Response to Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars

Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars by Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto is a thorough introduction to and reference work for issues and dilemmas surrounding the digital humanities, especially for scholars like me who are relatively new to DH. But beyond being just a reference work, I read this book as a cautionary tale—or an explanation of what the digital humanities are not—for those who may view DH as either the salvation or displacement of humanities scholarship.

A common thread I find running through the subtext of Digital Humanities is a caution against assuming that digital tools somehow displace the need for thorough scholarship by providing “shortcuts.” Chapter 2 describes two foundational concepts of the study of the humanities: the study of documents, objects, artifacts—the “data” of the humanities-- can’t be encompassed in large numerical data sets (as the research of the sciences often is) (15) and that seeing such “data” in person, in its original context (or as close to that as possible) is the only truly authentic way to understand the object being studied (16).

It would be easy to fall into the trap of assuming that, because numerical data sets can be compiled easily with digital tools and are often easy to comb through with software like Excel, or because a high-resolution image of an artifact exists online, the researcher doesn’t need to see it in person to fully comprehend it – that the combination of digital tools with humanities research can supplant the need to study the particular or the original. By clearly defining from the outset what humanities research is (or ought to be), Musto and Gardiner make it clear that digital humanities does not remove (and often even complicates) notions of uniqueness and authenticity.

Musto and Gardiner also mention, in their discussion of texts and documents, that “Part of the challenge for the digital humanist is determining whether the material in question is of enough interest and significance to warrant digitization, especially considering the limited financial resources for the humanities” (32-33). This reminds me that as scholars, we can’t assume that because something has been documented (on paper or eventually in digital form), it represents the entirety of the “data” to be collected from that “set.” In other words, issues inherent to documentation (and how thoroughly we can document anything) still exist, and the need to “keep digging” to find the necessary data, story, narrative, object, etc. remains an imperative for conscientious scholars.

One question I’m interested in researching in my T&T program is the subject of the digitization of women’s novels from the early twentieth century and before (works that are now in the public domain). As women have historically encountered many issues in the publications of their work, such as needing to adopt male pseudonyms or have a male relative negotiate the publishing industry on their behalf, I want to understand if, in the process of digitizing public domain works, are we still prioritizing  the works of white males? In other words, is patriarchy “baked into” the process of publishing women’s works, even 200 years into the life of a text, or have open access repositories helped level the playing field by giving access to works that were previously shoved to the margins? 

I love the fact that I can open Project Gutenberg and access a feminist novel and read it easily on my Kindle, so I am by no means against technology. But Digital Humanities helped me contextualize digital tools in my own mind—tools that can show us the subjects we study in new ways or collect and publish information in ways never before available – but the demand for thorough and rigorous scholarship is, if anything, complicated by digitization rather than supplanted by it.

Gardiner, Eileen and Ronald G. Musto. Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars. Cambridge UP, 2015. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139003865.