Presentation given during Panel 1 ("Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?") at "Research Conditions and Digital Humanities: What are the Prospects for the Next Generation? #dhiha5" (10–11 June 2013, Paris), an international colloquium organised by Mareike König (IHA), Georgios Chatzoudis (Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung), in cooperation with Pierre Mounier (Cleo).

1. Research Conditions
and DIGITAL HUMANITIES
What are the prospects for the
Next Generation?
Panel 1
Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Dr Arianna Ciula
DHIP IHA
11 June 2013

2. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in
our Research and Academic Culture?
Academic culture
“Digital Humanities should not be
considered to only be an academic
phenomenon. I think that a move
towards the digital is present in
academia, publishing, marketing,
business, and much much more. It is
likely to end up being the overall
presence in how people do their jobs,
no matter what their job is, in the next
few years.” (Fraser 2013)

3. Humanities united at war
• Fragmentation of disciplines → regain combination ≠
homogenisation
 “disruptive political force that has the potential to reshape
fundamental aspects of academic practice” (Gold 2012)
 To question the “scholarly infrastructure” (Svensson 2012) as a whole and
 To channel a common “transformative sentiment” (Svensson 2012)
“digital humanities as
representing or manifesting
the humanities” and as
“means to discuss the future
of the humanities at large”
(Svensson 2012) e.g.
http://4humanities.org/

4. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Changes
Are these changes “facelifts” or are they changing the humanities?
Focus on social value:
“Is digital humanities is [sic] a "distinctly social enterprise"? I wonder if as the
locus of research moves from the mind of the researcher into the world where
others can participate directly, in real time, in its development, collaboration
becomes not simply possible but more desirable -- not just because the talents
of others are needed but because it is somehow an inherently social activity?”
(McCarty 2013)
Keep calm... and act (laboratores as per Burghart 2013 – but not
slaves!)

5. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship
 Towards a “A de-constructionist scholarly information continuum”
(Gradmann and Meister 2008)

6. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship

7. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship

Publication cultures in SSH
 “complex document models
and publishing formats heavily
intertwined with core research
operations” - text as “complex,
semiological digital object”
(process and product)
 text turned into 'heuristic
machine' through the digital
e.g. dynamic edition (Buzzetti
and Rebhein 2008)

8. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Digital publishing and e-Science/e-Scholarship
• Call for researchers to steer the digital realm to better fit their publication
cultures and innovate their scholarship:
“In a vision that ultimately renders obsolete Snow’s simplistic dichotomy of the
‘two cultures’ one could conclude that for digital publishing to truly work
both in the STM and SSH communities we need a broader vision of ‘E-
Science’ and ‘E-Scholarship’ alike which then includes digital publishing
as one of its constituents.” (Gradmann and Meister 2008)

Digital repositories and Open Access policy → call for institutional
actors to re-think their roles and experiment with new models (Romary
2013)

Global AND Public Humanities

9. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
From publishing to research

“texts (in the broad sense of linguistic, visual,
acoustic, filmic works) → not static objects but
encoded provocations for reading.” (Drucker
2012)

“The challenge is to shift humanistic study from attention to the effects of
technology (from readings of social media, games, narrative, personae, digital
texts, images, environments), to a humanistically informed theory of the
making of technology (a humanistic computing at the level of design,
modeling of information architecture, data types, interface, and protocols).”
(Drucker 2012)

10. Collaboration and Interdisciplinary aspect
 “Trading zones do not necessarily stop at departments or schools. Importantly, such
zones or meeting places could, and probably should, extend outside the humanities
proper to other parts of the university and, if appropriate and mutually beneficial, to
industry, cultural institutions and the art world. […] An open meeting place and
energetic trading zone does not necessarily make a sharp distinction between
research, education and other activities.” (Svensson 2012)

“The great project of humanities computing is the
development of a hermeneutic—a concept and practice of
interpretation—parallel to that of the dominant, postwar,
theory-driven humanities: a way of performing cultural and
aesthetic criticism less through solitary points of view
expressed in language, and more in team-based acts of
building.” (Nowviskie 2012a)

“Digital scholarship happens within complex networks of
human production. […] meaningful human partnerships”
(Nowviskie 2012b)
Collaborative nature of digital humanities work and openness

11. Collaboration and Interdisciplinary aspect
Interdisciplinary aspect as bridge across scientific cultures
Historical and comparative perspective

Early modern Europe: “the humanities not only preceded the sciences but also
shaped them to a very large extent via the formal and empirical study of
music, art, language and texts” (Bod et al. 2010, 11-12)
19th
century reform of the universities and formation of modern
scientific disciplines → sealed faith of the ‘humanist
mathematics’, break with the classics (Bod et al. 2012, 12)
Discipline formation as a form of hybridization rather than
specialization (Bod et al. 2012)
Institutional perspective

Tensions with established disciplines and scientific
culture of the humanities (see also Svensson 2012)

12. Learn to collaborate
“Mutual respect entails being interested in other people’s research and practice,
acknowledging different epistemic traditions, engaging in dialogue and collaborative work
regardless of someone’s position in the university hierarchy or other structures, but also
respecting more "monastic" work processes […] and a temporary reluctance to be highly
dialogic.” (Svensson 2012)
and so if we want young people to better understand and appreciate the way their world
actually operates, we need to teach them about collaboration and to collaborate in their
schoolwork. And because digital humanities is more self-conscious than the more
established disciplines where this kind of collaboration is commonplace, it leads to more
purposeful engagement with the subject.” (Meeks 2013b)
(Higher) Education
“Collaboration is important from both a
professional perspective and a social
perspective. The world that your students are
going to go out into is not one where they will
work alone at one station, and punch a time
clock and go home, but one where they are
constantly in touch with everyone they are
working with. More importantly, their world
outside their work is the product of such
collaboration.[...] Steve Jobs didn’t go into his
workshop and carve out an iPhone by himself,

13. Know-how attributes vs. Human project

“We [...] cannot make knowing or not knowing Mark Up the one thing
everyone not in the field knows about us or we will destroy our field by
provincializing it ― and by stigmatizing our students out of the one area
where there are jobs right now. […] An ideal job candidate burns with the
passion of making a field anew. Vision, expansiveness, imagination,
ideas, and brilliance are the requirements. Knowing or not knowing
HTML is way down the list of attributes that make colleagues know that
you are the one they need for a better and brighter future.” (Davidson
2011)
(Higher) Education

Essential 'Apprenticeship' → 'human project'
(McCarty 2013)

14. “Information literacy in a variety of now commonplace
representations of data” (Meeks 2013b)
Understanding the modern world

“Digital humanities, along with providing a more sophisticated understanding
of humanities phenomena, provides a more sophisticated understanding of
a modern world that runs on the very same tools and techniques outlined
above”
Critique (ethical and social ramifications)

“By bringing the digital into the humanities, we provide a space to question
the effect of these pervasive techniques and tools on culture and society.
Digital humanities [...] is extremely self-conscious and self-critical, it lingers
on definitions and problems of its scope and place, and it especially turns a
jaundiced eye to technological optimism of all sorts, even as it attempts to
integrate new technologies into the asking of very old questions.”
(Higher) Education

15. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Early career and junior researchers as agents of change
Avoid prescribed roles (Svensson 2012)
Hybrid role (legacy of humanities computing)
“The digital humanities specialist is a participatory mediator who must be able to
draw on deep awareness and experience of the intersecting intellectual space
where the modelling occurs.” (McCarty and Short 2012)
Investors
“young researchers with an investment in the digital
humanities who are anchored in a traditional disciplinary
and scholarly context” (Svensson 2012)

16. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Recognition mechanisms? Sustainability infrastructures?
See also Moulin et al. 2011
“evaluation of humanities scholars
as individuals” → “it feels
increasingly alien to the
collaborative and publicly iterative
modes in which we and our
colleagues at other digital centers
now operate to produce and
disseminate knowledge”
(Nowviskie 2012a)
'fiction' of “final outputs” (Nowviskie
2012b)
(Meeks 2013a)

17. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Recognition mechanisms? Sustainability infrastructures?
(Meeks 2013a)
“humanities computing has a long
history of tension in terms of
establishing academic job opportunities
and career paths, which is partly
related to an often institutionally
peripheral position, a different
professional structure than most
disciplines (including heaver reliance
on skills and practices not typical of
traditional humanities scholarship) and
no clear way to a tenure track or
equivalent position nor a highly
qualified expert role.” (Svensson 2012)

18. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Recognition mechanisms? Sustainability infrastructures?
(Meeks 2013a)

19. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Scholarly changes
Inherent to disciplines

“Connecting to the heart of the disciplines involves relating to the core
challenges and needs of those disciplines. This does not imply a
pronounced service function [...] or aligning with disciplinary agendas but
rather to be engaged in an intellectual dialogue that sparks core interest
among scholars from those disciplines.” (Svensson 2012)

e.g. Palaeography
 2004: the term 'Digital palaeography' didn't even exist!
 2010: ERC Starting Grant http://digipal.eu/
 2011: ESF Exploratory Workshop
 Use of digital tools/resources: from defensive approach (2001 and before)
to common (unquestioned?) practice (2013) → critical use, engaged
modelling and discussion of limitations
 From auxiliary discipline to integral perspective in connection with philology,
linguistics and cognitive sciences?
 Which work is the most known? (production/reception)

20. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Scholarly changes
Illegible?
“Products of digital work in the humanities are evident all around us, but the
arguments that they instantiate remain deceptively tacit to those who have not
learned to appreciate their sites of discourse, their languages and protocols.
Humanities-computing arguments are made collectively and tested iteratively.
The field advances through craft and construction: the fashioning and
refashioning of digital architectures and artifacts. It is little wonder that
bibliographers, archivists and textual critics, and archaeologists and other
specialists in material culture were the first to grasp the implications of
digital technology for humanities scholarship. Methodological, embodied, and
quiet knowledge transfer lies at the heart of our work, which can remain
frustratingly illegible to scholars whose experience rests more in verbal
exchange.” (Nowviskie 2012a)

21. Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our
Research and Academic Culture?
Scholarly changes
Agenda and (human) Infrastructure
•
“Despite all the focus on cyberinfrastructure and scholarly workflows,
we’re fashioning ever closer, more intimate and personalized systems of
production.” (Nowviskie 2012b)
•
Contextualise an infrastructure within an agenda against 'disciplinary
servitude': “many of the scholars […], not paid to think and act like
scholars, have lost sight of that which infrastructure is for” (McCarty 2012)
•
“There is a need for iterative and integrated processes, which influences
and, to some extent, shapes both the research and the technological
development. Such a process must allow for some risk taking and
experimentation (we do not always know what specific technologies are
good for, if anything), and must be adaptive (the research challenges may
change as a result of availability or development of certain methods and
technologies) and critically engaged.” (Svensson 2012)

22. References (or 'networked spaces')
“Ces nouvelles plateformes de discussions en ligne pourraient former un nouveau centre de débats entre
scientifiques, en complétant – sans les remplacer – les débats par articles et revues interposés ; mais
également de contacts entre professeurs, étudiants, érudits.” (Dubois 2013)
Bod, Rens, J. Maat, and T. Weststeijn, eds. The Making of the Humanities. Vol. I: The Humanities in Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam University Press. 2010. Print and
Web.
--, eds. The Making of the Humanities. Vol. II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines. Amsterdam University Press. 2012. Print and Web.
Burghart, Marjoerie. “The Three Orders or Digital Humanities Imagined #dhiha5”. http://dhiha.hypotheses.org/ Digital Humanities à l'IHA. 28 April 2013. 31 May
2013. http://dhiha.hypotheses.org/817
Buzzetti, Dino, and Malte Rehbein. "Towards a model for dynamic text editions". Digital Humanities 2008. Ed. Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Mikko Jokelainen, Ilkka
Juuso, and Tapio Seppänen. Oulu: University of Oulu, 2008. 78–81.
Davidson, Cathy N. "Advice to DigHum Job Candidates: Don't Lead with HTML". http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ HASTAC blog. 13 January 2011. 28 May 2013.
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/advice-dighum-job-candidates-dont-lead-html
Drucker, Johanna. “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship”. Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print
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Fraser, Benjamin. “DH/Digital Humanities in general – 4 points and a rant followed by a question”. http://urbanculturalstudies.wordpress.com/ Urban Cultural
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McCarty, Willard. "The residue of uniqueness". Controversies around the digital humanities, ed Manfred Thaller. Historical Social Research - Historische
Sozialforschung 37.3: 24-45. 2012. Print and podcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuRftmWUJmA (preprint available at
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--. “Subject: indigenous knowledge?” Humanist Discussion Group. Vol. 26, No. 941, 4 April 2013. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. Web.
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-- and Harold Short. Proposal for a Research Centre in Digital Humanities. June 2012. Unpublished.
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