One of the most vocal criticisms of the digital humanities is their supposed lack of interpretation. As interpretation remains the bedrock of the humanities, the argument goes, the digital humanities represent, at best, a degradation of the humanities or, at worst, something antithetical to them. For a recent example of this criticism, consider the words of Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia in the Los Angeles Review of Books earlier this year (and alluded to in one of our classes):

Digital Humanities has often tended to be anti-interpretive, especially when interpretation is understood as a political activity. Digital Humanities instead aims to archive materials, produce data, and develop software, while bracketing off the work of interpretation to a later moment or leaving it to other scholars — or abandoning it altogether for those who argue that we ought to become “postcritical.” (Allington et al.)

For the authors, the digital humanities clearly concern themselves with archival, data, and software development—tasks more suited to corporations than to scholars. Pitted against the digital humanities, there exists the critical, political, and interpretative work that should define the humanities. Does this definition of the digital humanities, and its comparison to the political work within the humanities, seem limited or even inaccurate?¹

Viewing the digital humanities through the lens of digital history, I think this definition does seem limited and maybe inaccurate. As Stephen Brier argues, historians “made a substantial and quite different contribution to the emergence of the Digital Humanities” than certain literary scholars that the digital-humanities-as-anti-interpretation critics often highlight (1). For Brier, there exists another digital humanities emergence story where social history—“recounting what happened in the past ‘from the bottom up’” by emphasizing the voices of marginalized peoples—and public history—making the past relevant to those “that could and would benefit from exposure to and knowledge about their ‘lost’ pasts”—play major roles (2, 4). Together, these modes of history concern themselves with both the interpretive and the political. Moreover, in seeking to elevate the voices of the marginalized or to reach marginalized peoples, social and public historians were comfortable with new modes of investigation and “new, non-print” forms of communications such as radio broadcasts, television series, and films (4). As precursors to digital historians and digital humanists, then, they envisioned a fruitful relationship between interpretation and new tools of scholarly production.

This fruitful relationship becomes more apparent when we consider more recent projects in digital history. For example, Timothy Mahoney’s Gilded Age Plains City expands a peer-reviewed essay on a murder trial and 19th-century urban culture in Lincoln, Nebraska into a “self-directed exploration of the social, cultural, legal, and political concerns raised in the course of the trial providing insight into understanding the origins of Progressivism and modernity” (Seefeldt and Thomas). By augmenting his textual “spatial narratives” with interactive mapping tools, Mahoney seeks to generate a better understanding of his subjects. Similarly, Crandall Shifflett’s essay on the construction of Virtual Jamestown reveals how a consideration of information architecture and the development of mapping visualizations transformed a “digital archive” into “a far more interpretive site” about interactions among Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans in Jamestown (Shifflett). Not until Shifflett and his team had to organize an archive of materials in a digital space did they fully determine how to interpret those materials. As Shifflett himself concludes, “presentation may be the area where new technologies have the greatest potential for the practice of history” (Shifflett).

This interplay between interpretation and new tools of scholarly production suggests that digital historians do not necessarily archive materials, produce data, and develop software in “bracketed off” and “postcritical” spaces. Rather, these tasks are integral to the production of scholarship and the critical work contained therein. If we expand our definition of the digital humanities to encompass digital history, and its interpretive and politically-engaged influences, then distinction between critical humanistic work and newer digital tools seems more complicated.

Note

1. The evidence the authors use to arrive at this definition does, at the very least, seem limited but not inaccurate: in the section of “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities” in which this excerpt appears, they discuss, almost exclusively, the English department at the University of Virginia.

Works Cited

Allington, Daniel et al. “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 May 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/.

Brier, Stephen. “Confessions of a Premature Digital Humanist” (draft).

Seefeldt, Douglas and William Thomas. “What is Digital History?” Perspectives on History, 1 May 2009, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/intersections-history-and-new-media/what-is-digital-history.

Shifflett, Crandall. “The Problem of Design and Navigation: A Case Study from Virtual Jamestown.” http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/essays/shifflettessay.php.

During our last class, much of the discussion—about Google Books, funding for projects, the potential need for advertising—gravitated towards questions of producing and publishing scholarship in the contemporary digital environment. This prompted me to think more about the difference between “producing” and “publishing” and how the digital humanities can illuminate and maybe even change it. In this context, “producing” refers to a scholar’s, or a group of scholars’, presentation of research in written, visual, or some other computational form, while “publishing” refers to larger project of designing, distributing, and monetizing these presentations. Ultimately, though, the emphases on method and openness central to the digital humanities might collapse this difference and introduce some simpler, more transparent production and publishing processes.

Both producing and publishing rely on a multitude of proprietary software products to accomplish their respective tasks. For example, a scholar might use Word to write an article; a publisher might then use InDesign to typeset that article and place it within a journal. And, while Microsoft and Adobe try to make these products seem as transparent and usable as possible, “what you see is not what you get,” as Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff argue in “Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown” (Tenen and Wythoff). Underlying the seemingly simple graphical user interfaces of these products exist “complicated layer[s] of code understandable only to machines” that encode the actual scholarship in convoluted markup languages difficult and time-consuming to clean and decode for human readers (Tenen and Wythoff). Proprietary software, in other words, inhibits the open exchange of scholarship between its producers and publishers.

How, though, can the digital humanities address this problem? Emphasis on method seems like a good start. Tom Scheinfeldt, confronting the argument that the digital humanities (in 2012) might not argue anything, articulates a case for a tools-oriented approach—“one of the things digital humanities shares with the sciences is a heavy reliance on instruments, on tools”—that turns “scholarly attention” onto the “tools themselves and the whiz-bang effects they produce” (Scheinfeldt). While Scheinfeldt suggests that digital humanists should build and study their own tools in this passage, we should expand the scope of his call to “scholarly attention” to the tools we use so commonly when producing and publishing scholarship. What are the whiz-bang effects of proprietary software like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Adobe InDesign? Do they articulate or contradict the values of the digital humanities?

One of the values that seems consistent across the multiple areas of inquiry that comprise the digital humanities is openness. Lisa Spiro, in fact, lists openness as the first proposed value in her 2012 essay “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities”: “Openness operates on several levels in the digital humanities, describing a commitment to the open exchange of ideas, the development of open content and software, and transparency” (Spiro). By connecting openness to “exchange of ideas,” “content,” and “software,” Spiro suggests the if the digital humanities can adopt central values, they might influence not only scholarly ideas but the infrastructure that supports the exchange, production, and publication of those ideas. As digital humanists have promoted, and continue to promote, greater inclusiveness in the years since 2012, they have preserved and solidified the value of openness. Consider, for example, the following conditions for apps from “QueerOS: A User’s Manual” in the 2016 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities:

Promiscuity: the ability to move and interact across platforms, devices, users, and geographical regions unrestricted.

Commons: contra the “app store” ethos driven by finance and conservative social investments, QueerOS apps exist in a space of free exchange, sharing, and open development. (Barnett et al.)

Here, the authors emphasize unrestricted movement and “free exchange.” Though the focus of digital humanities seems to have changed from 2012 to 2016 from definition to the inclusion of cultural criticism and historically marginalized voices, openness remains a prominent value.

If we think of the difference between producing and publishing in the context of Scheinfeldt’s tools-based and methodological approach and the integral digital humanities value of openness it seems that we need to rethink some of the infrastructure that supports scholarship. A simple markup language, like Markdown, could eliminate the complicated encodings of Word or Google documents, for example (Tenen and Wythoff). Authors, editors, and publishers could exchange files without the need to waste hours reformatting work. Meanwhile software like Pandoc or LaTeX could reduce the effort required to convert documents from one format to another and allow for the simpler creation of well-designed publications (Tenen and Wythoff). Authors, editors, and publishers could run straightforward commands, instead of labyrinthine scripts, to transform and style scholarship for readers. While such work requires some technical know-how, it relies on simple encoding and open-source tools that do not divide producing and publishing labor as sharply as proprietary software does. By blurring the difference between producing and publishing with these open-source tools, we might develop an infrastructure more hospitable to the digital humanities values of openness and transparency.

Works Cited

Barnett, Fiona et al. “QueerOS: A User’s Manual.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/56.

Scheinfeldt, Tom. “Where’s the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions?.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/13.

Spiro, Lisa. “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/13.

Tenen, Dennis and Grant Wythoff. “Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown.” The Programming Historian, 19 March 2014, http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/sustainable-authorship-in-plain-text-using-pandoc-and-markdown.