I am having a thought that I could not formulate into 140 characters so on the blog it goes. I am wondering if any graduate programs making digital methods part of their core curriculum? I ask this because I am seeing so many people reluctant to use the title digital humanist for themselves. While this makes me sad, I get it. I think most people are, at the very least, (digital) humanists for the most part. We all interact with the Digital in our research. We use library websites and digital versions of articles all the time. I can’t think of the last time someone used a typewriter or a non-digital tool to write a paper. Wait. That’s a lie. It was middle school. Many of us are finding our way on to social networking sites where we connect with other people in our disciplines and talk shop, again, digital. We use digital tools to help us organize and analyze our information and/or data. The Digital is just a part of our life. Apart from those places that are completely cut off from access, (look at me avoid saying digital divide!), we live in a more and more digital world.
But people with humanistic approaches are scared to call themselves digital humanists. Grad students who have found a community online to discuss and work through the central problems of their work are scared of labeling themselves as digital humanists. I don’t know what to make of this.
My observation is that we are at a shifting point. More and more job postings show a realization that it is important to have people who explicitly do digital work. When I first entered my program 2 years ago, most of my coursework (not all), still looked at the primacy of the paper as end all be all and didn’t understand or even attempt to engage digital work. I decided to enroll in two classes this semester. For one, all the writing is done on a class blog. In the other, we have a course social networking microsite on lore.com. We share all of our written work with each other, post links and additional readings of interest, and sort of create a digital community. We are approaching our work with a digital methodology. It is being made as we go along. I am okay with this, sort of. No one is explicitly pointing out that this is Digital Methods! There is no conversation going on about the benefits and drawbacks to the format. As a result, there is limited guidance as well.
While I am a fan of the “choose your own adventure” format, a big fan actually, I wish that, across disciplines, there was a requirement for a digital methods course, where, once students knew their projects well enough to articulate primary questions, they began exploring ways to articulate, engage, and create secondary questions through the digital. The other part I want/need/hope for is discussion around theorizing and citing the digital work that is done, both as final produced scholarship & the labor of creating said scholarship. A lot of the conversations I see people having, from facebook, to twitter, to tumblr, are so amazingly generative, thought out and engaging. But then we go back to the books to see what we can find to support what we’ve already worked out. This is great… but I wish it wasn’t necessary.
I guess what all this is trying to say is, I wish that we looked at Digital Humanities and the Digital Humanist not as a product, but as critical method of engagement, one that we are all engaging in, and one that we all examined as part of working through our projects.