Digital in DH
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 I think that in “The Death of a Discipline” David Golumbia’s argument is different from what we have viewed so far, and could be very important. But I have to stay that his suggesting that DH has little to do with the digital makes me rethink my own idea of what is considered to be digital? and what is not? In my attempt to do that, let’s first look at a simple definition of the word “digital” According to the English Oxford dictionary, digital means “(of signals or data) expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity such as voltage or magnetic polarization.” which looks very mathematical;however, the one definition that I want to consider is a sub-definition of the word “digital” is “Involving or relating to the use of computer technology.” which is basically related directly to what we have here. So does that sub-definition have anything to do with Digital Humanities? I think yes! My reason is that even if DH contains many strategies, methods, and materials that are so much like traditional scholarship “books, articles, blog posts, and position statements”(172) it is still occur in a digital virtual world that based on “the use of computer technology”. This world was created for the purpose of fast and almost instant communication and interaction which all are involved with digital humanities. Therefore, I believe the use of the word “digital” in DH is out of the question because all the “traditional” literary work Golumbia is referring to occur in a digital enviroment, not a physical one. I think it’s that simple!
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 With this in mind, it’s important to again note that Golumbia’s argument is important, and with value because he points out that much of the activities and techniques used in DH comes from a traditional standpoint, and based on centuries-old procedures. At the end of his essay, Golumbia sort of insist that DH has to “demonstrate its capacity and commitment to contribute to literary studies as a project in the humanities, clarify its relationship to that enterprise and especially to the scholarly practices that define it, or else openly proclaim its rejection of those practices and thus its distance from the discipline itself” (173). However, I think Golumbia in his discussion did not consider what is digital about the literary activities, which is clear in mostly every aspect of its nature. First the tools used in creating these literary pieces are purely digital, like Word Press or Microsoft Word. Second, the time saved in researching anything related to the literary activity, from searching a simple term to searching what others have said about the same topic. And finally, the little time spent in getting back a response which can be as little as instantly. Therefore, with DH, I think maybe the activities in itself didn’t change much, but the tools in which we get things done did. For that reason, those tools have transformed the traditional literary activities into digital literary activities.
You perform a very interesting — if somewhat hard-to-follow — synthesis of Golumbia’s arguments in the context of definitions of the word “digital.” You seem to be claiming, at heart, that traditional literary scholarship is already “digital” in nature and that digital literary scholarship (as Golumbia points out) is, in many ways, still very traditional.
This is an important point, but I wonder how it squares with Golumbia’s arguments about politics. Golumbia, in pointing out that “traditional” and “DH” scholarship actually have more in common than we might have thought at first glance, is really trying to show that the main difference between the two is not digital methodology but, rather, politics. He lays this claim out even more plainly in the LA Review of Books “Neoliberal Tools” essay. And I’d be curious to hear — given your point that traditional and digital scholarship really do have most things in common — whether or not you also observe this to be the difference between them.