The state of the digital humanities
A report and a critique
Alan Liu University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
‘The humanities are in trouble today, and digital methods have an important role to play in effectively showing the public why the humanities need to be part of any vision of a future society.’ (Liu,P.31/)
The title of this paper brings to mind Kafka’s short story A report to an academy in which the ape Red Peter, who has been taught to behave like a human tells the academy how he achieved his transformation. He signs off his dispatch to the learned gentlemen by stating, “Even to you, esteemed gentlemen of the Academy, I have only made a report”. (Kafka P. 8)
The state that Liu refers to could be a questioning of the condition the field of DH is in, just how is it doing? Perhaps he is contemplating how it would behave is it was a physical location, perhaps a new country, the state of Digital Humanities, which I imagine to be like that non-state which existed nowhere but where Apple at one point used to domicile their taxes.
Here I think that Liu is playing with the multiple ways the word state can be used, as a noun describing the condition of a place or thing as territory which forms an entity and is organized under one government.
But for Liu one thing is clear, which state that DH currently serves.
“If the digital humanities are currently in a state of expansion, it follows that in some manner, for better or worse, they serve the postindustrial state. “(Liu 10)
Liu separates two branches of the discipline – the stream flowing from new media studies which have a focus on how the field interacts and intersects with society, the economy, etc. This branch tends to be indiscriminately critical of “society and global informational empire” (Liu)
But it fails to sufficiently take into account the specificities of different institutions- university vs. corporation for example. The other branch, which stems from the field of Humanities Computing lacks almost all critical cultural awareness. Digital Humanities stands on three under-lying concepts: technology, media, and information. (Liu. P.13)
I find it interesting to see the use of metaphors around surface and depth and also around scale- going to the micro level of reading a particular book, etc. and the ability to be able to analyses all the books written in the world ever! Moving through time from the now of blogs to the medieval past.
There is also something interesting going on around the notions of a physical space and something that seems immaterial, intangible. Liu quotes Bill Gates in the footnotes hyperventilating about how with the advent of the Free Web the best lectures in the world will all be available and essentially there will be no necessity for a physical college space apart for those needed for the parties! This resonates with Liu’s reference to advertising and the selling of the counter-culture cool, which “creates a new image of work that allows corporate and other organizational cultures to imagine a cool new vision of themselves’’. (Liu P.9) Universities then also end up mirroring this image.
“need forces higher education to adjust its image in the mirror of information technology to resemble that of consumer businesses perceived to be both cool and profitable (able to exert ‘market appeal).’’ (Liu. P.9)
The blurring of the start division between the idea of technology as tools and media as surface is a positive recent development.
“By viewing media as the interactive apparition and operation of technology, they dissolve a particularly debilitating false binary that has long haunted the field: that technology is ‘just’ materiality (or, at best, tools) while media is ‘just’ spectacle (or, at best, interface).” (Liu. P.17)
The coding aspect seems to be equated more with structure and material and the ‘surface’ media content as more associated with the immaterial. He writes that ‘code artists have worked more and generally have more of an understanding of how the undergirding of the ‘surface’ works (e.g. code work artists such as “John Cayley, Mez Breeze (Mary-Anne Breeze), Talan Memmott, and their interpreters insist on the ineluctable co-presence of code both operationally behind the scenes and phenomenally in a work’s experiential form.”
This also had resonances with the modernist notion in art of ‘letting the material speak’. In the arena of code this means that the ‘undergirding’ can be visible in some way on the surface. Another aspect that spoke to me is when he referenced poets who attempt to have the poem not mean – essentially to try and compel the audience to simply appreciate the ‘material, tangible aspect’ the signifier as opposed to the signified – Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Ars Poetica’ (MacLeish, 1985: 106–7), ‘A poem should not mean/But be.’ or McLuhan’s dictum ‘the medium is the message’. (Liu. P.17)
Liu finds it strange that DH does not place as much emphasis on communication as on technology, media and information.
What is the compulsion to blindly produce, more and more information? Liu has an interesting answer- in the US during the 80’s and 90s there was a constant increase in US corporations investing in information technology but no increase in productivity. (A business increases productivity by producing more with the same amount of labour, so essentially if you can output more sausages from your sausage factory with the same input you get more profit.) This was referred to as the ‘the productivity paradox’. This paradox was solved very creatively- by viewing the information technology as a predictor of just how much the corporation would be able to restructure, down-size, out -source in the future; the future of the post- industrial corporation’.
The humanities has a productivity problem also, they are not viewed as useful, digital humanities could be an ‘advocacy tool’ for the humanities but Liu’s fear is that will lead to ‘eleventh campuses’ and ‘cyber-campuses’ that are the same in all essential principles and practices as the ‘virtual corporation’?
Is the Digital Humanist telling the story to the academy of how they have made the transformation from the out-moded humanist to the shiny new digital realm, and advocating for their usefulness in the 21st century academy?
Bibliography
(https://www.kafka-online.info/a-report-for-an-academy-page8.html)
The state of the digital humanities: A report and a critique.
Alan Liu / University of California, Santa Barbara, USA/ 2011
