Questioning the Need for and Utility of Digital Techniques
Many humanities scholars feel that that the adoption of computation techniques in the humanities have been objectively unsuccessful. Although computational methods have applied to literature for over thirty years, they have not had a large effect on literary history. Writing in 1993, Mark Olsen of the University of Chicago stated: “Computer-aided literature studies have failed to have a significant impact on the field as a whole” (Olsen, 1993, cited in Underwood, 2017). Olsen traces this failure to the inability of computational methods to perform refined analysis of “subtle semantic or grammatical structures in single texts or the works of individual authors”, and that those methods cannot represent or process the complexities of language (Olsen, 1993).
Modern and Classical Languages scholar Jonathan Green of University of North Dakota, in a 2015 blog post, criticizes the overreliance on computation in the humanities, and raised questions about the entire project. He discusses an article in the New York times by Armand Marie Leroi, a professor of developmental biology at Imperial College in London, who presents the case that the humanities must become a more mathematical discipline if they are to survive.
Green states bluntly: “If we do in fact reach the point where the digital humanities expresses its results ‘not in words, but equations,’ where the ‘analog scholar won’t even know how to read the results,’ then the digital humanities will fail.”
A related issue is that the digital humanities may reach a point where words are not the end product of humanities scholarship, but rather equations and numbers. In that case, it is unclear whether the digital humanities will address the guiding questions of humanities scholarship or present their results in a manner accessible and comprehensible to the wider humanities communities. Green therefore challenges Leroi’s contention that the approaches of biology, mathematics, and computer science are directly mappable to the humanities.
As Green puts it: “It is furthermore not at all clear that the tools of evolutionary biology, where reproduction is the first imperative of the most basic building blocks of life, should apply to culture, where it is not.”
Algorithms currently support distant reading better than close reading, the type of reading most practiced by humanities scholars. Green summarizes the situation with the observation that mathematical, statistical and computational approaches are “dead ends” when applied to the humanities. He cites the example of semantic encoding of mediaeval texts in the 1970s and 1980s that were intended to facilitate searching by semantic collocations (idiosyncratic expressions or groups of words that are syntactically uncommon and do not appear with statistically frequency), in addition to text searches, and which Green has deemed a failure. However, he also describes corpus linguistics, in which languages (linguistics) are studied as they are expressed in large collections of text (corpus) as a successful effort, but only as a supplementary method playing a supporting role to more established scholarly approaches. His overall conclusion is that, because scientific and mathematical assumptions and presuppositions do not correspond with those of the humanities, the methods of the former are not directly transferable to the latter, and consequently, the humanities should not relinquish their grounding in their own disciplines.
According to education writer Carl Straumsheim, the digital humanities was an academic “bubble” caused by unrealistically high expectations (Straumsheim, 2014). For instance, as also noted by Adeline Koh, the practice of digital humanities does not automatically translate into increased funding, better career prospects for digital humanities academics, increased enrollments in humanities programs, or overall improved situations for humanities departments in higher education. However, there is a widespread sense, even among digital humanities scholars, that the “bubble has burst”, as a marked revival of the humanities has not occurred, and that there is a feeling of general disappointment. As noted by Marc Bousquet in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University, one indication of this effect has been students being more drawn to subjects such a journalism, mass communication, and other fields whose activity is composing, and which make extensive use of digital tools and techniques, although these fields are considered to be within the humanities domain. Although digital humanities skills are in high demand for certain professions, at least in an ancillary way, the burgeoning of digital humanities tenure-track positions in post-secondary education has not materialized as much as originally thought.
However, some scholars see the scaling back of expectations as a good thing. For instance, Mark Bauerlein, also at Emory University, sees the digital humanities as being subsumed by the broader humanities. He recognizes the importance digital humanities tools and technologies for such areas as text analysis, but also downplays the idea that the digital humanities itself is “revolutionary” (Straumsheim, 2014).