In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[ 85 Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship johanna drucker D igital humanists have seen themselves within the longer tradition of the humanities,suggesting that the main value of their work resides in the creation , migration, or preservation of cultural materials (McGann). Using new platforms and networked environments, humanists entering the digital arena learned a great deal from the encounter. Expressed succinctly, the tasks of creating metadata, doing markup, and making classification schemes or information architectures forced humanists to make explicit many assumptions often left implicit in our work. Humanities content met digital methods and created projects in which thetermsof productionwere,necessarily,setbytechnologicalrestraints.(Theforms of print media and their rhetorics, by contrast, were established by humanist scholars for whom debate, commentary, and interpretative exposition were so essential they drove the development of the book format and the paratextual apparatus.) After several decades of digital work, the question remains whether humanists are actually doing anything different or just extending the activities that have always been their core concerns, enabled by advantages of networked digital technology (easier access to primary materials, speed of comparison, searching, etc.). Whatever the answer, the role of humanities scholars is crucial in the production and interpretation of cultural materials. It may turn out that data mining or large corpus processing and distant reading are substantially different from close reading and textual analysis and may bring new insights and techniques into the humanities (Moretti). But my second question frames a very different agenda: Have the humanities had any impact on the digital environment? Can we create graphical interfaces and digital platforms from humanistic methods? The cultural authority of digital technology is still claimed by the fields that design the platforms and protocols on which we work. These are largely fields in which quantitative, engineering, and computational sensibilities prevail. Tools for humanities work have evolved considerably in the last decade,but during that same period a host of protocols for information visualization, data mining, geospatial representation,andotherresearchinstrumentshavebeenabsorbedfromdisciplines part ii ][ Chapter 6 johanna drucker 86 ] whose epistemological foundations and fundamental values are at odds with, or even hostile to,the humanities.Positivistic,strictly quantitative,mechanistic,reductive and literal, these visualization and processing techniques preclude humanistic methods from their operations because of the very assumptions on which they are designed:thatobjectsof knowledgecanbeunderstoodasself-identical,self-evident, ahistorical, and autonomous. Within a humanistic theoretical frame, all of these are precepts that have been subject to serious critical rethinking. So can we engage in the design of digital environments that embody specific theoretical principles drawn from the humanities, not merely work within platforms and protocols created by disciplines whose methodological premises are often at odds with—even hostile to—humanistic values and thought? This question is particularly pressing in light of the absorption of these visualization techniques, since they come entirely from realms outside the humanities—management, social sciences, natural sciences, business, economics, military surveillance, entertainment, gaming, and other fields in which the relativistic and comparative methods of the humanities play,at best,a small and accessory role.While it may seem like an extreme statement, I think the ideology of almost all current information visualization is anathema to humanistic thought, antipathetic to its aims and values.The persuasive and seductive rhetorical force of visualization performs such a powerful reification of information that graphics such as Google Maps are taken to be simply a presentation of “what is,”as if all critical thought had been precipitously and completely jettisoned. Therefore, this is a critical moment to identify core theoretical issues in the humanities and develop digital platforms that arise from these principles. At their base—which is to say, in the encoded protocols of operating systems, machine languages, compilers, and programming—computational environments are fundamentally resistant to qualitative approaches. We can cast an interpretative gaze on these instruments from a humanistic perspective, and we can build humanities content on their base; but we have rarely imagined creating computational protocols grounded in humanistic theory and methods.Is this even possible? Desirable? I suggest that it is essential if we are to assert the cultural authority of the humanities in a world whose fundamental medium is digital that we demonstrate that the methods and theory of the humanities have a critical purchase on the design of platforms that embody humanistic values. Humanistic methods are necessarily probabilistic rather than deterministic,performative rather than declarative . To incorporate these methods, more advanced models of simulation than the literal techniques of current visualization will need to be designed. The...

Share