Chapter Title: “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the
Values of the Digital Humanities Chapter Author(s): LISA SPIRO
paRT I ][ Chapter 3
“This Is Why We Fight”:
De?ning the Values of the Digital Humanities
LISA SpIRO
E
16 ]
ven as the digital humanities (DH) is being hailed as
the “next big thing,”
members of the DH community have been debating what
counts as digital humanities and what does not, who is in and who is out, and
whether DH is
about making or theorizing, computation or
communication, practice or politics. Soon after William Pannapacker declared
the arrival of digital humanities at the Modern Languages Association (MLA)
conference in 2009 (Pannapacker,“The MLA and the Digital Humanities”), David
Parry wrote a much-debated blog post insisting that DH should aim to “challenge
and change scholarship” rather than “us[e] com- puters to ‘tag up Milton’”
(Parry). MLA 2011 unleashed another round of debates, as Pannapacker pointed to
a DH in-crowd, an ironic label for a group of people who have long felt like
mis?ts (Pannapacker, “Digital Humanities Triumphant?”).
Although the
debate has generated intellectual energy and compelling exchanges, it also has
left me frustrated by statements that seem to devalue the work of fellow
digital humanists and longing for a more coherent sense of community. Even as
we debate the digital humanities, We need to participate in a frank discus-
sion about what connects us and what values we hold in common. Given that the
digital humanities community includes people with different disciplines,
method- ological approaches, professional roles, and theoretical inclinations,
it is doubtful that we will settle on a tight de?nition of the digital humanities—just
witness the many de?nitions of the term offered by participants in the Day of
Digital Humani- ties (“How do you de?ne Humanities Computing/Digital
Humanities?”). Instead of trying to pigeonhole digital humanities by
prescribing particular methods or theoretical approaches, we can instead focus
on a community that comes together around values such as openness and
collaboration. As Matt Kirschenbaum sug- gests, “the digital humanities today
is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to
which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound
up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and
[ 17
more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a
scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of
people and that live an active, 24-7 life online” (Kirschenbaum, 6). How the
digital humanities community operates— transparently, collaboratively, through
online networks—distinguishes it. Even as we acknowledge points of difference,
I propose that the digital humanities commu- nity develop a ?exible statement
of values that it can use to communicate its identity to itself and the general
public, guide its priorities, and perhaps heal its divisions. Rather than
debating who is in and who is out, the DH community needs to develop a keener
sense of what it stands for and what is at stake in its work. Taking an initial
step toward this goal, I will discuss the rationale for creating a core values
statement by drawing on the literature about professional codes, suggest a
process for engag- ing the community in developing a values statement, explore
models for and in?u- ences on DH values, and analyze the DH literature to put
forward potential values.
Why the Digital Humanities Community Needs a Statement
of Values
By creating a core set of values, the digital
humanities community may be able to unite to confront challenges such as the
lack of open access to information and hide- bound policies that limit collaboration
and experimentation. As Kathleen Fitzpat- rick notes of the digital humanities,
“the key problems that we face again and again are social rather than
technological in nature: problems of encouraging participa- tion in
collaborative and collective projects, of developing sound preservation and
sustainability practices, of inciting institutional change, of promoting new
ways of thinking about how academic work might be done in the coming years”
(Fitzpatrick, “Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference”). Solving
such problems is not simple, but an important ?rst step may be articulating
shared values that can then be used to de?ne goals, develop collaborations, and
foster participation. Most professional organizations advance a set of values
or an ethical code to make clear their aspirations, set standards of behavior,
“provide the foundation of institutional mission and guide professional
practice and decision making” (Miller, 5). Further, values statements can
enable groups to confront change while remaining true to their overarching
principles (Bell).
Yet even as
they help to de?ne a community, values statements can also con- ?ne it,
re?ecting a static understanding of the organization or the particular biases
of a powerful clique that de?nes the standards. Finding consensus on the few
val- ues held in common by the community is dif?cult (Weissinger); indeed,
dissensus plays an important role in pressing an organization to consider blind
spots and alternative perspectives. Thus organizations must seek community-wide
input on values statements and view them as ?exible and contextual rather than
?xed and eternal. As I suggest later in the section “How to Produce a Values
Statement,” the DH community should re?ect its own spirit of collaboration and
?exibility in
18 ] lISA SpIRO
developing a values statement, opening up the process
to participation via wikis and other social media.
This essay
will focus on values rather than speci?c ethical guidelines. Whereas values
“represent closely held belief[s] and ideal[s],” ethics “are stated guidelines
attempting to describe standards and inform behavior so that the behavior will
meet these standards” (Miller, 8). A statement of values is typically broader
than an ethical code and serves in part to inspire and to help an organization
set pri- orities, de?ning what it holds most important. Professional codes such
as ethical guidelines or values statements ful?ll several functions, including
providing guid- ance for professionals, shaping the public’s expectations of
the profession, promot- ing professional socialization, improving the
profession’s reputation, “preserv[ing] entrenched professional biases,”
preventing unethical actions, supporting profes- sionals in their decision
making, and adjudicating disputes (Frankel, 111–12). While a statement of
values won’t settle debates in the digital humanities (nor should it), it will
at least frame them and provide the grounds for conversation. The digital
humanities profession, loosely con?gured as it is, has matured to the point
where it needs a values statement to help articulate its mission.
HOW TO pRODUCE a vaLUES STaTEMENT
Producing a values statement is dif?cult, since it
requires you to synthesize what matters to a community even as you recognize
areas of potential disagreement. (As a good humanist, I am well aware of the
contingencies, ideologies, and contexts that shape values.) I believe that
articulating a set of values for a community should be done by the community.
The process of producing a values statement may be as important as the
statement itself, since that process will embody how the commu- nity operates
and what it embraces. Thus the values statement should not come down on high
from a Committee that meets in private, then delivers its decrees to the
community. Instead, the DH community should enact an open, participatory,
iterative, networked process to develop its values statement. The statement
itself should be created and disseminated on a wiki, so that one can see it
change from version to version, review the discussion history, and understand
the dynamic, col- laborative nature of knowledge creation. The community should
engage in diverse efforts to solicit input and foster conversation, such as
online forums, face-to-face discussions at digital humanities conferences and
unconferences, and blog posts exploring key values. To ensure that the code of
values is not narrowly focused but re?ects the needs of the larger community,
wide input should be solicited from out- siders as well as “insiders”
(Frankel). But someone needs to kick off the discussion, which is what I aim to
do in this essay.
In de?ning
core values, the community needs to consider what it is excluding as well as
the cultural and ideological contexts surrounding the values it promotes. Given
the diversity of the community and the ways in which culture informs values,
[ 19
it may be dif?cult to arrive at consensus on the core
values (Koehler). Indeed, it is likely that creating a set of core values will
stimulate further debate, since different subcommunities and even individuals
will have their own views about what values are most important and whether it
even makes sense to come up with a core values statement. Stated values can
come into con?ict with the “values in practice” of com- munity members (Morgan,
Mason, and Nahon, 8). For example, the Wikipedia com- munity split over a
debate whether to include a controversial cartoon representing the prophet
Muhammad in a Wikipedia article about the publication of that cartoon by a
Danish newspaper, as the value of freedom of information clashed with that of
“mul- ticultural inclusivity” (Morgan, Mason, and Nahon, 9). But if the process
of develop- ing values is handled fairly and openly, con?icts can be defused
and healthy discussion can move the community forward. The process of
developing a set of values for the DH community can prompt self-re?ection and
conversation, helping the profession to mature. These values should serve as
beacons illuminating different paths rather than rigid rules constraining
choices. Even as the community recognizes that values are contextual rather
than ?xed, the process of developing a values statement can spark a concrete
discussion about what the digital humanities is trying to achieve and can
produce a living document that can help guide planning and decision making.
TOWaRD a sET OF DIGITaL HUManITIES VaLUES
In developing a set of values, the digital humanities
community can draw from sev- eral sources that re?ect its own diverse
in?uences. The values of the digital humani- ties represent a convergence of
several sets of values, including those of the humani- ties; libraries,
museums, and cultural heritage organizations; and networked culture. In some
ways, these values can come into con?ict, which may be contributing to the
ongoing debates about the digital humanities. Yet at their core, they share a
common aim to advance knowledge, foster innovation, and serve the public.
The values of
the humanities provide the foundation for the digital humani- ties. Indeed, the
humanities are typically de?ned by their focus on aesthetics and values
(American Council of Learned Societies). Among core humanistic values are
inquiry, critical thinking, debate, pluralism, balancing innovation and
tradition, and exploration and critique (Levine et al.). Yet contemporary
humanities scholarship also recognizes that values are not universal or ?xed
but rather re?ect particular contexts and ideologies: “At its best,
contemporary humanistic thinking does not peddle ideology, but rather attempts
to sensitize us to the presence of ideology in our work, and to its capacity to
delude us into promoting as universal values that in fact belong to one nation,
one social class, one sect” (Levine et al.). We cannot assume that the values
of one culture are shared by another culture; rather, values reveal the
ideologies and interests of those who hold them.
The
professional values of academic humanities scholars are to some extent narrower
than general humanistic values, as manifested in the insistence on solo
20 ] lISA SpIRO
scholarship, specialization, and scholarly authority.
For example, defending the humanities against conservative attacks on academic
specialization and literary theory such as Lynne Cheney’s Humanities in
America, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) report Speaking for
the Humanities insists on the impor- tance of professionalization: “It is
precisely because teachers of the humanities take their subject seriously that
they become specialists, allow themselves to be profes- sionals rather than
amateurs—belle lettrists who unselfconsciously sustain tradi- tional
hierarchies, traditional social and cultural exclusions, assuming that their audience
is both universal and homogeneous” (Levine et al.). Driven by a conser- vative
political agenda, Humanities in America takes a limited view in insisting that
humanities scholarship should focus solely on “timeless . . . truth—and beauty
and excellence” (Cheney, 7). Further, it is important to defend expert
knowledge and the academic profession. However, the emphasis, in Speaking for
the Humanities, on professionalization reinforces hierarchy and reveals its own
elitism in its assumption that nonprofessionals will naively uphold
“traditional hierarchies.” Likewise, Speak- ing for the Humanities celebrates
the challenge to authority and objective knowl- edge represented by
contemporary theory but insists on the authority of the pro- fessoriate, proclaiming
that the “competence of the best scholars in the humanities today is
remarkable” (Levine et al.). In a sense, these values focus more on asserting
the importance of scholarly authority and professional identity than on how
schol- ars work and what they do for society.
Such emphasis
on specialization and professional authority clashes with the collaborative,
crowdsourced approaches of the digital humanities—though the dig- ital
humanities, too, wrestles with questions of how to value expert knowledge. As
Ed Ayers suggests, IT culture and academic culture often clash, as IT is
“highly unsta- ble . . . designed to be transparent,” and has “all work
performed by anonymous teams,” while the academy is “the most stable
institution across the world . . . opaque and labyrinth,” and “centered on
scholarly stars” (Ayers, “The Academic Culture and the IT Culture”). The
digital humanities represents a partial blending of these two cultures. Perhaps
because the digital humanities includes people representing different
professional positions (faculty, librarians, technologists, museum profes-
sionals, passionate amateurs, and others) and often deliberately pursues a
public role for scholarship (whether through creating freely accessible digital
archives or supporting networked discussion of ideas), it often better serves
values such as plu- ralism and innovation than do the professional values of
the traditional academic humanities, which often seem to be crouched in a
defensive posture.
Yet the
formal values statements of professional humanities organizations do offer
important principles that can guide the digital humanities, including inquiry,
respect, debate, and integrity. As be?ts a scholarly organization, the American
His- torical Association’s (AHA) “Statement on Standards of Professional
Conduct” does not simply list particular scholarly values but rather explores
and contextualizes them in an essay. The document emphasizes the importance of
“critical dialogue”
[ 21
and demonstrating “trust and respect both of one’s
peers and of the public at large” (American Historical Association), embracing
a public role for historical scholar- ship. While “practicing history with
integrity does not mean being neutral or hav- ing no point of view,” it does
require “mutual respect and constructive criticism . . . awareness of one’s own
biases and a readiness to follow sound method and analy- sis wherever they may
lead,” and recognizing “the receipt of any ?nancial support” (American Historical
Association). AHA’s values statement seeks a balance between critical dialogue
and integrity, recognizing the importance of staking out a position yet also of
honoring evidence. Likewise, the Modern Language Association’s code of
professional ethics emphasizes freedom of inquiry, while admitting that it can
come into con?ict with other values. Thus the MLA acknowledges that “this free-
dom carries with it the responsibilities of professional conduct,” including
integrity, respect for diversity, and fairness (Modern Language Association,
“MLA Statement of Professional Ethics”).
Since the
digital humanities encompasses ?elds such as librarianship in addi- tion to
humanities disciplines, we should also look to models such as the American
Library Association’s (ALA) “Core Values of Librarianship.” Adopted in 2004,
this list of eleven values emphasizes the civic role that libraries play in
promoting access, con?dentiality/privacy, democracy, diversity, education and
lifelong learning, intel- lectual freedom, preservation, the public good,
professionalism, service, and social responsibility (American Library
Association). Whereas the values statements of the academic organizations
emphasize what scholars do (pursue inquiry) and how they do it (with integrity),
the ALA focuses on providing service and upholding the public good through
access, lifelong learning, and intellectual freedom. Bridg- ing these two
communities, the digital humanities community brings together core scholarly
values such as critical dialogue and free inquiry with an ethic focused on the
democratic sharing of ideas.
In a sense,
the digital humanities recon?gures the humanities for the Inter- net age,
leveraging networked technologies to exchange ideas, create communities of
practice, and build knowledge. The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 deliber-
ately sets the digital humanities in the context of traditional humanistic
values, arguing that DH seeks to revitalize them in a time when culture is
shifting from print to digital forms of knowledge dissemination: “Knowledge of
the Humanities as constituted in the modern university has shaped lives,
conveyed critical skills, provided a moral compass for human experiences, given
pleasure and satisfaction, inspired acts of generosity and heroism. Digital
Humanities represent an effort not to downplay or ‘downsize’ these traditional
merits but, on the contrary, to reassert and reinterpret their value in an era
when our relation to information, knowledge, and cultural heritage is radically
changing, when our entire cultural legacy as a spe- cies is migrating to
digital formats” (UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities). Even as the
humanities continue to make a vital contribution to society, they must be
“reassert[ed] and reinterpret[ed]” in a networked age. Whereas the traditional
22 ] lISA SpIRO
humanities typically value originality, authority, and
authorship—an ethos based in part on the scarcity of information and the
perceived need for gatekeepers—the Digital Humanities Manifesto instead
promotes remixing, openness, and the wis- dom of the crowd. For the digital
humanities, information is not a commodity to be controlled but a social good
to be shared and reused.
Internet
values themselves grow out of the humanistic mission to explore and exchange
ideas. As Tim O’Reilly argues, “Just as the Copernican revolution was part of a
broader social revolution that turned society away from hierarchy and received
knowledge, and instead sparked a spirit of inquiry and knowledge sharing, open source
is part of a communications revolution designed to maximize the free sharing of
ideas expressed in code” (O’Reilly). With the development of the Inter- net and
of open-source technologies come new ways to communicate information and ideas,
build communities, and promote the growth of knowledge. The digital humanities,
dubbed “Humanities 2.0” by Cathy Davidson, likewise promote open- ness,
participation, and community (Davidson).
Indeed,
Internet values, as manifested in the ethos of open source, infuse the digital
humanities. As Tom Scheinfeldt argues, the digital humanities community
operates much like a “social network,” nimble and connected: “Digital
humanities takes more than tools from the Internet. It works like the Internet.
It takes its val- ues from the Internet” (Scheinfeldt, “Stuff Digital Humanists
Like”). Like the Inter- net, the digital humanities community is distributed
rather than centralized, built on trust and the freedom to invent. Yet we might
also say that, like the Internet, the digital humanities community needs
protocols—values—to guide its develop- ment. As Scheinfeldt suggests, we can
see these Internet values re?ected in the DH community’s focus on openness,
iterative development, and transparency, as well as in its adoption of
open-source approaches to code development and commu- nity education.
In some ways,
the values of print culture (which is identi?ed with the tradi- tional
humanities) clash with those of Internet culture. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick,
citing Lawrence Lessig, explains, “the networks of electronic communication
carry embedded values within the codes that structure their operation, and many
of the Internet’s codes, and thus its values, are substantively different from
those within which scholars—or at least those in the humanities—profess to
operate. We must examine our values, and the ways that our new technologies may
affect them, in order to make the most productive use of those new forms”
(Planned Obsolescence). According to Fitzpatrick, the values of print
authorship are typically “individual- ity, originality, completeness,
ownership,” while the values of the Internet include “open, shared protocols
and codes” (Planned Obsolescence). At their core, both sets of values aim to
promote the exchange of ideas and the progress of knowledge, but print (at
least in the tradition of academic prose) typically gives greater emphasis to
authority and ownership, while digital scholarship values access, conversation,
?uidity, and collaboration. Likewise, Paula Petrik contrasts the ethos of
traditional
[ 23
humanities scholarship with the ethos of digital
humanities scholarship. Whereas the traditional humanities are text based and
nontechnical and value solitary, spe- cialized work resulting in a book, the
digital humanities are collaborative and tech- nical, value design, and are
built upon shared information resources (“Digital Schol- arship in the
University Tenure and Promotion Process”).
Grounded in
humanistic values but catalyzed by Internet values, the digital humanities
seeks to push the humanities into new territory by promoting collabo- ration,
openness, and experimentation. Although no professional organization in the
digital humanities has, to my knowledge, crafted a values statement, we can ?nd
sources for such a statement in ongoing discussions in blogs and articles, the
mission statements of DH centers, and digital humanities manifestos. Taking a
witty, prag- matic look at “Stuff Digital Humanists Like,” Tom Scheinfeldt points
to open social networks (Twitter vs. Facebook), agile development (rapid,
iterative), do-it-yourself (building, making), PHP (simplicity, accessibility),
and extramural grants (inno- vation, collaboration) (“Stuff Digital Humanists
Like”). Scheinfeldt’s list captures much of what animates the digital
humanities community, expressing this descrip- tion in terms of core
technologies and technical approaches. In Diane Zorich’s study of digital
humanities centers, she distills key values as expressed in their mis- sion
statements, including “the enduring value of the humanities, collaboration and
cross-disciplinarity, openness, civic and social responsibility, and
questioning sacred cows” (Zorich). Even as the digital humanities insist on the
importance of the humanities, they also seek to transform practices (or “sacred
cows”) such as ten- ure, publication, and peer review and to promote
collaboration, cross-disciplinarity, and public responsibility. The Digital
Humanities Manifesto 2.0 advances values such as openness (open access, open
source), collaboration, multiplicity, participa- tion,“scholarly innovation,
disciplinary cross-fertilization, and the democratization of knowledge” (UCLA
Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities). Likewise, the Paris “Manifesto for the
Digital Humanities” focuses on de?ning the DH community as “solidary, open,
welcoming and freely accessible . . . multilingual and multidisci- plinary,”
and favoring “the advancement of knowledge, the improvement of research quality
in our disciplines, the enrichment of knowledge and of collective patri- mony,
in the academic sphere and beyond it” (“Manifesto for the Digital Humani-
ties”). Running throughout these statements is an overarching sense that the
digital humanities should promote traditional humanistic values such as access
to knowl- edge and civic responsibility by embracing collaboration,
cross-disciplinarity, inno- vation, participation, and openness.
pROposED VaLUES
Drawing from manifestos, model statements of value,
and my own analysis of the rhetoric of the digital humanities, I propose the
following initial list of digital human- ities values. My intent is not to
speak presumptuously for the community and decide
24 ] lISA SpIRO
on my own what it values but rather to open up the
conversation. Although I wanted to keep the list of values concise, I recognize
that others should probably be added, such as sharing public knowledge,
curiosity, multidisciplinarity, and balancing the- ory and practice. With each
value, I explain what it is and why it is embraced by the digital humanities
community, and I also offer a few examples of how the value manifests itself,
aggregating ongoing discussions in the digital humanities. This set of values
signi?es what the digital humanities community aspires to achieve, not
necessarily what it has fully met.
Openness
Openness operates on several levels in the digital
humanities, describing a com- mitment to the open exchange of ideas, the
development of open content and soft- ware, and transparency (Zorich, 11). The
digital humanities community embraces openness because of both self-interest
and ethical aspirations. In order to create digital scholarship, researchers
typically need access to data, tools, and dissemi- nation platforms. As Christine
Borgman argues, “Openness matters for the digi- tal humanities for reasons of
interoperability, discovery, usability, and reusability” (Borgman), since it
means that scholars are better able to ?nd and use the data they need and
create systems that work together. As participants at a 2011 MLA panel on “The
Open Professoriate” argued, openness allows scholars to reach larger audiences
than the few who read academic journals, meet their responsibilities to be
“pub- lic servants,” participate in public exchanges, and become more visible
(Jaschik). Ultimately, openness promotes the larger goal of the humanities “to
democratize knowledge to reach out to ‘publics,’ share academic discoveries,
and invite an array of audiences to participate in knowledge production”
(Draxler et al.).
We can see
openness at work throughout the digital humanities community, such as in
open-source software tools, freely accessible digital collections, and open-
access journals and books. In the United States, the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH)“strongly encourages” grant applicants to release software
devel- oped through NEH support as open source (National Endowment for the
Humani- ties). The digital humanities community has produced a number of
open-source tools, including Zotero and NINES Collex. Likewise, some digital
collections impor- tant to the digital humanities, such as the Rossetti
Archive, use Creative Commons licenses; even more make their content freely
accessible without explicitly using such open licenses. In launching Digital
Humanities Quarterly, the editors decided to make it open access to expand the
audience and connect with ?elds related to the digital humanities, so that “it
can offer a freely accessible view of the ?eld to those who are curious about
it, and can also provide a publication venue that is visible to readers (and
potential authors) from these other domains” (Flanders, Piez, and Terras).
Openness thus supports related values such as transdisciplinarity, collabo-
ration, and the democratization of knowledge.
[ 25
Digital
humanists are beginning to press for open access not only to digital col-
lections, tools, and scholarship but also to educational resources and even
course evaluations. As Ethan Watrall argues, open courseware bene?ts the global
commu- nity of learners by making knowledge widely available (and is thus “the
right thing to do”), the university by making visible its curriculum and
offering educational resources for current students, and faculty members by
documenting their educa- tional innovations and giving them access to the
pedagogical contributions of their colleagues. As part of his commitment to
openness and transparency, Mark Sample makes his course evaluations public and
shares his Zotero library (“Transparency, Teaching, and Taking My Evaluations
Public”). As Sample argues, the work of the humanities “is so crucial that we
need to share what we learn, every step along the way” (“On Hacking and
Unpacking My (Zotero) Library”). Rather than cheapen- ing knowledge by making
it free, embracing openness recognizes the importance of the humanities to
society.
Collaboration
As Steven Johnson argues, a“majority of breakthrough
ideas emerge in collaborative environments” as the free ?ow of information
allows people to build on ideas and think in new ways. If reforming education
and solving social problems depends on tapping our “collective creative
potential,” then the humanities faces a “real ethical dilemma in its persistant
[sic] presumption that intellectual work is fundamentally individual,” argues
Alex Reid. Thus one of the key contributions that the digital humanities can
make is “to encourage a new kind of communal behavior, guided by a new
ethos”(Reid).
Indeed, the
digital humanities community promotes an ethos that embraces collaboration as
essential to its work and mission (even as it recognizes that some work is
better done in solitude). In part, that emphasis on collaboration re?ects the
need for people with a range of skills to contribute to digital scholarship. As
Mar- tha Nell Smith explains, “By its very nature, humanities computing demands
new models of work, speci?cally those that exploit the technology of
collaboration, for humanities computing projects cannot be realized without
project managers, text encoders, scanners, visionaries, and others with a
variety of responsibilities to pro- duce effective multimedia projects.” Often
collaborations in the digital humanities are interdisciplinary, linking
together the humanistic and computational approaches (Siemens, Unsworth, and
Schreibman). Yet collaboration isn’t just about being more productive but also
about transforming how the humanities work. Instead of work- ing on a project
alone, a digital humanist will typically participate as part of a team,
learning from others and contributing to an ongoing dialogue. By bringing
together people with diverse expertise, collaboration opens up new approaches
to tackling a problem, as statistical computing is applied to the study of
literature or geospatial tools are used to understand historical data.
26 ] lISA SpIRO
There are
many indicators of the importance of collaboration to the digital humanities
community. Consider, for instance, how frequently “collaboration” is a topic at
digital humanities conferences. For instance, at the Digital Humanities 2010
Conference, a number of papers, posters, and workshop sessions addressed
collaboration, whether as a key component of the humanities cyberinfrastructure
(e.g., “Content, Compliance, Collaboration and Complexity: Creating and
Sustain- ing Information”), a goal for online environments (e.g., “Developing a
Collabora- tive Online Environment for History—The Experience of British
History Online”), a characteristic of the digital humanities community (e.g.,
“A Tale of Two Cities: Implications of the Similarities and Differences in
Collaborative Approaches within the Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities
Communities”), or a means of accom- plishing work (e.g., “An Inter-Disciplinary
Approach to Web Programming: A Col- laboration Between the University Archives
and the Department of Computer Sci- ence”) (Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organisations, Digital Humanities 2010 Conference Abstracts). In my own
preliminary analysis of collaboration in the digi- tal humanities community, I
found that, between 2004 and 2008, 48 percent of the articles published in
Literary and Linguistic Computing, a major DH journal, were coauthored, a much
higher percentage than is typical of humanities journals (Spiro). Digital
humanities centers (such as the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for
Humanities) strive to support collaborations (Zorich), as do digital humanities
networks such as the Humanities Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Col-
laboratory (HASTAC), a focus sometimes re?ected in their names. Many digital
humanities funding programs explicitly require or encourage collaboration,
includ- ing the NEH’s Collaborative Research Grants, Digging into Data
Challenge, JISC/ NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants, and
DFG/NEH joint grants. But it isn’t just that the digital humanities community
values collaboration— rather, it values collaboration that acknowledges
contributions by all involved, whether they are tenured faculty, graduate
students, technologists, or librarians (Nowviskie). To guide the DH community
in collaborating with respect and fair- ness for all, the “Collaborators’ Bill
of Rights” af?rms the community value of rec- ognizing all involved in a
collaboration and outlines how credit should be attributed
and intellectual property rights of contributors
respected (Kirschenbaum et al.).
Collegiality and Connectedness
As part of its commitment to openness and
collaboration, the digital humanities community promotes collegiality,
welcoming contributions and offering help to those who need it. Tom Scheinfeldt
calls this the “niceness” of digital humanities, which he ascribes to both its
collaborative nature and its focus on method rather than theory (“Why Digital
Humanities is ‘Nice’”). Furthermore, as Lincoln Mul- len argues, inclusion may
be an effective strategy for increasing the acceptance of digital scholarship:
“It’s the ethos that says, I’m a coder and you’re not, so let me
[ 27
teach you, or let me build the tools you need. It’s
the ethos that says texts and tools should be available for all and that
publicly funded research and instruction should be publicly accessible”
(Mullen). If the underlying goal is the promotion of public knowledge, why not
share?
We can see
this commitment to collegiality in both virtual and physical spaces that bring
together digital humanists. For example, Digital Humanities Questions and
Answers1 aims to “create a friendly and inviting space where people can help
each other with questions about languages, tools, standards, best practices,
peda- gogy, and all things related to scholarly activity in the digital
humanities (broadly de?ned)” (Meloni). Between September of 2010 and April
2011, Digital Human- ities Questions and Answers has attracted over one
thousand posts, attesting to the willingness of the DH community to help.
Likewise, THATCamp, an “uncon- ference” that promotes collaboration and
conversation in the digital humanities, aims to be “open, . . . informal,” and
“non-hierarchical and non-disciplinary and inter-professional” (French). Rather
than establishing an agenda in advance, THAT- Camps encourage participants to
write short blog posts before the unconference to describe their session ideas,
then charge the participants with de?ning the sched- ule during the ?rst
session. At a typical THATCamp, it doesn’t matter whether you are a senior
faculty member, a graduate student, a programmer, or an early career librarian;
what matters is your willingness to participate and the quality of your ideas.
With the participants in charge of de?ning the conference, sometimes indi-
viduals can dominate the discussion, and some conversations can be less
inclusive than others, but the ethic of THATCamp emphasizes collaboration,
productivity, and fun (French).
Recently,
this idea of inclusiveness in the digital humanities has come under critique.
For example, William Pannapacker noted the split between “builders and
theorizers” and “an in-group, out-group dynamic” in the digital humanities
(“Digital Humanities Triumphant?”), a comment echoed by others (Sulley). But as
Stéfan Sinclair suggests, the digital humanities community recognizes a vari-
ety of contributions, from authoring publications to moderating discussion
lists to developing software. Many of its members devote themselves to serving
the community—“advocating for the digital humanities at various levels, helping
to provide support and expertise for other colleagues, mentoring junior colleagues
formally and informally” (Sinclair). Still, leaders of the digital humanities
com- munity have reacted with concern to the charge of exclusiveness. Geoffrey
Rock- well argues for providing more paths to entry to the community, looks to
THAT- Camp as a model for “creating a new ‘we’ of community,” and concludes,
“May we have the grace to welcome the exuberance of passion of the next
generation.” Likewise, John Unsworth suggests that “to expand the community
further,” digi- tal humanities will need to demonstrate how it can advance
humanities research, provide support for researchers and teachers who want to
use digital tools and methods, and reward their efforts (“The State of Digital
Humanities, 2010”). Even
28 ] lISA SpIRO
if the DH community has not fully met the value of
collegiality and inclusiveness, it certainly aspires to.
Diversity
The digital humanities embraces diversity, recognizing
that the community is more vibrant, discussions are richer, and projects are
stronger if multiple perspec- tives are represented. Some argue that the
digital humanities community pays lip service to diversity but has not engaged
with it on a deeper level. As Tanner Higgin contends, “issues of cultural
politics are downplayed or, more commonly, consid- ered a given within DH.
There’s a disposition that the battles of race, gender, class and ecology have
already been won, their lessons have been learned, and by espous- ing a
rhetoric of equity everything will fall into place” (Higgin). Similarly, Anne
Cong-Huyen asks, “where are those individuals and communities who are visibly
different to examine and create or represent disparate voices and media
objects?” Given the DH community’s orientation toward building and making
rather than theorizing, its focus has not really been on cultural politics,
although Alan Liu and others have been pressing it to engage with cultural
criticism (Liu). Based on my admittedly anecdotal observations at DH
gatherings, the community may not have achieved the same degree of diversity in
race and ethnicity as it has in professional roles, nationalities, age,
disciplines, and gender. However, the community works toward diversity as a
goal. In recognition of the need for the digital humanities to be diverse,
THATCamp SoCal created a position statement, “Towards an Open Digital
Humanities”: “Digital humanities must take active strides to include all the
areas of study that comprise the humanities and must strive to include
participants of diverse age, generation, skill, race, ethnicity, sexuality,
ability, nationality, culture, discipline, areas of interest. Without open
participation and broad outreach, the digital human- ities movement limits its
capacity for critical engagement” (Rivera Monclova). The community’s desire to
achieve diversity and inclusiveness is re?ected in the theme of the 2011
Digital Humanities conference, “Big Tent Digital Humanities” (Alliance of
Digital Humanities Organizations, “General CFP”). The call for papers for the
conference includes “digital humanities and diversity” as a suggested topic,
re?ecting both the importance given to the topic and the sense that it merits
deeper discussion.
Experimentation
The language of experimentation runs throughout the
digital humanities, demon- strating its support of risk taking,
entrepreneurship, and innovation. By leveraging information technology to
explore data, digital humanities casts intellectual prob- lems as experiments:
What is the effect of modeling the data in a particular way? What happens when
we visualize data or use text mining tools to discover patterns in it?
(Svensson, “The Landscape of Digital Humanities”). As Willard McCarty sug-
gests, “ours is an experimental practice, using equipment and instantiating
de?nite
[ 29
methods.” As in the sciences, digital humanities
projects often use data, tools, and methods to examine particular questions,
but the work supports interpretation and exploration. The word “experiment”
turns up in Burrows’s Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s
Novels and an Experiment in Method, which explores the use of textual analysis
software to study Austen’s language. Likewise, Ayers and Thomas initially
included the word “experiment”—Two American Com- munities on the Eve of the
Civil War: An Experiment in Form and Analysis (Ayers and Thomas)—in the title
of their article for The American Historical Review, which tests how historians
can “create or present new forms of scholarship and narrative” (Thomas, 415).
However, reviewers rejected the article’s use of hypertext, since it
“frustrated readers’ expectations for a scholarly article laid out in a certain
way” (Ayers, “The Academic Culture and the IT Culture”). When Ayers and Thom-
as’s article was ?nally published in the journal, it adopted a “much-simpli?ed
form” and took a new title that deemphasized its experimental approach: “The
Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities” (Ayers,
“The Aca- demic Culture and the IT Culture”). Perhaps a traditional academic journal
wasn’t ready for “an experiment in form and analysis” (although the language of
experi- mentation still permeates the article).
Not all
experiments succeed as originally imagined, but the digital humani- ties
community recognizes the value of failure in the pursuit of innovation. “[T]o
encourage innovations in the digital humanities,” the National Endowment for
the Humanities offers “Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,” which “are modeled,
in part, on the ‘high risk/high reward’ paradigm often used by funding agencies
in the sciences” (National Endowment for the Humanities). Failure is accepted
as a use- ful result in the digital humanities, since it indicates that the
experiment was likely high risk and means that we collectively learn from failure
rather than reproducing it (assuming that the failure is documented). As John
Unsworth argues, “If an elec- tronic scholarly project can’t fail and doesn’t
produce new ignorance, then it isn’t worth a damn” (“Documenting the
Reinvention of Text”).
Many digital
humanities organizations model themselves after laboratories, emphasizing the
experimental, collaborative nature of their work. In de?ning the term “digital
humanities center,” Diane Zorich characterizes it as “an entity where new media
and technologies are used for humanities-based research, teaching, and
intellectual engagement and experimentation” (4). Indeed, a number of DH
centers position themselves as labs, including the University of Virginia’s
Scholars’ Lab, the HUMlab at Umeå University, and University of California
Davis’s Humanities Inno- vation Lab, re?ecting the sense of a lab both as a
space where experiments are car- ried out and as a community focused on
exploration and experimentation. Likewise, the Stanford Literary Lab focuses on
quantitative methods to study literature, where “[i]deally, research will take
the form of a genuine ‘experiment’” (“Stanford Liter- ary Lab”). Stanford
Literary Lab’s recent investigation into automatically classifying
30 ] lISA SpIRO
texts by genre, Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment
(Allison et al.), employs the language of experimentation throughout.
For the
digital humanities community, experimentation suggests not only a method of
testing ideas and creating knowledge but also its engagement in trans- forming
traditional approaches to teaching and research. “Experiment” belongs in a
constellation of terms such as curiosity, play, exploration, and
do-it-yourself. Dan Cohen ran an experiment to see if he could disseminate a
historical puzzle via Twit- ter and get an answer back from the research
community (Cohen). Similarly, in launching Digital Humanities Quarterly, the
editors characterize it as an experi- ment “in how academic journals are
published,” given its use of open standards such as XML and commitment to “the
rhetoric of digital authoring” (Flanders, Piez, and Terras). Experimentation
goes on in the classroom as well as in research and publishing. For instance,
the Looking for Whitman project brought together classes at four different
universities to explore the work of Walt Whitman, collabo- rate using social
networking technologies, and contribute to an open repository of resources from
places where Whitman once lived (“About Looking for Whitman”). Jim Groom
characterizes Looking for Whitman as “an attempt to experiment with how [a
group] of distributed faculty and students can share, collaborate, and con-
verse out in the open” (Groom). “Experiment” thus suggests the aim to develop
innovative, novel practices for humanities research and teaching.
Conclusion
To some extent, some digital humanities values may
clash with the norms of the academy. For example, universities’ intellectual
property policies may be unfavor- able toward producing open-source software.
In addition, professors may ?nd it dif?cult to ?nd publishers for their work if
they initially release it as open access (although some publishers—including
the University of Minnesota Press, which is publishing this volume—are willing
to adopt open licenses). Likewise, many humanities departments favor solo work
in their tenure and promotion policies and may ?nd it dif?cult to determine how
to assign credit for collaborative work (Modern Language Association, Report of
the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Schol- arship for Tenure and Promotion). This
resistance (or, in some cases, ignorance) makes it all the more important for
the DH community to come together in putting forward values such as openness
and collaboration. These values point to an over- arching ethos that promotes
innovative scholarship as a public good and believes that it should be
practiced openly and collaboratively.
By
developing a core values statement, the digital humanities community can craft
a more coherent identity, use these values as guiding principles, and pass them
on as part of DH education. What de?nes a profession is not only what it does
but also what values it upholds and how it practices “professional
responsibility” (Fuller and Keim). If groups share common values, they are
typically governed more
[ 31
effectively and can motivate people to participate
more actively (Zhu, Kraut, and Kittur). As Patrick Svensson notes, the DH
community offers “rather strong sup- port for expanding the territory and for
achieving a higher degree of penetration” across the humanities community
(“Humanities Computing as Digital Humani- ties”); one way to reach out is to
articulate core values that those both inside and out- side the community might
understand and embrace. Of course, these values must operate in a speci?c
context, where they may clash or get complicated. But they can help to guide
decision making about priorities and serve as the basis for the DH community’s
goals. Should projects use proprietary code? What should DH curri- cula
emphasize? What should determine the agenda of a DH center or professional
organization? In tackling these questions, we can draw guidance from an
explicit yet evolving set of community values.
