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

[Julia Flanders]

Just circling back to give a more substantive response to Ben's observation below...

I co-organized a workshop on data modeling in digital humanities a few years ago, and there was a very interesting recurring theme/exchange in which the humanists in the room would say something like "but of course the sciences believe in the possibility of objective/raw data..." or "scientists treat their models as transparent..."  (etc.etc.), and the scientists in the room would say "actually, that's actually just a humanistic caricature about the sciences, scientists are very much aware of the non-objectivity/non-rawness of their data, the non-transparency of their methods..." (etc. etc.) Within each field there's a spectrum of positions on these matters. 

So I agree that the opposition you suggest below is an exaggeration, but I also think it's one that arises from the ways that the humanities likes to construct its antagonists (and has done so for some time). I think one of the interesting things about the digital humanities is the way it has internalized (and continues to be agonized by) the humanities' distrust of the sciences and of "technology." It's revealing that it's so easy even for passionate fans of DH to represent it as the miraculous yoking of opposites ("humanists and technology--who would have guessed it?!?!!") rather than as a successful synthesis in which the original elements combine into something different. The uneasy status of "the tool" in DH is another fascinating symptom. I don't like this version of digital humanities and I think it has arisen with the rapid influx into the field of practitioners who are actually really humanists (doing digital things) who retain that distrust of technology but are simultaneously fascinated by it. ("I'm not an engineer, but...") The estuarine version of DH that interests me is one that tries to get past a "you do your objectivist technology thing and I'll do my completely different humanities thing and together we will be doing digital humanities"--that separation (and the false model of "collaboration" that it proposes) seems to me to just reify and reinforce a lot of the class divisions that underpin some of the broader problems in the academy as a whole. (Why do humanists always refer to working with technology as "getting their hands dirty"?)

I do think the characterization you give below has meaning--clearly those views of the sciences and the humanities do possess cultural currency, so they're not just mirages. I guess what I'm getting at here is that just as we know that a genuinely thoughtful  and intellectually sophisticated physicist or biologist or historian or literary scholar would never represent their own field (or anyone else's) using these simplistic terms, so we would try to get beyond these terms in seeking a thoughtful understanding of the digital humanities. 

I hope these observations don't come across as critical or too grumpy--I'm using your thought below as a jumping-off point for a hobbyhorse that I'm probably riding too energetically here. Thanks so much for your post and for reading--

best, Julia

> On Mar 20, 2015, at 7:20 PM, B. Bogart <ben at ekran.org> wrote:
> 
> When I think of technoscience I tend to think of optimization, global
> metrics, objectivity and so on, while when I think of humanities I think
> of thick descriptions, richness, subjectivity and pluralism. This may be
> an exaggeration, but is the root of my initial questions regarding DH.
>