Digital Humanities

Good. I like this discussion of “survival” here — it’s put DH in the frame of “survival of the fittest” and the logic of evolution, for sure. Yet I think, when considering ideologies of survival, we have to think about the kinds of active roles that people themselves play in the processes of bringing about their own obsolescence and ruin. If the humanities are dying, it is not a “natural” phenonmenon. It is the result of the actions and behaviors of people.

Another way of putting this: if the humanities are dying because the majority of people no longer value them, are the minority of people who value the humanities really going to be able to succeed in saving them with the help of computers? Why would that even make a difference?

Good observations here.

Cite this more directly, and work with McGann’s comments in specific. What is “hard” about the digital humanities, according to McGann, and how might it be made easier?

We seem to be approaching a kind of hierarchy of newness–that something might be valuable simply for being new. Personally, I can think of a lot of new things that are not so great.

Much of the problem with the DH is that it’s NOT in high demand, and that people don’t fully understand what it does and how it works. Again, newness for its own sake seems like an ineffective way to try and “save” the humanities.

You do touch on an interesting idea here that I hadn’t thought of much before: the intertwining of DH with the “crisis of the humanities.” This is similar to what Stanley Fish touched on in his piece–that DH is inherently related to the feeling in the humanities that as scholars our relevance is waning. It seems a pretty significant concern that DH might strive to maintain the humanities simply by being new and innovative. We should focus, and I think McGann starts to do this, on what reason we have to innovate–what goals or purposes are driving forward our field, especially in the DH. That feels like a critical question in the DH’s relation to the field more broadly–and one we should certainly wrestle with.

What kind of change do you think McGann is arguing for? I think my comment on your previous paragraph applies here, but it occurs to me to ask what kind of change would be beneficial for the humanities?

If the sheer newness of DH actually keeps it from becoming a serious part of humanities scholarship, what would be the value of seeking constant change?

There an interesting and important distinction to make here, I think, between continually changing and continually learning. I don’t think McGann argues for change for its own sake–and changing and learning are not synonymous.  One of the primary drives of McGann’s essay seems to be the concretizing and familiarizing the work of DH, and I’d imagine arguing for a perpetually shifting field would work against that drive. Perpetual learning, while in some ways suggestive of an openness to new approaches and methods, requires a firmer foundation or primary goal. This primary goal McGann seems to say remains the same, and that makes a push into the DH less frightening and more important.

There seems to be a struggle in this first paragraph to articulate McGann’s argument as it relates to what DH is, and I think that struggle reflects the slippery nature of the field’s work in general. It makes sense that one might strain a bit to identify McGann’s approach and what it means for the relationship between the field’s member and their object of focus.

I will disagree, though, with your implication that McGann’s argument suggests a constantly shifting relationship between subject and object. If anything, McGann’s argument asserts that the relationship between subject and object in the humanities (and in general, perhaps) is pretty stable: it’s always the subject building and seeking to affect the object. The only real difference in the DH, McGann says, is that we’re dealing with new objects–new things to build. So I’ll push back a little here: where do we see the primary thrust of McGann’s argument being a slippery relationship between subject and object?