Response to Cody’s prompt
Both Matthew and Brett Bobley use umbrella, or “umbrella nature” to describe DH in our reading this week, I like the inclusive nature of that metaphor; it brings everyone together under itself. I think the definition offered at the bottom of page 293 is closest to what I would identify as DH practically. “…DH as an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of digital work in the humanities: development of multimedia pedagogies and scholarship, designing and building tools, a human computer interaction, designing and building archives, etc”. None of the work described here is necessarily restricted to the Humanities, or at least not any particular category in itself. In this way I think that umbrella can grow to encompass more and more people under it, and those connections and conversations are what the ever changing definition of DH can coelesce around.
As to what Cody prompts us with, I think there is a strong connection between using a tool or even theory, and being changed by it, as his quote asserts. Certainly I expect the tools I quoted Bobley describing above are not the limit of what DH will eventually become. As we move forward in time I believe it will grow to be more interdisciplinary because those tools are useful to people in what used to be considered disparate fields. One of the definitions in the text even identified GIS as a tool perhaps to include under DH. I think perhaps that one lacks enough of the “H”, but we certainly haven’t exhausted all the ways the Humanities can engage with this new toolset.
Para. 1: I agree that the “umbrella definitions” are the most inclusive and comforting. They try to pull everything under the same term. It’s interesting, though, that these definitions fall relatively low on Gibbs breakdown. Most DHers tend to delimit things a bit more. The reason for this, I think, is the inherent danger in positing too broad of a definition for DH, too wide of an umbrella. If the definition is made to include everything mildly digital and humanities-adjacent, the term loses some of its meaning, arguably. Especially if DH is struggling to be recognized in some coherent way in the academy, wouldn’t an increasingly amorphous and all-encompassing definition just add to the problem of DH’s scholarly reputation?
Para. 2: I’m interested in how you seem to sidestep the idea of change here—more specifically how the individual is changed. It makes sense to me that DH might become increasingly inter-disciplinary, but does that mean more people will be changed by it? And what kind of change would that be? GIS as a DH tool (which also caught my eye in the text) certainly feels humanities-adjacent, though is clearly related to how people live within a particular environment. GIS might actually be a good example: would person working in GIS as an individual scholar somehow fundamentally changed by his work? Would he see the world differently? Forcier seems to say so, but I’m still not entirely convinced DH and its methods represent a major paradigm shift.
Not sure what happened here, formatting-wise, but it was likely the result of your uploading the text of your blog post from a Word document. Make sure, in the future, that you enable the comment feature by paying attention to the formatting of your post.
That said, I’m interested in the connection that you describe between “use” and “alteration.” You suggest that to use is to become altered by; Nicholas Carr, certainly, would agree with this outlook, but I wonder if you could be a bit more specific about how it relates to the tools of DH, in particular.