Week 10: (Digital) humanities - meaning in the humanities

Even a short break to the 'outside' world served as a plentiful reminder that academia is truly insulated and insular - a bubble that many struggle to understand - and one that now more than ever has work to do, minds to change, and meanings to impart.

Alan Liu's The Meaning of Digital Humanities didn't explicate the genre/study/field as much as I would have liked, but it did result in inciting some significant feelings about how people conceive of the humanities and what that might mean for us. But let's set that aside for now and look at the article...

Liu posits that the effort to suss out the purpose or meaning of digital humanities is really a process of questing the meaning of humanities as a whole, and it all comes down to who and what is meaningful in society. "Here we reach the crux of the meaning problem in the digital humanities:"

[A] computer should be able to read texts algorithmically and discover word cohorts or clusters leading to themes without acting on an initial concept from an interpreter looking to confirm a particular theme...however, tabula rasa interpretation puts in question Heuser and Le-Khac's ultimate goal, which is to get from numbers to humanistic meaning.

And so we have set up a dichotomy between digital and human (fact and interpretation, science and literature, data vs. analysis, etc.). (Because we need more of those right?) Liu identifies a type of hybridity that digital humanities might achieve by borrowing features from neighboring fields: a mix between empirical and semantic and even acknowledges the 'postmodern' branch of STS that understands the impure, entangled, unstable relationship between human and machine, especially in the process of making and locating meaning. But then rounds out his article by reiterating the crisis facing the humanities and posing ways for the digital humanities to vouch for its overly-sentimental sister field.

I could be vastly misunderstanding the article, but it seemed like another argument for digital as necessarily opposed to humanist, and that humanities are also necessarily/solely humanist. Now, as an ecocritic, plenty of what I do has a post-human feel, and I think that as a whole, many other scholars are comfortable with the fact that nonhuman factors are at play in society, history, and literature. I also get the idea that digital humanities is not about validating the humanities through method, or scientizing literary research to be cool or savvy or up to date, which is what this article makes it out to be.

The question of whether machines and modeling and digitization can do the work of analysis is one that isn't cleared up. We should opt for a mix! Isn't a good enough answer for me, either. I also don't think that if it's a purely 'human' endeavor, it is a necessarily humanist or athropocentric one.

My entire paper is tackling the notion of looking outside the anthropocene, and technology and digitization plays a big part in that. But those creatures or ideas or meanings that exist beyond humanism are not purely empirical or data-driven. The mixture has to be intentional and validating for both sides. I don't think this article took a subtle or nuanced approach, and left me feeling agitated but uninformed. Did anyone else get a better grip on this?