Useless (Digital) Humanities?

Digital and Humanities

Waves of critique of DH persist, not always concurring on what it is that is being opposed.10 A Google search shows that “oxymoron digital humanities” is a frequent locution. It is easy to suppose that humanities, qualitative, cannot be served by quantitative methods. Some attacks on DH have assumed that it aspires to make C. P. Snow’s two cultures of science/information and arts and letters/aesthetics into a monoculture, to the demotion of the apparently softer values. On the contrary, there is a dialectic if not an oxymoron in the term digital humanities. In positive senses, the “digital” can entail technological innovation and collaboration on publicly accessible products; “humanities” can mean state-of-the-art documentation and interpretation of the objects of humanities research, often in solitary inquiry shared with a few specialists.11 In one of many refutations of attacks on DH within academic humanities, Sarah E. Bond, Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood insist, as their title puts it, “‘Digital’ Is Not the Opposite of ‘Humanities.’” Noting that computer technology helps us explore “questions, long central to literary history . . . on a new scale,” they also offer examples of “social-justice initiatives” using geographic information systems to reveal “the spatial patterns of lynching, urban segregation, and ‘white flight.’ Expanding the scope of our knowledge needn’t make scholars less critical of power.” I share this conviction that humanities research can prompt collaboration and public access with digital methods and in the process move toward the interdisciplinarity and impact that many in higher education have long advocated. My interest here is in the necessary choices, the roads taken to prepare future explorers, not to seek extraction or colonization but care, sustainability, and discoveries that respect diverse pasts.

We can agree with Alan Liu that humanists all would gain from some familiarity with developments apparently non-native to humanities: statistics; data visualization; machine learning; linked open data about peoples, objects and sites, archives, and print corpora; documenting social media in crises; born-digital literature and arts; and information architecture (Liu, “Toward a Diversity Stack”). At the same time, Liu anticipates that something in the humanities is left behind in the present dissemination of myriad bites of information. In Friending the Past, Liu’s media archaeology and reflections on cultural studies and DH alike register the loss of a sense of collective history. Liu is far from nostalgic or technophobic; he maintains that “one needs to handle the apparatus and the code to gain a feel for the future of the sense of history” (8). The future will undoubtedly bring fewer well-written academic monographs or essays like Liu’s.12 Writing that works well in grants is different from journalism, blogs, or tweets and again from the diction of books by professors of literature, which, however readable, must introduce specialized terms and footnotes. How easily does a novice in the humanities or digital technology acquire the range of skills necessary to produce the research, whether in book or digital form? Digital humanities asks us to unite skills, knowledge, theory, and tolerance of the elusive in a challenging combination.

Like some other senior faculty today, I was introduced to DH gradually, at a period when the horizons of online research were opening but before the digitization of swaths of library holdings. A graduate student can now traverse that introduction in a matter of weeks, whereas training in a particular field such as American studies or French extends over years. Often, researchers turn to digital methods when they find their inquiry expands beyond what can be confirmed by travel to far-flung archives or communicated in printed prose with static tables and footnotes. I took the digital fork in the road to investigate variegated data in a neglected genre (books not yet digitized), but I was also motivated by collaboration, public access, interdisciplinarity, and impact. I was attracted by a more interactive and less hierarchical mode of teaching and scholarly communication. I always felt humanities research was diminished by its specialist print formats, slow and unlikely to reach general readers, so I was excited by the resurgence of public intellectuals in blogs and websites. Then, the large scope of a bibliography project and the obvious advantage of online searchability led me, with the help of many people, to hands-on humanities computing and immersion in the rich discourse of reflections upon this work. I was drawn to the joined effort to assemble something colorful and moving, tangible and coded, not unlike a quilt in also being useful. It was an aspiration to exceed my own graduate training, much like learning a new language. Continuing to learn on the job is a hallmark of both alt-ac and academic jobs, not least because the humanities are never constant.

Competing for Scarce Time in Digital and Humanities

Ars longa, vita brevis. Or, Liu’s long list of what we need to learn runs up against the short years of a researcher’s life. I have already noted that a humanities discipline requires years even without the technological skills. If the student’s previous humanities education has not been global, critical of such categories as nation and period and race, and aware of media history, if it has not developed skills of close reading and writing and has not also offered experience in archival research or data collection, and if it has made the humanities appear to be about surface familiarity with a received repertoire instead of about living matters that have served different interests, well, graduate education in the humanities may be too little, too late. And while catching up and absorbing the changing global perspectives beyond nation, period, and departmental boundaries, we hope the graduate student will also master project management and Python. The educational transformation must begin earlier, as I suggest with respect to pedagogical collaborations, below.

University administrators have accepted pressures to shorten the time it takes to earn the doctorate or master’s degree. In the United States, specialized studies are delayed until the third year of undergraduate school. Digital research methods are often encountered first in the MA or PhD program, when the student may be undertaking advanced humanities research for the first time. Digital skills can be learned in online tutorials or workshops and institutes, but reinforcement of this learning and enticement to keep practicing depends on a community, perhaps hardly overlapping with people in one’s home humanities field (field-specific associates may be hostile to DH). Not everyone has access to resources such as fellowships, licensed software or databases, or research centers, and further obstacles come with travel restrictions, health vulnerabilities or disabilities, or family care and schooling obligations. Without the advantages of access, both training and implementation of projects will take far longer. A master’s student needs to jump in immediately and may not have time to launch and complete an independent project. The doctoral candidate is advised to postpone large-scale independent DH projects to devote scarce time to completing the dissertation. This pressure intensifies with the rankings and metrics that count time to degree. As with a linguist’s or anthropologist’s fieldwork or learning a necessary language, a DH researcher should be allowed a focused additional year.

There are related pressures of time: all project managers can attest that “it will take longer than you think”; DH implementation, even as technology speeds up, is labor intensive. And projects should not linger and cannot survive long because technology changes so fast.13 The schedule of research obsolescence appears to be even faster in new media: publish and perish. Printed articles and books, along with ephemera, periodicals, and archival materials, have been known to last decades longer than digital access or microfilm access to these materials. So, may graduate students be enthusiastic adopters of new digital applications, but may they also avoid intertwining their research profiles with the datasets or technical resources of this decade alone. Taking the time to learn the long histories and expanding perspectives of humanities disciplines prepares for an adaptable career and helps to remind that digital modes of graduate work are rapidly evolving along with the world’s encounter with transformative technology.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

It requires a change of custom for humanists to take stock of the infrastructure of their research—the many other people who have saved their time, we might say. Scholarship with the solo byline (e.g., a monograph) includes acknowledgments, which sometimes mention librarians and archivists and usually name colleagues, research assistants, typists, and family members. Any scholar’s book or article also needs a scaffolding of citation but often elides the crucial prior work (and bias) of databases and search engines, the building of the cathedrals of digitized materials. Originality is still at a premium in DH, and indeed the demand for novelty in tools and designs can stand in the way of perceiving the value of substantial innovation in materials and interpretation. But digital projects usually preempt any claim to solo authorship. The group effort resembles film production, even in work that looks like end user calculations; someone built that out-of-the-box software. Certainly, the ethic I observe in DH puts strong pressure on acknowledging all contributors. Citation is not enough; we need the equivalents of film credits, including all the extras, who deserve fair pay.

Acknowledgment is one thing, but evaluation in graduate school and future employment tends to be individual. And we know that DH is still hard to plug into the academic systems for evaluation and promotion (and tenure, for track faculty). After decades of guidelines from professional organizations such as the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities, review committees still claim to be unable to assess digital projects alongside published articles and books.14 As in multiauthored articles produced by grant-funded labs, it can be difficult to tease apart one person’s contributions to a digital project, but as in the natural sciences, there are ways to reconstruct the role of many participants. Giving due credit is not the main obstacle to fair evaluation. The problem is disbelief that coding and building entail intellectual and theoretical work. It may be a holdover from the gender, race, and class hierarchies that associate invention and intellect with powerful men and iteration and hand work with subordinates (Chun et al., “Dark Side,” 499–500; Nowviskie, “On the Origin”). Those who evaluate digital research projects should have some familiarity with the scholarly value of each element of different sorts of project, from productive parsing of newly discovered data to whether the method itself is the experimental focus; this is all the more reason to include some digital training in any program in humanities, from archaeology to philosophy to urban planning. In the precious time of education beyond high school, students should have experience with ongoing research teams, quite the contrary to the premium placed on individual originality. Research projects should be structured to engage faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates, acknowledging and compensating all contributors.

(Digital) Humanities Education Is Not Useful for Graduate Students Only

I have noted that a collaborative ethos does not mesh well with the incentive system in academia and that DH can strain the available time of humanities researchers facing these incentives. Pedagogical training and experience are often sidelined in graduate programs, as if they merely offset tuition and can be learned well enough on the fly. Instead, advanced research should interweave with pedagogy in humanities as is already the case in some areas of social and natural sciences. Graduate education in DH should not only be well taught as shared inquiry, but graduate students in DH should be trained as teachers and mentors within research practice and under thoughtful discussion. In light of the time compression of graduate education, undergraduates should be introduced to research applications of technology, find opportunities to collaborate on speculative projects (rather than proven pedagogical exercises), and engage in peer review as they also learn to write a single-author essay. As part of giving credit to all participants, students should move quickly to coauthor and present a project, under decent work conditions (Di Pressi et al., “Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights”). In a well-designed digital research and learning community, staff and faculty can promote long-term advanced projects (given that students stay at the institution for only a few years), projects that provide opportunities for course assignments and paid research positions at all levels.15 Undergraduates gain experience in advanced research and graduate students gain experience as teachers and mentors as well as researchers. The faculty or staff who ostensibly lead projects also directly and indirectly learn from this multilayered team interaction.

Digital humanities collaboration, in best practice, reduces hierarchies and redistributes access to privileged knowledge. Interdisciplinary collaborative pedagogy and research can mesh with community engagement and communicate beyond universities and top research libraries. Public humanities and service learning are gaining traction at Georgetown, Yale, Rutgers, and other universities as well as the University of Virginia, which was founded in the early nineteenth century to educate white gentlemen and built and funded by the labor of enslaved and free Black men and women. Even when libraries, colleges and universities, museums, and government research agencies around the world are the main engines behind substantial DH projects, many of these projects are designed to be influential in earlier education and lifelong learning, with crowdsourcing, microcomputing, or community-guided work in precarious archives.16 Digital humanities as a bridge to community engagement can enhance education in all our vicinities, with antiracism and diversity as guiding aims. In my experience, graduate students affiliated with the Scholars’ Lab have helped me, Brandon Walsh, and other staff and faculty members mentor undergraduates in a summer program funded by Mellon for undergraduates enrolled at historically Black colleges and universities or from Latinx communities; they quickly absorb digital humanities skills and produce projects ready for graduate school.

Useless Humanities, Transformed Education

Oscar Wilde declared that arts and humanities are utterly useless. He did not want them harnessed to commercial or normative purpose, but the aesthete’s paradoxical aphorisms were far from pointless. Ludic performance does not signal idle complacency. With Wilde, we might entertain an idea of uselessness beyond what programmatically counts, hoping to find ways to stump so-called artificial intelligence and to protect human records from surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Yet data is not the enemy, nor is tech the solution, nor are humanities a refuge. Chun et al. warn against the cruel optimism (Lauren Berlant’s term) of relying on DH to solve the market crisis of humanities (“Dark Side,” 495–96). We should not tout digital literacy or technological skills as vocational training any more than we should suppose humanities can be a preserve of all the wild, endangered things that resist instrumentality. Digital humanities research and teaching are not the solution but a willingness to engage in the difficulty of lifelong understanding in the humanities, facing the challenge of adapting computational tools to such understanding, while also striving to shape machine learning to ethical priorities. Graduate training in DH could help model a reinvented university in which graduate students with their intense, inventive repertoires influence both undergraduates and faculty. Humanities teaching, research, and service can flourish in creative tension with the different working terms and affordances of new media. We should practice ambivalence, generating a collaborative and less hierarchical public humanities that is artfully useless and deliberately needful.

Notes

An earlier version of this essay was shared at the MLA Convention session under the book’s title, January 3, 2019.

1. 1. On experiences running DH centers, see Booth and Posner, “Materials at Hand.” The DH Center (since 2023) includes the Scholars’ Lab (since 2006), led by Amanda Visconti; its prominent graduate training program, Praxis, and dissertation fellowships are led by Brandon Walsh, contributor to this volume, with Jeremy Boggs, Shane Lin, Ronda Grizzle, and others (https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu). Also in the DH Center is the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (since 1992), led by Sarah Wells, which supports faculty fellowships (http://iath.virginia.edu). The pan-university graduate certificate in DH is now administered by Rennie Mapp in Arts and Sciences, with Library and School of Data Science support.

2. 2. Examples involving Scholars’ Lab and the University of Virginia Library include Take Back the Archive (PI Lisa Goff, English, 2014–19), https://takeback.scholarslab.org/about; Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas (co-PI, Rebecca Coleman, Library, and Michele Claibourn, Equity Center, 2014–24), https://virginiaequitycenter.github.io/cville-equity-atlas/; community-focused events beginning in 2018 to crowdsource the transcription of the papers of the late Civil Rights leader and faculty member Julian Bond, https://woodson.as.virginia.edu/transcribebond-crowdsourcing-event, a collaboration led by the Carter G. Woodson Institute and the Center for Textual Editing.

3. 3. Italics in the original.

4. 4. During a 2018 lecture, Davidson offered remarks based on her book, The New Education. See Davidson, “New Education.” The historian Adrian Johns shows that a science of reading took over American institutions to safeguard democracy and fend off race degeneration. See Johns, The Science of Reading.

5. 5. Newfield also urged, “Delegitimize inequalities of research resources” because evidence shows that the humanities and some social sciences net revenues for universities, but STEM research and education cost millions of dollars not covered by the funding they bring in. I cite slides from his talk hosted by the AAUP chapter I participate in at my university. Newfield, “When Did Tenured Faculty Give Up on Governance? Notes Towards a Self-Governed University,” December 2, 2020, University of Virginia.

6. 6. Business executives and hiring managers were polled to list the qualities most valued in job applicants. They cited effective oral communication; critical thinking; ethical judgment; and working effectively both in teams and independently; see McKenzie, “Why a Humanities Degree.” McKenzie notes that humanities as well as STEM education yields such skills. Another desired qualification, effective written communication, is much stronger in humanities education.

7. 7. After decades of minuscule tenure-track job prospects, the graduate humanities degree remains worthwhile and leads to careers as researcher, teacher, librarian, editor, journalist or writer, higher education administrator, grant writer, project manager, caseworker or executive, in both nonprofit and private sectors. Arguably, work-life balance is better outside academia.

8. 8. Along with increasing adjunctification, the pandemic has exposed more than ever the unequal labor conditions for women and people of color, from care work to staff positions whose work cannot be done remotely.

9. 9. Since the beginnings of this volume, there have been allocations and policies supporting humanities and graduate studies at the University of Virginia.

10. 10. Digital humanities itself is not a single discipline though it has job listings, degrees, and even departments. It may be a “para discipline”; see O’Donnell, “All along the Watchtower,” 171; it includes social sciences in “reflexive understanding of knowledge production and information as process.” See Clement, “Where Is the Methodology,” 160. Notable takedowns usually focus on text analysis, which some call distant reading or cultural analytics. Only that narrowed focus could lead one to assert that “the digital humanities has displayed almost no specifically political interest in the world outside the university.” See Lennon, “Digital Humanities,” 140–41, where he cites a range of political critiques from within DH.

11. 11. Lee traces information overload in the new age of mass print. Lennon points out that linguists and philologists were recruited for intelligence work. McPherson argues that the modular and “lenticular logics” of computation compartmentalized social critique from data processing; see McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?,” 142–45. Proposing an MLA 2013 panel, “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,” Chun et al. note the risk of justifying a field for “instrumental or utilitarian value” that can increase the distance between the haves and “‘have-nots’ of mainstream humanities” (“Dark Side,” 493). Chun and Grusin anticipate some of my points here. Currently, DH does not look like it is diverting funds from humanities, from where I sit.

12. 12. I caution that valuation of style is a shifting consensus based on the purpose of the communication and the era in which it is produced. Care for effective prose, like humanities and arts, may be treated like a luxury.

13. 13. Sustainability is the byword of libraries and DH circles, but experience warrants skepticism about the viability of today’s projects as they age.

14. 14. The MLA Committee on Information Technology has submitted new guidelines and an extensive handbook to be adopted by the organization in 2024. See Alison Booth et al., “Sustainab* Public H*? Thirty Years of Evaluation Guidelines for Digital Scholarship,” a presentation about work in progress on thirty years of professional guidelines.

15. 15. In the U.S., external sources of funding for DH are woefully limited. Yet the cost (other than staff and space) of some kinds of multiyear projects can be supported internally through competitive small grants, fellowships, or short-term institutes, and research and teaching assistantships built into graduate funding plans and curricular allocations.

16. 16. Examples include One More Voice, a project launched in 2021 by Adrian Wisnicki, Heather F. Ball, Jared McDonald, and Mary Borgo Ton (https://onemorevoice.org) and the Colored Conventions Project, launched at University of Delaware in 2012, since 2020 at Penn State University, with a book of essays edited by Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Patterson, and a range of online exhibits: https://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/.

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