Debates in the Digital Humanities

7 This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One

96 ] This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One jamie “skye” bianco Aggression Cultural Studies . . . ephemera. Irrelevant. Critical theory, I mean, let’s be honest, what did it ever do politically? While historians continued to ponder the pros and cons of quantitative methods and while the profession increasingly turned to cultural studies, or took the “linguistic turn,” as some have called the move toward the textual and French theory, computer scientists were hammering out a common language for shared files over the Internet. I offer these three quotations in order to frame a set of problems;and,to be clear,the authors of these three synecdochal snippets do not share much in common beyond a particular advocacy for what is now ubiquitously termed the digital humanities.1 The first citation, taken from an informal conversation with a senior colleague whoself-definesasacomputationalhumanistwithinaliteraryspecialization,marks what might be thought of as two mutated legacies reemerging in contemporary digital humanities discourse: first, a tendency to treat cultural objects as enclosed, rational systems that may be fully transcoded computationally and, second, an old humanist tendency to claim the irrelevance and disavow the privilege of position and deterministic stratifications, which are lived by those outside a centrifugal or privileged referent through a variety of identity-based isms marking the leverage of political, economic, and social power relations. We might think of this twofold movement as an echo of T. S. Eliot’s advocacy of “a continual extinction of personality [by the artist]” such that “in this depersonalization . . . art may be said to approach the condition of [so-called objective] science” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 10).2 part ii ][ Chapter 7 This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One [ 97 The second quotation, more of a digital humanities inflected echo (of the Jacques Derrida, François Cussett, and Stanley Fish circuit3 ) than a statement of invention, was spoken informally in a group discussing methodology. The conversation focused on the inadequacy of print-based critical methods in the wake of informatically and computationally informed practices.4 I share a sense of the complex limitations of the critical enterprise; and, while I find myself often describing why I feel, as Bruno Latour phrases it,“critique [has] run out of steam,” it is rather surprising to repeatedly encounter the assertion that critique (often framed in a denigrated reference to “French theory”) ran on a historical rail of impotence and trivialized academic navel gazing rather than running across a historically situated duration that has since changed nontrivially. The third quotation, taken from William G. Thomas II’s “Computing and the Historical Imagination,”was published in the well-known, early collection A Companion to Digital Humanities (edited by Susan Schreibman,Ray Siemens,and John Unsworth)that,astheoriginstoryistold,gave the digitalhumanities,ourcomputationalAdam ,his name.WhatThomasoffersinthisfoundational,tripartitenarrative isahistoryof recentacademichistory,locatingtogetherthesegregatedemergenceof quantitative analysis, cultural studies, and the linguistic turn with the development (by computer scientists) of the Internet. He goes on to infer a clear, if not genetic, relationship between the quantitative analysis (performed with computers) in the computational humanities and the computational work that made the Internet. Thomas includes the narrative of Vannevar Bush’s vision of the memex, essentially an imagined apparatus for archiving and data mining,but he does not point to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a web of shared knowledge, culture and semantic content, which might reassemble the collective emergence of quantitative analysis, cultural studies,“the linguistic turn,” and computational networks. Ethos and Difference Taken together, what constellations of politics are emerging through the digital humanities? And while one might legitimately ask whether the digital humanities has any acknowledged politics, I would specify my usage of the term. By the word “politics,” I am asking what power relations have emerged. And because the digital humanities operates through a web of politics, people, institutions, and technics in a network of uneven, albeit ubiquitous, relations, perhaps the question might be more accurately framed as one of ethics.Does the digital humanities need an ethology or an ethical turn? Simply put, yes. The three anecdotal moments at the head of this essay are meant to point to unsettling substrates growing in the debates of a set of fields that, until a year or two ago, were known by many names, sub- and extra-academic and disciplinary practices . What quick, concatenating, and centrifugal forces have so quickly rendered the many under the name of one, the digital humanities? What’s in this name, its [3.139.82.23] Project MUSE (2024...