But I am worried that my late remarks at MLA 11 are touching a nerve in a way that is not provocative (in the good sense), but blithely exclusionary. The particular remarks are as follows:

“Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of Digital Humanities and I say ‘yes.’”

“Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things [. . .] If you are not making anything, you are not . . . a digital humanist.”

I suppose I could say that both of those quotes are taken out of context, but given that all quotes are by nature taken out of context, it does not seem exactly fair to protest. But just stating things like this (as I soon discovered) really does touch upon a number of anxieties both in Digital Humanities (DH) and among those who bid participation. I do not know if I can alleviate that anxiety. I am not even sure that I want to, insofar as some anxieties can be oddly productive. But there is a lot more to be said here.

I have had the pleasure of talking with lots and lots of people in DH from among a wide range of disciplines. And I have been having that conversation since the mid-nineties. I have discovered that there are lots of things that distinguish an historian from, say, a literary critic or a philosopher, and there are a lot of differences between 1995 and 2011. But to me, there has always been a profound — and profoundly exciting and enabling — commonality to everyone who finds their way to DH. And that commonality, I think, involves moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.”

Excerpt from http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/

By Steve Ramsay

Game titled Zig Zag Flag Shag 1991

According to Assistant English Professor Dr. Lori Emerson of University of Colorado at Boulder, a born-digital literature piece must be an “artifact that generally must be read/viewed on a computer and also makes the most of what the digital medium has to offer” (L. Emerson, personal communication, February, 24 2011). This means that pieces of born-digital literature (also called digital fiction and e-lit) cannot be printed out and have the same effect; the use of code, flash, hypertext, and overall variability that comes with user interaction cannot be translated into the printed word. So, what does this mean to the computer savvy masses that make up the twenty-first century? Literacy is taken to a whole new level—not only must we learn to read words, but we must learn how to read digital literature.

To review an attempt at defining this new form of literacy, “A [S]creed for Digital Fiction”—written cooperatively by Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, Dave Ciccoricco, Hans Rustad, Jess Laccetti, and Jessica Pressman and housed in the Electronic Book Review—establishes a “creed for the screen,” in an attempt to create guidelines for the exploration of digital fiction as well as to define what digital fiction is and is not. Divided into over twenty components, the [s]creed addresses topics ranging from its use of “close analysis” and “reading” to more digital-specific concepts like “cybersomatics and corporeality,” “nodes,” and “topologies.” Though the [s]creed acknowledges that the act of reading is innately linear, the multilinearity of digital fiction’s medium is also touted, relating to the ideas of multimedial and multimodal awareness in the genre itself. It is this added layer of complexity and accretion of meanings that define the overarching theme of this text, as well as the revolutionary attitude that digital fiction is something to be defined and examined in a very specific manner.

Screen from Nightingale’s Playground 2010

Many questions, however, arise from such a [s]creed. Implicit in the title of this document is the limitation of genre; why fiction and not poetry? Will there be a different [s]creed for digital poetry, and if so, how will it be different, if at all? Throughout the document, the idea of the reader sitting in front of a screen with digital fiction on it accompanied by the clicking of a mouse already sounds outdated—does this document cover touch screens and e-paper? In light of the constant changes in new technology, how can we ever keep up? Will new [s]creeds be made for different types of screens? A distinction is made between reading, watching, playing, and “experiencing” digital fiction. How is experience different from these other active verbs and can this apply to printed texts that incorporate aspects of interactive fiction (i.e. House of Leaves)? Certain diction choices in the [s]creed call to attention its assumptions and limitations as well; is this just a utopian academic manual for “us” and if so, who is this “us”? Does the use of the plural pronoun suggest that this [s]creed should be universal, even if digital fiction is not universal due to its modal limitations? Namely, the access to digital fiction is rarer than access to print fiction, which leads this document to be highly theoretical and hopeful that “we” as “experiencers” will constantly encounter digital fiction. Implicit in these issues is the perennial nature of constantly evolving technologies—it took a few centuries for mankind to step up from the printing press to digital machines, but nowadays new forms of technology and communication are being pushed out every few months. Will this be a problem for English majors who want to embrace e-lit, yet have trouble keeping up with the methods of creation?

Despite these questions that shake the foundations of this [s]creed, it is still quite ambitious and useful in its scope, offering detailed definitions of the tenets of digital fiction and that for which it stands. Particularly significant is its listing of what digital fiction is not: blogs, e-books, and communitarian digital fiction. The cultural significance of having a definition of digital fiction and a way to decipher it is enormous because this reveals that the medium is shifting, and with every medium shift there must be a new paradigm to overlap with it and new scholars to define it.

I am confident that the definition of born-digital literature will stick around, and will gain momentum in the coming years. To many, born-digital literature is just another way to describe text-heavy new media pieces. That definition is not what matters here. It is how we, as readers, react to and interact with these works of art that reflect the mutable and developing nature of our digitally saturated world.

By Pollyanna Macchiano

Willard McCarty has been contributing papers on the subject for years (a monograph too). Under the earlier appellation, John Unsworth has advised us “what is humanities computing and what is it not.” Most recently Patrik Svensson has been publishing a series of well-documented articles on multiple aspects of the topic, including the lexical shift from humanities computing to digital humanities. Moreover, as Cynthia Selfe in an ADE Bulletin from 1988 reminds us, computers have been part of our disciplinary lives for well over two decades now. During this time digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in English than any other departmental home.

Digital humanities, which began as a term of consensus among a relatively small group of researchers, is now backed on a growing number of campuses by a level of funding, infrastructure, and administrative commitments that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Even more recently, I would argue, the network effects of blogs and Twitter at a moment when the academy itself is facing massive and often wrenching changes linked both to new technologies and the changing political and economic landscape has led to the construction of “digital humanities” as a freefloating signifier, one that increasingly serves to focus the anxiety and even outrage of individual scholars over their own lack of agency amid the turmoil in their institutions and profession.

Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online. Is that not something you want in your English department?

From http://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/kirschenbaum_ade150.pdf

By Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

I will not even attempt to account for the volume of discussion on this issue. However, I believe it is safe to say that “digital humanities” raises many more eyebrows than the term “humanities computing.” And this is a rhetorical issue to me. For example, if one looks at the Companion to Digital Humanities, the terms “digital humanities” and “humanities computing” are used interchangeably. Kirschenbaum’s ADE article (which I cited in my last post as well) begins with the question, “What is (or are) the ‘digital humanities,’ aka ‘humanities computing’?” He then traces a very specific genesis of the term “digital humanities” through an interview with John Unsworth, who he quotes:

“The real origin of that term [digital humanities] was in conversation with Andrew McNeillie, the original acquiring editor for the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities. We started talking with him about that book project in 2001, in April, and by the end of November we’d lined up contributors and were discussing the title, for the contract. Ray [Siemens] wanted “a Companion to Humanities Computing,” as that was the term commonly used at that point; the editorial and marketing folks at Blackwell wanted “Companion to Digitized Humanities.” I suggested “Companion to Digital Humanities” to shift the emphasis away from simple digitization.

So there you go. I think it is undoubtedly the case that the term digital humanities was meant to mean humanities computing. It also seems clear that the switch was a rhetorical move. From this passage it is impossible to know if the term “digitized humanities” or “digital humanities” was thought to be more accurate in some epistemological, (inter)disciplinary, sense than “humanities computing,” or if the switch was intended as a way of creating a title that might have broader appeal. The reference to “marketing folks” makes me think the latter, but one can’t be sure. Now someone who is not a rhetorician may think that is a kind of criticism, but it is not coming from me. The switch, in my view, would represent a belief on the part of the authors and editors regarding who they believe their audience should be. Digital humanities addresses that audience in a way that humanities computing does not.

Excerpt from http://www.alex-reid.net/2011/02/the-rhetoric-of-digital-humanities.html

By Alex Reid