By William Pannapacker
Last year when I blogged about the MLA, I said that the digital humanities seems like the “next big thing,” and, quite naturally, the digital humanists were indignant because they’ve been doing their thing for more than 20 years (and maybe even longer than that).
At a standing-room only session I attended yesterday, “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities,” one panelist noted that there has been some defensiveness about the field, partly because it has included so many alt-academics who felt disrespected by the traditional academy: “Harrumph … Playing with electronic toys is not scholarship. Where are your peer-reviewed articles?” I know from experience that there are plenty of people in the profession who know little about this established field and even regard it with disdain as something disturbingly outré and dangerous to the mission of the humanities. During the discussion at that session, Matthew Kirschenbaum, author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT, 2009), which won the MLA’s First Book Award last year, observed that “If you don’t know what the digital humanities is, you haven’t looked very hard.”
I mean, c’mon, just start with the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities. The digital humanities are not some flashy new theory that might go out of fashion. At this point, the digital humanities are The Thing. There’s no Next about it. And it won’t be long until the digital humanities are, quite simply, “the humanities.”
Consider the quantity, quality, and comprehensiveness of the digital humanities panels at this year’s MLA convention.
The digital humanities have some internal tensions, such as the occasional divide between builders and theorizers, and coders and non-coders. But the field, as a whole, seems to be developing an in-group, out-group dynamic that threatens to replicate the culture of Big Theory back in the 80s and 90s, which was alienating to so many people. It’s perceptible in the universe of Twitter: We read it, but we do not participate. It’s the cool-kids’ table.
So, the digital humanities seem more exclusive, more cliquish, than they did even one year ago. There are identifiable stars who know they are stars. And some of the senior figures in the field, like Alan Liu, seem like gods among us. And maybe most important of all: There’s money, most obviously represented by Brett Bobley from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities—looking just a little like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.
If this keeps up, I might start wearing ironic T-shirts under my black sport coat.
There’s justice in this turn of events: Well-earned success for a community that has long regarded itself as facing uncomprehending resistance. At the same time, the tendency to become like Big Theory may change the attractive ethics of the field, described by one panelist “as community, collaboration, and goodwill.” The grassroots days seem to be ending.
As this process develops, how will it affect the majority of the profession: those who teach at community colleges, for-profit schools, and teaching-intensive institutions? The growing tendency of the digital humanities to become an elite community—always pursuing the cutting edge—may leave most of us behind, struggling to catch up with limited support, and humanities education, in general, will be unchanged by the innovation and excitement promised by the digital humanities at this year’s MLA convention.
William Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is a Chronicle columnist (under the pen name “Thomas H. Benton”), and this is his third year live-blogging the MLA convention.
16 Responses to Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant?
henry_adams - January 8, 2011 at 7:38 pm
Professor Pannapacker, great blog. Some people scorn digital humanities, but in the past people scorned the idea that humans could fly, that the earth moves around the sun, and that the world is round. I can easily imagine dinosaurs looking at upstart mammals and asking, “What is this warm-blooded nonsense?”
I wouldn’t worry about community colleges. Although two-year schools sometimes show little interest in theory, they have been ahead of the rest of us in using new technologies, at least in pedagogy.
I’d like to know what role you and others see digital humanities playing in regard to the current crisis in the academy.
bitnetted - January 8, 2011 at 10:19 pm
There is a big difference between the digital humanities crowd and Big Theory: On the whole, DH people are not as structurally empowered within the academy as the theory leaders of the 80s and 90s were. That there are some senior “names” in the field is great, but the field itself is still heterogenous and developing. As was pointed out in several sessions, many DH people are grad students, non TT, or staff. Those who are attempting to do such work from the TT are stressed about whether any of it will count towards T&P, especially if they are of the making or coding variety of digital humanists. Also, there are a lot more people involved in DH activities at MLA than those who name-check each other in Twitter streams. Beyond that, the DH universe extends far, far beyond MLA disciplines, especially if we consider the overlap with other digital media modes, and digitally enriched pedagogical practice. The real story is about the perhaps uniquely interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of DH, rather than about some elite in-group. It is all in how you draw the lines.
drrom - January 9, 2011 at 10:57 am
In response to henry_adams, there was a large number of Digital Humanities people who led the charge to help the Humanities in general. See here for more information:
http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/
And, in response to the article, with all due respect to Pannapacker, I was on that Past/Future panel and am from a teaching-intensive university. My brief comments were meant to have us talk more transparently about teaching and Digital Humanities, to gather our voices, to help out each other as teachers and teacher-scholars. It was never my intention to say that those teaching the heavier loads have been excluded from Digital Humanities. In my experience, there are plenty on my campus doing it already, but we’re so fractured in our schedules that we haven’t found a way to come together and talk about it.
Better PR?
Anyway, thank you for the blog/article. Maybe it’s a hint that DH needs to do more outreach.
Katherine D. Harris
San Jose State University
pannapacker - January 9, 2011 at 12:16 pm
I appreciate all the comments this piece has received. I don’t mean it as a “strong criticism” (hence all the tongue-in-cheek references). I don’t feel excluded (though the incessant Twittering is a lot to keep up with, like being nibbled to death by ducks, and yet it seems like that’s where the action is). There are lot of people in the DH community who have gone out of their way to welcome me and aid me in a variety of projects, and I am grateful to them.
My secondary point here (following my strong praise for what has been accomplished by the DH community) is that there are a lot of places where faculty members don’t even know what DH is (or is it “are”?) and have trouble finding the time and money to engage with that community. I know a lot has been done already, but I am essentially urging even more outreach and support for faculty members who are not located near the major centers and for whom traveling is not an option. Perhaps the next step is creating more infrastructure for pedagogy at the introductory level for faculty members who are not going to become experts but just want to keep up.
This was all pretty kneejerk (not some kind of manifesto), but one thing that’s notable in the reaction is how little attention has been given to the strongly positive things I have said about the Digital Humanities. And I really liked Jeff Goldblum in that movie.
jessica_pressman - January 10, 2011 at 3:50 pm
The question of the relationship between literary studies and DH motivates the following call for papers for a special issue of the _Digital Humanities Quarterly_, so please read and submit:
CFP: _Digital Humanities Quarterly_ Special Issue: The Literary
This special issue of DHQ invites essays that consider the study of literature and the category of the literary to be an essential part of the digital humanities. We welcome essays that consider how digital technologies affect our understanding of the literary— its aesthetics, its history, its production and dissemination processes, and also the traditional practices we use to critically analyze it. We also seek critical reflections on the relationships between traditional literary hermeneutics and larger-scale humanities computing projects. What is the relationship between literary study and the digital humanities, and what should it be? We welcome essays that approach this topic from a wide range of critical perspectives and that focus on diverse objects of study from antiquity to the present as well as born-digital forms.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 1,000 words and a short CV to Jessica Pressman and Lisa Swanstrom at by Feb. 1, 2011. We will reply by March 1, 2011 and request that full-length papers of no more than 9,000 words be submitted by *June 15, 2011*.
caedmon5 - January 10, 2011 at 6:59 pm
I don’t think the paragraph everybody is referring to is actually all that far off. In fact the challenge in DH is going to be avoiding the star system trap big theory fell into: it will kill the exploratory, “what could go wrong,” ethos.
“So, the digital humanities seem more exclusive, more cliquish, than they did even one year ago. There are identifiable stars who know they are stars. And some of the senior figures in the field … seem like gods among us.”
I deleted the person named because I don’t think it is fair to single out anybody in particular.
11130277 - January 12, 2011 at 4:09 pm
I would like to have been at the MLA Convention myself to see how the digital humanities are being received/perceived. The MLA has had a Discussion Group and a committee dealing with digital humanities issues for at least the past 20 years. To have a good idea how digital resources and methodologies that rely on them have been permeating our field (language and literature), I’d recommend the following: (1) _A Companion to Digital Humanities_ (ed. Schreibman, Siemens, Unsworth, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 2004); (2) Willard McCarty’s _Humanities Computing_ (Palgrave 2005); _A Companion to Digital Literary Studies_ (ed. Ray Siemens & Susan Schreibman, Blackwell, 2007, and online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/). Disclaimer: I’m a member of the MLA but not an author of, or contributor to, any of these works.
punquito - January 12, 2011 at 7:08 pm
When ISN’T there a dominant academic formation, at any given time? We all get to take turns in this game. The commenters above are also correct that the digital humanities encompasses many different professional networks, some of which aren’t as strongly linked to each other as it might seem (and include scholars who don’t often present at MLA or attend it).
The likeness to Big Theory crumbles in one respect. Whatever one thinks of it, “theory” demands that one read very widely and deeply — in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and multiple areas of social theory (including science studies and the history of technology) as well as in literary criticism. Often, it produced “theorists” so well-read that they couldn’t write comprehensibly any more. Digital humanities has the opposite problem: many digital humanists are seriously under-educated, deeply uncomfortable with the intellectual tradition that produced them, and unable to work in any language other than Globish.
It did have its star system and its fawning graduate students, but Theory was really driven by critique and challenge, both of the social world and of one “theorist” by another. One sees very little of that in the digital humanities. Important books in the field seldom receive anything other than critical praise. That might gratify some authors, but it surely haunts others (especially those who take their teaching seriously), and it isn’t healthy for any project.
mkirschenbaum - January 14, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Wanted to post the link to my reply to Pannapacker and subsequent discussion:
http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/the-dh-stars-come-out-in-la-2/
westtexas - February 1, 2011 at 11:40 am
Although my own work appears on the web, as a community college teacher, I feel strongly that these students especially need less face-to-screen time and more face-to-face time to build interpersonal skills.
jonippolito - February 2, 2011 at 1:33 pm
“Harrumph … Playing with electronic toys is not scholarship. Where are your peer-reviewed articles?”
This may be changing. I encourage anyone whose tenure committee needs an upgrade to read “New Criteria for New Media,” the most frequently downloaded article from MIT’s Leonardo magazine.
http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/275.php