Political Considerations
Michelle Moravec of Rosemont College in Pennsylvania points to exceptionalism in the digital humanities and the “uneasy” fit between the discipline and power politics. She delineates problems of identity, disengagement and lack of diversity , as well as the important problem of the relationship between scholarly research and pedagogy. Although she supports the “utopianism”, or optimism, generated by digital humanities, she also concurs with several areas of neglect listed by digital humanities scholar Matthew K. Gold of City University of New York, as he describes the content of a 2012 collection of digital humanities critiques: “a lack of attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; a preference for research-driven projects over pedagogical ones; an absence of political commitment; an inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners” (Gold & others, 2012). Gold also notes a disconnect between humanists that use the new technologies to enhance traditional scholarly practices and those that see them as a “disruption”, revolutionizing the entire humanities enterprise.
At the level of higher education, austerity budgets, and specifically budget cuts to humanities departments, have been deeply felt among faculty. Therefore, it seemed natural to think of the digital humanities as a way to revitalize the departments’ fortunes in the academy. Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (Koh, 2015), writes that the “digital humanities” is in some ways a guise for “humanities computing”, with support from new concepts such as Big Data and “object oriented ontology”, and that this is not enough to improve the standing of the humanities in higher education, nor will it prevent further reduction in funding. In fact, it may even accelerate the humanities’ further decrease in prestige. Of particular concern, according to Koh, is the relationship of the humanities to tools and techniques from STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Computational methods, considered in isolation, render the “humanities” component of digital humanities as only a servant to the dominant STEM fields. Meanwhile, the “digital” component of digital humanities often leads to the perception that the latter is a “pseudo-STEM” field, and not strictly humanities. Koh also points to the objective methodologies that characterize STEM as not conducive to introspection and, vis-à-vis the humanities, “does not integrally inspect critical identity categories, access and privilege in the process of making, issues that designate what the humanities considers to be “critical” (Koh, 2015). Furthermore, the traditional “non-digital” humanities is relatively inexpensive, compared to STEM fields. The technology to fully support and incorporate the digital component in digital humanities, Big Data analysis, 3D printing, computational hardware, and the development of useful software tools are very costly in comparison. One of the salient points in Koh’s critique is that the digital humanities constitute a worthwhile endeavor, and should be enthusiastically supported, but that what constitutes the “best”, “most critical”, and “seminal” in digital humanities scholarship must be redefined. She gives the example of being able to perform excellent scholarship with free, open-source software that does not necessitate expertise in computer programming (Koh uses the R language for illustration). The relationship between research and pedagogy should also be rethought, and strengthened, as teaching is a central concern of DH. Additionally, Koh urges digital humanities scholars “consider class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality primary to and constitutional of the digital humanities” (Koh, 2015). Therefore, digital humanities can make meaningful contributions to the humanities only if it retains its core humanistic questions. As a set of disciplines that studies the processes and documentation of human cultures and human ideas, the methods used for this processing and documenting are critically questioned, while an overemphasis on computational techniques, which are generally not focused on social implications, cannot benefit the humanities. Koh draws the following conclusion: “Only when we completely reconfigure and re-center the humanities in digital humanities will we be able to talk about using the field to ‘save’ humanities departments from extinction” (Koh, 2015). Put succinctly, the digital humanities must privilege humanities over the digital.
Another accusation against the digital humanities is that because of its dependence on technology, i.e., its “digital” instantiation, it is (at least implicitly) a neoliberal construct (see Allington, D., Brouillette, S., and Golumbia, D. “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2016, cited in Greenspan, 2018). The target of this criticism is a specific type of tradition of textual studies and humanities computing. The main arguments for the digital humanities enabling neoliberalism are as follows. In the digital humanities, there is an increased pressure for funding, as digital infrastructure is costly. These technological platforms and software are generally commercialized, and contrast with the open-access archives, databases, and infrastructure developed for scholarly purposes. Humanists are traditionally considered to be nontechnical and thus nonmanagerial, and therefore there is a potential disconnect between humanistic inquiry and the technological culture that is part of the digital humanities. Other new aspects of funding proposals are relatively unusual in humanities research. Support for students, whose contributions are major drivers of advances in the field, is now routinely required. In addition, some scholars have observed a trend towards a more outcome-oriented focus, and away from the “pure research” that has traditionally situated humanities questions. Furthermore, it has been argued that digital scholarship is merely “disruptive” innovation, replacing the progressive inquiry that is embodied in the academic culture of the humanities (Greenspan, 2018).
Another argument is that the digital humanities, even if not directly endorsing neoliberal tendencies, still exacerbate the inclinations that pre-exist in academia due to increasing reliance on technological infrastructure. As the “digital” – and therefore technological – subdiscipline of the humanities, the field necessarily has a major stake in these technological issues (Greenspan, 2018).
A variety of counterarguments have been made to address these criticisms. Some scholars point out that many areas of inquiry have contributed to the development of the digital humanities, including history, classics, internet studies, game studies, and critical media studies, among many others (Greenspan, 2018). Concerning the use of commercial software and platforms, there is a resistance to commercialization, as evidenced by the large amount of work in the field to build open-source tools and hardware platforms, and to use open-source programming languages and libraries. In previous sections, it was noted that knowledge of languages such as Python and R, used in conjunction with powerful and widely available libraries and packages contributed by the user community, enable humanities scholars to perform research in a way most conducive to their goals, and therefore they are not constrained by the inherent limitations of commercial and/or pre-programmed systems.
Additionally, although digital humanists are involved in computationally expensive work, the areas they investigate rarely have direct commercial benefits in terms of “deliverables”. Topic modeling, for instance, is a particularly computationally intensive and time-consuming task, where the result, it is hoped, is the discovery of new discursive patterns. From a purely utilitarian viewpoint, however, the effort is impractical, and utilizes a large amount of resources with little or no return on investment (Greenspan, 2018).
However, these scholars also agreed that digital humanists need to better distinguish their own
“inventive and critical explorations of alternate pedagogies and methodologies” from “disruptive” technologies promoted by university administrations, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Greenspan, 2018).
Furthermore, a subtle reason for the perception of the digital humanities as being (sometimes unintentionally) supportive of neoliberalism is that the field consciously focuses on, foregrounds, and illuminates the material apparatus and their maintenance that are often simply presumed by most humanities scholars. Digital humanities work closely examines and critiques the technical, social, and labour-related aspects and constraints under which most current scholarship is conducted.
Carleton University digital humanities scholar Brian Greenspan summarizes the situation as follows: “If anything, the digital humanities are guilty of making all too visible the dirty gears that drive the scholarly machine, along with the mechanic’s maintenance bill…The digital humanities do not pander to the system (at least not more than any other field) so much as they scandalously reveal the system’s components, while focusing critical attention on the mechanisms needed to maintain them” (Greenspan, 2018).