Digital Humanities from Below (original) (raw)
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Towards a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities
In this article I try to articulate a critical assessment of the current geopolitical asset of Digital Humanities. This critique is based on one hand on data about the composition of government organs, institutions and principal journals of the field, and on the other hand on a general reflection on the cultural, political and linguistic bias of digital standards, protocols and interfaces. These reflections suggest that DH is not only a discipline and an academic discourse dominated materially by an Anglo-American élite and intellectually by a mono-cultural view, but that it lacks a theoretical model for reflecting critically on its own instruments. I conclude proposing to elaborate a different model of DH, based on the concept of knowledge as commons and the cultivation of cultural margins, as opposed to the present obsession with large-scale digitization projects and “archiving fever” that leads to an increase of our dependency on private industry products and, of course, funding.
Digital Humanities between Technology and Labor
In this essay I offer a reflection on a conspicuous absence in digital humanities discourse. Engaging with the manifold ways in which the digital sphere shapes culture and society, the interests and methods of digital humanities appear indispensable in contemporary academia. However, it is my contention that digital humanities systematically omits dealing with the ways in which issues of technology converge with our labor in humanities today. Viewed in the context of an increasing adaptation of research and higher education to the market form, this disciplinary blind spot reveals technological instrumentality as a structuring principle of both digital humanities and its institutional setting, the “university of excellence.”
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There seems to be a vague sense among digital humanities scholars that this emerging field should be concerned with, and engaged in, thinking the humanities differently. However, there is no significant agreement about what this might actually mean. Is the encounter between the humanities and digitality sufficient to make the humanitites ‘different’, or ‘new’? In what sense would digitality bring about something ‘new’ in the humanities, and what implications would this have for the way in which the humanities are practiced in the academy? Alan Liu, among others, has raised questions for such a search for novelty or ‘new beginnings’ in academic disciplines (Liu, 2008: 4). In his book of 2008 entitled Local Transcendence he understands the chase for ‘the new or innovative in business, technology, media, art fashion’, and (we may add) in academic disciplines, as a feature of the postindustrial Western sense of temporality – a ‘sense of loose beginnings and loose ends’ (1).
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This article proceeds in two distinct parts. The first section engages with a deliberately small number of popular texts written by discriminating and interrogative consumers and producers of digital culture and society. While these may be dismissed as journalistic texts and sources by those of a more focused academic intent, here these texts are used because they are the connection between academic engagement and wider public readership. As such, they frame what can be termed the critical public engagement with digital capitalism. These texts are read in tandem with my thesis of immaterial capitalism and Marazzi's' The Violence of Financial Capitalism. The paper then concludes with what can be described as the 'manifesto turn' by raising some questions for a renewed engagement with digital society, to be undertaken from what is termed, an emergent critical digital humanities, as the site of critique and resistance. This is an exercise in what can be labelled Mongrel methodology and ideology, a neo-logism deliberately provocative in intent to signal a postacademic approach, chosen over such traditional descriptors as mixed-methods or assemblage and the like. As such, it may draw on Marxist thought but is not Marxist in ideology or final intent; it is critical of capitalism but acknowledges our ongoing existence and possibilities within it; it is written by an academic seeking to act as intermediary between academic and non-academic readings and responses. It is a deliberate act of provocation as a manifesto call for change.
The Promise of the Digital Humanities and the Contested Nature of Digital Scholarship
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Numerous recent reports have addressed the state of the humanities, but none have explored the ways in which the digital humanities have expanded and opened up possibilities in the modes of scholarly production. This essay examines the contested nature of scholarship between the disciplines and the digital humanities and within the digital humanities. It argues that between 1993 and 2013 the digital humanities led a widespread effort to re-purpose the humanities for the digital age, where scholarship would take place not in the traditional formats but in the open digital environment. Despite the accomplishments of this twenty-year surge in the digital humanities, this essay proposes ways to organize, review, and critique digital scholarship.
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It has been most recently discussed in relation to digital humanities entanglement with the stakes of the neoliberal university.
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The present article examines the current academic encounter with the “thing” of the digital humanities, i.e., with the digital as both a source of crisis and an attempt to control this crisis. By mapping conceptualisations of the digital as an object of study, a tool and the constitution of new practices, the “thing” is presented from the threefold perspective of access, evidence and control: access as the newfound availability and emancipation of the digital object, evidence as the cognitive approach marshalled in response to the surge of data, and control as the new ruling practice, whether aca- demic, ethical or critical. The article seeks to demonstrate that the “thing” cannot be immediately grasped or pinned down, that whenever you think you have it, it turns out to be somewhere else. The proposed threefold perspective of access, evidence, and control is but a way of closing in on something that remains forever elusive.