Jeremy Douglass, "Right Now: Digital Scholarship and the Quantitative Turn"

It is March 2009. Right now, I am working on an NEH-funded project in
Humanities High-Performance Computing, the grant having been awarded in 2009 for the first time. Right now, I’m applying to an NEH-funded grant on Digging Into Data, which will be awarded in 2009 for the first time. Right now, I’m organizing a conference track at Digital Arts and Culture 2009 on Software Studies. Right now, most humanists don’t consider either the processes or outcomes of data exploration, high-performance computing, or software theory to be humanities scholarship.

My contribution to this session focuses on what I’m calling the “quantitative turn” in current digital humanities research agendas, both for recent NEH Office of Digital Humanities initiatives and in new digital humanities research paradigms such as Software Studies, Platform Studies, and Cultural Analytics. How will we come to grips with the digital scholarship that results from this generation of scholarly conferences, grants, initiatives, and projects — the ones that are happening right now? In the future, how will we use, reference, circulated, evaluate and reward this digital scholarship? In the past, what precedents and models can we find for previous accommodations of digital scholarship and the metaphors that justified them — corpus-based text mining as a kind of archival research and close reading, digitization projects and data repositories as kind of editorial and curatorial activity, networked manuscripts as a kind of co-authoring and peer review, and so forth.

The quantitative turn is both an opportunity that enables digital humanities data exploration and a problem for how we define humanities scholarship as a discourse of qualities. Our engagement with this opportunity and problem will determine how we accept, reject, or ignore what is happening right now.