{"id":1945,"date":"2015-07-27T07:48:47","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T14:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=1945"},"modified":"2015-07-28T16:17:39","modified_gmt":"2015-07-28T23:17:39","slug":"whats-next-the-radical-unrealized-potential-of-digital-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/whats-next-the-radical-unrealized-potential-of-digital-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a lightly edited version of the keynote address I was honored to give at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference<\/a> at the University of Pennsylvania on July 22, 2015. Thank you to the organizing committee for inviting me!<\/em><\/p>\n

My sincere thanks, too, to Lauren Klein<\/a> and Roderic Crooks<\/a> for their advice and feedback on this talk. I\u2019d also like to acknowledge the huge intellectual debt I owe to David Kim<\/a> and Johanna Drucker<\/a>, with whom I\u2019ve argued, negotiated, and formulated a lot of these ideas, mostly in the context of teaching together. David’s important dissertation, <\/em>Archives, Models, and Methods for Critical Approaches to Identities: Representing Race and Ethnicity in the Digital Humanities (UCLA, 2015), takes on many of these issues at much greater length.<\/em><\/p>\n

I gave the title of this talk to Dot Porter some time ago in a fit of ambition, and it\u2019s seemed wildly hubristic to me ever since. But it\u2019s something I care a lot about, and so tonight I\u2019d like to outline some ideas about how digital humanities might critically investigate structures of power, like race and gender.<\/p>\n

We are doing some of that now, as evidenced by some of the work at this conference, but I don\u2019t think we\u2019re doing it with the energy or the creativity that we might. I\u2019ll argue that to truly engage in this kind of work would be so much more difficult and fascinating than we\u2019re currently talking about for the future of DH; in fact, it would require dismantling and rebuilding much of the organizing logic, like the data models or databases, that underlies most our work.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ll start by saying a little about where I think we are with digital humanities now, and also about some new directions, with respect to these structures of power, that I\u2019d like to see the field go.<\/p>\n


\nWe\u2019re at a really interesting moment, as everyone always says during periods of contention. In some ways, it\u2019s a frustrating time, but in other ways, it represents some meaningful opportunity. The field of digital humanities is growing and institutionalizing, as evidenced by this very conference, and beginning to find a good number of adherents. DH gets occasional mainstream press coverage, and there\u2019s at least the perception, if not the reality, that opportunities and funds are available to digital humanities scholars in a pretty remarkable way.<\/p>\n

We can map points and shapes \u2014 not perfectly, but we can do it. We can build graphs and charts, and we can do an OK job mining texts in search of patterns. We\u2019re working more with images, though that\u2019s still pretty nascent, and we\u2019re even making some forays into moving image analysis.<\/p>\n

All of this is really fun and interesting, and personally, I get a lot of satisfaction out of doing this kind of thing, and helping other people to do it. It\u2019s useful and absorbing, and in many cases, it really does help us do our work better.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more out there, and even bigger challenges. For all of its vaunted innovation, the digital humanities actually borrows a lot of its infrastructure, data models, and visual rhetoric from other areas, and particularly from models developed for business applications. In some ways, that\u2019s inevitable, because the business market is just so much bigger, and so much better funded, than the market for weird, boutique humanities tools.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s take Google Maps, which powers a lot of our projects. Many have observed \u2014 I\u2019m certainly not the first \u2014 that this technology enshrines a Cartesian model of space that derives directly from a colonialist project of empire-building. [1]<\/sup><\/a>See, e.g.,\u00a0Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire the Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1997); or, on digital maps, Jason Farman, … Continue reading<\/span><\/span><\/span>