The Dark Side of DH

Book Abstract:
The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities reconsiders key debates, methods, possibilities, and failings from across the digital humanities, offering a timely interrogation of the present and future of the arts and humanities in the digital age.

Comprising 43 essays from some of the field's leading scholars and practitioners, this comprehensive collection examines, among its many subjects, the emergence and ongoing development of DH, postcolonial digital humanities, feminist digital humanities, race and DH, multilingual digital humanities, media studies as DH, the failings of DH, critical digital humanities, the future of text encoding, cultural analytics, natural language processing, open access and digital publishing, digital cultural heritage, archiving and editing, sustainability, DH pedagogy, labour, artificial intelligence, the cultural economy, and the role of the digital humanities in climate change.

Chapter Extract: 

Despite being a relatively new field, Digital Humanities (DH) has an intellectual history with much the same richness as history, classics, or literary studies. This includes many positive elements related to epistemological and methodological growth, but it also (naturally enough) includes periods of disagreement and conflict. This is heightened by its association with contemporary issues of substantial importance to everyday life: digital tools and methods are loaded with cultural, ethical, and moral implications. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, technology was viewed by many commentators as an existential threat to the humanities, resulting from the corrosive importation of instrumentalist thinking and hyper-rationalism into a world of emotion, aesthetics, and interpretative complexity. Such perspectives still exist today in various forms, although they have been quietened by the growing ubiquity of technology and enforced communion with digital tools.

It is reasonable to suggest that DH has become a floating signifier for these broader tensions between the core humanities disciplines and global digital culture (Gold and Klein 2016). As the leading digital practice in the humanities, DH often acts as a lightning rod for anxiety about not only the future of the humanities but the effect of digital capitalism on self and society. In 2013 these issues coalesced in discussion of “The Dark Side of DH” (Chun and Rhody 2014; Grusin 2014), establishing criticism of the field that has yet to be resolved. This chapter argues that it is important the dark side of DH continues to be explored, to ensure the field retains its intellectual edge and nurtures a tradition of criticism and critique. Encouraging dissenting opinion and honestly appraising the complexities a union of technology and the humanities creates needs to be as integral to DH as its technical tools and methods....