My little collection of webpages and blog posts (pearltree) grows slowly, but I was glad to add a post today by Matthew Jockers, whose work got highlighted in an article in the Chronicle back in 2008, just as I was designing my dissertation proposal. It was inspiring in the sense that I felt like what I was doing was related, but cooler. I felt encouraged, in a word. I wasn’t being as bizarrely idiosyncratic as I feared.
Anyway, Jockers divides the digital humanities into two groups: those that work on digital objects and those who use digital tools on objects (that may or may not be digital). In my department, the former group (“A”) seems to circulate around the New Media Workshop, and the latter… well, they don’t really seem to have a high profile.
I like to imagine myself as part of the second group, the group B, to the point where I’m not positive I’d even consider those who are exclusively in group A “Digital Humanists,” but that’s probably not a fight worth having. Point is, I’ve got some of the cred,1 but one glance at the latest Literary and Linguistic Computing indicates that I’m still a total n00b.
Still, the reason I bring this all up is that Jockers closes his post by pointing out that there is nothing quite as “new” about us Type B Digital Humanists as current outsider articles seem to be suggesting. As he writes:
I came to utilize computation in my research not because the siren’s song of revolution was tempting me away from my dusty, tired, and antiquated approaches to literature. Rather, computational tools and statistical methods simply offered a way of asking and exploring the questions that I (and others such as those pictured above) have about the literary field. What has changed is not the object of study but the nature of the questions.
That’s right. I mean, it’s tough to say straight that one did not pursue question x instead of question y without some kind of fantasy of “revolution”; there’s a reason a dissertation proposal includes a “state of the field” section, after all. But what I extrapolate from Jockers’s position is dead on: you can’t digi yourself up in a useful manner until your questions need digi techniques to get answered (cue my usual complaint about Wordles).
And that Wordle complaint is worth cuing again, since the point deserves being repeated over, and over, and over, and over…
- Membership in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, utilizing tools like R, ArcGIS, and GeoDa in my work [↩]
Tags: Chronicle of Higher Education, digital humanities, Matthew Jockers
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