Kirschenbaum’s essay, “What is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?” (2014), speaks as if the Digital Humanities were different, as a construct, as if it were different from any other developing discipline. But, even old disciplines if seen from far enough away allow one to imagine them as constructs or dwellings surrounded by space. His essay attempts to define the Digital Humanities at a particular state during its development (2014) by analyzing the way the term “Digital Humanities” surfaces in speech and writing. To me, this type of critique is vacuous in that it may be either reduced or expanded to the zero point of meaning over time. Except in reference to Liu’s essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (2013). He talks about the conception people have rather than explicitly stating that Digital Humanities is a defined discipline. In other words, the author implies that the way that people talk about a discipline can in some way alter the results and methods that that discipline produces. I can say, as a member of the What Every 1 Says project and a former member of many projects at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, that Digital Humanities functions as a discipline.
Digital Humanities produces results, none less than an astrophysics or mechanical engineering department. It is the lack of what the Digital Humanities produces in Kirschenbaum’s essay that I found conspicuous and a detraction to his consistent use of a “construct” (without a center, postmodern) analogy. Digital Humanities produces results such as finding that the frequency of the word “the” may be used to question why “the” appears more in Gothic novels than in other genres. Another result is that books of a specific genre may be found within a compendium of books. And according to Liu, the Digital Humanities utilizes a method of “multimodal, dynamic, and participatory design ”to arrive “pattern understanding;” Science and Technology “is [a] method for knowing meaning in the digital humanities” (Liu 416). Use value and knowledge, of the methods and results, produced by Digital Humanities are what disciplines create.
Liu focuses his “essay on digital literary studies” and how the digital humanities arrives at meaning valued by humanists (Liu 420). The meaning of what the Digital Humanities is is what defines the discipline, and this is what Liu describes in his essay. By explaining how the quantitative results, the numbers crunched by the computer, arrive at semantic meaning which originated in the HTOED, are carried through to the analysis, he shows the reader that themes generated by a computer software program aid in the critique of many volumes of literature. According to Liu,
> Lines of interpretation generated by machine observation--”supported the author's [of the software called the correlator] thesis that the “‘values of conduct and social norms’” in “‘knowable communities’” declined in the face of “‘urbanization, industrialization, and new stages of capitalism’” and “the discovery of precise word cohorts [semantically established through the use of the HTOED] giving genuinely fresh insight into the thesis, enables [the authors] . . . to offer more recognizable normative literary and cultural criticism, touching on action, setting, and character. (413-14)
In this way then Liu reveals that Digital Humanities is a disciplinary identity of the Humanities--Digital Humanities has as its basis the humanities.
Since Liu had already defined the Digital Humanities as a discipline, and since Kirschenbaum references Liu’s essay I found Kirschenbaum a bit disingenuous in his definition of the Digital Humanities as a kind of evolving consensus of discourse about the Digital Humanities. Kirschenbaum even admits so far as to say “of course one should ask questions about any set of disciplinary practices as visible and prodigious as digital humanities” and further: “‘digital humanities’” is, in fact, a diversified set of practices, one whose details and methodologies responsible critique has a responsibility to understand and engage” (Kirschenbaum 14). So, the author of “What is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?” uses a postmodern construct focused at the edges--discourse about what the digital humanities is-- when it is an already defined (by Liu in 2013, one year before Kirschenbaum’s essay) and growing discipline. The same type of critique concerning language used by people speaking about the intersection of disciplines may be made at any time, but it is especially disheartening to see an author throw mud on a previously defined discipline as it struggles to become more broadly known.
I recognize the value of Kirschenbaum’s critique because it describes ways that people may talk about what Digital Humanities is and how discourse defines a discipline. But, because he speaks as if the dialogue about the Digital Humanities defines the Digital Humanities he misses the point of Liu’s essay which is that the digital humanities is a disciplinary identity of the humanities. Kirschenbaum, in my opinion, would have better stated his title as “At the periphery of the Digital Humanities: How people speak about unknown disciplines.”
Works Cited
Kirschenbaum, M. “What Is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?” Differences 25, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 46–63. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2419997.
Liu, A. Y. “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” 128, no. 2 (March 1, 2013): 409–23. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.2.409.
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