Digital Humanities - Or How Geospatial Technologies Creep Into the Liberal Arts

The New York Times had an article on digital humanities yesterday. Though it may not be a thrilling time for humanities-focused disciplines, it seems a thriving time for digital humanities with grant money flowing in and places like the George Mason Univ's Center for History and New Media in the news on a regular basis.

From the Times article by Patricia Cohen:"The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data."

And much of that digital humanistic data has space and time attached to it as many of the projects listed in Cohen's piece are geospatial in nature or scope. And that's why I'm thrilled with all the digital humanities interest. Check out the Thomas Jefferson project out of the Univ of Virginia. Of course, history, religion and language were affected by place, topography, landscape, weather. You know, mappeable variables. But (some) historians and the like are now mapping those variables to analyze for patterns.

"Some pioneering efforts began years ago, but most humanities professors remain unaware, uninterested or unconvinced that digital humanities has much to offer. Even historians, who have used databases before, have been slow to embrace the trend."

This I know all too well. I knew a professor interested in incorporating environmental and geospatial context in his Israel and Palestinian Authority course or one who wanted to map New York City neighborhoods from the 1920s to look at how demographics affected one writer's novels. The stumbling block for these and the many other professors - inside and outside the humanities - who wanted to investigate geospatial relationships but did not learn GIS while getting the PhD was taking the time to do/learn/keep up with/incorporate GIS into teaching and research which would only hurt those assistant professors when it came time for review for tenure. I lost them all that way. These digital humanities projects take a person devoted to the task of finding the hard copy materials, digitizing the information, interpreting the data along with colleagues, making those data presentable to a potentially non-academic audience. Large groups of professionals, some teaching and some not, at places like the CHNM or at the Univ of Virginia's Scholar's Lab are where these projects can take shape and make digital data come alive. 

One other aspect of this Times article that pleases me is the full mention, praise even, for GIS. They even spelled it out. I've had issues in the past with the Times writing stories with a geospatial angle and never mentioning the mapping that made the magic happen.

I found some of the inevitable Twitter back-chatter that followed the posting of the Times piece quite interesting. Here are two from Dan Cohen:

A) "7 stages of reaction to digital humanities: 1. Ignorance 2. Belittling 3. Denial 4. "Well, digital archives are useful" ... (1/2)"

and

B) "... 5. "Wait, how did you do that?" 6. "You mean it can complement our other ways of knowing?" 7. Acceptance. (2/2)"

and a followed from Tom Scheinfeldt: "@dancohen But what I'd most like to see is #8: "hey, let's work together."

Yep, that sounds about right. I don't think things are quite there yet, I mean at numbers 7 or 8 (see quote above), at small liberal arts colleges but we must be moving in the right direction.