Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Pressner,
Jeffrey Schnapp
Digital_Humanities
Jan Baetens
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-0262018470
Warning: dear reader, please accept my apologies for not giving you here a full-fledged summary of
Digital_Humanities. Countless other reviewers have done so already (see for instance Dena Grigar
in Leonardo: http://leonardo.info/reviews/dec2012/burdick-grigar.php), and much better than I feel capable of doing here. Besides, given the distance in time between the publication of the book and the current release of this review, I suppose that you have already read it yourself anyway (if you haven't done so yet, you should do it immediately, even before continuing to read this review).
Digital_Humanities is, to put it clearly from the very start, a landmark publication that may
prove as significant and powerful as Jean-François Lyotard's Postmodern Condition (1979). Yet this new collective volume, co-written in a single voice by five authors who are all authoritative in their respective field (or rather fields), is also quite dissimilar from the state of the art of knowledge and (humanist, philosophical) research established by Lyotard more than three decades ago. Whereas Lyotard cleared new ground for ways of thinking after the collapse of our grand narratives, opening the era of all kind of "posts" (including that of the posthuman), his stance toward the impact of technology and the rise of communication sciences in the humanities remained rather abstract and general. On these two points, that of the future of the humanities as well as that of the impact of technology, Digital_Humanities offers not only different perspectives, but also and most importantly a totally different "tone", no longer half-nostalgic and tepidly future-oriented as in Lyotard's book, which struggles with the difficulty of letting go a glorious past, but quietly assertive and decidedly optimistic. Contrary to Lyotard, who stresses the gap between "modern" and "postmodern", Digital_Humanities, which emphasizes the underscore (not the hyphen!) to stitch together two field often thought to be conflicting if not antagonistic, does not present the new forms of thinking, learning, and doing research in the humanities in terms of inventing a new form of humanities (digital humanities, with a lot of "digital" and little "humanities"), but of reinventing, reshaping, expanding the age-old project of humanities (not by adding the "digital" to it, but by
establishing a new form of humanities, the underscored "digital_humanities"). To a certain extent, the whole book can be read also as a new variation on the seminal essays by R.W. Emerson, "Nature" or "The American Scholar", whose future-oriented spirit it unquestionably shares (an absurd anachronistic reading of Digital_Humanities? I don't think so).
Digital_Humanities is not a manifesto, a prophecy, a prediction of how things should be or
become if the humanities want to maintain some of the nowadays problematic social relevance that has long been their "unique selling proposition". For the authors of this book, the digitization of humanist research is not an attempt to save the last remnants of this glorious past, but a major turn in the construction of a new, updated, expanded humanism, a change that is already underway and that should be strengthened by all academic and non-academic policy makers. Roughly speaking, the new humanities are characterized by the following features: 1) the need for collaborative work (the specialized effort of the single scholar can in this way be enriched by the interdisciplinary perspectives of teams of researchers), 2) the possibility of asking new questions by taking into account "big data" (the traditional approach of "close" reading" can in this way be complemented by one of "distant" reading),3) the merger of form and content (this aspect has to do with the steadily increasing importance of data visualization and design, which is not a "post hoc" intervention, but a constitutive part of the research itself: information is not displayed, but produced by its design), 4) the linking of study work and production (digital humanists are not only scholars, their ethos is also entrepreneurial, even if it is not-for-profit). It should not come as a surprise that as a real "ars poetica" Digital_Humanities is performing itself what it claims for the whole field: the book is designed with great craft and invention, its designer is credited as coauthor, and the work itself is both an essay, a work of art, and an instrument for further action.
Although fundamentally optimistic about the chances of revitalizing humanist research,
Digital_Humanities is anything but naive and context-blind. The book does not dissimulate the
many obstacles that prevent humanities from becoming "better" humanities through digitization: current copyright legislation is clearly a point in case here (the authors take strong copy-left standpoints, regretting also that corporate interests force researchers to reorient their study toward "orphan" material); but also the problem of academic tenure and, at a less specific level, of evaluating collective research is appropriately highlighted (how to be assessed as an individual scholar if one's name does not recognizably appear in the collective endeavor?), as is the whole institutional and economical background of new humanist research (what about scholarly independence? what about interdisciplinary work in mono-disciplinary environments? what about
training and permanent education? what about supra-institutional alliances?).
In order to tackle these questions and advance workable solutions, Digital_Humanities offers a wide range of tools that will be tremendously helpful for all those, researchers as well as policy makers, seeking to implement good practices and avoid time-consuming and morale-breaking failures. The book contains a FAQ section, but also a detailed description of five successful digital humanities projects covering almost the full range of humanist work. Together with the very ecumenical approach of the whole book, which systematically stresses the possible symbiosis of traditional humanist ways of working and thinking and their digital rethinking and transformation, this hands-on study book, for this is what Digital_Humanities finally is, brings a message of hope and encouragement to all those eager to take advantage of the technological revolution (for Renaissance humanists the printing press, for digital humanists the e-world, for tomorrow's humanists something that we cannot foresee yet) to reestablish the central place of humanities not just in academe but in society.
Jan Baetens (KU Leuven, MDRN research group: www.mdrn.be) is editor of Image (&) Narrative. Email: jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
