I want to apologize before I start if this post seems a little surly. I’ve been on the soapbox about this several times lately, so I might get a little fired up.
I remember when Jimmy Fallon was on Saturday Night Live he did a recurrent character called “Nick Burns, your company’s computer guy.” The premise was he would walk into the room, diagnose the computer problem in seconds, make a few keystrokes, then “make fun of you” for not being able to do it yourself.
I also remember fighting tooth and nail against the idea of the “Digital native,” not only because of what being native to something means but also because the idea itself– that some people have mastery over digital technology because they were born into a generation with deeper saturation– doesn’t hold up to actual research scrutiny.
I mention these two things in concert to start this post because somewhere between Nick Burns and the digital native the collaborators who make up a great deal of the digital humanities got lost driving around in the utopian narrative that stilts up DH as a thing.
Before I get pessimistic and potentially ruffle feathers, let me make it clear that I consider myself a Digital Humanist (is that what we’re going with? DHer sounds weird) and that I believe, very strongly and to the point that I’d wage battle in a faculty meeting, that digital humanities is the only real way the humanities can go other than the route of becoming a hobby and not the backbone of a college education. The world is increasingly more dependent upon digital technologies, and our research grows by leaps and bounds– as does our ability to deliver and to reach diverse audiences– with each technological evolution. When we have the power to make one-of-a-kind localized archives that are loose sheets of decaying paper into a database anyone in the world can search for key terms, we can change the very nature of how we do what we do. And that’s one example in many.
That said, we have to all have a long, involved conversation. And maybe I’m too junior in the field to be the one to be calling for the discussion, but if so, maybe this will at least get someone higher up the food chain to speak louder about what is clearly a problem that not only I see. But we need to talk about both sides of the equation– particularly the humanities, but it goes the other way, too– being realistic.
I think I’m one of a rather large but still “handful” shaped group of people who fall in the weird portion of DH; we’re kind of viewed, at least by those we work with, as being almost perfectly positioned on the fence between the digital part of the world and the humanities part of the academy. I want to go on record as saying I don’t see myself in that middle, really– I’m not a luddite, of course, or an apologist for either side, but I have degrees in humanities. I’m good with computers, but I don’t have tech degrees. I have tech comm degrees. 😛
But being in the middle, or toward the middle, makes me a go-to person for DH projects and a sounding board for others working in DH. So I see and hear a significant number of smaller scale (and sometimes large scale) DH projects. And the one thing I see, over and over, is that some people who want to be part of the DH world don’t want to learn enough to at least grasp the other side.
It is all too often that I hear humanists who have no digital training, or very limited digital training, ask for things that are mind-blowingly complex as if they’re asking for someone to stop and pick up a bottle of wine on the way to dinner. For example, someone a few weeks ago told me that a colleague asked for a “quick computer application” to measure a non-statistical amount/degree of something highly subjective (sorry to be abstract here, but if I’m too specific people might draw lines back, and I don’t want him to get in trouble for musing to me about his plight). We talked for a bit about the project, and given that I’m not a hardcore coder by any means, I still couldn’t conceive of a timeline of less than a year to make this thing work. Because software takes time. Particularly if you want to measure– here’s a fictional version of it– the amount of snark in a Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson wrestling promo vs. The Rock’s social and economic right to layeth the smacketh down. Before even starting to code and develop any sort of equations or anything of that sort, the project team (yes, I said team– this would take a team) would need to figure out how to quantify and measure snark and what sort of social-economic scale existed to change the degree of acceptable snark for a given person in a given situation. Then there’s building equations, testing those, coding up all of that complex stuff so that you can input the data and get back data a human can understand, testing that again, creating a UI that someone with no considerable computer skills can master, testing that, etc.
If you ask me for a Rock-o-tronic 6400 Snark Measure app on Monday and want it on Friday, all I can tell you is that on a meta level, your snark is way off the Rock-o-tronic chart. I can get it to you in a year if I stop doing some of my own work and can find at least three helpers.
I feel like I’m in a good position to talk about things like this as I am currently working on a data capturing application for the iOS and a game-like writing interface for online teaching. These are of course not all I work on: i’m banging out a book manuscript, finishing revisions to an article manuscript, and I teach 3 classes. But those two projects– the two pieces of software– are on-going longterm projects. They won’t be done tomorrow. In fact they might not be done for years.
I like to tease people a bit with my research when I talk about this. Over the course of the last year, as a researcher, I slew countless dragons. I tamed and rode a phoenix. I assembled the pieces of a legendary axe and used the souls of the cursed to forge it into a weapon worthy of slaying an undead king.
I know about magic.
I still can’t magically make you an iPhone app that creates archives from piles of paper.
And neither can anyone else.
But if you’d like some sort of cool digital tool, I’d love to talk to you about how we might make it happen. Just make sure that before you go to someone who you want to do the heavy D lifting you understand how heavy that D might be. Otherwise, the D person might ask you who the H you think you are.
Happy day of DH, folks. Keep choppin’ that wood!