Mindsets in the Digital Humanities

It’s easy to get lost in the technical aspects of digital humanities. After all, isn’t the “digital” part of the term fundamental to the condition of the discipline? It would seem, anyway, that that was the core part of this whole area of study. Most of the elements we’ve been studying in the course of this year’s Digital History course at Western have had that technical nature about them. These have varied in complexity from subject to subject, of course; there is little that is really technical in a computing sense about how not to design web pages, but discussions of spam filtering techniques require some knowledge of computing theory to grasp, and their historical connections aren’t immediately relevant. All of these, however – and most of what we’ve discussed in the last year – have in common that substantial “digital” focus. The impression at first glance is that we’re talking about technology and history, not technology and history or technology and history.

It is important, however, to keep the “humanities” half of “digital humanities” in mind. The technologies we use these days, either for historical research and presentation or for any number of other uses, are – for now, mostly – designed and used by people. As we know as historians, people who aren’t mathematicians are likely to bring quite a lot of outside baggage into their work. The tools, theories and outputs used in the digital humanities – and anything else, for that matter – are going to reflect certain cultures, backgrounds and key assumptions inherent to those who produce them. In my previous post, I discussed Bonnett’s use of the term “hieroglyph” to refer to interfaces or tools which are too difficult for layfolk to readily understand. This can also be applied to the mindsets of people who produce those tools, which can either provide another layer of obfuscation or simply be the source of the initial problems. This can produce some elements of culture shock on top of the learning curves involved in using new technologies.

As an example: in class about a month ago, we were talking about locative technologies and ubiquitous computing. In the middle of the readings for that day was an article by Bruce Sterling on “blobjects” which started something of a stir in the discussion. A lot of this seemed to be about Sterling’s writing style in his article. Fair enough: technophile and spec-fic geek though I am, even I found it hyperbolic, annoying and laden with for-its-own-sake jargon. But there was some substantial context behind the words being written in that article. Sterling is a science fiction writer; not only that, but one of the writers whose work helped define and establish one of the most computer-centric fields of science fiction, cyberpunk, as a thriving genre. He was speaking at SIGGRAPH, a prestigious conference on computer graphics and research on same. There is going to be a different set of approaches, of expectations, of worldviews in a group of people who are likely to non-ironically talk about The Future (with Emphatic Capitalization, of course) than there would be for those who tend to get published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies. (There’s also going to be certain expectations from the audience on the author. I’m certain Sterling delivered on that front, but I also wasn’t the audience so I can’t be sure.)

So where am I going with all of this?

The plan here is to get a series of four or so posts up in the next few days, where I'll try to look at some of the approaches and mindsets out there which strongly influence different aspects of digital humanities (while also trying to draw together a bunch of material from my time in this course and program). I’m convinced a combination of parts of the digital cultures which developed in academia and migrated onto the net, and the rebirth of a broader amateur culture from the last few years, provide a lot of the foundation beneath digital humanities in general, and are only going to influence them more as they become more popular over the next several years. People don't, of course, need to be fully involved in, or even that aware of, what's going on behind the scenes of the tools they use in their day-to-day lives or projects in order to use said tools. It helps, however, especially when it comes to encountering concepts which are relatively new or strange, such as a growing emphasis of technology in the presentation of history and other humanities.