Remarks on the Digital Humanities
Manifesto:
There are, to put it diplomatically, issues with this manifesto, both in
its precision of terminology and critical thinking. First of all, the
term "digital humanities" is fuzzy. Does it mean the cultural study of
digital information systems, or simply the use of these systems in
humanities research and education? If the latter is meant, why
differentiate between humanities and other fields of study and not talk
about "digital technology-based research and education" in general?
Paragraph 1 of the manifesto states that...
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent
practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the
exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or
disseminated.
This is a straightforward paraphrase of McLuhan's "end of the Gutenberg
Galaxy", with the only catch that McLuhan referred to analog media -
film, radio, television. So it seems as if the authors thoroughly
confuse "electronic" and "paper" with "digital" and "analog". But,
technically seen, the movable type printing press is not an analog, but
a digital system in that all writing into discrete, countable [and thus
computable] units.
On top of that, there are very contemporary positions in the so-called
'new media' field that are much more differentiated and a few steps
ahead in their reflection of the relation between online and print
publishing. In his introductory essay to the first Mag.net reader,
Alessandro Ludovico soundly argues that "print is becoming the
quintessence of the web", a stable long-term medium for which the
unstable medium of the Web serves as a production and filtering
platform.
Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution
looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print
was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating
search and retrieval.
The common assumption that media studies suffer
from a lack of mid- and long-term memory is a confirmed by this
paragraph. Historically, the opposite is true. In their "first wave of
the digital revolution", the humanities chiefly associated the new
technology with holographic visuality of "virtual reality" and
"cyberspace". The humanities needed about ten years to catch up and
grasp that computing and the Internet was based on code, and thus on
linguistic logic.
Now it must look forwards into an immediate future
in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core.
First of all, "the digital" is not a medium, but a type of information;
information made up of discrete units [such as numbers] instead of an analog
continuum [such as waves]. The medium - the carrier - itself is,
strictly speaking, always analog: electricity, airwaves, magnetic
platters, optical rays, paper.
To insist on this terminological precision is not just some
technological nitpicking, but of political significance. It reminds of
the concrete materiality of the Internet and computing that involves the
exploitation of energy, natural resources and human labor, as opposed to
falsely buying, by the virtue of abstraction, into the "immateriality"
of "digital media".
The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and
retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative,
interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital
toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities:
complexity.
As it remains totally vague what this "second wave" represents - YouTube
and social networking as the next evolutionary step after Google Search?
[Seriously? How young are the people who wrote this?] -, it is
nearly impossible to seriously discuss this argument. It also seems
quite futile to argue whether the humanities or sciences have the better
grip on "complexity" - a word which is a systems theoretical null
signifier typically serving as a dialectical device for reducing the
very thing it means; saying that something is "complex" is a truism, and
thus a simplification.
Aside from that, the above argument is seriously flawed in its implicit
assumption that there was no, or less, social and cultural complexity
involved in what it calls the "quantitative" formalisms of databases and
programming. It's a blatant regression behind the research of critical
media scholars [like Matthew Fuller, Wendy Chun, McKenzie Wark and many
others] and hacker activists of the past decade; research that has shown
again and again how these very formalisms are "qualitative", i.e.
designed by human groups and shaped by cultural, economical and
political interests through and through.
Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity are empty
words unless they imply changes in language, practice, method, and
output.
And the words in this paragraph are just as empty because they state
a completely generic truism.
The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open
doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized
for what it is: the enemy.
I'm slightly tempted to put the above paragraph, as a sarcastic joke,
into my E-Mail signature, because it is the perfect [if for sure
unintended] joining of the ideological opposites of a liberal Popperian
ideology of "the open" with a right-wing Carl Schmittian agonistic
rhetoric of "the enemy".
I'll stop here in order not to produce a prolonged rant - and sincerely
apologize for my harshness if the "Digital Humanities Manifesto" should
turn out to be a text written by younger students.