Digital Humanities Initiative:Some Analogies and Thoughts

Growing up, I was always taught that Jews are the most disputation-prone of all ethnicities and religions. Put nine Jews in a room and you get ten opinions. Then I went in to academia and started working on committees. Some of the most interesting DHI discussions I’ve had about both the definition of digital humanities and the purpose of the Digital Humanities Initiative make yeshiva pilpul look like, well, playground arguments. So anything I assert about the DHI is inevitably open to debate. I say this because I have found DHI committee conversation a fascinating reflection of the puzzlement that the Humanities at large is experiencing in the face a new and pervasive medium. Every Digital Humanities Center I have visited online is trying to figure out precisely what they should be doing.

So let me start with an assertion whose main point of controversy is hopefully that it is a bit tautological: the Digital Humanities Initiative is trying to encourage the study and use of digital technology from a critical perspective. We have decided to start with what we would not like to do: we are not supporting classroom teaching. There are several organizations on the Boulder campus that support teaching with technology, including ATLAS, The Dean’s Fund for Excellence, and FTEP. It’s not that we provide sufficient encouragement for teaching with technology on this campus – we don’t. It’s just that there is almost no organized support for scholarship in Digital Humanities. So here is what we don’t do: we don’t provide support for clickers; we don’t provide funds for experimental classroom methods.

We are engaged in the following activities: finding and applying for grants, uncovering scholarly and artistic projects to support, and engaging in a consortium – Project Bamboo – with several other universities for the same purposes. We are been in business for just a year, so we are looking for worthwhile projects to help out. And by help out, I mean provide help with fundraising rather than directly with funds. We have no funds.

I’d like to spend some time talking about some sample projects going on at other institutions.In 2008 curators at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts X-Rayed a Tintoretto “Nativity” (1570), and found that what had seemed an awkward single painting was in fact a stitching-together of several works.

One of which was a crucifixionA nativity that is a palimpsest of a crucifixion changes rather significantly our sense of the meaning of the painting. X-Ray and infrared technology have changed the way art critics and historians understand their object of study. For example, our sense of provenance and even of subject is further destabilized.

Most of the university centers for research thematize their research projects. For example, Stanford’s Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities focuses on Music research; King’s College Centre for Computing in the Humanities specializes in “visualization research”; University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) favors historical projects, with an emphasis on histories of the Far East, and Medieval and Renaissance Europe; The Center for the Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina uses its Scholarly Edition and Digital Archive of the works of Edmund Spenser as a sort of centerpiece; MIT’s Hyperstudio digitizes documentation around specific subjects interesting to different kinds of scholars; George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media originates new software for scholars: Zotero, Omeka, and Text Mining, to name a few. And so on.

Many projects are essentially databases, for which the revolution has already been televised. These are interesting ways of relating Humanities research and technology. Their proliferation is a sign of health in the Humanities, and a sign that the way we think about scholarship is changing.

Though worthwhile, these projects seem to me to be not pieces of original scholarship in the way we think of such work – as contributing a new bit of knowledge or a new way of looking at familiar knowledge. Rather, these examples of digital scholarship tend to either disseminate already-existent knowledge to a general public, or to provide the tools for other scholarship that is not itself digital. We now know how to use digital technology to data-mine, archive, visualize, and collaborate. The question is: to what end?

The problem with using digital technologies to do traditional criticism is that it is intellectually reactionary, a way of retreating from the critical heights and highs the Humanities has experienced in the last few decades. A throwaway line in an article submitted to the DHI list reminded me of this: “no suggestion for rehabilitating [the Humanities] can be as controversial as making digital information and technology its savior.”

I have to admit to being more interested in kinds of scholarship that actually change the way we do scholarship. For example, the Hinman Collator, of the late 1940s, which allowed Shakespeare scholars at the Folger Library to compare folios for physical differences in type, encouraged an interest in the material conditions of books, print, and type.By the by, the campus library evidently owns a Hinman collator, which is pretty cool by any standard. Does anyone know where it is?

What Humanities scholarship can deploy, reinvent, or re-imagine digital technology in a way that makes people think differently, or that makes other scholars do scholarship differently? You should be hearing a number of interesting research projects originating at or around CU in the next couple of days, (my presenter-colleague’s discussion of Zotero, for example) but here are a couple that are happening elsewhere.

For my money, some of the most interesting stuff in the Humanities is going on in the Arts, for example at Rhizome.org

Here is an idea for changing the way Humanities scholars interact. CinemaBus: An Online Film Journal A journal that can make use of the various forms of representation available to the Internet – video, text, sound, image – in order to provide an open-access online journal of interest to scholars, film buffs, and the general public. Such a journal can provide a new model for scholarship in the public sphere; further, because it is multimedia, it can provide an ideal venue for film scholarship that does not exist in print media. The journal will function as a scholarly journal 2.0. That is to say it will bring film scholarship to the public sphere, and provide the public sphere to film scholars. Other hard-copy film journals have in the past attempted this kind of crossover; the BFI’s Sight and Sound is probably the most successful. But no such journal has had the kind of mass participation that the Internet enables. Even now, no such film studies journal website exists on the Internet. And, except for a very few such experiments as Vectors, very few Humanities journals are as ambitious to use the potential of the Internet as a site for the experimental representation of scholarship.

Here is a brief, practical description of the journal website:1. This quarterly journal will be publically accessible by anyone who signs up for a (free) account. Anyone with an account may contribute to an article’s wikis and blogs. While the journal articles will not be editable, the wikis will utilize software (for example “Reframe It” [reframeit.com]) that will allow commentary, annotation, and other forms of marginalia.2. The journal will consist of articles – created as wikis – written by scholars for a large audience. Film scholars will be solicited to provide essays on central questions about the criticism, history, production, and theory of film. These essays will be highlighted as exemplary texts designed for emulation, annotation, critique, and discussion. Though we are aiming for ideological neutrality, themes for each issue will be provocative. We are considering “Covert Racism in Recent Hollywood Film” as the journal’s first entry. The prose style will range from Sight and Sound to the BFI books on film. (Again, the point of these British publications is to bring scholarship to a popular audience.) 3. Articles will be accompanied by supporting visuals (for example, video clips) in a design agreed upon by the writer and the journal. Each author will receive technical help in mounting film stills, video clips, and other visuals in a way that best represents the argument of the article.4. The journal will collect the most interesting blog discussions as separate publications.