Debates in the Digital Humanities

2 The Humanities, Done Digitally

12 ] The Humanities, Done Digitally kathleen fitzpatrick A few months back, I gave a lunchtime talk called “Digital Humanities: Singular or Plural?”My title was in part a weak joke driven primarily by brain exhaustion. As I sat at the computer putting together my remarks, which were intended to introduce the field,I’d initially decided to title them“What Is Digital Humanities?” But then I thought “What Is the Digital Humanities?” sounded better, and I stared at the screen for a minute trying to decide if it should be“What Are the Digital Humanities?” In my precoffee, underslept haze, I honestly couldn’t tell which one was correct. At first this was just a grammatical mix-up,but at some point it occurred to me that it was actually a useful metaphor for something that’s been going on in the field of late.Digital humanities has gained prominence in the last couple of years,in part becauseof thevisibilitygiventhefieldbytheuseof socialmedia,particularlyTwitter, at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention and other large scholarly meetings.But that prominence and visibility have also produced a fair bit of tension within the field—every “What Is Digital Humanities?” panel aimed at explaining the field to other scholars winds up uncovering more differences of opinion among its practitioners. Sometimes those differences develop into tense debates about the borders of the field and about who’s in and who’s out. My first stab at trying to define digital humanities came in a post I wrote in July 2010 for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker blog. In that post, I wrote that the digital humanities could be understood as “a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities, or, as is more true of my own work, ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies.”1 There is, however, a specific history to the term digital humanities, detailed by my friend (and scholar of English) Matthew Kirschenbaum in a 2010 article in the Association of Departments of English Bulletin. In 2001 the field was known as humanitiescomputingandhadbeenaroundforsomedecadeswhenSusanSchreibman , Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, three of its key practitioners, entered into part i ][ Chapter 2 The Humanities, Done Digitally [ 13 discussionswithBlackwellPublishingabouteditingavolumeprospectivelytitled“A Companion to Humanities Computing.”Blackwell wanted a title that might appeal to a wider range of readers and so proposed “A Companion to Digitized Humanities .”Unsworth countered with“Digital Humanities”to keep the field from appearing to be about mere digitization, and the name has stuck, helping to characterize a robust area of research and teaching supported by a number of prestigious conferences , well-received journals, scholarly societies, and even a dedicated office within the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Digital humanities thus grows specifically out of an attempt to make“humanitiescomputing ,”whichsoundedasthoughtheemphasislayonthetechnology,more palatable to humanists in general.The field’s background in humanities computing typically,but far from exclusively,results in projects that focus on computing methods applicable to textual materials. Some of these projects have been editorial and archival in nature, producing large-scale digital text collections for scholarly study. One such project is the William Blake Archive, which presents carefully annotated scholarlyeditionsof boththewritingandvisualartof theromantic-eraBritishpoet. It is sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Rochester, and a division of the NEH. Tools and technical standards to support the production of such archives have been another key source of digital humanities work, including projects like the Text Encoding Initiative or the Text-Image Linking Environment.There are projects that focus on processing those large collections through a statistical analysis of a text’s linguistic features, for example, or author attribution studies or studies that rely on data mining. And there are initiatives that are designed to help digital humanities archives and projects become interoperable and to facilitate the peer review of these projects. Digital humanities as it is currently practiced isn’t just located in literary studies departments; the field is broadly humanities based and includes scholars in history, musicology, performance studies, media studies, and other fields that can benefit from bringing computing technologies to bear on traditional humanities materials. However, when many of us hear the term digital humanities today, we take the referent to be not the specific subfield that grew out of humanities computing but rather the changes that digital...