Digital Humanities & The Disciplines

So I attended the 'Digital Humanities and the Disciplines' Conference a couple of weeks ago and I have just come around to collecting my thoughts about it. Here they are - and they seem to be quite relevant to our discussions on Media History:

Two bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Chris Kelly

Check out Kelly's book at twobits.net.

For Kelly, Free Software offers at once a way to understand Media History (much of his book follows this history behind Free Software such as Linux) and a way to rethink the discipline's work in the age of New Media. For Kelly, free software is not just the object of study of his book but also his methodology (hence the book being available on his website for free). Ultimately, Kelly is trying to figure out what is the cultural significance of free software ("encouraging modification" and "making things public" seem to be two ways of answering that question for him).

For Kelly free software follows a history through these 5 steps:

1. Fomenting a movement.

2. Sharing a source code.

3. Defining an open infrastructure.

4. Writing copyleft licenses.

and 5. Coordinating cooperation. (You should really visit his site/read his book since I don't think I could do justice to his chronology/elaboration)

... which he traces in following the history of Linux.

But what really caught my attention in hearing Kelly talk about his project was the notion of 'Recursive Public' that he believes free software creates (where we have a public that argues about technology through and with technology in order to keep technology public).

In this sense, he says, we should look at Wikipedia not as a tool anathema to academia, for example, but as a diagnostic of the way academia gets done. In Kelly's sense then, free software is not just an object of study, but a tool for reflection: what does it tell us about our disciplines, our tools, our ways of knowing, etc.? And this is what is fascinating about Kelly's approach, which is at once historiographical but also analytical and self-conscious. One of Kelly's most provocative moments came up when he asked (rhetorically?) - "why are/would academics pay attention to this? what does it say about them/the humanities?" A question which I think a lot of us here try and grapple with every day.

Cyberinfrastructure and Cultural Heritage

Greg Crane

For Crane, the point of thinking about the 'new' digital age and the humanities is about embracing new technologies in order to think/pursue things we have never before been able to think/pursue before, a project which he breaks down as follows:

eWissenschaft (Objective Knowledge): What new topics can we pursue?

eHumanities (Lived Intellectual Life): What new thoughts can we think?

ePublication (Minimal Criteria): What does it mean?

eProduction (Who does what?): Implications of undergraduate research.

If that sounds a bit obscure, allow me to elaborate. For Crane the biggest obstacle/barrier of humanity is LANGUAGE and new technologies allow us to bypass. For Crane, the projects that we should be focusing on should be cross-cultural, cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary in nature. His main example came from trying to find Platonic influences in Iranian ideology: a project that without new technologies which allow us to translate and quickly isolate and cross-reference passages in multiple languages, would be unthinkable if not unworkable. This of course yields a lot of collaborative work: new technologies can do the brunt work but we need collaborative academic endeavours to bridge differences and craft new projects and conclusions. New digital projects where annotated editions are dynamic and allow for undergraduate work on old languages are also on Crane's mind when he thinks of what the digital age can offer the humanities, thus enabling a different type of research for our undergraduate students, even if it is couched in a sort of formalism that bears little or no use outside of the Classics departments.

Added to this, Crane also believes new media should also be revolutionalizing Academia (in terms of publication, tenure-tracks and creating a more open-source, collaborative model in research - echoing Kelly's talk)

That's all for now. I'll have write-ups about Martha Nell Smith and David Jaffe's presentation and the roundtable that followed.