Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities

Advocates characterize the development of such tools as revolutionary and claim that other literary scholars fail to see their political import due to fear or ignorance of technology. But the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.

What Digital Humanities is not about, despite its explicit claims, is the use of digital or quantitative methodologies to answer research questions in the humanities. It is, instead, about the promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing, the rebranding of insecure campus employment as an empowering “alt-ac” career choice, and the redefinition of technical expertise as a form (indeed, the superior form) of humanist knowledge.

While the reading lists and position statements with which the events were launched make formal nods toward the importance of historical, sociological, and philosophical approaches to science and technology, the outcome was the establishment, essentially by fiat, of Digital Humanities as an academic and not a support field, with the accompanying assertion that technical and managerial expertise simply was humanist knowledge. The unavoidable implication was that other humanists were wrong — not so much about how they went about answering humanist questions as about the very definition of the humanities.

This view reaches its apotheosis in the repeated suggestion that building computational tools should qualify as a replacement for scholarly writing: an idea that runs counter to the culture not only of English departments but also of Computer Science departments, which have never handed out PhDs for competence in programming alone. Versions of this principle — the idea that technical support is the cutting edge of the humanities — continue to surface. For example, in the characteristic assertion that, "One day, creating [and] maintaining platforms to enable the dissemination of [and] engagement with scholarly content will 'count' as scholarship." Carried to its logical conclusion, such a declaration would entail that the workers in IT departments of corporations such as Elsevier and Google are engaged in humanities scholarship.

Although not emerging from Digital Humanities proper, [Google’s] Ngram Viewer has inspired much Digital Humanities work, and represents exactly the kind of “success” that drives the movement’s public relations: a technique is appropriated from an academic field not associated with humanist scholarship (here, linguistics), shorn of the theoretical checks that once regulated its use, and given the appearance of revolution through application to a dataset that appears capable of silencing all criticism through sheer size.

And even if it were to be taken seriously as a proposal, it could hardly correct the structural and institutional conditions that explain the unique position of Digital Humanities today. In an article on what she sees as the unrealized radical potential of the field, Miriam Posner writes that "[wle can't allow Digital Humanities to recapitulate the inequities and underrepresentations that plague Silicon Valley," but we argue that its spectacular institutional success is a consequence of its constitution, from the outset, as precisely such a recapitulation. In the academy and outside of it, the privileging of technical expertise above other forms of knowledge is a political gesture, and one that has proved highly effective in neutralizing critique of established power relations. We offer our analysis of the Digital Humanities social movement as a way of resisting that gesture and as an inducement to other scholars to do the same.