Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 259.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Andrew Taylor <agrahamt@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.257: an interdisciplinary common ground (73)
[2] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.258: an interdisciplinary common ground: not a factory floor (30)
[3] From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.258: an interdisciplinary common ground: not a factory floor (52)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-10-16 17:32:45+00:00
From: Andrew Taylor <agrahamt@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.257: an interdisciplinary common ground
Maybe the home for digital humanities should be a space that has always
been interdisciplinary - the University library. It would be an especially
appropriate place now that the focus of libraries is on creating
collaborative spaces rather than merely storing materials for research. Of
course such a space would be best served through an alliance between the
University library, and the information technology department.
This approach would (and does) face institutional resistance, because it
does not tend to be the domain of tenured professors pursuing research and
publishing, but rather that of support staff - librarians and
technologists rather than disciplinary experts.
On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 12:54 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 257.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2023-10-12 08:25:14+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: maintaining an interdisciplinary ground
>
> David Graeber, in "Radical alterity is just another way of saying
> 'reality'"*, begins with the following lament:
>
> > Old fashioned anthropological debates, of the sort made famous by,
> > say, Edmund Leach or David Schneider, were once one of the most
> > dramatic—and entertaining signs of the vitality of the discipline.
> > They don’t seem to happen much any more. Perhaps this is the
> > inevitable result of fragmentation: we no longer share enough of a
> > common ground even to agree on what there is to argue about.
> > Certainly, when anthropologists do engage in polemics nowadays, they
> > more often than not seem to be talking past each other. If not
> > shouting.
>
> In our case, I would translate Graeber's "fragmentation" as the tendency
> of digital humanities to be absorbed by the disciplines of those who
> take it up, hence to lose its interdisciplinary standing point. For a
> field that is intrinsically interdisciplinary (as I argue), this results
> in a great loss for everyone--a loss of the conversation across
> disciplines of which there is already too little.
>
> As an economic necessity for the individual, yes, the dive into whatever
> department has its doors open is simply what one may have to do. But it
> is also an imaginative failure not to use a digital/computational
> perspective to expand one's discipline of origin into as many others as
> possible. (I paraphrase Northrop Frye, from On Education.)
>
> One would think that the creation of academic departments in the field
> would guarantee that other disciplines did not swallow digital
> humanities whole. There are examples that suggest the contrary. Where,
> then, is the best place--the best institutional form--for digital
> humanities? Should we not be asking what's unique as a starting point?
> Is the lab the (or an) answer?
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> -----
> *(HAU, Journal of Anthropological Theory 5.2 (2015): 1-41
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-10-16 15:33:50+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.258: an interdisciplinary common ground: not a factory floor
I think that DH isn't truly interdisciplinary because the digital itself
doesn't contribute to our understanding of aesthetic products. So many DH
projects could, over a long period of time and with much painstaking work,
be done by hand. Jewish Rabbis counted words in Hebrew texts for quite a
long time before we had computers. The Documentary Hypothesis -- which is
an attempt to identify different source documents for the Pentateuch -- was
developed by calculating word frequency before computers were used for
these tasks. Methodologies and the task of interpreting results, in other
words, comes from the humanist side, and the digital side generally
provides tools that enable humanists to do their jobs faster and -maybe-
more accurately, but even that isn't certain.
Robert Brandom's work seems to turn things the other way around: to think
about ethics the way a programmer would. It yields interesting insights. I
don't know that he relies on computers themselves to do his work.
I think perhaps it's a mistake to think DH could ever really be an
interdisciplinary field until the people providing the digital side are
creating knowledge rather than contributing expertise in different uses of
a technology -- when those different uses are imagined and determined by
humanists. The people creating and inventing on the digital side aren't
thinking in humanist terms. They are thinking about how they can make this
thing smaller and do more faster. They're more dependent on physics and
engineering than the humanities for actually doing their work. If they rely
on the humanities at all, it might be to consider the ethical implications
of their work, but that's not consistent.
Jim R
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-10-16 09:12:22+00:00
From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.258: an interdisciplinary common ground: not a factory floor
hi Jerry,
i think that if digital humanists continue to use IT tools to
deliver/transmediate traditional “aesthetic” works as if they were
information delivery devices, it is (also) because every work in its
actual state has at least 'one component' which is information. i could
take as an example the famous verses of Catullus about the plokamos of
Berenikes. Nino Marinone, a great scholar whose lessons i attended,
studied the astronomical information (explicit and implicit) contained
in those verses in order to get a deeper and better comprehension of
that “aesthetic” work.
be this a dead end, we haven't yet found another better way to convey in
digital form the bigger part of the whole amount of knowledge we have
about a work. one of these could be that the digital TEI/XML edition
becomes in wider way the container of the knowledge we have about it:
something like the ancient glossae.
best
Maurizio
Il 16/10/23 07:04, Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu> ha scritto:
> Picking up on Willard’s lament about the absence of “old fashioned
> . . .debates”, I suggest that digital humanists explain why we continue to use
> IT tools to deliver/transmediate traditional “aesthetic” works as if they
were
> information delivery devices. TEI/inline markup cum relational databasing has
> long been, as Willard long ago pointed out, a “dead end” for such work (Isn’t
> it?). Yet our factories keep pouring them out and, worse, sustaining them as
> such.
>
> Is that provocative enough?
>
> Of course such works ARE also information records. But primarily they are
what
> Do McKenzie (also long ago) pointed out: that they are “records of their own
> making”. A very different animal.
>
> X
> Jerry
the knowledge gap between rich and poor is widening
witten & bainbridge, how to build a digital library
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maurizio Lana
Università del Piemonte Orientale
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli
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