A Professor of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Helle Porsdam teaches American history as well as the culture and history of human rights. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University, has been a Liberal Arts Fellow twice at the Harvard Law School, an Arcadia Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study, Munich. Among her books may be mentioned
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Are we currently confusing being connected with communicating - and does the sort
of communication people are typically engaging in on the Internet, in social
media and when they use their mobile phones merely lead to superficial rather
than meaningful dialogue? If this is the case, it ought to concern Digital
Humanities (DH) scholars, many of whom continue to be more interested in how we
connect than in the substance and dialogue of that very connectedness. I would
like to argue for a better balance between the
Fox, hedgehog, or hedgefox?
Are we currently confusing being connected with communicating - and does the sort of
communication people are typically engaging in on the Internet, in social media and
when they use their mobile phones merely lead to superficial rather than meaningful
dialogue?
The arguments made by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp in
make them active participants and stakeholders in the creation and preservation of cultural materials.
a state ofubiquitous scholarship, of ever-more interconnected, publicly engaged, participant citizens.
the processes of design and the creation of the experiential, the social, and the communal.Indeed,
authorship is design and design is authorship.
by definition, applied.It is scholarship that values the
It is not, the authors of
there can be little doubt that the technologies that give rise to the Digital Humanities push us - scholars, students, and citizens alike - into the fox family. The nature of discourse and debate in networks, the reality of study in multimedia environments, and the inexorable splintering of attention that multiple windows and channels afford lead to pursuingmany ends .
Toward the very end of
The prevailing research culture of the Digital Humanities will become entrepreneurial, much like design or certain areas of contemporary engineering and the sciences are… The digital humanist’s sense of identity will be less anchored in a discipline or disciplinary specialty than in a sense ofbelonging to a community of practice within which tools and methods are primary and objects of study are secondary considerations .
This sounds very much like a dismissal of the possibility described earlier of
creating hedgefoxes - of somehow also cherishing that part of humanities scholarship
which is based on the hedgehog’s ability to work long and hard and with intense
rigor on one particular topic. Are Burdick, et al. telling us, we cannot help
wondering at this point, that humanities scholarship will only be concerned with
process, form, design - in short, the How can the Digital Humanities keep
the ways of the hedgehog alive in the era of the fox’s ascendance? How do we
inject deep digs into the free-ranging ways of networked
scholarship?
To this reader, these last two questions posed by Burdick, et al. are the very
questions that Digital Humanities (DH) scholars ought to become more interested in
answering at the present moment. If none of the willingness to discuss the
questions of value and
interpretation, with the realms of rhetoric as well as logic, with
subjective judgment alongside attention to verifiable truths.
In the following, it is the
Arguing for the need to find a better balance between the
two culturesdebate has since come to be echoed in various DH connections. Part three concerns what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1962 referred to as the
mystiqueof quantitative research: the hegemonic drive of the quantitative approach. Questioning, a mere six months after F.R. Leavis had delivered a vicious response to Snow’s
Leavis and Schlesinger were right, I conclude, in pointing to the problems inherent in the wish to quantify humanities teaching and scholarship - a wish that is today often repeated by DH scholars.
As David M. Berry sees it, the time has now come for a third-wave Digital Humanities. Neither the first- nor the second-wave DH, as they have been described by e.g. Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp in their
unspoken assumptions and ontological foundations which support thenormal research that humanities scholars undertake on an everyday basis,
At the very center of Berry’s third-wave Digital Humanities is the notion of a
digital In short,
the professor who tells you what
you should be looking up and the
What we are potentially looking at here, according to Berry, is nothing short of
a Kuhnian paradigm shift - a moment of revolutionary science,
in the Kuhnian sense,
during which a new normal
science
will emerge. Computer science and the reading and writing of
computer code play an especially poignant role in this paradigm shift, he
speculates - though not in the sense that the
a
from linear temporal causality
to spatialized grids extending in all directions and incorporating
rich connections within themselves as well as cross-connections with
other grids.
normal science
currently emerging, this is the very moment to
become involved.
Berry’s recommendation that a humanistic approach concerning the reading and writing of computer code be promoted is one that is shared by other DH scholars. In
The approaches that tolerate
relativism and diversity in thinking, orders of experience, and, yes,
fundamental values
at least posit, if not fully
enable, a future in which participation is possible for everyone,
anywhere, anytime. It would be as if it were possible to bring about a
public sphere in which no one was excluded. This is the core human value
of the Digital Humanities.
One important part of this visionary digital enfranchisement discourse is its
association with technology and the digital more generally.
to better understand current controversies over whether the Internet will beopen orclosed
Time has proven Rosenzweig right. Those controversies over the internet are still
very much with us; indeed, they have in some ways become more bitter as a result
of what has come to be known as the copyright
wars
- the pitched battles over new technology, business models and
consumers, between those attempting to expand copyright protection and those
trying to circumvent it. But this only goes to show the importance of the
internet and of digital communication, and several historians have followed
Rosenzweig’s invitation to historicize and contextualize both. Some have been
especially interested in the
Historians focusing on the powered by ideas, ideals, and by
idealism
we want to provide as many eBooks in
as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many
languages as possible.
Logo
, the first programming language written especially
for children, introduced by Seymour Papert as early as 1967. Logo became the
start of the program One Laptop Per Child
whose Mission Statement reads:
To create educational opportunities for the
world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost,
low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for
collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to
this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn,
share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the
world and to a brighter future.
More recently, DH scholar Patrik Svensson has also emphasized the link between
visionary thinking and technological development (Svensson 2012, 65). Remarking
how the constant challenges waged at core approaches and methods add to the
sense of a field that is dynamic and constantly changing, he sees the truly
interdisciplinary nature of DH and the way in which it potentially operates
across all humanities disciplines as a big advantage when it comes to applying
for funding, national as well as international, where there may be a need for
Big Humanities to match Big Science projects.
Key words - for Svensson as for Burdick, et al., Berry and many other DH scholars
- are urgency and change; the need for rethinking and pushing against the
boundaries of existing and established structures and ways of thinking. Because
most of the work done within DH is collaborative and project-based and its
concrete outcome often is digital publications that do not fit easily into
traditional academic patterns of reward and support, moreover, many within the
DH community press for changes to accommodate their work. When we add to this
the sense that many humanities scholars have of competing for funding,
recognition and the place of their respective disciplines within higher
education, it is easy to understand how DH could become a platform or means for
rethinking the humanities and higher education and a way of channeling
transformative sentiment that often goes far beyond the digital
humanities proper.
There is indeed much at stake for the humanities and for its students and scholars, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick sums it up in
two cultures?
It is interesting that at the core of the wish for digital enfranchisement of the public we find a somewhat traditional (American) multicultural argument. As the authors of
inherited curricula, which were rightly seen as constrained by issues of race, class, gender, and first-world biases rooted in Eurocentric traditions
It was a different, though related, kind of gap that inspired F.R. Leavis to
engage in fierce dialogue with his Cambridge colleague C.P. Snow in the early
1960s: that between what the latter termed the
Two Cultures
, the technological and natural sciences on the one hand
and the arts and humanities on the other. The interest in higher education was
one that Leavis shared with Burdick, et al. and other DH scholars, though - at
bottom, the famous Two Cultures
debate
had everything to do with what ought to be the core curriculum of the
humanities. It is therefore perhaps no coincidence that echoes of the old debate
have found their way into the DH community. Indeed, from the very beginning,
Susan Hockey tells us in
humanities computing has had to embrace[my emphasis]., to bring the rigor and systematic unambiguous procedural methodologies characteristic of the sciences to address problems within the humanities that had hitherto been most often treated in a serendipitous fashion the two cultures
Humanities computing, which later developed into DH, has always been a visionary
discourse, as we saw. One such visionary attempt to use the digital as a means
of renegotiating the humanities and to rely on digital networks to further
interdisciplinary work is the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced
Collaboratory. More commonly known as HASTAC, it describes itself as, A network of individuals and institutions inspired
the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn,
teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities.
We are motivated by the conviction that the digital era provides rich
opportunities for informal and formal learning and for collaborative,
networked research that extends across traditional disciplines, across the
boundaries of academe and community, across the
the two cultures
HASTAC wishes to provide a forum for, and thereby further, the interconnected and
interactive global nature of knowledge today – a forum that will blur sharp
distinctions between research, education and other activities and that will
extend DH beyond the humanities themselves to industry, cultural institutions
and the art world. The ultimate vision, though, is finding a way of bridging the
two cultures
– defined here as not
only those of the humanities and the sciences/technology, but also those of
theory versus practice. What is interesting about the HASTAC statement is the
way in which it also includes a vision of bridging social divisions as well as
national borders digitally. Many of these elements were present in the debate on
the two cultures
between C.P. Snow
and F.R. Leavis.
Sir Charles Percy Snow did a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, but it was as a novelist and government official that he became a well-known figure to the English public. Between 1940 and 1970, he published eleven novels that became known collectively as
the two cultures- a debate to which Leavis contributed with his Richmond Lecture, entitled
It is Leavis’ reaction to Snow’s lecture that concerns me here. Elsewhere, I have
written at greater length about both Snow’s and Leavis’ points of view Technologico-Benthamite
view of the world.
The dimension that Leavis most of all found lacking in Snow was the individual,
the human one. Though all human beings share certain common features - hunger
and thirst, for example, and the fact that we all have eyes, noses, legs and
arms - individual lives cannot be
aggregated or equated or dealt with quantitatively in any way.
In coming to terms with great
literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for - what
ultimately for? What do men live by - the questions work and tell at
what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling.
At another level, the issue, as Leavis saw it, was the pace of life that modern
science and technology seemed to result in. Snow had kept stressing, in his Rede
Lecture, the urgency of his concerns, the speed with which today turns into
tomorrow - we have very little time. So little
I dare not guess at it
such concern is not enough -
disastrously not enough.
The advance of science and
technology means a human future of change so rapid and of such kinds, of
tests and challenges so unprecedented, of decisions and possible
non-decisions so momentous and insidious in their consequences, that
mankind - this is surely clear - will need to be in full intelligent
possession of its full humanity (and ‘possession’ here means, not
confident ownership of that which belongs to
Intellectual depth and complexity along with a both critical and creative
response to change - or the creation of the human world, including
language,
he argued, the triumphant
erection of the scientific edifice would not have been possible.
The
word cultural community or consciousness.
The
place where this cultural consciousness might be sustained was the university,
and because language was central to thought and thought, past as well as
present, would be communicated via literature, the center of the university
ought to be vital English School,
Leavis maintained: Like Snow I look to the university.
Unlike Snow, I am concerned to make it really a university, something
(that is) more than a collocation of specialist departments - to make it
a centre of human consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgment and
responsibility. And perhaps I have sufficiently indicated on what lines
I would justify my seeing the centre of a university in a vital English
School.
Throughout his lecture, Leavis anxiously claimed that he was not himself a
Luddite, but that he would be dismissed by Snow and his cohort as being one, the
moment he pointed to the complexity of current technical and intellectual
developments. Any criticism voiced would be seen as inevitably highbrow
- a negative term wielded against
anyone who attempted to work toward qualitative, rather than quantitative goals: The upshot is that if you insist on
the need for any other kind of concern, entailing forethought, action
and provision, about the human future - any other kind of misgiving -
than that which talks in terms of productivity, material standards of
living, hygienic and technological progress, then you are a
Luddite.
Just as Snow personified for Leavis everything that was currently wrong, so
Leavis was for Snow in the end just another Luddite. Today, the name of each is
very much associated with the two cultures debate of which they were the main
protagonists. As we find ourselves in the middle of another technological
revolution - this time a digital one - we are once more very concerned with what
the implications will be for our research and our way of thinking and writing.
To what extent will the technologically savvy, already as fully converted to the
digital cause as Snow was to the scientific revolution, carry the day - and on
what terms? And to what extent will those of us who care about the humanities be
allowed to fret about the present state and future of our disciplines in the
same way that Leavis wondered about what can and should be done, without being
considered highbrow,
elitist snobs?
Snow’s lecture got an immediate response, both positive and negative, and he
later thought that this must be because he had touched on something which was
already It was
clear that many people had been thinking on this assembly of topics. The
ideas were in the air… any of us could have produced a hubbub.
Apart
from the fact that these ideas were not all that original to him, what could be
inferred from this, Snow claimed, was that there must be something in
them.
Snow had a point. Whether or not people agreed with him - and Leavis and many
others obviously did not - he was on to something that greatly interested
people. In fact, there was a similar debate going on at the University of
Oxford. Here, Isaiah Berlin took the leading part in building a new graduate
college, Wolfson College, which would promote the powerful scientific and
technological developments of the time.
Schlesinger started out with a Insofar as empirical social
research can drive historians to criticize their assumptions, to expose
their premises, to tighten their logic, to pursue and respect their
facts, to restrain their rhetoric - in short, insofar as it gives them
an acute sense of the extraordinary precariousness of the historical
enterprise - it administers a wholly salutary shock to a somewhat
uncritical and even complacent discipline.
Having thus demonstrated that he had absolutely no quarrel with empirical social
research per se and that, as a historian, he felt indebted to sociologists such
as Lazarsfeld, Schlesinger then went on to clarify that the problem he wanted to
address concerned the way in which many sociologists had come to consider
empirical social research In the meantime, this humanist is bound to say that, as an aid to
the understanding of society and men, quantitative social research
is admirable and indispensable. As a guide to the significance of
problems, it is misleading when it exudes the assumption that only
problems susceptible to quantitative solutions are important. As a
means of explaining human or social behavior, it is powerful but
profoundly incomplete. As the source of a theory of human nature and
of the universe, it is but a new formulation of an ancient romantic
myth.not one of several
paths to social wisdom, but the central and in-fallible path.
Having
fallen under the spell of what Schlesinger thought could only be called the mystique of empirical social research,
these sociologists had increasingly come to understand empirical social research
as above all, quantitative research - that is,
research which deals in quantifiable problems and yields numerical or
quasi-numerical conclusions.
He stressed once again that he did not
wish to be misunderstood; no historian could possibly deny that quantitative research, complete with IBM cards and
computers, can make an important contribution to historical
understanding.
What he questioned was the assumption that such
quantitative research can handle everything
which the humanist must take into account.
And perhaps worst of all,
Schlesinger argued, was the dismissal of everything non-quantifiable as being
irrelevant and un-important. What quantitative methods are not very good at
handling can in fact well be the things that matter
most,
There is much, I would add,
which we must leave, whether we like it or not, not just to historians
but to poets, novelists, painters, musicians, philosophers, theologians,
even politicians, even saints - in short, to one form or another of
humanist. For an indefinite future, I suspect, humanism will continue to
yield truths about both individual and social experience which
quantitative social research by itself could never reach. Whether these
truths are inherently or merely temporarily inaccessible to the
quantitative method is a question which only experience can answer.
Leavis would have agreed wholeheartedly. As Guy Ortolano has shown, it was not
the importance of science and technology that Leavis questioned, but rather the
complete endorsement by modern civilization of ideals such as description, logic
and clarity - to the exclusion of older, more qualitative ideals.
It is precisely this insight - that we are not talking about an either/or, and
that we are and should not be engaged in trench warfare - which makes it
worthwhile to look at the old ‘two cultures’ debate. In its modern DH version, I
would suggest, this means realizing that both qualitative and quantitative ways
of doing research are needed - and that the furthering of a ‘humanist spirit’ or
new digital
Viewed in an optimistic light, Bernhard Rieder and Theo Röhle correctly point
out, the great interest among humanities scholars for the digital media looks
like the emergence of a new and genuine trans-disciplinarity: Digital humanities - an
endeavor at the forefront of crossing boundaries and research traditions
- would seem
[my emphasis].
two cultures
If we look more closely, however, we risk finding a wish to compete with the
natural sciences on their own turf by doing objective research, with the help of
machines, which aims to reduce as far as possible any kind of human, subjective
bias and/or emotion. Reminding us how, in the nineteenth century, the drive for
objectivity led to the belief in evidence
than is textual rhetoric which is considered by most scientists to be argumentation
only
Rieder and Röhle have no clear-cut answer to the challenges to what they, too,
consider to be a Kuhnian paradigm shift in favor of computer-based approaches.
Could computerized research make more
traditional scholarship (look) obsolete,
they ask; is there a danger of catering too much to short
attention spans while at the same time cruising on technology’s aura of
objectivity?
Being themselves all in favor of computer-based
approaches, they do advocate that humanities scholars get involved with and try
out the new computer-based methods. But they conclude their article by insisting
on a thoughtful and critical approach - one that raises inopportune questions
when the need arises: In order to develop a
sensibility for the wider repercussions of methodological innovation, it
is crucial that we understand not only the potential but also the limits
of these new methods. Obviously, building research tools is not an end
in itself and in many areas there is an argument to be made for the
confident defense of methods that are based on principles other than
Like Rieder and Röhle, I think - and have in this article argued - that the many new developments within DH must be discussed with a view not only to their potential, but also to their limits. Whether or not it may properly be classified as a Kuhnian paradigm shift - and the vote is still out on this - the digital turn and the involvement with computer-based approaches will cause substantial changes for both the teaching and the research in the humanities. A number of humanities scholars have not yet understood the importance or, indeed, the enormity of this turn - especially when it comes to their way of doing basic research. Whereas a lot has been written on the impact on our teaching and dissemination of knowledge in the humanities, not that many scholars have tried to grapple with the impact on humanities research and recognition - with the epistemological consequences of working through computers.
We are repeatedly told, by politicians, funding agencies and colleagues in other
parts of Academia, that if we want to stay vital, interesting and relevant we
need to the two cultures.
Perhaps we should do something similar
today, as computer-based approaches force us to reexamine the relationships of
the