Anne Burdick – Digital_Humanities

Vii – The present volume puts itself forward in support of a Digital Humanities that asks what it means to be a human being in the networked information age and to participate in fluid communities of practice, asking and answering research questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre, medium, discipline, or institution. Digital Humanities represents a major expansion of the purview of the humanities, precisely because it brings the values, representational and interpretive practices, meaning-making strategies, complexities, and ambiguities of being human into every realm of experience and knowledge of the world. It is a global, trans-historical, and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-making.
The model we have created is experimental. It moves design— information design, graphics, typography, formal and rhetorical patterning— to the center of the research questions that it poses. It understands digital and physical making as inextricably and productively intertwined. This model is collaborative and committed to public knowledge. Crafted for a heterogeneous audience with crisscrossing and even contradictory interests and needs, it is meant as a porous multiple construct: a guidebook for the perplexed, a report on the state of the field, a vision statement regarding the future, an encouragement to engage, and a tool for critically positioning new forms of scholarship with respect to contemporary society.
Viii – The first three chapters offer synthetic mappings of the field, its emerging methodologies, and its social characteristics. Chapter 1. hUMANITIES TO DIGITAL HUMANITIES explores emerging forms of transmedia research and the increasing importance of prototyping, experimentation, and tool and platform development for contemporary scholarship in the humanities. Chapter 2. eMERGING METHODS AND GENRES charts new ways of doing things using digital tools and platforms that extend traditional scholarly practices or devise entirely new ones (whether new fields of inquiry or new models of dissemination and practice): the shapes that scholarly knowledge can assume in digital environments, the models of practice that are becoming prevalent, and the units of argument of which they are composed. Chapter 3. tHE SOCIAL LIFE OF the DIGITAL HUMANITIES analyzes the real and potential roles that Digital Humanities projects are playing in contemporary society, the purposes they serve, the communities engaged by them, and the values they affirm. Chapter 4. pROVOCATIONS builds from the synoptic to offer a series of propositions regarding what the future might hold for the Digital Humanities specifically and the humanities generally. The conclusions are speculative, raising thorny questions whose answers necessarily lie beyond the scope of present knowledge.//In addition to the main chapters, there are two other components to this book. At the end of Chapter 2 , we offer a pORTFOLIO OF CASE STUDIES for launching Digital Humanities projects into the world. To avoid forming an inadvertent canon, we have chosen not to pick from the host of exemplary Digital Humanities projects that already exist, many of long-standing impact and significance. Instead, we chose to aggregate and synthesize their defining features in the form of speculative case studies, fictions that delineate emerging methods and genres informed by present capabilities and resonant with the lessons gleaned from several decades of pioneering work. Our goal here and elsewhere in this book is to provide a concrete framework for the creation of generative scholarship.The case studies provide models for building teams, assembling necessary technical resources, and situating the projects within cross-disciplinary and multi-institutional configurations.
Ix – That is because the Digital Humanities remains at its core a profoundly collaborative enterprise. Over the decades, a diverse array of individuals, projects, and organizations has built the field of Digital Humanities as it exists today. We cite some of these precursors and colleagues in our text, while many more of them inform the book’s ideas and arguments. In shaping this volume, we have striven not to privilege one lineage or another within the Digital Humanities, seeking instead an encompassing yet polemical voice that speaks both inside and outside the walls of the academy. Accordingly, our case studies are fictional, our quotations of specific figures and theorists sparing, and our language direct.
3 – With the migration of cultural materials into networked environments, questions regarding the production, availability, validity, and stewardship of these materials present new challenges and opportunities for humanists. In contrast with most traditional forms of scholarship, digital approaches are conspicuously collaborative and generative, even as they remain grounded in the traditions of humanistic inquiry. This changes the culture of humanities work as well as the questions that can be asked of the materials and objects that comprise the humanistic corpus.
5 – These projects engage with any number of different methodologies and approaches, but here we concentrate on four: curation, analysis, editing, and modeling as central to contemporary humanistic inquiry. These intertwinings of scholarly method, computational capacity, and new modes of knowledge formation combine to make possible what we term the Generative Humanities, a mode of practice that depends on rapid cycles of prototyping and testing, a willingness to embrace productive failure, and the realization that any “solutions” generated within the Digital Humanities will spawn new “problems”— and that this is all to the good. Finally, we conclude this chapter by making the argument that the Digital Humanities may well function as a core curriculum for the 21st century.
6 – Along with many other scholars, we suggest that the migration of cultural materials into digital media is a process analogous to the flowering of Renaissance and post-Renaissance print culture.
7 – In other words, modern concepts of humanistic knowledge were built on authoring, narrative, and textual models specific to the medium of print, with the monograph gradually supplanting commentaries and critical editions as the inviolable touchstone of scholarly knowledge and achievement .
No matter how imperiled by vocationalism, cost-cutting administrators, or the self-inflicted wounds of internecine battles, the humanities must survive because they embody distinctive modes of producing knowledge and distinctive models of knowledge itself.We refuse to take the default position that the humanities are in “crisis,” in part because this very rhetoric of crisis has persisted for well over a century, however many mutations it has undergone. Jeremiads regarding the decline of educational standards, the failure of students and faculty alike to adequately embrace humanistic ideals, and the demise of tradition may well be inherent to the process of education itself. Digital_Humanities adopts a different view: It envisages the present era as one of exceptional promise for the renewal of humanistic scholarship and sets out to demonstrate the contributions of contemporary humanities scholarship to new modes of knowledge formation enabled by networked, digital environments.
- This is a promise that i’m depending on coming to fruition
8 – Gathering momentum from the late 1980s through the start of the 21st century, a first wave of Digital Humanities developed, critiqued, and disseminated ways of structuring humanities data to dialogue effectively with computation. Database tools provided the foundation of the first Digital Humanities projects that were seeded around the world. Though this work was varied in nature, there were common, salient features: a concern with textual analysis and cataloging, the study of linguistic features, an emphasis on pedagogical supports and learning environments, and research questions driven by analyzing structured data.
9 – In the late 1990s , projects began to appear that harnessed the digital to create visualizations, geospatial representations, simulated spaces, and network analyses of complex systems.
Questions about how to infuse the technological underpinnings of these approaches with humanistic methods and values remain. Challenges lie everywhere and, with them, opportunities to once again make explicit the value of humanistic modes of inquiry, thought, and creativity. How might the history of ancient scroll design and late medieval page layouts reshape our imaginings of the expressive possibilities of digital scrolling or digital page units?
What media forms and modalities of engagement might a critical edition of an audio recording assume? We see such questions and the many others that accompany them as harbingers of renewal, signs that this is a galvanizing moment to be a humanist involved in devising, designing, and deploying new tools; in opening expanded modes of inquiry unthinkable under pre-digital conditions; and in forging innovative, multimodal approaches to traditional questions (about authorship, influence, dissemination patterns) through the as-yet-unrealized possibilities of digital platforms.
11 – What this means is that the visual becomes ever more fundamental to the Digital Humanities, in ways that complement, enhance, and sometimes are in tension with the textual. There is no either/or, no simple interchangeability between language and the visual, no strict subordination of the one to the other. Words are themselves visual but other kinds of visual constructs do different things.
15 – One caveat is worth noting. The positive demand for expanded skill-sets could have profoundly negative effects on scholarship if it becomes the academic equivalent of a neo-liberal speedup in which ever more quantitative metrics are used to push “education workers” into acquiring technological skills without commensurate pay, skills which they are then held accountable for, both within and outside of tenure tracks.
- Which digital humanities are we ending up with?
17 – Both computational foundations and processing activities have endured, but other platforms, tools, and infrastructures have also developed to support curation, analysis, editing, and modeling. These depend upon the basic building blocks of digital activity: digitization , classification , description and metadata , organization , and navigation . Designing and building digital projects depend on knowledge of these fundamentals and on a nuanced understanding of the networked environments in which the projects will develop and variously reside.
26 – The digitization of the world’s knowledge and its movement across global networks, no matter how incomplete or incompletely free, have transformed what we understand by and how we approach the humanities in the 21st century. We are continually creating new ways of accessing and assessing this new cultural production, which continually open up important new spaces for exploring humanity’s cultural heritage and for imagining future possibilities using the transmedia methods and genres of the digital present. It is to these methods and genres that we now turn.

Tags: Digital Humanities

paul kelley vieth

portfo

Anne Burdick – Digital_Humanities

Leave a Reply Cancel reply