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438 ] The Resistance to Digital Humanities david greetham T his essay is a perhaps foreseeable follow-up to an earlier piece on“The Resistance to Philology”(Greetham),1 published in the collection The Margins of the Text. That volume dealt not just with those parts of a text that typically were relegated to the bibliographical margins (titles, annotations, marginalia, etc.) but also with those features of textual discourse (race, gender, sexual orientation, class, among others) that had been marginalized in discussions of textual scholarship . The collection had been prompted by the discovery that in some otherwise highly regarded academic institutions, a scholarly edition, bibliography, or textual study counted as only one half of a“real”book in promotion and tenure decisions. The critical hardback monograph was the gold standard by which scholarly and intellectual achievement was to be measured. Now, a decade and more later, it is unclear whether that institutional prejudice againstbibliographicalandeditorialworkhasbeenovercomeorwhetherithasbeen compounded by a newer dismissive attitude, this time toward digital and electronic “publications.”Since the great majority of new scholarly editions established in the last twenty years and more have some prominent digital component (electronic text, hyperlinks and hypermedia, and so on), if the institutional marginalization of text has been joined by a similar prejudice (or, at best, an equivocal attitude) toward medium, then those of us working with electronic text are confronted with a double whammy in an increasingly competitive academic atmosphere. Put in a related form: is the very concept of digital humanities (DH) seen in some quarters as an oxymoron, the passing off of technē as if it were critique; and, a fortiori, if this oxymoronic DH is concerned with the production of textual or bibliographical resources, are those scholars engaging in such pursuits under a two-fold suspicion by the general community of “humanists”? In a short essay describing the potential problem, it is unlikely that we will find a smoking gun or that the usual cloak of confidentiality regarding tenure and promotion will be sufficiently lifted to provide a clear view of academic predispositions . Nonetheless, there is little sign of the old prejudices against textual study part vi ][ Chapter 25 The Resistance to Digital Humanities [ 439 havingbeenlifted.Inpart,thiscontinueddisdainmayberelatedtothepositivistand antihermeneutical postures of the more technical (and less critical) claims of some textuists (e.g., that textual scholarship is a “science,” with demonstrable proofs), a self-characterizationthatonlyfeedsthesuspicionsof somehumanitiesscholarsthat bibliographical and textual research belongs in current humanities departments only as a “service” activity, not fully integrated in or related to the loftier philosophical aspirations of postformalist humanities. In the original“Resistance”essay, I argued that textuists should embrace hermeneutics rather than science to become “dangerous”again;andHansWalterGabler(2010)hasrecentlypromotedarecognition of textual criticism as the sine qua non of editorial and bibliographical activity. It is probably true that,because digital work has at least acquired a veneer of the “sexy”and the“new,”while there may be some chartable unease about the quantification and the technical coding (SGML, HTML, XML) aspects of electronic work, the proliferation of recent print publications (and even movies) on the Internet, information(seeGleick),onlinesocialnetworks,andsoonhasgivenapublicprominence to digital humanities,whatever that is.The ongoing series of New York Times articles on “Humanities 2.0”; the citing of blogs as evidence in the popular press; the use of Twitter and digital phones in recent political movements (Iran, Egypt, Tunisia,Yemen); and the continued, perhaps exacerbated, concerns of government with the control of copyright in digital environments—all of these features of what Bourdieu calls“fields”of “cultural production”—show that the electronic environment is a persistent and well-traversed area of our common discourse.Whether that discourse will admit digital bibliographical scholarship, digital editing, and digital textuality as academic credentials is another matter. As in the case of the earlier “Resistance” essay, this problem can be seen as one of rhetoric (though recognizing that this usage is not meant to undervalue the very real and practical concerns of scholars, particularly younger scholars, facing the career-determining decisions of review committees). Thus, in the first issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ, whose very title shows an indebtedness to, or desire to connect with, an established“print”mode of production), Joseph Raben’s apologia (“Tenure, Promotion and Digital Publication”) makes much of the fact that DHQ is a“a totally online scholarly publication,”while at the same time noting that“the absence of parallel publications in other sectors of humanities research is a measure of the distance still to be traveled...

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