[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 03 : Bettivia and Flanders

[Julia Flanders]

I have to confess to reading these recent postings in the wrong order, so forgive me if my responses earlier seemed to be ignoring important aspects of the discussion. 

In particular I hope it did not appear that I was trying to define DH in my earlier comments. In the extract you quote below, what I was getting at was a particular kind of impact that DH might have on professional roles outside the academy. I don't think these kinds of impact are integral to the purpose or identity of DH as a domain--rather they're one consequence of its existence that I was trying to tease out in response to Rhiannon's question about the role DH might play in the evolution of labor prospects, etc.

I'll come right out and say it: I would not characterize DH as "simply the application of IT skills in a humanities context", nor would I characterize it as "science-about-humanities," nor do I think it threatens non-objectivist ways of understanding. I'm not sure it's possible to generalize about DH in these ways; it's a label that is adopted by and applied to such a wide range of practices and interests that it makes more sense to say what DH *includes* rather than what it *is*, particularly when talking with people who are coming from an outside perspective and are not directly familiar with the domain at any level of detail. 

To expand a bit here: I don't think the characterization as "application of IT skills in a humanities context" is useful, because it implies that the skills and the context retain their distinctness. It also implies that these skills are defined by a relation with or origin in "IT". Indeed, grouping "metadata" and "websites" together suggests a category of "skills" that isn't really a category at all. Expertise in metadata standards sits at the intersection of library/information science and the humanities (in the sense that the use of such standards in a DH context requires a deep understanding of the humanities subject domain and also of the principles of metadata)--not an IT skill so much as a hybrid form of scholarship.  "Websites" is a pretty large category which could include web programming, information design, human-computer interaction, other things--some of which might be characterized as "IT skills" (things like load balancing, SEO, HTML coding) but others of which are more like information architecture and in fact dovetail fairly closely with humanities research/scholarly communication concerns. I think it's true that DH is a domain in which information technology and digital technologies/methods encounter humanities methods, content, and research agendas, but that encounter is one in which both contributing sides get transformed--I think of it almost as an estuarine zone where there is mixing and where we see an ecology that is quite different from what goes on in the spaces on either side.

My objection to the "science-about-humanities" characterization has to do in part with the fact that it really ignores most of what I find interesting about DH as a research domain. I can see its applicability to the strands of research that involve data mining (the domains that find the label "big data" enabling), and I think those practitioners might find the "science" label sympathetic (though probably not unproblematic). But the term really doesn't apply to core DH domains like hypertext, data modeling, text markup, digital scholarly editing, new media, game studies, plenty of others. Despite the recent high visibility of the "big data" label and its quasi-scientific coloring, it doesn't represent the bulk of work done under the rubric of "DH": that is, the work represented in the major journals and conferences of the DH community, the methods taught in DH courses and degree programs, the projects and research initiatives discussed in the major online discussion forums. And I would say emphatically that no one I know in the DH domain would see DH as a move towards the "quantification of everything." Even those who are interested in quantitative methods have a sense of the limits of their applicability. That kind of characterization is something one sees in the popular press (or inflammatory critics trying to be provocative) but not within the field itself.

You ask:  

>  I fail to see
> what, as a discipline, we gain if its simply the exploitation of an
> existing skill set that becomes increasingly dominant and even
> displacing traditional media. Is DH about making humanities knowledge
> more accessible, or about applying quantitative and analytic methods
> from data science to cultural artifacts? (or both? or neither?)


I don't think these are all of the choices on the table. There are no doubt plenty of people who characterize their work as digital humanities who are taking the approaches you describe. When I consider what I think are the most useful and interesting things a field like "digital humanities" could do, I think they are:

--to study and improve our understanding of how the use of quantitative, analytical, and digitally mediated methods in the context of humanities research alters the nature of that research (and perhaps also alters our understanding of those methods)

--to study and improve our understanding of how digital representation systems (text markup, 3D modelling systems, different kinds of metadata standards and other surrogates/proxies, different ways of modeling image and sound data, etc.) affect our apprehension, consumption, reasoning, analysis, and other processes concerning the objects of our research

--and a bit less centrally, to explore and demonstrate the ways in which the creation of working digital systems and publications (or "projects") creates experimental environments where familiar modes of scholarly practice may undergo interesting transformations

These suggestions are of course a bit tendentious--they represent what I find compelling about DH as a body of work and a research agenda. But I think for me they help explain why DH is not simply what happens when you give a humanities faculty member access to a programmer, or when you build a web site with humanities content in it. Your emphasis on "coding skills" below in relation to "design ability" illustrates this point well: the "creative coder" is more than just a designer who knows how to code. The bridging function you point to is a hybridization and not just a combination; in order to really serve as a bridge, one needs to have one's expertise on both sides of the equation formed and deepened by the presence of the other expertise. By analogy, digital humanists serve as bridges because they have a changed understanding of both digital media/representation systems/tools/methods and of humanities research methods/content. (This "changed understanding" isn't necessarily a deeper form of expertise--they are probably not as deeply expert on either side, let alone on both sides, as someone who specializes in one or the other. But they may have a critical perspective on both sides that genuine specialists have a harder time achieving.)

You've also asked some really important questions about training and credentials:

>  I wonder what students end
> up being DH professionals and what programs do they attend? Is DH IT +
> humanities training? Is it IT skills taught in the context of
> humanities? Is it better under the umbrella of computer science as a
> data science? Is DH a signal of the impending collapse of the science
> and art distinction, resulting in a unified quantitative methodological
> framework for science-about-culture and science-about-nature?

and I'm afraid I'm going to have to postpone answering this till tomorrow. But perhaps you'd be inclined to reframe these options in light of my clarifications above. You can predict by now that I will be resisting the "DH = IT + humanities training" :-) And I also don't think DH is a signal of the impending collapse of the science and art distinction (or that there is going to be a unified quantitative methodological framework for science-about-culture and science-about-nature). 

Thanks for reading and apologies for a very long-winded response--I hope this is useful.

More soon--

best wishes, Julia


> On Mar 18, 2015, at 12:25 PM, B. Bogart <ben at ekran.org> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thank you Julia. I'm not sure if you saw my question that followed up on
> Rhiannon's question? (Sent on Mar 17, 2015 11:42 am)
> 
> After reading your responses I'm even more confused as to what DH
> actually is. You did mention some difficulty in defining it, but the
> extract from your email below baffles me. Based on this quote, it would
> seem DH is simply the application of IT skills (meta data, websites,
> etc.) in a humanities context. This is quite a bit more shallow than my
> previous conception of DH as science-about-humanities. I fail to see
> what, as a discipline, we gain if its simply the exploitation of an
> existing skill set that becomes increasingly dominant and even
> displacing traditional media. Is DH about making humanities knowledge
> more accessible, or about applying quantitative and analytic methods
> from data science to cultural artifacts? (or both? or neither?)
> 
> What strikes me most is the notion of all the graduates of new media art
> and design programs could fit under the umbrella of DH (as far as I can
> glean from the quote below). I keep thinking of the notion of the
> "creative coder" who knows a lot of design and some coding, and is
> intended to prototype whole projects and act as a bridge between the
> design and coding specializations. There has been some backlash against
> this area because graduates have been seen as lacking the depth of
> coding skills to balance their design ability, and end up working
> largely as designers because coders are required to fill in the skill gaps.
> 
> The reason for my interest in (and challenge of) DH is an apparent move
> to the quantification of everything and thus the domination of
> scientific methodologies over all others. Maybe this is an obvious
> extension of the movement for social science to be accepted by hard
> sciences in terms of rigorous methods?
> 
> To get back to the topic of Engineering the University (which is
> interesting it itself being an apparent optimization or design problem
> to solve, rather than a dialogue to unfold), I wonder what students end
> up being DH professionals and what programs do they attend? Is DH IT +
> humanities training? Is it IT skills taught in the context of
> humanities? Is it better under the umbrella of computer science as a
> data science? Is DH a signal of the impending collapse of the science
> and art distinction, resulting in a unified quantitative methodological
> framework for science-about-culture and science-about-nature?
> 
> Ben Bogart
> 
> On 15-03-17 07:27 PM, Julia Flanders wrote:
>> A museum might feel a need, without any prompting, for a "web master"
>> or a "metadata specialist"--but once we have a pool of professionals
>> who understand how the well-formalized intellectual capital of
>> metadata can serve as the basis for a dynamic online presence that
>> engages the public in exploring the museum's collections, that's the
>> basis for an entirely different kind of professional niche.
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