Why I’m Not a Digital Humanist
I associate the digital humanities with the group of people connected (via podcast, twitter, or THAT camp) to the Center for Media and New History at George Mason University. I make a good candidate for digital humanist since I integrate lots of technology into my courses. A student who follows my courses from intro level on up will engage in blogging, a Google Earth project, and a Wikipedia entry.. in addition to self-designed multi-media projects that I encourage for upper level classes. Add to that my personal blogging and online translation project, and I think I could make a case for being a digital humanist. But that title doesn’t sit well with me, and for the past few days I’ve been trying to think about why. My thinking was jump-started by this tweet:
typing up my “Twitter lecture” for my online course: any suggestions about what I should say?
I see there in that tweet a high level of interest in technology itself, and that’s one side of digital humanities with which I have trouble connecting. I have no idea what I would say about Twitter itself in a lecture! But I have lots to say when it comes to talking about Twitter and other platforms as useful means of learning something about the outside world. I just came across the following tweet from someone I follow:
very funny and true cartoon by Al Rabea. This is exactly how I found the ministry of education women’s office http://bit.ly/drOgXT
Click on the link and you are taken to this picture:
The tweet works as a surprising entrance to someone else’s experience. It’s not just seeing a cartoon from an Arabic newspaper, but having someone say: yes, this is what it was like to experience a certain office. What I enjoy about Twitter is the opportunity to peer into these different windows and see a world that otherwise would be out of reach. Here I could have a lot to say: how can Twitter be used to understand parts of the world better?
As I reflect, I see that my engagement with other platforms is similar. It’s not the thing itself, but the use of the thing for a particular end that draws me. Maybe I should characterize myself as a digital globalist? That better expresses priorities with technology. A definition might be “someone who uses technology as a means of encountering the world.”
Playing music works as a parallel. Music is music—who wants to read magazines about the music business? That defines my distaste for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I admit to an interest in some articles, but I try not to read it on a regular basis. I don’t want my mental space filled with discussion about what I do. I’m more interested in what I do. My frustration with digital humanities is that it often sounds to me more like discussion about what we do and not a trading of “what I saw today relating to my field of study.” But there are surprisingly few places where academics can talk about the books and subjects they care about with others.
