Digital Humanities

There’s always more Fish in the sea

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 Golumbia’s argument swayed me the most when he moved to his discussion of linguistics. He points out that many linguistic scholars use computers to aid their work, but they don’t define themselves as “digital linguists” as if they were doing something dinstinct. Golumbia notes that “attending linguistics conferences, one does not notice dramatic changes in tone and affect (see Grusin) between “digital” and “non-digital” talks” (163). This is a methodology argument. “Traditional” humanists may or may not use digital tools to do their work (though now most do), but the work produced largely looks the same. This means that defining “digital humanities” by the tools used to do traditional literary scholarship makes as much sense as drawing a distinction between digital and non-digital linguistics when the product is the same.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Perhaps this is why Ramsay argues that you’re not doing DH unless you’re building something, and Golumbia notes this as well. And in light of Golumbia’s argument, I’m even more swayed by Ramsay’s. However, Golumbia doesn’t seem to see the potential for DH to create new tools or build scholarship that’s worth-while. (Nor does he seem to think that the tools necessary for building said scholarship are worth-while per his argument against code counting as a “language” for DH scholars). Instead, he points out that “many widely used digital tools in our scholarly toolkit (JSTOR, EEBO, Google, Microsoft Word, the OED) do not emerge from DH” (172).

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Coming around to the catachresis of the word “digital” in DH, I would argue that yes there’s a conflation of identity that’s problematic for both DH and “traditional literary scholars” that needs to be corrected. Literary scholars who use the aforementioned digital tools to do literary scholarship are no more digital humanists than computational linguists are digital linguists. However, I don’t get the sense that Golumbia would support DH activity even if it did get off his “turf” and define itself more clearly. He argues that it hasn’t earned its stripes in the way that theory did and that because it hasn’t been as quickly and as completely embraced as theory was, that it doesn’t have use. He argues, “…works by Derrida, de Man, Spivak, and many others began to show up in the bibliographies of scholars working in every period and genre. The same simply cannot be said of DH…” (162). It seems as though he’s comparing apples and oranges here, but maybe that’s part of the problem. When we conflate the activities and values of two very different branches of scholarship, this kind of confusion ensues. In other words, digital humanities needs to be understood and judged on its own merits and that may mean that it needs to define itself more clearly in contrast with “traditional LITERARY scholarship” which is what Golumbia keeps coming back to.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 So, yes, digital scholarship needs to be more tightly defined but it also needs to people like Golumbia to get off its back. How can DH reach its full potential when it has to spend so much time justifying and explaining its existence? How can DH-ers create worth-while projects when they have to acquire the skills to do so on their own time because their committees or peers don’t believe that digital scholarship has a place in the department? It seems a little unfair to complain that DH hasn’t produced any tools used by literary scholars when they’re not giving space in the University to produce that kind of work. Golumbia makes some fair points about why we need to clearer distinction for DH, but he’s kind of being a Stanley Fish about it. And that’s not useful to anybody.

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