Digital Humanities, Counting, And Form

[NOTE: I'm anxious to post this while still (somewhat) fresh in my mind despite it being prior to the formal start of the HASTAC Scholar program.]

On August 1st Laura Mandell from Miami University, Ohio visited my home institution, Dartmouth College, on the invitation of Research Computing to present on NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) and her experiences both as an architect of “cyber-infrastructure” and a user, through the Poetess Archive project. She described NINES as an intervention in what she, and many others, have described as a crisis in academic publishing. Through a suite of tools, primarily one called COLLEX users of NINES “curate” digital exhibits or projects across the range of affiliated NINES projects. In this way NINES appears to function as both a federation and a repository. As described, NINES has evolved through several of the major stumbling blocks for projects in the digital humanities, and for data repositories in general. These include licensing (COLLEX users select from Creative Commons Licenses), standardized data/information submission (XML-based project submission), and peer-review (through the creation of review boards).

The larger issue at hand, as always, is in finding ways to make scholarly projects “count.” By count, I mean in the various ways Bill Brown uses the term counting, as in, for example, his mise en scène of a dean examining a stack of materials as evidence of scholarly output in her decision of whether to grant a promotion. Laura, and NINES’s, solution to this problem (can we call it a lack of physicality?) is to print paper versions of digital projects on demand. Rice University Press, in particular, has made progress in promoting themselves as digital publishers and through a partnership with NINES can turn the virtual into that highly valued physical “thing,” the single-author monograph. While this transformation from the hyper to the printed, fixed, and linear will surely assist our deans and tenure committees in locating objects, it leaves open other questions of counting. For example, how are we to understand the disciplinary nature of a curated exhibit? One can easily imagine the first steps to producing such a project would be to select a series of objects, say photographs of furniture or paintings, from digital archives and then constructing a narrative around them. Do we place these projects within the domain of art history or are we somewhere else? Another question to be asked in this, what I presume to be temporary, scenario of printing on demand these projects fundamentally different from any number of journal articles making use of material culture studies? Perhaps not so in the printed form, but we have introduced a great change in flattening out a web of connections and in removing viewer interaction.

Finally, another important form of academic accumulation is in the social capital gained in the public display of scholarship. The Division of Humanities at The University of Chicago has an annual party for faculty members who have published books during the previous year. Among copious amounts of the best wine and cheese served all year faculty circulate around a large table viewing the spread of colorful books. The occasional CD appears, but the primary fetish object is the monograph. I imagine in the near future events such as these may feature a computer, or perhaps one per digital project, but the question will now be: what sort of digital project is the equivalent to a book? Will we have a division dean measuring the size (in megabytes, bandwidth, number of clicks?) of a project? Or perhaps we should count the time spent writing code, encoding text, searching archives, and formulating an interpretation.

Despite a number of reservations regarding the digital humanities, I’m excited about the infusion of energy into the humanities from projects such as NINES. Issues around peer-review and evaluation will eventually be worked out as more scholars become familiar with technology and with the promotion of scholars already working with these media. One of the greatest benefits, which will eventually come, might be in the transformation of this form of scholarship from the curatorial to the argumentative.