Shakespeare Quarterly

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Trevor Munoz. Trevor Munoz said: Food for thought in points @whitneytrettien makes about DH in the comments at http://bit.ly/bzgRhP and http://bit.ly/dnplOX [...]

That’s a fascinating set of observations, Whitney, though it also, in a way, frightens the life out of me. By an odd coincidence, I’ve ended up simultaneously: participating in this experiment; joining Facebook (initially to gain access to an academic fanpage, but then taking some tentative steps into Facebook as the world knows it); engaging in an extended series of long emails with an independent scholar about the meaning and purpose of literary criticism. All of these things have given me a feel for the amazing potential of digital humanities. I love the idea you offer here of research as an ongoing conversation which might reach a number of ‘way points’ rather than arriving in the terminal station of print in one great puff of smoke and steam.

But, as a busy middle-aged academic, I’m also wary of the time demands of learning various new platforms and of potentially having precious time leach away meeting new demands that I interact with students in these various new ways.

Part of the problem, I think, is that systems of professional reward — at least in the UK — are still heavily structured around producing monographs and other printed forms of scholarship. The model you map out is very exciting and is clearly a vision of the future, but I think we are surely in for an extended period of transition, whatever this Dave Parry bloke may say (but I will go and read his piece).

Andy

This is a great question, one that Digital Humanities seems to be asking itself right now. A few months ago Dave Parry’s widely-circulated blog post, tauntingly titled “Be Online or Be Irrelevant” — written shortly after the MLA, and arguing that scholars not on Twitter or using blogs were marginalizing themselves — sparked a lot of debate about what it “means” to call oneself a Digital Humanist: do you have to be involved in a lab or one of the big projects? are humanities bloggers/twitters part of the DH community? how do we (or do we not) want to delimit our own community?

For me (and this is what I tried to get across toward the end of the SQ review), DH shouldn’t be marked a discipline but a *methodology*. This is a move toward curation over publication, toward research as in-process instead of end-product, and toward constant (rather than intermittent, at conferences etc.) community. The digital humanist — at least what I’d like to call a digital humanist — wakes up every day and (setting aside the marketing implications of the term) networks with like-minded folks, both within and outside the academy. In short, it’s about using media to share ideas.

The large-scale platform projects are wonderful and necessary for us to do our work; but 1) I’m less enthusiastic now about giving these projects precedence within DH, for all the reasons outlined in the review, and 2) I’m starting to think they might be better situated institutionally within libraries and museums. Librarians are better equipped to deal with the sticky wickets of information management and retrieval; and while humanities scholars may be able to help them think through use-case scenarios, etc., I’m increasingly disinclined to see that role as central.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, this description might resonate with a lot of Shakespeareans, who have always been involved with their primary texts at multiple levels: as/with fans, scholars, performers, set/costume designers, rare book enthusiasts, historians, and so on. It’s less interesting, to me, to think about large-scale pedagogical initiatives than the ways in which individuals across all these roles are using new media — even in the smallest, mundane ways — to connect and collaborate with other Shakespeareans.