Kujichagulia in
Wuhan, China
Digital Humanities and Graduate Education in a Future
The 2nd Forum for Modern and Contemporary English
Literature
Central China Normal University
Brief Speculations
When the first issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly was published in 2007, the editors had
the foresight to recommend that the question WHAT IS THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES? should be deferred to a future. This was a wise strategy. The future never arrives. The future is the post-truth of a
post-whatever. Chosen as the "Word
of the Year" by the Oxford English
Dictionary, "post-truth" is a rhetorical strategy for locating
how some people speak. The editors
believed the better question was HOW CAN WE SHAPE THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES? The best ultimate question, however, has
emerged from this forum:
As we participate by choice or accident in a seeming
inevitability of digital humanities, are the transhuman questions we raise
about literature and language identical with the posthuman moral and ethical
questions which pertain to scholarship and teaching in the 21st century?
WHY?
WHY NOT?
The points I
wanted to make about (1) persuading graduate professors and students to embrace
new digital technologies and (2) whether
having competence in modes of thinking usually associated with scientific
disciplines can make humanistic inquiry more accountable and desirable --those points are already modified by the
dialectic and dialogues of this forum.
The forum has shown the claim made in a review of Matthew
Jockers' Macroanalysis, Digital Methods
and Literary History (2013) that
digital humanities is emerging "as a major topic of conversation among scholars
and administrators associated with the humanities" (Digital Humanities Quarterly 10.3 (2016)) has merit. We are inside the international conversation
regarding digital humanities. We should
meditate now and after the forum on shape futures.
1) Why/how should
we teach literature after December 6, 2016?
2) How/why should
we embrace or reject new digital
technologies?
3) How/why shall
we educate graduate students?
In all cases, we shall have to account to ourselves and
our institutions about what is urgent, necessary, and cost-effective in the
work we do with literature, language, and new versions of literacy. We are users (consumers) who have good reason
not to abandon what is exceptionally valuable in practices of close readings of
texts. Nevertheless, the global dynamics
of change obligate us to retool ourselves and the traditions we value most
highly. We may not find it an easy
matter to refashion ourselves as people who are skilled in mastering new
technologies, new methods of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation --- as people who truly assume
responsibility for new forms of "evidence" grounded at once in
sciences and humanities.
Work in digital humanities, if we opt to do it, will
require
(1) Our being
conversant with empirical aesthetics, findings in psychology that adjust our
understanding of the phenomenology of reading (going beyond 20th century theory
and such theorists as Wolfgang Iser)
(2) Our
understanding cultural histories as unstable narratives and processes
determined, in part, by principles of uncertainty that swim in cyberspace
(3) Our being
conversant with what neuroscience may eventually reveal about how our brains
are very, very slowly being transformed by exposure to electronic forms of
information.
As we teach graduate students and use digital pedagogy
(1) How do we
integrate traditional humanistic methods and methodologies with the research
methods and questions of cognitive and social sciences to demonstrate that
transgressing boundaries among disciplines is at once desirable and practical?
(2) How do we
convince the agencies which fund higher education that support for digital
humanities is a necessary investment in the growth of national economies? (This
is a long-term aim that it may take more than a decade to achieve).
(3) What in our
curricula can ensure that students receive rigorous training in the use of
emerging digital humanities and in formulating interdisciplinary questions?
I swerve back to
an earlier point
As we participate
by choice or accident in a seeming inevitability of digital humanities, are the
transhuman questions we raise about literature and language identical with the
posthuman moral and ethical questions which pertain to scholarship and teaching
in the 21st century?
WHY?
WHY NOT?
and strongly recommend
reading
Niels Beigger, "Digital Humanities in the 21st
Century: Digital Material as a Driving Force," Digital Humanities Quarterly 10.2 (2016).
and accessing
Digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000256/000256.html
Beigger's article can help us to synthesize our notes
from the many excellent forum presentations about
A. What we are in
the process of becoming (evolving into or out of)
B. Why we study
and re-study individual works of literature in order to move toward a
comprehensive understanding of what
literature actually has been and continues to be, and why so-called canons of "literature" (dances of inclusion and exclusion) fail to
tell us what we may truly need to know about how and why
human beings (who are not exactly yet
"posted" and mechanical) insist on "writing" (signing)
themselves in the time and space of the actual (chaos) as well as in the real
(grids of order).
Perhaps following simultaneously the east/west motions
suggested by Hitoshi Oshima (Professor
Emeritus in Fukuoka University, Japan )can liberate us into the south/north
perpetual spin of KNOWLEDGE.
PERHAPS THAT IS THE TELOS OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND THIS
FORUM.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. December 6, 2016
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