Disciplinarity, Genre, and Finding a Place to Call Home
I think Digital Humanities is a temporary term. In 50 years, I think it will be simply humanities again or else it may morph into something, but the word digital will disappear from the title. It is currently a marker, to distinguish it from non-digital, paper-based forms of research and ways of knowing.
I think of Derrida's Law of Genre -- I will not mix genres; genres are not to be mixed. I always thought of that as more or a description than a prescription, because it seems to me that genres become saturated and then break open, forming new genres, new alliances. Alvarado says "instead of a definition, we have a genealogy, a network of family resemblance," that reflects "the anxiety of self definition [that] seems to indicate a new phase." It seems from his article that that there are those who are attached to the "genre" of Digital Humanities, who see it more exclusive that those who choose to self-identify.
I see that in many literary movements. Since I use a lot of Surrealism in my work and in the classroom, I will use that as a point of comparison. Contemporary Surrealists keep the movement alive in some kind of ideological purity, which creates a space that they belong in, acting as gatekeepers for who can call themselves a Surrealist and who cannot, as opposed to a more open, anarchic kind of Neo-Dada which anyone can participate in and claim. (Alvarado's mention of a "kind of scandal" arising from "playfully . . .combative and defensive" conversations in the DH also brought back an image of Dadaism that you don't normally associate with academia.) This is the case, of course, with many art communities, political communities, and types of academic discourse.
In Performance Studies, going back to 2004 and earlier, there was and remains much interest in defining what constitutes valid scholarship that does go beyond the written word, into embodied practice, not necessarily a textual document, a thesis, or a dissertation.
. I don’t know that I agree with the idea that “knowledge is a text-based application.” I would say the sharing of knowledge, the attempt to pass it along to a multitude, ism if we believe that texts are more fixed that performances, stories, and lectures (I’m thinking of Saussure and of JL Austin, whose students used their own notes to publish their lectures). The text does stand as a referent, but what it means is still very much open to interpretation and reinterpretation.
Still, much is made of computation methods in some of these articles. Am I to redefine computation so as to be inclusive enough to place myself in the DH? There are people like Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, Conceptual Poets, who do use computation at times in their studies of poetry, or linguists who conduct analyses of language and use computation. But I wonder what such things might have to do materially with teaching texts and how with other scholars in the humanities see themselves and how such a definition would fit into my life.
As I start on these readings, it would seem to me that digital humanities at the most basic level would at least encompass the digital into our studies and possibly the ways in which reading or taking notes online differs from the paper-based versions across all disciplines, for example. Is that a form on computation?
The other things that I most responded to in these sets of readings were the nature of disciplinarity, practice and praxis, and collectivity, all things that coming out of performance studies, I respond to.
After being in a highly theoretical field in my PhD program, one which I didn’t really fit into at all, I especially admire the emphasis on methodology over theory that Scheinfeldt talks about in “Why Digital Humanities is ‘Nice.’” I once told my advisor that if there wasn’t a practical edge to the theory and ways to apply it to my own life and teaching, that it just felt like interesting bullshit to me – nothing more.
In “Where’s the Beef?” Scheinfeldt also mentions Robert Hooke, whom he describes as an “experimenter” which also appeals to me intellectually, Coming from both writing and pedagogy, I think of all the work I do as an experiment to be tested and changed rather than a theory to be defended. I am always looking for an artistic and an intellectual community, discipline, and so the “big tent” that Lisa Spiro describes, a community with shared values, openness and collaboration. That’s what I desire for my students as well as myself.