As part of my PhD, I have started following a short course on Digital Humanities. Students on the course create a weekly blog and so I am posting my blog here. It may or may not make sense.
For the first session, we were invited to consider three issues. Firstly, the distinctive characteristics of digital methodologies, secondly, the new research questions which they make possible and finally, any possible limitations.
Last week, this seemed straightforward, however as I sit here and look at the task, it seems anything but. The reason for this is, I think, that digital humanities is an emerging technology and this, after all, is what attracts me. Those working in the field currently are, in a sense, still pioneers. This has many pluses. Pioneers do amazing things with very little. They take risks and keep trying when a jobsworth would have long since given up. This is vital. Debates around the meaning of open access, the appropriate technology, participation in development and so on are what will lead to success.
Bu they don’t make it easy to get a handle on it. We seem to have a common umbrella term – Digital Humanities. But common characteristics are problematic. The list could in fact be boiled down to two: openly available on line and to some extent put together by university teams with research funding. But that’s not the point. The point is the diversity. Emerging technology does not benefit from the straitjacket of a definition.
Research questions, or rather possibilities, on the other hand are more interesting. In ‘England’s Immigrants’, for example, it was obvious that the amount of data would have daunted most pen and paper researchers and so while the same research question might have occurred, it might well have been rejected as unfeasible. In ‘Film Hub North’ another truth came home: when you look at texts, you may be seeing trees not the wood. Transforming that text into data and making it visual points up connections and leads to conclusions which might well have been obscured in an analogue source. But to me, the most vital resource is connectivity. Not all the sites we looked at had this, but where they did, this opened up huge potential. Bringing together text, audio and visuals is already a powerful thing; enabling research that draws on more than one database to make comparisons and connections is breaking new ground.
The limitations? Today’s limitations are tomorrow’s developments. Even the limitations of our own vision will change as the technology opens up new possibilities. But at some point the ‘emerging technology’ has to settle into established techniques on the one hand and research and development on the other. At some point this needs to become the established way of transmitting knowledge and culture. Slowly, this is happening: Elsevier already publishes scientific articles online with links to live research data; scholarly editions of outstanding texts, for example the Lorsch Codex in Germany are now online with a mass of supporting data and analytical tools.[1] But this is still cherry picking. A publishing house does it because it is a sure market. A university does it for prestige. But when will this become normal? And more importantly, who will pay? Therein lies the limitation.
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