JM Turners 'The Slave Ship' (1840). This image helped to turn public opinion in Britain against global slavery

I am associated with a group called 4Humanities that is a Digital Humanities advocacy group based in the US that is advocating for the Humanities. The economic reality of the recession in the US and Europe has put enormous pressures on Humanities schools and many are closing or losing staff. The group is doing a lot of good work and has received financial support from two of the leading Associations in the Digital Humanities; the ACH and ALLC.  I am on the discussion list for the group and recently sent this post (that has been edited and I hope makes sense out of the context of the threaded discussion…and in reflection; I am not actually sure I have a concrete suggestion for what I am advocating).

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I have just read a few past emails and there are some very interesting threads here (and I am exited by the ACH and ALLC donation and the broader support of the DH community!). If you put a button on the site to donate I will send some Antipodean money your way (plus we will have our own Association to help you soon). This region has not suffered the same economic downturn as the US and Europe, partly because we kept-it-real in the banking sector. But the humanities has suffered for quite sometime for the opposite reason. The economy wants jobs and dare I say ‘usuful’ and compliant skilled labour; not critical and independently motivated people who challenge and innovate . The humanities has been in relative decline for at least 2 decades in Australia.

Let me be a little contrary here in that I am a little worried by a focus upon ‘showcase’ and ‘methods’ and ‘networks’. What audiences love seeing is their history in new ways; in engaging with the ‘methods’ that help them understand the human condition; of understanding the struggles and choices that have made their society and will continue to make their society. In other words, a network has meaning and is built within larger active humanistic understandings. Scientists know this (I think); and they would never attempt to build a network that does little except advocate Science. A network, like a Union, uses is scaled-up power to critically addresses problems that individuals can’t.

What is a large problem in the US that a network could slot itself into? What is a large coherent and inclusive problem that a network could address? (apart from the obvious recession fuelled one because if everyone is broke; then who cares about the humanities?) May I be so bold and suggest that an underinvestment in humanities education could exacerbate US decline on the international stage. Would stating this (and collectively proving it) get the right people excited? Is there something new and exciting about US humanities work on-line that could challenge and excite large audiences? Would it be possible to curate and focus some digital resources quickly around some burning national problem; to challenge people, to upset them and show what the humanities does within the hearts and minds of the American people? A Union has power because it can withdraw the central commodity in a capitalist economy; Labour. What power does a network have? Can we say; withdraw XML or TEI? Scale in the Digital Humanities; networked or otherwise means little when it is not driven by an equally bold intellectual agenda.

What we need is bold intellectual leadership centred on a synergistic human problem and then let the network follow. I liked very much Alan’s post in terms of HASTAC scholars and activist techniques. This is the right direction as long as the medium and the message can marry; like in JM Turner’s The Slave Ship. It helped to stop slavery and he did it with a few cans of paint! Surely with the resources at our disposal we could do something very special.

In terms of a regional Association, there is a lot of work to be done. The term ‘Digital Humanities’ isn’t widely used in Australia but I have found little resistance to its use within the forums in which I have participated or organised. It is important to use the term ‘Digital Humanities’ as it is well understood in the US and Europe and as with all good research; we need to engage with the depth and breadth of knowledge in the field both locally and internationally so that this knowledge can be advanced (both locally and internationally). Plus we must acknowledge all the hard work of humanities scholars to establish the field over many decades. The Digital Humanities is research led and not service led. There are already a lot of excellent support mechanisms to support general computing in the humanities, but where the real gap lay is in research computing. By ‘research computing’ I mean using computers in a meaningful way to answer research questions (ie. the work of the  ‘Digital Humanities’). As an example of this; the Founders and Survivors project is using linking methodologies to link records about the convict experience in Tasmania and uncover new knowledge about convicts. Convicts are the significant founding population of Australia and the use of computing methodologies in this instance is establishing new knowledge about this population.

The Digital Humanities isn’t about publishing a facsimile of a document online and then getting excited about this new found convenience. I have never heard of an Historian argue in a historical thesis the case for ‘convenience’. Research is inconvenient; it is about asking inconvenient questions. It isn’t simply about creating new access to digital facsimiles of a document (this is why we have Google who do a pretty average job). It is about creating machine readable texts that retain and advance the interpretative layer of that text. And the Digital Humanities isn’t Benthamite, utilitarian, nor modernist. These idea are usually associated with industry and government water utilities. The Digital Humanities is about culture; the cultural use of computing to understand new things about the human cultural condition. And some of the things we discover may be uncomfortable and inconvenient.

The Digital Humanities is always going to have at its core a rich philosophical debate about its defining values and principles. This is the sign of the maturity of the field because what field doesn’t have at its core the same set of reflections. It is the Benthamite, utilitarian, modernists who need concrete definitions. They would like to see us ‘defined’ in a glass cabinet in a 19th Century Museum where we would become inert, safe, and a curiosity to be viewed on special occasions. But like all humanities research, the Digital Humanities makes critical, dynamic, and holistic people who create problems (not solutions) . It is a dynamic set of skills and values that we apply to answer (inconvenient) questions.

Also, read what the media theorist, Clay Shirky has to say about Wiki Leaks.

“Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks”.

Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities (link)

There are also a number of domains that are still working. Wikileaks.nl and Wikileaks.de

I don't agree with Architecture

One of the more difficult areas that the more service focussed domain of the Digital Humanities traverses is between infrastructure development (ie. large computing systems that link various institutions together) and broader discipline-specific debates in the humanities. A tenured historian or linguist, with many years experience of the field, may be confronted by the decisions needed to implement a large computing system. The skills of the historian or linguist may involve critical debate, close reading of text, argument, and synthesis of competing evidence into an academic monologue. However, the decisions needed to build large computing infrastructures exist in an entirely different set of debates and more importantly, ways to debate.  The historian may say ‘I don’t agree’. And the infrastructure developer might say ‘I don’t care if you don’t agree with the moon; show us a model’. Traversing realities and negotiating between realities is difficult; partly because most people believe their reality is the only reality.

I am sorry, but I don’t rate highly marketable computing skills as prerequisites for the underprivileged.  A classicist with both computing skills and humanities education (a ‘digital humanist’) is highly employable in all sorts of contexts. A classicist with only a humanities education is less employable. A historian with both computing research and humanities research skills (again a ‘Digital Humanist’) is very employable; perhaps more so than someone with a narrower set of skills. Why then do many Digital Humanities scholars, especially the more successful ones, whine so much?

I think it has a lot to do with the nature of the field. The Digital Humanities is a broad and eclectic field with little common academic ground. So, where better to find common ground than in the comfort of the ‘underprivileged’.  As long as there is some force that is discriminating against the Digital Humanities, it can find the elusive ‘common ground’ it seems.

The ‘underprivileged’ thesis of the Digital Humanities is an immature, unconvincing and distracting argument and acts as a retardant for intellectual growth. The assumption of  ‘privilege’ is a much more humble and responsible footing on which to engage with human culture, rather than looking for acceptance from a straw man whilst stomping on his foot!

The next time someone in the Digital Humanities says they are ‘underprivileged’,  politely ask them to explicitly prove it to you, to provide some statistical evidence, to bring some rigour to their thesis. Would we expect anything else from any other researcher? Then we can perhaps move away from this refuge of the tyrant and start to engage with some really serious subject matter; some of which may be about people more underprivileged than ourselves.

(the shanty town of the ‘underprivileged’ Digital Humanities mind)

Defining the Digital Humanities is much simpler than defining History or defining Philosophy or defining Modernism. Yet people still ask the annoying question ‘what is the Digital Humanities?’. I am not sure why this is the case; perhaps it is because lack of certainty requires a certain independence of thinking that definitions do not. What is an Australian, what is a man, what is an animal? If we just accept that these things exist and get on with it, then we wouldn’t get bogged down in asking banal questions in the first place.

And getting into a heated argument about the existence of something is as exhausting as it is futile.

Thanks to Alexis B for the link