DH & Fundamental Change: Prompt for 10/10
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 Once again, we turn to definitions of Digital Humanities, and it increasingly seems, at least in our brief foray into the field, that defining is an important facet of DH, or at least something that cannot yet be taken for granted. In our blog post for today, I’d like us to take a run at sketching the role that defining plays in DH.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 More specifically, I’d like us to take a closer look at what is written by Eric Forcier at the end of Fred Gibbs’ blog post. In Gibbs’ words, Forcier paints DH as “an ephemeral, seemingly idiosyncratic curiosity that either attracts or repels people, and often changes them fundamentally” (297). This sense of the fundamental runs throughout many of the definitions of DH found in Ch. 20 (and throughout this text, really), and might underlie the anxiety evident in arriving at a definition at all. So then, how might DH change people fundamentally, if it does at all? And what does the risk of such a fundamental change mean as we attempt to define DH? Feel free to turn to one or some of the definitions (serious or snarky) in Ch. 20 to answer these questions.
This point — meaning your claim that defining itself cannot yet be “taken for granted” in discussions of digital humanities — is an important one. I mean, our course text, Defining the Digital Humanities is devoted entirely to this topic. And yet it doesn’t seem that the topic itself has come anywhere close to becoming “settled,” or moot, despite all of the discussion and time that scholars have devoted to it over roughly the last decade.
I wonder, though, if we might consider the role of “defining” more broadly within humanistic practice, though. One could argue that “defining” things — words, concepts, ideas, arguments — has been central to the task of the humanities for hundreds of years. That might, in part, help to explain our collective obsession over “defining DH”: defining is simply what we, as humanists, do.