Debates in the Digital Humanities

Has Critical Theory Run Out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship?

[ 127 Has Critical Theory Run Out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship? gary hall Certainly, something that is particularly noticeable about many instances of this turn to data-driven scholarship—especially after decades when the humanities have been heavily marked by a variety of critical theories (Marxist, psychoanalytic, postcolonialist , post-Marxist)—is just how difficult they find it to understand computing and the digital as much more than tools,techniques,and resources and thus how naiveandlackinginmeaningfulcritiquetheyoftenare(Liu;Higgen).Of course,this (at times explicit) repudiation of criticality could be viewed as part of what makes certain aspects of the digital humanities so intriguing at the moment.From this perspective , exponents of the computational turn are precisely not making what I have elsewhere characterized as the antipolitical gesture of conforming to accepted (and often moralistic) conceptions of politics that have been decided in advance, including those that see it only in terms of power, ideology, race, gender, class, sexuality, ecology, affect, and so forth (Hall, Digitize). Refusing to “go through the motions of a critical avant-garde,” to borrow the words of Bruno Latour, they are responding to what is perceived as a fundamentally new cultural situation and the challenge it represents to our traditional methods of studying culture by avoiding such conventional gestures and experimenting with the development of fresh methods and approaches for the humanities instead.1 Inaseriesof postsonhisFound History blog,TomScheinfeldt,managingdirector at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University,positions such scholarship very much in terms of a shift from a concern with theory and ideology to a concern with methodology: I believe . . . we are entering a new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not by ideas, but once again by organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work . . . as a digital historian, I traffic much less in new theories than in new methods. The new technology of part ii ][ Blog Posts gary hall 128 ] the Internet has shifted the work of a rapidly growing number of scholars away from thinking big thoughts to forging new tools,methods,materials,techniques, and modes or work which will enable us to harness the still unwieldy, but obviously game-changing,information technologies now sitting on our desktops and in our pockets. (Scheinfeldt, “Sunset”) Inthisrespecttheremaywellbeadegreeof“relief inhavingescapedtheculturewars of the 1980s”—for those in the United States especially—as a result of this move “into the space of methodological work”(Higgen) and what Scheinfeldt reportedly dubs “the post-theoretical age” (cited in Cohen, “Digital Keys”). The problem is, though, without such reflexive critical thinking and theories many of those whose workformspartof thiscomputationalturnfinditdifficulttoarticulateexactlywhat the point of what they are doing is, as Scheinfeldt readily acknowledges (“Where’s the Beef?”). Witness one of the projects I mentioned earlier: the attempt by Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs to text mine all the books published in English in the Victorian age (or at least those digitized by Google).2 Among other things, this allows Cohen and Gibbs to show that use of the word “revolution” in book titles of the period spiked around“the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848”(Cohen,“Searching”). But what argument is it that they are trying to make with this? How exactly is the number of times a word does or does not occur significant? What is it we are able to learnasaresultof thisuseof computationalpowerontheirpartthatwedidn’tknow already and couldn’t have discovered without it (Scheinfeldt,“Where’s the Beef”)? Elsewhere, in an explicit response to Cohen and Gibbs’s project, Scheinfeldt suggests that the problem of theory, or the lack of it, may actually be a matter of scale and timing: It expects something of the scale of humanities scholarship which I’m not sure is true anymore: that a single scholar—nay, every scholar—working alone will, over the course of his or her lifetime . . . make a fundamental theoretical advance to the field. Increasingly, this expectation is something peculiar to the humanities. . . . it required the work of a generation of mathematicians and observational astronomers ,gainfully employed,to enable the eventual“discovery”of Neptune ...Since the scientific revolution, most theoretical advances play out over generations, not single careers. We don’t expect all of our physics graduate students to make fundamental theoretical breakthroughs or claims about the nature of quantum mechanics, for example. There is just too much lab work to be done and data to analyzed for each person to be...