By way of Bruce Maylath, I came across Cathy Davidson’s “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions” (couldn’t find an online version, and so: PMLA, 2008, Volume 123, Number 3, pp. 707–717).
This is a pretty good read, as Davidson takes up some issues that have long perplexed me and made me think that the “crisis in the humanities” is largely a self-inflected wound.
For instance, she surveys the historical moment and wonders “why so many humanists feel irrelevant to a culture that names the “creative class” as one of its defining features.” She also uses this essay to detail the positive impact of digital technologies on very traditional humanities scholarship. Yet it is the very relationship between digital technologies and academic humanities is where the essay is too conservative. Davidson comes to the edge of understanding–or at least sharing her understanding–of how much the ground has shifted under traditional, university-based humanists.
We are all digital humanists now, and this is a very good thing.
The hedging begins with Davidson writing that “Perhaps we need a paradigm shift. Perhaps we need to see technology and the humanities not as a binary but as two sides of a necessarily interdependent, conjoined, and mutually constitutive set of intellectual, educational, social, political, and economic practices.” The fact that this statement contains a “perhaps”–two even–lies at the very heart of why university-based humanists have made themselves increasingly irrelevant to the practices and questions of the current moment. The fact that such interdependency requires a “paradigm shift” at all speaks to the conservative, even reactionary academic and intellectual politics of the humanities in too many institutions.
The hedging and conservative nature of Davidson’s essay is important because it reflects where the humanities are right now with respect to digital technologies and computer networks: unsure, wary, distrustful, critical, scared.
I am all for the “critical” part given that the outcome of the criticism is, as Latour argues, productive. But most interesting in Davidson’s essay is the door that she opens but doesn’t walk through, and that is the power of computer networks to provide platforms for flatter, more distributed work.
Davidson’s essay describes, accurately, that nearly all of the work in the digital humanities has been focused on making digital archives. The web as platform, and just as powerfully, the move from the page to the stream, has meant that, as long as the archives are open, anyone can use them. And as long as the archives are “Web 2″ archives, anyone can add content to them (WIDE has the most interesting Web 2 archive project going: see here). This means that nearly anyone can play in sandboxes once reserved for credentialed experts. Davidson’s essay usefully articulates a number of questions and concerns related to this destablization of expertise driven by a flatter way to generate humanities content.
Davidson argues that we should be helping to shape our digital present and future. The “we” in her sentence is the small group of credentialed humanities experts who pay attention to MLA publications, and that is the correct audience for her. “We” had better get with it, because the arts and humanities are alive and well, vibrant and useful, and deeply engaged in shaping the world that we inhabit. It is still an open question how important university-based arts and humanities programs will be as culture is made all around us.
Right now, “we” seems a little too focused on lamenting the fact that the world doesn’t understand the arts and humanities in the ways that we want them to and is not focused on how important the digital arts and humanities are in the lives of lots of people.