Digitization?

First real post has been a long time coming.

When I first heard about the Digital Humanities, I have to say I was a little frightened. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a purist: The Beatles' "Come Together" will always be better than Aerosmith's. Don't even get me started on Guns n' Roses covering "Knocking on Heaven's Door." And yes, the Black Eyed Peas completely destroyed "Miserlou." When I start reading about books being entirely digitalized in the future, classes taking place entirely online via web cam, or, as my Literature Criticism professor put it:

All the business and the way we conduct our lives (i.e. expression, education, humanities, trade, communication, and consciousness) will be brought to you by companies that don't exist yet through a continuous digital exchange.

I tend to get a little defensive.

Does that mean I'm against progress? Maybe, at first glance, but I don't think so. The thought is just so huge and so immediate on the horizon it kind of makes you want to go back in your shell for just a minute to sort it out.

But after reading this article I feel like I have a more positive jumping off point for exploring the Digital Humanities.

The article is taken from a presentation given by Brett Bobley, the Director of the Office of Digital Humanities in the National Endowment for the Humanities. He describes how technology is "game-changing" in terms of scholarship and education in general. He also gives a more concrete description of the digital humanities for all the noobs out there (such as myself):

 We use “digital humanities” as an umbrella term for a number of different activities that surround technology and humanities scholarship. Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others.

In a sense, the digital humanities include everything needed to practice any sort of scholarship. He also talks about "the stereotype of the “lone scholar,” toiling away in a library studying these cultural heritage materials." This is where my nostalgia kicks in. I love to see the images of the scholar in dim, dusty, candle-lit libraries, poring over volumes of history or literature or science all written on brittle parchment with a quill. That is, of course, my personal poetic view. But even though I know that image has been dead for some time, I still hold on to it as a metaphor for the trouble and torment that is the learning process and the acquiring of knowledge.

I suppose the metaphor and meaning stay the same, but now the image has changed.

Now you get another image: a red-eyed college student staring at a computer screen with a minimum of nine windows open (eleven tabs on each window and at least one on each window is Facebook), an empty bowl of Ramen sitting next to a dirty microwave, a pack of Camels with one left, and a few empty beer cans under the computer chair. Somehow the first image seems so much more admirable. Even if the scholar likely got tuberculosis from all the dust and died a young death, the pain felt in the pursuit of knowledge can be felt (and no it doesn't start with a slight cough... hopefully you've had your shots). The second image (if you identify with all of the psychological side-effects of sleep deprivation) leaves you feeling disgusted and numb.

But this new image carries a lot of deeper implications as far as what the digital humanities are and can do. Bobley says:

 Never before have scholars had access to such a huge volume of materials. This kind of scale adds new challenges and new opportunities. A scholar of 19th century literature could never hope to read every book published in the 1800’s – but a computer can. A historian who is studying World War II could never hope to read every newspaper editorial about the war – but a computer can... We have only begun to scratch the surface on how this mountain of data might be used to advance humanities research. But now that millions of books and newspapers are right at our fingertips, we must ask: What new knowledge can we acquire? What new questions might the data drive us to ask? How might it help the scholar locate new materials ripe for close reading? How might old theories be questioned and new ones posed?

It's these questions that the digital humanities want to answer. If not answer, then, at the very least, explore. The possibilities of having all the known information in all of human history at your fingertips is an incredible idea. We've already accomplished so much, but, as it is with knowledge, the more you know, the more you realize you don't.

As I said, I am still hesitant about what total digitization could mean. I love the feel of a book in my hands and the feeling that I get when I turn the last page over and set it down with a soft thud on my nightstand. No iPad, Kindle, Nook or cranny, will ever replace that feeling. But the future is here, and it is better to face it head on then to let it catch me looking backwards.