“I would prefer not to”
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 How does DH change people fundamentally?
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Answering this question feels a bit like defining DH, because it’s an attempt to define the people. I will make an attempt at this, even though I would prefer not to give a definition, just as the scholars in these examples expressed:
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 “I don’t, I just do it. –Nick Mirzoeff” (Selected Definitions 286)
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 “With extreme reluctance. (Lou Bernard, UK)” (Definitions by Type 294)
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 “I hate this question, and I don’t have an answer for it. Neither, it seems, does a large portion of the people who might be called Digital Humanists. I’ll leave it at that. (Justin Tonra, University of Virginia, USA)” (Definitions by Type 294)
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 2 The interesting phenomenon here, especially shown by Mirzoeff’s definition, is that many people involved in Digital Humanities are “attracted” to the field, but “repelled” by defining it. In fact, Fred Gibbs notes in his essay “Digital Humanities Definitions by Type” that 12 of the 170 definitions he analyzed about DH fell under the category of “refusals to define the term” (290). Another 15 definitions were said to “minimize the difference between the DH and humanities” (290), which is similar to not giving a definition because it suggests that you do not need a definition for DH. Perhaps the fundamental change occurring for many people involved in the DH is that they want to do their DH work and not waste time with petty definitions and discussions about it.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 What does the risk of such a fundamental change mean as we attempt to define DH? If people do not want to define the DH, a clear danger is that there will be no consistency in the field, and “outsiders” (such as administrators or those allocating grant money) will not take the field seriously. This might suggest that we need a clear definition and a line to judge who is “in” or “out”, but there is another perspective to consider. As Haley suggested in class today, the true problem here might be that “we are defining what we cannot define”, with the example of the field of philosophy. Is it possible for us to accept that we cannot define the DH, especially for the scholars that are eager to define it? Would this impact the field negatively because people cannot take it seriously or do not know what they should be doing in the field? Or in contrast, would this benefit the field because the people who are invested in it would stop wasting their time trying to define it and instead get to work? Let’s stop trying to be dictionaries and start trying to be DH-ers, whatever that is.
You do a nice job of lining up definitions here, and of grouping them according to themes of stubbornness and vitriol. Why do you think some DHers are so resistant to the task of defining? Are we talking simply about an antagonism between “theorizing” (or thinking) and “doing” (or acting)? Because this is how many DHers view traditional humanities criticism — as overly concerned with thinking (to the point of obsession, perhaps …).