Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 350.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-01-18 12:25:30+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.339: advice?
Dear Willard,
> Looking through the recently published Bloomsbury Handbook to the
> Digital Humanities (ed. James O'Sullivan)
thanks very much for pointing us to the volume; or at the very least,
and emphatically so, to the editor's introduction. His somewhat dystopic
view of the "Digital Humanities" at least for me made a truly refreshing
reading and I honor the courage of an editor to admit, that the chosen
field of the volume he edits - even if it is restricted to his personal
interpretation - actually faces a serious epistemic problem, and may not
be as healthy as expected.
> Let us say for the purposes of discussion that someone with the power
> and money to set up a department/centre for digital humanities, having
> looked through this Handbook, were to ask you where to begin. What
> would you say?
Well - I am not quite sure, what words I would choose, depending on the
implications of the social setting, but substantially I would start with
the question "Why would you want to do so?", probably getting some
platitudes in return, after which I'd try to find what the true motive is:
If the answer points to "we have to attract more students":
Find the staff in the faculty who are willing to co-operate, hand them
the volume and ask what technical support they need.
If the answer points to "we have to become more highly visible":
Find somebody at the faculty who is willing who run a digitization
project, preferably with a manifest that that material has been unjustly
invisible for a long time, hire appropriate technical support.
That the willingness to set the department up is triggered by some
epistemic reason is highly unlikely, so I skip that.
If ... etc. etc. ...
I hope this does not read to dystopic; but indeed O'Sullivan's
introduction IS dystopic.
They REAL problem in my opinion is, that the "Digital" in Digital
Humanities is not really very important at the moment. The Humanities
are in a crisis; the Digital ones only reflect that and have shown
themselves to be willing to be much more receptive to proposals for
alternative approaches to Humanities topics in publications,
conferences, etc. than the non-Digital Humanities.
As an example: In the volume in question Boyd and Ruberg, pp.63-73,
"Queer Digital Humanities" is a very good example of a manifesto asking
for support for a topic of research most worthy. Nevertheless: If you
had the machine readable version available (I bought the printed book)
and deleted systematically the word "digital" - I think you would need
extremely little additional editorial effort to convert it into an
equally convincing manifesto for queer Humanities in general.
If as a sponsor / funder you want to engage in the Digital Humanities,
while being uncertain why one should be engaging in the Humanities as
such, your footing will be quite uncertain ... which triggered my
pragmatic / sarcastic approach above.
Kind regards,
Manfred
Am 13.01.23 um 08:29 schrieb Humanist:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 339.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2023-01-13 07:11:28+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: advice to those starting out?
>
> Looking through the recently published Bloomsbury Handbook to the
> Digital Humanities (ed. James O'Sullivan) raises for some, I suspect,
> the question of choice. Consider its Table of Contents, at
> <https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury-handbook-to-the-digital-
> humanities-9781350232129/>. Where to begin?
>
> Once upon a time, in the antediluvian period from the mid 1960s to the
> 1990s, the question that wouldn't go away concerned 'evidence of value'
> and was mostly focused on text-analysis for literary studies. The
> editor of the Handbook suggests that the question now is, "to what end?"
> He also suggests a deep discontent with the digital humanities:
> "we should strive for something different to its present."
>
> Let us say for the purposes of discussion that someone with the power
> and money to set up a department/centre for digital humanities, having
> looked through this Handbook, were to ask you where to begin. What
> would you say?
>
> For my answer, I'd start by paraphrasing a remark Northrop Frye made
> somewhere about one's discipline of origin: it doesn't matter where you
> begin as long as you begin with a question that can expand into all
> other questions. And then I'd ask in turn, what kind of a setup would
> foster such pursuits?
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
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