More Than Marketable Skills

The traditional digital humanist origin story often goes something like the following. At some point a trained humanities scholar finds the methods and tools of their field inadequate for asking the questions they really want answered. They may have questions of frequency and scale: how many times does a word, phrase, or idea appear in a corpus that would take months or years to scan by hand? They may have questions of space and time: how can they chart the variant history of a document such that its constitutive variations are visible all at once or plot geographical locations within a landscape that has changed over time? Eventually, they learn that computing tools are particularly well equipped for parsing questions of frequency, scale, and variation and could potentially allow their research to extend beyond the reach of what raw brain power could reasonably work out or beyond the constraints of a physical page. They then undertake the daunting task of using technical instructions written for an entirely different audience to teach themselves how to use the relevant digital tools and technologies, while still meeting the expectations of their own field. The work feels thrilling and revelatory; it is also frequently isolating and poorly supported.

The current training graduate students receive within a growing number of digital humanities centers, humanities departments, and certificate programs continues to overwhelmingly prioritize learning tools and digital methods and putting them toward analytical ends.1 Faculty regularly teach current students to approach the work of DH in the way they originally had to, that is, as a collection of tools acquired to amplify their research—as a methodology. Although this methods-centric framing is unsurprising and entirely reasonable given the particular moonlit path many faculty traditionally take to the field, it has the unintended side effect of sentencing new scholars to deal with the same shortcomings of the version of DH through which faculty came, a field with a tendency toward isolated work and infrequent structural support and a self-conscious urge to prove the field’s relevance by pushing it toward analysis. In academia broadly, DH’s tool-centric branding has led faculty and administrators outside of the field to also push students pragmatically toward tools and methods, stating in various ways, “Do DH work and you will have ‘marketable skills’ if you want to leave the academy, or you can demonstrate a diverse ‘skill set’ to hiring committees if you want to remain.” In doing so, they inadvertently set students up for potential inefficacy. According to this logic, students who move into nonacademic jobs will have to pit themselves directly against candidates who have dedicated the majority of their time solely to technical training, asking to be judged primarily on their technical ability as if they had done the same. Alternatively, students who remain in academic roles will have to continue splitting their time and commitment between visible and invisible labor—humanities scholarship and the solitary process of tool-learning—demonstrating an ability to divide their work in half while somehow being wholly devoted to each.2 At this promising moment when DH is increasingly accepted at and formalized within the institutions where graduate training takes place, new digital humanists’ present and future careers would be better served by a framing of DH that moves through and beyond methodology to theory and creativity—a framing that traditional humanists understand instinctively and nonacademic environments sorely need.

My introduction to digital humanities work was highly structured for a field that has often evolved informally; I earned my MA in digital humanities from King’s College London, the first and oldest digital humanities center in the world (and one of the only places to even get an MADH at the time). My time at King’s was enormously instructive and generative and a representative example of the most formalized versions of DH; I was exposed to the breadth of the theoretical questions through which the field originally emerged, and I developed technical competence in various tools to enable me to create my own niche in the field’s current work. I came into the program with a background and future in English: I had earned my BA in English and a minor in computer science and deferred my acceptance into Emory University’s English PhD program to study at King’s. The King’s program encouraged me to realize my textual inclinations by exploring the field’s gravitation toward archival digitization and formal text analysis through learning the corresponding methods, a process that I found increasingly unexciting and practically frustrating to navigate. The self-taught nature of my professors’ own technical instruction meant that their technical knowledge was specific to the projects they had done. Though I received strong encouragement and personal enthusiasm from faculty about my research, it was often up to me to figure out how to make the technology work for my unique purposes.

In studying the early history of the field, I saw a playfulness and curiosity that was not emphasized in my own methods-heavy instruction, which above all pushed me toward tools and analysis—text and otherwise. I think of the “first wave” of digital humanities’ critical development as the period when scholars separately found themselves experimenting with what we would now collectively call “digital humanities” work, but at the time could have had any number of labels—projects like the Index Thomisticus, the Lost Museum interactive game, and the Women Writers’ Project. The first wave developed in roughly the second half of the twentieth century and was characterized by a broad interest in using (and building) different technologies and bringing them to bear on the humanistic corpora with which they were previously seen as incompatible.3 The radical intervention of the first wave was the notion that computers could have anything at all to do with the humanities; its central shortcoming was the diffuse nature of its projects and lack of a unifying language for describing its work.

According to this framework, the second wave of DH development emerged in the early 2000s when the field became more self-conscious, and digital humanists began to attempt to organize their work around central labels and definitions. Digital humanities projects in the second wave were characterized by scholars’ interest in furthering the field as such, using a now-familiar collection of tools to reveal and analyze previously obfuscated meaning within humanistic objects. The intervention of the second wave was the premise that DH was capable of being synthesized into a recognizable set of scholarly outputs through a dependable set of practices; its central shortcoming was the fact that by naming itself “digital humanities,” its practitioners were asked to expend a significant amount of energy proving the field’s relevance in both technological and humanistic spheres, resulting in a standardized tool-centric and analytical definition of what it means to do digital humanities work.

Thanks in large part to their successful institutional struggles for legitimacy, DH practitioners who came to the field through its second wave have been training scholars in a different academic world for some time now—a third wave that more regularly accepts and makes space for DH’s academic presence and so has less to prove. “Third wave DH” has the potential to be the product of the best impulses of the first two and can route future waves beyond the problems of the past, but when it frames and defines DH primarily as a methodology, it mis-serves or entirely misses its newest scholars, who are poised to shift DH in their own new directions. These emerging scholars are motivated by what I see as the increasingly expressive theoretical questions of DH scholarship’s third wave and are interested in ultimately moving beyond it by asking questions like: What does it mean to use a digital publication to provide an interpretation of a text rather than just to provide access or analysis? What does the process of mapping a shifting political boundary teach us not just about the particular geopolitical tensions in a region but about the way that maps themselves can shape those tensions? How can creating an object like a digital text or map explore and express questions such as these? The natural evolution from methods places the third wave’s emphasis increasingly on the process of inquiry rather than the product of analysis—on the object a tool creates and how, rather than on the tool itself and the analysis to which it leads—but the structure of much DH framing continues to push students into the past.4

In my current post-PhD capacity as the codirector of the Digital Dissertation Scholars Program at Emory University, I have seen related tensions play out repeatedly. Graduate students already interested in DH are often taught that their main offering is in the analysis they contribute, which causes them to shelve more experimental projects that do not fit the expected mold. On a number of occasions, their academic advisors have expressed concern that their students’ interest in doing a digital dissertation will distract them from their “scholarly” work, because their only impression of DH output is the development of databases and datasets through the use of complicated tools. I have also seen formally innovative students rule themselves out as digital humanists because they value qualitative work and “are not good at technology”; they do not think of themselves as having analytical questions, so they do not think they are capable of, much less already in the early stages of, “doing DH.” Framing third-wave DH through and beyond its methods creates space for these students to explore DH as a theoretical mode of inquiry, looking for ways to use digital tools to theorize and express rather than simply expose and analyze. It allows students to see the movements of the past as foundational bedrock rather than a series of Sisyphean boulders all future digital humanists are destined to forever roll uphill. A DH graduate program framed this way focuses introspectively on the theoretical implications introduced by using any tool. It introduces DH inquiry as the vital work of understanding how different tools do not just parse meaning but create it, focusing broadly on process—experimentation and iteration—and the interpretive objects generated along the way.

As it turns out, the relevance of a field that emphasizes theory, process, and creation is often an even easier sell within humanities departments than methods-heavy DH, at least in my past experience in creating a digital dissertation and current experience consulting on the digital dissertations of other graduate students.5 I was the first student in the Emory English department to complete a digital dissertation, a project I framed with my committee as equal parts theory and application: a written dissertation of four chapters and four accompanying digital publications. Each chapter addressed different nineteenth-century texts or collections of texts that were unsuccessful as printed editions. I argued that the originals failed in print because the texts were more structurally interactive and expressive than print allowed them to be; in other words, they were digital, and as a result would express themselves better as digital publications. The written chapters gave me space to close-read the texts and present my expansive definition of what it means for any text to be “digital”; the digital publications gave me space to test those theories in application. Between the two, I could both argue for and present Moby-Dick’s chaotic content as a linked, nonlinear Choose Your Own Adventure story, the indecisive drafts of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems as a clickable series of interactive objects, the newspaper poems of Frances Watkins Harper as a virtual ephemeral archive, and Walt Whitman’s autobiography as a virtual exhibition. Even though (at the time) no English faculty were directly involved with DH work, and no one on my interdisciplinary committee had personal research experience with DH, the feedback I received from them was incredibly valuable. My committee members were able to critique my argument on the grounds of literary theory and make suggestions for what the digital publications should prioritize and demonstrate, all while having no specific knowledge of the practicalities involved in doing so. I was also able to supplement my coding background by bringing in technical experts whenever I hit the limits of my knowledge. I have seen similar situations play out with the Digital Dissertation Scholars Program. Once faculty have been relieved of the expectation that supporting a digital dissertation means having to advise on its technical execution, they frequently dive into their own interpretive suggestions for what the object the student has built can do and mean. Once students have been relieved of the expectation that they should find technical solutions themselves, they regularly shift their energy into collaborative, experimental possibilities for their work.

When framed within a more theoretical and ultimately creative mode, the practicalities of doing DH work take on a deeper pragmatism for students’ future careers as well. Learning to use digital tools becomes a necessary and exploratory exercise in what different forms of expression can reveal and create rather than a mechanical process of value primarily for its basic utility. Graduate students are not left trying to solve problems using tools they largely teach themselves, with the goal of finding answers. They are encouraged to approach digital methods with probing curiosity about what layers their tools could reveal and generate instead of seeing them as potential keys to long-standing problems and their future job security. By not deriving the value of their DH work from solitarily laboring over tools and methods in order to prove their mettle, students are empowered to seek the expertise of others in order to fill out their understanding; in academic and nonacademic spheres, students can work collaboratively with the extensively and exclusively trained technical experts rather than seeing themselves as directly in competition with them.

Digital humanities training in the academy should make it clear that the task assigned to graduate students is not to learn to code to solve problems but to become informed critics of the tools used to create any digital object environment. Digital scholarship teaches graduate students that the value they bring to academic and nonacademic spaces is their ability to see the theoretical questions behind any inquiry—to code and build, yes, but also to understand the broader human implications of what they build and how.6 By creating space for DH to be more than analysis, we also allow it to be a creative space that is always working to become more than the sum of its parts, a place characterized by expression, experimentation, and endless curiosity.