Though, at this point, Tom Scheinfeldt’s post “Sunset forIdeology, Sunrise for Methodology” is quite dated, I want to focus on it in
this post because the questions he raises, and the strict dichotomy he
constructs, gets at the heart of some of the issues I’ve been mulling over the
past couple weeks. A few weeks ago, I
made a comment on Jordan’s blog with regards to breaking down the dichotomy
between close and distant reading—suggesting, perhaps, the ability to use
digital tools for closer readings,
though not necessarily “close” readings in the traditional sense of the
term. Especially in light of what turned
out to be quite a debate over “show-and-tell” versus “construct an argument”
last week, I’ve been thinking about the way in which we seem to gravitate
toward strict opposing poles when discussing DH. DH becomes a question of close
versus distance reading, essay writing versus non-traditional representations,
or, in the case of Scheinfeldt’s post, ideology versus methodology. I think it’s important to break down these
binaries in order to explore the ways that we can use DH on an evolving spectrum
of close and distant reading while also exploring its potential as an ideology
and a methodology on a spectrum as well.
At one point in his post, Scheinfeldt claims that “we are
entering a new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not by ideas, but
once again by organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and
organizing ourselves and our work.” This
seems to imply that this shift toward organizing activities effaces the focus on
ideas, as opposed to working in conjunction with it. In the comments, both Gavin and Rob call him
out on his construction of a false dichotomy and I whole heartedly agree. I
think it’s incredibly important to see the ways that new methodologies can
grant insight to evolving ideologies.
Tools do not elide ideas—when has that ever been the case? Tools help
one in their development of ideas. In
his response to comments, Scheinfeldt seems to grant this as well, writing, “I
agree that our current shift towards thinking about new methods will in turn
only raise new theoretical questions and ideological debates. And so it goes.”
In trying to understand DH’s place with
regards to ideology and methodology, I keep coming back to classifying it as a
tool that can assist one in making an argument. Thinking about it in this way,
though, places it pretty firmly on the “methodology” side of the spectrum. Ramsey and Rockwell attempt to answer some of
these questions in their contribution to Debates
in the Digital Humanities. As they
ask if DH things can be theories, they work their way through the different DH
things and how we can classify each. In
their explanations, though, they keep coming back to the classification of DH
as a tool, and trying to answer if that tool can be a theory. In reference to
DH artifacts, they write, “Where there is an argument, the artifact has ceased
to be a tool and has become something else” (78). They propose, instead, that the way to think
of artifact as theories would be to think of them as “hermeneutical instruments
through which we can interpret other phenomena” (79). This still sounds like a
tool to me. In their section on the digital as a theoretical model they come
back to the classification of the digital as a methodology, in much the same
way that writing is a methodology (82). Again, this sounds like a tool to
me. In my understanding, this seems like
they’re trying to find different ways equate the two poles with each other in what
appears to be a futile task. Rather than
this take, I think it would be productive to analyze DH on a spectrum of “tool-ness,”
depending on the DH technique you’re discussing. Sometimes it will be more of a
tool, sometimes it will be more of a theory, sometimes it will grant greater
insight to a theory, sometimes it will not.
Instead of trying to classify it by these hard lines of categorization,
we need to use, evaluate, teach, and experience DH on an evolving spectrum, one
that can grant useful insight for one’s project and one that can, in some
cases, serve as the insightful project in its own right.
Staci, I love that you draw our attention to the ideology/methodology discussion in terms of an evolving continuum. It seems to me that no one in the field is calling for a distinct separation between the two except for those who oppose DH praxis and claim that this separation is the downfall of DH work. It seems to me that ideology and methodology, criticism and critical "tools" are in a constant dialectic with each other. One informs the other and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteLike you say, tools do not elide ideas. Rather, they are the outgrowth of ideas with their feet on the ground, so to speak. Of course, one measure of an interesting tool is the quality of the ideas that it produces. The logic here is recursive, evolutionary as it traverses back and forth between building and saying.
"It seems to me that no one in the field is calling for a distinct separation between the two except for those who oppose DH praxis and claim that this separation is the downfall of DH work."
DeleteI’m not so sure. The pictures that Golumbia paints – of the DH as an exclusive club within and among fields that already use the digital (6-7), of this club’s hostility toward theory and, “literary and cultural studies as they are now practiced,” (6) of the anger deployed defending the GOLD ideology (15) – all seem to point to a climate in which it is precisely the highly cliquey advocates of the DH who have spun the fantasy of ‘making’ as distinct from everything that isn’t as new. You write that, “tools do not elide ideas. Rather, they are the outgrowth of ideas with their feet on the ground, so to speak.” I fear that the advocates of ‘making’ are constructing (and more importantly, talking about) their tools in such a way that distinguish them from less productive modes of scholarship.
Hi. My name is Abby Mullen, and I'm a first-year PhD student in the history department at Northeastern University, and I'm taking Ryan Cordell's class "Doing Digital Humanities."
ReplyDeleteI've thought a lot about the tool-ness of DH as well. One of my favorite descriptions of DH (which I heard first from Ryan Cordell) is that it's "zoomable." I think this speaks to your fear about whether DH tends to be polarizing. DH is unique precisely because it's easy to switch back and forth between close and distant reading, for example. But your post made me think about how DH can also be zoomable between other polarizations as well, such as ideology and methodology or essays and non-traditional writing.
So to focus in on ideology and methodology for a moment. As one person wrote, "Digital humanities is a spectrum. To put it another way, all humanities scholars use digital practices and concepts to one degree or another, even those who do not identify as digital humanists. Working as a digital humanist is not one side of a binary, the other side of which is working as a traditional scholar." (http://lincolnmullen.com/blog/digital-humanities-is-a-spectrum/)
I think these ideas are true of methodology as well. As we build more elaborate tools, or tools that do things that we couldn't do with "traditional" scholarship, we have to be willing to think about the ideology behind our tools. It's not that different from thinking about the archives you visit or the texts you choose to feature in traditional scholarship. It's just an added layer that you have to think about as you do your work.
So as we do research, digital humanities is zoomable in that sometimes we're using tools just to help get things done faster (Zotero trumps 3x5 cards any day in my book), but as we begin to use tools for serious analysis, we need to look not only at our methodology (the use of the tools), but ideology, how those tools affect our analysis.
Zoomability isn't a perfect analogy, but it's worth thinking about, at least to me.
Hi Staci. Like Abby I'm also a student of Prof Cordell, but from the English Department.
ReplyDeleteIn a number of my course blog posts, I have talked about both distant reading (and how close reading, in its 'traditional' sense, can step in and complement it, echoing Franco Moretti's argument in his 'Conjectures on World Literature' [2000]) and how digital tools can themselves be generative of meaning in their own right, but since your present post focusses on the latter, I would treat your intriguing idea of closer reading and the possible ability of certain digital tools to help us do so in another post.
Your concept of a 'spectrum of tool-ness' and Abby's zoomability of Digital Humanities both share scale or range as a property. In terms of chronology, the closer to the point of departure (i.e. its introduction to the greater field of humanities, knowledge, &c) DH and its various tools sit on this scale, the more likely they are to be thought of as purely methodological; over time and as we move along the temporal spectrum, the theoretical or meaning-generating aspects of the field (and its individual tools) become apparent and subjected to study and analysis in their own right. (Perhaps by then, and as its novelty has worn off, I, too, feel more comfortable spelling DH in lower case as digital humanities.) In other words, from this chronological standpoint the theoretical and the instrumental aspects of DH had always been there; it is only a matter of time for us to recognise that the 'ideological' sun had never set.
Scholarship continues to build or borrow increasingly more complex tools in order to carry out its investigations. Based on my reading of Abby's formulation of the 'methodology vs ideology' binary, it is easier with those tools which sit on the less complex points of our instrumental-complexity spectrum to determine when, where, and in what ways our analyses are being affected by the tools we use for that purpose. The more complex these tools get, the more difficult the task of demarcating pure methodological utility from intimations of ideology becomes.
We could superimpose Abby's principle of zoomability on your spectrum, and then we would reach something like as follows: at the point of its introduction it would seem that a complex, say digital, instrument is quite innocent of any ideological charged-ness in contrast to a simple instrument (e.g. one that traditional scholarship has used for ages), merely because it is more difficult to account for all the various and far-reaching--thus unseen--consequences that the digital tool could have on our analyses; the simple tool, on the other hand, betrays any ideological utility it might possess from the outset, and, therefore, it is either discarded early on (i.e. never enters the field/mass circulation) or is used but with utmost professional prudence. As we move along the temporal spectrum, however, the different uses to which the digital tool could be put become known, and it is only then that monographs are written and high-flown speeches delivered as to how these tools and/or their developers/users have blood on their hands….
In DH, it seems, we have not got to those relatively advanced stages yet (with the field as a whole and with most of the tools that come to the practitioners' attention on a regular basis) so it is not surprising that a number of commentators would glorify the coming of an ideology-free, purely methodological era in the name of Digital Humanities. (And it is only appropriate to our times that some should [hope to] jettison the 'ominous' concept of ideology from the way they think about things altogether.)
Thanks,
~Kasra