digital humanities in the anthropocene

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

[Update: I’ve made low-res versions of my slides and an audio reading available for download on Vimeo, Alex Gil has kindly translated the talk into Spanish, and Melissa Terras’ wonderful performance is now up on the Digital Humanities 2014 website. Finally, a peer-reviewed and formally-published version appears in a 2015 issue of DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.]

“And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.” – A. A. Milne

Every morning, as the Virginia sun spills over the rim of the Shenandoah Valley, I dive into the water of my municipal swimming pool and think of ruined Roman baths. On either end of the lane in which I take my laps are blue tile letters, mortared just beneath the waterline by a craftsman of the century gone by. I read two words as I swim back and forth: shallow and deep, shallow and deep.

I’m here to give a talk that likewise wants to glide from shallows to depths in turn. My hope is to position our work—the work of the DH community that has nurtured me with kindness for some 18 years—less as it is lately figured (that is, less as a fragmenting set of methodological interventions in the contemporary, disciplinary agon of humanities scholarship) and more as one cohesive and improbably hopeful possibility. The possibility is for strongly connecting technologies and patterns of work in the humanities to deep time: both to times long past and very far in prospect. But I’ll swim to the shallows, too—because, by musing about the messages we may attempt to send and receive in the longest of longues durées, I mean also to encourage a searching and an active stance in DH, toward our present moment—toward engagement with the technological, environmental, and ethical conditions of our vital here-and-now.

I promised in my abstract a practitioner’s talk, and that is what you will get. I’m not a philosopher or a critic. I’m a builder and a caretaker of systems—so I will attempt to bring a craftsperson’s perspective to my theme tonight.

Continue reading “digital humanities in the anthropocene”

anthropocene abstract

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

I am deeply honored to have been invited to give a plenary lecture at this year’s Digital Humanities conference, planned for Lausanne, Switzerland in early July. My fellow keynoters are Bruno Latour, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Ray Siemens, who will receive ADHO‘s Zampolli Prize. This is quite a line-up! I’m not nervous at all. Why do you ask?

Now that I’ve provided an abstract for the talk, I thought I’d share it here. My subject is Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene:

This will be a practitioner’s talk, and—though the abstract belies it—an optimistic one. I take as given the evidence that human beings are irrevocably altering the conditions for life on Earth and that, despite certain unpredictabilities, we live at the cusp of a mass extinction. What is the place of digital humanities practice in the new social and geological era of the Anthropocene? What are the DH community’s most significant responsibilities, and to whom? This talk will position itself in deep time, but strive for a foothold in the vital here-and-now of service to broad publics. From the presentist, emotional aesthetics of Dark Mountain to the arms-length futurism of the Long Now, I’ll dwell on concepts of graceful degradation, preservation, memorialization, apocalypse, ephemerality, and minimal computing. I’ll discuss digital recovery and close reading of texts and artifacts—like the Herculaneum papyri—once thought lost forever, and the ways that prosopography, graphesis, and distant reading open new vistas on the longue durée. Can DH develop a practical ethics of resilience and repair? Can it become more humane while working at inhuman scales? Can we resist narratives of progress, and still progress? I wish to open community discussion about the practice of DH, and what to give, in the face of a great hiatus or the end of it all.

The talk will likely be recorded at the event and later published in one of the ADHO journals, but I will also (as usual) post the text here after I deliver it. You’ll see hints at my reading on the subject in the abstract above—from Jo Guldi and David Armitage to Steven J. Jackson, Rebecca Solnit, Shiv Visvanathan, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Morton, Susie O’Brien, Brian Lennon, Eileen Crist, and more, including a number of institutional and collective projects—but I welcome messages pointing me at things you suspect I’ll miss.

asking for it

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

A report published this week by OCLC Research asks the burning question of no one, no where: “Does every research library need a digital humanities center?” The answer, of course, is of course not.

Of course, I’m being rude. The click-bait question, as posed, had a foregone conclusion — but there’s much to recommend in the report, even if it fails to define a “DH center” in any clear way, makes an unwarranted assumption that “DH academics” and librarians exist in mutually-exclusive categories, and bases too much of its understanding of faculty and researcher perceptions on the inadequate sample of some conference-going and a couple of focus groups (however carefully convened and accurately reported).

The chief value of the report may lie in its stated and implied purposes: providing library directors with a set of options to consider (stated) and an easy citation — a bit of OCLC back-up — (implied) for the local arguments they must formulate in the event their provosts or presidents catch Library-based DH Center-itis and seem completely unwilling to entertain a model customized to the needs of the institution. Wait a minute. That will never happen.

Okay, the chief value of the report is in its clear reinforcement of the notion that a one-size-fits-all approach to digital scholarship support never fits all. Continue reading “asking for it”

on the origin of “hack” and “yack”

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

One of the least helpful constructs of our “digital humanities” moment has been a supposed active opposition, drawn out over the course of years in publications, presentations, and social media conversation, between two inane-sounding concepts: “hack” and “yack.” The heralding of DH as the academy’s “next big thing” has been (depending on whom you ask) over-due or overblown, unexpected or contrived, refreshing or retrograde—but one thing is clear: everyone has a rhetorical use for it.  The uses of “hack vs. yack,” on the other hand, rapidly became so one-sided that I find it odd the phrase retains any currency for critique.

Continue reading “on the origin of “hack” and “yack””