4.1.2: Critical Digital Humanities

In the previous chapter, I argued for arts-based research frameworks that circumvented economic and social capital (3.1.2). This chapter shifts from creative practices to engage with the design-centered thinking central to the digital humanities (DH). While I am shifting my language from the term arts-based, to use terms like practice-based or design-based, my intention is not to imply an opposition between these concepts, but instead to think of them as being two sides of the same coin: they emphasize the process of making as a theoretical intervention, which affords different rhetorical avenues (3.1.2; 3.3.4; 4.3.4). The development of archives, databases, tools, and digital projects, all of which rely just as much on the intellectual labor of coders as much as the theoretical and epistemic decisions of researchers,¹ became a focus point in DH’s popular emergence as a field in the late aughts. While the field had been in development since the mid-twentieth century,² it was a niche field until a series of shifts in the aughts, spurred in part by the decline of humanities departments nationally and exacerbated in part by the 2008 financial collapse, that put the DH in the spotlight.³ This rise is historically tied to the 2008 opening of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which brought a significant influx of money to the emerging scholarly conversation. This, alongside a name change from “humanities computing” to “digital humanities” thanks to a Routledge published DH compendium, helped the field achieve surprising academic success in a moment of economic turmoil.

Critics at the time pointed out that while the big tent⁴ of digital humanities offers many modes of design-based approaches to humanistic questions, the underlaying epistemic and ideological apparatuses of these digital tools were not always critiqued. In other words, the focus on digital tools seemed to undermine the field’s ability to engage in cultural criticism. As Alan Liu argued in 2012, DHers,

rarely extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics or culture. How the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today’s great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital is thus a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar.⁵

DH’s history, under its previous moniker “humanities computing”, is tied to a reticence toward, or outward rejection of, the cultural turn in the humanities in the late twentieth century, and the adoption of technical aptitude went hand in hand with a turn away from cultural theories that argued against traditional frameworks of epistemic authority.⁶ The poststructural and postmodern interpretive frameworks introduced by post-1968 French theorists like Jacque Derrida and Michel Foucault, among others, critiqued the grounds upon which academic arguments were levied. However, overemphasizing DH’s past circumvents the critical potential that might otherwise be afforded by design and other practice-based interventions. Miriam Posner, who was a film studies scholar prior to her work in DH, argues that many of the models and tools DHers use regularly are borrowed from capital-focused corporate enterprises, and that many of these tools assume data as measuring a stable, concrete substance. She writes,

I’d like us to start understanding markers like gender and race not as givens but as constructions that are actively created from time to time and place to place. In other words, I want us to stop acting as though the data models for identity are containers to be filled in order to produce meaning, and understand that these structures themselves constitute data. That’s where the work of DH should begin.⁷

In many ways the broader critique of Liu and others is not a methodological issue, but an epistemic one: the digital turn meant an adoption of tools, which required a specific kind of expertise and labor, which in turn forced an adoption of the pregivens that were needed to make those tools function. Jessica Marie Johnson has shown, using the archives of the transatlantic slave trade as an example, that being reducible to a set of characteristics in a quantifiable way went part-in-parcel with the dehumanizing objectification necessary for slavery. The digital turn, with its need for supposedly objective data, echoed and enhanced these same practices (0.2.2).⁸

Johanna Drucker, likewise, has pointed to the assumed neutrality and naturalism of data, arguing for humanists to conceive their material as captured, taken, or otherwise unmoored from its origin. Capta—a term that functions in opposition to data—emphasizes these thefts and extractions, stressing the subjectivity of researchers and the constructedness of their arguments. Drucker herself argues something similar to Posner writing,

To intervene in this ideological system, humanists, and the values they embrace and enact, must counter with conceptual tools that demonstrate humanities principles in their operation, execution, and display. The digital humanities can no longer afford to take its tools and methods from disciplines whose fundamental epistemological assumptions are at odds with humanistic method.⁹

Practice-based work, for DHers especially, is the building of tools and frameworks to contradict and counteract the hegemonic and ideological approaches to digital technologies.¹⁰ This is doubly important in the creation of open source and community driven tools that do not rely on Silicon Valley ideologies, as those are untenable to knowledge workers interested in social justice.¹¹ The linkage of these technologies to venture capital, carceral violence, colonial genocide, the continuation of hard right and libertarian ideologies,¹² and the enshittification¹³ and privatization of public-facing technologies, demands the creation of tools which work to circumvent and challenge technofascism’s stranglehold on culture.

Critical DH, as argued by Liu, Posner, Johnson, and Drucker, and by others like Roopika Risam, Kim Gallon, and Kimberly Christen, presents a model for how the process of building tools and platforms can produce meaningful interventions in larger, cultural struggles. The ‘practice’ of practice-based methods can and should be steeped in a theoretically sharpened epistemic critique. While practice-based methods are more generally adopted by DHers as a broader community, critical DH sees the creation of new tools and methods as a means to push against overarching disciplinary assumptions in digital spaces. Projects like Muruktu, the Vectors journal, and Covid Black, among others,¹⁴ present a counter argument against the over-determined critiques of DH’s inability to address culture. The Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP) presents another model for this kind of critical, reparative work. The platform and its code articulate practices that are counterintuitive in respect to the assumed openness of archives like HathiTrust or the Internet Archive, challenging the implicit hegemonies which guide such online projects.¹⁵