0.5 Digital humanities 2.0: a report on knowledge  (Page 9/10)

This not only affects the state of disciplines but also the status and role of the university in scholarly creation. In its best form, the university does not merely “store” and “transmit” knowledge but rather is a site of contestation, experimentation, and imaginative creation and re-creation. But today, many of the most innovative and impactful research technologies (at least for humanists and probably social scientists as well) are being developed by private industry, leaving the scholars and librarians to be consumers and users of these technologies. As Johanna Drucker has cogently argued, the design of new research environments cannot be left to technical staff and private corporations, as if this were somehow not intellectual work or not something in which we as scholars should be invested. The very word processing tools that I use to write this paper are not value-neutral; Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, web-browsers, web applications like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Second Life, and even markup and programming languages like HTML, XML, Java, and C++ are all culturally contingent technologies for knowledge production and dissemination. You may not agree with or care about the knowledge being produced here, but regardless, we—as humanities scholars—have barely started to grapple with the massive assumptions built into and implications of these technologies and languages and their social and cultural practices. We barely know what can be thought using these technologies, let alone what cannot be thought. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that these technologies weren't designed by and for humanists. I suggest that if we apply the same kind of rigorous, media-specific, social, cultural, and economic analyses that we have honed to study print culture to not just emerging but already prevalent technologies, we can begin to understand the status of knowledge in our “computerized societies” of 2009. Beyond “studying” such technologies, we must actively engage with, design, create, and even hack the environments and technologies that facilitate humanities research and knowledge production.

Finally, let me turn to the issue of knowledge legitimation, which is where Digital Humanities encounters the most resistance, skepticism, and denial. Most humanities scholars have been trained in "Normal Humanities" (to somewhat loosely apply Thomas Kuhn's formulation to our disciplines). "Normal Humanities" means clearly defined and legitimated research based on past achievements, on stabilized ways of knowing and communicating this knowledge, and on general agreement about what counts as and what looks like a research problem. I would venture that the vast majority of scholarship is not really novel but falls into “Normal Humanities,” obeying both the tacit and explicit rules of disciplinarity, media form, scholarly citation, and the accepted theoretical and methodological paradigms of a given field. Many people get tenure and are promoted by doing “Normal Humanities” well. What we are seeing today, however, is much more than a “paradigm shift.” We are at the beginning of a shift in “standards governing permissible problems, concepts, and explanations” (Kuhn, 106), and also in the midst of a transformation of the institutional and conceptual conditions of possibility for the generation, transmission, accessibility, and preservation of knowledge. To be sure, “traditional” humanities knowledge will not go the way of Ptolemy's computations of planetary position or phlogiston theory, since the transformation in humanities paradigms is not, strictly speaking, based upon the “incommensurability” with what came before. Rather, the transformation alters the ways in which the humanities articulates and investigates problems as well as the institutional and media structures that facilitate problem-solving in the first place. Within the transition period, there will, of course, be much searching for the fundamentals of the field as well as the emergence of competing and overlapping paradigms, but when the transition is complete, as Kuhn predicts with regard to scientific revolutions, “the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals” (85). A new “Normal Humanities” will have emerged.