Thursday, October 21, 2010
DH and the production of knowledge
First, I would like to apologize for the poor quality of my written English. As I mentioned earlier to a few interlocutors in the context of our project, it would take me a little more time to make my style more acceptable, and I don’t happen to have that time right now. I thank you in advance for your patience. Having that said, I wanted to share a little of my thoughts regarding an aspect of the Digital humanities we haven’t seem to discuss much. One of my primary concerns in regard of sustainability is with the importance of developing and sharing tools that will allow humanities scholars to do the kind of work that is central to their research in the new digital environment, especially in the context of team work. I often find there is much emphasis on archiving, dissemination, and editing, and not enough on analysis and the management of ever-increasing bodies of information (especially in literary history). As a scholar working in the field of humanities, I do not want to aim most my work on preservation (even if I know there is money for that). Doing that, I think we then would start to do the same kind of work than archivists or librairians. Of course, we have to participate in the selection of what is aimed to last and needs to be collected, but, if you allow me a comparison with books, I do not want to be the one who will manage the preservation conditions. Especially in the context where we have less and less time for research in most of Canadian universities. I happen to think about the same regarding the links between scholarship and the cultural sectors. I agree that it is now and important field in the area of digital humanities (especially in the creation-performance domaine, notably in Quebec), as more and more what we call "recherche-création" is going on. But here again we might want to take care and not neglect the more "traditional" research. I consider that our work is about transforming something like raw literary material, and to produce new knowledge in understanding it. We might want to try to keep a place for this aspect within digital humanities. I paste here a link to a French site which really reflects my perspectives: http://socioargu.hypotheses.org/1095 Also, I take this occasion to invite you to consult a very well done review of what is happening in the digital humanities, done by my colleague René Audet at Université Laval. It considers material in English as well as in French, even if the comments are in French : http://carnets.contemporain.info/ex-situ/
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1 comment:
Chantal, you have to stop apologizing for the quality of your English. It's terrific. You do not, on the other hand, want to read my French.
And you make an extremely important point here. A great deal of the effort of digitization has been directed at older materials, including some that are in no immediate danger of disappearing. Meanwhile, we are in a situation in which the knowledge created in digital form may be the most vulnerable to being lost, along with much of the cultural materials of the past couple of decades since the personal computer began to take over as the dominant tool for composition and, increasingly, communication.
So this is a very important reminder that we need to be considering how research on culture is to be sustained. Research in a digital mode may well require different kinds of infrastructure, different funding models, and different models to sustain it as, at one and the same time, an ongoing knowledge production site and a scholarly dissemination site analogues to a monograph or journal. As we watch the scholarly paradigm in the humanities shift increasingly towards these new modes of work, towards teams, towards dissemination that is both much faster and more attenuated, we are already in a situation where the first generation of digital humanists is retiring, and the question of how to sustain what they produced, if only to archive and migrate it as technology changes, is becoming increasingly pressing.
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