What Might Digital Humanities Be? And Why Might It Matter?
DEFINITIONS
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA) defines DH as: “A nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities, or, as is more true of my own work, who ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies.”
But Johanna Drucker (UCLA) and Stephen Ramsay (Nebraska) both say: “If you’re not making something, you’re not a digital humanist.”
Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland): “Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that’s bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that is collaborative and depends on networks of people and that lives an active, 24/7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English department?”
Brett Bobley (NEH): “I use ‘digital humanities’ as an umbrella term for a number of different activities that surround technology and humanities scholarship. Under the digital humanities rubric, I would includet opics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, media studies, and many others.”
SUGGESTIONS
We need to start thinking about digital humanities here at Wheaton because digital technologies are increasingly shaping how we and our students encounter the texts and images that have traditionally constituted “the humanities.” It would be naïve to assume that these changing technologies don't also change our modes of perception. What are the differences between (a) seeing a painting in person, (b) seeing a reproduction of that painting in a large-format, glossy-paged book, and (c) seeing a zoomable reproduction of that painting on a museum’s website? What happens if we’re teaching Augustine and discover that some of our students are reading him in a codex book, others on a Kindle, and still others on an iPad?
Learning to cope with the changes in perception introduced by digital media should be a central task for general education in a liberal-arts context.
If one takes the long historical view, Christians have often been quick to make use of appropriate technologies. We were among the first to make the transition from the scroll to the codex. Biblical study and theology were major drivers of the Gutenberg revolution. Even today, organizations like Every Tribe Every Nation are solving immensely challenging technical problems in order to get the Bible to cell-phone users who speak minority languages. We should ask ourselves whether the rise of the digital humanities offers us opportunities to think and act Christianly that we have so far been oblivious to.
LINKS
New York Times series on "Humanities 2.0"
Patrik Svensson on "The Landscape of Digital Humanities"
Chris Foster outlining some possibilities
A nice infographic on the current state of DH
