newhorizonS
[The Technologies Ahead]
The Ouroboros; or, How “Digital”
and “Humanities” Will Shape
Each Other in the Near Future
B
Outreach is probably the most important of these features,
efore I can tackle the future of digital humanibecause public engagement takes advantage of the single largest
ties, it’s important to note that there are varying
structural difference between early computational humanities
beliefs regarding what the digital humanities
and 21st-century digital humanities: connectivity. For example,
actually are. This was never more apparent to
after Sarah Palin suggested that the colonial patriot Paul Revere
me than when I recently attended THATCamp,
warned the British that they weren’t going to be able to take
a popular and well-respected digital humanities conference.
away American arms, her devotees edited Wikipedia to back up
Based on the sessions, dialogue, and Twitter stream, it was
her statement.4 Though it might pain us to see the value in such
obvious that for the attendees, as for the field at large, the
digital humanities are defined along a spectrum with two
inaccurate historical recollection, the fluid nature of the source
poles: those who focus their research on the ways in which
(Wikipedia) and the public debate between specialist and gendigital tools change the human experience, and those who
eralist presaged a key piece of the future of digital humanities.
use digital tools to expand the scope and
The instant, constantly evolving nature of
shape of their research into new questions
a two-way channel marks a structural and
and domains. Yet regardless of how we
disciplinary difference between the narrowly
To focus on the
define our work, most of us think of ouraccessible type of work that Roberto Busa did
future of digital
selves as humanists first. Thus, to focus on
starting in the 1940s and the public outreach
the future of digital humanities is to look at
that digital humanists can and should do in
humanities is to
how digital humanists integrate their work
the future.
look at how digital
into a much larger humanities sphere.
This kind of debate also highlights the
humanists integrate need for consumers of digital humanities to
The logical conclusion of the first
approach to framing the digital humanities
have a new set of skills, including a critical
their work into
is that all humanist work is now mediated by
awareness of the fluidity of many online
a much larger
the digital, which suggests that all humansources. It’s easy to assume that anyone
humanities sphere.
ists are now digital.1 This approach extends
born after 1995 has both digital literacy, or
the ability to actively sift through digital
existing disciplinary boundaries into online
information in a discerning way, and digital
space, emphasizing the broad digital distrifluency, or the ability to communicate and create in digital
bution of rare source materials and specialized humanities
media environments.5 Reality suggests otherwise. Familiarity
research. This often includes a focus on collections and
library science.2 The second approach suggests that digital
with tools is often very different from critical engagement
with the content those tools make available.6 In the classtools create a new kind of humanist whose work and credentials don’t fit into traditional humanities departments, such
room, digital humanists do engage students in the traditional
as literature or history, because tools and techniques from
interpretive exercises common to humanities disciplines.
computer science and telecommunications form the founHowever, digital humanists also increasingly ask students
dation of these new research methods. There are arguments
to question the implications of the digital tools they use to
for and against both approaches. Notably, critics suggest that
distribute their findings and, if they find the tools lacking, to
the former perpetuates disciplinary silos and adds little new
actively seek out and learn new tools. The key to the future
information to the conversation, whereas the latter also isn’t
of digital humanities in the classroom is for students to feel
really that new, since techniques that are central to other dis“uncomfortable.”7 Creating a feedback loop between critical
ciplines (e.g., text mining, n-grams, statistical research) have
consumption and practical production strengthens both
been part of the humanities world for decades.3 However,
digital literacy and digital fluency, but it also means digital
humanists will find themselves utilizing tools they themscholars in both camps share some interests that will shape
selves may not entirely understand.
the future of digital humanities and that should likewise be
Finally, though it may seem obvious given the outreach
of interest to humanists in general: public outreach, practical
and training facets of the digital humanities, another area of
training, and scholarly diversity.
58 E d u c a u s E r e v i e w Se p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 011
New Horizons Department Editor: Sarah Smith-Robbins
By Kalani Craig
concern is whether the digital humanities world includes a
diverse range of scholars. That diversity fits along two axes:
academic diversity and socioeconomic diversity. From the
academic perspective, digital humanists emphasize the
importance of breaking down barriers between “traditional”
tenured faculty roles and nontraditional, alternate academic
careers (known as #alt-ac). Limiting specialists to those who
hold Ph.D.’s, employing researchers in traditional tenured
limits before they ever enter the classroom, and that too hinders the public-outreach goal.
The future of digital humanities, then, is about access to
new peers, new scholars, new information, and new techniques. Regardless of whether we see all humanists as digital
or see all digital humanists as members of a new discipline,
the connectivity built into today’s digital world requires us to
rethink not only what it means to be a humanist but also how
being a humanist may change as a result of these new and
emerging technologies.
n
Notes
Francesco Bongiorni, © 2011
  1. See Alex Reid, “Digital Humanities: Two Venn Diagrams,” digital
digs, March 9, 2011, <http://www.alex-reid.net/2011/03/digitalhumanities-two-venn-diagrams.html>.
  2. See “Digital Humanities and the Future of
Libraries” (video), New York Public Library,
June 16, 2011, <http://www.nypl.org/events/
programs/2011/06/16/digital-humanities-andfuture-libraries>.
  3. For the former, see Stephen G.
Nichols, “Time to Change Our Thinking:
Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital
Scholarship,” Ariadne, issue 58 (January
30, 2009), <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/
issue58/nichols/>. For the latter, see
Thomas Nelson Winter, “Roberto
Busa, S.J., and the Invention of the
Machine-Generated Concordance,”
Classical Bulletin, vol. 75, no. 1 (1999),
pp. 3–20, <http://
digitalcommons.unl
.edu/cgi/viewcontent
.cgi?article=1069&
context=classicsfacpub&
sei-redir=1>.
4. Rachel Weiner, “Fight Brews over
Sarah Palin on Paul Revere Wikipedia
Page,” The Fix (Washington Post), June 7,
2011, <http://www.washingtonpost
.com/blogs/the-fix/post/sarah-palinfans-fight-over-paul-revere-wikipediapage/2011/06/06/AGxtzHKH_blog.html>.
  5. See the NETS standards of the
International Society for Technology in
Education: <http://www.iste.org/standards
.aspx>.
  6. Committee on Information Technology Literacy,
National Research Council, Being Fluent with Information
Technology (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999),
<http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=6482>.
  7. Jeffrey McClurken, “Uncomfortable, but Not Paralyzed,” Techist:
A Blog about Technology, History and Teaching, January 22, 2008, <http://
mcclurken.blogspot.com/2008/01/uncomfortable-but-not-paralyzed.html>.
professorships, and maintaining a paywall around academic
publications hinder the outreach that digital humanists see
as their first priority. Socioeconomic boundaries also limit
the kinds of outreach that digital humanists—especially
those at the college/university level—can do. Even though
higher education enrollments are more diverse than ever,
that diversity has its limits. Students often encounter these
w w w. e d u c a u s e . e d u / e r
Kalani Craig ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. candidate in medieval
history at Indiana University, where her primary research uses data mining
and other digital humanities tools to examine the interaction of divine and
human agency in bishops’ lives between 500 C.E. and 1000 C.E. (http://
www.kalanicraig.com).
© 2011 Kalani Craig. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-sa/3.0/).
Se p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 011 E d u c a u s e r e v i e w 59