Cross-posted at Clio Machine:

(This post is a continuation of some of the questions I raised in my original THATCamp proposal.)

Are the humanities inherently valuable, both in terms of the skills they impart to students and because the value of humanistic scholarship cannot be validated by external (often quantitative) measures?  Or are the humanities experiencing a crisis of funding and enrollments because they have not adequately or persuasively justified their worth?  These debates have recently resurfaced in the popular press and in academic arenas.  Some commentators would point to the recession as the primary reason for why these questions are being asked.  We should also consider the possibility that the mainstreaming of the digital humanities over last couple of years is another (but overlooked) reason for why questions about the value and worth of the traditional humanities are being taken more seriously.

As humanists have pursued academic prestige, they have long resisted the notion that intuition is important in their analysis and interpretation of texts.  (Although I think this is more true in history than in literary studies, perhaps because the latter is considered more “feminine” than the former.) Humanists have distanced themselves from the notion that their subjective study is somehow speculative or irrational.  They have been much more comfortable describing their work as imaginative and creative.  What all of this posturing overlooks is the advances that cognitive scientists have made in explaining intuition over the last few decades.  For instance, they have shown that humans are hardwired for instantly recognizing the emotions felt by other people.  They have also explained how our minds are programmed to find patterns, even where none may exist.  This tension was captured in the title of a recent book by a respected psychologist, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils.  From this new perspective, then, intuition is taken for granted or ignored by almost all humanists but it is actually central to much of their work.

This debate over intuition raises important questions for traditional humanists working in the digital era.  Would traditional humanists argue that their close reading of texts, which has become the hallmark of humanistic scholarship, is an example of this new concept of intuition at its best, since it is theoretically rigorous and excels at finding new patterns in old texts?  Or will traditional humanists increasingly feel that their research methodology is threatened by what Franco Moretti calls “distant reading,” precisely because it risks exposing the limitations or perils of their intuitive models of scholarship?  How would traditional humanists react if they knew that various digital humanists have searched Google Books to test the arguments set forth in some monographs and found them lacking when text mining revealed an significant number of counterexamples that were missed or ignored by the authors?  These and other examples should get us thinking seriously about the advantages and disadvantages of relying so heavily on anecdotal, case study, and close reading research methods in the humanities.

Data and databases have become the holy grail of the new class of information workers.  One recent books applies the term super crunchers to these data analysts.  Recent articles in the popular press describe how large data sets allow trained professionals to find new patterns and make predictions in areas such as health care, education, and consumer behavior.  In fact, we have probably reached the point this country where it is impossible to change public policy without the use of statistics.  Even the American Academy of Arts and Sciences jumped on the statistics bandwagon when it launched its Humanities Indicators Prototype web sitelast year, presumably in plenty of time for congressional budget hearings.  The fact that the humanities were the last group of disciplines to compile this kind of data raises some troubling questions about the lack of quantitative perspectives in the traditional humanities.

The humanities and mathematically-driven disciplines operate at almost opposite poles of scholarly inquiry.  In the humanities, practitioners privilege crystallized intelligence, which is highly correlated with verbal ability.  This has given rise to the idea that a “senior scholar” in the humanities accomplishes his or her most important work in their 50’s or 60’s, after a lifetime of accumulating and analyzing knowledge in their particular specialization.  By contrast, the most mathematically-inclined disciplines prize the abstract thinking that characterizes fluid intelligence.  This other form of general intelligence peaks in a person’s 20’s and 30’s.  As a consequence, the Fields Medal, widely considered the highest award in Mathematics, has never been awarded to a mathematician over the age of 40.  So if the digital humanities require young scholars to learn and excel at computational and algorithmic forms of thinking, we should be asking ourselves whether most senior scholars in the humanities will resist this as a perceived threat to their systems of seniority and authority.

Digital humanists have already written and talked quite a bit about how tenure and promotion committees have rejected some digital scholarship for being non-traditional.  Further compounding this problem are what appear to be significant cultural differences.  Almost all traditional humanists work on their scholarship in isolation; digital humanists collaborate often, sometimes because this is the only way to assemble the requisite technical knowledge.  Traditional humanists distinguish their scholarship from that produced in the social sciences, which they often think lowers itself to the level of policy concerns.  Digital humanists, by contrast, are almost universally oriented towards serving the needs of the public.  And while traditional humanists place a premium on theoretical innovation, digital humanists have so far focused much more on embracing and pioneering new methodologies.

Digital humanists will have to seriously ask themselves whether their embrace of social science methods will be considered heretical by traditional humanists.  Online mapping and work with GIS in the digital humanities is clearly borrowing from geography.  The National Historic Geographical Information System, which maps aggregate census data from 1790 to 2000, is obviously influenced by demographic and economic analysis.  The Voting America web site, overseen by the digital humanist Ed Ayers, builds on decades of studies in political science.  Text mining is catching on as digital humanists adapt the methods of computational linguistics and natural language processing.  What remains to be seen is whether the digital humanities will take this flirtation to its logical conclusion and follow the example of the computational social sciences.

All of this might sound quite unlikely to some of you.  After all, most, if not all, of us have heard the mantra that the digital humanities is a misnomer because in ten to fifteen years all humanists will be using digital methods.  But for that to be true, digital humanists will have to fall into the same trap as traditional humanists: believing that others will follow our example because the correctness of our way of doing things seems self-evident.  But as we have seen, there may actually be significant differences in the ways that digital humanists and traditional humanists think about and practice their disciplines.

Let me conclude with a few questions that I would love to see discussed, especially as part of a session at THATCamp.  Will the methodologies and mindset of the traditional humanities become increasingly anachronistic in today’s data-driven society?  Will the digital humanities have to team up with the computational social sciences and create a new discipline, similar to what happened with the emergence of cognitive science as a discipline, if traditional humanists realize that we could radically change their research methods and therefore decide that we are too heretical?  What if this departure from the traditional humanities is the only way for digital humanists to become eligible for some share of the 3 percent of the GDP that Obama has committed to scientific research?  If digital humanists decide instead to remain loyal to traditional humanists, then what are the chances that young humanists can overthrow the traditions enshrined by senior scholars?  Won’t traditional humanists fight attempts to fundamentally change their disciplines and oppose efforts to make them more open, public, collaborative, relevant, and practical?