Debates in the Digital Humanities

29 Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?

490 ] Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities? alan liu A sthecueforathesisIwishtoofferaboutthefutureofthedigitalhumanities, I start by confessing to a lie I inserted in the last paragraph of the mission statement of 4Humanities. 4Humanities is an initiative I helped cofound with other digital humanists in November 2010 to advocate for the humanities at a time when economic retrenchment has accelerated a long-term decline in the perceived value of the humanities.1 It serves as a platform for advocacy statements and campaigns,international news on the state of the humanities,showcase examples of humanities work,“student voices” for the humanities, and other ways of speaking up publicly for the humanities.But unlike other humanities advocacy campaigns— for example, those of the National Humanities Alliance in the United States or the Defend the Arts and Humanities and Humanities and Social Sciences Matter initiatives in the United Kingdom—it has a special premise. As emblematized in the motto on its website, 4Humanities is “powered by the digital humanities community .” The idea is that in today’s world of networked communications the digital humanities have a special role to play in helping the humanities reach out. The last paragraph of the 4Humanities mission statement (which I wrote) thus asserts, 4Humanities began because the digital humanities community—which specializes in making creative use of digital technology to advance humanities research and teaching as well as to think about the basic nature of the new media and technologies—wokeuptoitsspecialpotentialandresponsibilitytoassisthumanities advocacy.The digital humanities are increasingly integrated in the humanities at large.They catch the eye of administrators and funding agencies who otherwise dismiss the humanities as yesterday’s news. They connect across disciplines with science and engineering fields. They have the potential to use new technologies to help the humanities communicate with, and adapt to, contemporary society. But,in reality,the past tense in the wake-up call here (“the digital humanities community . . . woke up to its special potential and responsibility to assist humanities part vi ][ Chapter 29 Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities? [ 491 advocacy”) is counterfactual or, at best, proleptic. It’s a tactical lie in the service of a hope. In outline form, my thesis about the digital humanities is as follows. While my opening stance is critical, my final goal is hopeful: to recommend how the deficit in the digital humanities I identify may convert antithetically into an opportunity. The digital humanities have been oblivious to cultural criticism After the era of May 1968, one of the leading features of the humanities has been cultural criticism, including both interpretive cultural studies and edgier cultural critique.2 In parallel, we recall, the computer industry developed the personal computer and networking in the 1970s and 1980s in a Zeitgeist marked by its own kind of cultural criticism: cyberlibertarianism in conjunction with social-justice activism (e.g., in the vintage manner of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility or the Electronic Frontier Foundation).3 Yet in all that time, as it were, the digital humanities (initially known even more soberly as “humanities computing”) never once inhaled. Especially by contrast with “new media studies,” whose provocateur artists, net critics, tactical media theorists, hacktivists, and so on, blend post-1960s media theory, poststructuralist theory, and political critique into “net critique” and other kinds of digital cultural criticism, the digital humanities are noticeably missing in action on the cultural-critical scene.4 While digital humanists develop tools, data, and metadata critically, therefore (e.g., debating the“ordered hierarchy of content objects” principle; disputing whether computation is best used for truth finding or,as Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann put it, “deformance”; and so on) rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society,economics,politics,or culture.5 How the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today’s great postindustrial , neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital is thus a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar. Not even the clichéd forms of such issues—for example, “the digital divide,” “surveillance,” “privacy,” “copyright ,” and so on—get much play. It is as if, when the order comes down from the funding agencies, university administrations, and other bodies mediating today’s dominant socioeconomic and political beliefs, digital humanists just concentrate on pushing the“execute”button on projects that amass the most data for the greatest number,process that data most efficiently and flexibly (flexible efficiency being the hallmark...