A recent post I placed on Humanist; one of the most important academic initiatives in the Digital Humanities run by Professor Willard McCarty of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. In this post, I sort of hijacked the subject somewhat but this needed to be said because as I see it, the otherwise wonderful infrastructure agenda in the Digital Humanities in this instance lacks clarity and purposefulness.
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: critical thinkingWhat I think all this has to do with computing is in our understanding
better what computing has to do with the culture in which it has surfaced.
The utilitarian argument (“the computer is useful”) is so trite, so dull, so
incapable of supporting for long the professional activity we would like to
see given a better place in the sun. The principle of reciprocity that governs
human relations says we need to be useful for sure, but to attract the sort
of students we want as well as keep ourselves alive intellectually I’d think
we need to offer something with a real bite to it. What has that bite? Not a
totally paranoid vision, though the thrill of the threat of it is a start.
Dear Willard and Humanist,
This is an interesting argument and given the institutional arrangements of the Digital Humanities, they aren’t going to be resolved quickly. I think where we find ourselves in the Digital Humanities is wedged somewhere between a contemporary version of CP Snow’s Two Cultures argument. But rather than wedged between ‘Science’ and ‘Humanities’ we find ourselves stuck somewhere between highly skilled technical labour and academic labour. They are both two very valuable and different cultures with divergent approaches to work, merit, aspiration, and research significance. This division is especially problematic in the UK context given the history of the class system where working class kids went to technical school and middle class kids were given the opportunity to become academics. This of course changed significantly with mass tertiary education and the rise of the Polytechnics.
And in recent years, ‘pragmatism’ (or even utilitarianism) in the UK has taken a decisively hegemonic and political role in the middle classes spurred on by excessive London ‘City’ culture and a somewhat pragmatic anti-intellectual elite. The Banking sector in that country was after all merely there to perform a service function, but somehow managed through ‘service innovation’ to create a bloated self-serving industry that not only rewarded itself for its own mediocrity, but subsumed the more productive and innovative components of the British economy.
I know that I am making a polemical leap here (and it is on purpose), but I am worried that we in our own small way are making the same mistakes in the Digital Humanities. We are for instance, allowing simplistic understandings of concepts such as ‘infrastructure’ to distract us away from perhaps more significant research endeavours. For example one of the recent posts on Humanist announced yet another layer on the Infrastructure spaghetti-portfolio called CHAIN (Collation of Humanities and Arts Infrastructure Networks). http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2009-November/000860.html
If networks such as this are to attract and sustain academic attention, they must also be only be open to academic critique so that they may be embedded within real academic research culture and critical concerns (beyond the ‘practical’ debates) . Although good infrastructure is not entirely without merit, I worry that in this instance the group is crudely undifferentiated and lacks clear theoretical and technical underpinnings and achievable goals. At least one of the ‘infrastructure’ projects listed is an otherwise pedestrian off-the-shelf installation of Drupal but is placed beside a massive iterative design project that consists of 60 universities worldwide! One of the networks I am not sure actually exists, and another doesn’t deal with technical standards at all as far as I am aware. The vision of this group is far too grandiose and nebulous and although dialogue is always good, at these times of diminished resources, we also need to concentrate all our academic energies on deeper and more significant understanding of the human condition so that we may find more achievable ways to advance it.
