Digital Humanities Futures

Ben Goldman and Meg Backus

Throughout the semester we've noted that the stable print-based infrastructure of the past couple centuries yielded equally stable environments for humanities scholars. Those technological developments that allowed information containers to be printed efficiently, cited easily, and organized effectively in libraries arguably privileged humanists' work over that of their scientist (and visual artist?) peers. Typographers designed typefaces and page layouts ideal for narrative texts, which lent themselves well to the production and exchange of humanists' scholarship, with the primacy of language in most of their work. When computing technology availed itself to the research world, however, tables were turned. Scientists immediately grasped and celebrated the implications of these machines on their work, while humanists seemed to carry on, largely oblivious, doing what they had always done in the past. Obliviousness is no longer possible, and we've tried to understand what to expect for/from the humanities while that print era, along with it's corresponding security, is increasingly challenged by a digital economy.

As we have followed and tried to assimilate the contours of this emerging field, we seem to be undecided (collectively) about how revolutionary the Digital Humanities really is: whether the productions in new media significantly depart from and triumph over the limits of the old print medium; whether the differences between print and digital texts demand a theoretical overhaul on the nature and function of textuality; whether interactivity is truly a novel innovation that restructures the rhetorical device of narrative.

The thing is, computing in the humanities does not have fifty years of catching up to do despite the lack of attention it has received from most in the field. It doesn't have to make up for lost time in real time. The accepted role of technology does not mirror historical development of technology--even though the humanities have comparatively little rapport with technology, allowing it into their discipline means accepting it in its latest version(s). They may not have the option of wading in slowly, adapting their field and their skills in light of low tech solutions, then graduating to incrementally higher tech ones while continuing to adjust the norms of the discipline. Neither do they have the option to write technology off as a missed bus. They have to absorb the full impact of emerging digital environments regardless of how prepared their theories and practices are to do so. The humanities, then, are asking the same questions, puzzling over the same phenomena, and ultimately confronting the same crises as everyone else, including academia, libraries, and culture at-large. When the readings from this week grapple with the threats to scholarly publishing we should recognize they are simultaneously making arguments deeply pertaining to our discussions about the Googlization of everything, the merits of electronic texts, the death of reading in this networked age, and the preservation of quality and access to educational information in this electronic information age.

Last week we touched on several issues concerning the future of Digital Humanities research. We explored, briefly, the tools developed by Jerome McGann's NINES organization, and touched on the scholarly activities that most humanists believe will be strongly affected by technology, including interpretation, exploration, collaboration, and visualization. The summation of the summit text was that the collaborative processes promoted by use of these tools dramatically changes the academic culture of the humanities. While identifying that altering the modes of sharing and dissemination is what fuels this cultural change, the summit made only passing reference to the institutions that would be responsible for distributing these collaborative products. This is where Jensen and McGann join the conversation, with their essays on scholarly publishing in the digital age.

In a thread last week we briefly discussed the possibility of including user/usage data to inform decisions about Digital Humanities projects, a perfectly sound idea. But as McGann points out in his article, scholarly publishing is now an insulated field: academics are largely publishing for other academics alone. Should a new model of scholarly publishing be concerned with the needs of a wider audience? Would a digital publishing model that reaches no new audience ultimately fall prey to the same shortcomings as the existing scholarly publishing model?

Thinking along these lines is Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Pomona College, who argues in a presentation at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities that it is not the form or the content of scholarly publishing that has failed, but the process. Migrating the present scholarly publishing model to an electronic distribution system would likely do little to revive academic publishing. True change, she argues, would need to be focused on the institutional and social processes that make up the present publishing model. Agreement on this point seems widespread (McCarty, 2008). McGann and Jensen both acknowledge this core problem; they just have different solutions for addressing it.

Jensen's Approach: The Slow Humanities?

Jensen, who comes to us from the publishing industry, argues for caution in the face of technical advances. He guides us through an analogous (though not entirely similar) informal case study from Czechoslovakia in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era of for-profit, capitalist publishing to replace the former socialist model. The results of this transformation were business decisions that led to significant changes in the reading and educational habits of the society--ultimately for the worse, in Jensen's estimation. Jensen feels that a rushed transition from paper to electronic publishing might have similarly disastrous results.

Calling such transformations in the publishing industry "revolutions," Jensen cautions against "naive revolutionaries" that push for too many changes too quickly, resulting in "the loss of cultural and societal habits that encouraged educational engagement." He worries about the implications of for-profit information, and references the current state of copyright as an example of the restrictions inherent in such a model. But the obvious response to these well-placed concerns is: "aren't we there already?"  Traditional scholarly publishing is now beholden to the bottom line while academics are oft-lamenting the death of reading culture.

Besides cautioning against moving too quickly towards the future, Jensen also offers some very practical insights. He acknowledges that profit is somewhat important in a new publishing model, though clearly second fiddle to providing value. Like McGann, he also preaches the value of collaboration and interdisciplinarity. Most importantly, he tries to assert the role of tradition--the value of publishing as a set of honed professional decisions.

McGann's Proposal: You Have to Make it Fall

Che Guevara said, "The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall," and McGann's arguments and activities would seem to follow this general philosophy. McGann's mechanism for making the apple fall is NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), an organization that seeks to normalize some of the institutional changes he proposes by providing: institutional support and prestige (in the form of peer review) for digital scholarship; digital scholarship training; and a suite of digital tools to "facilitate the production of high-quality humanities content".

McGann bemoans the superstructural discourse that never gives way to activity at the base. He wants humanities to learn by doing, from failures as well as successes. Continuous plight-of-the-humanist talk that refuses to start acting on the available options for transitioning to a new publishing regime submits to "the slow train that's coming and won't be sidetracked." Without collaborating to publish aggregated, peer-reviewed humanities scholarship online through trusted channels, scholars' work is vulnerable to instability, illegitimacy, and worst, obscurity.

The blog post from Spiro last week mentions Unsworth's scholarly primitives, including discovery, interpretation, and exchange--each of which is possible only because human thought has been committed to paper (or hard drive). Published material is the stuff of scholarship. McGann closes his essay with a reference to Swinburne's line of man [and woman] as the master of things, distinguishing things from people or life events. But, he continues, given that scholarship will inevitably be "cast and maintained and disseminated in digital forms," humanists need to allow themselves to be the students of things during this transition. Humanists are not currently masters of the stuff of scholarship. They need to assume roles as students in order to become masters of today's things. A fluency in the languages defended by Kirschenbaum and Spiro (e.g. Perl) will help to preserve their cultural role and to protect themselves and their contributions from commercial exploitation, from being bought low and sold high. McGann wants them to keep learning, keep moving, and learn from their collective failures.

The Digitally Illiterate Humanities

McGann very bluntly says that humanists are technically illiterate. In an update to his "Culture and Technology" article, published earlier this year with the title "The Future is Digital," McGann even calls out the elite humanities institutions: "If you survey the departments at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Chicago, and Cornell, not a single faculty member in English is involved in digitally-oriented scholarship." This issue should sound especially poignant to us because much the same argument can be made about librarians. Librarians and Humanities scholars alike are producing some fine digital work, but their numbers are too far and few between. McGann even reminds us in this article of the role the library has in the Digital Humanities. The library, he says, "is a cornerstone, if not the very foundation, of modern humanities. And the library is undergoing right now a complete digital transformation. In the next fifty years the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination.

Can we really begin to talk about a digital revolution in the Humanities, or in scholarly publishing, if the people best positioned to lead this revolution (or at least govern the new state) are largely unprepared to do so? And how can humanists ensure that their interests are best met if digital illiteracy puts them "on the margin of conversations and actions" that affect their cultural and scholarly interests? (McGann, p.72, culture and tech). What can we (library students) do to ensure that our libraries are not on the margins of this conversation?

But before moving on to the next topic, we might also gently question McGann's authority on this topic. In the beginning of his article, McGann seems to be in a room crowded with "some of the most distinguished academics on this continent" and he's most troubled by a problem (and its solution) to which he is singularly privy. Do we believe him that there's widespread ignorance of IT's relevance to humanities, and that it seriously threatens scholarship and education? Do we accept that illiteracy plagues even the most established, respected humanities scholars? If this is, in Dr. Schreibman's words, a quiet revolution, is it because so few have anything to say on the topic of technology?

Some Pessimism

One significant obstacle--perhaps the most significant--should be familiar to all of us in and entering the library profession: funding. The future of Digital Humanities will depend on the money that is available. Given the present state of the economy, as well as some dire predictions for its future, can we expect a massive overhaul to scholarly publishing? What is the future of universities and their research libraries in a time of shrinking funding, endowments, and enrollments? Here in New York State, we are facing a $40 billion budget short fall over the near term. The governor has proposed a 20% cut in funding for state libraries, a cut which will force institutions to make hard decisions. How much money will be there for digital projects?

What are You Prepared to do?

Jensen spoke reverentially of the Czech public who--whether outfitted in hard hats or tweed suits--read material of consequence. Both he and McGann seem to have some hope that a similar condition can be achieved if the right attitudes and technologies are embraced for publishing. McGann, for his part, preaches the relation between societal ills and the ills of the academy. He calls those scholars on "our tight little island" to action, unafraid to address not only "what is to be done" but also to ask directly, "what are you prepared to do?" We have been through twelve weeks of class, read about the major topics in the Digitial Humanities, discussed approaches, technologies, theories, and possibilities. So what will you do with this knowledge?

After all, "each to himself [or herself] must be the oracle."

Questions

1. Many of you have spoken of discomfort with using advanced technology (such as programming languages). If the library is the foundation of modern humanities, and the humanities are undergoing a digital revolution, do you believe librarians will need to become more technically fluent to support humanities scholarship? Given what we now know of the Digital Humanities, what technical skills might be essential for librarians to have?
2. The crisis in scholarly publishing arguably speaks to a number of other academic crises: the low numbers of students pursuing humanities majors, the "death of reading/books," and the worries about privatization and commodification of information are but a few. McGann and Jensen make very appropriate suggestions for improving the institutional and social processes but are the institutional and social problems more global/universal in scope, reaching beyond just academia? If so, can an organization like NINES really effect any substantive changes?
3. Consider the positions of both McGann and Jensen. Which views or concerns of theirs do you most heartily second? Do any of their points seem farfetched, overblown, or otherwise off the mark? Are your own thoughts and ideas more simpatico with one or the other of them, and how so?
4. Make a prediction about the future of digital humanities. Optimistic or pessimistic, fun or serious, practical or theoretical.

Bibliography/Suggested Reading

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains." The Atlantic. July/August 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and theFuture of the Academy.” October 21, 2008. MITH Digital Dialogues Podcast. http://khelone.umd.edu/staff/dreside/dd-10-21-08.mp3

Jensen, Michael. "Intermediation and its Malcontents: ValidatingProfessionalism in the Age of Raw Dissemination." In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens & J. Unsworth (Eds.), A companion to digital humanities.  Oxford: Blackwell, 543-556.

McCarty, W. (2008). "What’s going on?" Literary and Linguistic Computing,  23(3) 3.

McGann, Jerome. "Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What Is to Be Done?" New Literary History, 2005, 36: 71–82.

McGann, Jerome. "The Future is Digital." Journal of Victorian Culture 13,no. 1 (2008): 80-88. http://muse.jhu.edu.libezproxy2.syr.edu/ (accessed September 18, 2008).

McGann, Jerome."A Note on the Current State of Humanities Scholarship." The Future of Criticism: A Critical Inquiry Symposium. 2003.  http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.McGann.html