The Emergence of the Digital Humanities by Stephen E. Jones (review)

Stephen Jones’s account of the digital humanities offers something unique for a rhetorical audience because, unlike other media studies texts, Jones’s provides an examination of the discourse surrounding technology at the moment of the emergence of the digital humanities. Rhetoric has long recognized that metaphor is not merely a stylistic flourish but is a significant component of our conceptual system, influencing the ways we understand objects and phenomena. In The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, Jones brings this same attention to language, characterizing our experience of technology by closely examining the metaphors we use to describe it. Despite the increasing ubiquity of new media, Jones notes that we continue to employ spatial metaphors that depict “the virtual” as a distinct or separate realm. To better describe the technological transformation we are undergoing, Jones suggests the term eversion, a metaphor he borrows from William Gibson to describe how the virtual realm has turned inside out, steadily creeping into everyday life and making the distinction between the real and the virtual unsustainable.

Jones introduces his book with a preliminary description of the digital humanities, which is not quite a field or discipline but simply a term to describe studies that “combine computing and digital media with humanities research and teaching”(5). Jones’s depiction indicates the difficulty of labeling, encapsulating, or describing the digital humanities, a label attached to a wide range of academic research as well as alternative pedagogies. According to Jones, what distinguishes the digital humanities from media or technology studies is that it includes multiple materials in its archive, examining the relationship between physical objects and data rather than taking their difference for granted. Furthermore, the digital humanities contributes to our future understandings of the “social, locative, combined, and object-oriented nature of our experience in the networked world” (14). In the first chapter Jones develops the eversion metaphor that will structure the entire book. Eversion refers to more than the ubiquity of technological devices in everyday life; it describes the inversion of a dualism that has characterized “the virtual” as a space that is separate from and in opposition to the “real” or “actual” world. Jones does not attempt to debunk this false binary but instead explores the significance of the spatial metaphors that have structured discourse about technology. As virtual information and communication become a commonplace aspect of the physical world, Jones is interested in how people come to “sense” their relationship with technology in a moment when we shift to a new guiding metaphor. Eversion, for Jones, “characterizes our sometimes tense and ambiguous relationship to technology at the moment” (29). The metaphor depicts the complexity of this turn, “the messy and uneven status of that process—network’s leaking, spilling its guts out into the world” (29).

In his second chapter, Jones attends to the metaphor of dimensions, which is the term deployed when describing the sense that the digital network is “breaking through” to the physical world. Jones provides the example of a QR code, a two-dimensional barcode that, when scanned with a mobile phone, directs users to web content. Jones describes these codes as dimensional ruptures that “nakedly reveal the gesture of connecting data with the physical world” and claims they indicate a cultural desire for such a connection. He also explores dimensions through the process of digitizing texts, a practice he claims is popular in the digital humanities because translating objects from physical to digital entities reveals how objects are already encoded in data. He ends by considering the implications of the dimensions metaphor, explaining that transit between dimensions indicates ambivalence to technological change. Though the notion of separate dimensions does not hold up under scrutiny, these conceptual frameworks reveal how people frame their relationships to technology and articulate their understanding of its role in their lives.

Jones’s third chapter focuses on people in technology, explaining how the development of social media has made our culture more reflexive about...