Reading
- The Emerging Field of Digital Humanities: An Interview with Johanna Drucker
- Meaning of the Digital Humanities
- Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities
- The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities
- Toward a Postdigital Humanities: Cultural Analytics and the Computational Turn to Data-Driven Scholarship
- Digital Humanities @ Duke University Libraries
- The Digital Humanities Stack
- Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
The Emerging Field of Digital Humanities: An Interview with Johanna Drucker
This interview provides a succinct definition and description of the digital humanities by Johann Drucker, Ph.D., an artist and writer in areas related to the digital humanities. With Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, she is an author of Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), a seminal book in the field. Among her many publications is the influential Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship, appearing in Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). She is currently the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In this interview, Dr. Drucker provides a definition of the digital humanities in terms of interdisciplinarity and the tools, techniques and used by digital humanists, as well as some relevant applications:
She also emphasizes the crucial role of text-based scholarship and linguistic in the development of the digital humanities, and discusses her co-authored book Digital_Humanities.
Many of the topics to which Dr. Drucker alludes will be covered in this program. Many of the new approaches she mentions, including information visualization, network analysis, imaging, data mining, and geospatial tools and techniques will be discussed in detail.
Read: The Emerging Field of Digital Humanities: An Interview with Johanna Drucker
Meaning of the Digital Humanities
An article by Dr. Alan Liu, an influential scholar in the digital humanities. He is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is affiliated with the Media Arts and Technology graduate program there. He also taught at Yale University.
As the title states, the article is concerned with the question of meaning. Liu poses the question of the meaning of the digital humanities for the humanities in general. As Liu states: “The question of the meaning of the digital humanities best opens such an argument to view because it registers both a specific problem in the digital humanities and the larger crisis of the meaningfulness of today’s humanities.”
Read: Meaning of the Digital Humanities
Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities
In this article, Patrik Svensson, scholar, writer, and visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2016 to 2020, traces the development of the digital humanities, and how it emerged from its earlier instantiation, humanities computing. He investigates whether the transition from humanities computing to digital humanities is simply a re-branding, or re-packaging, or whether it represents an expanded scope, a shift in emphasis, or a set of different relationships to what was traditionally called “humanities computing”. Svensson is less interested in the precise meaning of the change in terms than how the terms came to be introduced in academic discourse.
Humanities computing is described as having the following four characteristics:
| 1. Humanities computing employs an instrumental approach to technology in the humanities, meaning that it uses tools as support mechanisms for humanities scholarship. Digital humanities scholar Susan Hockey states that computational applications take precedence in humanities computing. Computation itself is not the subject of research inquiry or scholarly exploration, but rather these techniques are used to solve specific problems. In sum, humanities computing is about using computational tools. Within this framework, text encoding is a core activity. It is seen as foundational for all work in the humanities. A specific example of this importance is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a classification and markup paradigm that has been widely influential in the digital humanities community. | ||
| 2. Humanities computing has had an emphasis on computational methods and technologies, due to its instrumental orientation. However, this link to other, non-humanities disciplines complicates the integration of humanities computing into the broader, traditional humanities scholarship. Humanities scholars with interest in the tools and methods utilized by humanities computing practitioners is still limited. Consequently, it could be argued that the “emerging” area of digital humanities has been neglect by the larger humanities community. | 3. Humanities computing has focused on text, and maintains a strong emphasis on textual analysis, with a preference given to traditional text is clearly a privileged level of description and analysis. Although humanities computing has been primarily concerned with text, especially text that is corpus-based, there is also an increased interest in multimedia and other non-textual media, manifested in the form of metadata schemes for visual material. Additionally, there is a growing interest in geographical information systems (GIS), 3D-modeling, animation, and virtual reality, among other forms. | |
| 4. Data is another important characteristic of humanities computing. These data are considered to fall into the four basic categories of text, image, number, and sound. As the source materials of humanities computing are thought to be reduced these four types, there is a corresponding perception that there is a limited toolset for manipulating and analyzing them, thereby encouraging science-driven models of knowledge production in humanities computing, especially where, as stated in #3, text is the predominant object of interest. |
In contrast to humanities computing, which takes an “instrumental” approach to technology in humanities work, where existing tools are adapted and adopted for humanities applications. Digital humanities, however, is also interested in interfaces, and “look and feel”. It also addresses a wider range of concerns and encompasses the activities at the intersection of and in between humanities disciplines and computational tools and techniques. Svensson writes: “In any case, the new name definitely suggests a broader scope and it is also used in wider circles as a collective name for activities and structures in between the Humanities and information technology. And as we have seen in this analysis, there are many examples of humanities computing as digital humanities claiming a larger territory.”
Read: Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities
The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities
This article, by David M. Berry, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex, should be read in a complementary fashion to Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities, described above. It describes the computational turn as the importance of understanding computational approaches that are employed across a wide variety of disciplines – most notably in the physical, biological, and medical sciences, but also in the social sciences and humanities. In the computational turn, this influence becomes so strong that the theories and structures of those disciplines are shifted. Because the physical and biological sciences have long employed quantitative techniques, and because they have made use of computational science for decades, the computational turn in the social sciences and digital humanities has been particularly noteworthy.
The article also explores the relationship between humanities computing and the digital humanities, again emphasizing that the former dealt primarily with the applications of computational techniques and technologies to humanities subjects, where the tools play a supporting role, and were seen as secondary to the application. Digital humanities, in contrast, while enabled by tools used in humanities computing, considers these technologies as participants in the scholarship endeavor. In the digital humanities, computation was increasingly thought of as an important component of what humanities scholarship is. In the words of Berry, “…computational technology has become the very condition of possibility required in order to think about many of the questions raised in the humanities today.”
Citing the work of Jeffrey Schnapp and Todd Presner in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, the development of the digital humanities can be described as taking place in two “waves”.
The first wave focused on quantitative methods, including harnessing the search and retrieval capabilities of database management systems. Text analysis, classification, encoding, and markup were major focal points. This first wave also witnessed large-scale digitization projects, specifically, the digitization of manuscripts and other “analog” archival material, as well as the institution of computational infrastructures to support these initiatives.
The second wave, or Digital Humanities 2.0, was more qualitative and interpretive compared to the more quantitative first wave. Digital Humanities 2.0 is characterized by new disciplinary areas, the convergence of existing fields of study, hybridization of computational techniques, and new models of publication. It is also focused on curating, processing, and analyzing material that is “born digital” rather than on digitizing existing, non-digital resources. At the end of Berry’s investigation, the topic becomes computer code and software itself, constituting a potential third wave in the digital humanities.
Here, computationality becomes a focal point, and the digital component of digital humanities becomes key. Investigations can now center on whether this new computationality induces corresponding epistemic changes. Interactions with the new field of software studies, which researches the cultural and social effects of software systems, can contribute to these efforts. [It is important to note that software studies is to be distinguished from new media studies. The former is concerned with software sources and processes, while, in general, the latter deals with interfaces.] Berry concludes that “we take a philosophical approach to the subject of computer code, paying attention to the wider aspects of code and software, and connecting them to the materiality of this growing digital world…the question of code becomes central to understanding in the digital humanities, and serves as a condition of possibility for the many computational forms that mediate out experience of contemporary culture and society.”
Read: The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities
Toward a Postdigital Humanities: Cultural Analytics and the Computational Turn to Data-Driven Scholarship
This substantial, complex, but illuminating article by Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, United Kingdom, is a response to the computational turn in the humanities. This article focuses on cultural analytics, developed by digital humanities scholar Lev Manovich, Professor of Computer Science at City University of New York, and will therefore be further discussed in more detail in the section on that topic. Hall uses this area as an important example of the computational turn in the humanities, specifically exploring the relationship between data-driven scholarship and theory. In the present context, Hall provides a complementary description of the computational turn as the process in which computational methodologies – interactive information visualization and visual analytics, imaging, geospatial science, statistics, network analysis and visualization, and techniques from data science – are employed to generate new approaches to analyze, understand, and gain insights into humanities subjects and texts. As the title of the article indicates, Hall also develops the idea of a postdigital humanities, as, in effect, almost all media today are digital or digitized, and therefore emphasizing the “digital” nature of such media becomes almost redundant. Hall also invokes the 2009 Digital Humanities Manifesto (Florian Cramer), where the term “postdigital” also indicates the retrieval and rediscovery of analog (i.e. non- or pre-digital) resources and technologies by new researchers in the field.
Hall also discusses data-driven scholarship in the humanities in detail. This is the primary reason that he selected the area of cultural analytics as his reference point, as this new field is primarily data-driven. Hall states that in the humanities, questions go beyond the control, ordering, visualization, analysis, and interpretation of cultural “big data” that can be performed with computational techniques and tools. Hall draws attention to a fundamental problem in shifting questions that traditionally occupied the humanities – such as critical theories – to tools and techniques adapted from scientific, mathematical, and computational fields. A tendency can be detected in the digital humanities to leave theory behind, or at least minimize its impact. Such a tendency can act as a feedback mechanism, further shifting paradigms away from the humanities, and towards STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) areas – which of course include the computational sciences. It also has the effect of legitimating current power structures in social systems by emphasizing instrumental concerns, away from questions of justice, truth, and public service. These criticisms have been leveled against the data-driven paradigm of cultural analytics, as this research may be thought to function as a rather “shallow” practice of humanities scholarship. The concern is that such a paradigm is controlled by the concerns of the “special interests” of scientists, industry, and government.
Digital Humanities @ Duke University Libraries
This short web page provides a good summary of definitions, and a timeline, with an emphasis on library science and digital resources at libraries.
Read: Digital Humanities @ Duke University Libraries
This blog post describes an overview, map, or pictorial representation of the digital humanities as a “stack” comprised of several “layers”. The layers indicate abstraction levels. In this figure, found in Berry and Fagerjord (2017) and duplicated in the Wikipedia article on the digital humanities, computational “tools”, or software are placed at the bottom of the stack, at the lowest abstraction level (i.e. the least “abstract” layer). The lowest layer, “Encoding and Education”, includes computational thinking, algorithms, and computer programs, as well as technical instruments to represent knowledge, such as optical character readers, databases, HTML, XML and its TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) extensions. Atop this lowest layer is the “Institutions” layer, consisting of research infrastructures, such as digital humanities research laboratories and centres. The “Code / Data” layer is next, and consists of intermediate “products” of digital humanities scholarship, such as digital archives and metadata that describes these archives and other data repositories, databases, and data structures. “Shared Structures” is the next layer that are used across computational systems in the digital humanities, and is characterized by application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow developers and non-computational scholars to utilize complex algorithms and functions, the details and internal workings of which are encapsulated in code, and, in a way, “hidden” from users. “Systems”, or platforms for digital humanities scholarship, forms the next level. The top level, with the highest level of abstraction, is the “Interface” layer, which includes publications and projects.
The idea of the digital humanities stack was proposed in Berry, D. M., & Fagerjord, A. (2017). Digital humanities: Knowledge and critique in a digital age. John Wiley & Sons.
Peruse the website Digital Humanities Now (https://digitalhumanitiesnow.org). This experimental site is an edited publication for the dissemination of informal digital humanities scholarship and resources that are available from the open web. Its goal, as stated on the main page of the site, is “refining processes of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review to open and extend conversations about the digital humanities research and practice.”
Read: The Digital Humanities Stack
Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
This document is a short, informative, and entertaining illustrated discussion of the digital humanities from a variety of perspectives, and bills itself as a “manifesto of manifestos”. It was authored by Jeffrey Schnapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld and Johanna Drucker in 2008 to initiate a discussion about the role, potential, and future directions of the digital humanities. Its description of what the digital humanities is (and is not) is illuminating: “Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which: a) print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences.”
As in the article of David M. Berry, discussed above, the Manifesto describes the first and second “waves” of digital humanities scholarship, and draws particular attention the disciplines experiential and generative aspects that characterize the second wave. A particular emphasis of the manifesto is the commitment to openness in digital scholarship.
Read: Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
https://www.toddpresner.com/?p=7