Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Volume 25, Issue 1. Issue Editors. Elizabeth Weed Elizabeth Weed. This Site. Ellen Rooney. Previous Article Next Article. Article Navigation. Research Article May 01 Matthew Kirschenbaum Matthew Kirschenbaum. Cite Icon Cite. You do not currently have access to this content. View full article. Sign in Don't already have an account? Client Account. Yet digital humanities is also a social undertaking At Stanford University, Digital Humanities is described as "at the crossroads of computer science and the humanities.
First, lets define humanities. The study of humanities is the academic discipline or field of study of the aspects of human society and culture. The humanities use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.
The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts such as music and theatre.
Areas that are sometimes regarded as social sciences and sometimes as humanities include history, archaeology, anthropology, area studies, communication studies, classical studies, law and linguistics…. They use it daily to share information, establish contacts, ask and answer questions, bullshit, banter, rant, vent, kid, and carry on. The obvious fact that not every digital humanist is actually on Twitter is thus beside the point for purposes of this argument. Rather, the deployment of the specific character string as a hashtag exposes it to algorithmic eyes that formally map and define what the digital humanities are or is at any given moment.
On the one hand, then, digital humanities is a term possessed of enough currency and escape velocity to penetrate layers of administrative strata to get funds allocated, initiatives under way, and plans set in motion.
On the other hand, it is a populist term, self-identified and self-perpetuating through the algorithmic structures of contemporary social media. In what follows I will explore an example of each and then offer some concluding comments about the implications of this strange confluence.
And the Name. Timing, as they say, is everything. Text analysis and text encoding, hypertext fiction, and computational linguistics were all represented as potentially constitutive of humanities computing as an academic discipline. Unsurprisingly as these things go, the conclusion reached by the seminar was that a degree program should be offered, and two academic years later in —2, a second seminar, this time with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, was convened.
Not only does the lack of an interrogative in the title furnish an up-front answer to the question posed by the earlier seminar, the lexical shift to digital humanities already seems a fait accompli. The agenda was also conspicuously more focused, with some two dozen faculty and graduate students participating as well as again a set of visiting speakers and consultants myself among them. The institutional landscape is thus defined as one of media studies versus humanities computing, with McCarty especially laboring mightily to recapitulate the latter as a scholarly and theoretical undertaking, as distinct from service-oriented academic computing.
By the time we get to December , however, only a few months later, the question seems to have been decided, at least within the seminar.
Concerns over legitimization, status, and intrainstitutional relationships predominate. At this point, some chronological housekeeping is in order. A third key component was the founding of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations shortly thereafter, where Unsworth again played a central role with digital humanities emerging as the term of choice for this new governance body—also detailed in my earlier essay.
One option would be to start with a program within an existing department and work [to] attract students and faculty. When the program is a working success, then we could move to create a separate department. However, the seminar group seemed decided that the need for new faculty, facilities, and research agendas precludes starting small.
Now seems to be the time to campaign aggressively for a large-scale Digital Media program. To establish the degree as an independent program would eventually require the blessing of this statewide body; to establish it within the contours of an existing departmental program would sidestep that necessity. It is clear that there was a mood of confidence in the seminar, a feeling that the moment was right for a big push, one with consequences not only for the degree as such but also at the level of personnel and facilities like classrooms and labs.
Crucially, such a move would be advanced under the banner of digital media or, as it later turned out, digital humanities and not humanities computing. These are tactical considerations. While the degree program never materialized it certainly never made it to SCHEV , the discussions generated by the process have proven influential.
And the name stuck. And Virtual Alike. Digital humanities is a mobile and tactical signifier, whether from the standpoint of universities, publishers, scholarly organizations, funders, the press, or its actual practitioners.
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