Golumbia Response-11/7
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 Digital Humanities uses the word “digital” as an adjective. The word digital is supposed to describe the type of humanities the field encompasses. Perhaps there could be a better name for what digital humanities does, but I think digital humanities is an apt name for the field. Because digital humanities is more of a methodology than anything else, the use of the digital tools to do humanities work means digital humanities is inherently digital. Using the tools to do textual analysis or building the tools to do that scholarship is enough to call digital humanities digital, even if the focus is on literary studies.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Golumbia’s suggestion that DH “openly proclaim its rejection of those [literary studies] practices and thus its distance from the discipline itself” makes sense to me if we view DH as a method of replacing traditional literary scholarship, but it’s not. DH is a methodology, and it uses those methods in order to do literary scholarship. I believe traditional scholarship and DH can coexist together, without DH needing to reject the discipline, and I’m not sure why DH would reject the discipline which is a pillar of humanities. I do believe DH and it’s scholarship resemble a more “traditional” form in some cases, and not as much in other cases, but that is not enough to say that the two are the same.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Golumbia wants to know if “building [is] literary scholarship” the way Ramsay and Rockwell refer to it in “Developing Things”. I disagree with Ramsay in his definition that builders are DHers in the same way that others are. Builders can be digital humanists, but the main discipline of digital humanities is literary scholarship, and using the digital tools in order to do that scholarship. Golumbia takes issue with Ramsay and Rockwell too, wanting to know how DH fits in as literary scholarship. I would argue that the main point of DH is literary scholarship, its just using different tools to do so. Golumbia points out that many of the DH scholars who engage in DH literary studies “a sizeable number openly express concern or hesitation about it, either in its specifics or as a general movement.” That statement means that DH needs to change something about the way it works in order for the scholars who are participating in it to feel comfortable doing that type of scholarship. Perhaps to the people who are in DH, literary scholarship doesn’t feel like the main point, so in order to counteract Golumbia’s claim that DH should “openly proclaim its rejection of [the literary studies] practices” we should focus on finding a way to determine what it is that makes those scholars worried about the field.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 The difference between traditional scholarship and DH scholarship is the (say it with me now) methodology. In today’s technology infested world, traditional scholarship does use many digital tools to research and catalog. However, the difference lies in the main focus of the scholarship. If an article is using a website like Twitter to argue that social media is scholarship, that is digital humanities. Even if an article only uses a keyword search engine to analyze all the uses of certain words, since the focus of the article is about the results obtained from a digital tool, that is digital humanities. To me, using an online database to find an article (even if that article is online-only) is not enough to qualify as being DH. The way we use the things around us lets us categorize them and a person can use the same thing in many different ways, just like the digital humanities can be used in so many different ways.
But, of course, “digital” already is an adjective (it’s describing a particular noun — in this case, that noun is the humanities). Melissa Terras tackled this issue in her essay “Disciplined” when she defined DH as having the word “humanities” modified by the word “digital” (as opposed to the earlier moniker, humanities computing, wherein “computing” as a verb was modified by the word “humanities.”)
I would like to have seen you make stronger connections between the ideas you offer here and some other scholars’ arguments while discussing this point.