Abstract This chapter examines material published in the field of digital humanities in 2020. It begins with an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly by a group of early-career scholars taking a novel approach to understanding the field, using topic modelling to query a dataset of definitions of digital humanities. The article brings into focus the proliferation of texts in this area, and the extent to which this ongoing discourse impinges on those, particularly early-career, scholars seeking to enter the field. It also observes the upsurge in writing about the lack of diversity and inclusion in the digital humanities, making the arrival of Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein's Data Feminism all the more welcome. This hugely important text offers an intersectional approach to the study of historical and contemporary social and cultural data, urging scholars to take up their seven principles for uncovering the ways in which power can be uncovered, examined, analysed, and challenged. They offer a vision of what data justice could look like in theory and in practice. Richard Jean So's Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction takes just such an approach to the analysis of literary culture in post-war America. Using an incisive combination of data science and traditional literary scholarly methods, So paints a compelling picture of the persistence of whiteness in literary culture, analysing the whole cycle of literary production to uncover the ways in which power moves through the system.
This open access book challenges the contemporary relevance of the current model of knowledge production. It argues that the full digitisation of society sharply accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic has added extreme complexity to the world, conclusively exposing the inadequacy of our current model of knowledge creation. Addressing many of the different ways in which reality has been transformed by technology – the pervasive adoption of big data, the fetishisation of algorithms and automation, and the digitalisation of education and research – Viola examines how the rigid conceptualisation in disciplines' division and competition is complicit of promoting a narrative which has paired computational methods with exactness and neutrality whilst stigmatising consciousness and criticality as carriers of biases and inequality. Taking the humanities as a focal point, the author retraces schisms in the field between the humanities, the digital humanities and critical digital humanities; these are embedded, she argues, within old dichotomies: sciences vs humanities, digital vs non-digital and authentic vs non-authentic. Through the analysis of personal use cases and exploring a variety of applied contexts such as digital heritage practices, digital linguistic injustice, critical digital literacy and critical digital visualisation, the book shows a third way: knowledge creation in the digital.
Abstract The absence of an entry on digital humanities in the last volume of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory due to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the exacerbation of academic precarity (that was acknowledged in the editorial preface of the last volume) predicates that this chapter develop a narrative bibliography of notable scholarship in the digital humanities from both 2021 and 2022. Therefore the unprecedented circumstances that have extended the scope of scholarly review for this chapter beyond a single chronological year also provide the unique opportunity to not only 'trace and expand upon currents in critical and cultural theory, and to engage in [the] areas' key debates' (Quinn and Ghosh, 'Preface' to YWCCT 2022) but also (and more importantly, one might argue) understand some of the radical thematic transformations brought about and anticipated by the legacies, presents, and futures of digital humanities within the supposedly 'new normal' of a post-Covid world. Through consolidating diverse conversations from varied contexts that are shaping contemporary digital humanities and in anticipating the futures of the discipline, this chapter locates scholarship in the digital humanities and related fields from the years 2021 and 2022 within the interconnected themes of resistive ontologies, organizations, and new directions in the digital humanities. While the focus remains on the scholarship produced within the aforesaid chronological period, our methodological attempt in this intervention has been to acknowledge and put into dialogue relevant contributions related to the three primary themes of analysis that may fall beyond the ambit of a specific period.
AbstractThis chapter examines material published in the field of digital humanities in 2019. Key work published this year has grappled with longstanding conflicts at the heart of the field, on whether and how computational methods should be applied to humanities data, and who should validate such methodologies. The chapter begins with new work by Ted Underwood, who makes the case for hypothesis-driven methods and the modelling of humanities data. It discusses how recent work in computational literary studies had appeared to resist the trap into which much previous work had fallen, that is, work that was perceived to fall into the binaries of distant vs. close reading, computation vs. engagement, objectivity vs. subjectivity. The continued friction over the appropriateness of certain computational methodological approaches was amplified by new work that called into question the statistical methods of a number of key works in the field over past years. Nan Z. Da's critique of computational literary studies through the lens of statistical rigour imploded the uneasy truce between computational methods and the more traditional questions and methods at the heart of literary studies. Da's article reopens the debate about how digital humanities scholars use statistical methods, and how greater reliance on such methods may demand greater cross-disciplinary oversight to ensure that they are used in a way that is both robust and appropriate. Her contribution is examined alongside the rash of responses to it from key scholars in the field which produced an important snapshot of the fractures and fundamentals of data-driven literary studies. I then turn to new and timely work by James E. Dobson, which argues for a third way, a Critical Digital Humanities that engages critically with computational as well as humanistic scholarship.I survey important contributions on the impact of mass digitization, historicism and the archive, and how to study history in the age of digital archives and the historic web. Ian Milligan's work provides a much-needed introduction to the potentials and pitfalls of studying recent history through the digital traces left behind. It self-consciously identifies areas in which greater cross-disciplinary scholarship and critical engagement will be needed as this area of study matures. Discussion then turns to work by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on digital waste, which shows how connecting new media theory to waste studies can provide an important frame through which to examine issues of data toxicity and pollution. This work sets the stage for two landmark books on sex and race which implore us to take a more careful look at the toxic technologies we build and the questions we ask of them. Both Caroline Criado Perez and Ruha Benjamin examine the damage done by the reliance of data systems on the 'default', frequently a white male, forcing us to see anything that departs from this norm as deviant. These works make a powerful case for reinventing the systems we increasingly rely on, questioning the underlying prejudice that created them, and rethinking the modes of meaning-making ascribed to them, especially when that narrative so often assumes a benign neutrality. Finally, I examine these works alongside a new volume of essays on digital humanities and intersectionality edited by Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam, which serves to amplify and contextualize the need for the approaches taken by Criado Perez and Benjamin, showing how deeply enmeshed within the field these power structures are.
"Landmarks is a single-volume survey of global culture designed to help students of humanities cultural history and history of the arts to understand and appreciate the relevance of historical works and ideas to their own daily lives. In chronological sequence Landmarks guides students on a journey of the most notable monuments of the human imagination and the most prominent ideas and issues that have shaped the course and character of the world's cultures from prehistory to the present"--
Abstract This chapter examines material published in the field of the digital humanities (DH) in 2018, all of which explores the relationship between the digitalized present and its pre-digital past(s). In one publication, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age, Alan Liu notes: 'The signal sense of history […] is not just like a plot on a radar scope. It is like the unfolding epic plot of Tolstoy's War and Peace' (p. 157). As political scandals over the use of social media and the role of cyber-targeting to influence electoral outcomes continue to dominate the news, it is becoming increasingly evident that not only are social media ushering in an era in which we are alienated from our personal data, but that today's digitalized world builds on and replicates pre-digital hegemonic structures. Books by Andrew Piper and Alan Liu discuss ways in which scholars can approach the complexities and challenges of literary tradition and historical transmutation through the application of computational methods and digital tools. Discussion then turns to the ways in which digital practices have converged with wider cultural and political developments since the second half of the twentieth century. Lee Humphreys examines this transformation through the traces that we leave as the record of our daily lives while on social media, while Felix Stalder considers how such practices have wider ramifications as symptoms of a 'digital condition', for good and ill. Exploring the pressure points of the digital condition more closely, Safiya Umoja Noble scrutinizes the ways in which algorithmic processes, notably those that drive Google's search engine, are shaped by and sustain discriminatory regimes at the expense of vulnerable minorities. Finally, Roopika Risam's critique interrogates the field of the digital humanities itself, which—notwithstanding good intentions—remains dominated by the Global North and is at risk of perpetuating the very power structures that it seeks to dismantle.
Across the humanities and in the performative arts the experiment — commonly associated with the empirical sciences — is gaining ground. These diverse endeavours understand the experiment as a formalized (re)staging of an encounter that may produce unforeseen results. Such encounters put greater emphasis on the research environment and foreground the participation of previously neglected human and non-human actors. As a consequence, increasing attention is paid to the constitution, agency, and surfaces of objects of knowledge. The lectures and discussion aim to examine the relation, distinction, and interplay between experimental practices, laboratory settings, and creative processes, as well as the status of repetition, restaging, and novelty within knowledge production in the humanities and the performative arts. Nishant Shah Error 400 – Bad Request: Authorship, Authority, Authenticity in the Experimental Setup The model of the experiment often comes with the imagined attributes of neutrality and openness, particularly made glamorous by the promise of failure. Ideas of replication, verification, and scalability further reinforce the idea of the experiment as a pure form of knowledge production that can be constructed and repeated as a universal given, thus offering a truth that can be evidenced. Shah proposes that experimental setups depend upon the political, contested, and exclusionary constructions of authorship, authority, and authenticity, which are hidden in the description of the experimental setup. Looking at a postcolonial feminist history of digital technologies, computational networks, and cybernetics, this talk will dismantle the experimental setup by looking at the conditions of asking questions and the need to expand the idea of the experiment beyond the logistics of apparatus, process, and replication. Nishant Shah is the Vice-President of Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts and a research mentor with the Hivos Foundation's 'Digital Earth' programme. His current preoccupation is with ...
