by Thomas Keenan (Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies Librarian)
Over the five-day digital mapping workshop held in beautiful Marburg, Germany, our gracious hosts at the Herder Institut created a wonderfully comfortable and productive atmosphere of enthusiasm, cooperation, and generosity — the perfect environment for the discussion of tentative ideas and the possibilities and limitations of status-quo digital technologies for a broad range of in-progress or prospective projects. The topic of the workshop was digital mapping, but for me personally, the most valuable part of the interactions was the more macro-level conceptual discussions of the digital humanities. As a humanist by training, for whom computational research methods are still a largely unfamiliar category, the workshop provided a near ideal venue for the entertainment of my hopes and doubts vis-à-vis a digital future for the humanities. A palpable vigorous enthusiasm was at all times tempered with salutary skepticism, which forestalled the kind of naïve exuberance or evangelistic tone one sometimes encounters in DH forums. The relaxed and open atmosphere and the very collegial and receptive assembly of researchers from the Herder, Princeton, and institutions in Poland, Hungary and Ukraine made the whole workshop an organically cooperative event, and in a sense modeled precisely the kind of complementary-expertise collaboration without which digital humanities projects are impossible, a cooperative research mode generally unfamiliar to humanists who are accustomed to more solitary scholarly enterprises.
The time spent learning about the Herder Institut’s highly impressive research collections for the study of Eastern Europe left me wanting to come up with a project that will take me back there for more intensive exploration.
For me, though, the most memorable moment from the workshop was a discussion about the disciplinary boundaries of the humanities themselves and the effect on those boundaries of the introduction of computational methods. At one point Princeton’s own Natasha Ermolaev raised the question of whether, over time, the qualifier “digital” in “digital humanities” will become redundant, as digital technologies continue to advance, literary and artistic canons continue to expand, and the scope of humanistic inquiry continues to expand beyond those canons. Will the use of computational methods in the humanities become so much a matter of course that the “digital” qualifier will fall away? After all, no one uses this qualifier now for fields of inquiry that traditionally deal in numerical data; no one talks about “digital science” or even “digital social science” (although I myself would argue that many of the “digital humanities” projects I’ve seen showcased are more social-scientific than humanistic). Natasha’s question occasioned very productive contemplations of some very difficult and interesting problems. One was the theoretical question of the boundaries between disciplinary approaches. Are digital methods now becoming applicable to humanities research, in a way they long have been to social science research, precisely because the humanities as a discipline are morphing into something more social-scientific? Can the targets of humanistic inquiry traditionally conceived really be made available to computationally assisted “distant readings”? If, rather than engaging them as meaningful works on their own terms, we look at literary texts and other artworks as social constructs or the products of social forces (economic, political, ideological, etc.), are we engaged in social-scientific rather than humanistic investigations? This brought in the distinction between data more traditionally conceived, i.e. numeric data, and things like literary texts, musical works and visual artworks which have come to be included in the new expanded definition of data. It also touched on the very difficult problem of the convertibility of exponents of the latter category of data, historically viewed as processible exclusively by human subjects, into the former category so they can be processed by machines. From this followed the perhaps even thornier questions of which elements of humanistic inquiry and analysis can and/or should be relegated to automated or automatable processes.
The project presented by Aaron Shkuda was an interesting test case for some of these questions of the boundaries between humanistic and social-scientific inquiry and the applicability of computational methods to different components of a research question. His project looked at the art scene that exploded in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan from the 1960s through the 1980s, and at the associated gentrification of that neighborhood. A variety of plottable data points (locations of galleries and other businesses, demographic data, economic data), mapped onto a cartographic representation of the neighborhood, produced an informative partial picture of the SoHo gentrification process. Ultimately, though, it seemed that complementary, more traditional humanistic components might be necessary to explore the x factor of the enormous impact of the artworks that were the ostensible catalyst for this very particular, now iconic, instance of the gentrification phenomenon.
For me the most valuable takeaway from the workshop was the conviction that it is critical that the academy make large investments now in the kinds of experimental research that will eventually define the evolving roles of computational technologies in the likewise evolving understanding and analyses of the products of human artistic expression. Without this investment, the academy risks forfeiting its rightful role in shaping the way the humanist legacy is represented in the digital realm. The time at the Herder Insitut brought into sharper focus the urgency of immediate, committed, vigorous engagement in digital humanities research. It left me assured that questions of how computational technologies and methods will, should, and should not affect humanities research are ones the academy really cannot afford not to address. I came away from the workshop feeling that my own mandate, given my particular role in the academy, was to be the best possible advocate for investment in this kind of experimental work amid a research-institution culture that has become intensely focused on short-term, forecastable results. One of the most formidable challenges for DH advocates as a whole, it seems, is to make space for this important experimental work in an academy whose hiring, promotion and tenure processes still strongly privilege traditional metrics of scholarly productivity. To rise to these occasions and to be persuasive DH advocates we need to model the healthy balance between, on the one hand, an enterprising spirit of investment and open inquiry, and on the other, the skeptical rigor and critical distance that attend all humanistic projects and to which the work of the humanities scholars we want to reach is constantly subject. I felt that the workshop in Marburg laid a very solid foundation for further development of just this kind of energetic, open, and rigorous approach to the field of digital scholarship. I very much hope this was the beginning of a long-term transatlantic collaboration that will generate constructive responses to the challenges and opportunities digital technologies pose for humanities research.
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