by Jon Lackman | 25 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Two of the contributors to the CAA blog this year are Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. They are academics and the creators of smarthistory.org, where they also maintain a blog. In one recent entry, they contrast Stanley Fish’s recent obit for the humanities with the Digital Humanities Manifesto, which is “a project of the Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA” and includes statements such as
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.
Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core.
The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities: complexity …
Copyright and IP standards must, accordingly, be freed from the stranglehold of Capital. Pirate and pervert Disney materials on such a massive scale that Disney will have to sue… your entire neighborhood, school, or country. Practice digital anarchy by creatively undermining copyright and mashing up media …
Large-scale complexity: need for teamwork as new model for the production and reproduction of humanistic knowledge. Teams sometimes fail because they take risks. This is the heart of digital humanities: Risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation …
Big Humanities: whereas the revolution of the post-WWII era has consisted in the proliferation of every smaller and more rigorous areas of expertise and subexpertise, and the consequent emergence of private languages, the Digital humanities revolution is about integration: the building of bigger pictures out of the tesserae of expert knowledge. It is not about the emergence of a new general culture, Renaissance humanism/humanities, or universal literacy, but, on the contrary, promotes collaboration across domains of expertise …
The Humanities are contingent formations that have become stabilized and made culturally redundant at the university: As if we have always had The Department of X, which has produced knowledge about X, and therefore we can’t possibly imagine anything otherwise …
Harris and Zucker write:
… we confess, we read the Digital Humanities Manifesto, with glee! … Fish, writing as curmudgeon of the academy, nostalgically laments the death of an idealized humanities education of yore—an education he imagines nobly separated from practical application and that he sees defiled by for-profit institutions and the rise of a permanent adjunct class … Clearly, the humanities are changing and the university is being challenged to its core; but maybe what will be lost is its insular elitism … Here is the definition of “digital humanities”:
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.
And here are our favorite parts of the manifesto:
Paragraph 11: Among the highest aims of scholarship: entertainment; entertainment as scholarship: a scandal that is now no longer a scandal. To speak to an audience.
Paragraph 13: Redefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.
We’ve written earlier about a new model of education where teachers are more accountable to students (no more boring lectures?). With Smarthistory, we’ve tried to be entertaining AND enlightening – using conversation as our tool. We’ve also tried to eschew an authoritative voice in favor of personal, opinionated voices. But we’ve also struggled with how to engage a broader public. We’ve “distributed” smarthistory to dipity, flickr, youtube and vimeo… and we’re working on Facebook now too (with Juliana Kreinik’s help).
Recently, someone emailed them to point out an error in one of their podcasts, “a great reminder that expertise is broadly distributed. I love our networked world! The Liberal Arts at an end!? We hardly think so…”
this is good. but the webcasts sometimes don’t load on my computer. could you provide a trancript as well?