Response to Golumbia 11/7/16
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 It seems we’re doing some of that basic humanistic literary work here: picking our way through what language–and a single word, really–means and how that meaning informs our thinking. If we want to get at this question of how the word “digital” is used in DH and what it means, it may help to step back a little. “Digital” in the standard denotative sense, refers to data that exists as a series of 0s and 1s. More broadly, of course, it refers to something that exists in a digital form, that is, on a computer, regardless of whether we understand and recognize its construction in code. This latter definition seems to be what is meant by scholars working in DH when they use the word “digital.” They are referring to texts, programs, tools–things–that exist on (in?) computers.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 The problem that Golumbia identifies, at least in part, is that the “digital” in digital humanities is a catachresis in that it “does not mean the same thing that the word digital does in ordinary discourse, including that of ‘non-DH’ literary scholars,” (157) and that this re-appropriated has tended to undermine and subvert the work of traditional literary scholarship rather than contribute to it. Golumbia makes his case on several grounds, and one of the more interesting aspects of his argument is when he compares it to another humanities field that also hovers in and around English departments: linguistics (163-168). Just like many other humanities fields, linguistics employs digital and computer tools extensively, but does not see the use of cordoning off a special place for those linguists that use digital tools and separating them from those who don’t. The difference, according to Golumbia, is that regardless of the tools they use, linguists continue to do much the same work they’ve always done, and while there is some discussion of how certain technologies impact their area of study, it is understood that that area remains largely the same. Golumbia sees DH as something completely different. In using both “digital” and “humanities,” DH is in essence hijacking a part of the discipline, undermining its work in the guise of radical subversion and progress. It is not, in other words, allowing scholars who actually work in the field of humanities (as Golumbia sees it) to determine the best course for their field.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Generally speaking, I find Golumbia’s argument somewhat convincing, and I’m interested in his insistence that we judge DH scholars by the quality of their product, especially against more traditional humanities scholarship contemporary to it, such as Spivak’s Death of a Discipline. But one problem we run into, and this seems to me a fair counter-argument to Golumbia, is that we aren’t able to judge the utility of new tools with old scales. This seems an ongoing issue in DH and one that deserves to be addressed. Golumbia’s point, however, remains poignant: if we can’t judge DH’s product with our existing scales born from traditional literary study, how do we do it? And does our inability to evaluate DH in even the most basic terms of literary scholarship mean it may not belong in the humanities at all?
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 This moves us to that last question you bring up–what is the difference between traditional scholarship and DH scholarship? Well, could we think of traditional scholarship as being analog rather than digital? If so, what does “analog” mean? At a fundamental level, analog technology works to measure things through analogy, through representations of phenomena, e.g. an analog watch’s hands moving across a marked dial. In contrast, a digital tool measures things through digits, through numbers. In some ways, we might think of this kind of measurement as more precise, but then again, we can think of the translation into 0s and 1s as being just another kind of analogy. What both methods share–and this is my roundabout way of answering your question–is the importance of interpretation. Whether we’re looking at an analog watch or a digital watch, whether we’re using close-reading to understand a text or using a program to find other patters, we still must take the time to think about what those patterns mean and how they fit into a larger understanding of the thing in question.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 What Golumbia fears, and we’ve seen this from several writers this semester (Stanley Fish and Nicholas Carr), is that DH tools encourage an over-reliance on digital tools and a step back from interpretation. An example of this might be the distant reading discussed by N. Katherine Hayles, where digital tools are used to perform broader readings that search for patterns a human reader might miss. We can take some solace, perhaps, from the way that Hayles actually stresses the importance of interpretation in her discussion of these new reading practices–that interpretation remains the cornerstone of the scholarly practice of reading, regardless of how the reader arrives at the material to be interpreted. If we can employ digital tools in a way that maintains the importance of interpretation, I don’t think DH work is appreciably different than so-called traditional scholarship. After all, we might argue that humanities work is fundamentally interpretative, and even if we’re employing new tools to see information in a different way, we’re still working to push into that information and wrestle with what it means. If DH was not concerned with interpretation (though some of the “builder”-type DHers maybe less so, to be fair), it would surely not be so concerned with how to define itself and its work.
Good point. In close-reading the term “digital humanities” (as we’ve seen other scholars do already this semester …), we are employing some traditional methodologies.