Manifest Destiny
Just finished another read-through of the new Digital Humanities Manifesto and it’s interesting to see how the Digital Humanities continues to position itself as an academic, intellectual ally to so many of the progressive movements found on the Internet. Still, the discipline, or “array of convergent practices” as the UCLA folks like to call it, is struggling with a crisis of identity. Namely, there’s the nervous hipsterism (including scatalogical gif humor*–boy, there’s a strange phrase) injected into a thoughtful examination of a field that doesn’t quite how to describe itself to the lay and academic audiences simultaneously, but there’s also a tension that exists between the old-style Humanities Computing crowd and the more spatially and social computing-oriented Digital Humanists. As an admission of bias, I took the liberty of merging Humanities Computing into the Digital Humanities entry on Wikipedia 3 years ago (For which Willard McCarty apparently asked an audience at a conference, “Does anyone even know who this guy is who’s setting the agenda for our discipline?”), and so I reside firmly in the pro-Wikipedia, pro-multidisciplinary, pro-spatiality camp represented in this new manifesto.
Of particular saliency is the claim that we’re in the second wave of digital humanities work, which moves beyond trying to shoehorn quantitative functions in ArcGIS or MySQL into qualitative exploration of history, literature and art. It also demands a reevalutation of Intellectual Property, especially in regard to the better-safe-than-sorry approach present in the modern university. I’ll take issue with the call to free poor Shepard Fairey, but I’ve dealt with that in detail in an earlier installment here on Seven Lions. In all, though, it’s the best example of aggressive, digitally-forward humanities thought since Unsworth’s Scholarly Primitives paper. Regardless of your feelings on the place of the University in the digital world and the positive benefits of integrating wikis and twitter and GIS and any other new media into humanities scholarship, I’d recommend a perusal.
* This seems to only be present in the pdf version. Maybe I have a rare, mashed up and graffito-laden copy. I’ll save it for the grandkids.