Submitted by Kathleen on Feb 12, 2009, 10:27 AM
As I was reminded during the recent forum on the future of the digital humanities, the field of "digital humanities" does not represent a break with "traditional" methods or forms of scholarship; it offers instead a new set of tools, and new ways of thinking, in addressing the questions raised by research in the humanities. Perhaps within the next few years the term "digital humanities" will come to be seen as old-fashioned and outdated, much in the same way that the name "horseless carriage" reflected old ways of framing and perceiving innovative technology. After all, this term indicated that the new invention would be judged according to the current situation without understanding how revolutionary that new invention would become. Here I am reminded of a quote about how at the turn of the 20th century a reasonably astute person could have predicted that the invention of the car would have a big impact on American society, and a brilliant person could predict the development of the interstate highway system as a result, but only a science-fiction writer could have predicted traffic. I think that these new paradigms offered by "digital humanities" will open up amazing highways and avenues for thought, but since I'm not a writer of science-fiction I will leave the contemplation of "traffic" for others.

I am amazed by the possibilities offered by new techniques of literary analysis, such as Professor Franco Moretti's fascinating (and funny) analysis of lengthy book titles and what can be learned from a systematic overview of an entire corpus for a specific time period, possible only with the aid of computers, in his keynote address at the Digital Humanities conference here in Champaign-Urbana in 2007 (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007/). I learned a great deal from this conference, and I'm really looking forward to the upcoming HASTAC conference here in April. Conferences like these ones are such a great way to learn about work in other areas--to "traverse" disciplines in search of innovation.

My own work as an American scholar in the field of Germanic literature, combined with my background in library science, constantly requires me to traverse certain types of boundaries (geographic, for example--there is a great deal of primary source material available online, but the bulk of my research will still require on-site archival work in Germany).

Currently I'm working on a dissertation topic based on early modern women in German-speaking lands who collected texts-I'm necessarily using works that deal with the broader western European context of collecting, gender roles, and means of representation. I'm interesting in exploring how these women viewed their own activities as collectors and how they have been represented in the literary tradition. For example, Sophie Eleonore von Stolberg-Stolberg (1669-1745), assembled a collection of over 40,000 Leichenpredigten (funeral sermons), yet she is not given credit as a collector in her own right. These funeral sermons contain a wealth of genealogical information about the period and this collection is very important, yet this woman's conscious act of amassing this amazing resource is instead portrayed as "accidental," as though she could not possibly have understood what she was doing.

My work reminds me that other, more complicated boundaries still exist. Many of the intelligent and capable early modern women I am studying are still viewed as amateurs in the shadow of male family members rather than as important collectors and patrons of culture in their own right. Much has changed since their time, yet there is still room for improvement. For example, I would argue that my position as a female graduate student in a department in which the majority of professors are female (and many have young children) is quite unusual; in many professions women are still forced to choose between career advancement and family. I'm curious why there are so few women in top-level management positions in general, let alone professions in which women are well-represented (library science and the humanities, for example)? Will the "interstate highways" and avenues offered by innovative tools for humanities scholarship open these doors a little wider in the future?

HASTAC III. "Traversing Digital Boundaries."
This blog is part of a series of blogs leading up to the third annual HASTAC conference, which will be held April 19-21, 2009, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the theme "Traversing Digital Boundaries." As the theme suggests, the gathering will focus on the exploration of new territory and on work that crosses, manipulates, or simply ignores traditional boundaries. The conference program will include presentations of research, performances, technology demonstrations, posters, panel discussions, and "virtual" participation via telepresence technology. For more information, visit http://www.chass.uiuc.edu/Index/Entries/2009/1/26_HASTAC_III.htmlor contact HASTAC3@ncsa.uiuc.edu.