Discipline and Punish, the DH Edition
Since the MLA and the conversations about the digital humanities it has inspired on Twitter, I have been thinking a great deal about the formation of academic fields, how they work, who they include and who they leave out. Others have weighed in on this issue of “defining” DH and provided salient critiques, most recently David Golumbia, and there were others before him at MLA (the now infamous “Dark Side” panel is one example, and Alexis Lothian has kindly compiled very good notes), in the Twitterverse (Adeline Koh’s Storify illustrates some of these conflicts), and in blog posts (see Ted Underwood and Alan Liu), all of which sought to analyze the institutional framing of the digital humanities as it currently stands. The problem of definition, it seems to me, is inspired by the formation of a field that doesn’t very much want to be defined.
An analogous academic instance, I think, is the advent of “Queer Theory” or “Queer Studies” as an academic discipline. On the one hand, people doing the work of queer studies needed to be given credit for their scholarship in the tenure and promotion process, departments needed money to hire new faculty, and scholars needed funds to go to conferences, finish book contracts, and complete academic labor of the kind we do every day. On the other hand, the impulse of much of queer theory was anti-institutional and in fact rightly read institutionalization as an oppressive disciplinary category that had the potential to close down productive avenues of inquiry by relying upon a singular definition of queer studies. Moreover, since queer studies is also bound up in many cases with the self-identity of its scholars, the question became not so much, “Is my work an example of queer studies?” or “What is the object of queer studies?”, but “What is queer?” “Am I sufficiently ‘queer’?”, and “Is queer me?” These questions continue to productively haunt the field of queer studies and can be seen in work that positions itself as a critique of the proper object of Queer Studies (Susan Fraiman’s book Cool Men and the Second Sex is a good example, as was the panel at MLA with Robyn Wiegman, Annemarie Jagose, and Elizabeth Wilson). This work argues, if implicitly, that an unintentional consequence of the institutionalization of queer theory/studies has been the creation of hierarchies and the normalization of the category of queerness itself.
The Digital Humanities appears to be suffering from a similar crisis of institutionalization. DH wants to be, at its core, a transdisciplinary project that resists traditional academic structures. However, as with queer studies, the need for funding and recognition for one’s work has required institutionalization within an existing disciplinary model with the same definitional needs that accompany every other field. These definitional moves, even when undertaken tactically as Matthew Kirschenbaum has argued in Debates in DH they should be, produce institutional exclusions and hierarchies. Further, the same questions that plagued the rise of Queer Studies in the academy also seem to plague DH–not “What is or can be objects of study for the digital humanities?”, but “Am I sufficiently DH?” These questions–perhaps most often heard by graduate students and scholars at non-R1 institutions–should be taken seriously by those within the field.
The critique of the ways in which digital humanities has been institutionalized appears to be born out of anxiety about exclusions that may be unintentional, but nonetheless feel very real. For example, at the MLA panel on Literary Labs, someone asked the question “How do I know if I am DH?” and Laura Mandell (Texas A&M, IDHMC) replied that in her estimation, to call oneself DH, you have to have worked on a project. This comment was unrehearsed and off-the-cuff and I know comes from a place that intends inclusion–Laura thinks everyone should be able to work on a project!–but it is also embedded in an emerging field that, as Katherine Harris has regularly pointed out, requires financial and temporal capital in ways that other “traditional” fields do not. Even the “DIY” scholar needs server space, and this is not always readily available at smaller institutions. Coding has been another sticking point in the definition of DH because of the gendered and racialized dimensions of “code culture” and the sometimes open hostility of undergraduate CS classrooms. (Miriam Posner wrote an excellent blog post on the subject awhile back that engendered a number of conversations and controversies.) Thus, when these critiques are made, it is not to tear down DH or particular projects, but to open things up and make space for people who might feel and thus internalize these exclusions based on economics, gender, race, and/or academic position.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, critique is a form of love. Those of us who are critiquing the current institutional formation of DH are in it because we want to be included and because we care how all of this turns out. I hope that practitioners of DH, like scholars of queer studies and women’s studies before it, will see this as an opportunity to rigorously examine institutional practices and their intended and unintended effects. If queer studies is any indication, the work we’re doing will only get better and more exciting by embracing critique as form of love and doing our level best to respond to those critiques and open up the discourse to those who may feel outside of it.
I broadly agree with the way you frame the issue here, in the sense that there’s a tension between people who want to define a field, and people who don’t especially.
The one thing I’d add is that there are a lot of different communities involved, making field definition harder than it might appear. Those of us who come to “DH” from the humanities side sometimes see DH as a technologically-informed subfield of “the humanities.” I confess that’s how I initially saw it.
But there are actually a lot of other disciplines actively involved, not all of them in the humanities. Computer science, machine learning, Library and Information Science, various kinds of linguistics, geography, media studies, communications, and so on. They’re all working on similar problems.
It’s true that there are practical incentives to stabilize this mess somehow, and define “a field,” as you say. But I think it’s going to prove much harder to do that than humanists imagine, and I’m not sure the effort will succeed. Candidly, a lot of departments outside the humanities are already immersed in questions about culture and technology. And programs like Library Science already teach programming to grad students. So they’ve got a bit of a head start on us.
I’m absolutely convinced that the problems we’re grappling with have a bright future, and I’m convinced that online intellectual life has a bright future. But I’m not convinced that “DH” is going to stabilize as a subfield inside the humanities. I would bet it falls apart into a complex web of relations between different departments. E.g. new media – visual arts. Library science – machine learning – communications. English depts – game studies. If it plays out like that, the issue of “inclusion/exclusion” may be a bit moot — or at least, it may need to be thought through in a different way.
And to avoid misunderstanding: when I say programming gives LIS a “head start,” I don’t mean that programming is necessary for all-things-now-called-DH. It isn’t. But it’s necessary for certain problems that interest me.
And that sort of difference is really what I’m getting at: the problems called “DH” are so diverse that I doubt they’ll all end up in the same dept. Some of them will end up in iSchools, or in media studies, etc. We may all still chat on Twitter, but I doubt there’s going to be a single “field” in an institutional sense.
Thank you, Ted, for your comments. I appreciate that you highlight the myriad of areas that DH is having an impact, particularly in those non-humanities disciplines like CS and LIS. In that respect, I think the analogy to queer studies is still apt. Very few schools have a department focused solely on Queer Studies (Yale is one standout exception with a department of LGBT studies). Most scholars in the field are spread out across a variety of disciplines, including English, History, Sociology, Women’s Studies, etc. DH seems to me to function in a very similar way. I don’t mean to suggest that I think DH will crystallize as a department–it might at some of the larger R1s and private schools with the funding to do so, but that is part of the critique I’m trying to make here–but that there has been a need to define a discursive field even within other disciplines, a way to legitimize, for example, “I’m a historian and DH scholar” through academic channels. What I’m trying to get at in my post is that these definitions are largely at odds with the way DH sees itself–as an “objectless” field where anyone can do anything they want and find an outlet for that scholarship with like-minded individuals. I hope the tension there will be productive for DHer’s own institutional critiques.
That makes sense. I agree about the tension you describe. I don’t have a solution, and your contribution here seems very constructive to me.
This might not apply to everyone, but I’m finding it helpful to develop a relationship to another specific field. In other words, instead of saying “I’m a literary historian and DH scholar,” I increasingly say “I’m a literary historian who does data mining.” I don’t know if it legitimizes me, but it may save me three minutes of conversation defining DH
Actually, I think the situation is unlike Queer Studies in one important sense. Since we’re not just talking about the humanities here, I suspect a lot of people involved in these projects are never going to self-identify as “digital humanists.” E.g., computational linguists are never going to say “we do DH.” In their eyes, they do computational linguistics. Same thing with people in CS, communications, etc.
In that sense, I’m not sure we can even consolidate DH as a “discursive field,” let alone a dept. I think it’ll still be a matter of making connections across field and disciplinary boundaries. That needn’t be a problem: Twitter works very well for this. I follow people in all kinds of disciplines that I don’t actually belong to. But I’m dwelling on this to explain why I see the definitional problem as slightly moot. I think interdisciplinary research is always going to require an ad-hoc network that’s not confined by a field, or even by a specifiable “discursive field.” Anyway, that’s how it looks from where I sit.
I hope that ad-hoc networks will remain/become the norm for the field. I’m sympathetic to the idea that there are a lot of people involved in DH projects that might not self-identify as DHers. What I’m trying to talk about in the post are the conversations being held by those who do self-identify as DHers. It is difficult for me not to see an attempt at discursive consolidation when there are “Short Guides” making the rounds (as talked about on Golumbia’s blog and in the comments) or sections of books purporting to “define” DH, even for tactical means, which as I said in the post, I am fully behind the need to do so, but think we should recognize the exclusions/effects/affects those strategies produce. I think within the humanities there is (and maybe should be, I don’t know) an attempt to at least establish the parameters of a discursive field. What I’m trying to get at is the conversation I think a lot of self-identified humanists are having about DH. That being said, I do not want to advocate for one particular version of DH or another, I just want to point out that the critiques of current definitional modes are not coming from a place of antagonism.
You’re right about that “Short Guide.” I think my disagreement here is not with you at all, but with it, and with the larger book it’s drawn from, Digital_Humanities. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities-0
The authors of that book definitely are trying to stabilize DH as a coherent subfield of the humanities, and — while I admire them personally and bear them no ill-will — I don’t think that’s a good account of what’s happening. If you look closely at the ToC of that book, for instance, they leave out what I do (text mining) entirely. And you sort of have to do that to make DH fit neatly *into* the humanities. If you start talking about text mining, it rapidly becomes clear that the methodological center of gravity might sometimes be in other disciplines.
Anyway, this is a bit at a tangent to your post. But I think we’ve clarified that there are at least three points of view here. a) I don’t think DH is a coherent intellectual project. I think it’s an assemblage of radically different interdisciplinary experiments. And I’m fine with that. b) The authors of D_H think it’s more coherent than that. And, while I won’t attempt to summarize your point of view, (c), I think it’s significantly different from both (a) and (b)!
Thank you so much again, Ted, for so thoughtfully engaging with this post.
Thank you for your cogent synopsis of some of the growing pains within the current instantiation of dh/DH. Over at David Golumbia’s post (http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=203), we’ve got quite a lengthy discussion going about the Short Guide to DH that recently was distributed by its authors (and borrowed from the MIT publication by these authors). This year’s MLA was…..interesting. Some of the same anxieties about digital humanities was rehearsed but this time in bigger rooms and by all of the incredibly wise and sage named practitioners. I was most struck by the Literary Labs panel — many luminaries, including Laura Mandell, who have struggled and managed to create space/place/critical areas for study in all things digital. Lindsey Eckert (@LindsEckert), an advanced graduate student, was the sole practitioner on the panel — meaning that she was the only participant who was, well, simply a participant in a pseudo literary lab at her university. Her presentation asked for more from these labs, more than big data. As a book history scholar, she wants to know the price of books from the 19th century, their bindings, the paper, all of the things that make a book a book. She wants that included in the data sets for analysis. And in this way, Ms. Eckert was pushing for a more robust view of the data sets in essence so we can eek out the details about publishing history. And with this information, we can start to see more authors beyond the canonical few who govern a majority of the literary digital archiving projects. Well, she was the only one who pushed the field at that presentation. All of the panelists responded with an emphatic, Yes!
Bravo, Ms. Eckert. Bravo!
But, we need more of the graduate student discussing the nascent role of digital humanities in his/her studies. We need to bring students into the conversations as more than our worker bees. We need to see more of what goes on in the undergraduate classroom. RE:Humanities, a conference for undergraduates, does just this.
By opening up the conversation to include other voices, we’ll also cross a economic divide that seems to be inherent to the U.S. university system. I work with the have-nots in my university system. But, ironically, they don’t realize that they’re the have-nots. I’d like to keep it that way. But, in order for me to continue doing the work of digital humanities and digital pedagogy, the field needs to open up just a bit more to recognize that not everything is “big.”
Finally, at our department meeting this morning, I was describing digital pedagogy to a self-described technophobic colleague; after a few minutes of discussing assignments that require her frosh to read about accounts of courtly love in an electronic age, I asked this colleague if she couldn’t instead have the students participate in something and then theorize it. My example was frosh in my Food & You composition course building a Google Map of the local eateries and then writing reviews on Yelp. Her response: “Oh, you mean have them BUILD SOMETHING!?” Yes, why, yes indeed. Welcome to digital humanities.
Thanks so much, Katherine, for your perspective. I was at that panel, as I mentioned in my post, and I loved Lindsey’s presentation. I also think it is so important for “big important faculty” to keep inviting graduate students (and undergrads) to participate in their panels and conference presentations, not just as “worker bees” as you say. I do think Laura is particularly good about doing this and she has been great with my attempted forays into DH.
I imagine from what I’ve read of your tweets/blog responses that you and I serve similar populations. At my institution, I largely serve first and second year writing students, a population I love, but not one necessarily positioned to participate in DH projects of the kind undertaken at larger schools by students who are majoring in English. For me, DH right now is largely about employing digital pedagogy. I have my students, for example, writing Storify essays this semester in Comp I, an assignment whose trials and errors will be the subject of a later post. In this capacity, I have to spend a lot of time teaching my students not just how to use the site, but sometimes the beyond-basic computer skills needed to use these tools. I think it is really important to empower students to be the agents of digital creation. Thanks for your thoughts!
This is a very insightful post. I’d add that some of the pressure to define “DH” comes from people who assume (rightly or wrongly) that they aren’t part of DH, or even from an implicit struggle between figures like Mandell and even Drucker who want a more narrow definition (probably for very important reasons, since they spent years creating the infrastructures that they now enjoy) and younger scholars like myself who want to include as many people as possible. It reminds me of a tension in queer studies between the idea that everyone is necessarily queer (i.e. even supposedly “straight” people are queer) and the idea that queer is a specific category, a set of identities mushed together into acronyms (LGBTQ, QUILTBAG, GLBTA) even a verb that is performed by a reader. I remember reading Butler’s Undoing Gender and feeling extremely annoyed at her ambivalent vacillation between advocating specific identities and yet also her insistence that all of these identities are constantly being remade.
DH is similar to me b/c on the one hand, people (like myself) want to claim DH as an identity — especially when looking for jobs. Yet, I also know (and I say this while trying to be as anti-reductive as possible) that all humanities are essentially digital – or becoming-digital. Most of us use LMSs, read pdfs or ebooks, use Facebook, or engage with technology in some way on a daily basis. All of this matters and requires new forms of digital literacy, whether or not you explicitly code or use computational methods in your research. So, this is all to say that I think there is a good amount to truth to what you are saying.
Thanks for your comment, Roger. The universalizing of certain identities (or acts) is one of the problems Queer Studies has faced recently and was one of the major themes driving Jagose, Wiegman, and Wilson’s panel at MLA. In particular, I think, because these moves have tended to privilege masculinity and maleness. The universalizing of DH identities tends to privilege (albeit largely unintentionally) the same things–maleness, capital, whiteness, etc.–that are the subject of critique in other academic fields. I only hope the contributions we’re making to the field will encourage some change in perspective.