Why I Love the Digital Humanities

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called “Why I Love THATCamp.” In it, I said:

So much of my experience in the humanities has been centered around finding, and defending, an increasingly small track of academic land. Conferences have often filled me with a sense of the resentment that I feel almost programmed to acknowledge as the proper approach to academic life. Most recently, I remember having a discussion about the role of love in philosophy. One participant remarked that we should be critical of love, that it often keeps us starry-eyed with a thinker or a topic while ignoring important problems. I didn’t necessarily disagree, but I was truly disgusted. You mean I can’t even really love what I do anymore?

I reflect upon this post in light of recent discussions surrounding gender and DH, Miriam Posner’s rejoinder that we should all work together, and Sheila Brennan’s powerful account of why the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is such a transformative work environment. Sheila’s post is full of really important points about the way a collaborative environment contrasts so sharply with the hyper-competitive museum she worked at prior to her tenure at George Mason. I found the following a powerful parallel to my own experiences:

Seven years of these battles tired me out, particularly after I started my PhD and was looking to leave that museum. I saw the possibilities of cross-institutional collaboration and content production and audience engagement that was happening through RRCHNM. I also saw how RRCHNM grew in the early and mid 00′s to include additional women and men working as web designers, research assistants, project managers, project directors, and post-docs. I learned that at RRCHNM, and indeed of most DH professionals that I would come to know, most of the staff taught themselves HTML, CSS, PHP, et al. Then they shared that knowledge with one another. As an observer, this was a very different model of working than I had known. People worked well together and were producing thoughtful public history work that was accessible to a broad range of users from elementary school students to historians and genealogists.

I apologize for the long quotes, but I feel the need to give a flavor of both posts, to show how eye-opening and career changing the idea of institutional collaboration has been for several people in the digital humanities. I come from the midwest, a town known for being the buckle of the Bible belt: Springfield, Missouri. Much has changed since I moved from there ten years ago, but Springfield is not known for being a bastion of liberal thought. I remember being told as a child that I was going to hell because my mother divorced my father. I also remember my mother struggling to make ends-meet because she could not find a single, stable career in a town that was far too willing to hire men before they would consider hiring a woman.

I remember how gender discrimination molded me. It made me feel that I could not rely on anyone else, since my mother had to cobble together a living from many different and contingent jobs. It made me resentful of other families who had more money and went to expensive churches every Sunday, while seeing me as a lost soul from a broken home and pressuring me to go to church with them under the guise of pizza parties and (I kid you not) paint ball tournaments. It alienated me from my peers in Junior High and High School, most of whom questioned my sexuality because I lived in a single parent home and (they presumed) didn’t have a strong male role model. It made me remain in “remedial” courses while my friends went on to honors English and Chemistry and History. I was patronizingly told that I needed more help because my mother worked all day. This meant that my friends went to more prestigious colleges (USC, Tulane, Northwestern) while I struggled to catch up.

I’ve also had my share of sexist, racist, and homophobic thoughts. Springfield didn’t exactly give me many opportunities for shattering my prejudices. I was particularly prone to homophobia. I had a friend who found it even more difficult than I did to relate to other people. We were assigned to share a tent on a boy scout trip, and he said “are you coming to bed?” at the end of the first night. You can, of course, imagine what the other scouts said after I refused, he entered the tent, and everyone started chuckling. I laughed as well, slept under the stars that night, and requested another tent the next day. I had conversations with friends where I joked about “gays getting married,” and expressed disgust. Looking back years later, after becoming friends with many people in the LGBTQ community and learning that my cousin is transgender, I’m not exactly proud of what I said and did.

All of these experiences, feeling alienated and the need to prove myself, shaped my early academic experience. Researching was about defending myself from all of the identities that I could not claim, yet also showing solidarity to multiple theoretical concerns simultaneously. I spent so much time apologizing and defending that I never found a theoretical home. I called myself a Derridean because I empathized with the feeling of displacement and groundlessness that I found in his writing. Due to my isolation, I relate quite strongly to Tara McPherson’s article “Why are the Digital Humanities So White?, or, Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation” in Debates in the Digital Humanities. Mcpherson charts the development of lenticularity and modularity in programming and aligns it with the way the American government dealt with separating and containing uprisings like those in Watts and Chicago during the Civil Rights Movement. For her, lenticularity, “structures representations but also epistemologies. It also serves to secure our understandings of race in very narrow registers, fixating on sameness or difference while forestalling connection and interrelation.” My entire early academic life was depressingly modular. I felt completely isolated, and that isolation only grew as I wrote my dissertation and believed that I would have to separate myself from the rest of the community to get work done.

But this is why I love the digital humanities. DH gives me a very different vision for how valuable humanities work can be accomplished with other people, rather than against them. Working at DiSC, and learning how librarians share knowledge, is part and parcel of a collaborative value that (for me) is essential to why the digital humanities matter. I met Miriam Posner, Stewart Varner, and Brian Croxall on the first day working at DiSC and, after hearing about how they wanted to work with me to create large research projects, I felt like I had been wearing a straight-jacket for years that had finally fallen off. I had always liked collaboration, particularly participating in edited collections, but this experience was entirely different. I wasn’t alone anymore. I could think about issues with other people and not worry that they were out to prove that I had some deficiency.

I think this way of organizing knowledge can be applied to cultural studies as well. While I have had many opportunities due to my race and gender, I’ve also been impacted in many not so subtle ways by discrimination - we all have. We are all shaped by, but are also more than, our identities. And prejudice impacts communities and families, just as it does individuals. The collaborative spirit involved in DH could help create a safe space for honestly addressing racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, humanism, and other prejudices. I would be proud to be part of a group that supported one another while approaching the extremely complicated issues that no one person can really think about alone. We urgently need to address cultural and critical theory in DH, but I feel that we also (as a community) need to find a better way of doing it, rather than cutting each other down and destroying what makes DH so special.