Them’s fightin’ words
Want to see academics get into a verbal brawl?
Ask a group of humanists in your most affected naivete Elle Woods voices, “So, like, what is the definition of digital humanities?”. And to really get them going, follow up with:
Defining digital humanities, including digital history, is notoriously divisive. So much so that Jason Heppler created a “What is Digital Humanities?” definition generator based upon #DayofDH tweets from 2009-2014. My favorite and oft-quoted definition from this is, “My lawyer advised against me answering this.” This gives incredible Marshawn Lynch energy (which, honestly, I respect and understand more and more as the “professional” I become). But I digress.
So, like, what is digital humanities? What is digital history?
William G. Thomas gave a response during a 2008 Journal of American History conversation with seven other leading historians in the field that resonates with my view, experiences, and goals within the field.
“Digital history is about the medium, not the method. I like Amy Murrell Taylor’s [another historian in the conversation] emphasis on the idea of genre and medium very much. It is especially helpful because the focus on the medium helps us widen our scope and recognize the breadth that digital history can encompass”.
This appeals to me for two big reasons.
One: A medium, not a methodology
One, positioning the digital humanities and digital history as being defined as a medium, rather than a distinct method, for academic output, historical analysis, and scholarship may be helpful in navigating some of the questions around digital publications and work.
In responding to how technology and the digital have transformed historical research, Ian Milligan noted that “Historians too often shy away from explicit methodological discussions…Yet if historians want consciously to reflect in our writing on the role of technological mediation, more discussions are needed.”
These statements seem at odds, but hear me out.
Digital publications notoriously do not get the respect they deserve, especially in the academy and for academics on the tenure track or strive to be.
Digital humanists and historians (especially those who then go on to edit journals and provide peer review), should encourage a practice of explaining the choice of mediums. This could open the door for more robust documentation of how digital publications and projects were created (increasing reproducibility and verification) as well as conversations about how the various mediums used affected the publication or product.
I am in the camp that history is not social science (another hot topic you can drop on a group of scholars to watch academic no-holds-barred pankration ensue). When completing a degree in a field that considers itself a social science (Library Science), I would grow frustrated with (what I believed to be) too much methodological discussion in articles, and not enough analysis, interpretation, and prescription.
But history and the humanities have the inverse problem. When reading articles involving mapping and GIS, I found wonderful analysis and interpretation. But for a student reading about digital work that is slightly (ok…a lot) outside of my digital skill set, I was left wondering “how did you do that?”, “why did you choose that?”, and “what were some of the issues you ran into?”.
Discussing the choice of medium as well as the advantages and limitations of the chosen mediums may help with that. As a student and reader of articles, I do not care to read in-depth methodology about the statistical analysis you ran or your exact “P” value graph (“throw that in an appendix!”). But what would interest me is discussion of how, for example, the chosen medium of using certain search engines to find text or assist in scraping data. Citing Safiya Noble’s work and interpreting it in relation to the chosen digital humanities and digital history medium could be intriguing.
Two: Inherently public History and history
This leads into the second big reason why interpreting digital humanities and digital history as a medium appeals to me: “medium” connotes creativity and curiosity.
My other favorite definition of digital humanities, that is much less joking and more to how I strive to position myself as a budding historian and archivist, comes from Sheila A. Brennan. Brennan describes digital humanities as being inherently public humanities. When combined with the concept of digital humanities and digital history as a medium, this addresses some concerns raised by both Michael Frisch and Ian Miligan.
Frisch expressed a concern that capital-H “History”- the research conducted by historians to nudge the field forward, lowercase-h “history”- the sources and evidence that makes History possible, are an intimately interconnected practice that too narrow of a definition of digital history (and digital humanities, I argue), threatens to unlink.
I agree. Digital history and digital humanities should not just maintain, but strengthen this relationship between History and history. By approaching the field as a medium to create and explore, it makes this all the more possible. For example, I have worked as a research assistant for Dr. Angel David Nieves’ Apartheid Heritage(s) Project, a digital humanities publication that uses the medium of technology to explore the spatial history of Soweto, a historic Black township just outside of Johannesburg. This project supports History and history advancing the scholarly conversation about space, race, apartheid, and the history of Soweto, while also advancing the means to do history. An important component of this digital humanities and digital history project is an archival exhibit of the documents, records, and artifacts that informed the scholarship. Many of these items have never before been digitized and made available to a wider audience.
For the people!!! (and the academe, too)
The medium of digital humanities and digital history allows the Historical debate and historical record to be advanced for the benefit of both the academe and the public.
Further, approaching digital humanities from the perspectives I have briefly discussed above could also begin to address the issue of the digitized historical record that is of concern to archivists, librarians, historians, and professors alike. As Ian Milligan argues, that only a tiny sliver of the even tinier sliver of records and artifacts that make up “the historic record” have been digitized is an incredible problem. Digitization is a reflection of what the institutions who authorized the scanning of documents deem to be important enough to spend resources, human labor and financial capital, on.
At a previous institution, the policy was to digitize upon request. When a researcher requested digital copies of archival records that were not previously digitized, the institution would use that as an excuse to add to the digital records. I mean, we already have the scanner out, so why not do a TIF scan as well and add it to the finding aide?
The problem with this, as Milligan articulates much better than I, is that it creates a loop and misrepresentation of the evidence of history that is the vital component of creating History. For a student raised in an era where seemingly everything can be found online, the undigitized items might as well not exist.
Digital history and digital humanities as a medium can help with this. It empowers practitioners at all levels- student, professional, and enthusiast- to explore history and History in new and creative ways.
