A Digital Humanities Manifesto

Add: -Department of Erasure Studies: The purpose of this department is to develop models and criteria both for the cancellation of records and archives, and for selective, strategic, and smart conservation and archiving.

Suggestion:
Rename the “Department of Discourse Analyses” as the “Department of Discourse Analyses and Critical Thinking.” Add to the description so that the last line reads as follows:
“encountered, evaluated, valued, and utilized.”

[...] The Digital Humanities Manifesto that was discussed at the Mellon Seminar has now been published on a WordPress blog at http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digitalhumanities/2008/12/15/digital-humanities-manifesto/, [...]

While I understand that there are significant disciplinary differences between these two departments, does the separation between Print Media Studies and Comparative Media Studies reproduce the common and unfortunate division between Language departments and Film Studies, which assigns all “media studies” to the Film Department? I think it might make more sense to put all media studies under one department and then have subsequent divisions by medium. Why still privilege print media in this way?

Okay, disciplines don’t die because they enact useful reductions of complexity. They define a coherent domain of concern and enable scholarship–including, of course, inter-disciplinary scholarship, which is predicated on the existence of disciplines. They don’t die because the evolving bodies of knowledge they represent continue to function as objects of intense desire for scholars and their students. Furthermore it is wrong to claim that disciplines inhibit risk-taking. Rather, they make risk-taking meaningful. Not that there is anything wrong with inventing new disciplines, but the notion that we should blood-sacrifice the old ones in homage to our new machines is ridiculous.

This is just fantastic and, needless to say, dovetails beautifully with the three-prongs of HASTAC: critical thinking, creative design/development, participatory learning. Congratulations on this, on producing such a terrific document. My one question and it is one I grapple with all the time: is it the right time, to use “digital humanities” to define what we’re doing? Does that leave out social sciences, natural and computational sciences, and what does that word “digital” mean here? Anyone who knows me knows I am really grappling with that question and would love some real conversation on this one. Thanks for this marvelous forum!

I don’t think Digital Humanities are “the last blow.” Some in the digital humanities, in fact, reify a very traditional standard of the profession, going back to 19th century formations as well as to 1930s and 1950s forms of textual editing. Others are deeply transformative. Yet others are saying we need to get rid of “digital” because of its own specific history and reference points and also because “digital social science” or “digital natural science” would be a bit silly. Why? What does “digital” do to “humanities”? These aren’t clear questions without clear answers.

Why in the world would we want departments? It feels as if the first 25 paragraphs point to a new mapping of contingent, ever-shifting, and ever rebounded knowledges across all fields and endeavors and extending into the community globally. Does the digital humanities need departments? Does it want them? The ones listed here are thought-provoking but even to imagine how one would be a member of one and not another is to create borders that MUST be crossed and even crisscrossed.

“O los has de perdonar/O matar la villa toda.” –Lope de Vega, _Fuenteovejuna_.

“What does it mean to study “literature” or “history” when print is no longer the normative medium in which literary or historical artifacts are produced, let alone analyzed?”

I am curious to know how “historical artifacts” are produced ditigally - a digitzed representation of a material object (still in the realm of “artifact”, unless all we are talking about are documents) hardly constitutes the production of an artifact….

Writing code is not the same as writing a history or a poem…. Despite what one Bay Area university advertisment proclaimed, Cobol is not one of the new romance langauges….

[...] Digital Humanities Manifesto [...]

More than the “tool” aspect, the new audiences which digital can generate will allow scholars to leave the ivory tower and have a greater impact on global society.

There is something banal at the core of digital humanities: I could never put my finger on what exactly it is, but this graf helps. Under shelter of a cloud of poststructuralist cliches, “digital humanities” flails around with no higher sense of purpose than to manifest its “contingency,” “expansiveness,” etc. I submit that the tiredness of these tropes circa 2009 makes them self-refuting. Digital humanities does better intellectually when it has a strong, positive (even, dare I say, “positivist”) agenda driving it. Think here of Moretti’s recent work, which is driven by the effort to accumulate literary knowledge through data collection, analysis, and interpretation and does without the mystagogy of “unfixity,” “infinity,” etc. These terms should rather be taken as the given of our situation, for better and worse. The more interesting questions then become: what do we want to fix? What do we want to define? What do we want to help take place and maybe even endure? The rhetorical flight to “no place” is mostly a way of avoiding these questions, and of trying to make that avoidance look principled.

For whom is this document written? Calling it a “manifesto” implies the the general public (or general academic public), but much of this document would be meaningless to such an audience - excepting, perhaps, the gratuitous echoes of Marx (which are not particularly flattering and read like an unintentional parody). If it were my document, I would keep the first three paragraphs and rethink the content/structure of the remainder.

I assume the unstated (i.e., ambiguous) connection to the preceding text is that the interdisciplinarity/etc. mentioned here is facilitated by digital humanism? If so, this paragraph provides a potential outline for the remainder of the document that I don’t think is fulfilled (or at least not in an explicit enough manner for a manifesto). What specific changes in language, practice, method, and output? Geez, I would just turn each of these into subsections and tackle them one after another.

I happen to strongly support the use of open source technology and open access to digital resources - however, I also understand that the realities of project funding conflict with those goals. Its really too nuanced an issue to justify a loaded term like “enemy” (this black-and-white dualism conjures up the image of George W. Bush and his oversimplifying rhetoric).

This is a little silly - see my comments on the overall document about unintentional parody of Marxist rhetoric. Copyright and IP standards are a fact of life - certainly the academic community must push-back against excessive claims by institutions like Disney - but that doesn’t mean we’re all going to join a commune anytime soon.

A decent enough paragraph - I don’t necessarily see how teamwork and risk-taking are inherently related (consider the phenomenon of group-think), but the general sentiment about the need/reality of greater collaboration is sound. Perhaps you mean risk-taking becomes more feasible when working alongside others who can share the burdens created by false starts?

Pseudo-marxist baloney - see my comments above.

I sense both here and elsewhere in this document some confusion in differentiating between what is essential to the digital humanities and what is simply an instance of their manifestation. Wiki-fication and mass-produced content are undoubtedly part of the digital humanities, but are they essential to it? That seems like an unnecessarily limiting view of a field that is alternately praised for its methodological inclusiveness.

Pseudo-marxist baloney - see previous comments.

Medium cannot effect the basic difference between the expert and novice - although the possibility emerges for a disjunction between the ‘content expert’ and ‘medium expert’ categories that was less likely in print culture.

This paragraph pointlessly ties the development of the digital humanities to the tired disciplinary wars of the 70s and 80s. Do digital humanists want to fight the same battles and reaffirm the same divisions?

Bit of a weak and narrow ending - surely the main point of this manifesto isn’t the inadequacy of current departmental divisions? You really need to finish with something about the larger intellectual issues at stake in defining the digital humanities.

On the one hand, the contrast of digital practices and print may be outmoded. On the other hand, many digital humanities ventures involving publishing texts online, so the print universe is still very relevant.

1. The phrase “all media revolutions” is quite vague. Papyrus? Easel painting? Sound cinema?

2. The antecedent of the “it” in the third sentence is unclear.

3. “Medium specific” should be hyphenated.

4. Further, scholars in film studies and art history have been arguing against medium-specificity for nearly two decades. When you position yourself as ‘revolutionary,’ there is always the danger that anything conservative about your position undermines your stance.

1. In what sense is the ability to search a database “vertiginous”? I don’t remember experiencing vertigo when flipping through a library card catalog.

2. Can a “wave” be “emotive”?

3. The argument that “the very core strength of the Humanities” is “complexity” is not supported–or even explained.

1. If these are empty words, why use them?

2. Arguably, the words “language, practice, method, and output [whatever that is]” are no less ambiguous than the three words being criticized.

I agree with JCarlson that this Schmittian rhetoric of enemies is unpleasant.

Also that this rhetoric of openness lacks nuance.

Surely this manifesto cannot be recommending that no university computing system anywhere employ any firewalls or any means authenticating users.

MarkJamesMcGurl is strong in his criticisms.

I agree with the general critique I believe he’s making: that putting a definite article in front of an adjective (or a noun, “no place”) threatens to become empty.

The first part–’yes, we admit there are utopian urges and longings in the digital humanities’–seems to me like a nice rhetorical move, a concession.

But then the list that follows strikes me as far too vague.

I don’t think many universities would endorse a manifesto which recommends frankly illegal behavior.

It seems mean to single out Disney for ridicule.

This sentence is part of a “screed” rather than a manifesto.

The etymological point is interesting. I think it could be stated with greater brevity–and hence sharper focus.

I agree with JCarlson that teamwork and risk seem unrelated–or there’s no explanation given of the intrinsic relation.

The first sentence is a fragment. I personally don’t like sentence fragments in formal writing.

A briefer sentence could make the point better.

This is partly redundant with the preceding paragraph.

But there is no explanation of the value of “the mad individual.”

The series of phrases after the colon bear an ambiguous relation to each other.

The last part is a sentence fragment.

This is hyperbolic.

The word “dedefinition” is obscure.

The opening sentence is a fragment.

In the third sentence “it” has no clear antecedent.

The last sentence seems promising but could be clearer: challenge to whom or what? which distributed reality?

I agree with JCarlson on certain points.

The audience and purpose of this document is unclear. To whom is it addressed? With what purpose? To produce what effect?

I think some general parameters might be adopted.

1. Define the audience and purpose in the document itself. Is this to be an inclusive document for humanists and technologists? Or a contentious, axe-grinding, rabble-rousing call to arms?

2. Avoid hyperbole and overgeneralization. Even a manifesto can be specific.

3. Remove sentence fragments. They lack clear focus.

4. Be brief. I suspect this document is so long in part because the purpose is not clear.

Specific examples accompany some of the paragraphs below. I stopped adding comments when I feared becoming redundant. (The document’s authors might bear this in mind.)

Like a ship manifest, manifestos describe in detail what one is laden with - all the baggage one is carrying around. In such a dynamic context, where the territory is not known, where there are no established pathways, nimbleness is surely more advantageous.

If we look to the explores of the past, what can we learn of their methods of preparation, and travel - certainly resourcefulness; innovative action and wise insight are of superior practical value.

Manifesto type statements tend to constrict and provoke at a moment of critical gestation. They are closed systems - which state parameters of a position, rather than possibilities for discussion.

This might be fine if the persons involved are a small group of artists attempting to carve out some of the art scene and cause some sensation that result in selling more paintings. It seems a dangerous place to begin, and perhaps the wrong tool, if one wants to build a broad platform of support - one that embraces depth of critical experience and understanding, as well as the ferment that occurs through engaged discussion and disagreement.

[...] ene initiatief is het Digital Humanities Manifesto, opgesteld door een aantal medewerkers van het Center for Digital Humanities van UCLA. Het manifest [...]

A thematic dismissal or relegation of print is unnecessary: revolutions may by nature be antagonistic, but they should not create unneeded enemies.

I agree with EDWARDONEILL that print is still very relevant to the practices (and projects) of the digital humanities, and in the production and dissemination of digital humanities criticism. For example, while Blackwell’s companion to Digital Literary Studies (link below) is available in an electronic version (and contains a very useful search function), the digital edition is still very much print-based in its overall design and execution (for example, there are few multimedia components and limited interactivity, such as through comments or a discussion board).

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/

The intersections between expertise, authority, and crowd-sourced knowledge is interesting, and complex - and perhaps deserves more space here. What’s the relation between the mass production of knowledge in para14, and the expertise that would define and uphold the “highest standards of scholarship” here?

Not sure I see the “flattening” of that relationship - certainly a redefinition of the relationship between expert and non-expert, but I imagine something much more vibrant and dynamic. Expertise will not become obsolete.

I think, as unpleasant as the word “enemy” might seem, it is rhetorically valuable. As a Humanist (”digital” or otherwise) I see the corporate will and the increasingly restrictive laws and user “agreements” to prevent access to ideas, to publicly-funded research, and to public domain texts and images, as the enemy. The digital realm has the capacity to provide access to cultural history and high-level commentary and debate, just as much as it provides access to more lolcats than anyone thought possible. If we do not advocate for open access and open source, we cease to participate in and contribute to the prevailing mode of discourse in many countries around the world. If we do not advocate for open access and open source, we allow corporate interests to control our cultural heritage and indeed the dissemination of our own research.

Firewalls are necessary, of course, for certain activities and applications–but firewalls and open access or open source are not mutually exclusive.

[...] — Rachel Lee @ 4:29 pm The Institute for the Future of the Book has published “A Digital Humanities Manifesto” which allows users to comment on individual paragraphs or the entire document. Between the [...]

I’m not sure the first wave was quantitative: partially it was so, as any database search or text analysis (e.g. concordances or collocation) made traditional scholarly methods much more efficient — and yes, vertiginous in terms of the excitement at having such tools to obliterate some of the worst tedium from aspects of scholarly work. On the other hand, consider that from early on to some degree we were digital humanists participating in and exploring “an array of convergent practices [where] print is no longer the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated) when we were participating in email discussion lists; when we made forays into MUDs; when we experimented with and/or read computer-generated poetry (Eliza, the MUC Love Letter generator, etc.); when we made our very first websites with hyperlinks.

That is to say, humans are complex and creative: the presence of the quantitative does not exclude the qualitative, interpretive, and emotional experience.

Perhaps we in the Humanities and DH might argue for asserting our existing rights entrenched in copyright law (i.e. claim and practice our rights to fair use or fair dealing; claim and practice our rights to copy and publish images of and text from documents that are now in the public domain; and resist user “agreements” that attempt to circumvent these laws). We aren’t necessarily undermining copyright when we use Disney materials or when mash up media. Quite the reverse: in a mashup, we are very often “quoting” from the original for the purpose of commentary or critique; we are often simply exercising fair use or fair dealing.

and maybe less shouting

Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity have always been empty, and even more so when they actually do change language, practice, method and output. Its a set of terms taken up by the global wave of academic consultants, and therefore, inherently meaningless, devoutly thick, and able only to be used as fodder for economically rational Deans down-costing teaching modules.

MarkJamesMcGurl - I agree entirely. The vagueness almost appears parodic in places.

Also, copia means a bit more than abundance, it may be useful to drag it out a bit?

So does the digital humanities have founders and founding principles? I thought it was all no gods, no masters? Or are those the academic consultants we have to pay to institutionalise this at the undergraduate level?

Also; this was part and parcel of Victorian-era thinking on the public expert and university lecturer. Quite a historical reflex.

Christ. Save us from ironic-haired twonks with Thunderbirds theme/R Kelly mashups on their boothacked Ubuntu laptops, playing through a Gameboy camera hooked up to Korg Kaoss pad. No wait, they are the new curators and creators! Give them jobs! They have so much to teach people!

This has been happening since 1960. Universities take on board knowledge from just about anywhere they can these days. What is new about the .. ‘digital revolution’.. is it?

But wikipedia has a whole bunch of different ways of operating, which one is the new reality? Also, mass media has always been produced by the masses.. I mean, its how we got into this mess in the first place.

Then you got your wish - starting in the 1980s, University departments around the world have been rationalised, closed, merged, staff cut back, experts thrown into the street. Its precisely this reasoning that was used the UK, USA, Australia, NZ, Europe for the past 30 years.

Does this repeat the sentiments in section 11? Does this mean Clay Shirky and like scholars are considered a positive model for scholarship?

What change?

I’ve done all of those things, and I disagree vehemently with the sentiments herein.

This sounds great if you are firing people at a university, but practically, for making knowledge happen, it hasn’t worked so far. Collaborative team learning and good teachers work.

Good universities do this - I guess if you are in a place that doesn’t, you need to get out or change it, but most successful places these days dovetail all these elements. All scholars must be public, I think.

The computer screen still prints fonts, though. If anything, the principles of print have been massively and endlessly recapitulated by the digital. Especially the way things are going with decentralised web services and cloud computing, my god.

The most radical thing a University could do now would get rid of the computer entirely. Can you imagine the reduction in carbon footprint?

Once again, this has been the tendency since the 1970s. There are now Languages departments, DIgital Media departments, etc. What is being proposed here is recent history.

The New School, MIT, European Graduate School, RMIT provide models for good alternative ways of working.

The first three and the last already exist at different universities, but the point is well taken.
I don’t think the borders are as stable in some countries as others. In Australia, people have no problem moving across fields and experimenting with different work, collaborative projects.

In the end, departments are not closed or opened on whether they are culturally relevant or not. That means absolutely nothing - departments are costed down to undergraduate and postgraduate income. Nothing else matters. If people want to study Archeology, then changing it into, lets say, a more generalised Department of Cultural Artefact will make people who want to be archeologists run to another university. The end.

What IS possible, is to contain fewer and fewer layers of management, and encourage the university to have basically two formal layers - the collective group (Archeology) and have people able to be called whatever they want, and their degrees Archeology, but in practice, a building called Cultural Artefacts that may also have Architecture and whatever else.

Again, though, and I can’t repeat this enough, this has been happening since 1970. Its unclear what else is being suggested here.

I too would be wary of separating ourselves from print, although I take the point. I am also not sure of convergence — it is neither possible nor desirable. The emphasis on practice is the key. DH emerges from the exploration of the representational and participatory affordances produced by digital media; it announces a shift in the humanities from a period of theory to one of method.

[...] Humanist Discussion Group, the UCLA’s Digital Humanities and Media Studies have published a A Digital Humanities Manifesto using the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress, a modified version of [...]

[...] Tags: manifesto, openness The  Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA issued A Digital Humanities Manifesto.  (Thanks to Open Access News). Excerpt from the [...]

[...] UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities has come up with a A Digital Humanities Manifesto which is worth reading. It starts with, Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of [...]

Note, over 50 years ago, in ‘Between Past and Present,’ Hannah Arendt wrote;

“What the concept of process implies is that the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning, have parted company. The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and significance.”

The difference is Arendt wrote this as part of sustained effort of committed scholarship and it was published in the United States by Viking Press in 1961. But what would a digital humanist need from a book, let alone an idea that pre-dates their new revolution?

The Department of Information Studies at UCLA covers most - in fact, all - of the topics indicated under Print Media Studies. Similar departments exist at other institutions and they are commonly referred to as “iSchools” (yes, possibly the worst name ever).

So, by implication, the sciences are less complex than the humanities? I guess I agree if “complex” really means “impressionistic.” But the real problem with this graf is the debilitating dualism upon which it rests, pitting the merely quantitative against the richly qualitative. Surely one of the potential strengths of the digital humanities would be in questioning this all-too-traditional dualism. It should be part of the program of the digital humanities to discover the quantitative in the qualitative and vice versa.

What happens to critique?

Great news for downsizers: the humanities are eating their young! All the non-textual fields are now to be lumped into one mishmosh and forced to be ahistorical and comparative (apparently with one another but not with texts?). Where all the other departments are “new,” this one “replaces” several others.

Also, it’s on intellectually shaky ground. It dictates perverse methodological boundaries. The activities it contains are fine. But is there never any reason to consider the aural, or the visual, or the tactile, as a distinct area of inquiry? And is there never any reason to consider any of these areas in conjunction with texts? I don’t see why film needs to be studied in “comparison” with music more than art needs to be studied in “comparison” with literature.

[...] digtal humanities people at UCLA have published this manifesto for a Digital Humanities. The tendency online is to rip the inadequacies of this to shreds (mainly via the amazing potential [...]

Beware of paranoia. Beware also of those who think that “continuity” is an inherent evil. Like all neoliberals, they wave the banners of change and compliment themselves on the creativity of their creative destruction, and never mind the casualties. They cast themselves in the roll of anti-corporate underdog even as they utter the magic word the corporations have taught them (”technology”) and see all of the doors on campus suddenly fly open.

I look around Digital Humanities and see the domain (mostly) of the old white men of tomorrow. Didn’t deconstruction already deconstruct the materiality, methods, and media of humanistic inquiry and practices? What ends and ideologies are served by technofetishim? Can digital humanities engage in self-critique?

[...] now the point of this blog post — we confess, we read the Digital Humanities Manifesto, with glee! We’re always suckers for descriptions of the radically new and different face of [...]

I think I can be more specific about what doesn’t work in this paragraph: it confuses the opposition between print and digital technology with the opposition (in fact non-opposition) between print and “visuality.” Last I checked, print is something you look at. By the same token, in the (digital-) humanistic context, code largely remains invisible because it is not widely perceived as an object of interesting human experience “in itself.” The digital domain may be conspicuously friendly to the dissemination of images, but it is no less so (look at your computer screen right now) to the dissemination of words. If anything, the specificity of the digital would be located in its special relation to the invisible (that is, to the layers of digits beneath the GUI). Whether the latter can be made interesting for long, or whether it will be the flashing insight of “code poetry,” is another question. And what if, alternatively, the capacity for vasty accelerated search and retrieval offered by the digital is finally what makes it specific?

[...] Probably the most provocative point raised in the article is the role of the curator, or expert, in the Smithsonian’s digital future. Institutions like museums (or presses) have traditionally occupied the role of gatekeepers (to steal a term from mass communication), choosing “the best” from the masses to display (or sell). For example, less than 1% of the museum’s 137 million items are on display. As many have pointed out, digital technologies change how information is generated and shared, and within the context of 2.0 technologies, crowd-sourcing, and remixing, the role of the expert and conceptions of authority are also transforming - transformations actively “promoted” in the digital humanities imagined in the forward-thinking “Manifesto” from UCLA’s Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities: Digital humanities promote a flattening of the relationship between masters and disciples. A dedefinition of the roles of professor and student, expert and non-expert. (paragraph #19) [...]

[...] folks at the Mellon Foundation are a busy lot. Apparently they have funded a seminar at UCLA on the digital humanities. The manifesto that the seminar has produced/is producing currently runs 20 paragraphs, with an [...]

I like your invitation, but like another commenter above, I don’t see in this current matrix any place for the study of ordinary human beings outside of their composing “large datasets.” This the greatest innovation in the study of humans in the twentieth century, the anthropological perspective, gets swept aside. As a folklorist, it’s rather like what happened when Bill Ferris was replaced by Bruce Cole at the NEH in 2001. Boggling.

[...] Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA issued A Digital Humanities Manifesto, which beautifully expresses the value of openness in [...]

[...] Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA issued A Digital Humanities Manifesto that has some interesting things to say about the nature of the ever-evolving digital [...]

One problem I see here — and why this document is troubling if it is to be called a “manifesto” — is that the “universe” that is written about is already marching forward with our without the help of digital humanists. Thus, digital humanists can hardly be the avant garde — insights into the power of new media and computers are being translated into actual machines and programs quite quickly (contrast this to communism, whose manifesto was descriptive but also prescriptive, but who “rabble rousing” tone also appealed to the “masses” who might want to act toward something not yet there).

I guess it could still qualify as a manifesto, but even the most forward looking of “digital humanists,” such as Lev Manovich, make their bread and butter observing what creators in the field (Apple, for instance, or the makers of YouTube) are literally transforming the world with. So, Manovich provides accurate, subtle descriptions of these changes, but is not “driving the car” (to cop a phrase from Williams). Marinetti is another comparison: there was the manifesto, but there was also the art, the product. I guess I could read this as addressed to academics who need to wake up to the changes in the world of the internet, but I think younger academics — the ones who still have to produce certain types of scholarship to get tenure — probably are aware of the basic rudiments of digital culture outlined here.

I would have to agree with the above — I don’t think I would ever describe the care strength of the Humanities as “complexity.” Later in the manifesto you valorize “entertainment,” and if there’s one thing I don’t think of when I think of entertainment, it’s complexity. Bad entertainment is entirely simplistic, while good entertainment creates an open channel between something that is quite gripping and has a visceral effect, but which unfolds into a world of subtle (indeed, complex) relations.

Perhaps I’m misreading the tone of paragraph 11: are you commenting on “scholarship up until now”? (Did Rimbaud sneak a paragraph into your Wordpress blog?)

I’ve heard the argument in this paragraph stated before, and I think Mark’s point about the very value of “interdisciplinary studies” being based on the fact of disciplines is a valid one. I think “disciplines” are bodies of knowledge but also bodies of practice that have to be learned or acquired, “internalized,” over several years.

To take an obvious example, anthropology since Levi Strauss has been characterized by highly theoretical discussions concerning the methodology, which involves dealing with live human beings who live in cultures entirely unlike ours, and then going out in the field and doing this work. I.e. more than just the facts. Cultural Analytics, on the other hand, which seems to have a relationship to anthropology, is unequipped to offer a counterweight to our starry-eyed notions of what computers can do, since it deals entirely with data.

It’s all about “styles of thinking.” Granted, disciplines acquire a lot of rust over the years, but, in some cases, the pointlessness of some of the internal practices of a discipline can be justified as a stay against dilittantism.

Most of the digitnal humanities projects that seek to display some new aspect of “poetry” — an interactive version of a Wallace Stevens poem, for example — usually fail because no one on the team seemed willing, or able (due to lack of true love of old-timey print poetry) to stand up and say that, indeed, the entire beauty of a poem has been lost by letting you move it around with your mouse — that the “eye candy” element of the project destroys the gravitas of the poem itself. I think this is a problem with digital “dilettantism” — intoxicaton with the powers of the computer — much as I am a digital dilittante myself and enjoy being so!

This is another case of tone and also where “we” stand in relation to the past and future. I.e. does a paragraph like this even have to be written in any context? I like the bit about process over product, and of course I love remixes and the whatnot, but I’d like to see (in ten words or less, of course — this is a manifesto!) — some inkling of a what a “mash-up” is in the world of scholarship. Surely it’s not a photograph of Al Gore shaking hands with a twinkie?

I think I’ve focused in on my problems with the document, which (I think) is as follows:

The first half — poetic, dismissive, ironic, Debordian, what have you — seems to contain very little that is specific to academic practice, and indeed when specific aspects of academic culture are mentioned, they come through in cartoon form — troping on some of the bile from Modernist manifestos but without the rich note of true disgust.

The second half, however, contains some actual prescriptive content — things the audience to which this is geared can “relate to.” Whereas a lot of the first half of the manifesto seems to be rehashing of some of the tropes we are familiar with in digital cultural discourse (and for those who are not, tough luck making sense of these clipped paragraphs), lacing it with Voriticist intensity, the second half seems conversational and “persuasive.”

This can be written with more confidence — be propulsive and “prescriptive” while being accurately “descriptive” of the sort of backward culture you are trying to (purportedly) to change. Don’t channel the tones of classic manifestos to put up a sheen of irony between the text and the audience. It’s tough — manifestos are meant to hurt feelings, and I don’t sense anyone wants to do that — but perhaps that’s why, in the end, it shouldn’t be framed as a manifesto or even allude to the genre in its tone.

I thought you might be interested in one of the more provocative manifesto-like statements that have appeared recently in the world of poetry. It’s by Kenneth Goldsmith, and he’s writing about something called “conceptual poetics” — a practice of complete “uncreativity” as he describes it — in which the writer is reduced to merely transcribing some source of language (a radio broadcast, his own conversation, etc.) into text. In some cases, the author is merely retyping some other text, such as a day’s worth of the New York Times (one of KG’s projects, called Day) and publishing it as a book.

The historical premises aren’t entirely different than what you/we are describing here — that this latest incarnation of the information age is characterized by appropriation, remixes, etc. — but the provocative twist is that the entire practice of writing has been reduced to placing some “unoriginal” text under one’s own name as an “author” — straight out of Calvino (and conceptual art), of course, but the practice has garnered a lot of attention in the world of poetry. (They are actually quite fun to read as well.)

In any case, I’ve always been impressed with the understated, but provocative (annoying to many), tone and content of Kenny’s various published statements on the practice. Like with the Digital Humanities manifesto, there is some shouting out to now-classic tropes of digital culture, but there isn’t a single line of the document that isn’t marked by a torque folding it into (do torques fold? ok…) his central thesis about a very concrete practice of producing literature. I suppose my advice, then, would be to make sure that no statement in this manifesto (such as paragraphs 4 and 12) could easily appear in some other text about digital culture — every phrase must be united with a core provocation. Also, no phrase should be included merely because it contributes to the pseudo-manifesto tone — this isn’t a “persona” a la Browning.

In addition, Kenny’s statement (linked to below) was not framed as a “manifesto” — he probably realized what a turn-off that would be, and that it’s far more controversial to be “cool” (as in “Laws of Cool”) in the digital age than to be “hot” — the “caffeine of Europe” has been displaced by designer psychiatric meds, indeed.

http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/2007.01.22.html

Entertainment is not the same as effective rhetorical appeal. The aim of scholarship should be the latter, not the former. (Especially if we’re targeting Disney as the enemy in par. 7.)

This is not an integrationist sentiment. It creates a false dichotomy between traditional and new forms of academic publishing.

Where is the integrationism in this statement? We take personal, financial, institutional, and professional risks to preserve and expand humanities disciplines because they have produced knowledge. Knowledge that humanists believe strengthens, enobles, enriches, and clarifies the human experience of the world. We do this in the face of extreme pressure from the corporate university, whose only measure of value is utility and trendy (and marketable) change (administration has no problem at all with letting humanities departments die). You align yourself here with the corporate university: throwing out the old because it is old is death of history, and thinking that the old can teach us nothing because it’s old is the adolescent and market-driven logic of unchecked capitalism.

I don’t think these terms are empty, and I like this par. How to enact these terms without eating one’s old or one’s young is the trick.

If print is the paradigm that digital humanities is attempting to subvert, I wonder if we could look at how humanities discourse existed in the pre-Gutenberg era. Might there be a historical lesson to avail ourselves of in trying to define this “media revolution”?

Fortunately this stops short of implying other dubious characteristics sometimes used to describe new media: that they are entirely “new,” or disembodied/ephemeral in nature. Perhaps that point should be made more explicit, however.

In need of some clarification here, and in paragraph 16. What is gained/lost in taking this stance toward entertainment? Are we to assume the traditional standard was information (as an activity rather than a thing), education, or something else?

Interesting point about the formation of disciplines and professions. Robert Darnton’s recent response to this question:

“As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty of reason, with its successor from the end of the eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie méthodique, which divided knowledge into fields that we can recognize today: chemistry, physics, history, mathematics, and the rest. In the nineteenth century, those fields turned into professions, certified by Ph.D.s and guarded by professional associations. They metamorphosed into departments of universities, and by the twentieth century they had left their mark on campuses—chemistry housed in this building, physics in that one, history here, mathematics there, and at the center of it all, a library, usually designed to look like a temple of learning.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

Although narrative might fall under literature, I’m not sure where it fits within this new scheme. Another thing to be included are heuristics (as defined by Andrew Abbott)–possibly under discourse analyses or cultural analytics.

Also, I question whether digital cultural mapping merits its own department, though I applaud the news of such an undergraduate program being formed here at UCLA.

[...] 16, 2009 in Uncategorized I can’t imagine that the fine folks who produced the Digital Humanities Manifesto (distributed to C-18L by its indefatigable Netwallah, Dogsbody, and General Factotum, Kevin Joel [...]

It’s a real avant garde manifesto … I like most of the points: open source, copyright/IP, etc. … but mostly I like it for aesthetic reasons because of the tone and cadences which so recall manifestos on writing, art and media from the teens and 1920s.

I think the new departments as announced here actually impoverish the existing ones, though, or just dress them in new names - and in some cases it looks like you’re just cutting the number of administrative units for purposes of cutting overhead, as happens in eras of budget cuts!

I agree with CHRISTIAN and KAH3NA FALKEN. These are very reductionist claims about expertise and authority. This, rather perversely mirrors the technocratic expertise that has so failed late capitalism-certainly in finance, but in other areas as well. Those institutions which are supposed to be the best assessors of risk in neoliberal free-market capitalism–banks and insurance companies–have gutted the system and led to a new phase of state intervention into the market place.

Experts are not disinterested parties. This seems very different from much of what you are trying to articulate. It seems like an aporia. Are users of code who do not code just a sub-class to this new army of digital natives who will code a new humanity from the ground up. In which case is this project utopian or imperialist?

[...] “Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution.” - A Digital Humanities Manifesto [...]

[...] I am pleased that UCLA has discovered the Digital Humanities. Here is a manifesto that they published from the Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities (link). [...]

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[...] finished another read-through of the new Digital Humanities Manifesto and it’s interesting to see how the Digital Humanities continues to position itself as an [...]

[...] apuntan a odelos opuestos:el Digital Humanities and lMedias Studies de la UCLA, ha lanzado su Digital Humanities Manifesto, que propugan un modelo aberto y participativo en sintonia con lo que siempre ha caracterizado el [...]