THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.

University of Minnesota Press. 2012

The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism.

David Parry

We should all probably start by admitting that none of us really know what

Digital Humanities is. Or, more precisely that none of us is fully in control of what
DH is. As with so many disciplinary practices the answer to the "what is" question is
likely to be legion. And, as Matt Kirschenbaum has noted, defining DH has become
somewhat of a genre essay. But contrary to any suggestion that the definition is
settled or has been fully explored, the rising number of conference presentations
along with the surplus of writings on the topic would suggest that many see the
question as somehow crucial. Indeed the significant rise in discourse about the
question What is DH? reveals, I would suggest not only a certain angst about the
constitution of the field, a not-so-unconscious uneasiness on the part of the
practitioners, but a recognition that DH has become a significant force discursively
and economically within the institution.

Establishing a definition by asking after the essence of something though

seems to me a futile project. "What is the essence of the digital humanities," is an

impossible question to answer, as if there is an ideal form of digital humanities out
there to which one can point, a central Platonic ideal from which all other Digital
Humanities can be judged in relation. (I am not really into Platonic ideals.) It is
however possible to engage the question from another angle, performing a
discursive analysis. Rather than asking What is the Digital Humanities?, asking how
is it that those who practice Digital Humanities talk about what their disciplinary
practice does.

For the past three years scholars identifying as digital humanists have

participated in a project called, "A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities" or "Day
of DH" for short. In an effort to create a picture of what it is that DH scholars actually
do, practitioners write about what scholarly (and sometimes not so scholarly)
activities they engage in throughout the day. Typically this takes the form of writing

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

blog posts documenting one's work day, attempting to render transparent their
individual work, while simultaneously representing the diversity of work that is
collected under the name DH. This year over 200 scholars registered and posted to
the official Day of DH site, with numerous others engaging through other venues
such as Twitter (up from around a 100 two years ago and 150 last year). As such, the
textual corpus produced on this day while not a definite answer to the question of
what is DH, serves as an important representative sampling of how it is that a group
of scholars who self identify as practicing DH talk about their work. The text
produced on this day represents an inclusive example (not a restrictive one) of how it
is people talk (or more precisely write) about what it means to "do DH."

Unfortunately though with such a large sampling it would be difficult to closely

read all of essays listed on the Day of DH website, which is to say nothing of the
material and conversations produced via other means which are not archived on the
official Day of DH website. Reading all of this material would indeed be a Sisyphean
task, whereby any close engagement would necessarily yield numerous other texts
which would have to be read, a black hole to be sure. Luckily however, digital
humanists have supplied tools which render such a reading trivial. To understand
how it is that digital humanists talk about their work we merely have to take all of
the text produced during the Day of DH, and process it via a textual analysis tool,
looking for frequency of word use, saving us the task of actually reading all of said
day of DH posts.

The data that such an analysis yields is not entirely shocking though. The most

frequent words by far are digital, humanities, day, and work. Again, not
surprising, given that the these are the terms being discoursed about: what a day
looks like for those who work in the digital humanities. But the next level of words
with high frequency are revealing if mostly predictable: research, design, project,
data, text (and its variants such as textual), and tool(s). Which is to suggest that
people who identify as DH practitioners see themselves as designing and building

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

tools and projects which deal with text and data, producing text and data about said
text and data. Perhaps tellingly all of these words have a higher occurrence than
"reading" and "writing."

None of this is particularly surprising though, it merely reinforces a sense that

many have already articulated: Digital Humanities is largely (primarily) about using
computing technologies as tools to do traditional humanities based research. Indeed
one could, I suspect, perform this type of textual analysis on a range of sources
producing similar results. The Digital Humanities Conference programs, Blackwells' A
Guide to the Digital Humanities, or even the recipients of NEH funding would all
present a similar type of variance. This is not to make an evaluative claim (not yet at
least), simply to make an observational one: The Digital Humanities, or those who
identify their work as Digital Humanities, primarily talk about using computers to do
humanities research.

Indeed there is a strong connection between digital humanities and humanities

computing. The first sentence in Kirschenbaum's essay suggests as much, quickly

conflating the two terms, "What is (or are) the "digital humanities," aka "humanities
computing?" (1) As his essay goes on to argue, the term digital humanities itself is a
(re)branding of the term humanities computing, specifically executed around the
Blackwell book project, and later perhaps crucially, as Kirschenbaum suggests, with
respect to the formation of the office of the digital humanities. What Kirschenbaum
illustrates is how the term digital humanities was a strategic choice made by several
key players. It is these events that serve as one of the focal points for
Kirschenbaum's essay in which he argues that these moments will "earn a place in
histories of the profession alongside major critical movements like the Birmingham
school or Yale deconstruction (4). And this, is ultimately I would like to argue, what
is at stake in the "what is DH debate." Digital humanities has become "something of a
movement," indeed perhaps the next big movement in humanities based scholarship.
As such scholars look to define what it is that constitutes the movement, and by

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

extension what it is that is not part of the movement. Unfortunately for the
humanities though, this digital humanities does little to separate itself from, or
question the humanities as such, which is why it can be the next movement which
replaces the Birmingham school or Yale deconstruction.

Consider, we do not have pencil humanists or typewriter humanists. This

might seem like an odd observation, but we should ask what the adjective digital is
doing in digital humanities. As the introductory textual analysis suggests, what
digital humanists mean by digital humanities is not that they use computers to write
or read humanities based texts, but rather that a digital humanities scholar uses
digital devices to perform critical and theoretical observations that are not possible
with traditional pencil/typewriter aided analysis. That is, that computers, and by
extension the digital, enable a new critical lens for understanding traditional
humanistic subjects of inquiry, a lens not available prior to the invention of
computing technologies. And, at this point we do not even have to distinguish
between the people who make tools for this type of analysis and those who use
these tools for analysis. The defining feature is the use of digital tools to perform
humanistic inquiry.

In the same way that the Birmingham school or Yale deconstruction opened up

new ways of critiquing texts not possible prior to their inception, computers
inaugurate a school of critique, a new series of tools through which we can analyze
texts. This is to say nothing of the relative significance of any of these movements,
but rather to point out that all of them see themselves as movements, as ways of
critiquing and analyzing texts that illustrate or reveal textual meaning in a way
previously unavailable prior to the invention of said methodology. Simply using a
computer does not make one a digital humanities scholar, typing your manuscript on
a word processor does not let you in the club, rather your work needs to share an
affinity with a certain method of approach to humanities scholarship.

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

Perhaps the best way to explain this view of digital humanities is as Alex Reid

suggests as a Venn diagram, where the humanities is one circle, the digital another,
and their overlap constituting the field of digital humanities. In many respects this
works to describe any one of a number of methodological approaches to the
humanities. A Venn diagram with the feminism school as one circle, humanities
another, and their overlap constituting a humanities scholar who practices feminist
humanism, or similarly Marxism as one circle, humanities as another, with the
overlap constituting Marxist humanities scholarship. Indeed this is often how
scholars describe their endeavors, "I work at the intersection of computing,
feminism, and 18th Century writing."

On the whole this version of the digital humanities treats the digital as an

adjective, a word which modifies the unchanged notion of the humanities, leaving
the core of what happens unaltered, instead updating the means by which it is done,
making humanities relevant in the age of computing, demonstrating that humanists
to can use computers to do better, more elaborate projects, deal with large data
sets, count word occurrences and produce interesting textual visualizations. In this
sense the rhetorical shift from humanities computing, humanities as the adjective
which modifies computing, humanities as a way of computing, to digital humanities,
the digital as a way of doing humanities, seems rather predictable, it is both more
descriptive of the actual practice and less threatening to traditional humanistic
scholars.

In this respect digital humanists talk about the digital as something added

onto the humanities. The question in this type of scholarship is how can the digital
be used to enhance, reframe, or illuminate scholarship that is already done, in some
cases merely do it more efficiently. While texts become data, and word frequency
counts substitute for sentence level analysis, the goal remains markedly the same: a
hermeneutics of the text meant to discern what it is a text (or often more precisely a
large group of texts) means.

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

This all suggests that there is a non-digital humanities a humanities

unaffected by the digital. Which comes to be a rather problematic claim when we

realize that the digital has so altered the culture that there are relatively few
scholarly activities which are not already significantly altered by the digital. Almost
all scholars at this point use computers rather than typewriters, compose
manuscripts using word processors not long form on legal pads with a pen. Library
card catalogs have been replaced by computer searches, journal articles are often
available only by electronic means. The practice of the humanities, of the academy as
a whole (certainly within the American and European contexts) is thoroughly
integrated with the digital, at this point impossible to separate.

But for the most part, epistemological claims of large data sets not

withstanding, the digital has done little to alter the structure of the humanities. To
be sure digital humanities now means that one can build tools to read texts and
produce data, design a tool as part of a project to study 18th century manuscripts,
but the work of a humanist remains largely unphased by the existence of the
computational device. The digital is a means to do what has always been done, to do
it more efficiently and better, but to do what has always been done. I think the speed
at which the digital humanities have been so easily incorporated into humanities
programs, Kirschenbaum notes that the transition from term of convenience to
whole scale movement is less than five years, should give us pause, and certainly
suggests that the digital humanities are not all that transformative, and certainly not
a threat to the business of humanities departments or the university as a whole.

This is not to suggest that there are not some significant and interesting

projects being done under the banner of DH both within and outside of the
academia, but rather that a great deal of what is being done, what is seen as central
and representative of digital humanities scholarship does little to question the
founding principles of academic knowledge, again, especially within the humanities.
A digital humanism which replaces an ivory tower of bricks and mortar with one of

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

supercomputers and server farms crunching large amounts of textual data producing
more and more textual analysis simply replaces one form of isolationism with
another, re-inscribing and re-enforcing a very conservative form of humanities
based scholarship.

Now we could juxtapose this digital humanism to another, the one not

represented in the textual analysis of the Day of DH which began this essay.
Tellingly there are a group of words that appear less frequently in scholars posts
about the digital humanities, ones often associated with the digital and the
humanities that are significantly less represented, in some place all together absent.
Social media, video games, or even contemporary web services and objects are
significantly underrepresented. Indeed even popular services such as Facebook or
Twitter have a relatively low occurrence and when mentioned often are used in the
context referring to using said service rather than studying the tool. The most
popular word used with either of these two services is "checked" indicating that they
are referenced as a medium of communication and not a medium of study.

This is to suggest that there are at least two digital humanisms, one which

sees the digital as a set of tools to be applied to humanistic inquiry (design, project,
tools, data) and another which sees the digital as an object of study (social media,
digital games, mobile computing). As Kathleen Fitzpatrick observes digital
humanities can be defined as, "a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing
technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the
humanities, or, as is more true of my own work, who ask traditional kinds of
humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies.

This definition would be more inclusive than the one derived from the

discursive approach used at the beginning of this essay. Indeed it is in the second
group, where Kathleen places her own work that I would also include mine. And so
here we have two versions (under one definition), sometimes in conflict, over what
constitutes the digital humanities. The first is the sense that the digital is a direct,

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

almost practical use of computational means for research in the humanities,

computer enabled reading. The second is a group of scholars who study media, or
more popularly "new media" (a somewhat problematic term as new media is neither
new nor media, but I digress).

On the whole I think the data is pretty clear on this subject though. Given how

people who identify as digital humanists talk about their work, given what is
included in journals and conferences under the rubric of "digital humanities" the first
definition appears to be carrying the day. That is, that the digital humanities I have
been discussing for the majority of this essay, the one that sees the computational
as a tool for doing humanities based research is becoming the privileged term, with
the media studies version of the digital humanities serving the marginal role. As
much as the "big tent" definition and narrative is iterated the practice of what
actually occurs points to a different reality.

Now I could argue that this type of polarity or conflict between a digital

humanism of computational technologies as adjectival modification of humanities

research trumping a digital humanities of humanities based research into the digital
is an unfortunate academic development. Indeed, it seems to me that the dominant
type of digital humanism privileges the old at the expense of the new even while it
brings computational technologies into humanities buildings. And personally I find
the first form of digital humanism, well frankly rather boring, I am not really
interested in scholarship which counts word occurrence in Jane Austen texts, or even
word occurrence across all the texts written in the same year as Austen's. While Ngram viewers might illuminate certain interesting, up until now unnoticed
statisticalal trends regarding word usage and ultimately perhaps cultural meaning, if
they become the paradigmatic example of what it means to perform a humanities
reading I fear not only for the future relevance of the humanities but also our ability
to be easily replaced by Watson style computers. (There is nothing particularly new
here, Calvino imagined just such a computational reading practice in If on a Winter's

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

Night a Traveler far before the instance of any humanities based computing.) If using
computational technologies to perform text analysis becomes just the latest way to
make humanities exciting and relevant, arguing for funding, begging to not be
eliminated from the University, then DH will soon also go the way of any one of other
numerous textual reading schools, historically important, yes; culturally
transformative, no. Hopefully DH can be something more than more text analysis
done faster.

But actually I am not going to make a claim as to why we should reverse this

privileging, arguing for my flavor of DH over another. Really this is just an

etymological battle that might only reflect a preference for studying Facebook over
Pride and Prejudice, and which a particular scholar thinks is more socially relevant.
What we chose to call these practices seems less significant than actually doing
them, and if within the academy we end up dividing humanities computing from
emerging media studies with each getting their own name I am not sure this would
be an entirely unproductive distinction. Instead, though, I want to suggest we think
about a different way to conceive of this problem, via Benjamin.

I have become convinced over the last few years that Benjamin's "The Work of

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is one of the most important essays in
media studies, not because of the careful reading Benjamin has about the
photograph, film, mechanization, art or the effect these things have on culture, but
rather for the process that he uses during the investigation. That is, it is less the
precise contours of the argument in relation to art or fascism, but rather his
methodology that I find crucial. What Benjamin says is that rather than ask is
photography art, we need to ask the more important question: What does having the
photograph do to our concept of art? How does the mere existence of the
photograph change our ability to conceive of art as such? What change does the
existence of the photograph bring about from which there is no going back?

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

By extension asking what is the digital humanities, or should this particular

approach to humanities be included under a tent of digital humanism is to perform

the less than productive inquiry. Rather we should be asking what does the digital do
to our concept of the humanities.

It is clear to me now, and I think it should be clear to any scholar, that the

digital does not merely transform all means by which we do scholarship, word
processors instead of pencils, computers instead of card catalogs, text encoding, but
rather the existence of the digital transforms the very meaning of the word
scholarship. Simply put the existence of the digital transforms all areas of culture,
not just scholarship (indeed scholarly transformations are just one small piece of the
puzzle). We live in a world that is so thoroughly digital it is impossible at this point
to talk about the non-digital. To treat the digital as simply an adjective that can be
added onto the humanities is an attempt to contain it, discipline the digital, regulate
it to one amongst a range of approaches to scholarship, rather than recognizing that
the only way to do scholarship now is digital. Even if one never turns on a computer,
answers an email, or sends a text message, our cultural support structures are
digital to the core: the world is digital now, not analog. If what adding digital to the
humanities does is just to take old disciplines, ways of talking about texts, objects of
study and make them digital, leaving the disciplinarity and the silo structure of the
University in tact, it will have failed, or more precisely perhaps reduced itself to
simply an adjective. This critique holds equally well for studying Facebook or Pride
and Prejudice, what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology,
but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by
extension what it means to study the humanities. (Although I would argue that you
cannot begin to understand the complexities of these questions without engaging
the present. No amount of Shakespeare and claiming his centrality to expressing a
universal human condition will help you understand the role of Wikileaks in the
Tunisia uprising.)

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

In discussing the Venn diagram of the digital humanities, Alex Reid posits a

second option. Rather than think of the digital and the humanities as two separate
spheres of influence, which overlap and intersect in a field known as digital
humanities, we should rather think of one giant circle, labeled digital humanities.
That is, there is no studying of the humanities separate from the digital, that to
study the humanities (or any kind of socially relevant, engaged in the present
inquiry) necessitates a realization that the world is now digital. There is no
humanism separate from the digital. This is not about the means of study
(computers to process text), nor is it about the object of the study (digital media),
although both are implicated, rather it is about how the idea of studying itself is
altered by the existence of the digital.

It is in this respect that I think the digital humanities has something to offer

the academy, and where there is perhaps a third definition, one we could oppose to
either the first or the second. The digital humanities as an understanding of new
modes of scholarship, as a change not only in tools and objects but scholarship
itself. What is important about the Day of DH was not what was talked about, using
text analyzers to rank word counts. Rather the importance of the Day of DH lies in
the fact that a community of scholars was differently constituted publicly performing
scholarship, blogging, tweeting, facebooking about what it means to be an
academic. That such a discussion took place around a specific, ultimately narrowly
defined academic discipline seems less important to me than the fact that such a
demonstration and public conversation took place. Doing digital work means
working differently, whether that is humanities or sociology or physics.

Indeed, it is the secondary benefits of the scholarship that goes by the name

humanities computing that tends to be of the most importance. Humanistic inquiry

that involves conversation between computer scientists and classically trained
humanists cannot but help to produce a different kind of cross disciplinary
understanding even if said scholarship is limited by a focus on traditional objects of

THIS IS A PREPRINT COPY NOT FOR CITATION. PLEASE SEE Debates in the Digital Humanities. ed. Matt Gold.
University of Minnesota Press. 2012

study. A program that reads all of the texts published in England in 1784 to measure
occurrences of the word God ultimately seems of less importance to me than a
project which necessitates (by its digital nature) a collaboration and merging of
disciplinary silos.

In the end debates will occur about digital humanities, with various

practitioners carving out ground and staking claim to there particular fields and
methods of inquiry. If I were to guess, I suspect that the primary definition of digital
humanities as humanities computing, using computers as tools to do humanities
research will win the day, a concession I am more than willing to make. Indeed I have
very little to no desire to label myself a digital humanist. The real transformation will
come, or not come, based on the way the academy, and even humanists transform
the nature of scholarship based on the digital, and more importantly come to terms
with the way the digital transforms what it means to have a humanism.

Bibliography
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference.
Chronicle of Higher Education. 13 July, 2010. Web. 12 March 2010.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. What is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English
Departments? ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 1-7. Web. 12 March 2011.
Reid, Alex. Digital Humanities: Two Venn Diagrams. Alex-Reid.net. Reid, 10 March,
2011. Web. 12 March 2011.