37

Dropping the Digital

Jentery Sayers

<script type=“text/ruination”> // begin argument

var str=“digital humanities”; var str=“digital humanists”; // define variables

In the following paragraphs, I “ruin” digital humanities in order to isolate what makes them distinct or compelling in the first place. Ruination is a technique whereby a text is procedurally manipulated to render it less persuasive.1 The manipulated text is interpreted alongside the original, and key differences between the two versions are analyzed. Informed by a long legacy of text manipulation, including work by OuLiPo, Brion Gysin, Kathy Acker, Tom Phillips, Lisa Samuels, Jerome McGann, Mark Sample, Stephen Ramsay, and—most relevant here—Kari Kraus, I consider ruination’s conjectural exercises.2 Borrowing from Kraus’s “Conjectural Criticism,” we might say ruinations are “concerned with issues of transmission, transformation, and prediction (as well as retrodiction)” (Kraus, ¶4).3 They facilitate “knowledge about what might have been or could be or almost was,” with a bias toward possibility rather than demonstrability or empiricism (¶5). Ruinations point to possible trajectories without fully illuminating them, and they insinuate that the stuff of digital humanities has been insufficiently identified and described. They also underscore how digital humanities may differ from other strains of humanities and—most important—ask what else digital humanities could be, or should do, or might at least consider.

For the purposes of this argument, my particular ruination technique is “dropping the digital,” where I remove the word “digital” from a sentence in order to examine how its absence shapes meaning and interpretation.4 My source material for ruination is the 2012 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities (edited by Matthew K. Gold). Not only is this collection of essays rife with persuasive writing and argumentation, it also begs for additional attention to how the word “digital” is used to qualify humanities research.

document.write(str.replace(“digital”, “ . . . ”)); // commence ruinations

Here, then, is the first in a series of ruinations, where each use of ellipses marks the removal of the word “digital” from Debates in Digital Humanities:

This first selection is found in Gold’s introduction to the volume. It is compelling because it succinctly highlights the everyday information inundation that—for better or worse—subtends digital humanities. Consider how project developments are routinely announced via Twitter, or the rate at which short-form scholarship is published online, or the fact that a majority of the 2012 Debates volume is anchored in discussions about the future. As Ian Bogost suggests by way of Alex Reid: “The digital humanities are just the humanities of the present moment.”6 In practice, a digital humanities of the present moment entails studying and using emerging technologies, however alpha they may be. It also entails reconfiguring how humanities practitioners communicate and through what channels, reimagining the peer-review process, and keeping up with a high frequency of software updates, bug fixes, standards versioning, and hardware mods.

Appropriately enough, when I ruin Gold’s sentence, we get what most would consider a contradiction in terms:

Historically, the humanities have not been known for their speedy pace, but rather for the glacial temporality of archival research and print communications.7 However, my intent here is not to ask how we can rev up the humanities, or how we can coax humanities faculty into running with new technologies. Instead I am interested in how this ruination raises questions about achieving a self-reflexive digital humanities, especially as scholarly labor comes face-to-face with the alienating instruments that organize and measure networked communications.8 Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s work on metrics as well as Matthew Kirschenbaum’s insights about Twitter—both in the 2012 Debates volume—are a fantastic start here. On the topic of web traffic and usage statistics, Fitzpatrick observes: “Digital scholarly publishing will require rethinking the ways that such traffic is measured and assessed, moving from a focus on conversion to a focus on engagement—and engagement can be quite difficult to measure” (“Beyond Metrics,” 457).9 On the role of Twitter in digital humanities, Kirschenbaum remarks: “the fact is that Twitter more than any other technology or platform is—at the very moment when digital humanities is achieving its institutional apotheosis—the backchannel and professional grapevine for hundreds of people who self-identify as digital humanists” (“Digital Humanities As/Is,” 416–17).10 Both comments prompt us to seriously consider how digital scholarly communications are tied to productivity, the quantified self, social analytics, attention accumulation, and online reputation management.11

While analytics may help us study the nodes and edges of social networks, they also favor reification and individuation.12 Many important questions emerge from this tension: what are the practical implications of keeping one foot in, say, hermeneutics, and the other in the immersive use of gadgets? What are the ethical implications of relying on backchannels and algorithms for sorting and circulating scholarship? What are the structural implications of usage statistics playing a prevalent role in the shelf lives of digital projects? What are the long-term implications of ripping a journal article from its binding and individually assessing its impact factor? How, if at all, can we actually measure an audience’s engagement with digital projects? And what would it mean for digital humanities to establish their own metrics for scholarly communications, or to resist such metrics altogether?13 These issues surely have complex histories—in the humanities as well as in the arts and sciences—and we need to spend some significant time assessing their potential consequences as we participate in networked scholarly communication.

Echoing the attention to attention running throughout this chapter thus far, my second selection for ruination stresses the public dimensions of digital humanities:

From “Beyond the Big Tent,” Patrik Svensson’s comment about external interest and attraction is telling, especially when we consider the ways in which digital humanities have garnered support from agencies such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The passage is even more telling when it is ruined:

Most people will likely agree with the first sentence. Arguing for a coherent or homogenous identity for the humanities is probably a stretch, and very few (if any) people would pursue such a unifying vision today. Still, the second half of the second sentence raises a brow. Many readers may wonder whether—especially since the mid-1990s (when, for example, the NEH budget was dramatically cut)—the humanities have managed to gain external interest and attraction. As goes the stereotype, most humanities researchers work alone in their contiguous-but-not-connected offices, generating scholarship intended for a small group of like-minded experts who are also in academe. In response to such stereotypes, the issue of external interest and attraction is central to ongoing initiatives such as 4Humanities as well as Alan Liu’s arguments in “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”15 There, Liu claims cultural criticism has not played a prominent role in digital humanities thus far. In fact, he provocatively declares: “The digital humanities have been oblivious to cultural criticism” (491). Later, he adds that, if invested in cultural criticism (e.g., critical approaches to metadata), digital humanities would be poised to strategically direct eyes toward humanities research. And in the final paragraph of his essay, he asserts: “the greatest service that the digital humanities can contribute to the humanities is to practice instrumentalism in a way . . . to show that the humanities are needed alongside the sciences to solve the intricately interwoven natural, technological, economic, social, political, and cultural problems of the global age” (502).

The key word in that sentence—and perhaps in the entire piece—is “instrumentalism,” a contentious term in technology studies, to say the least. It is contentious because (to polarize a debate for the sake of illustration) on the one hand instrumentality suggests either a purposeful or unconscious lack of attention to the value-laden character of technologies.16 In this sense, an instrument is treated naively or enthusiastically, as a mere vehicle for unambiguously converting input into output. By extension, the instrument determines cultural change. It is a positivist agent of progress that gains authority over time. On the other hand, instrumentality is neatly imbricated with building infrastructure, developing projects, creating resources, and articulating action items.17 It allows people to work within institutions and transform them. It is arguably essential to making a difference in the academy, and it is vital to laboratory research, for example. That said, balancing this impulse for institutional change with a critical awareness of how technologies proliferate worldviews is no doubt difficult; some would say impossible. Even if that balance is achieved, it inevitably produces contradictions and ironies. It is also new ground for most humanities practitioners, which is perhaps one reason why Svensson’s ruined passage is not persuasive.18

That is, people in the humanities are rarely trained to conduct research and compose in ways that gain large-scale interest and external attraction. And the sorts of humanities Liu and Svensson imagine are public humanities that demand both rhetorical savvy and capacities for code-switching (e.g., switching between subject positions, languages, and rhetorical conventions), not to mention technical and theoretical competencies.19 Presumably they also necessitate a distribution of expertise and communication across media types, disciplines, and communities of practice across sectors. Since such a knowledge base exceeds the time and labor of a single person, collaboration would seem essential to this work.

Consequently, we might follow Svensson’s and Liu’s gestures with two sets of questions: first, in what ways, exactly, are digital humanities public humanities? Is gaining external attraction and publicly communicating humanities research online a matter of access alone (e.g., the switch from pay-walled articles to open-access communications and open-source projects)? Is it primarily a matter of the medium (e.g., shifting from PDFs and DOCs to videos, blogs, and graphs)? Or is it a more fundamental transition toward participatory action research? Of intimately involving publics in the scholarly production process, much in the way many science studies practitioners and policy experts have advocated for at least the last decade?20 For example, when working with culturally sensitive materials, who should oversee, moderate, and maintain digital collections? Where should they be stored? Through what kinds of institutional and community support? Whatever the answers here, one thing is certain: a mistake is made when public research is equated with a reduction of academic complexity (e.g., a “dumbing down” of research for “nonexpert” audiences). Code-switching and juggling instrumentalism’s multiple valences are no simple tasks, and a digital public humanities requires a strategic-yet-flexible, multimodal-yet-medium-aware approach earnestly invested in the democratization of knowledge.21

The second set of questions takes another turn, away from method and toward the actual content of digital projects: To what will—or should—digital humanities attract attention? How can they balance their long-standing investments in pre-twentieth-century materials with cultural studies of the present? With inquiries into contemporary art, literature, and politics? Initiatives such as Vectors journal, Media Commons, HASTAC, 4Humanities, and many Omeka projects are already pushing the envelope in these directions, and more cultural work is going live by the day. Still, one tangible challenge for many humanities practitioners is learning how to unpack the present with the future in mind. Methods such as Kraus’s conjectural criticism move in that direction.22 Kraus argues: “We might, for starters, imagine conjecture as a knowledge toolkit designed to perform ‘what if’ analyses across a range of texts” (¶15). Another direction is the recent work of #transformDH, particularly the ways in which its participants occupy digital humanities, reimagine it, and directly address issues of equity and social justice.23 For instance, in the “Periscope” section of Social Text, Alexis Lothian and Jayna Brown write: “speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining.” Words such as “speculation,” “play,” and “imagining” are growing increasingly familiar to digital humanities as of late, and the authors give such terms a tangible context when they remark: “At a moment when so many have been struggling to enact alternatives to the depressing world produced by Wall Street’s speculative failures, we need to practice imagining now more than ever” (Lothian and Brown). Which is to say, both conjectural criticism and #transformDH exhibit how serious speculation about possible futures is irreducible to Minority Report-esque fetishes for gadgets. In this particular case, it is about arguing for what the cultural climate of digital humanities (as a set of social relations) should be, and—as the 2012 Debates volume demonstrates—such arguments are rife with productive anxieties and differences of opinion.24

Of course, the notion of difference is itself a line of inquiry in Debates. Not only does Svensson’s 2012 essay explore the possibilities for a heterogeneous digital humanities involving multiple, perhaps incongruous traditions; in the volume, digital humanities also confront a prevailing ideology of niceness and its concomitant politics of inclusion, which risks eliding or foreclosing important cultural differences. Jamie “Skye” Bianco contends: “we must ask ourselves what sort of social narrative is [niceness]—one that smoothes out potential social differences before conflict sets in? Is this the substrate for our ethics and for a theorization of the social? Who does it include and what (self- and other-) disciplines must we practice and propagate?” (99). These questions are addressed to practitioners as well as projects.

Bianco’s concerns about difference, narrative, and ethics bring me to my third selection for ruination:

This passage, from Amy Earhart’s “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon,” is compelling because it identifies a tendency in digital humanities to construct and maintain a very skewed canon—a re-presentation of a normative past. Earhart contextualizes this observation, providing a number of telling examples from existing projects and initiatives. She writes: “A quick perusal of ‘The Minority Studies’ section [of Voice of the Shuttle] . . . reveals that a tremendous number of the projects have become lost. For example, of the six sites listed in ‘General Resources in Minority Literature,’ half cannot be located, suggesting that they have been removed or lost” (313). She adds: “The National Endowment of [sic] Humanities awarded 141 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants from 2007 through 2010. Of those grants, only twenty-nine were focused on diverse communities and sixteen on the preservation or recovery of diverse community texts” (314). Earhart then caps off her remarks with a reference to her own work, particularly the ways in which it blends critical race theory with competencies in metadata and classification:25 “My digital project, The Nineteenth-Century Digital Concord Archive, is . . . invested in exploring how to appropriately apply technological standards to shifting constructions of race represented in textual materials. Our current challenge is how we represent varying representations of blackness found in the census in a database” (316). These are only a few of the many examples referenced throughout Earhart’s essay, and through a web ethnography of sorts, she convincingly shows how the vexed relations between race, representation, and digital technologies must be addressed through multiple layers of project development, from support (e.g., grants), digitization (e.g., encoding manuscripts), and metadata (e.g., Dublin Core descriptions) to expression (e.g., visualizing data), narrative (e.g., in online scholarly exhibits), discovery (e.g., through search engines), and storage (e.g., sustaining the shelf life of web-based resources). In short, project creation is important, but so, too, is caring for those projects over time.

And when the digital is dropped from her sentence —

Now we are faced with an obvious yet necessary question: How did these exclusions happen, especially when, for decades now, humanities scholars have been demystifying and transforming canons? How and why has humanities work in cultural studies not more visibly—and “visibly” is a key word here—influenced the methods of many digital humanities projects? What are the histories that enabled such a bias in the creation and care of digital collections? And what other humanities approaches are necessary to not only revise skewed canons but also speak more directly to the contemporary intersections of computation and culture? This last question is vital, since it implies that biases are not simply glitches to be “remedied” or “fixed” through new, inclusionary collections of historical materials. They are symptomatic of worldviews warranting acknowledgment and sustained interrogation. In other words, much like the color-coded residential security maps exhibited via the Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces (T-RACES), they are the stuff of material culture that can become our very objects of inquiry—the willfully ignored inscriptions of racism and sexism in national records, the discarded documents of local histories, the dusty artifacts in and outside our archives.26 Through transformative methods across media cultures, these neglected objects should be encountered anew, interpreted, rendered discoverable, and maintained (with infrastructural and personnel support), not conveniently forgotten, corrected, or erased.

In other words, in tandem with recovery work, digital humanities need more projects accounting for how skews are produced in computational culture. Tara McPherson’s “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” provides such an account, unfolding digital humanities’ tendency to avoid topics like race, immigration, and neoliberalism through an intricate history of UNIX and color-blindness since World War II (140). Resonating with Wendy Chun’s research on interface design and source code, McPherson interrogates the instrumental character of computational technologies and how they actively shape information (often beyond the perceptions and consciousness of their developers or users).27 Importantly, this approach assumes neither a hermeneutics of suspicion nor a deliberate injection of discriminatory politics into technologies.28 Resisting such reductive readings, McPherson makes two crucial moves in her essay. First, she writes: “I am highlighting the ways in which the organization and capital in the 1960s powerfully responds—across many registers—to the struggles for racial justice and democracy that so categorized the United States at the time” (149). She then adds: “The emergence of covert racism and its rhetoric of color blindness are not so much intentional as systemic. Computation is a primary delivery method of these new systems, and it seems at best naive to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another” (149). For McPherson, digital humanities are so white because—for one reason among many—they are steeped in a longer legacy of bracketing off race from computational techniques, of justifying the reduction of cultural ambivalence for the sake of intuitive designs, neat ontologies, simple expressions, and clean interfaces (140, 145–48). Instead of identifying this legacy and stopping there, however, McPherson gestures toward some possible interventions: “In extending our critical methodologies, we must have at least a passing familiarity with code languages, operating systems, algorithmic thinking, and systems design. . . . We need new hybrid practitioners: artist-theorists, programming humanists, activist-scholars; theoretical archivists, critical race coders” (154). Comparable to Earhart’s line of inquiry, this hybrid work necessarily resists any divide between critical theory and technical competencies, thinking and doing, or yacking and hacking. As it conjectures about possible futures (e.g., where canons are not skewed), it is also extremely aware of the frameworks it mobilizes for historical inquiry.

Of course, the history of digital humanities tends to be a very particular one, generally situated in humanities computing and differing just a touch from McPherson’s articulation. For example, my last selection for ruination—from Johanna Drucker’s “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship”—states:

This first phase is anchored in Father Busa’s concordance and corpus linguistics, including the discreteness, persistence, and general lack of ambiguity ostensibly afforded by midcentury computation (Drucker, 87).29 Drucker then proceeds to highlight other phases, such as repository building and critical editing in the 1990s and, more recently, data mining, graphical expression, and geospatial representation (87–89). Ultimately, she argues that digital humanities need to extend humanities interpretations beyond the “effects of computational methods” and into the models, process, and warrants of those methods, including how data is taken, not given (89, 94). She compellingly concludes with this statement: “The question is not, Does digital humanities need theory? but rather, How will digital scholarship be humanistic without it?” (94).

When Drucker’s sentence—and thus a portion of the history on which it relies—is ruined, we get a rather amusing statement:

The exigencies of computational methods remain rooted in the automation of calculation, yet the humanities become a constellation of disciplines fundamentally about that method. That is, from their start the humanities reveal an interest in automation and computation. This scenario is difficult to imagine, indeed. Nevertheless, the ruination prompts us to speculate: What are the stakes of unpacking the humanities through the ways in which—returning for a moment to McPherson’s arguments—they have historically infected computation and vice versa? How would such projects allow us to imagine the investments and methods of digital humanities as part and parcel of the humanities more generally, and to account for humanities computing as an important pressure point in a broad and no doubt conflicted genealogy of the field?

None of these questions invalidates corpus linguistics, critical editing, data visualization, or the construction of concordances and repositories. None of them denies histories articulated by scholars such as Kirschenbaum, who underscores “the institutional, material, and social contexts in which the term digital humanities has already been taken up and operationally embedded” (“Digital Humanities As/Is,” 426). Yet most important, none of them tacitly or overtly advocates for abandoning digital humanities as a name, label, tradition, or set of social relations. On the contrary, these questions push the field to conjecture toward a big tent history for big tent humanities—to recognize how the array of practices falling under the digital humanities umbrella corresponds with an array of historical conditions and worldviews, many of which we may not classify as humanities computing or digital humanities. Here, Elizabeth Losh’s “Hacktivism and the Humanities” is particularly relevant, as it carves out a space for digital dissent and electronic civil disobedience within digital humanities. Participants in these histories will probably not be found frequently on the pages of, say, Literary and Linguistic Computing or Digital Humanities Quarterly. And, as Losh acknowledges, some digital humanities practitioners may not deem hacktivism at all relevant to the field (178–79). Yet if critics actually attend to the history she provides, then they will learn that hacktivism tells us a lot about why “both the hacktivist and the more mainstream digital humanist must be sensitive to the vulnerability and imperfection of digital knowledge systems to pursue their avocations on a day-to-day basis,” reminding us of the often overlooked, material roles that surprises play in our quotidian contributions to digital projects (181).

While Losh’s account of hacktivism is more or less contemporary in character, we can easily reference others like it that precede World War II, personal computing, the Internet, or the terms “humanities computing” and “digital humanities.” Consider the technology and media history work of Wendy Chun, Mary Ann Doane, Matthew Fuller, Lisa Gitelman, Sadie Plant, Jonathan Sterne, and Cornelia Vismann, among many others. While these scholars’ methods are not always (if ever) computational, their research gives audiences a robust sense of the humanities’ long legacy of engaging technologies on issues such as instrumentalism, labor, power, positivism, exclusion, exploitation, and metrics. They also allow us to wrangle with current digital humanities topics without falling back on “digital” as our keyword—without assuming that the impulses of our work are unique to life after the Internet, the ENIAC, or the personal computer. Sure, emerging technologies included, much about life today is extraordinarily new. To acknowledge as much is pivotal to—recalling Bogost by way of Reid—a humanities of the present moment. Nevertheless, a big tent history of digital humanities (i.e., relying on material traditions of the term as well as material traditions of the practices informing it) provides us with some rich case studies for better understanding the technocultural complexity of the 2010s. For instance, what might data visualization and geospatial representation learn from a humanities history of graphic design and graphical expression?30 What might encoding and metadata learn from a material history of classification and information organization?31 What might interaction and user experience design learn from a literary history of experimental poetry? These kinds of questions respond directly, or so it seems, to Drucker’s injunction: to practice digital humanities, from start to finish, with the humanities in mind. Of course, one possible consequence is that the boundaries between humanities and critical theory (on the one hand) and computation and technical competencies (on the other) are blurred. But that is precisely the point. After all, blurring is a likely outcome of a field that moves quickly. Yet we need not stop there. We can also learn a lot from how and why we blur lines and make boundaries in digital humanities.

</script> // end ruinations

In keeping with the routines of procedural manipulation, I now repeat myself: Debates in the Digital Humanities is rife with persuasive writing and argumentation; it also begs for additional attention to how the word “digital” is used to qualify humanities research. By dropping the digital, my intent was not only to—example after example after example—demonstrate how the volume is compelling. It was also to call more attention to the general economy of digital humanities: their evolving metrics, including means of quantification and accumulation; their perceptions of what it means to do public work, including external relations and instrumentalism; their canons and resources, including skews and exclusions; and their histories of particular terms and practices. Appeals to economy frequently entail speculation, generally so that people can anticipate the course of things and later confirm (or, better yet, reward) their suspicions. However, as we probably well know, another approach stresses complicity—not what we will risk, gain, or prove but what we can no longer ignore and what we must work to change. Although I can only conjecture, I hope the latter is the trajectory of digital humanities.

Notes

Bibliography