Tag: humanities computing

Next year will be a reasonably big year on the Digital Humanities calendar in Australia. In March, we will hold THATCamp here at the University of Melbourne and also, we will establish our very own Digital Humanities Association in the first quarter of 2011. In the second half of the year, I will run a symposium with a Digital Humanities theme; possibly on reading or on Virtual Research Environments.There are also a number of projects that VeRSI is involved that will come into fruition in 2011.

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.