Considering how crucial digital media and digital methods are to my own work<\/a>, I want to take the opportunity to look at some of the criticism that has accompanied the digital turn, and explain why I think much of that criticism is misrepresenting what digital humanities are. I also want to discuss what a good digital humanities approach should entail, and why I think that the ethos of digital humanities is actually not disruptive, novel, or revolutionary, but in fact draws from the very same ideas that have informed good scholarship and good teaching in the humanities all along. I have also followed up on these issues in a recent interview at Leiden University, so I am including the video here.<\/p>\n [youtube id=”fOHhfx6yLvs”]<\/p>\n The discussion over digital humanities tends to reproduce many of the arguments that accompany the wider debate on digital media, which often draws from clean-cut dichotomies of techno-utopianism vs. techno-phobia, emancipation vs. totalitarianism, and ultimately good vs. evil. A high-profile, polarized debate about the digital turn has arguably been the entertaining though at times misleading sparring between Clay Shirky<\/a>\u00a0(2010) and Evgeny Morozov<\/a> (2013), though other prominent writers and public intellectuals like Sherry Turkle<\/a> (2011) or Nicholas Carr<\/a> (2010) have also added to the hype and hysteria.<\/p>\n It is therefore understandable that critics of the digital humanities like Stephen Marche<\/a>\u00a0feel that supporters are enamoured of a fad. For Marche, digital humanities are simply \u201cyet another next big thing\u201d. In its more innocent guise, this may simply mean that professors are now \u201caware of the existence of Twitter\u201d. In its more worrisome incarnation, the digital humanities appear to be a project by computer geeks and neoliberal administrators who want to turn traditional scholarship on literature, art, or music into \u201cbig data<\/a>\u201d research. In this view, the fact that more and more books are being digitized, for example, threatens to turn the art and literature into problem-solving exercises within a large corpus of words that are searched and mined by means of digital tools. The university, in such a model, is no longer an institution of learning and critical thinking, but becomes a factory that produces \u201csolutionists\u201d (Morozov 2013): people who see the world as a set of puzzles that need solving, rather than as a myriad of different viewpoints that deserve to be explained and understood.<\/p>\n William Pannapacker has collected additional critical comments on the digital humanities<\/a>, and has argued that many of these worries are directed at a straw man. The reality of digital humanities research is quite different. In essence, the digital humanities are about two things: firstly, they are about making use of digital technology to study the human condition. This can include the use of digital tools to explore large amounts of text<\/a>, but it can also mean looking at images in new ways<\/a>, or using software to map out what role social ties played in different historical situation, such as Renaissance Florence<\/a>, premodern Mesopotamia<\/a>, or imperial China<\/a>. In that sense, digital humanities deploy new tools to study existing topics. Secondly, and equally importantly, digital humanities aim to create a nuanced and critical understanding of how digital technology shapes humanity. This can mean studying how we acquire knowledge through search engines<\/a> and online encyclopaedias<\/a>, how social movements use microblogging services<\/a> and mobile technologies to organize protests, or what politics inform the linking behaviour in a certain part of the blogosphere<\/a> (cf. Rogers 2013). In other words, digital humanities raise questions that affect our societies today but would be difficult to study without taking digital media seriously in their own right. To me, neither of these concerns obviates traditional ways of studying culture or exploring how societies and their politics work.<\/p>\n Good work in the digital humanities needs to always be in dialogue with other scholarship, not parasitical of it as the critics seem to fear, and I think there are four ways to assure this:<\/p>\n 2) Being open:<\/strong> one thing that the digital humanities have arguably inherited from the counter-culture of hackers is an egalitarian, open-access spirit. This does not mean that classic education methods like the university lecture should simply be \u201cdigitized\u201d and offered online, though this has indeed been a trend in higher education<\/a>. Maybe more importantly, digital humanities scholarship does not only study digital media, or build digital tools into its research designs, but also uses digital media to communicate ideas and facilitate discussions. True to the view of the education reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt<\/a>, and the philosophy that his explorer-brother Alexander practiced in his lectures<\/a>, the digital humanities emphasize that scholarship always happens within and together with society. This means communicating research results clearly to a broad audience, whether through websites, online videos, microblogging, social networking tools, or mobile aps. It also means involving students in open discussions, and including non-academics in the exchange of ideas.<\/p>\n 3) Being digital:<\/strong> the digital humanities are not simply a way to showcase scholarship in digital form, for instance by digitizing books or articles. They also provide the digital methods<\/a>\u00a0to creatively explore issues that have been \u201cborn digitally\u201d, such as how information flows through digital social networks, or how knowledge is structured on the Internet (Rogers 2013). Digital humanities also takes the idea seriously that scholarly content can itself be \u201cborn digitally\u201d, and it consequently aims to empower students to explore their creativity through digital media, for instance by putting together a graduate thesis as a website<\/a>, creating software art<\/a>\u00a0or platforms for sharing political art<\/a>, or building interactive curriculum vitae<\/a>. Digital humanities is at its heart a creative endeavour.<\/p>\n [grid_6] [frame_right]<\/p>\n “the ultimate task of our existence is to give the fullest possible content to the concept of humanity in our own person (…) through the impact of actions in our own lives” (UNESCO 2000) [\/frame_right] [\/grid_6]<\/p>\n 4) Being critical:<\/strong> one of the arguments against digital humanities is that research in this field often uses existing social media platforms and search engines, and that this fundamentally compromises the researchers while legitimizing commercial companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google. Indeed, a favourite credo in the digital humanities is the question \u201cwhat would Google do<\/a>\u201d, made famous by the blogger and business consultant Jeff Jarvis<\/a>. Such criticism omits how digital humanities research critically examines the myths of digital communication<\/a>\u00a0in different contexts and questions the agendas of the major players in the digital media industries (Turner 2008). In addition, such research explores the ways in which our lives are embedded in software code that we ourselves have not written, and that most people are not able to fully understand. As Lev Manovich<\/a>\u00a0has put it: \u201cWelcome to the world of permanent change \u2013 the world that is now defined not by heavy industrial machines that change infrequently, but by software that is always in flux\u201d (Manovich 2013). This is why digital humanities start with the code: they see programming not only as a creative way to produce software, but also as a way to interrogate software for its inherent rationale and transformative effects.<\/p>\n Digital tools have enabled fresh ways to look at the world, and promoting such new perspectives is indeed an important aspect of the digital humanities. At the same time, the digital humanities extend the logic of critical thinking that has always informed good scholarship and teaching to our contemporary human condition. The world we live in tethers us to digital devices and complex information networks, to smartphones and PCs, ATMs and CCTV camera systems, search engine results and wikis. In this world, our societies, cultures, politics, and economics are fundamentally shaped by digital technologies and codes. Being able to understand how Google works, what goes on inside an Apple product, and how to programme in html or python<\/a>\u00a0have become matters of basic literacy. This is why the digital turn in the arts, humanities, and social sciences is not a fad, but a responsibility.<\/p>\nThe \u201cdark side\u201d of the digital?<\/h3>\n
Four ways to be digital about the humanities<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>1) Being interdisciplinary:<\/strong>\u00a0Steve Jobs liked to present his company Apple as an enterprise at the crossroads of Technology and Liberal Arts. Much can be criticized about Apple and its founder, but the insight that digital technology should serve human creativity deserves attention not only from those who work on technology, but also from those whose focus is on the arts. Digital humanities aim to break down disciplinary boundaries and focus on the shared questions that drive scholarship in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. They are a team effort that can bring together scholars from diverse fields, such as literature, art history, anthropology, politics, sociology, psychology, computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, and many more.<\/p>\nWilhelm von Humboldt:<\/h4>\n
Conclusion: digital literacy<\/h3>\n
References:<\/h3>\n