I want to start my reflections about these first readings for ENGL 946 by concentrating on John Unsworth's title "What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?" and I have two specific reasons for wanting to start from there. The first reason is my radical predilection for the term Humanities Computing in lieu of Digital Humanities. It's not a nostalgic move toward a better, simpler past: when Digital Humanities were still Humanities Computing I was still completely unaware of their existence as a new field, discipline, or, better, "practice of representation and way of reasoning,"(Unsworth) "social category" (Alvarado) or "social undertaking" (Kirschenbaum), "array of convergent practices" (DH Manifesto '09), "set of ontological commitments" (Unsworth), and so on and so forth. I like "Humanities Computing" better because I feel that what "Digital Humanities" might be doing, as a term, is exactly to reinforce that commonplace view of the digital as mere tool which people invested in this work are constantly fighting against. While "Digital" is, and feels, semantically, as an adjective, an addition which does not substantially change the noun it precedes, "Computing" is this versatile -ing form which juices up the noun it follows. My preoccupation might sound somehow over-linguistic, pedantic and even irrelevant, and yet I think that the second part of Unsworth's title, the question "What is Not?" justifies my worry. So here I come to my second reason. It seems to me that the "anxiety for self definition" by which the discipline (yes, this is how I want to call it, and I'll be sure to explain why later) is affected, according to Alvarado (and many many others,) is producing not only a number of affirmative and rather beautiful definitions but also many negative definitions (which remind me of a manifesto-of-poetics line by Italian poet Eugenio Montale, "All I can tell you now is this: / what we are not, what we do not want".) Unsworth specifies what HC, or DH, is not, and even talks about charlatanism referring to pseudo-DH enterprises, the Manifesto repeats the same move and underlines it through its graphically emphatic "Is(n't)" and its "process not product" slogan, Burdick et al. also devote some paragraphs to make sure misunderstanding do not take place. Now, if it's true that such an anxiety for a self-definition that has to be achieved not only through constitutive, affirmative declarations, but also through negations aimed to avoid common misunderstandings, exists, the choice of "Digital Humanities" seems to me particularly unfortunate.
I have to confess that I admire this negative, dialectical component of DH's construction of identity for which it is necessary to declare what one is, but most of all what one is NOT. Perhaps because my primary field is literary translation, I feel sympathy for complex, interdisciplinary "modes of scholarship"(Burdick et al.) that struggle for recognition in academia and fight against the stereotypes that label them as mechanic, linear, applicative approaches that "do not really change or contribute to the understanding of the texts they are working with; they only facilitate their reading" (I intend text veeeery largely, of course. Also, I do not know who I am quoting but you know that somebody - multiplied per thousands- have said that.) I am convinced that DH and literary translation share a lot: they both tend to produce "material" interpretations and arguments instead of theorizing them; they both have a certain utopian excitement about their potential achievements, followed by an always present, counterbalancing dystopian sense of the limits of what can and cannot effectively be done, considering one’s resources and one’s existing ‘language’, a language that always has to be respected, even if it can definitely be progressively challenged and renovated.And perhaps for this reason I felt attracted by DH, to the point of moving to Nebraska from Italy in order to learn more about them. Since then, my obsession has been and still is a fully theoretical and fully utopian, possibly delusional, one. Let me expose it briefly: Matthew Kirschenbaum argues that “Digital Humanities is about a scholarship and a pedagogy that are publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed.” Well, this is an appealing idea as applied to translation. Translation needs this visibility, as invoked by Lawrence Venuti (see http://www.translationindustry.ir/Uploads/Pdf/venuti.pdf) : it needs to expose its own decisional processes and make them visible to the readers. And it needs to offer readers a critical apparatus (which could consist of a commentary on alternative solutions; explanatory and analytical digressions; contextual sections; semantic fields) that traditional print-based editions do not allow, for space reasons, but also because of the fixed, classical idea of translation as a finite operation. Translation needs to expose its non-finiteness and its non-autonomy, it needs to denaturalize its supposed function of neutral communicative transfer, and show its interpretative moves as well as the inevitability of its teleology. It needs to make visible its processes of constant revision, and it needs to interact with readers and with other translations (for example, of the same text in the same language, or in different languages and historical moments). This visibility is one that DH would not merely facilitate and enhance, but create and define, thus illuminating the nature of the complex, impossible, and yet ever-necessary task of translation.
And now I come to my final point. I did promise to clarify why I choose to call DH a discipline and here I am. Notwithstanding my enthusiasm and two full Nebraskan winters, I have only moved the first steps in the DH world, and my translations have not yet been substantially changed in the way I create them and represent them. Why? Because I am still a literary translator who needs to learn lots of skills and to start doing real work and get "dirty hands" before, hopefully, developing into a real digital humanist who does literary translation. But students to come could be given the chance to be "born so," by having been fully and "deliberately trained to be digital humanists" (Unsworth) with specializations in history, literature, translation, sociology, geography, and so forth, from the very beginning of their academic career. In this sense, I am strongly convinced that DH needs to be regarded as a new discipline, or better, interdiscipline, and to be institutionally legitimated as such.
Great post Caterina, and your articulation of the similarities between translation studies and DH was particularly impressive. Your assertion that both "have a certain utopian excitement about their potential achievements, followed by an always present, counterbalancing dystopian sense of the limits of what can and cannot effectively be done" hit particularly close to home for me, as that "counterbalancing dystopian" sense is one I find myself encountering more and more, and something that reading through all of manifestos only increased.
ReplyDeleteTo switch gears, I wondered about your comment that closes out your post, the conviction that "DH needs to be regarded as a new discipline, or better, interdiscipline." How do you see this coming about? Will the mere fact that students can now be trained as "digital humanists" from the beginning of their education necessarily lead to the acceptance of DH as a field or discipline unto itself? Or must DHers (both current and aspiring) change something about the way they market themselves and their work? Or some other course of action entirely?
Thanks for your comment, Kevin.
ReplyDeleteI am not an expert about how to found a discipline institutionally and academically speaking. I imagine the creation of specific curricula, grad studies and PhD within the Computer Science Dept, probably, but not necessarily. A Dept of its own would probably be the best solution although I imagine it be problematic. But weren't other Depts founded in this way, in the past? Think of how vast the field of Political Science is, how interdisciplinary it is, and it still does get to stand on its own...Perhaps it was problematic to establish it, but it's now accepted all over, I guess.
First, translation does contribute to the understanding of texts; whoever says that it only provides the text in your own language is missing quite a lot when reading, at least, literary works. Hence, I really liked your connection between DH and translation, since, as you say, the first would certainly help the second in different ways such as facilitating the creation of the critical apparatus that print versions of texts do not allow.
ReplyDeleteYet, I cannot help but wonder to what extend could that apparatus successfully be created from a distinct DH discipline. I’m thinking: A student trained to be a digital humanists on the first place is clearly going to be able to create the digital text; would he/she be able, though, to translate, comment, explain a text if the instruction on literature/culture/translation is left to a specialization? How much time would they spend learning DH and how much the specialization? Or would it imply a collaborative job between the DHist and a fully trained translator? This question may be biased by the fact that as a literature student myself, I have the knowledge on the subject of analysis before getting into analysing that subject with computational tools.
Great post Caterina! I am especially intrigued by your preference for "Humanities Computing" over "Digital Humanities," since I find myself gravitating toward the former term as well. I agree with your analysis that the word "digital" functions as an "addition which does not substantially change the noun it precedes." However, I think that, for me at least, another issue at stake is the fact that "digital humanities" seems broad and fuzzy in the same way as "new media studies." Digital humanities is thus much more inclusive (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) but the cost of this is that it is also much more vague. There is something solidly less confrontational about "digital," as opposed to computational.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how political the name itself is. While I know that on some level I gravitate towards "humanities computing" because I think that "computing" is a fundamental part of the field, I wonder if changing the name back would have the negative consequence of make the discipline seem less inviting?