“Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments.”
“Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress.”
“Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives.”
“But the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.”
“Neoliberal policies and institutions value academic work that produces findings immediately usable by industry and that produces graduates trained for the current requirements of the commercial workplace.”
“In pursuit of these goals, the 21st-century university has restructured itself on the model of the corporate world, paying consultants lavish fees, employing miserably paid casual laborers, and constructing a vast new apparatus of bureaucratic control.”
“The humanities are, in their traditional form, less amenable to such restructuring than other disciplines, relying on painstaking individual scholarship and producing forms of knowledge with less immediate economic application.”
“By providing a model for humanities teaching and research that appears to overcome these perceived limitations, Digital Humanities has played a leading role in the corporatist restructuring of the humanities.”
“What Digital Humanities is not about, despite its explicit claims, is the use of digital or quantitative methodologies to answer research questions in the humanities. It is, instead, about the promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing, the rebranding of insecure campus employment as an empowering “alt-ac” career choice, and the redefinition of technical expertise as a form (indeed, the superior form) of humanist knowledge.”
“This is why Digital Humanities is pushed far more strongly by university administrators than it is by scholars and students, who increasingly find themselves pressured to redirect their work toward Digital Humanities.”
“One of his key hires in the 1960s was E. D. Hirsch, who was worlds apart from Bowers in many respects, but whose hermeneutic theories also emphasized the importance of authorial intention (in contrast to the New Criticism, which rejected what it called the “intentional fallacy”). Informed by Hirsch’s common sense and empiricist spirit, Virginia became known as a bastion of resistance to the abstractness of French literary theory.”
“E. D. Hirsch’s most influential book, Validity in Interpretation (1967), was published at the height of the civil rights and countercultural moments. Although it contains no reference to contemporary politics, it was written with the aim of restoring decorum to literary studies by limiting its object to what Hirsch called “the re-cognition of what an author meant,” an idea that gave philosophical justification to the methodology of the New Bibliography.”
“Hirsch claims not to be a political conservative, but his scholarly arguments were enthusiastically received by those who wanted to reverse the politicization of literary studies. Indeed, his book was a touchstone for those who opposed socially engaged literary study.”
“Hirsch’s work demanded that the critic stop after recovering the author’s intention. Cantor paints Hirsch and Bowers as representing a “diversity” that trumps gender, racial, and ethnic diversity, but to scholars who champion those values, they look like two sides of the same coin.”
“The idea that interpretation is inherently progressive is questionable, but conservative commentators nonetheless have converged on the view that readers shouldn’t interpret and evaluate texts for themselves, especially with regard to politics.”
“At its foundations, political interpretation historicizes (“relativizes”) claims to superior cultural status, especially for the favored texts and artifacts of privileged groups.”
“Hirsch’s own puzzlement at the left’s rejection of his work — even after minor concessions to cultural representation for women and minorities — is echoed in the aggressive incomprehension with which many Digital Humanists respond to the argument that their work supports the rise of the neoliberal university.”
“It is telling that Digital Humanities, like Hirsch, and like Bowers, has found an institutional home at the University of Virginia.”
“We argue that, like Hirsch’s tightly constrained approach to literary criticism, and like Bowers’s similarly constrained approach to textual scholarship, Digital Humanities has often tended to be anti-interpretive, especially when interpretation is understood as a political activity.”
“Digital Humanities instead aims to archive materials, produce data, and develop software, while bracketing off the work of interpretation to a later moment or leaving it to other scholars — or abandoning it altogether for those who argue that we ought to become “postcritical.””
“Computer use in the humanities of course predates the formal movement that calls itself Digital Humanities. The trailblazer is usually identified as a Jesuit priest, Roberto Busa, whose 56-volume concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas was produced over a period of three decades from 1949, with support from IBM.”
“Thus, Digital Humanities was born from disdain and at times outright contempt, not just for humanities scholarship, but for the standards, procedures, and claims of leading literary scholars.”
“At the same time that scholars at the University of Virginia argued for the rebranded Humanities Computing as the future of the humanities, a separate development was taking shape at Stanford University, under the leadership of Franco Moretti. Moretti is a Marxist literary critic who — while continuing to practice the form of interpretive scholarship known as “close reading” — wished to extend the range of methodologies available to literary studies with what he wittily called “distant reading”: essentially, the application to literature of forms of quantification previously associated with the social sciences.”
“In itself, this was not particularly revolutionary, as a strong tradition of quantitative research on literature already existed, especially in the sociology of culture and in certain forms of linguistics. However, this quantitative work tended to be published in journals humanists didn’t read.”
“Moretti’s innovation, then, was to present a version of this quantitative tradition in humanities journals such as New Left Review. Moretti was not employed in Humanities Computing, and did not do software design or maintenance himself, but relied on technical support staff, and, in presenting the fruits of their labors in a form that traditional humanities scholars could understand, implicitly argued for the value of skills he himself neither possessed nor practiced.”
“From the viewpoint of the neoliberal university, the best kind of research (and the kind to be most handsomely rewarded) is the kind that brings in the most external funding.”
“This is one of the main reasons why the digitization of archives and the development of software tools — conspicuously expensive activities that influential funding bodies have enthusiastically supported — can exert such powerful attraction, effectively enabling scholarship to be reconfigured on the model of the tech startup, with public, private, and charitable funding in place of Silicon Valley venture capital.”
“The priority accorded to Digital Humanities by the Canadian government in its support for humanities research funding is directly comparable. Digital Humanities projects are compatible with two of the six “Future Challenge Areas” currently named by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). In the first, priority goes to research that answers the question, “What new ways of learning, particularly in higher education, will Canadians need to thrive in an evolving society and labour market?” In the second, researchers are enjoined to study how emerging technologies can be “leveraged to benefit Canadians.” Canada’s leading Digital Humanities specialist, Raymond Siemens, who held a Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing from 2004 to 2015, is one of 15 members of SSHRC’s core council.”
“The priority accorded to Digital Humanities by the SSHRC only amplifies general tendencies that affect all applicants. Those who wish to acquire a sizeable grant, and who do not have site-based research needs, must develop a compelling rationale to employ graduate students.”
“One of the simplest ways to justify the need for graduate students is to set up a named lab — a lab that requires not just funding but continual funding, and whose students can work on an evolving list of projects.”
“In turn, applicants must explain how graduate students’ research enhances their employability. This makes Digital Humanities labs especially attractive, and makes researchers feel as if they cannot win large grants without doing Digital Humanities.”
“The biggest projects require wages for graduate students, technical staff such as developers, consultants working on paid short-term contracts, and salaried project managers.”
“SSHRC’s model of funding therefore complements the development of new models of intellectual work within the neoliberal university — accelerating the devaluation of older models of literary study.”
“For enthusiasts, Digital Humanities is “open” and “collaborative” and committed to making the “traditional” humanities rethink “outdated” tendencies: all Silicon Valley buzzwords that cast other approaches in a remarkably negative light, much as does the venture capitalist’s contempt for “incumbents.””
“The movement’s level of institutional support may be exceptional, but its biases are not. They accord with a variety of other postcritical methodologies, such as versions of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, and the explicitly “postcritical” literary theory advocated by scholars such as University of Virginia English Professor Rita Felski, which tend to challenge, avoid, or disavow scholarly endeavor that is overtly critical of existing social relations.”
“We therefore suggest that it is not the “traditional” scholarly world, with its hierarchies and glorified experts and close reading of works read by only a precious few people, to which the Digital Humanities social movement is most meaningfully opposed.”
“What it stands in opposition to, rather, is the insistence that academic work should be critical, and that there is, after all, no work and no way to be in the world that is not political.”
“This is what textual scholarship à la Bowers as well as E. D. Hirsch’s approach to literary interpretation share with Digital Humanities, and so the fact that all three have shared an institutional base in the same department is hard to overlook.”
“Alan Liu, one of the earliest supporters of Digital Humanities, wrote half a decade ago that:
While digital humanists develop tools, data, and other meta-data critically […] rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics, or culture. How the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today’s great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital is thus a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar. Not even the clichéd forms of such issues — for example, “the digital divide,” surveillance,” “privacy,” “copyright,” and so on — get much play.”
“The problem to which Liu draws attention is a theme that has recurred throughout this article: purported technical expertise trumps all other forms of knowledge, including critique of the uses to which such expertise is put. (What counts as “expertise,” however, turns out to be highly variable. For example, most of the senior scholars mentioned here — Moretti, Liu, McGann, Drucker, and Smith — openly disclaim any ability to code, even as other major figures in the field insist on this as a minimum qualification.)”
“Digital Humanities has achieved its institutional prominence precisely because of a willingness on the part of many of its key figures to play the role that Liu describes. Liu’s repeatedly published complaints of the absence of “cultural criticism” from Digital Humanities might have had some effect if that absence was coincidental, but it is not.”
“Indeed, the institutional success of Digital Humanities appears to be explained in large part by its designed-in potential to drive social, cultural, and political critique from the humanities as a whole.”
“At the Digital Humanities 2015 conference, noted media studies scholar Deb Verhoeven addressed the men present as follows:
You have made a world designed around ensuring your own personal comfort, but it’s not comfortable for many, many other people. […] This is not about issuing another policy advisory for “inclusion.” This is not about developing a new checklist to mitigate your biases. And its definitely not about inviting a token female speaker to join you – this actually needs to be about your plans to exit the stage. This is not about learning how to do it better next time – this is about you leaving before there’s a next time. […] This is about letting other people in by letting go of your privileged position.”
“Such a recommendation is, of course, extremely unlikely to be followed. With astonishing bravery, Verhoeven told the men in attendance that the problem is “how many of you occupy the positions that get to speak,” i.e. to define what Digital Humanities is taken to be.”
“We might say in the same spirit that if Digital Humanities means to be (as it claims) a truly “big tent,” defined by openness to all perspectives and diversity of projects and applications — a definition capacious enough to make one wonder what purpose the label could serve at all — it will be necessary for its chief practitioners, associated with the biggest projects and the biggest labs, to mute themselves for a number of years so that the voices of the outsiders they claim to welcome may be amplified in turn. But the idea is laughable: major research institutions, from the University of Virginia to University College London, have invested in Digital Humanities precisely in order to consolidate their grip on available research funding, and are about as likely to renounce their market dominance as are Facebook, Amazon, or Google.”
“And even if it were to be taken seriously as a proposal, it could hardly correct the structural and institutional conditions that explain the unique position of Digital Humanities today. In an article on what she sees as the unrealized radical potential of the field, Miriam Posner writes that “[w]e can’t allow Digital Humanities to recapitulate the inequities and underrepresentations that plague Silicon Valley,” but we argue that its spectacular institutional success is a consequence of its constitution, from the outset, as precisely such a recapitulation.”