, AI may become sophisticated enough as to offer us a convincing simulation but that is not the same thing as passion or desperation or any other distinctly human trait. Will we use our unburdening to become distinctly human, or will we just consume and gradually retreat from our human being?
The Wikipedia article on Digital Humanities is particularly useful in term of its “values and methods” section. If we are going to define something as “new” part of that newness necessarily needs be methods, for the postmodernist in me, I love the blurring that is implicated in these methods, for example, one tells a story, and is at once writing literary criticism as well. Treating programming languages as languages and discovering the poetry in them is fascinating as well, as examples.
Historically the arts are driven by patrons and donors, and happily, we see that the National Endowment for the Humanities has a subsite devoted to the Digital Humanities. The Office of Digital Humanities despite its unfortunately glum name offers access to grant funding and a wealth of information about projects and research.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education provides both a catalog of resources and debate around the relative accessibility of digital humanities as a turn in one’s professional scholarship. One might say that this article is itself a practice in digital humanities since it curates other catalog’s of resources as well. It is a criticism/observation of higher education’s moment.
centerNet is an international resource for digital humanities scholars. It catalogs the locations of centers of study around the world.
The online journal “Digital Humanities Quarterly” has been published since 2007, they describe themselves saying, ” open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.” A quick review of recent articles shows a pretty even split on doing digital humanities and on methodological self-reflexion as one would expect from a youthful cluster of research.
Digital Humanities although a commonplace in higher education and academic libraries is perhaps less ubiquitous a notion among the general public. This article again captures the unsettled moment in higher education. Interestingly reporting on an MLA presentation from a community college professor simultaneously advocating for digital humanities and celebrating how the lack of funding at her home institution forces her to be precise in her disciplinary practice. Other comments point to the joint practicing of scholarship by professors and students, changes in publishing, the article ends with a salute to the media literacy that grows out of digital humanities scholarship offering that as a pretty good reason to be involved on its own.
I think these articles were interesting because my approach to Digital Humanities was focused on what ordinary people were doing online with SoundCloud, Storify, YouTube for examples. I was thinking about the production of music, art, and storytelling, not about the scholarship of and around those activities. The scholarship, however, does an interesting thing to our traditional notion of humanities because the practices blur some of the clear lines between social science and humanities or math and humanities and that is fascinating.
References
Alexander, B. (2011). The new digital storytelling: Creating narratives with new media. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger.
Digital Humanities. (2017, Jan. 26). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 28, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities
Bessette, L.S. (March 14, 2017).Digital Humanities Training Opportunities and Challenges, In The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved May 28, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/digital-humanities-training-opportunities-and-challenges/63709
Fenton, W. (JANUARY 13, 2017). Digital Humanities: The Most Exciting Field You’ve Never Heard Of, In PC Mag. Retrieved May 28, 2017, http://www.pcmag.com/commentary/350984/digital-humanities-the-most-exciting-field-youve-never-hea