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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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The Emergence of the Digital Humanities
The world is slowly but surely recognizing that the revolution in computing and information technology has began to transform the humanities. Other fields in the liberal arts were more obviously changed by the digital revolution, mainly through the capacity of computing to deal with massive quantities of digital information. The humanist version of number crunching occurred early in the field of linguistics, producing an entirely new discipline of computational linguistics. But other approaches ranging from computer visualization to the creation of hugely complex databases have slowly changed the ways in which humanists think about significant problems, as well as the manner in which they analyze them.
Since universities, in which the bulk of humanistic scholarship takes place, devote a smaller and smaller proportion of research resources to the humanities, much of the promise of the digital humanities frontier has been underdeveloped. Humanists are last in line for new hardware and software, they have fewer technologists who specialize in their digital needs, the libraries they depend on are underfunded, and they have a less fully developed national digital infrastructure. As to this last point, I was encouraged by the appearance oc the ACLS cyberinfrastructure project a couple of years ago, but disappointed to find that nothing seems to have been done to implement the report after it appeared on the Web.
But I was encouraged by the recent National Endowment for the Humanities announcement that its “Digital Humanities Initiative” has now been institutionalized as the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. That sounds right, and if more significant resources emerge in forthcoming NEH budgets, this will be an important step in the right direction. Thanks to Chairman Bruce Cole for this. NEH is also considering the feasibility of a University of Virginia-based organization for digital scholarly editing, which is precisely the sort of infrastructural support the field needs.
But the primary inspiration for the digital humanities has, from the start, come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Under the program officer Don Waters, Mellon has provided both leadership and significant funding for a host of worthy projects and initiatives, not least of which have been its own initiatives, JSTOR and ARTSTOR. The most recent of their funded projects is Bamboo, an attempt by humanities technologists at Berkeley and Chicago to develop shared technology services for humanities research. Without Mellon, we simply would not have a field to worry about.
Much remains to be done, and campus-based inattention to the humanities complicates the task. But the digital humanities are here to stay, and they bear close watching.
Posted at 04:24:21 PM on April 7, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
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Well, take Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer-prize-winning “article” (mentioned also in Gina Barreca’s post): “Pearls Before Breakfast” at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
Let’s see now: It’s “read” online and it has embedded videos and music; it discusses art (“framing”), philosophy (Kant, et al.), and, of course, music. And it is painfully all about public perception/reception. In short, a piece of the humanities at its finest.
Oh, and it was, in a very real sense, team-produced — as are experiments in the sciences.
Yet, how many college/university classrooms have faculty in the humanities who teach that kind of digital humanities writing (ok, call it “journalism” if you have to) — yes, how many?
Oh, yes, one can bemoan that the sciences get the better computers and all but, really, how many humanists have actually wanted to teach digital humanities, to work in digital humanities, to think and create in digital humanities?
I fear the answer is painfully obvious — as obvious and as painful as watching the crowd passing by Joshua Bell on a Washington, D.C. morning in the Metro….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 7, 11:30 PM · #
I agree wholeheartedly!
— Mike · Apr 8, 10:02 AM · #
My response to #1 and #2 would be “many more than you think.” Indeed, if you take the time to read about the new Bamboo Project to which Stan refers (and in which we at Penn State University have now become officially involved, as have many other universities, extending this project well beyond just its two originating universities), you will see that in fact there is a real pent-up demand from humanists for more technological support for what they are trying to accomplish. If this Project is successful over the next several years, it will have realized much of what the ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure had urged.
— Sandy · Apr 9, 05:05 AM · #
We all get sucked into ideas that we love, that appeal to us, that transform us, we feel. We came into contact with those ideas via some medium, usually, that we long had mastered and used. It is rare that we come across great transforming ideas via media we are poor at or afraid of. So we all have rich lives of our minds mostly in media we are masters of, not in media we are bad at or newcomers to.
So, should we criticize us and others because we cling to media we are good at and have mastered? It that bad? Should we all, for some reason, be obligated to master all or any new media that come along for the sheer reason that they exist and have come along?
Beating up the humanities for “being dilatory” or “being late” to update media and technologies is easy to do but rather casual and meaningless and hurtful-to-no-point I feel. The greatness of the life-transforming ideas, all over the humanities, outweigh, considerably, in my book, whatever damn medium is used to convey them. If a lot of us know only a few old media, then so be it—let us use those well. If some of us have learned newer media—well then let some of us use those too.
Where cometh this “thou shalt use new media soon after they first appear” commandment? Which god hath wrought it? What pompous horse’s ass promoteth it?
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 9, 06:55 AM · #
Imagine how poorer the world would be had Plato not made the leap to using writing as part of instruction…
Socrates who?
That’s not to say that all professors should be forced into new media, but some must make the leap in order for the scholarly material to also make the transition.
— Dan · Apr 9, 09:07 AM · #
The old ways developed over time and I came to them honestly in my era. I love them. I use them. Yet, I see younger scholars coming to the work with a different tool, not spending as much time verifying factual material, being content to nurse their leaps of faith too often only through interpretation and conjecture. One day I hope the younger ones will take the time to root their conclusions solidly in the facts that apply to their subjects. Meanwhile I see new media affecting research. One day the new media will become old media. But, sooner rather than later, when my generation passes on, we’ll take our beautiful buggy whips of old media with us.
— Allan McGuffey · Apr 9, 09:43 AM · #
How is Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.uchicago.edu/what-bamboo) anything other than a MERLOT (www.merlot.org) with Mellon funding which allows its administrative participants some fun funded travel and meetings (to Berkeley and Chicago and, yup, Paris, France: http://projectbamboo.uchicago.edu/colleges-universities)?
Seriously, a glance at the long-established and similarly-structured MERLOT institution and system member list (http://taste.merlot.org/allpartnerlist.html) reveals that it is overwhelmingly inhabited by public college and university systems, institutions, and faculty as participants/members.
I guess that’s just not elitist enough for the research universities and liberal arts colleges that sip at the glass (feed at the trough) of the Mellon Foundation, now is it?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 11:01 AM · #
Seeing this much attention devoted to the digital humanities is a real pleasure. I hope interested readers will look at the conversation on this very topic that has been going on since shortly after a meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanites in 1987. The current listserv is at https://lists.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=humanist and is moderated by Willard McCarty. A related conference that alternates mainly between North America and Europe is now called ADHO and can currently be found at: http://www.ekl.oulu.fi/dh2008/.
— Joel · Apr 10, 09:08 AM · #
Mellon is also funding SEASR, Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, which will provide key infrastructure for the humanities. SEASR’s service-oriented architecture and semantic-web technologies are aimed at building the software bridges that will help scholars access large, digital data stores more readily; provide them with enhanced data synthesis and query analysis; and empower their domain collaboration and humanities computing projects through innovating virtual research environments. The project is under development at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It’s being developed in service to humanities researchers and digital humanities developers. See www.seasr.org for more information.
— Kelly Searsmith · Apr 21, 09:32 AM · #