Our minds developed over millennia as we strove to survive in a physical world that was mysterious and challenging, which is of course why we developed such a strong desire to create tools and frameworks in the first place–to help us understand and shape the physical world. This is why the new media of virtual worlds is so compelling.
Immersing ourselves perceptually in virtual world environments initially seems like the ultimate detachment from what it means to be human. It seems like a synthetic imitation, without substance yet simulating substance, our identities embodied as avatars walking across the streets of cities that do not exist. Yet, there is a deep resonance in this perception. We understand virtual worlds as we understand the physical world. We understand the idea of people and places within those worlds. Something ancient in our minds silently clicks into place and our minds begin to interpret the virtual world as real. It feels real and we feel real within it.
Virtual worlds exist today most commonly as video games. They also exist as open-ended creative platforms without predefined goals. As a canvas for new media expression, they provide new opportunities for engaging people in perceptually immersive experiences. New languages for storytelling and artistic expression unfold with new affordances. Advances in technology will only make these virtual worlds more perceptually immersive.

We will eventually be able to lose ourselves in environments that fully engage all of our senses. At some future point in time, we will not be able to tell the difference between the virtual experiences and the physical ones. Distinctions between virtual and real will be meaningless.
In this way, the virtual world metaphor will collapse into a new shared reality. As we approach that point, we will be coming full circle: back to fulfilling our basic human desires to explore, understand, and shape the world around us, back to our needs to explore new worlds with other people, back to what makes us most human.

John Lester (AKA Pathfinder)

Photo by Marek Kapolka, courtesy Mojang.

The differences between interactivity and agency aren’t entirely clear, but one way of looking at it is to see an interaction as an atomic element–one action and one reaction–and agency as the sum of an agent’s potential actions. More important, though, is to distinguish the aesthetics of interactivity and agency from the aesthetics of non-interactive elements within a video game. When creating an interactive system, there are necessary non-interactive elements that deliver information about the state of the system to the player. In a game, these might be avatars showing the position of the player characters or health bars displaying their physical state. These non-interactive elements have their own aesthetic and can contribute significantly to the overall feel of a game, but they do not necessarily indicate the level of agency for players.

In digital video games, the distinction between interactive and non-interactive elements is understood, respectively, in terms of “gameplay” and “visuals,” “graphics,” “sound,” etc. It is generally accepted, among gamers, that gameplay has a preeminent position among the other facets of a video game. A game that has very airy and lighthearted visuals can still feel claustrophobic if interactive player agency is too limited. The other facets are nice. They are a spectacle and can keep a game intriguing, but they are not a game’s artistic raison d’être. In other words, artists working in different media can express non-interactive ideas better than with video games, whereas artists working in the domain of games have the unique ability to advance ideas about interactive player agency.

Photo by Marek Kapolka, courtesy Nintendo

Most gamers are not self-declared artists, however, and they do not share the same artistic goals. Games qua games exist as a platform on which to learn how to better manipulate and conquer the system of play. They provide an environment with rigidly defined rules, clear winning and losing conditions, and a limited set of potential actions that players can take. The players’ goal is to become better at winning. The design ideal is to constantly present challenging problems that players must surmount, so that as they defeat the challenges they are bathed in exaltations.

To some video game artists, however, this myopic focus on challenge is asphyxiating. Although games are unique in their ability to provide this kind of confrontational, direct challenge, there is another potential paradigm–to explore agency in terms of interactive aesthetics as an end in itself, rather than as a means to challenge players. Simply acting within a video game can provide an immense amount of aesthetic pleasure, even if those actions are not challenged by the hostile requirements of an antagonistic system or directed towards the completion of a mandated task.

The aesthetic potential of undirected interaction has been proven in several existing video games: for instance, jumping around aimlessly in the castle garden of Super Mario 64; carving out mines to build castles in Minecraft; or, driving around in Grand Theft Auto. Each of these undirected interactions, even if taken outside of the larger context of the game, would be interesting and engaging. However, for some reason when artists do venture to make a video game that sets aside the larger narrative and stacked challenges, such as in the case of Noby Noby Boy, critics accuse them of making something pointless, which raises the question: what’s the point of a goal-driven game?

By Marek Kapolka

That video game artists are becoming more and more capable of emulating these other modes of narrative storytelling is technically astounding, but considering the potential to generate new and unique formats from these borrowed techniques, mere emulation is not impressive. Storytellers throughout history have succeeded at depicting fixed narratives, in lieu of making something dramatic happen and in a variety of ways. Video games push storytelling even further, offering genuine simulations of causal events. They can be approximations of what it is to exist within indeterminate stories, to gain a better understanding of how they unfold, better than what is possible from passive observation. Currently, however, video games neglect to explore these possibilities and this is dissatisfying.

An early milestone in the evolution of video game narratives was the transition from lo-res raster images and text to fully cinematic sequences with sets, stunts, choreography, acting, lighting, and cameras. During this maturation period, both players and storytellers developed a new understanding of and taste for the medium. Proper terminologies developed from critical discussions, and the discourse on gaming technology commenced. Today, it would seem that video games have long surpassed that initial nascent era, given the proliferation of games that are examined within academic and artistic contexts. Now, serious exploration of new conceptual frontiers has not only been proven possible, but also necessary if video games are to continue evolving into a more respectable and culturally significant artistic medium.

Confronting video games as more than a compilation of elements from other established modes of storytelling raises the more complicated issue of defining those frontiers that are worth exploring. Genuine simulations are one possible area of games worth exploring, and among the most straightforward; they are a logical progression from storytelling, given the opportunities granted by new technologies, such as real-time interactive virtual cameras. Interactions between player-characters and non-player-characters, even those that are hard coded–that is, those that occur for every player that experiences the game–are immensely more effective than interactions observed. To see a story element carried out onscreen details the natures of characters and sets precedents for the relationships between interacting parties. If a character involved is an avatar, a player-character, then the act that results ultimately happens due to the decisions that player has made that have, in turn, brought their avatar to a particular point in the game.

Relationships in simulated game stories belong to players in addition to their characters. Players must take some degree of responsibility for their avatars’ actions, as they themselves are the entities who propel the story forward. It is only through the input of players that game stories progress. Everything that occurs is the result of decisions made by players. This responsibility, this sense of ownership, makes events much more emotional and personal as players are not ultimately detached from the story. Whatever connection players have with the avatar is within the story; it is the bridge by which they effect events inside the game as much as they are affected by those events. If storytelling is a way of teaching significant lessons, addressing morality, or simply a means to entertain, there is no greater method of impacting an audience, no greater way to raise the stakes, than to position the audience as players who have direct emotional investments in the story.

A video game story that is effected by its audience raises a number of questions as to how it might be crafted. Instead of constructing narratives alone, game designers must also consider environmental conditions. Whereas previous storytelling mechanisms embraced the presence of the author’s guiding hand, well-crafted video game narratives are guided by an invisible hand. Narratives “told” in games invariably contain more elements than the central plot line. It is even possible to omit a central plot altogether, to instead build worlds that are stocked with a number of interesting stories, each with the potential to have numerous outcomes. As plot progression moves away from a single fixed idea presented by a single author and branches out into a wider array of possibilities that depend on player input, the genre of emergent video game stories begins to materialize. In this way, video games transcend other media because they move beyond the singular story with one title and invariable message and introduce crafted possibilities of numerous stories. To discuss a video game with other players is, in some cases, to call to mind a particular story about which you may collectively reminisce in a manner similar to discussing a film or book. In other cases, discussing a game with other players may be an opportunity to share any number of possible stories that occurred within a limited contingent reality. Certain plot points, themes, characters, and sets may or may not be similar, creating journeys that are unique and personal.

Leading video game artists have established a storytelling spectrum much broader than other mediums–their own specialized craft, yet still much more limited than reality. Their video games share many features and require much of the same skill sets to produce as the other established modes of storytelling, but they also have exclusive and distinct characteristics. On one hand, it is worrisome that, given all these unexplored frontiers of storytelling in video games, so much of the money within the commercial industry is focused on emulating the quality of other narrative mediums and then reconciling those facets of production with interactive elements to make a seamlessly packaged product. On the other hand, the video game is still a young medium that, while no longer in its infancy, is certainly struggling through its incipient phase where both players and developers are operating within cultures that are only just acknowledging the potential for exploring new conceptual conceits.

By Michael Tucker

Photo by anonymous, courtesy molleindustria

Instead, video game artists can train players to acknowledge their own agency in a way that carries over from the virtual to the real world.
Measured against this activist standard, Every Day the Same Dream is an evil application of the medium. Depicted in the video game world is a poetic facsimile of the upper-middle class nuclear family, proceeding along the tedious course of a white-collar white man’s life, and it is built in such a way that denies players any agency to change their subjected status.

Photo by anonymous, courtesy molleindustria

Characters do not even have the ability to futilely resist. The most empowered actions the characters perform are “don’t put on clothes” and “touch a cow.” This video game’s message is clear: you cannot escape. The artists have consciously depicted their target player audience; who else but those who sympathize would spend their time on such a tedious video game? It seems an ironic gesture that the real world white-collar players are so controlled and subdued that they would never dream of rebellion within this virtual white-collar world. Even the most radical actions they can consider will lead them nowhere. Their only option is suicide, which many of their colleagues have already chosen. Every Day the Same Dream fails to pose any critical commentary on contemporary life. The video game introduces nothing to its players with which they do not already agree. It is a reckless perpetuation of the imagined mythic chains that bind them, pandering to purportedly disenfranchised players.

As if reinforcing the enslavement of its players was not enough, the video game also creates an internal hierarchy of its component media to keep established forces in control of the revolutionary. Video games can be seen as a gestalt comprised of elements of many other media: visuals, sound, plot, and interaction are some of the elements that contribute to the game as a whole. However, the interactive component of Every Day the Same Dream exists only as a means of displaying the non-interactive parts. When playing, the only reason the player continues is to watch the vignettes that serve as aglets for the shoestring paths of the video game. Controlling the character provides minimal interest for players.

This hierarchical infrastructure of media is by no means unique to this video game. It seems a common idea among certain types of video game artists and thinkers that, if passive art has such an established history, then games can only be art if they embrace this traditional mode of viewership. This tradition stems, in part, from the notion that art relies on the exact and genius vision of one artist who controls precisely what the viewers are supposed to see. If video games allow the players to make choices, the artist has given up this control. Not only is this an outdated definition of art – there are plenty examples of generative, participatory, systemic, and other art forms that require the artist to relinquish some degree of control over the finished product – it is also a completely inaccurate definition of video games.

Photo by anonymous, courtesy Tale of Tales

Video game designers have absolute control over every action the player can perform within the bounds of the game, and any action the player takes that puts them beyond the realm of the game causes the player to cease playing the same game.

These passive video games are not solely coming from those working within the machinery of the mainstream culture industry. The most egregious offenders come from those who supposedly represent the avant-garde in video game design: self-professed conceptual artists like Tale of Tales and Jordan Magnuson, who have thought long and hard about the medium, separated themselves from external pressures, and all but declared that yes, it’s clear, the future of video games as art is to do away with the player’s agency. We’re dreadfully sorry, but it just has to go – how else can video games be art? No other form of art lets you do things. It’s for the best.

Using video games in this way demeans the potential of play and perpetuates the reign of passive art. Although it’s fast becoming a truism, it bears repeating: there is a seemingly infinite amount of squandered potential in video games. Everyone seems to acknowledge this, but almost no one is doing anything to approach that potential, either because they are paralyzed by financial necessities, enjoy creating meaningless paracosms that satisfy mainstream tastes, or are stuck in the past, making video games that prostrate themselves in front of their non-interactive artistic predecessors.

By Yomi

“My works and video arts are similar to mental puzzles, where you can travel from one point to another by analyzing a picture’s symbolic objects. There is always something for the observer to discover. “

Tammy Mike Laufer is an Israeli contemporary artist who creates hybrid digital art. She incorporates both video art and digital painting references from art movements such as Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop, and Feminist art. Her work shows traces of Salvador Dali’s depiction of dreams, Frida Kahlo’s palette, Andy Warhol’s silk prints, and Judi Chicago’s early feminist work. By drawing her inspiration from different artists, Laufer creates her own digital art language through which she emphasizes the isolated human condition in the technological age.

Laufer’s digital paintings depict various objects and subjects, including cars and skyscrapers within urban fantasy landscapes and a series of a generic woman separated from the material world. The depiction of a woman detached from her environment and floating within an arid background imitates a womb, referencing well-known early minimalist feminist work by Chicago depicting images of the vulva in an abstract manner. There is also a deeper relation between Laufer and Chicago since they are both female artists who had their own struggles in the art world. Maybe that is why Laufer depicts her women isolated and alienated from their surroundings, or maybe she places them in a safe place such as the womb in order to protect them from the patriarchal world.

Image courtesey of the artist.

Interestingly, Laufer’s recent artwork depicts pigs while referencing the global economic struggle. PIGS CRISIS (2011) is a video installation inspired by the swine flu “media-panic” that replaced the media’s obsession with the recent economic recession. Included are portrayals of real pigs that fly in a dark galaxy. Similar to a video game simulation, the pigs fight each other and are confronted by flu viruses. In addition, the term “PIGS” is an acronym for the four countries (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) whose national debts and economic crises are a threat to the European economy and to the stability of the European Union. Eventually, the pigs withdraw from view and the video ends with coins piling up signaling “game over.” There are no winners and no losers, as if to suggest that we cannot be certain about the future and who will be on top in the end. This is Laufer’s well-crafted version of a short narrative.

Laufer’s digital paintings and video art depict different notions of alienation and struggle. As an artist, she consistently critiques and expresses her ideas about life; even if she presents imaginary fantastic images, the message is clear and pertinent to reality. She prompts viewers to be hypersensitive to their surroundings, in an effort to increase awareness about the nature of art and its social relevance.

By Maayan Glaser-Koren

Scene one: silhouettes of a high-rise building skyline by night, blue smoke clouds, and a small group of people with Mickey Mouse ears who are playfully swiping or, perhaps, actually punching each other. Above, the light beams of military helicopters are circling coolly and quietly.

Another scene: two watchtowers on the beach, a romantic sunset in front of which the watchtower guards wave to each other and look deeper into each other’s eyes through binoculars. Between the towers, someone is hauling a lifeless body away. On the horizon, a warship is cruising sedately through the ocean, underscored by the staccato of Morse code signals.

A further scene: night reigns and between the camouflaged bushes and trunks, several human silhouettes are discernable, pulling on a rope. Perhaps they are in an adventure camp–the jungle rhythms and the mating calls of a tropical frog seem to suggest so–and is it a big stone, a whale, or a tank tied in the rope that they are pulling. Under a tree, two reservists seem to have been waiting a long time for their deployment; a sea of emptied beer bottles has accumulated around them. An ostrich nearby is sticking its head in the sand; as usual, a cripple is struggling away on his crutches; and further groups of human figures pass by, carrying each other away or hitting one another.

Indeed, Paz develops her dramaturgies as a collection of isolated combinations of reality and fiction. The mysterious mood of the scenes from IS THIS A GOOD DAY TO START A WAR (2009)–an exhibition with several videos and large scale panoramas–arises from Paz’s unconventional use and superimposition of documentary references and images with the aesthetic subjects and motifs of animated film, which assume a contrasting function.

Image courtesy of the artist.

The scenes allude to social and military events without explicitly specifying any particular incident. Since Sharon Paz is an Israeli artist, it is a logical step to interpret her work within the very specific political situation of her country. Where else can one watch warships and warplanes from a beach towel and afterwards go to work or to the shopping centre? The everyday, the holiday, and the constant potential for political and military emergencies merge into one layered existence in Paz’s homeland, producing a pervasive tension from which the search for entertainment offers an escape. Juxtaposing the cut-out silhouettes of sparring figures with Mickey Mouse ears and military equipment, Paz aims to imagine a collective memory, while also referring back to reality by incorporating documentary photography from the Palmach archives. Indeed, there is a specific political undertone to her work.

Founded in 1941 by Hagana, a Jewish underground organization in the British Mandate of Palestine, the Palmach was a paramilitary outfit that specialized in covert military training. The Palmach was relatively small, but played an important role in Israel-Palestine relations. Its members were trained in basic military capabilities, which qualified them for positions of command in the subsequent Israeli armed forces. The photographs from the Palmach archives show young men and women training in attack and defence exercises in disturbingly cheerful camps.

These photos were the inspiration for IS THIS A GOOD DAY TO START A WAR. However, Paz is not interested in simply reproducing or re-staging these photographic documents; she is interested in understanding how people manage to accept war as part of normal life. In the composition of images, choreography of action, and sequences of movement, her layered video art resembles a computer game more so than photographs. For example, computer game figures repetitively simulate activities, programmed in micro-movement loops, until they get an action command from a player. Waiting for that command input, the figures seem to be holding themselves in permanent readiness for (violent) action. They are the perfect reservists, so to speak, or witnesses whose endlessly repeating micro-movements have neither reason nor purpose: these are movements that go nowhere, movement for movement’s sake. While the fairytale ambience à la Lotte Reiniger gives an almost childlike, gaudy, cuteness to the figures, their performance, which follows the logic of a computer game, reinforces the aspect of constant simulation. Hilarity creeps into the work due to the absurdity of this permanent escalating simulation. Still, one cannot be quite sure about the actual aggressiveness of the silhouette figures. There are several astonishing examples of commercial computer games that are beamed into the market and transform young people into cold-blooded amok runners. It is exactly this situation that interests Paz–virtually arming people against perceived threats–and the possibility that eventually this rehearsed violence will be useful.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Paz hits the nail on the head with the title: IS THIS A GOOD DAY TO START A WAR. The question seems absurd, at least in Europe, which according to its own self-conception waged its last war more than 60 years ago. Israel, on the contrary, is a country which has been tangled up in half a dozen warlike conflicts over the last few decades and perceives itself to be encircled by enemies. Things are different there, and perhaps people really do ask themselves some mornings, before taking their children to kindergarten, whether someone has not deemed today the day to start the next war. Military logic creeps into everyday life in Israel. Citizens must be prepared for the outbreak of war at any time. Hence, any day could be a good day to start a war. When I called Paz shortly after the outbreak of the Gaza attack in December 2008 to discuss whether or not I should postpone my planned visit, she showed concern about the calmness with which Israelis were carrying on with their normal lives. However, with the title of her work, Sharon Paz summarizes an attitude that is not exclusive to Israelis. It is no different from when the German army mission in Afghanistan staged a peace mission. Citizens in many parts of the world consider the next war to be completely unavoidable and, as a result, mentally prepare for it.

Alongside the use of Mickey Mouse pop culture iconography, cut-out silhouettes from early cartoons, and computer game aesthetics, a formally striking aspect of this video artwork is the slide-like ordering of scenery into panoramas that are traversed by the eye like a sequence shot in a film. In the foreground and background, various small fragments of the action are installed. The panoramas displayed in the exhibition follow a very similar principle and aesthetic. The narrative fragments of the works are reminiscent of romantic paintings, as well as the photo wallpaper developed by contemporary designers. Paz succeeds in keeping her complex worlds of layered aesthetics and histories formal and yet transparent enough to accommodate photographs inspired by the Palmach archives, other war imagery from documentary and fictional film epics, and, ultimately, the private image banks of observers.

By Dörte Ilsabé Denneman

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