Digital Humanities Manifesto: Comments?
The Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA has published a "Digital Humanities Manifesto": http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digitalhumanities/2008/12/15/digital-humanities-...
Some of the more interesting propositions:
"9. Large-scale complexity: need for teamwork as new model for the production and reproduction of humanistic knowledge. Teams sometimes fail because they take risks. This is the heart of digital humanities: Risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation."
"12. Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution."
I'm often struck by the value of process in DH work, so much so that I think it may be DH's most important legacy. If that is true, we are, of course, in trouble, and making trouble. Process doesn't create easily measurable outcomes. Process works at crosspurposes to the institutional structures that surround us. Talk about risk!
What strikes you? What defines digital humanities in your work, or in your vision of what your work might someday be? How do we get there from here?
Comments
Beyond the facsimile
We've done a lot in DH with what we could call the electronic facsimile -- the archive. The work has been good for the larger humanities community because it makes materials easier to access, just as the print facsimile granted access to unique manuscripts.
I'm trying to see what we can do beyond facsimile. What kind of apparatus can we build that allows us to produce scholarly works on-line instead of in print? Scholars don't reinvent the printed book every time they write a monograph. They shouldn't have to do that with on-line/web-based projects either.
Part of this involves developing tools that the digital humanist can use to play with their data. Part of this is developing a critical language that we can use to discuss the structure and presentation of a "digital monograph."
I think part of the digital monograph will involve sharing the process by which the author came to their realizations (similar to what the author might do in a print monograph today). This involves the reader being able to explore what the author explored through mashups/remixing and experimentation -- a guided interactive narrative that leads the reader to the same epiphanies.
Once a work allows this freedom for the reader, it's not much to ask for the work to open up its basic data set (its "facsimile layer") for others to use in their own projects. The value is not in the facsimile, but in the journey designed by the author and experienced by the reader.
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